psmith, gamer

Something very odd has happened to gaming: people no longer try their damnedest to get to the end of a title to find out what happens. These days, with some of the biggest games around, the story is mostly a compared to the pursuit of increasing a player’s score, XP or level.

Gone are the linear afternoons spent testing “completing” games - Atari, C64, Spectrum and Amiga veterans will understand this concept all too well - now it’s more a case of competing in them.

XBox Live’s GamerScore, Steam’s in-built, in-game achievements and Ubisoft’s own game achievements system add another layer to games: outside the plot, nothing to do with the characters, they’re just extraneous throw-away trophies to compare with friends.

Some very clever people such as Jesse Schell, technology professor at Carnegie Mellon Institute (via the very good Gamestm magazine), think this is a bad thing for games.

Here are some achievement/XP heavy titles:

— Call of Duty 2: Modern Warfare, the biggest consumer entertainment product launch of all time (according to Activision/Vivendi) was nothing to do with its story-based first-person single player mode, but everything to do with its collaborative or solo deathmatch leagues, which are still sapping bandwith in homes and internet cafes across the world.

The plot and gameplay on the single player mode is pretty good, as with previous CoD installments - but millions couldn’t really care less. For them it’s about levelling up and improving their stats.

— World of Warcraft, another Activision(+Blizzard) title, the big daddy of MMORPGS literally has no plot other than the ones gamers create for themselves through various set-piece activities. And it’s all about the “levelling”.

— FIFA 2010: Even footy isn’t safe these days. The quite joy of just winning the World Cup or whatever is now replaced by increasing the stats of your created online character or “Pro”. A good cross or goal gives your wee man better skills. Online head to head 11 v 11 match victory gives you points and increases your ranking - eventually a few wins sees you climb the seeding system to play harder opponents. The same is true of things like the Madden titles and something similar is in place in the (devilishly difficult, for me anyway) basketball sim 2K10.

On balance, these online titles gain from the XP factor. Achievements and XP are an interesting way of gaughing your progress through a game and another element of play is always welcome.

But for me XP works better in sports titles, where the action is more naturally competitive. If you doubt that, why not check out the Valve FPS titles, starting with the princely, unbeatable, utter classics Half-Life and Half-Life 2, currently available for next to nothing via the Steam store.

The main character doesn’t change at all in terms of ability or stats (of which there are none anyway). Sure, the guns get enjoyably bigger and the aliens a bit more scary, but at their heart the HL titles are great, non-stop sci-fi stories and it’s that that gets me going back to them.

And just to demean that aforementioned execellent story-telling, here’s a video that compiles not one but both Half-Life titles into 60 seconds (with added funny due to its German dialogue)