Well, if you have a Theory of Everything, it should provide some useful explanatory power, right? The advantage is that you can now analyse a game, see where it falls in this space and how much area it covers. That gives you a handle on how well or badly it covers the space compared to nearby games. You won’t compare Portal and TF2 by mistake, for example. Since Mitch Krpata looked at Rock Band, Metroid Prime 3 and Portal, I’ll do the same.

To help you remember, here are the names I’ve come up with for the corners of the space:

Metroid Prime 3

Metroid Prime 3 is clearly a narrative heavy game—you do so much exploration, always pursuing the next objective. The gameplay is there, but it doesn’t change much over the course of the game. So on the procedural side of things, it leans toward procedural mastery, although it’s still not very hard. Maybe harder than a lot of Western games these days. So, Metroid Prime 3 stretches diagonally from the narrative corner toward mastery. It doesn’t try to be a social game and it doesn’t introduce too many new mechanics, so it’s a relatively thin strip.

Well, wait. That’s not really true. It’s constantly introducing new mechanics as you get new equipment. It’s just that I’ve played too many Metroids—I’ve seen it all before. So I have to change my analysis. Metroid Prime 3, as analysed separately from the other Metroids, covers both procedure learning and mastery pretty well. You get a new weapon, learn to use it, use it for a while, then fight a boss with it. And the boss is usually kind of hard.

It’s nothing like the Old Days where you’d get new weapons only when an enemy dropped a powerup. And bosses were Basically Impossible. But it was the early Metroids that helped put the Old Days behind us in the first place. It just seems heavy on the mastery side by comparison to Western games, I think.

Note that there’s a clear difference between Metroid Prime 3 and Metroid Prime in the emphasis on story versus exploration. My coordinate system doesn’t capture that difference, pushing both toward the narrative/exploration corner. Hmm.

Portal

Portal is clearly a procedure learning game for the first half, and very little else. In contrast, the second half doesn’t introduce any new mechanics. It shifts focus to procedure mastery and narrative: you pay a lot more attention to GlaDOS after the furnace stunt, that’s for sure. But it’s not a very good procedure mastery game: the second half’s puzzles are too easy for a true puzzle aficionado. (I can tell, because they’re just about right for me.) So it seems like the game really wants you to finish the story.

Hmm. That was surprisingly easy. I probably missed something. Yell at me in the comments.

Rock Band

Rock Band is basically a procedure mastery game. You hit the right notes at the right time, or you lose. No story, no learning, no social interaction. Although Mitch points out that the Tourist will play Rock Band, realistically, its stickiness for these gamers is only a strong as the quality of the track list. It’s still basically Tetris with the added draw of familiar music. If it had no recognisable songs, most people would give it about 15 minutes.

Note that compared to the original Guitar Hero, Rock Band covers more space: it adds more narrative in the form of a more coherent progression of sets and locations. And guitar games have always had some procedure learning as you progress toward Expert, but it’s minimal; I understand pretty much everything my friends do on Expert. I just can’t DO it.

Well, um, ok. I’m either tired of writing or else it’s so easy to classify games in this space that I only need one paragraph per game. Probably the former. Maybe it’s that I don’t know Rock Band well enough. Please point out what I missed.