The Impact Factor

Overstuffed: Games and Ph.D. Science Have A Lot In Common

Article, Parallels

Abstract: Abstracting my experience as a Ph.D. candidate in biomedical sciences helped to highlight unexpected parallels between video games and research science. In recent years, the two have become increasingly overstuffed with content. In science, heightened data demands have led to overlong and often diluted manuscripts. In games, the community’s demand for more had led to experiences with artificially inflated completion time and undercooked content. More is better, except when it’s not.

Sometimes it bums me out that I cannot directly translate my experience as a biomedical Ph.D. scientist into my perspectives on games more often. It would be great to link games to phosphorylation events in signaling cascades. Or to a recent study found that mammary epithelial cells throughout organogenesis develop tools for immune evasion as part of ductal elongation, which may correlate with the body’s difficulty to combat breast cancer.

As I get further into my thesis project, direct parallels between what I think about and work on becomes increasingly detached from a generalizable foundation. When I started this blog I had high hopes that I could pull in my specific perspective as a biomedical scientist in the discussion of video games, but as I enter my ninth month of doing this, it’s clear that direct translation isn’t the font of content I thought it to be. I, however, know games and science to be intrinsically related. I can feel the parallels. So I took it on myself to abstract my experiences from graduate school to look for narrative and thematic threads that have shaped my time working towards a Ph.D. And voila. The similarities between Ph.D. science and games took form before my eyes. That brings me to the topic at hand.

This doesn't scream video games to you?

You ever read a scientific manuscript and get to a point where you ask yourself, “Just how many supplementary figures are there going to be?” Or “Well I guess I need to be an expert in molecular, systems and cellular biology to really understand what all these data mean.” What about when you’re playing a video game, have you ever thought, “I feel totally overwhelmed by the sheer amount of things there are to do.” Or “I’m 20 hours in, just another 80 to go to beat the game!” It might not initially look like it, but these two feelings share a common foundation.

We currently live in a time in which video games and research science are overstuffed. Packed to the brim with content. For their own reasons, each believe that more is better. I’m here to say that isn't always true. Not for either.

Let’s talk about the science side of things first. Getting your research published is almost certainly harder now than it has ever been. Journals, the place to which you submit your story, are incredibly demanding. Not only does your story have to be novel (i.e. unlike anything before it), but it also has to absolutely packed with data that support your hypothesis. Fair. It’s dangerous to publish ideas without proper supporting evidence. But the content demands have been skyrocketing in the past decade. Scientists have to work for months, even years, to add more and more data into their manuscript during the journal's revision process. The community expects published work to address the question so "completely" that stories often become a jumbled mess of data, an amalgam of several clear ideas into one loosely comprehensible one. And expectations seem to only be getting higher.

I’ll frame this discussion with a recent anecdote from my lab. Due to intense reviewer demands, a post-doc spent the better part of a year adding ideas and figures and data into his original story. Seemingly the more he gave to the journal the more it increased their appetite for supporting evidence. As arduous as his journey to publication was, it’s sadly becoming the norm for research science. What started out as straightforward, but important, study, morphed into a homunculus of three separate stories with dozens of supplemental figures and others in the main text had 15+ panels (that’s a lot). And this is all done in the name of having a more “complete” story, and by the nature of the science community, whose high demands shape this phenomenon.

 

The data is great but you know there's a problem when
editor demands push you up to 16 panels.

In many ways we’re seeing the same thing happen with video games. The gaming community at large is pushing for more and more. Content demands in games are higher now than they have ever been. Developers, on the AAA side especially, put immense effort into jamming as many things for the players to do into their games. Or work to artificially lengthen the time to complete their titles. Because people demand it. Jeremy Dunham, developer of one of the year’s biggest hits (Rocket League) said in a conversation with the Kinda Funny Games crew that, “The key to video games is to make them fun. And you can increase the chances of having fun by having as many options as possible.” While Dunham is certainly not wrong his mindset, reflective of the industry’s mindset, it has led to video games like research publications to become overstuffed.

 

MPG might not always be the best idea.

Let’s talk a few examples. 2015 is the year of absolutely massive AAA games. The Witcher 3 has easily 150+ hours of diverse content to tackle. Batman Arkham Knight took what was a 10-15 hour experience in Arkham Asylum and converted it into a 30+ hour game. Metal Gear Solid V is so large that people are reporting only 50% completion after 70 hours of play. And then there’s Fallout 4. Lead producer Jeff Gardiner was quoted saying that, “I have played [Fallout 4] for probably 400 hours, and I’m still finding stuff I haven’t seen.” To say these games are packed with content would be an understatement. Content density doesn’t inherently weaken a game (nor science manuscript), as The Witcher 3 is phenomenal, but it’s still clear the industry is trending towards excess.

Fallout 4 is a game you'll be playing and playing and playing. And playing.

There are plenty of examples where overstuffing a game can be detrimental. First, let’s look at Alien Isolation. As a fan of the Alien franchise and horror games, I was excited for Creative Assembly’s action-adventure, stealth, survival horror foray. When reviews started pouring out, however, one thing became stunningly clear—the game was just too long. I read dozens of reviews saying just how much they loved the first 5-8 hours, but as the game went on for another 12-15 after that, Alien Isolation quickly lost its appeal. While I don’t have any insider information here, I have to imagine the inflated time to completion came about in response to the ‘need’ for more content. The necessity of saying that is game is longer than 8 hours. Crystal Dynamic’s 2013 Tomb Raider reboot is another great example. In their attempt to appeal to as many gamers as possible the studio included a half-baked multiplayer mode that, while it didn’t weaken the excellent single player experience, felt forcefully shoehorned in.

Alien Isolation is a game that by many accounts should not have been 20 hours long.

In both Ph.D. science and games, I understand where this demand for increased content density is coming from. For science, there are many instances in which stories are submitted with glaring omissions or lacking key supporting evidence. Further, highly multidisciplinary studies are reflective of the time, as research continues driving towards more collaborative projects. For games, too, it makes sense. The market is becoming increasingly crowded with new releases. To ensure your best chances at financial success, you need to appeal to as many groups of people as possible, and varied content is one easy way to accomplish this. More games mean less unclaimed consumer money, too. Creating a content dense game that can take hundreds of hours to complete can be presented as an astounding value proposition.

While good in theory, often times this mindset is detrimental to the final product. In science, cramming in as much data as possible can dilute the message of the story. In games, it can lead to weak filler content that artificially lengthens completion time and undercooked modes. No matter where I go, all I see is content density. So when you sit down to play Fallout 4 just think about the scientist who is now 6 months into her resubmission experiments putting together her fourteenth supplemental figure. They’ve got a lot in common.