Scenes from the video games Skyrim, Beyond: Two Souls and The Last of Us.
Scenes from the video games Skyrim, Beyond: Two Souls and The Last of Us.
Siobhan Keogh tackles the key components that really make a video game good.
What makes a great game?
This year's most notable releases are still on their way, but afterwards there will inevitably be talk about which one deserves "game of the year". Once upon a time, this award kind of made sense. There were often a couple of clear contenders - games which had blown away everyone who played them.
Nowadays, however, there are a lot - a lot - of games released every year. Some of the great ones will be action games, some will be retro eight-bit platformers, some will be mobile tile-swapping games. Some will see mainstream success and some will deserve it but go nowhere. How do you choose from these? How do you compare them?
Realistically, you can't. At least not in a way that will make everyone happy. I can only share with you the factors required to turn me, personally, into an addict and an advocate. Because while I can play tens or even hundreds of hours of games like Hearthstone or even Bejeweled, they're not the games that leave a lasting impression on me.
If you want me to be talking about how much I loved your game for years to come, it needs to make me feel something other than fun or frustration. That means it needs to nail at least a couple of these three things:
Characters
Being invested in a game, for me, means being invested in the lives of the people within the game. Two years ago I got hooked on Beyond: Two Souls not because of its story or its mechanics, but because I cared, surprisingly deeply, about the fate of Jodie. There were plenty of people out there who didn't even like that game, because of its quicktime events and minimal interactivity, but I did because for me great characters trump everything.
A scene from the video game Beyond: Two Souls.
The same goes for the Walking Dead series. Do you, the gamer, actually do a lot? Not really. But you quickly become invested in the lives of characters like Lee and Clementine.
Story
A scene from the video game Skyrim.
But good characters are shaped by their circumstances - and that's where the story comes in. There's a reason everyone loved Skyrim, and that's because the people who made it created an enormous, detailed alternate universe. No matter where you were in Skyrim you could pick up its of paper, learn more about the world around you, and in 30 seconds change your view of the overarching story. At the same time, you don't have to read all of that stuff to become invested, so it provides different strokes for different folks.
Really nailing the story is a difficult thing, and rarer than most people realise. There are plenty of games out there that don't even have a story, and they're still great games - just not the kind that captures hearts as well as minds.
Gameplay
A scene from the video game Civilization.
Yes, most games still do have to be 'fun'.
Fun is not the same thing as entertaining. Beyond: Two Souls was entertaining, but was it fun? I'm not so sure.
Fun games keep you on your toes. Whether it's testing your reflexes in a shooter, your powers of deduction in a puzzle game, or engaging your strategic mind in Civilization, it needs to engage your brain. You need to be able to fail or succeed. You need to have goals and feel good about achieving them.
There's nothing wrong with games that don't do all of the above. Many of them don't deliberately, whether that's a design choice or simply a lack of resources, and they can still be fantastic games. But it's the rare game that does all three - The Last of Us, Mass Effect, Portal - that becomes an instant classic, beloved by all. I think of those as 'perfect games', or at least as close as you can get.
• What makes a perfect game for you? Let us know in the comments.
