Gamers' Bill of Rights

A friend pointed me to this interesting piece of text. It's basically a list of demands for the game developers to adhere to, things that gamers are supposedly entitled to. I'll list a few examples:

• The right to be able to play a game without having received a PhD in Computer Science. Games should be fun, not complicated. Game designers should not assume that the consumer of their products knows how or wants to perform lesser-known tasks just to be able to play the game.
• The right to enjoy a game without the fear of crashes, lock-ups, damage to or interference with other programs on the computer or the computer itself, or other such glitches.
• The right to have our voices and opinions listened to and respected by game developers and producers, so that we - not they - have the final say in quality-control.

This actually spawned some thoughts in my slightly intoxicated mind last night. At first I was a bit aggravated. It seemed incredibly annoying that the gamers, customers start throwing out demands to the game developers who work their arses off to make these games. Nobody forces you to buy the games, they're out there for entertainment. Don't like them? Don't buy them.

Then I realized that you can't compare games to movies and music for example. When you go to the movies or buy a CD, they work, it's another thing if you don't like them. If the audio CD is scratched and doesn't work you can return it. If you don't like the music or the movie, I think you can unfortunately return the CD or get a refund for the movie ticket, but I think that is bullshit. Although if you buy a CD as gift to someone and it turns out he hates the Foo Fighters or whatever, it's good that it can be returned.

Anyway, I'm getting sidetracked again. Games are obviously more complex products than a movie or an album. I'm forced to compare them to household appliances in a way that you expect for example a coffee maker to work straight out of the box and always work the way it should as long as you operate it correctly. It should never just stop in the middle of the process or it shouldn't take 10 hours to complete the process. If it acts like that, it's natural to return it to the store and get your money back. When you think of buggy games like this, some of those demands do make sense. I think it's ok to demand that the games really work and don't contain the kind of bugs that will make the gaming impossible or intolerable, it should work as it is meant to be.

On the other hand, demands like usability of the interface.. As much as I do hate cryptic illogical user interfaces, I don't feel comfortable demanding for better. It's part of the game, a feature as bad as it might be.

Ok, I'm exhausted and don't think I've covered the topic completely. I might write more on this later, but this is enough for now.

Bottom line:

• demands for working, relatively bug free games - Totally agree, that's way it should be.
  
• demanding the games to have certain features and other feature-specific demands - It's a pretty idea but something that won't happen, I don't see a point in these demands.
• there are other reasonable and unreasonable demands in there that I didn't cover.