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Medikits, Power-Ups, and Cheat CodesIn praise of the video-game cliché.

By Chris Baker
Posted Monday, July 23, 2007, at 7:26 AM ET

Click here to launch a slide show.Click the launch module to the left for a slide show on video-game clichés.

Video games aren't exactly inviting to neophytes. Every time you fire up a new title, you've got to learn how to look around, run, and fire an Uzi all over again. Once you nail down what the X button and the Z button do, you've got to figure out how to read the on-screen map, how to heal your wounds, and how to tell the good guys from the bad guys. Each game world is like a foreign country, full of unfamiliar sights and sounds and seemingly arbitrary rules. How do gamers survive in these strange lands? Clichés. Loads and loads of clichés.

In the last two decades, video games have developed a visual language from scratch. Sometimes, this iconography can feel tired and recycled—every shoot-'em-up game ever made includes an exploding barrel or 20. But it's worth remembering that, more than TV watchers or moviegoers, gamers need their hands held. Go to see Transformers in the theater, and you're guaranteed to make it to the final scene even if the plot makes no sense. Try out a new game, though, and you can wander around for hours without figuring out how to finish the first mission.

Click here for a slide-show appreciation of video-game clichés.

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Chris Baker is a senior editor at Wired.
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Remarks from the Fray:

You missed one very fundamental cliche of videogaming - the progressively increasing difficulty of the "enemies" throughout the game. It makes sense, of course, for the "big boss" to have his elite guard in and around his inner sanctum. However, many games I've played (which are admittedly few but tends to be RPGs) begin with a massive, violent event (e.g., the attack on the castle in Neverwinter Nights) which your character joins near the end of said event. Of course, the act is perpetrated by lowly imps that die with but a harsh look. It makes one wonder how there is any hope against the horde of the much tougher creatures awaiting you at levels 2 and beyond.

More importantly, it makes you wonder just how mediocre a bad guy you must be if you are assigned be the "boss" of the first level. That guy/girl/demon probably got that job as the result of nepotism ("Come on, I know my brother is slow, has no ranged attacks, and in fact has no combat ability to speak of, but he's kinda demonic looking and needs the work! Please let him sit around at the end of Act I until a random adventurer arrives? Please?!? He's cramping my style as the Lord of Darkness/Head of the Motor City Crime Syndicate/Undisputed, Spiky King of Mushrooms and Turtles").

--ridesq

(To reply, click here.)

Any media, and any genre, has its touch points, from a laugh track in a sitcom to a person behind the desk for the evening news. If you know baseball, you can appreciate home run with bases loaded. If you do not know baseball, a player could run the wrong way and it wouldn't phase you.

And clearly, the more expensive games get to make, as with move franchises, the less game developers are going to want to take risks.

But I think what is more interesting is that game are inventing a new kinesthetic language that will be worked into both classrooms and work processes in the near future. Even tycoon games have forever changed business schools. Concepts like situational awareness are now part of any gamer's vocabulary.

The trick for everyone from Electronic Arts to the U.S. Military is to realize both the opportunities and also the limitations of meeting users' expectations.

--Clark Aldrich

(To reply, click here.)

(7/26)