Scrubland - RPGs can have Scrubs Too

People play games for a lot of reasons. Some gamers might organize their social lives around their hobbies, while others might play games as an escape from the everyday. For some, having fun is enough, while others have more fun when they win. Most games are competitive, so ostensibly people who are playing them are on some level doing so with the intention of winning. However, there are a ton of games that aren't competitive and there are equally many people who play competitive games without any true intention of winning. David Sirlin who is best known as a competitive Street Fighter player and game designer who balanced Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo HD Remix and Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix (arguably the best Street Fighter) has written extensively on the subject of people who don't play to win, and refers to those people somewhat pejoratively as "scrubs." Scrubs are people who create artificial rules and self-imposed restrictions that keep them from being able to win, usually saying that certain tactics or plays are "cheap" or "not fun", which is unhealthy for a competitive game like Street Fighter. In most cases, scrubs are bad for a game because they don't promote high level competitive play. In some environments though, being a scrub is actually the best thing a person can do for their game, especially with regards to collaborative games where being competitive can be downright destructive.

Take a game like Magic: The Gathering. There is no doubt that MtG is a competitive game, and in fact its continued endurance as a franchise nearly 20 years after its inception is largely based on the strong competitive environment that Wizards of the Coast has fostered for it. You'd think that WotC would develop their game solely with competitive play in mind considering that competitive players drive the vast majority of their business, but lead designers over at WotC have stated on numerous occasions that they design bad cards with casual or "kitchen table" magic players in mind. It's exactly these players who must find a ways to level themselves (i.e. be scrubs) in order to keep their game alive. Imagine that you have a group of 3 other friends who play MtG and typically you all choose to play tier 2 or 3 decks that wouldn't be competitive for tournament play, and suddenly one of your friends shows up with a tier 1 net-deck that is dominant and just can't be beat by the rest of the group. He is playing to win, and this has severely unbalanced what was before a perfectly functional casual MtG group. The other players have been put in a situation where they have to decide whether or not to invest in better decks to compete in the arms race, be scrubs and choose not to play against that deck, or in the worst case stop playing altogether. Clearly none of these are good outcomes.

Collaborative games are another beast altogether. Role playing games are a good poster child for the genre since there truly are no winners and losers. In an RPG, the Game Master and players work together to craft a story that is enjoyable for everyone. The Game Master invents challenges and situations for the players to overcome, but he is not trying to beat them. In fact, beating the players is no work for the Game Master at all, since they are the final authority when it comes to resolving in-game situations and conflicts it is easy enough for them to obliterate the rest of the player characters, but this is not fun. To preserve the game, the GM must not try to win. Likewise, the players must also not try to win. You might be wondering how you can even play to win in a game like Dungeons & Dragons or Rogue Trader. Some people try, and those people are frequently referred to as power gamers. A power gamer is a person whose intention is to have the most powerful character in an RPG group, frequently (but not always) because they want to break the game (i.e. "win"), and they are generally unhappy if they cannot accomplish this. They use a lot of unsavory methods to achieve their goals, including but not limited to rules lawyering and meta-gaming, which most will agree can really drag a game down. GMs will often make certain types of characters or options unavailable to players specifically to try and ward off power gaming, which only deepens the power gamer's desire to win. To the power gamer, failure to craft their ideal character means that they have lost and the GM has won. In this case the GM is being a scrub to a certain extent, but when playing to win ruins the game he has no choice. It would be nice if everybody could just do what is best for the game, but then again we don't all play games for the same reasons.

Get Physical - Meatspace Preorder Bonuses

When Sony released the comically inadequate PSP Go, it seemed as though physical media might not be a thing that made the transition into the next generation of handhelds. On paper that seemed like a fine idea, especially for people who wanted to carry around a library of games without the hassle of lugging around a collection of UMDs, miniscule though they may be. Unfortunately, with no way to transfer their existing collection of UMD games onto their PSP Go, owners of the handheld were stuck with the unappealing and frankly criminal prospect of having to repurchase their games on PSN, those which were available anyway. This is probably the single largest contributing factor to the failure of the PSP Go, and although support for full retail releases on PSN has been adequate, there are still a lot of gaps in the library and far from every title is available. Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together was just released this week and is available on PSN, but there's still no legitimate reason to ever purchase it as a downloadable title unless of course you only have a PSP Go to play it on, and not one of the many superior older model PSPs.

For starters, pre-ordering the retail box game would have got you this incredibly sweet tarot card set featuring the 22 original art major arcana that you might remember from playing Ogre Battle: March of the Black Queen on SNES so many years ago (or on Wii Virtual Console not so many years ago). Even if you didn't preorder, this game comes with a manual so thick it hearkens back to the days of PC gaming before there stopped being any particular reason to buy boxed PC games (i.e. Steam). It's imaginable that they would have made the manual thicker if there weren't such a limited amount of space in the box. It is crammed full of the kind of useful information that is necessary to succeed playing a game which requires a bit more effort than most modern games which simply task you with remember that square is a light attack and triangle is a strong attack. They must have simply ran out of room judging by the absence of the ludicrous "notes" pages that occasionally still appear in the flimsy pamphlets that pass for game manuals these days. God of War III, does your manual really need a notes section? The answer is an emphatic "NO."

So what is the deal with downloadable games anyway then? It makes sense on a platform such as Apple's app store, where there has never been a precedent for boxed games since the devices have never had physical media drives. It also makes sense for PC games which are becoming an increasingly niche market, and also exist on a somewhat of an eternal format. You can rest assured that your Windows PC games you purchased on Steam will always play on a Windows PC for as long as the platform is around, which will probably be forever. Consoles and handhelds are a different matter altogether though on account of their generational hardware iterations, unless you're Nintendo, who have recently been pretty stellar about maintaining backwards compatibility across their platforms. The exception of course are titles that are available only as downloads due to their narrow appeal or insubstantial nature that does not warrant a full box release. How long, though, until the new generation of consoles or handhelds no longer have physical media drives? When will box sales become negligible to the point that publishers no longer care about maintaining a relationship with brick and mortar retailers? Hopefully that day will never come, for more than a few reasons.

First of all, you can give a goodbye kiss to most of your ownership of the games you laid hard earned cash down for. As of now there's no way to share downloadable titles, sell them back to the store (if you're into that sort of thing) or even lend them to friends, and it seems unlikely that such a system would ever be implemented. Additionally, the incentive for publishers to offer awesome preorder bonuses or collector's editions goes right out the window. Without a physical product, there is no medium by which to deliver things like original soundtracks, art books, terrible "making of" documentaries, or the rare creepy perverted mouse pad. Obviously there are huge incentives for publishers to eliminate physical media if they can do so without impacting sales, and luckily that time has not yet come. Unfortunately, it seems inevitable the infrastructure required to deliver that product to every potential customer will someday exist, and that will be a sad day for us all. Until then, keep it real.

Retro Active - Where New Games are Terrible

At some point, electronic gaming matured to the state where a sub-culture of gamers known as retro-gamers could appear. It's hard to say when this happened exactly, as I'm sure there were a ton of people kicking it old school and consistently jamming through NES Marble Madness playthroughs during all subsequent hardware generations. It's also hard to say how old a game needs to be to qualify, since recently we saw the release of an updated Golden Eye on the Wii and during the lead-up to its release whole pages of commentary recalling the good old days of playing the original on N64 sprang into existence. Clearly, games from that era (1997) hold some kind of retro-cachet, but it's only more recently that brand new titles have been delivered to us with deliberate retro qualities. Throw in the huge number of straight up ports that are available, especially on handhelds (ahem, 3DS first party ports), and you could probably make a stack of new-old games to keep you busy indefinitely. Playing these titles now can teach us a lot about games, including how far the medium has come, how sometimes it doesn't need to go very far, and how occasionally you wish it could just go back to the where it came from.

In terms of how far games have traveled from their origins, playing a game like Pacman Championship Edition DX is a real eye opening experience. It's like all bets are off and you can imagine a world where as soon as you think you understand how a franchise works, especially one so rooted in its own conventions, they go and add bullet time, "ghost trains", techno music and bombs. This has been tried before, but Pacman CE DX is the true realization of the potential that can be unlocked when you take something so well understood and ever so gently turn it on its head. It is simultaneously so Pacman and so not Pacman, and I was not surprised to hear it at least mentioned during a variety of game of the year discussions last year.

Sometimes a brand new game can still feel incredibly modern even if it hasn't gone through any significant updates since earlier titles in the franchise, even when those games were released over 15 years ago. Playing Donkey Kong Country Returns for any amount of time will trigger an almost Pavlovian surge of joy deep within you. This is in spite of the fact that not a whole lot of innovation has occured since the orignal Donkey Kong Conutry. It's all mostly the same, except now the fidelity is incredibly high, with sharper looking graphics and crisper sounding tunes. The gameplay consists mostly of the same stuff we were doing on the SNES all those years ago, so you'll spend a lot of time running, jumping, launching out of barrels and riding in mine carts, and all of that is just dandy. There's no shoehorned competitive online multiplayer, no DLC, no pan-media saturation campaign, and that's fine.

Lastly, you sometimes play a 13 year old game and wonder what the hell went wrong since then. Maybe that game is Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions, which you've picked up on the PSP to satiate some ravenous hunger for turn-based strategy RPGs the likes of which are rarely made in modern times, while you await the remake of Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together. Realizing that the genre peaked so many years ago can only be torturous for people who have been with Square from the beginning, enough to make them start saying "geez Square Enix really needs to just stop." It might be true SE needs to change how they do things on account of their recent record of mediocrity and rampant franchise milking (2011 will see at least five "Final Fantasy" releases), but what becomes apparent is that SE really needs to do is stop trying to fix things that aren't broken. Stop taking away equipment slots. Stop simplifying the level up and magic systems. Stop making games were all you do is travel between cut scenes featuring ridiculously dressed characters who blather incomprehensibly about having to save the blah by collecting the bleh with the right fighting spirit. It's in rare cases such as these, in this golden age of gaming where there's literally something for everyone, that it doesn't seem dishonest to pine for a past which was arguably worse in almost all other ways.