Expressiveness in Games

It's difficult to talk about games in the abstract, in the sense of the ephemeral components that sum together with the concrete technology to produce video entertainment. Part of this is the relative newness of the medium, sometimes a game is great or terrible for reasons we don't yet have language to describe. These intrinsic qualities require a body of work to assess, so that patterns spring forth and we can start labeling those patterns.

Unlike how a Sommelier might call upon a rich descriptive lexicon to describe a wine, game reviewers have long struggled (and needed) to develop a vocabulary to describe a game to those who have not experienced it - to draw not just a visual picture with words, but an experiential image. A game might have "tight controls" or "loose controls" for example, with "tight" being perceptually better in most cases.

Since the beginning. most games have been built around the idea of controlling an on-screen character or avatar. Derived from board game pieces, the game designers attempt to put your avatar into a variety of situations, relying on your shared identity and your instincts for self-preservation to spur you into action. During gameplay, you might be controlling a better-than-you-are Mario, capable of jumping, hopping, ducking, sliding, smashing, bouncing, stomping and otherwise careening about the play field in a dynamic controlled chaos - often using verbed moves in combination. Or you might be in charge of Duke Togo, capable of a saunter, a single height jump, and shooting while standing -- and that's it.

Putting on digital Mario, inhabiting him, you feel empowered, like you can do anything. As the game presents new situations, you feel like you have a toolbox of responses you can use to deal with them. Two different players might even approach the same part of the game with completely different approaches.

Poor Duke, however, feels like walking around a city wearing a refrigerator box while trying to maintain balance on a pogo stick. You feel panic at almost every encounter because your options are so limited: jump in mad desperation or stand there and absorb bullets until one of your wild shots finds a bad guy.

Mario allows you to express yourself, Duke doesn't. The game forces you to inhabit a hopelessly outclassed character, while Mario can be virtuosically played in any number of ways. Mario is an expressive character - and it's this expressiveness that defines the entire series to this day.

It's funny how often the presence of such an avatar can correlate with a game being considered good or bad. But it's not a perfect correlation. Simon Belmont in Castlevania was not very expressive. But it was the avatar's carefully considered limitations which helped fill the game with tension and balance the difficulty. Imagine if Simon could run, jump and smash like Mario from Super Mario Bros.! The game would be a cakewalk and the atmosphere would be ruined.

Later, when the Castelvania series was rebooted with Symphony of the Night, one of the most radical changes to the game was not the Metroid-style open world, but the expressiveness of Alucard as an avatar. It transformed the game-play and enabled a kind of fast-paced, aggressive play style that simply couldn't have existed in the 8-bit games. It made sense at the time, the son of Dracula, should be able to move so quickly, so fluidly, so much like you wanted him to play.

So it's important not to think of this term as being on the same axis as "good" and "bad", but just another dimension to consider when describing a game character and the play styles that character might be capable of.

Consider Leonardo in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game. Not too terribly expressive: you can walk, jump, and strike from walking or jumping, but the rest of the game presentation more than makes up for any limitations of your character. TMNT is widely considered to be a great game.

Now consider Frank Castle in The Punisher Arcade Game. He can walk, run, slide kick, stand and fight, shoot, throw, jump and throw, jump kick, pick up weapons, shoot, toss grenades and more. He's a wildly expressive character, yet the game is not well known. Arguably the art direction, sound and overall game design of TMNT is better. But The Punisher is still a great game. (full disclosure, I like The Punisher game more).

Expressive character is a term I'd like to use from now on, and you can think of this post as a placeholder, a reference point to explain what it means. I invite other reviewers to refer to this concept when describing games, it gives us digital sommeliers a common reference point and expands our meaning.