Beautiful Katamari (Namco, Now Production/Namco Bandai, 2007)
Played on Xbox 360
Beautiful Katamari (2007) is an abstract, third person puzzle game where the player is tasked to roll things up (varying in size from biscuits to whole cities) with a sticky ball in order to recreate planets and the whole universe with the help of the King of All Cosmos.
While increasingly abstract and even bizarre in its gameplay, the elements that make Beautiful Katamari (2007) an addictive and inventive game can be deconstructed following Celia Pearce’s definition. She notes that games have to build on a framework of goals, obstacles, resources, rewards, penalties and information (cited in Buckingham, 2006: 5). The combination of these components can create an arguably infinite variety of game concepts and also spontaneity in players’ engagement.
In Beautiful Katamari (2007) the goal remains the same throughout: roll the ball up to the given size in a given amount of time. While there is variation in the locations where the player has to complete this task and a certain amount of freedom is granted in selecting an avatar to play as, the objective itself on each level is the same (or very similar). Nevertheless, the game avoids being boring by continuously increasing the size of the ball that the player rolls at the beginning of the level and by setting certain target items that are requested by the King specifically. Consequently, the player finds herself rolling up entire ships and whales in order to satisfy the request for ‘sea things’ or devouring all sorts of animals to complete her in-game collection.
For Jesper Juul, it is a ‘variable, quantifiable outcome’ (cited in Buckingham, 2006: 6) rather than a goal that is to be achieved, and the objectives of Beautiful Katamari (2007) can be understood accordingly. The game tracks the types of items that the player rolls up and provides statistics of this data as well. This is not only part of the King’s requests (as the level can be passed even if the required items are not in majority in the finished ball), but also a form of reward, a desired outcome that ‘the player invests effort to achieve’ (cited in Buckingham, 2006: 6). While negotiating the different in-game environments, the player can build up a skill of identifying the needed type of items, rather than picking up anything and everything that can be picked up. This way, the game constructs the framework of goal, obstacle and reward, where each component is equally challenging but achievable and easy to understand but the skill is always improvable.
Games like Zuma (2003), de Blob (2008) and Peggle (2007) arguably build mainly on players’ desire to attain a high score, get a position on the leader board or beat their friends. While these games all include a story mode, their replayability comes primarily from free play, where the improvement of skill, speed and score becomes the main objective. In this play mode, it is arguably not the obstacles or gaps that ‘provoke the work’ or ‘motivate us to continue playing’ (Buckingham, 2006: 9) but our own desire and need for achievement. Abstract, casual puzzle games utilize this format frequently, but it can even be applied to titles like the Guitar Hero games (2005-2010). This arguably proves that the combination of the elements that define a game (as defined by Pearce) can be infinitely varied and can result in utterly wild but entertaining concepts, such as Beautiful Katamari (2007).
Bibliography:
Blue Tongue Entertainment (2008) de Blob [Disc] Wii. US: THQ, THQ Wireless.
Buckingham, D. (2006) ‘Studying Computer Games’ in D. Carr, D. Buckingham, A. Burn and G. Scott (eds.) Computer Games: Text, Narrative and Play, Cambridge: Polity, pp. 1-13.
Harmonix, Neversoft (2005-2010) Guitar Hero [Disc] Xbox 360. US: RedOctane, Activision.
Namco and Now Production (2007) Beautiful Katamari [Disc] Xbox 360. Japan: Namco Bandai.
Oberon Media and PopCap Games (2003) Zuma [Online] PC. US: PopCap Games.
PopCap Games (2007) Peggle [Online] PC. US: PopCap Games.
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