The dying breed and how PC gaming needs to adapt
The statistics nowadays seems to tell us that the PC gamers are a dying breed. As the next generation consoles takes over, PC just whimpers and dies. Why? And is this the reality we, PC gamers, are facing?
Since this is an usability blog, rather than gaming one, at this point one should have creeping feeling that, in my mind, this has something to do with usability and user interfaces. Well, if you came to that conclusion, I salute thee, thus thy are correct.
Now, first things first. As Crytek’s Cevat Yerli lately said, piracy is a factor on PC gaming, thus forcing Crytek to go multi-platform and cutting the PC-only titles. However, I’m also arguing that other things play their part in the equation which leads to PC gaming slow-down.
One thing that consoles have nailed down is user experience, in which usability plays huge part. To play a game all you need to do is just flick the machine on, put the disc in and start playing, easy as one-two-three. Wii gamers go even so far as not identifying themselves as gamers anymore, (which was evident at Nordic Game 2008 – Mass effect panel. Great event btw!) since games like Wii Sports really has no relation to traditional gaming, in the eyes of general public.
Now, consider the same thing with PC; with PCs you have to figure out if your machine can even run the game, if you have the needed updates, where you could download the latest updates for the game (since it was released un-finished), setup your controls, figure out the mouse orientation etc. In the end this means that the reward of eventually playing the game is behind pretty high walls, even for the experienced users.
Wind of Change
Then comes Call of Duty 4 – Modern combat, which actually takes the first steps towards better user experience and I don’t mean just the gameplay or the story, I mean the process of actually getting to play the game. Some games have already learned to actually tell the player how they can achieve something, move their character forward, pick up things etc. with the HUD hints; “Press W to move forwards“, although some games manage to do screw even this simple thing completely by showing the default keys, “Press Up to move forwards“, even though I just have mapped my keys to WASD. Fail. COD4, however, made it couple steps further; the game starts from S.A.S. bootcamp which teaches you how to find your way around in the world, basic tutorial stuff. On the “taking steps forward” -side the bootcamp also defines the difficulty level by running the user through close quarters training course, from which the game suggest difficulty level which should be par with your time and score from the course. Bingo! The user doesn’t have to questimate which level should he play with, and how could he, after all he’s playing the game for the first time. (though one could argue what are the reasons for actually setting anykind of level for the game difficulty itself, but maybe that’s a whole another post) But we’re not stopping there as there is something even better in the bootcamp, it lasts about 5 seconds or so, however the impact it has is huge; your commanding officer tells you fire your rifle to couple of targets, first one pops up from the floor, second from the ceiling, after you’ve hit the second target the game simply asks you if you would like to reverse the mouse orientation. Brilliant! The user doesn’t have to figure out where and how he can change the mouse orientation into his likings, the game will do that for him.
The reason I said that the impact of this is huge is the matter that now you’ve moved part of your actual control set-up into the gameplay itself. Why not move the whole “setting it up” process into the game as a whole? The game could ask the player to move forward, the player would hit a button, the game would map it to move forward function to the button and the character would move forward. Of course we would still need the HUD hints and stuff but boy, how simple would that be from the player point of view? He never even saw the control set up, the game just magically appeared to work.
One could take this one step further and introduce storytelling to the configuration process. Simple example would be flasbacks of the main character as a child, learning his way around the world.
Now, compare this to completely transparent and automatic update and graphics set-up processes. The user would simply need to fire up the game and start playing, no configuration needed. Smashing!
So, as an answer to the original questions wheter the PC gamers really are a dying breed, I would say that the PC gaming will not die, it just needs to adapt. Mostly their usability and user experience. The gaming industry needs to learn how not to treat their audience as hardcore only, after all, everyone has somekind of computer, if not for anything else but banking and e-mail, but still, they are part of the potential audience. However, they will not participate if the games will treat them as a hardcore player who magically just knows what to do. The Vista performance classification for the computer is a great start, if only the general public would know of it since the potential it offers is huge; no more “Wait, what? It doesn’t work with my computer? And it tells me this AFTER I’ve bougth it..”
PC gaming, adapt or die.
