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There is a certain language we too often use around video games, a particular body of criteria and expectations. You could call it the cult of smoothness. This is, I'll admit, more of a characterisation born of years spent trawling forums than it is some kind of scientific appraisal, but glance over the average review comments thread and you might know what I mean. It's the idea that an excellent game is, fundamentally, a game that knows how to get out of your way. This is the language of “polish” and “seamless” integration, of beautifully chiming ludic and narrative components, of vast realms in which you are never truly lost, and campaigns that "peak" and "trough" considerately, setting up a tempo of crises and revelations without ever seriously jolting you. It's the language of open worlders at their most sprawling yet navigable - games like Far Cry 4, where you don't so much explore as allow yourself to be blown about, drawn through the landscape by a magic alchemy of sightlines, surface tones and the quiet delight of variables interacting. It's the language of "flow", that intensely problematic state of indefinite, uncritical absorption when task, feedback and skill level are in perfect harmony, and of environmental storytelling, whereby insights are always to be scooped up in passing - to actually require that the player stop and digest a cutscene or piece of text, as in the more venerable Elder Scrolls titles, has come to be regarded as the height of impertinence.
Above all, this loose ethic rests on the idea that the player should always feel detached - always able to make the critical decisions, form judgements and enjoy the experience at their own pace, over and above any specific concepts or values the developer might wish to impart. The game shouldn't make a mark on you, in other words. It shouldn't intrude. It may test your reflexes, your memory or your capacity to identify abstract patterns, but its essential structures should leave you essentially unaltered, unmoved. You should feel free to manipulate the game without fear of being touched by it, weighed upon in turn. The designer's job is less to express something than to ensure that your choices are articulated and reflected as sinuously as possible, within the parameters of a genre or other broad interpretative framework. This is what senior producers mean when they rhapsodise about rewarding your "playstyle", ensuring a frictionless segue between a game's various tiers and components, dependent on your tastes or abilities. Real intrigue is a bump in the road, to be steam-rolled flat in the name of customer satisfaction.
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