Tuesday, April 9, 2013

An Experiment in Gaming Quality


Well, time to try to answer that age-old question: were games back in the day better than the games today?

First, of course, let's note potential biases, so we can try to avoid them and answer the (highly subjective) question more objectively.

There are two biases that are in favor of old games from the get-go:

First is your basic nostalgia.  You still like playing old games because you used to like them, and they remind you of a particular time in your life.  This is a difficult bias to get over, and really, the only way to do so is to ignore any old game that you have any affection for.

My example would be the King's Quest series.  I played King's Quest 1 and 2 when I was a kid, on a Tandy computer.  Now, consider that King's Quest 3 is essentially the same idea, it should be essentially the same quality.  But since I didn't grow up with KQ3, when I play it now, I don't really like it.  I may conclude from this that my mist of nostalgia is getting in the way of objectively rating KQ 1 and 2.

But, of course, ignoring the games you grew up with can get you into trouble, because you might be skipping the best of the best, the games which everyone had precisely because they were the highest quality that era had to offer.  So by ignoring games you feel nostalgia for is likely to lower the average quality of the era by default.

SMB3
Ignoring this one brings the class average down significantly.
Hopefully there are some old games that are considered classics that you never got around to, or never had the opportunity to play, and those would help in the testing.  For instance, I never played any Metroid games growing up, and those are typically high-quality games, so playing an old Metroid game, for me, might be a good way to find a high quality game unmarred by nostalgia.

The second bias is the "Oldies Station Effect".  This is the idea that arises from music radio that applies very well to any medium with a backlog.  The example is that an oldies station doesn't play every song that was popular in the fifties, but it picks out the songs which were popular then and still sound good now.  If there was some crummy song that was popular for a week, you aren't likely to remember it, and the oldies station isn't likely to play it.

But a modern station doesn't just play the best of this decade.  Instead, it picks a genre, and plays anything and everything that's selling at all.  Some artists that are popular now will appear to be one-hit wonders in the future, or may fade away entirely.

Pitbull, the rapper
Ahem.
So if you think about old games, you're limiting your field of view to only the games we remember, only the games we call "the classics".  Meanwhile, we are flooded with so many games today, both good and bad, that we might compare the average of today with the best of yesterday.

So to overcome this bias, perhaps we can only weed through today's games and compare the best of today with the classics of yesterday... as long as we're not nostalgic for them.

However, there are biases on the other side, too:

Some games might be our flavor of the week, and because it's so new to us, we think it's great.  We don't have any historical perspective on it, so the game might just be a flash in the pan, to be forgotten as soon as you get your next game.

So though we want to compare new games, we cannot necessarily use games that have just come out, but must use games that have been on the market for a time now and have proven success (or failure).

The other, far more obvious bias, is to suggest that newer games are better by default, because the technology is better, and/or because the industry has evolved to the point where developers have games down to a science.

Newest Sim City
I think we all now the previous statement is false.
Now that these biases are known, can we compare old games to new ones in a more objective manner?  Depends on how well you can get through these biases.  Some of them are tough to get over, because our natural inclination is to pick the games we grew up with and love already, and compare them to the new game that's currently the hot topic.

Perform this experiment yourself, and see how well it works:

Download an emulator for a classic system, like an NES (or for you young whippersnappers, an N64), or download a game on Wii's Virtual Console, and play a game with high marks that you never got around to playing.  Note how much fun you had, how much you truly enjoyed the experience.  Then pick up a recent game with equally high marks that you didn't have a chance to buy right when it first came out (by doing this, not only do you see what game is still being talked about, but you also get a reduced price!), and also mark just how much fun you had.

Of course, a single case study isn't much evidence, but if you can afford it (and if you can find enough old games you never played), try it out a few times, and average the results.

Original Sim City
Consider a classic game and it's modern counterpart as another comparison.  Though SimCity might be unfair.
Do you find yourself surprised by the results?  Did you change your mind on your belief that one age of games was better than the other?  Are they equal?  Is one age atrocious?

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