I recently got it in my head to discuss game design in the form of game reviews, and I thought it only right to start with a high-profile game designer whose fame is, I feel, entirely undeserved, whose games are big on spectacle and desperately low on any sort of redeeming value, even by his own irrational standards. I’m referring, of course, to the character of Jigsaw from the Saw series of films.
Now, I’m not a fan of these films, but I have, in one peer group or another, been dragged out to see the first three, and from a game design perspective I found them appalling. There’s a number of objections already raised against the Saw movies, amongst them the near-irrefutable “they are torture porn,” but as far as I know, no one’s taken the movies’ insane killer, Jigsaw, to task for his poor skills as a game designer.
Yes, he introduces his deathtraps as “games,” so he’s a game designer. And not a very good one. The stated goal of his games is to teach the people involved in them the value of life; he himself has cancer, and in his mind, his impending mortality gives him the right to impose his beliefs about life on others by murdering them.
That belief, in itself, isn’t a problem as far as game design goes. He’s crazy, so we can cut his philosophy a little slack in the “does-it-make-sense” department and just focus on how he puts it into practice. Like a twisted Marc Prensky, Jigsaw believes that games can be powerful teaching tools, and so he puts people into marginally escapable deathtraps in the hopes that those who survive will be better for the experience- that they will appreciate life more, and be better people in general.
It’s not a totally boneheaded idea, although putting it into practice is unambiguously evil; the problem is that Jigsaw makes the mistake of being totally uncompromising. In game design, it’s important to remember that your game is not a vehicle for your ego, but an experience for the player. Miyamoto didn’t make Super Mario Bros. a lengthy, punishing treatise on the value of life because it would have sucked and he knew that’s not what players wanted. Granted, Jigsaw is proceeding from a different starting point, since no one wants to play his games to begin with, but he still forgets that the game is ultimately about the needs of the player. To put it simply, the problem with Jigsaw’s games is that no one can win them.
Oh, there are exceptions, and I’ll get to them, but all in all, the overwhelming majority of people who play Jigsaw’s games die. Basically, Jigsaw has made Battletoads, if Battletoads could kill you. Jigsaw’s games are useless as teaching tools if no one survives them, and it is the height of game-designer arrogance to believe, as Jigsaw must, that it is the fault of the players that they always fail. I’m sorry, insane murderer, but it is you who have failed - failed to create an experience that benefits the player, regardless of how gratifying it is for you.
There are, if memory serves, exactly two people who have survived Jigsaw’s games- the young woman who he later took on as his protégé, and the man he ran through his game in Saw III. The young woman went on to be a murderer, even by Jigsaw’s lenient standards, and the man, who was supposed to learn the value of mercy from the games, sliced Jigsaw’s throat open upon meeting him.
So – even among the people who survived, Jigsaw’s rate of success, according to his stated goal of improving people’s character, is exactly zero. We don’t get a chance to see whether Jigsaw might have amended his methods upon learning this, since he finds out about both of them very shortly before his own death, but given his arrogance in the past, I doubt he would have. The lesson he should have learned, though, is that putting people into deathtraps apparently makes them feel powerless and angry at the world, which spurs them to take out those feelings on others.
So how could Jigsaw have improved his games? I’ll admit, deathtraps are a tricky line to walk, which is one reason they’re rarely attempted. You don’t actually want people to die, or at least you shouldn’t, but if you’re trying to test out your hypothesis that the threat of death can improve people, you’ve got to make the threat seem authentic. That’s easy enough the first time – just design a trap that looks like it can kill you, but really won’t, and for Christ’s sake give the player the means to escape without mutilating himself. As long as the player at least sort of believes he could have died, the game will already be serving its purpose better than the ones that leave the player, y’know, dead.
Granted, once word gets out that nobody actually dies in any of your traps, your cred is going to slip a bit, but if you kidnap someone, throw them in a dark room, and tell them they’re about to die, I think you can count on them to take the matter seriously regardless of what they heard on the news.
And how to avoid the feeling of helplessness and anger that comes from surviving one of your deathtraps? Simple: give the player a sense of accomplishment. The way the games work now, Jigsaw’s voice on the videotape just tells them whatever gruesome thing they need to do to get out of it. “Oh, crawl through barbed wire to escape this room.” “Dig a key out of a guy’s stomach.” Even when people do escape, it’s only because they did exactly what a madman told them to. That’s no way to build up a person’s self-esteem. Give the people a puzzle to solve, Jigsaw. Something that’ll make them feel like they saved their own lives.
I hate to be so hard on the old murderous psychopath, but forgetting the needs of the player in favor of your own ego is a cardinal sin of game design. Murdering your players is also a sin in game design, but it doesn’t come up so much unless Jack Thompson is around.
