I once read an interview with Sid Meier, inventor of the Civilization computer game series, in which he said that a great game forces a player to make “interesting decisions”. He described these as decisions that each had its own set of rewards and consequences.
Take Civ III. Is it better to build a Wonder now while there is a lull in activity? Or can you afford to spend a couple of turns building a much needed Warrior and risk another tribe beating you to the Great Wall? Or maybe a Temple is needed first in case the population swells as you build your Wonder, sending the city into disorder or forcing limitations on productivity.
It was especially in the early stages of Civ that the application of Meier’s theory made for one of the greatest strategy games ever written for computer. But especially in III, there was always the problem with late-game tedium, and in my opinion, the major cause of it was the unbelievably badly conceived and implemented idea of pollution.
The rest of late-game could still be an exercise in improvement and edification. Trying to isolate that final enemy city and keep it in check while your empire blooms into hugeness. Expanding production and coverage to keep those power and culture points accumulating with each turn.
But pollution? There was nothing interesting about it. No choice to be made. You had to — had to — stop whatever it was that you were doing and clean up the mess (requiring as many as six workers for a mountain) or else lose all the productivity of that square as well as cause greater pollution on subsequent turns. There was no “Well, I can ignore pollution in favor of this other thing” because there was no other thing. There was no reason to leave pollution alone.
Couple that with an interface that fought you every step of the way… as soon as a worker completed its task, you were yanked back to the other side of the world where the real action was, meaning you had to scroll your way back to the square either to finish the clean-up or restore the square’s production… and you have a game element that contributed nothing, presented no interesting decisions, and served no purpose other than to interfere with the more interesting aspects of the game.
Automating the cleanup was no better because then you had to scroll all over the map, tracking down where the workers had gone and restoring productivity to the squares. It was a crying shame that every turn consisted of a pointless easter egg hunt for something absolutely irrelevant to all the important decisions you were trying to make.
Thinking about this got me to wondering what other games people have played that suffer the same flaw. I don’t do shoot-em-ups or racing games, but I assume that the great ones also require interesting decisions to be made among choices. Shoot or run or hide? What weapon to use? What are the consequences of one plan of action versus another? Decisions made much faster than in Civ to be sure, but decisions nonetheless.
Have other gamers encountered this sort of game-killer in other games? And what were they?