Spoiled Novelty: Mechanical Spoilers

Games aren’t new anymore. They don’t surprise us.

The common thesis around the internet is that there’s nothing new in games because developers are creatively bankrupt. There are no new ideas because no one has any except for independent developers; if big name developers have ideas, they’re summarily crushed by publishers who want their games to fit easy points of comparison so they can get games journalists on their side.

In reality, I’m not sure that much has changed. One thing, though, has definitely changed: how much we are informed about games before we play them.

As someone who played and bought games in the 90’s, the biggest change between then and now is the amount of information we have about our games. When Chrono Trigger was released, for instance, all we knew about it was that it was a JRPG from Squaresoft with characters that looked really weird (Dragon Ball hadn’t permeated the culture yet, so only the hardest of the hardcore knew who Akira Toriyama was). When we got into it, and we realized this game was about time travel, there was a moment of wonder: this game was so much cooler than it had seemed on the outside!

If you played games in the 90’s, you remember games for their novelty. Mario 3 had the boot that showed up in one level and changed mechanics before going away. Super Mario RPG had these incredible characters you met who weren’t part of the Mario universe, characters you didn’t know anything about.

In some bizarro world where Mario RPG releases today, we’d have read long character bios of both Geno and Mallow. We’d know they were coming. There’d be no novelty to them, because they’d be cool people we’d expected to show up. We’d probably fall asleep halfway through the sewers because what’s coming wouldn’t have been good enough to justify what we played.

This is a microcosm of the problem with games nowadays: we expect everything. Few modern games can do anything to surprise us because we’ve read about everything in them before they release. In the interest of making an informed decision, we’ve ruined the game we’re about to buy. We know what mechanics are going to show up, how they’re going to change as the game goes on, and what we’re going to have to do. There’s never any novel game mechanics because that would require the publisher to not try to sell their game to the most people.

Look at Skyrim, a game we haven’t played but know a lot about. There are dragons in Skyrim. This has been the major marketing push of the game: like Oblivion but with dragons. I’m sure this excites some people, dragon fetishists mostly. Personally, I would have been happy with Like Oblivion, but better.

Here’s the place where the modern ruining of games comes in. There are dragons. We know that. When you play Skyrim for the first time in November, and you first see a dragon, think about your thought process. Is it going to be, Holy shit that’s so fucking cool! or Man, I’m going to get me some cool dragon powers! It’s going to be the latter. By revealing the dragons as part of marketing, they’ve been codified as a feature for the player to exploit rather than as a truly wondrous new thing. They’ve never bee allowed to exist as a new feature; now they are something we expect with the package. In another alternate world where Skyrim was just released in stores without publicity, with mysterious box art and absolutely no information, the first random dragon to attack you would have been a magical moment.

Those moments don’t exist in mainstream games anymore. There’s never that sense of shock and surprise at a new, unanticipated event, but rather a sense of expectation and then disappointment that nothing new came up. Of course there wasn’t anything new: the newness has been beaten to death in the public arena by marketing goons.

Indie games, on the other hand, get away with having new ideas because no one’s heard of them. I still have no idea, really, what Frozen Synapse is about: when I play it, later today, it will be a novel experience because I’ll have no preconceived notions going into it. Other independent games benefit from this phenomenon. For instance, Atom Zombie Smasher, a game I really liked, was made all the sweeter because I had an inaccurate view of it going in: I thought it’d be another zombie game, not a weird risk-management scenario with a crunchy leveling core. Balloon Diaspora charmed me not because it was different but because it was unexpected. Bangai-O Spirits captured my heart because I went in expecting a twin stick shooter and found the weirdest thing in the world.

On the other hand, I found Mass Effect 2 pretty bland and lifeless. Is this because it was bland and lifeless, or was it because I already knew a lot about it when it launched? Was it because the guns and conversation were boring, or because previews had me numbed to the twists and made me expect so much more? I didn’t like Dragon Age: Origins at first, because I’d hyped it up in my mind. When I came back to it later, with fresh eyes, I saw its novelty and innovations for what they were, and I appreciated the game for them. I have a gut feeling that if I ever go back to Final Fantasy XIII as someone not expecting the best game ever I might get a good game out of it. I would look at the battle system and see the novelty; I’d hear the story with ears ready to receive it without preconceived notions.

The trouble is this is a problem with no solution. We can say we won’t look at promotional media for games, but even the things we read about them can color our expectations into odd directions and paint the novel as old hat. Even games you try carefully to avoid spoilers for (like I’m doing right now with Journey) comes with the difficulty of people talking about the game. Spoilers exist, and we can’t avoid them. We can deal with them, but that’s about all we have.

The crucial question is whether or not game writers should set their games up expecting inevitable spoilers of mechanics and plot. On the one hand, we exist in a world where even the most novel ideas will be spoiled for us before we even unbox the game; on the other, spoiled mechanics are better than no new mechanics at all, which seems to be a modern trend in development. Would you prefer a world like the one where video games are now, with spoiled mechanics, or a world like where other media are, where tropes are codified and ossified to the point where breaking them can make a work unmarketable?