Refreshing

Henry Jenkins III and Kurt Squire

Being a game reviewer seems like a dream job: advance copies of games months before they ship, and most importantly, all the free games that you have time to play. Listen to most game critics, though, and you hear that reviewing games for a living can almost take the joy out of gaming. There are only so many dungeons that one can clear or look-alike real-time strategy games you can play before they all, well, start to look alike. Your senses literally become deadened by the repetition of game characters, themes, and mechanics.

Even the good games, which can take over 40 hours to finish, will often throw level after level of monsters at the player with little novelty. How many times do you get a few hours into a game and already know that you've seen it all before and that finishing is more a matter of endurance than excitement?

Fortunately, there are a few gems that suggest ways out of these gaming doldrums. In Half-Life, memorable moments are carefully doled out throughout. At first the game surprises the player with its interactive environment; it is not until much later that the player experiences some of the game's other most remarkable features, such as NPC guards that protect the player, marines which redefined state-of-the-art artificial intelligence for the time, or the dramatic desert and surrealist landscapes which come after hours of being locked in the dark cave-like spaces of the Black Mesa Compound.

Eye-catching graphics or unnervingly-good Artificial Intelligence are sure-fire ways to surprise the player, but games such as Pokemon Ruby / Sapphire for the Game Boy Advance show that good design can also create novelty and surprise. New Pokemon with colorful skills are peppered throughout the game and players delight in "collecting them all." Pokemon randomly evolve or gain new skills. And, like Half-Life, Pokemon introduces new game play elements such as contests or Pokemon breeding hours into the game, creating the feeling that the game could turn in new direction at any point.

Even a simple game like Pokemon Sapphire reminds us how games can break our expectations, teaching us new ways to think about games as a medium or about the worlds they represent. Media studies scholars call this process defamiliarization. Our normal perceptions get deadened, much like the poor critic who has to play through the same formulaic games again and again. Art reawakens refreshes and revitalizes them and encourages us to rethink our assumptions. This is as true for popular art - like computer and video games - as it is for the so-called fine arts. A game like The Sims can invite us to rethink our relations with family members or roommates, while a game like Half-Life breaks our expectations about how the first-person shooter genre operates. Knowing what expectations players have is part of the craft of game design; creatively challenging those expectations without frustrating the player is part of the art.

In both cases, part of what makes these games interesting is how they transport players into entirely new worlds. All media are interactive in one sense - we interpret information from our senses, relate what we're experiencing to what we already know and then build expectations about what will come next. Games are unique in that we act on our assumptions about how the world will operate, putting them to the test. The best designers shatter those expectations without leaving us feeling cheated or lost.

Genres in games, as in other arts, are enabling mechanisms that enhance the communication between artist and consumer, helping us to know what to expect and what we need to do to maximize our pleasure from the experience. The best artist knows when to break with those genres so that they offer us something novel and engaging. In a mature art, we come to read the breaks against the continuities to develop new understandings of the basic thematic building blocks of the medium. The risk is that genres become straight jackets that stifle innovation among artists and deaden the perceptions of consumers. Many game designers protest that the rigid application of genre formulas in the production process, in deciding what games to greenlight, in shaping their marketing, in determining how they get reviewed, and in producing a fairly conservative audience response, is what crushes innovation within the medium. These genre rules are often as enforced as powerfully by consumers who are outraged if a first person shooter doesn't include x feature. If the medium is to grow, however, both designers and players need to learn when and how they can defamiliarize those formulas to create fresh experiences and to keep us on our toes throughout the duration of gameplay.

Originally printed in Computer Games Magazine, October 2003