Mafia III taught me something no other video game in the last twenty years taught me.
Now, wait I’m not here to defend Mafia III’s gameplay from the people that demanded it be (somehow) a superior 1960s recreation of Grand Theft Auto V or the crowd that says the storyline was ‘repetitive’.
War paths typically are repetitive. That’s the nature of vengeance; It consumes the character, that’s the story.
But there’s a bigger lesson and it involves asking the question: who is responsible for repetitive gameplay in an open-world game?
I was about a third through the storyline of Mafia III and starting to feel the tedium and repetition of sneaking around exploiting the limited stealth AI. Ready to resign myself to the long grind; the autopilot a gamer goes into when they’ve found what they consider ‘the best way’ to beat the game.
And then that ugly gremlin thought crawled into my head, ‘This game sucks.’
And I almost listened to it. I’ve felt that resignation while grinding when you feel like you’re being tasked with carrying water from an endless well.
No one knows where inspiration comes from, that’s part of its magic, but something made me ask myself:
If I’m the one in control of the game, and it sucks because I’m grinding it, then whose fault is it that the game sucks?
And spoiler alert: it’s mine, or how I want you to understand it: it’s yours.
That’s right! If you grind by exploiting the A.I. of a game like you can in Mafia 3 with hacky stealth tactics, purely because it’s ‘the most efficient’ or ‘safest’ way– it’s your fault the game sucks.
You’re in control, you’re making it happen, the same way, every time, don’tcha get it mister?
The gameplay is formulaic and repetitive partly because you’re being given the same basic sandbox scenarios, but mostly because you keep building the same castle– because it’s familiar, you know it works, and you know you can.
Once it dawned on me, the very next mission instead of hacky stealth I conducted all-out warfare and Mafia III was better. Because I was playing it better and not trying to iron out the ‘winning formula’.
We’ve developed a complex from gaming’s history where we believe ourselves to be smart if we can ‘game’ the A.I.
And it makes sense. The old word for what we consider ‘grinding’ was ‘cheesing ‘. And cheesing used to have a valid place in gaming. First when playing time was dictated by quarters and you wanted to beat a difficult level, then during the span of PC and home console games that existed prior to the internet being a common utility in households.
Cheesing’s relevance remained due to that brief twilight where the only ‘guide help’ that could really be found was on the other end of a paid telephone line, which most kids would have gotten skinned alive for running the monthly landline bill up for.
But in the modern age with saved games, mission restarts, optional storylines, full story guides, video walk-throughs, etc. there’s little long-term punishment for failure in open-world games like Mafia III which means pleasure isn’t going to be derived from ‘beating it’, especially via cheesing, but experiencing everything it has to offer.
This fact makes the reality of cheesing to be all the more grim: it’s you, missing out on some of the best moments a game has to offer because you’re stuck in your old ways of engaging with video games.
The game doesn’t care that you’re exploiting its A.I. system. The game doesn’t even care that you’re ‘beating’ it.
You’re ruining it for you. You’re the one getting played because you’re souring your own experience, and if you don’t start trying to recognize it now, with such a high-budget production title, you’ll be bound to do it again.
The more you break yourself out of instinctually exploiting a weak game system because you can, the better your video game experiences are going to be across all genres.
And isn’t that what everyone wants?
Word Slurpee 