The Prestige, and meaningful game reviews

A game that can be finished in one hour (80 Days) can be a far better experience than one that lasts for a month (Clash of Anything, Really), an indie game with pixel based graphics (FTL!) may be a far more engaging and innovative experience than the latest AAA with high resolution art bursting out of the gills (Too many to list), and in this vein there are many more meaningless weasel metrics being paraded such as number of units or resolution (1080 vs 720!) in game reviews today, which fail miserably at capturing the essence of the game. This essence should reflect the sum of a game's parts, distinct from the individual parts themselves. Focusing on just one element without looking at the overall experience created by the interplay of content is doing a great disservice to the nature of games, designed as a means of spending your time in the best possible way. Hence I propose the following four phase structure of a game as the template for meaningful game reviews that do not lose the forest for the trees.

In my experience, there are four phases of experiencing a game, which I will try and roughly equate to the steps of a magic trick outlined in Christopher Nolan’s mental masterpiece, the Prestige. These are the Pledge, the Turn, The Prestige, and my own addition: The Aftermath. We’ll go into detail over these below, but it is worth mentioning that no one part is more important than the others on its own. Each plays a part towards the overall experience, much in the same way the elements of a four-course meal synthesize into a worthy culinary experience, or fail trying. Also like a four course meal, a game with bad starters and a dull main course may still be redeemed by an excellent desert at the end, but in that case there is always the risk of the player losing interest before ever reaching the exquisite desert. For the stages themselves:

The Pledge is the promise made at the beginning of the game, between the game and the gamer, laying down the essence of experience to come. What’s the game about? What’s the theme and the setting? Who are you? Your role? What kind of challenges lie ahead? What’s the objective? The Pledge lays down the framework of what the gamer should expect, the skeleton of the game’s structure. In business lingo, this would be the on-boarding.

In most cases, the Pledge will not end with the end of the formal tutorial, but with the player having a mental picture, an imprint of sorts, of what lies ahead. Where Assassin’s Creed 4 drags this on-boarding out over nearly laborious ten hours, the lighter mobile delight 80 Days makes itself clear in a much smoother twenty minutes. Effectively, the Pledge becomes the litmus test by which a player decides whether or not to invest their time into playing the whole game. In MOBAs like DOTA the pledge has been meticulously crafted to give a new player both a fair view of the game, and to incentivise them to play on with item gifts for completing the tutorial.

Just so we’re clear, I’ll share two examples of pledges - Spec Ops: The Line pledges to be a gritty 3^rd Person cover based military shooter set in a disaster struck Middle East, where finding out the cause of the current situation is the game’s purpose. In Terraria, the game’s pledge is to be a fantasy themed 2D platformer where the onus is on the player to figure out what to do next, and the eventual goal is to thrive off the randomly generated environment and defeat the creatures that attack you.  

On the PC, with the new Steam Two Hour Gameplay refund policy in effect, I expect to see a lot of improvement in the quality of this segment of the game and unfortunately also a lot of window dressing in the first two hours of many new games.

The Turn is where the ordinary concepts outlined in the pledge come together to create something truly extraordinary. The Turn is where the bulk of gameplay happens, it’s the stage in which you figure out how you want to aim for victory and set out doing that, interacting with the games systems and other players as you do it. Here the game matures and fleshes out its systems, introducing new and novel characters, places, items, challenges, and corresponding rewards along the way.

In Pokemon, this is the time you spend travelling from Gym to Gym, building your team, evolving your characters, and making a lot of memories on the way (A Safari! A Boat! Fossils!). In Sid Meier’s Civilization series, this is where you grow your nation, expanding your cities, researching technology, and waging war or promoting culture on the road to victory.

The systems outlined in the Pledge also get upgraded, twisted and subverted during the Turn. A great example of a twist is the Fanatic’s Tower in Final Fantasy VI. Up till the Tower, the game gives you the opportunity to attack enemies with physical attacks, magic, or through abilities. In the Fanatic’s tower, you cannot select physical attacks from the menu, and are expected to use the other two methods to damage your enemies. The catch? The enemies in the Tower are highly resistant to magic damage, and abilities take time to use. This twist in combat structure inspires the player to question the approach that got them this far and change their team and strategy to adjust. In my own play-through, this shakeup in the fundamental pledge made me stop and relook at every system, and how to face the new challenge. I distinctly remember my train of thought at that stage - Are there any resistance bypassing spells I can use? (Yes, Ultima) Is there a way to use physical attacks without selecting them from the menu? (Yes, for one character through specific items, also through a spell) Is there a store in the tower? (No) Do I have enough Mana Potions to reach the top of the Tower in one go? (No, so I went to a store and stocked up) Was there any way to bypass the regular enemies entirely on the way to the top? (Yes, but that approach would have deprived me of both the larger challenge and the experience points on the whole). Going through the tower with my strategy and defeating the Boss at the top was an extremely satisfying victory, derived from using the knowledge I already had with me, but through relooking at what I knew in new and novel ways. This twist added greatly to both the depth of the gameplay and the lasting experience of the game itself.

The Turn is where the game designer has free reign to challenge the player, to express his creativity, and to make the ordinary extraordinary, bit by bit. The actions made during the Turn build up towards the second last phase of the experience, The Prestige.

The Prestige is where everything that has been built towards comes to a crescendo. It is the final chapter in the story, where plot threads align, and decisions make their pay off. In Mass Effect 2, this was the Assault on the Collector Ship, where the time you had invested in building your crew and your ship either paid off (no casualties, a clean mission), or failed miserably (with the option of no survivors, not even the player character himself/herself). All the effort put in the earlier phases, the time spent learning the moves, the time invested into learning the lore, and the mastery of the underlying systems and decisions are challenged more than ever before in the Pledge.

Players tend the remember the Prestige very strongly when recalling the game, as it was the convergence of their experience and choices, and as such developers do well to focus on the quality of this segment. Many games go all out at this point with extremely challenging missions and/or bosses, defeating which gives the player a mental jolt of satisfaction in having become better players at the game than they were when they began the journey. At the same time, a carnival ending isn’t required everywhere to still be poignant and memorable, Gone Home’s final revelation brought together all the pieces of the story and explained why the titular home is empty and was none the less for it. Achieving the Prestige is the goal set up in the Pledge, and when done well, it is a powerful catharsis of elements in the minds of the player. 

When players meet and talk games, they may or may not share their experience of the Pledge or the Turn, but they readily share how a game’s Prestige impacted them (I survived the Mass Effect 2 Collector mission with my entire team alive, Woohoo!). However, the Prestige itself is not always the concluding experience of a game.

The Aftermath. With the commitments made during the Pledge either resolved or intentionally left open, the Aftermath is what happens after the main story has concluded. 

The Aftermath can happen in a number of ways – 

1. Limit the player to the game as it was just before the final chapter or a require the player start a new game from the start
2. Allow the player to replay the game from the start but with accrued benefits (including the intangible benefit of experience of what will happen in the game) from completing the first play through (the New Game + option)
3. Let the player continue the game where he left off, though by this point they’ll usually be strong enough that challenges laid out during the Turn will tend to be far less difficult
4. Open up and reveal new content that was hidden till now.

An example of each of the types of Aftermath is as follows: 

1. Mario and Luigi: Superstars Saga stops after you’ve defeated the final boss, the only way to continue is to replay the game from either the final battle or the very start again. This option does reduce the scope for replayability, as each playthrough will be more or less the same as the last in a linear game. 
2. Fire Emblem, on the other hand, gives new save files a handful of powerful and handy weapons for completing an existing savefile, which allow the player to play the core game faster or more enjoyably, or in some cases, in a different manner entirely. 
3. In GTA V, the Aftermath of the final heist is a strange endgame driven by completing side quests, collecting meta-game achievements and for a large part trying to figure out that entire UFO business.  
4. An example of the fourth kind, in Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, after beating the main story, an entire new character with new gameplay mechanics and a new boss were unlocked, which added an extra layer of narrative and depth to the game.

Among genres, Roguelikes are heavily dependent on the Aftermath to deliver the full range of their experience, as continual upgrades across one play provide bonuses to the next which enable the player to progress ahead and over time tease out the full content of the game.

What’s notable is that gameplay and the objectives in the Aftermath are often very different from the gameplay and experience during the Turn, as the raison d’etre of the game has changed, either because you already know the end to the story, or because you are playing more for diversity than for novelty. Linking back to Nolan’s Prestige, the Aftermath was what happened after we found out the identity of the man who had adopted the magician’s daughter.

To Summarize:

We can use the experiential stages of a game as a meaningful way to structure game reviews, one that doesn’t miss the forest for the trees and fixate over details that are not comparable. Comparing playing a game to the experience of witnessing a magic trick is one approach that can help provide a fair, overarching method to review games.