It’s my experience that, whether I download them or get them off a disc, video game demos come in one of two types, for every demo answers a question with two possible outcomes: “Yes, you are something I want to play,” and “No, you are not.”
I acknowledge degrees within each type — breeds of the species — but just even with Corgis being so different from Huskies, neither are exactly wolves. This is where the metaphor goes off the rails, though, as I’m forced to make a decision: which species is the affirmative and which the declination? Because while the greater game demo should probably be the wolf, fierce and rare and noble in its canine severity, the greater demo should also be something which I want very badly to have in my house. I am not all that eager to find a wolf waiting for me in my kitchen, or dropped off by UPS on my doorstep.
So this is the end of that metaphor, and back to the confirmation and the denial. The denial, obviously, is the demo that says I do not need to own the game in question. As I tend to own very few games for my 360 (for they are expensive), the vast majority of demos I play do not result in a sale. I might play and enjoy the demo for, say, Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood (as I did), but in doing so I am also instinctively aware that this is not a game I’ll be buying soon. It might be effective insofar as it makes me play a Wild West one-shot of Castle Falkenstein or Dust Devils (it did), but it didn’t sell me the game.
This is no shame. It’s like an identity check or a passport scan, not a measure of quality. If I find myself really itching for a Western shoot-em-up with a clever quick-draw six-gun duelist mechanic, I may reverse my decision and buy Bound in Blood, but I checked its boarding pass and it just doesn’t happen to be flying to my destination. At least now I know where to find it and what to use it for.
It’s a question of resource management. The amount of money I have to spend on Xbox games is woefully low — this is the #1 reason why I don’t review more video games here. It’s not an ideological stance. So it’s not enough for me to like a demo, I have to like it a whole lot and then still like it a week or so after I’ve played it, so I can start saving money, or even longer, so I can get the thing cheap. It has to stick with me.
The two categories aren’t about “good” or “bad,” they’re about testing the game against the idea I had of the game, against the picture on the passport. I found Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood, from two or three trips through the demo, to be the game it says it is on the tin — a mean, character-driven shooter with blood in its teeth and a cinematic flair. I’d let the game into my house… but I might not remember that when the time comes to pick the thing off the pre-owned shelf someplace. So my whole opinion of that game will come from the demo, which maybe isn’t fair. But so it goes.
Naturally, this means that this confirmation/denial split has to be measured against another dichotomy: money. I’ll play more games than I’d buy. I borrow every game I can, just to get a sense of what’s what, but I finish relatively few.
So the axes of my intuitive graph are actually just time/money. Every game I play, I play to confirm that I’d like to spend my time on it. Spending my money on it is a whole other thing — by the time a game is cheap enough for me to buy it, nobody wants to hear about it, so I have to be willing to play it just for the play experience alone. This is a pretty bid deal. It’s not enough to play a console game, I feel like. I have to play it during a weeks-long window when the game is relevant, or else I’m sitting on the playground after everyone else has gone home for dinner.
Thus, the games I buy early on are ones that I know I’m going to want to be conversant in, not just the ones I want to play. The experience of playing the game doesn’t get stale, but the window to have an opinion on it often does. I say this as somebody who plays a few games over and over, whether its LOTRO or Thief or Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. It’s never too late to study a game, but it can be too late to be a part of the culture that surrounds its release.
But let me ask you:
If I buy a game, it is probably a roleplaying game. I know I will be buying it weeks before the transaction. I have considered it for weeks or months.
The exception is when buying a gift. Sometimes some game is a suitable gift and will be bought without undue waiting.
The only time in recent memory that I’ve known in advance that I’m going to buy a (video) game has been with Scribblenauts, which I happened to stumble across press for. Otherwise, I don’t follow video game industry press at all.
Going back to put “video” in parenthesis resulted in a moment of surprise for me, because it looks like that also applies if RPGs and board games are included. I guess that D&D 4e would be the most recent example of a game I knew that I’d buy before it was released. And at the time, I was very grudging about it. I knew that I’d have to buy it whether I wanted it or not, and it kinda pissed me off.
I guess it turns out that I don’t follow news about upcoming games very closely, and it turns out that I’m really going to need to either (a) play the game myself to be assured that it’s worth the money, or (b) hear lots of really good things about it that are based on actual evidence of humans playing it as opposed to some company’s PR machine, or its slavering fanboys talking it up. And both of those things pretty much have to come after the game’s release.
It boils down, I think, in my case, to a lack of copious funds for game-buying, a lack of time to play lots of games on spec, and a lack of space in my house to store lots of new acquisitions. Also, perhaps, to being gunshy after being burnt a lot on games that looked cool but didn’t deliver.
Do you have an opinion on 4E, Jeff? I’ve hardly heard a peep out of you regarding that game.
I still haven’t really played it enough to feel safe venturing an opinion that I’m willing to defend. One of the first tasks of Operation: Weekly Local Playtesting Group is for me to run D&D for about eight weeks to learn and understand the system in a substantial way.