Last week, while watching video of Final Fantasy VI, I commented to my colleague Pete that old Final Fantasy is not fun to watch. He laughed and replied, “No comment.” The inherent absurdity of what I’d just said wasn’t lost on me either. There’s a constant disconnect between you and the activity in role-playing games. You select an action from a menu and then watch your avatar on the screen carry out the command after the fact; more often than not, you only watch the game. The basic design of an RPG necessitates strategy behind each selected action, but most RPGs are so simple that you can win by just pressing a single button to do one thing over and over again. I love role-playing games and, if I’m completely honest, I can admit that I get immense satisfaction of pressing that one button repeatedly and watching numbers (a character’s attributes or any other arbitrary statistic) rise as a result. Sometimes, just pressing a button is enough for a game to engage me.
This past weekend, I spent a couple of hours playing through Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney on the Nintendo DS. I’ve missed out on the series over the past few years. There are only so many games a person can play. The Ace Attorney games are part role-playing, part point-and-click adventure, and part comic book. The amount of interactivity you have in the games' murder investigations and bizarre court trials is extremely limited even though you are tapping the touch screen – Ace Attorney’s one button – repeatedly. After playing through two of the game’s five cases, I realized that I wasn’t enjoying it very much. I couldn’t figure out why. The characters were charming, the activities novel, the dialogue entertainingly eccentric. Then it hit me: there’s no threat of failure in Ace Attorney. It’s possible; take one too many incorrect actions in court and the game stops. I came close to that breaking point in the game’s second trial, and was truly stumped as to how to proceed. Then the game took over, a character told me that I’d already won, there was just one thing left to do. The drama was interesting but the game wasn’t anymore.
How many buttons do I have to push for a game to be a game? Is the capacity to win or lose in a game essential to the experience? If so, what does that say about simulation games like Animal Crossing where it’s impossible to win or lose? I’m not sure if my experience with Ace Attorney says anything about design but I do know that it’s one that’s gotten me thinking about why we play at all. Good food for thought.
