HelixFox | Games by Kyle Rodgers

While writing my previous post about where Flash games are going, I started to think about graphics and how they apply to peoples’ perceptions of games.

We look at modern games on consoles and ooh and aah about how pretty they look. We then plonk down a nice amount of cash (usually £40-50 here) to buy these games, play them for their 6-10 hours of gameplay, then shelve them until we want to replay them (perhaps never). This is an exaggeration, sure, as most games will potentially offer more than 6-10 hours of gameplay these days through multiplayer or additional features or, my favourite, achievements.

Then there are other games that don’t have these cutting edge graphics but offer more than 10 hours of gameplay and more replayability for the future.

Surely in terms of how much your time is worth the latter game should be worth more than the cutting edge game previously mentioned? This would make sense as you get more actual enjoyment out of it. It seems to be that this isn’t the case, however.

Let’s compare two games: Mirror’s Edge and Peggle. How much would you pay for these games? When first released Mirror’s Edge retailed for the typical £40 for a 360 game, but you can find it now for around £20. Peggle is on Steam for £6.99 or you can buy it with Peggle: Nights for £9.99. Does this sound about right? That’s about what I would expect to pay for it.

It’s the strangest thing. I’ve spent much more time on Peggle than I have on Mirror’s Edge. In fact I never even finished Mirror’s Edge. Yet I feel as though the latter is “worth” more than the former.

Perhaps good graphics and other tangible features (something we can easily quantify, such as number of levels) are what we actually look to when we decide how much a game is worth. It would make sense as good gameplay is a fairly intangible thing: something that is hard to define as a concept, never mind judging whether something is “good gameplay”. Graphics on the other hand are right there in front of you saying “Hey! Look at me! I’m pretty! I’m worth £40″.

There’s also the fact that graphics and such are the only thing you can judge a game by before you actually play it. It could be that we look to the graphics of a game to determine whether we can justify the price tag when making the initial investment for a game. With this you would expect the idea of judging a game’s worth to go away once someone actually plays the game, but it still seems to linger (for example, I’ve seen people complaining about Left 4 Dead’s price tag despite admitting that they’ve gotten more gameplay out of it than other similarly prices products that they don’t complain about).

Extrapolating from all of this it seems that the higher a game’s price is, the higher the graphical standard is expected to be. But similarly, lower priced games would be forgiven for poorer graphics. Free games can be forgiven entirely, assuming the graphics don’t get in the way of the actual gameplay (e.g. if the interface design is hideous).

There’s a game you may have heard of called Dwarf Fortress. Dwarf Fortress is well known for how ridiculously in depth it is in the way that it works and this gives it almost endless amounts of gameplay where the fun derives from discovering just what is possible in the game. But the graphics of Dwarf Fortress are a bit lacking…

Another game is Space Station 13, which has a different setting but is very similar, with incredible details and in depth gameplay. It also has very poor graphics.

How much would you pay for these games? Not a lot, right? They’re both free. Yet, many people sink lots of time into them, perhaps much more than they do into full priced retail games.

Obviously this rule does not hold true for every game. There are some games where the gameplay is good enough that people can forgive poorer graphics and still pay full price (Grand Theft Auto 1 springs to mind). There are other games that have beautiful graphics but don’t sell that well because they are obviously shit.

Flash games are almost always free and you very rarely see someone complaining about bad graphics (except, as previously mentioned, when the bad graphics detract from the gameplay). But what if Flash games suddenly cost money? Even something small like £1-5? I bet you would see people start to complain that it isn’t worth it unless the developers step up their game with the overall presentation of their games.