Another little challenge from Callan – this time he wants… well, I’ll quote what he posted to my Gamejolt profile and apologise in advance to my “regular” readers (all three of them, I can see their footprints in my server logs and things keep disappearing from the fridge) for what I suspect is now approaching bunny-boiling levels of obsession on my part. “Normal” services will resume when I’ve found a new development tool to knob about with.

Write a blog entry on what your saying when you say ‘playability’. I’m betting it’ll just boil down to being your own preferences rather than any universally recognised standards.

I was somewhat surprised by this because I was sure that just about everyone is now working to the standards set down by European Union directive 1978/06/EC, “Recognition, measurement and Disclosure of playability within computer and video games” (not to be confused with 1875/12/EC which actually pertains to board-based gaming and is an entirely different kettle of fish, or indeed 1933/09/EC which governs kettles of fish). Presumably Callan simply didn’t get the memo when it was sent out? As with most EU compliance documents, those standards are somewhat unwieldy, generally speaking the major requirement laid down is that games should actually be fun to play – who’d have thought it, eh.

Sarcasm aside it’s a ridiculous question – of course playability is based on personal preference and any opinions offered of a game will be subjective at some level regardless of if they’re posted to Gamejolt, a gaming blog, review website or indeed appearing in print, it’s simply impossible for them to not be. But at the same time that isn’t any kind of grounds to invalidate anybody else’s opinion, certainly not without knowing the writer can maintain at least some level of objectivity or at least some understanding of what informs their opinion. The whole point of being able to score games or write reviews on Gamejolt is to deliver personal opinions, the only other option would be for writers to try channelling some higher order of gaming gestalt and as with most large organisations they’re closed over the holiday.

After the hissy fits started, I popped on my rather fetching reviewing hat and offered up the following:

Callan asked via shoutbox if I thought “the original space invaders was unplayable” and my answer to that question is no, but that has almost no relevance to my opinion of Invaders From Space because as implementations go it really is an extremely poor one, taking only the bare minimum from the source material to the point where it bears marginally more resemblance to Galaxian. Either way, the sense of menace is lost entirely.

As a game in its own right there’s barely a game there to actually talk about because it’s quite obviously not built around the journey and focuses instead on the ending; I won’t spoil it, but variations on the “punch line” have appeared in science fiction for as long as the genre has existed.

Here’s a snippet of Callan’s response:

The menace? The journey? Sorry, when did these become required for ‘playability’??

Don’t look at me matey, there’s no point in what I wrote where it said that either the menace or journey were a requirement for playability and I’m fairly sure that anybody else actually comprehending what I wrote rather than merely skimming through and trying to bluff it will have realised that as well – but on the off chance that isn’t the case I’ll offer some clarification; the reference to “menace” was specific to Space Invaders because those invaders are, after all, meant to be invading and if the player doesn’t destroy them the game will be over (an important element for any clone that was totally omitted from Invaders From Space). The reference to the journey was, of course, merely a metaphor for the game itself as opposed to its ending and in that loose context every game has a journey, even a game of catch in the back garden which starts roughly along the lines of “fancy a game of catch?” with all manner of outcomes including “well, that was fun” or “did you have to throw it so bloody hard?!”.

Thinking about it, the most bemusing part of this entire situation (with a close second being how game developers three decades down the line can still make a total hash of copying Tomohiro Nishikado’s simple but still effective design) is the idea that anybody could get so unbelievably precious about something they didn’t invest even two hours into actually developing to the point where they feel “punished” by a less than generous score (and of the thirty eight downloads Gamejolt lists there are only six scores so presumably at least some of those didn’t think it even warranted a 1 vote) and spend more time justifying what they’ve done than it took to make – and since I’ve put far more time into explaining my opinion and my partner has started laughing in that way she does when a get a bee in my bonnet – this is the cut-off point after which I won’t be responding further.