The Game Boy: Should Games Have Win Buttons?

Posted 06/17/2009 at 9:30am | by Nathan Grayson

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High blood pressure. Teeth marks in keyboards. Keyboard marks in monitors. Millions dead. These are only a few of the symptoms typically associated with gamer rage, but as with any potent malady, thousands of talented men and women are racing to find a cure. Recently, however, two groups picked up the pace and sprinted to the head of the frustration-fighting pack. Their names are Bethesda and Nintendo.
 
Both companies are currently developing games that, in a manner of speaking, play themselves. They are -- to put it in cynical, crotchety, “back in my day” terms – finally handing players a Win Button. Bethesda has applied the name “SMART A.I.” to its get out of frustration free card, but it merely gives you the option of taking a breather while the A.I. controls your character’s movement toward a specific location. In other words, encounter anything with an itchy trigger finger and you’re S.O.L.

This is nowhere near as extreme as New Super Mario Bros. Wii’s approach, which will – according to Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto – do everything for you at your behest. Free from the slippery grasp of your feeble fingers, Mario will cut a swath through Bowser and his cohorts as though possessed by the reptile-battling soul of Steve Irwin. He will have his revenge. But will you enjoy it?

Well, I’d say it depends. Videogames, one could argue, have been subtly moving toward including this completely non-interactive option for quite some time. Whether it be auto-aim in console FPSes like Halo or guided jumps in games like Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune and inFAMOUS, developers funnel players into eventual success by shaving away little bits of interactivity from their games. If done well, these techniques help the player feel empowered, fitting perfectly into their in-game character’s role of, say, a nimble, sharp-shooting super human. In addition, this causes frustration to rear its ugly, screaming head less frequently, since by and large, the player feels like, well, a badass. Sure, that feeling of badassery – that form of empowerment – isn’t exactly a reflection of the player’s real skill level, but it’s enjoyable nonetheless.

It’s important to note, however, that if the player is given too much power over the game world – say, for instance, if a fighting game allows combatants to pull off their best moves effortlessly – then the player is likely to get bored. All the power’s been handed to you on a silver platter; what is there to strive for? When the developer guides the player through an experience, empowerment becomes an illusion to varying degrees. The developer, as the magician in this example, should never show all of his or her tricks. Now you might be thinking, “Isn’t a Win Button a big, red example of that mistake in action?” Again, as I’ll explain in further detail soon, it depends on what type of game we’re talking about.  
 
At this point, it’s pretty clear that the kind of satisfaction one earns from games that actually put up a fight is markedly different from that of those that simply ask you to close your eyes, hold out your hands, and receive An Experience. Here, any of the above in-game assist features only serve to make the player feel coddled. After all, in this case, empowerment surges through your synapses not while you’re doing the deed, but after you’ve conquered a tough level or finally outsmarted that boss that infuriatingly tossed you around as a cat would its broken, helpless prey. So sure, there’s an element of frustration involved, but so long as you tough it out, satisfaction and empowerment eventually flow like so much celebratory champagne.

Thus, with those two types of in-game empowerment outlined, we loop back around to our original question: Do games that play themselves actually bring anything significant to the table? If we’re talking about the first type of empowerment discussed – the kind that takes you out for a night on the town and only wants your happiness – then sure, one could make a case for autoplay in games.

Speaking generally, games of that variety tend to keep the difficulty curve relatively flat, meaning that skipping through one particularly difficult or frustrating section would probably yield another that’s more easily enjoyable. As a result, while the illusion of player empowerment might be temporarily destroyed due to your acceptance of your inability to consistently beat the game at its own, well, game, you probably won’t ever fly off the handle and rage-quit the game permanently. On top of that, thanks to autoplay, your in-game avatar stays in character, since you then watch him/her pulverize that difficult game section flawlessly, just as tough-as-nails hero/heroine should.

In fact, I’d be a-okay if all story intensive games, from this point forward, added an autoplay feature, as gameplay in such games takes a backseat to unraveling of the plot. And since most of those plots don’t make any mention of the main character biting it against Evil McBastard Boss 37 times and popping back to life through methods never adequately explained, I think autoplay would actually be a fairly substantial improvement.

As for the second type of empowerment outlined above – which sees the player “beat” games the good old fashioned way – autoplay makes about as much sense as jamming your fingers in your ears during a concert. In both cases, you’re missing the point of each respective medium entirely. Challenging games build to rewarding, empowering moments by forcing the player to jump through a series of increasingly impossible hoops. Overcoming the resulting pain and frustration and narrowly earning victory, then, is its own reward. If you skip those emotional peaks and valleys with autoplay, why even play the game in the first place?

This leads me to wonder: Why is Nintendo debuting its take on autoplay with a traditional Mario game? Mario’s all about pure, undiluted gameplay – certainly not story. Plus, Mario titles’ difficulty level tends to gradually slope upwards, so won’t players eventually reach a point where they just have to let the game play itself until the end?
 
Nintendo’s erroneous example, however, actually ties up my whole argument in a fairly nice package. Autoplay shouldn’t immediately be written off just because it isn’t interactive. Really, creating a great game is all about balancing interactive elements with their non-interactive counterparts, and autoplay is just another tool that developers can use to aid in that process. That’s not to say that every game should include it as a feature, but as with many non-interactive, experience-enriching features like cut-scenes and auto-aim, autoplay – as an option -- has its place.