Last week, I was talking to a friend, and I got onto the subject of Metal Gear Solid 3, and how its gameplay compares to its predecessor. I mentioned that while the latter is about actively moving around the sight of the enemy, the former is a lot of waiting within the sight of the enemy. His immediate response was "I hate waiting." My first thoughts were that he hadn't played the game and wouldn't have any reason to assume that a primary game mechanic of a highly acclaimed game isn't fun. But then I thought, why would he think that waiting is fun? He said, after an analogy of mine about pointing and clicking, that doing so at least something, and that waiting isn't at all. He had a point, and it got me thinking a lot about how the game is fun. Really, it comes down to framing.
For those who haven't played it, Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater was a very different game from the Metal Gear before it, Sons of Liberty. There was no radar, no sneaking suit (well, for most of the game), no close-sighted guards. It was just you, the guards, and some tall grass. Camouflage was the focus, and you had to keep your index high if you didn't want to be spotted by the guards, since they now had realistic vision capabilities. You moved through the grass slowly, like a predator. Every second crawling was plotting, setting some trap or searching for a hole in the guards' movement patterns, which have also slowed considerably. It wasn't just the same game but slower. It was an entirely new playstyle, with tension in even the smallest of movements.
Again, it's all about framing. Sure, waiting alone isn't fun, it'd just be wasting time. It's not the waiting that makes it enjoyable, though. It's the things you are doing, even if you can't see them with an untrained eye. Maintaining a spacial awareness, managing visibility and making sure noise is a minimum, scouting an area and forming a strategy... these are the things the player is thinking about while they're inching across the ground. The fact that a lot of that time is spent waiting isn't really important because of everything else going on, and it isn't necessarily a bad thing that movement is slow.
This extends to other games as well. You wouldn't think that clicking to the sound of music would be fun, but I'm 220,000 ranks into Osu and I'm not slowing down any time soon. Obeying or disobeying a narrator sounds like a really boring mechanic that couldn't hold up an entire game, but The Stanley Parable is very highly acclaimed. This logic could be used on video games in general. If you told somebody a hundred years ago that we'd all be pushing buttons to make pictures move for hours on end, they'd think you were crazy.
This extends to other games as well. You wouldn't think that clicking to the sound of music would be fun, but I'm 220,000 ranks into Osu and I'm not slowing down any time soon. Obeying or disobeying a narrator sounds like a really boring mechanic that couldn't hold up an entire game, but The Stanley Parable is very highly acclaimed. This logic could be used on video games in general. If you told somebody a hundred years ago that we'd all be pushing buttons to make pictures move for hours on end, they'd think you were crazy.
"We'll be doing what?"
The point is that pretty much anything can sound boring in concept. It's execution that matters. Clicking to music is interesting because it tests the player's skill and can be really rewarding if done well, not because it's just clicking to music. The gameplay of The Stanley Parable isn't what makes it interesting, it's the narrative controlled by the actions of the player in relation to the narrator. Next time you hear about a game that somebody else calls "Waiting: The Video Game", maybe consider their opinion of the game before the content itself. You might learn that a mechanic that seems bad isn't actually like that at all.
On another note, happy Leif Erikson Day, everyone, this is your captain, signing off.
On another note, happy Leif Erikson Day, everyone, this is your captain, signing off.