Learning to Love Bugs

Editor's Note: I personally get a lot of enjoyment out of glitches in games, so long as they don't impede my progress. I've also been known to take advantage of bugs, but only in a single-player environment. Cameron makes a good point here — sometimes bugs are just fun. – Jay

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Most gamers and programmers see bugs as flaws that should never be present in a finished game. At best, we see them as breaking immersion — taking the player out of the experience, even if only for a moment. At worst, they can completely sabotage the gaming experience by causing crashes or otherwise impeding progress. However, game developers are somewhat unique in their drive to eradicate all accidents from their work. It's time for that to change. Developers need to learn what artists and craftspeople have long known: mistakes can turn out to be an integral part of a finished work.

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This is a subject I've wanted to write about for a while, and episode 45 of the Mobcast finally pushed me to do so. About an hour into the episode, during a discussion of the differences between Japanese and western developers, Mark MacDonald explains that Japanese developers typically put a far higher premium on fixing every programming glitch. As an example, he points out that no Japanese studio would ever let a game as buggy as Fallout 3 out the door. I say, "so much the worse for Japanese developers." Fallout 3 is one of the best arguments for why developers need to cultivate a sense of when to own their bugs rather than rushing to patch them.

These are just a few of the glitches I've encountered in Fallout 3: dead ghouls randomly falling out of the sky, returning to an area only to find the bodies of enemies I had previously killed there laid out in neat rows with their guns hovering above their heads, and characters who had been reduced to abstract geometry which stretched infinitely into space. At first, I was surprised by just how buggy the game was. Eventually, though, I started to look forward to encountering the next bizarre glitch, so much so that I came to think of them as part of the game experience. At that point, Fallout 3's narrative took a turn for the surreal, becoming the tale of the protagonist's slow descent into madness after being chased out of his or her childhood home in Vault 101. Of course, Bethesda didn't intend for Fallout 3 to be told through the eyes of an unreliable narrator but, for me, that ceased to matter. They shipped the game they shipped, and that game's bugs ended up subverting its developer's intentions in a fascinating way.

Of course, I realize that this was a completely subjective interpretation, and that my enjoyment of Fallout 3's bugs puts me in a tiny minority. It doesn't have to be that way, though. Gamers and developers alike need to acquire a taste for the improvisational. If Bethesda had come out and said that all of the glitches in Fallout 3 were intentional, gamers everywhere would have immediately called bullshit. As kids, we might have thought "Minus World" in Super Mario Bros. was a secret intentionally put there by the programmers, but these days we're far more savvy. But what good is that degree of sophistication when it only has a negative impact on our interpretation of games? Maybe it would be annoyingly cheeky of Bethesda to have declared Fallout 3's bugs to be a part of the game experience, but it would also have been kind of revolutionary. And, at any rate, how much difference does it make if the bugs aren't causing the game to crash? The fact is that accidents can be a great source of innovation, but that source is all too rarely tapped by the people making video games.

That may be changing, though. In a recent interview with the 4 Guys 1Up podcast, members of Ruffian Games talked about turning glitches from Crackdown into features in Crackdown 2 because they were so popular with players. Other sandbox games, like Just Cause and various entries in the Grand Theft Auto series have also been cited by some critics as containing glitches that improve the games in ways the developers never intended. But it's not enough for gamers to stop seeing bugs as universally bad. More developers need to follow Ruffian's example and remain open to the possibility that some of the items that worked in their game were the rough edges they couldn't quite smooth out. I'm not holding out hope that the story of Fallout: New Vegas will be told from the point of view of an unreliable narrator, but maybe in time we'll get there.

Hopefully, gamers and developers alike are on the verge of a consciousness-raising moment, when both become more open to accepting bugs as potentially improving games. Is this giving sloppy programming a free pass? Not really — if a programming mistake makes a game more interesting or more fun, that should be enough to justify its existence. As improvisational music has taught us, sometimes the note a musician didn't mean to play turns out to be the best part of the song. When that happens, there's nothing wrong with pretending that it was intentional—and remembering to do it again next time around.