Good Game Get! Everyday Shooter

Playstation Network, PS3, and PSP. Queasy Games, 2008.

The term “game-as-design” or some variation of that is thrown around an awful lot these days. It is most often deployed by writers and gamers who really have no clear idea how to articulately describe a game which falls even slightly outside the established bounds of gaming norms.

I’m currently paying Jonathan Mak’s “Everyday Shooter” and enjoying it a great deal. I know, I’m pretty late to the party since this thing is around 2 years old, but what can I say. Since I’ve been so into the game, I did some digging online to see if I could learn more about it, any sequels, or Mak himself. A lot of what I found made me mad, although it had nothing to do with the game or Mak.

Basically little more than a top-down multidirectional shooter with unusually beautiful and unconventional graphics, “Everyday Shooter” has been called everything from art to design to music, but seldom simply a game. I disagree with all of that, and I think that to continually try to position “Everyday Shooter” as something MORE than a great videogame does a disservice to Mak and his skills. Even Kyle, who wrote about the game previously, stated that it was BOTH a great game and a great album.

Most videogames, when you boil them down, follow a strikingly similar pattern. The player controls something on a screen and is given an objective. The player, through observation, trial, error, failure, and success, learns the internal rules of the “world” of the game, achieves the objective, and is rewarded. Nearly every single game I can think of, with the possible exception of “Noby Noby Boy” (now THAT is a piece of art far more than a game) follows this formula.

And so does “Everyday Shooter.” The player controls a pixel-shaped thing which shoots, they learn how to navigate the various stages, which things to shoot, which to collect, how to chain explosions, and how to survive. There are even bosses to fight. At the end of each stage the player is awarded with continued play and points so they can unlock other features. Absolutely no different than “Gran Turismo” or “Final Fantasy” or “Super Mario” or “House of the Dead” deep down.

What really seems to throw people is the graphics. Since the thing you’re controlling is just a little pixel and the things you’re shooting are just shapes and colors and boxes people are confusing abstract imagery with abstract game play. It’s really disappointing that so many years of similar games have really conditioned us as gamers to be completely confused by anything that looks different.

In a way, all the hoopla about “Everyday Shooter” reminds me of how “The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker” was absolutely BLASTED by the critics, well before the game was even out, because it looked too cartoony and unrealistic. “Give us 3-D realism!” they commanded, deciding that the game sucked before they had even played it. And of course many of them had to eat their words when the game arrived, sold fantastically, and was of course a delightful and beautiful adventure to play.

So again, while “Everyday Shooter” is an absolutely fantastic game, wonderful to play and play again, it is most definitely not a “piece of design work” or simply “art” (although art is a huge part of it). Nor is it an “abstract game” or a multimedia project. It’s just a game. A great one, but just a game.

- Matt