Videogame Hierarchy of Needs

In recent years, we have had buggy releases, such as Sim City and Battlefield 4, or cases of overpriced unfinished products like Earth: Year 2066.

Now this is different from issues where the game is mostly bug free, but the design of the game or the story of the game was poorly thought out.

So what I want to do in this thread is to formulated a "hierarchy of needs" for video game quality.

This is what I have so far

Highest (Lowest priority)

• Immersion
• Quality of game mechanics, quality of difficulty, quality of content
• Quality of customer treatment
• Stable programming

Of course it going to take a lot of debating on something other than an Internet forum to yield something that is truly useful.

Last Edit: Ringsea's suggestion

edited 15th May '14 5:52:08 PM by Worlder

I would think customer treatment ought to be higher. After all, nobody wants to play a game that's makers treat them poorly *coughEAcough* (Whether we play them anyways is another issue though...)

I can loosely agree with that table, though I'd say customer treatment and gameplay quality should be pretty equivalent. Stable coding, optimizations, etc should definitely be the absolute highest priority for any game, or any computer program in general.

I'd accept customer treatment being considered a higher priority than gameplay quality if that entails making the game accessible for modding. Certainly, accessibility for modding is the only reason Bethesda Softworks is a profitable company! And games which are easily moddable also allows players to release their own unofficial patches, which can adjust the game to play the way that the players want while still allowing the original product to play the way the developers wanted it to play.

There is really no downside to encouraging and allowing modding in your games. Hell, think of how many sales of Arm A II were due purely to people wanting to play Day Z.

Perhaps someone with more authority and experience with video games should adopt and refine this model.

Hmm... For myself, I would put customer care at the top (the lowest priority): I tend to play single-player games, so customer care only really becomes an issue for me when it's very bad (such as the inclusion of DRM that I strongly disagree with, or something that I feel that I should take a stand on, etc.).

I'm not sure about my relative ranking of story and gameplay: I can see myself playing a game with poor gameplay in order to experience a good story (Planescape:Torment might be a good example of this), but I will admit that the quality of the gameplay is probably slightly more important than the quality of the story. I do think that their relation depends heavily on the type of game: for a first-person shooter an excuse plot is fine, while an investigative adventure game might fall down if the story is poor, even if the gameplay is good.

I do very much agree on the position of stability: a game that runs poorly isn't going to let me properly—or at all, in some cases—enjoy either story or gameplay, after all.

Hmm... What about this: separate the pyramid into three levels, like so:

            //\\
           //  \\
     Customer interaction
         //  ,.-'
         .-'`
             ,.-'`\\
        ,.-'`      \\
      //Gameplay,-'`\\
     //    ,.-'`     \\
    // .-'`   Story    \\
    -*`-----------------

   -----------------------
  //                      \\
 //     Implementation     \\
//                          \\
------------------------------

This is intended to express that story is generally less important than gameplay, but less so in some cases than others, as well as implementation being significantly more important than either gameplay or story, and customer care similarly less important than either, but more so in some games than others.

(I decided on the term "implementation" for the lowest (highest priority) tier in order to include other things than stability, such as efficiency.)

edited 15th May '14 5:20:53 PM by ArsThaumaturgis

I think calling it "story" is misleading. "Immersion" is probably closer, but even that's not quite true. Essentially the game has to make you care what's happening in it. That could be through story, it could be through art, or it could even be clever sound design or a well-designed point system. The best game mechanics in the world can't save something that you don't care about.

Definitely the highest priority if defined broadly.

edited 15th May '14 5:29:39 PM by Clarste

Usually yeah, but I think that also depends on the genre.

Perhaps simply "art" or "artistry", then? (Although I suspect that that would likely be taken to refer to visual art...) I considered "content", but aesthetic elements don't quite fall under that, it seems to me...

A well-designed point system would seem to me to fall under "gameplay".

Perhaps that's part of the problem: in some games, story/aesthetics/artistry and gameplay can be so closely intertwined that picking them apart is not only difficult, but misleading.

I'm not sure that I agree about the priority. While there have been cases of unstable games being remembered for their artistic merit (Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines comes to mind), they also tend to be somewhat notorious. I feel that a flaw in the fundamentals—stability and so on—can significantly impact both gameplay and the appreciation of the artistic elements of the game.

I considered that, but in thinking about it I felt that even in a story-heavy adventure game the quality of the gameplay mechanics—even if just the standard adventure mechanics—is slightly more important than the quality of the story. Thinking about it some more, however, I'm less confident: after all, how many adventure games have been excused iffy puzzles for a good story?

(Part of the problem may be in comparing the effect of a change in quality for each of story and gameplay, which are sufficiently different and sufficiently close in places that I'm finding the comparison tricky, I fear. :/)

(I noticed just now that my placement of "story" and "gameplay" is actually the wrong way around given my description, since lower-priority items are actually placed higher on the pyramid. Sorry about that! ^^; )

edited 15th May '14 6:22:26 PM by ArsThaumaturgis

Ok let's see

Low Priority
Education(?): Social values, social commentary, practical knowledge
Immersion: Story, gameplay, art style, graphics, content
Programming: Stable programs, optimizations, program security, non-intrusive procresses
High Priority

So according to this iteration of the model, a development team should first focus on getting the programming to some acceptable level of performance. Afterwards, the game must have a decent story, decent gameplay, pleasant art style and graphics, and acceptable amount of content. Lastly, if the developers choose to, they can work on conveying certain values, social commentary, and practical knowledge in way that doesn't hinder the immersion.

Also, it seems that as one goes from top to bottom things get less subjective and more objective.

I also considered a business tier, that covers community management, business practices, and honest advertising, but I am not sure if it belongs in a model used to determine a game's quality.

edited 23rd May '14 3:03:52 PM by Worlder

I don't think that I agree with such a model applying to the order of development.

For example, one truism in development is to first get a feature working, and only worry about optimising it later.

Similarly, when experimenting with or iterating on features, there may be little point in optimisation as the feature may well not be kept, or only be kept in a different form.

As to when story and the like are done, that might depend on the genre of game: an adventure game's story might well be written (in broad strokes, at least) before the first line of code is written, while a first-person shooter might have its story tacked on last of all.

In short, I feel that the actual development of a game can be somewhat more complicated than a linear application of that chart.

Finally, I note that customer interaction seems to have disappeared from the hierarchy.

Ok perhaps it shouldn't be used as a development plan.

But it could be used as a way to judge a game, correct?

edited 23rd May '14 3:48:54 PM by Worlder

Hmm... I would still like to have customer interaction on there somewhere, and I feel that the previous discussions of how the degrees to which (or even whether) one element stands above another may depend on the individual game (I feel that an excellent story may trump mediocre gameplay in an adventure game, for example), but otherwise it looks decent.

I'm a little uncertain of what you mean by "non-intrusive procresses"—if you're referring to things like DRM, then I'd likely place those elements at a rather lower priority: there are, I believe, plenty of gamers who simply don't care, as long as the game keeps working. Indeed, that sort of thing I'd likely place under "customer interaction", which I'm inclined to place (in general—again, this may vary from game to game) at the lowest priority.

[edit]
Oh, one more thing: if you want to judge games, then I'd caution against applying such a hierarchy strictly: I feel that sometimes a game may be good or bad in spite of how it scores on such a chart, whether more or less than the sum of its parts.

edited 23rd May '14 4:04:12 PM by ArsThaumaturgis