Of Consoles & Pixels: Time Wasters

To many, I have an enviable job. Currently, I am writing my dissertation (on gender and video games) and one of my regular tasks for the last few years has been to play many games under the guise of “research.” What I have a difficult time explaining to those who covet my research topic is that my “research” often involves playing poorly designed games that are attempting to target feminine demographics. Thus, playing World of Warcraft may sound like a fun research venture (and it is!) but spending several hours a day negotiating my virtual cooking skills with Cooking Mama often puts me in a fetal position while Mama, with her burning eyes, chastises, “Don’t worry! Mama will fix it!”

But I am not here today to talk about Cooking Mama. (Although, I suppose, I could rant about that too.) I want to talk about two recent game releases that particularly have pissed me off with their poor designs, poor controls, and misguided assumptions about players.

Fish Tickling

The first game is called Endless Ocean: Dive, Discover, Dream, for the Nintendo Wii. I don’t tend to like free-form, wander-at-your-will games, but I had heard some compelling things about Endless Ocean as an attempt to appeal to a highly coveted women’s demographic. The idea is that you roam around semi-freely as a scuba diver, exploring the ocean, examining neat sea-bound creatures, and looking at pretty coral reefs. I was dubious, but the reviews on Amazon were (mostly) pretty high and I figured it was worth checking out.

The primary problem with Endless Ocean is that it doesn’t know if wants to be free-form or not. While it isn’t necessarily a mission-based game (and you can wander around freely) spaces only open when you do really boring research missions involving collecting specimens. While you can interact with fish, you can only get so close to them to look at them, and you must befriend a fish before you can find out information about it (befriending a fish, by the way, is done by “petting it” which creepily is done with one finger, making it look like you are trying to tickle a fish).

Don’t get me wrong—I am not an all-action, all-the-time kind of game player, but there needs to be some kind of payoff to exploration games. I got especially annoyed when the woman minding the boat (the person who gives you advice and tells you about missions) explained that she doesn’t come with you because she doesn’t know how to swim. If only this game had weapons, I could have hit her over the head.

Obviously there are many people who like this game, and if they can find something compelling in this world… good for them. I just really didn’t get it.

Agatha Christie: And Then I Was Bored

The second game (also for the Nintendo Wii) is Agatha Christie: And Then There Were None
. Admittedly, this game never seemed remotely appealing to me and I could find no positive reviews about it, but (as I have already explained) I often have to buy and play games that look particularly moronic, but are being targeted at the demographic I am writing about. So despite all of my reservations, I purchased a video game based on a mid-century novel. Clearly what Agatha Christie had always intended.

I must be honest: I did not get past the first level of And Then There Were None. This was, in part, because having wandered around the game’s mystery mansion for about 30 minutes with nothing happening, most of the doors locked, and everyone telling me to leave them alone (and no one murdered!) I finally gave up. Is it too much to ask for a little bit of death in a murder mystery?

Here’s the thing, linear RPGs are frustrating enough. But linear RPGs where you have no idea (and no clue) what you are supposed to do next are absolutely infuriating. Finally, I took to clicking on every radiator I passed so that I could hear the narrator say, “A radiator. Those are always useful to have around.”

The worst part was that despite being designed for the Wii—where there is any number of innovative ways to move the character around, the game creators resorted to old school click-a-spot-to-move there controls. The only actual use of the wii-mote’s functions were to turn handles and open doors—and even that wasn’t asynchronous. It was like someone had designed a game for the Tandy computer and ported it over to the Wii twenty years later.

I had suspected that this would not go very well when I opened the game box to find an insert card that declared: “Register Now to Win Free Stuff” (very possibly the worst worded promotion I’ve ever seen).

Both of these games cost me $30 dollars, and I declare in the loudest voice I can possibly yell in on the Internet: I AM NOT HAVING FUN. I want my fucking $60 back.

- Shira Chess