As the Bible already stated it: "For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil." This also seems to apply to the video game industry and to artists.
I already felt it pretty soon when writing those articles, that many of the bad game design choices have one big thing in common and it is the love of money or the intent to maximise monetary profit over everything else.
What is worse than creating something? Creating nothing. How can you create something while at the same time creating nothing? Well you simply copy. Artistically a copy is nothing, or close to nothing. I once heard that the definition of art is to create something new and unique aka being creative and if you just copy, you are not being creative or artistic by definition and therefore a remake game, or clone is not good game design, as nothing or not much new is actually created.
Almost every gamer probably also knows this one, it is those invisible barriers that prevent you from going out of the map or going somewhere you are not supposed to go. For game designers this is often a necessary evil, because there is no other way to do it based on their resources, but it is an ugly solution, therefore a bad game design choice.
First this was planned as multiple articles, because there are many kinds of invisible walls, each for different reasons, some physical, some metaphorical, let me make a list of the basic types of invisible walls in games:
Mobile games are another big problem in the gaming realm, I'm not talking so much about mobile games in general, but the trend in designing regular games to appeal to the mobile market, because making mobile friendly games brings with itself a whole lot of problems that make games worse in general.
This phenomenon is a bit harder to describe so much that I had to invent my own word for it and it is about the intentional retardation of video game visuals to make them more cartoonish or children friendly. There are many potential reasons which can make this a bad design choice, so lets get into it.
After thinking about my last blog post "Why most people seem to prefer inferior quality games now" it came to me that the answer is quite obvious, at least to me: It is because the average person has no or very little ability to distinguish good art from bad art in the first place, at least not consciously, but we will come to that now.
This phenomenon has baffled me for quite a while now and it is that it seems to me that nowadays most people seem to prefer to play games that are of inferior quality, which seems very illogical to me.
I was not sure, if I should write an article about this one, since I already covered it partly in my previous blog post "The dumbing down of games", but I think for completeness sake I will write a more detailed article about why matchmaking is a bad game design choice.
Let's get back to bad game design choices to finish off the list I made in my notebook, the next one is DLCs.
What are DLCs? DLC stands for DownLoadableContent and such downloadable content are in general add-ons to the original games that can be downloaded and in most cases those cost additional money. DLC are more of a recent invention with the upcoming of digital distribution platforms.
My last blog post reminded me of my childhood and probably the main reason why I was so fascinated by video games and this was that in video games you could do anything you want, full freedom of choice. Well in reality you probably have more freedom of choice then you can ever have in a video game, but that is because of technical limitations, the real problem with reality however is, that reality has harsh consequences, that you might not want to deal with. So the reason why video games were so cool was, that you had freedom of choice to do the things you could not do in real life.
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