Linearity vs. Spoilability: Part 2

This is a continuation of last week's linearity post.

2. Some games are much more spoilable than others

Last year, one of the recurring topics in the circle of game blogs I read is that of spoilers. Michael Abbott (who you should read, by the way) started it going with a post in which he complained that the community was being stifled by the fear of giving away plot details, even rather mundane ones, when discussing a game. Essentially, he said that this shouldn't be a big deal; indeed, most movie or book reviews assume that it's impossible to evaluate something without, well, talking about it.

A flurry of comments ensued. One of the more interesting ones was from Clint Hocking, lead designer of Far Cry 2 and a good game theorist to boot. He said that while it was possible to spoil a game's story, that's not really spoiling the game itself, which consists of a set of mechanics. Hocking questioned whether you could ever really spoil the mechanics of a game, which are generally assumed to be open knowledge.

As a designer, Hocking is interested in replaced fixed stories told through cutscenes with stories told through the player's point of view, so there's a motive behind his question. Setting all that aside though, it's not quite correct to say that game mechanics are never spoilable. I'm going to go through a few examples of this, many of which were brought up by commenters responding to Hocking.

Many games have mechanics that evolve in ways that surprise the player. The first, although probably not the best, thing that comes to mind is the grav gun in Half-Life 2. You probably won't find anyone who hadn't heard about the grav gun before playing the game, but nonetheless it is a mildly spoilable fact. Experimenting with it and finding new ways to use the grav gun is a fun experience, and if someone had listed all these ways out to me beforehand, I would've missed out on that.

One could argue that the basic mechanic of Half-Life 2 is that of a fairly conventional first-person shooter, the particular guns you use are simply variations on this mechanic, which is in itself not spoilable. But that's like saying that the story of Half-Life 2 is really just your basic tale of good vs. evil, or one man versus a vast government conspiracy, and thus it's not really spoilable either. Besides, some games really do change the fundamental mechanic. Imagine if someone had not told you that you will become a Jedi after the first couple levels of Jedi Knight 2. That would completely change your experience of that game. I think one of the reasons that Hocking doesn't consider mechanics spoilable is because it's conventional to spoil them anyway. (I'm not saying that's wrong; I take Abbott's position that there shouldn't be restrictions on the way we talk about games. But it is fair to say that knowing certain things about a game does change the way you experience it.)

Once I started thinking about this, it became clear that spoilability (by which I mean mechanic-spoilability, not story-spoilability) is already a criterion we use for games, though a bit subconsciously. Think about what defines a strategy game, for instance. One of the key characteristics of a strategy game in my mind is that it has little to no spoilability. Like chess, we know what the rules are; the game consists of applying them with skill. Similarly, certain puzzle games like Tetris are in no way spoilable. (It is important to specify the type of spoilability. For instance, one of the key rewards of playing Command and Conquer, at least for me, is watching the FMV cutscenes after each level, and I wouldn't want those spoiled. Obviously, that has nothing to do with the game mechanics.)

These types of games occupy one end of a spectrum. Slightly more spoilable are the types of games I mentioned earlier, in which the mechanics undergo small (HL2) to big (JK2) changes. How do we tell just how spoilable these games are? Pretty simple, really. Pick a game, and make up a story about what you did in this game. Not what your character did (your character is involved in the narrative), but how you as the player interacted with this game. Be as specific as you need to be to give someone a good impression of what you did; don't be abstract. Then think about whether this information would affect someone who knew nothing about the game yet.

You'll find that story-spoilability and mechanic-spoilability are usually correlated, but not always. The Xenosaga series (along with most modern RPGs) is highly story-spoilable but not very mechanic-spoilable.

What games are the most spoilable in terms of mechanics? Adventure games, almost by definition. In fact, I think the decline in adventure games has a lot less to do with linearity and a lot more to do with spoilability, and this is a connection I want to explore in Part 3.