Super Nerd Sundays Presents: What's the Use in Wonderin'?

Popcap’s latest release, Plants vs. Zombies, dropped this week to expected and well deserved acclaim. To no one’s great surprise, the game is exactly what one would expect from Popcap: a highly polished iteration on some tried and true game play mechanics accompanied by adorable, impossibly inoffensive and infectious graphics, spot on music and airtight pacing. It is a worthy addition to the library of anyone who enjoys tower defense games and frankly, if you don’t like Plants vs. Zombies it probably has more to do with your personal tastes than the game itself. Also, you’re a thought criminal, and Popcap has dispatched a retrieval unit to your location in order to acquire you for re-education.

So Plants vs. Zombies is a fun game. It’s tough to really say it isn’t. It has a lot of meat, especially considering it costs about as much as a Chili’s entrée. It’s a simple, elegant game well worth your money.

But it’s also a game which raises a lot of questions. Questions like, where did my week go? How much head room is there in tower defense as a genre? And are the terms hardcore and casual useful terms when discussing games?

This last one rang especially true for me because of my time spent with another game this week: the latest Prince of Persia iteration. If you’ve played this game you know that the controls are, to say the least, simple. For the most part you just need to press the corresponding button at the correct time.

It’s a lot like a very low rent rhythm game, but with no musical elements and a much dodgier recognition system. At its most basic, Prince of Persia is about jumping at the proper moment. Occasionally this becomes more complicated. Sometimes it’s about jumping in the proper direction at the proper moment or noticing the visual cues to press the Y button at the proper moment or the B button at the proper moment.

But for the most part the game is all about fitting your button pushes to the game’s obtuse timing standards. There’s very little depth to the experience, and nearly all of that comes from the story which, frankly, isn’t nearly as engaging as past iterations.

The only thing to really set Prince of Persia aside as hardcore, aside from its hefty industry standard price tag, is the relative inaccessibility of the game. It’s hard to see anyone who isn’t already self identified as a “gamer” picking up a controller and playing Prince of Persia. And it’s unthinkable that they’d actually finish it.

What really baffles me is that, as a hardcore gamer, I don’t feel engaged by Prince of Persia. I’m playing it and I’m planning on finishing it, but that’s more out of a sense of loyalty to the series than anything else. The movement I love is there, and executing it can be breathtakingly pretty and fun, but there’s no challenge. As a game it has completely failed to draw me in, and I’m working through it because if I don’t I’ll feel like I’ve wasted $40. That and I know for a fact that I’ll never come back to it again after I’ve finished, because there just isn’t a lot there.

The basic mechanics of the game are introduced in the first fifteen minutes and they never really change. All of your movements are based around the same set of rules. This could change before the end of the game but so far the only addition has been a few new obstacles that seem to come from the dark places of Japanese culture rather than Middle Eastern mythology.

I’m completely serious when I say that the original Mario Brothers contained more depth for me than the most recent Prince of Persia. After all, it had that wacky replay option, it required that you solve new puzzles and it had a profound sense of urgency which Prince of Persia lacks. Prince of Persia has had every fail state mapped out of it. You cannot die, no matter how badly you might want to.

Prince of Persia is like Groundhog Day. Its sometimes good, sometimes bad, but it’s always the same set pieces arranged in different ways and even as you change the way you interact with them the outcome is usually the same and the process begins anew before long.

Now let’s compare this to Plants vs. Zombies, a loud and proud casual game from the kings and queens of casual games. I spent a quarter of the money on Plants vs. Zombies and I’ve actually lost sleep to that game. I’d never lose sleep to Prince of Persia; it would be like staying up just to watch C-SPAN or to work out. It’s indicative of a type of mental illness which, for all my profound dysfunction, I lack.

And Plants vs. Zombies is immediately accessible. There aren’t a whole bunch of weird buttons to grasp. You play the game with a mouse. You click icons and click on the ground so you can make plants shoot their plant matter at advancing zombies who, for all their aggression, aren’t particularly threatening. Your grandmother could play this game.

But PvZ is possessed of a depth that many hardcore games aspire to, but will never reach. It has some real tactical chops. The puzzles it offers up are engaging and challenging without being intimidating, and the game endeavors to teach its players without forcing them down a set path.

I don’t want to espouse the game’s virtues too much; plenty of other places will do that, and it’s really unnecessary. If you play video games you already know how you feel about Popcap, and if you don’t you don’t care. But what I do want to speak to is the dizzying space that PvZ leaves for thought and interpretation.

By Popcap standards it is possessed of an absurd amount of extras and doo-dads. It has a myriad of mini-games and puzzle modes, all of them engaging in their own right, and an unlocking system I expect to waste quite a bit of time on. It has a dizzying variety of plants, complete with a number of upgrade options for players to explore. It asks us to manage resources for maximum efficiency, but it’s very forgiving when we make errors.

I consider myself a gamer. In fact, hell, I consider myself a hardcore gamer. I spend between 20-40 hours each week playing games. But the game dominating my thoughts most of the time right now is Plants vs. Zombies. A casual game.

Ugh. The word tastes bitter in my mouth. Casual. It sounds so weak wristed, so limp and lifeless. Why would anyone be casual when they could be hardcore? Would anyone watch casual pornography or listen to casual metal? Perhaps. But not anyone I’d like to know.

And yet, this casual game has so much to it that I can’t stop playing. I had a similar affair with Peggle, where the simplicity of the game was matched with a commanding depth. And if I hadn’t been playing Prince of Persia at the same time, it never would’ve occurred to me that we’re not longer using hardcore as a term to define the experience a game offers us.

Instead we’re using it to describe the ethereal price of entry required of a player, the amount of time and condition you’re expected to put in to a game in order to learn its systems. Casual games are no longer games that need only be played in a web browser while your boss isn’t watching.

Rather they’re games that anyone can pick up and understand, conceptually simple products that ask the player to grow and adapt. And hardcore games are more and more becoming games that you must have a history in gaming to understand, games that demand a stint in a graduate level seminar in order to play.

So I’m going to make a futile demand. I’m going to ask people to stop using the terms casual and hardcore. I know, this is the internet, and I’m hardly a luminary of the world wide webs. No one’s going to hear my plea. But I’m going to make it anyway. These terms have long outlived their usefulness.

They no longer describe meaningful differences in what a game offers us, but instead simply serve to generate a divide between newcomers to the medium and its veterans. And they shouldn’t.

Now more and ever games are becoming a legitimate means of expression and developers are working harder and harder to make them accessible to larger and larger groups, and the divide between industry stalwarts and gaming virgins is shrinking as games slowly but surely work their way into society at large.

So let’s move past numeric scores that run a five to ten gamut. Let’s move past debating who’s got the real old school cred. Let’s all just sit down together and watch our pea plants tear some zombie shit up. Because, in the end, isn’t that what really matters?