Blips: Living Under a Rock

Source: The Rust Diaries: Letting go of structure in video games
Author: Kris Graft
Site: Gamasutra (blog)

This new post by Kris Graft over on Gamasutra has made me significantly more interested in Rust. That said, I doubt I'll get into the game since it seems a bit daunting to go in alone, but my mind has been shifted as it pertains to Rust's status as an Early Access title. Graft reflects, diary-style, on his time with the game and how individual happenings could be viewed as "missing" features in most "complete" games. Where Rust ultimately ends up, if it's even going to be something that's considered "finished," is a mystery, but the point of it, at least for now, seems to be the experience of playing within such an unsure space.

As the saying goes, "it's the journey, not the destination," which is a phrase that seems quite appropriate for Rust. But it's not just the Early Access status of the game that makes the phrase so fitting, but the freeflowing, open ended nature of Rust's world and the constant string of "win some, lose some" confrontations. The game doesn't track your moral decisions or help you find friends; that's entirely up to you and how you choose to play. Also, you could be killed at any moment and lose everything on your person. Material wealth in Rust can make you feel powerful, but also a target, Graft notes. It's Graft's conclusion that really hits home though, which asks "what's it all for?" given how easy it is to lose "progress." Graft's answer is that games never really give you anything tangible, only the hopefully engaging experience of playing them. Perhaps the games that shower players with virtual trinkets and compliments are the game that we should really be scrutinizing, since those games are more about accomplishment than play.

Blips: Feature Complete

Source: Early Access exposes the lie that the best games should, or even can, be finished
Author: Rowan Kaiser
Site: Polygon

Another week, another opinion piece with some interesting gray areas to discuss. Over at Polygon, Rowan Kaiser picks up the discussion of Steam's Early Access games and what it means for a game to be "finished." Many players and critics have voiced complaints about Early Access games for a variety of reasons ranging from their pricing structure, to the clarity of their current status (i.e. what's broken), to their prominence and quantity in the Steam marketplace. Kaiser posits that we've been playing "unfinished" games for years, and in fact that unfinished-ness is by design. He states that in addition to what we understand as unfinished games that have not seen a complete development cycle and final retail release, there are also games that the player can't complete.

Unfinishable games include sports games, endless runners or puzzlers (Tetris), MMOs, and pretty much anything resembling a multiplayer mode. We can think of every version of Street Fighter as the same game, just with various updates, each sold separately of course. Kasier's essay draws a parallel between Early Access games and unfinishable games in that they both see tweaks and additions to gameplay months and years after "official release."

There are two points I'd like to voice in response. First, while it's great that there are seemingly "mandatory" status notices on the store pages for Early Access games, they're not all super helpful, including Rust, which is cited in the article. The description for Rust currently reads: "We are in very early development. Some things work, some things don't. We haven't totally decided where the game is headed - so things will change. Things will change a lot. We might even make changes that you think are wrong. But we have a plan. It's in our interest to make the game awesome - so please trust us." While this is enough information to tell me that now is not the time to spend money on Rust, I also don't think this is evocative of the transparent development process that consumers are supposedly buying "access" to, unless Steam starts allowing players to return games for refunds.

Point 2: Players can also "be finished" with games, unfinishable or no. Being finished with a game can occur at anytime for a player and even after the credits roll in "finishable" games, many players still aren't done playing them, be it a New Game+, some other bonus mode, or investigating speed run possibilities. And the rub with Early Access games is that players can "be finished" with them before they're even feature-complete or at their least broken. I prefer to think of game sequels as continuations of one game instead of disparate entities, which applies to unfinishable games like the ones Kaiser cites, but "finishable" games as well. This is why sequels to games like Gears of War are met with sentiments like, "well, it's more Gears" because that's exactly what it is. That the nature of Early Access games would be inherently tied to a conventionally unfinishable status just seems like a leap of logic to me.