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Recipe for a great game

Only a fraction of games sell more than a million copies.

Only a fraction of games sell more than a million copies. Why so few? To me, the formula for what passes as a great game seems surprisingly easy, especially a game to appease the masses that want nothing more than to simply kill things and blow stuff up.

The formula begins with a main character. He will need to be male — tragic considering it’s the 21st century — bound in rippling muscles that seem to defy physiology, clad in combat gear that doesn’t really seem to have any purpose and plastered with weapons so immense that no reasonable military person could carry. His dialogue will need to be one missed syllable away from scraping its knuckles on the ground, with a raspy, cigar voice to match.

And the icing on this meaty man-cake will be the name. You can scratch Phillip, Gregory, even Hank. Remember the names that defined superheroes? Peter? Clark? Bruce? All gone. Today’s virtual hero will have a name like Stone, Rage, or Krew, personifying its monosyllabic, troglodytic owner. American Gladiators called; they want their character names back.

Next step is the plot. Regardless of when and where the story is set, best-selling video games still follow a typical Greek tragedy. Either a normal man leading a normal life becomes a mercenary when the woman he loved was killed, or a normal man wakes up in a dark, unknown place, only to find that the woman he loved was killed.

Thus begins the harrowingly predictable story of revenge, wrapped in the obligatory grander scheme of someone — or something — trying to conquer and destroy mankind. Dress it up all you like, with magic, terrorists or mutated alien-like creatures in a post-apocalyptic America. Throw a bunch of zombies in there for good measure. It still won’t escape the fact the plot will be so formulaic that Homer would be rolling over in his grave.

Finally, you need some kind of combat system that will allow the player to defeat everyone from meagre peons to impossibly large bosses with a visually visceral, button-mashing, slow-mo finishing move. The more body parts lopped off in these sequences where blood gushes out in ridiculous quantities, the more likely the common gamer will throw out a 9.2 rating on Gamespot.com.

So why is there no game about a man named Carl who must use his MacGyver-esque science skills to defeat an army of mutated dandelion spores before they destroy America’s agricultural belts? It simply wouldn’t sell, not in the quantities that companies like EA and Activision need to turn a profit.

The real name of the game in this industry is not ingenuity. The real name of the game is to placate gamers with more guns, more blood and more zombies. Developers run with the formula and hope to do something unique with their weapon customization, combat system or co-operative gameplay to make their game stand out. That way, they can announce in front of an audience at a convention, “Our game is unlike anything you’ve seen before.” Right.

Now don’t get me wrong. I enjoy these kinds of games. Diving into the mindless, muscle-bound persona of a would-be normal-man-turned-vigilante has a certain appeal. Personally, I prefer games that combine many of the above elements with a truly unique twist that moves the medium forward through beautiful art, original protagonists and innovative plots. Games like Bioshock, Mirror’s Edge and Mass Effect stand out for me because they don’t follow the formula as closely as most other games on the shelf. They risk doing something that defies the industry, fracturing its tunnel vision. And that, my friends, is the only way the industry will grow.

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