Primal Urges
At around 7am I’m sitting in my flat, controller in hand surrounded by empty cans of Red Bull and I realise I don’t have the self-control needed for videogames.
I think I meant to stop at about 10pm, but it’s Easter and not like I had anything to do. And with my flatmate over in California for ETCON, there was no-one around to slap me out of my gaming psychosis. Fortunately sunlight spanking the CRT is apparently nature’s defence against deep-vein thrombosis for the late-night gamer.
I was in town on Friday and noticed that GAME was offering the new PS2 release Primal for £20 (i.e. half of RRP) for “Reward Card” holders. It’s a free-roaming 3D platformer in the game genre now classified as “a bit like Tomb Raider”. I wasn’t planning on buying a new title until Enter The Matrix came out in May, but this was too sweet a deal.
Now, there are two things that make for a compelling single-player game. Firstly, the “I can do it next time” factor: Challenges that are temporarily beyond the capability of the player, but seem within reach. “One last try” ends up lasting many tries, and potentially many hours. The other is the game’s flow: the discovery of new things, a feeling of a fluid progression which becomes difficult to interrupt. Psychologists have their own technical terms for these. Good for them.
Primal’s strength isn’t with the first factor. I took to it’s combat system well, and despite my neurotic level of game saving I only actually “died” twice before the final confrontation.
What keeps Primal compelling is that it keeps moving. Being stuck in a game is frustrating – games are essentially trivial, yet it’s difficult to walk away from something you’ve spent a lot of money on. Normal media doesn’t attempt to keep it’s content away from the consumer (stupid copy-prtection schemes excepted). I imagine people wouldn’t buy a foreign movie in a language they didn’t understand unless they were sure it had subtitles (porn excepted). As a result there are empires out there built on helping those stuck in games. Books, magazines, websites, premium rate phone numbers. Protecting people’s investments.
The thing is, from my experience, video game puzzles aren’t difficult. The real difficulty is working within the game’s own logic. When solutions finally present themselves the usually seem so obvious in retrospect that you’ll instantly begin to doubt your previous difficulties. A fleeting moment of feeling like, as we would have said in a less sensitive age, “a spaz”.
It reminds me of a gag on a sketch-show parody of The Crystal Maze (a possible influence for the Primal designers?) in which a student is locked in a puzzle room consisting of a boiling kettle, cups, and tea-bags. The contestant quickly surveys the equipment before exclaiming with panic
“I can’t see what I’m supposed to do!”.
The design of Primal initially seems to threaten some level of complexity: Stargate-esque “rift-gates” that act as transporters between, and within, levels; the acquisition of new abilities and tools that can be used to solve puzzles. But it appears that at some point in the development it was steered towards a simpler linear progression, with frequent rewards. It seems, if you’ll forgive the conceit, relatively childish.
In comparison Resident Evil’s idea of a reward is “Here’s the key that opens the door you last saw four hours ago on the other side of a zombie-infested city. You’re going to have to go through all those
slowly opening doors again. Life is hard. Fuck you.” See – it’s more real, more adult.
Still, it’s quite satisfying to have done a Primal level, and refreshing to be able to walk back through a level and still see the corpses of your vanquished foes where they fell (and with the knowledge they won’t start grabbing at your ankles). There’s some additional nonsense related to finding hidden tarot cards, but I can’t see that appealing to anyone but the professional “walk-through” writer.
Perhaps it is the linear progression that kept me playing into the night. Telling myself I can stop playing after the next puzzle, the next cut-scene, the next world, the next… oh it’s done. It certainly helps that the game has high-production values, slick code with some interesting visual flourishes, and voice actors apparently cast from the world of cult TV (I’m tipping Adreas Katsulas to become the Donald Sutherland of the videogame voice-over world).
So I bought the game on Friday, and was finished on Sunday in time for “24″. In all probably around 24 hours of gaming. If it wasn’t for the accursed sun I could probably have completed it in one sitting. But I like to think of myself as having just enough self-control not to try.
