"You should read my blog," he said, slyly. "It'll be all about neat-o keen game stuff, and you'll like it for sure! It's super good!"
And for a time, lo, it was so, or mostly so. But then, slowly, over time, the game posts spasmed and dried to a trickle, and then slowly, those posts were replaced by the intermittent hum of quick apologies and posts that were promises to post later. Oh, posts about future posts! Like most such meta situations, it was mildly amusing to summarize from the outside looking in, but only tedious in practice.
Oh yes.
***
Today I must talk about expectations.
Making good games is all about wrestling with player expectations. I guess that's true about all media, really.
One tragedy about working with large publishers and producers, especially ones who don't know anything at all about games because they've made their names selling crackers prior to wandering over to the game industry (of course), is that expectations function so differently in media than they do in fields making more generic products.
When I buy crackers, I'm not looking for surprises. I'm looking for tastiness, crispness, and a nice edible shelf for Cheez Whiz. Give me this, and you have a cracker success story. I expect this in subsequent boxes of crackers, too. No surprises.
And this holds for all sorts of other things, of course. Computers should do what I buy them for. Same with cars. Cell phones, beds, nail clippers, harvested organs... I know what I want when I'm getting these things. I want my expectations to be met completely.
This is true for some games, too. When I buy a chess game, I will be, well, vexed, if I discover there are three knights on the board and a new piece entitled "The Groupie" which can be attached to any other piece in play and always occupies the last square the piece in question has vacated. Maybe these are fun rule changes - but chess they ain't. I expect the same things with Go and Monopoly and Football and Poker.
I think that for products that fall into these categories, focus groups, at least to an extent, can make good sense. It's hard to know what people want to buy, so just ask them, right? They're the ones out in the field, eating those crackers day in and day out, fiddling with those cell phones in darkened movie theaters, driving those pimped out rides while talking on those cell phones, requires those harvested organs after the natural consequences of the mighty cell phone / car combination, so they're the ones who know what they want. Surely.
For many kinds of games, though, I don't think this is the route to creating things that make an impression on players. Meeting peoples' expectations is a good way to please them. It's not way to make them sit up and take notice.
Rather, setting up player expectations to comfortable, pleasant levels, and then exceeding those expectations - that! That is the recipe for adoration.
Or so I claim.
An example.
Castlevania 3, on the Nintendo, was a very solid, well designed platform game. And, like most such platform games, there were a lot of graphics and fiddly bits in the backgrounds that looked cool but really had no impact on the gameplay. They were just there to keep you visually interested as you marched through the obstacle course. One of these background objects was a waterfall, the onrushing water of which slowed you down as you marched forward. Another aspect of the game was that there were a handful of characters you could find and join as you traveled through the game. One of these was a wizard, who had a handful of spells at her disposal. Further, one of these spells shot out five short ranged balls that could freeze enemies solid.
At one point, while playing the level with the waterfall, I used this freezing spell to attack an enemy, and, completely without warning or any sort of preface, the entire waterfall and river froze for several seconds, allowing my character to walk on top of the water and thus move through the level more quickly.
This elevated Castlevania 3 for me tremendously.
It's not just the freezing of the water that did it for me. I've certainly played other games that have let players do similar things. It was the unexpectedness of it, and the wonderful extraneousness of it, and the sheer secretness of it. The game implied that it was going to be a good platform game, and then it transcended those expectations.
If you had asked me, prior to playing, what I wanted in Castlevania 3, I would have said, "Castlevania 1, but with more levels, and more monsters, and more bosses, and more music, and more graphics, and more settings". Yep! Of _course_ that's what I would have wanted. Those are very obvious things to want. And if fact Castlevania 3 did deliver those things. But it also delivered things I didn't know that I wanted, things that weren't simply "more" but were fundamentally different in kind. And that is how the game left a mark.
Expectations are difficult to wrestle with. They've very sensitive to audiences, and where audiences are coming from. But I rarely get the sense, when I play new, non-DS games, that designers are trying to understand my expectations and then explode them. And for me, as a gamer, that's a shame.
