Intensity and the Evolution of Taste

There is a good reason for all this intensity: It's a kid thing. The world that children inhabit bubbles with the most amazing things, and kids snarf up all that excitement with gusto. They want to experience life to its fullest, and so they push everything to its limit.

Consider candy, for example. Candy is fun food. What makes candy so special among foods? I think that it's because candy is intensely pleasurable. Have you ever noticed just how intense an experience candy provides? It doesn't taste merely good; candy makes your tongue jump up and shout with joy. Now, there are other intense gustatory experiences chili peppers, for example. But they are not intensely pleasurable. A chili pepper makes your tongue scream, not laugh. Of course, because it's such an intense experience, candy must be taken in small doses. You don't eat an entire meal of candy, just a small piece.

When I was a child, I loved candy. It was my favorite food. But as I grew older, I became bored with the taste of candy. I wanted more subtlety and more variety in my eating experiences. By the time I was a teenager, my tastes had matured to favor such sophisticated foods as hamburgers, pizza, and hot dogs. As I grew older, my quest for subtlety and variety led me to try Chinese food, different breads, barbecue sauces, Italian food, cheeses, salads all manner of foods.

The aggregate efforts of millions of people pursuing similar courses has spawned a huge gustatory universe populated with a staggering variety of culinary delights: Thai food, peanut butter, wines, T-bone steaks, Béarnaise sauce, blackened foods, caviar, dill bread, and on and on. And one small subset of this universe is the world of candy, characterized by several traits: It is fun, intensely pleasurable food, best taken in small doses, and primarily appreciated by children.

Cartoons

Now consider cartoons. Cartoons are the most fun form of video. Sure, I enjoy many forms of video, but cartoons make me laugh more. What makes cartoons so much fun? I think that it has to do with the fact that they are so intensely pleasurable. Look at the colors in a cartoon: all bright, loud colors no soft pastels or delicate shades here. Or consider the pace of a cartoon. Everything happens at breakneck speed. Characters dash about frenetically, never giving the viewer a second to catch his breath. And there's nothing subtle about danger in cartoons. Characters are assailed by falling safes, flocks of flying knives, sizzling sticks of dynamite, and falls from cosmic heights.

Herein lies some of the pleasurable aspect of cartoons, for the characters are never seriously hurt by all this mayhem. Explosions merely blacken their faces. Falls from great heights produce body-shaped craters from which the character emerges, to wobble away unhurt. The impact of a falling safe flattens the character, who peels himself up from the ground to reinflate his body as if it were a balloon. This disjunction between terrible danger and lack of serious harm is a pleasurable release; it is fun.

The intensity of cartoons requires them to be short, only a few minutes' duration. This point is exemplified by the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, which started with a magnificent cartoon lasting all of three and a half minutes. Then the cartoon transformed into a movie: The bright colors softened, the pace slowed down to that of real life, and the intensity dropped down to a level that could be sustained for two hours.

When I was a kid, cartoons were my favorite form of video. I'd watch them all day long, if I could. But as I grew older, I became bored with the sameness of cartoons. I longed for characters who were more than cute little animals. I wanted some conflict that was resolved with more subtlety than a mallet-blow to the head. I wanted more variety and more subtlety in my video. So I began to watch more sophisticated programs, programs like Gilligan's Island and Lost in Space. And later still, I started watching even more serious video, so that now my viewing habits include movies like When Harry Met Sally, Out of Africa, and Koyaanisqatsi.

Most of us followed an analogous path, and now our combined tastes have created a huge universe of video pleasures, including comedies, how-to shows, mysteries, game shows, pornographic movies, talk shows, action-adventure movies, soap operas, kiddie shows, and many more forms of video. Cartoons comprise a small subset of this gigantic universe, distinguishable by the fact that they are fun, intensely pleasurable, best taken in small doses, and primarily appreciated by children.

Comics

Consider comics. (For the purposes of this discussion, I shall exclude from consideration the serious comics of recent years, such as Maus. Instead, I shall consider only the mainstream comics.) Comics are fun; I get a kick out of reading them. Comics are fun because they are intensely pleasurable. Look at the drawing style in the comics: bold, clean lines, with no hint of subtlety. The colors are bright and pure. The characters, conflicts, and events in the comics are always intense. Good guys are as good as they come; bad guys are ugly, deformed, and truly evil. The good guys always win; that's one of the things that makes comics fun.

Comics always come in small doses, largely because their intensity cannot be maintained over a long time. Their first audience is children. When I was a kid, I used to read comics all the time. After a while, though, I grew bored with the sameness of comics. I wanted more variety, more subtlety in my reading. So I began to read more mature fare: Jules Verne and Mark Twain. Later I graduated to Thoreau, Hemingway, and Shakespeare. Now I read Toynbee, Braudel, and von Clausewitz.

Each of us has pursued a similar evolution, starting with comics and proceeding to more subtle literature. Jointly, our courses have spawned a gigantic universe of literature, with newsmagazines and science books, cookbooks and sci-fi novels, the National Enquirer and Playboy, dictionaries, car repair books, economics textbooks, devotional literature, and even this book. And way over in one corner of this universe is a tiny subset of literature known as comics, unique in that they are fun, intensely pleasurable, best taken in small doses, and especially appreciated by children.

Videogames

These considerations explain the obsession with violence that saturates videogames. Violence is the most intense, direct, and physical form of conflict available; therefore, kids want to experience it. And it's intensely pleasurable, because the kid expects to kill off all the bad guys and win the game. Videogames are in the same league with candy, cartoons, and comic books…and they appeal to precisely the same audience.

What's different is that they are not part of a vast universe of computational delights, teeming with diversions appealing to a wide array of tastes. Our player is an astronaut floating alone in a vast, dark universe with no stars, no galaxies, nothing. Where are the games to appeal to his more mature tastes? Where are the games that are analogous to Caesar salads, nightly news, or bodice-ripper novels? Where are the bagel-and-cream-cheese games, the Archie Bunker games, the Jacquiline Susanne games? Where are the games about a boy and his dog or the prostitute with a heart of gold?

The reason for this emptiness, I think, has to do with the nativity of computer games. The other three pleasures all existed in forms quite separate from the kiddie-forms; indeed, the kiddie-corners of their universes were not explored until well after the main areas of the universe had been developed. We were eating nuts and berries long before we invented jellybeans; the first cartoons appeared more than a decade after the first silent movies; and literature got started thousands of years before the first entertainment-oriented comic books were created.

But computer games were the very first form of entertainment on the computer. The very first computer game, SpaceWar, featured two spaceships floating around in space shooting at each other. We didn't know the first thing about designing games when we got started, so we slapped together the simplest possible designs designs with intense, violent conflict. It is the tragedy of computer games that they were too successful too early. It's as if Homo erectus had been so successful that he spread all over the world, occupied every possible ecological niche, and thereby blocked the evolution of larger-brained hominids.

Don't dismiss too quickly my pessimistic assessment of the state of computer games; the free market is not as free as many designers realize. Economists have a concept called "barriers to entry"; it refers to the difficulties that some new product or service encounters in trying to make its way in the marketplace. Suppose, for example, that you were to wake up tomorrow morning with a brilliant new idea for an operating system. Suppose this operating system was clean, foolproof, perfectly secure…all the things that we want from an ideal operating system. Suppose that you coded up this operating system over the next few months, and that when you tested it, it outperformed every other operating system on the market by large margins. In this hypothetical universe, your operating system would enter the marketplace, demonstrate its superiority to customers, and replace all existing operating systems, making you richer than Bill Gates. Sounds great, doesn't it? Well, dream on, friend, because it ain't gonna happen. No matter how much better your operating system is, Windows will crush it because Windows is the established leader and Microsoft has erected cosmically high barriers to entry for any competitor.

The situation is even worse with games. With operating systems, Microsoft is motivated to continually improve its product and will introduce major innovations if it feels that they are warranted. In the world of games, there is no Microsoft, just a collection of competitors. And remember that the "games community" comprises much more than just the publishers. There are distributors, retailers, and customers, too. This entire community has developed in the last twenty years or so, and it has learned what works and what doesn't. This entrenched community knowledge ensures that computer games remain trapped in the kiddie corner.

Let's try the superior-product fantasy I used a few paragraphs back. Let's suppose that you come up with a brilliant new idea for a game. It's not a candy-game, to be sure; it's more subtle, more mature, less violent, and so on. You're sure that millions of 36-year-old housewives will love it. So you design and produce the game on your own dime (let's assume that you're rich and have lots of dimes). You take your game to a publisher and show it off. No matter how good your game is, the publisher will not take it. He knows the marketing numbers inside and out, and he knows that 36-year-old housewives don't spend much money on games. Sure, this game would sell to 36-year-old housewives if they were buying. But they're not, so your game is dead meat.

But let's assume that you get lucky and find a publisher who's altruistic enough to publish your game. He's violating his business sense, but is willing to take a flyer for a good cause. Good for you!

It's not over yet. Now the publisher has to convince the distributors to stock the game. Distributors all run on razor-thin margins, so they're some of the most conservative businessmen in the world. They will not stock a game unless they know that it will sell. You have to prove the certainty of success by comparing it to other games that have sold well. They'll all turn your publisher down, and your game will never be distributed.

But wait! Let's suppose that you get lucky and find a crazy distributor willing to stock your game. What a stroke of luck! Now all you have to do is convince the retailers to carry it.

Good luck. Retailers zealously guard their precious shelf space. They won't let anything onto that shelf space unless they know that it will move. And how can you prove that your product will sell? It's never been tried before!

But let's be idiotically optimistic here and assume that you find some retailers with shelf space to burn. They agree to carry your product. Success is at last within your grasp, right?

Wrong! The 13-year-olds who patronize the games store aren't interested in your adult game. "Bor-ring!" they'll exclaim, and walk away. And what about those 36-year-old housewives for whom the game is designed? Well, they certainly won't be going into a games store. They know perfectly well that games are for kids. Why should they go into a store like that?

Of course, the Internet changes things; with the Internet, you cut out those obstructionist distributors and retailers. But you still have to find a way to reach those 36-year-old housewives, and you still have to find a publisher, and each of these is a killer problem all by itself.

Thus, the games industry is trapped in a hole of its own making. Like comic books, even the most brilliant of unconventional works will not be sufficient to batter down the walls of expectations placed on us by the market. So perhaps reading this book is a complete waste of time. But I have never been one to shrink from hopeless quests, and I hope that you are similarly inclined. Recruit a Sancho Panza; the more Don Quixotes there are attacking this windmill, the better the chance we have of killing it.



Chris Crawford on Game Design
Chris Crawford on Game Design
ISBN: 0131460994
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 248

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