Dark Thoughts: What Makes a Good Game (Fallout 3 Spoiler)

What makes a good game? Every time a game designer starts a concept for the next “jewel” they ask themselves this. What they don’t seem to realize is that there’s a formula. They vary from game to game but they all stem from one truth: repetition is not your enemy. I hear all the time of how repetitive a game is and therefore is horrible but let’s break it down shall we? Back centuries ago in what we know as the 90’s when we were just inching our heads out of the primordial gaming ooze, ID Software released the iconic game known as Doom. This game was nothing but walking into a room, killing everything, walking into the next room and killing everything again, yet somehow it sucked thousands of hours out of the working man’s (and woman’s) life with its gory, pixelated awesomeness. The trick is, not to eliminate repetition, but to make is so awesome that we actually want to do it over and over and over again. Take Fallout 3 for example. We all thought at one point or another that the VATS system would get boring after awhile: target, shoot ,head explodes, repeat, but this wasn’t the case. Bethesda got it right. They didn’t take repetitiveness away, they made it good. SPOILER: Of course then they fucked it up when they made the wanderer play martyr or asshole until they gave us the fucking expansion to do the thing that anyone with half a brain stem would have done and send Frankenstein in to suck up the radiation END OF SPOILER. Yes, I know it’s harder for some games than others to do this, but it’s hardly impossible. If there’s anything you take from this, developers, it’s that GOOD repetition is just as important as variety in the game world. – Donny Grimm