Video Game-y

By Scott Pell
Writer

Weakpoints, boss battles, checkpoints, save points, side quests. All these things are tropes of the video game world, and they can only be described as "video game-y". Sometimes in other media we come across something that is video game-y, and we criticize it for being thus. Even in video games we criticize something if it comes off as too video game-y. Why is that a bad thing? Why does it never feel good to see something video game-y? Are video games bad? Why is it that when we encounter things that are distinct of video games, that it breaks our immersion?

I don't know. I like video games, and I think that video games are great, but there are somethings that just don't translate well to other media. The idea for this article came about when my brother sat down to play The Last of Us and played through the sequence where the Bloater is first introduced. He described it as "video game-y". I thought it weird of him to describe a video game that way, but he had a point. A boss battle doesn't really belong in a game that is so narratively driven as The Last of Us. If you remove that sequence from the game, nothing is particularly lost. The same could be said for a variety of content across all media, for various reasons. There's no harm in cutting out excess fat. However, what made the introduction of the Bloater in The Last of Us video game-y is that it puts the player in an arena with this giant monster, and they are forced to fight it. No running away, no other enemies. It's one on one in a fight to the death. Kinda sounds familiar....

I know that I rag on Mega Man a lot for being the most typical game in existence, but its themes and tropes resonate throughout games, even today. This bothers me that developers think that they have to have some element in their game to make it feel like a video game.

This is frustrating to me because it brings up the debate of what makes a video game a video game. That question is stupid because it is restrictive to the medium. If we set parameters and limitations to what a game can and cannot have, then we stymie the growth of video games and they will never be able to evolve as an art form. I firmly believe that video games are an art form, and as such, they should be allowed to grow, mature, experiment and try to do things differently, even if the end result is bad. The conversation / debate of what constitutes a video game needs to stop, because various developers don't need to be pressured into how to make the game that they don't even want to make. I'm not sure how this boss battle in The Last of Us came about, but I am certain that it was not discussed in a conference room. These design tropes are so embedded into how we see games, that it must have come out as a force of habit.

If games are art, then the should not have any restriction other than the fact that they need to be interactive in some respect. Whether the game is two dimensional, three dimensional, a racer, or a platformer, text-based or turn-based, it still needs to be interactive. That's what makes up a video game. We don't all need hit points, or leveling up, or status effects, or area of effects, or kill to death ratios. We just need to play.