It's been previewed on web sites now for two or three months. Pictures have been leaked, and passed around, and posted. A web site devoted to it has sprung up, seemingly out of nowhere, and is chock-full of tibits and rumors and -- sometimes -- real information from the people making it. Some of the people working on it even say how cool it's going to be, hinting at features and graphics and Internet play.

Then the official press release hits the web, and the anticipation rises to a fever pitch. Cries of "when's it coming out?" and "is it done yet?" fill message boards and news postings. More pictures, more hints, and more rumors come grinding out of the marketing mill, only making the wait seem even longer.

Then the rumors stop. Silence from the makers of this amazing creation; then, the announcement: "We've gone gold." Triumphant shouts ring out and the publisher sets a shelf date. On that day, you -- one of the fans -- rush to the store to get your hands on this amazing feat of artistry, programming, and design. You excitedly install it, load it up, enter the first level...

...and your machine freezes. Blue screen of death. Keyboard locked. You have to press the reset button.

So you try again. And again. And again. Nothing. Isn't happening. The irony? You're the lucky one; you could have been like your neighbor, who played 75% of the game, only then finding out that he missed a critical piece of the puzzle on the second level, or he tried to talk to an in-game character that he had already killed, and now has to reboot his machine to exit the game. Or that his system (which uses nothing but name-brand, widely-available, mainstream components) has a "known issue" that, well, he didn't know about, and now he has no sound. At all. Or he has to download unsuccessful patch after unsuccessful patch to fix something that was supposed to work when he bought it. Or he could finish the game, removing it using the application provided with the game, only to find out -- since he did something that many others do, but that the company didn't expect -- he's now wiped his entire hard drive. Or that the game he bought was strangely incomplete when he purchased it (for whatever reason) and he now has to wait for over an hour before playing for the first time while his game fixes itself through his phone line... and if he doesn't get free local calls (as much of the game-playing world does not), he gets to spend even more money waiting for his game to be fixed.

And what about the people who don't have Internet access that have this game? What do they do?

Does any of this sound familiar? It should; all of the above examples are taken from reports and reviews based both on released games and soon-to-be-released games. If you've been following the gaming scene for any length of time, you'll have noticed that the quality of games has been declining steadily for quite some time. Oh, I'm not saying that the games aren't fun; far from it. In fact, over the past year or so, some of the best games I've ever played have been released. Right now, in fact, I'm really enjoying Baldur's Gate, and I haven't gotten a kick out of an RPG like this since Eye of the Beholder.

However, some of the worst games I've ever played have also been released over the past year or so. I'm not naming any names -- that isn't the point of this article -- but I've purchased games that are months old that still don't work properly or consistently, even after a number of patches. I've played games that won't progress past a certain point no matter what I do, because of some hidden internal flaw. I've played games where I've been stuck in walls, thrust into (or explored through) areas that required a reboot or cheat code to escape from, dumped to the desktop for no apparent reason, and got stuck in some kind of CD loop when the drive was changing tracks.

If you can't get a game to work on your machine, does it really matter how much fun it is? If you have the wrong sound card, the orchestral music and the real-life voice-overs won't mean much to you, because you won't be hearing them. Worse still, if it's an erratic flaw, you simply won't be able to trust the game to work at any given moment, and you spend more time hitting the "save" button than playing. Is that fun? Or is that frustrating? And to think you paid US$30-50 to go through all this...

What did you expect, anyway?

Hand Me That Can Of Bug Spray... I Think I See Something Moving

So what is a bug? A bug, at its base, is a logic error, programming flaw, or design oversight. The Jargon File (a very well put-together site) calls it, "An unwanted and unintended property of a program or piece of hardware, esp. one that causes it to malfunction." Bugs can range from the nearly-unreproducible (the game only crashes when you're jumping off a ledge backwards, firing weapon number seven at a certain type of enemy while there are four more in certain positions on screen, and it's Tuesday at 5:45pm) to the common-and-annoying (pressing "Esc" when exiting a certain often-used screen kicks you out of the game to the desktop). For the purposes of this article, a "bug" is something that has the following characteristics:

• It is reproducible at will; you know what makes it happen, and can make it happen all the time.
• It causes you to exit the game (dump to the desktop, lock your machine, etc.), makes the game unplayable in some manner (endless loops, for instance), or hinders the playing of the game in some material and unpleasant way.
• It prevents you from playing the game with all its features (for instance, no sound).
• It shows up during the normal course of play -- you don't have to do anything special or "out of the ordinary" to make it happen.

Game's Got Bugs? So What? I'll Just Get The Patch...

Internet access is a boon to gamers that are connected, to be sure, but it's also part of the problem. See, in the past, there were no online game sites, and fixing a problem that was found in the game after it was shipped was troublesome, time-consuming, and expensive. Having to send out floppies to everyone that registered the game you sold them took a long, long time and cost a lot of money. Now, however, patching a game is easy... almost too easy. All a developer has to do is announce it on any major news site (this one included), and in minutes it'll be on every news site, with links to the patch on a number of servers. Bing bang boom, and in the time it takes you to download and install an "official" (not beta) patch, you'll be up and running again... or will you? Many times, the patches that are released have been tested about as closely as the original game itself, and have even been rushed through the approval process to placate angry fans. Also, ironically, patches often fix some parts of the game while they break others, and this, of course, requires another patch. A new trend in game "design" is the pre-release patch; this is where the game has gone gold and, before it even gets to the shelves, a patch has been made and is ready for release! This, to me, is the clearest sign that something is terribly wrong with the system the way it's working now... when a completed game is being fixed before it's even available, it's time to stop and re-evaluate exactly what's going on here.

Nevertheless, the ease of being able to "fix" the game in question may be one of the causes of the increase in bugs. After all, if you know you'll be able to fix the game later, wouldn't it be tempting to just get it out on the shelves right away? Game development costs money, after all -- a lot of money -- so the sooner you can recoup your investment, the better. Right?

On the other side of the coin, though, developers and publishers are, at heart, businesses, and the best way to generate income from your product is to give the buyers what they want. More importantly, however, is to give it to them when they want it... and gamers are notorious for wanting their game now. Yesterday, even, if that were possible. Rushing a game to get it to market to appease hungry, impatient, and vocal gamers is just one of the many pressures that is brought to bear on the developer and publisher; something to keep in mind when you complain that a game is "taking too long"...

Bigger, Better, Faster, More!

The wonderful thing about games in general is that they continue to become more and more technologically, visually, and thematically marvelous. Games now have depth, and feel, and immersive sound, graphics, and interaction with the environment. In many ways, they push the technological envelope like no other software application does, and with this cutting-edge technology, there is a price. That price is usually the cost of hardware upgrades, but it's now being said that buggy, sometimes broken, games are the cost as well. Is this too high a price?

In addition, developers often say that they're under pressure from the gaming public to continually increase the complexity of games. Gamers want better sound, more and better visuals, better AI (artificial intelligence) in their opposition, more involved and intricate plots and adventures, faster and smoother online play... and that the cost of all these advancements is -- you guessed it -- more unstable and quirky games in general. Is this too high a price?

Or, to put it another way, which would you rather have: a game with a hundred features that worked only half the time, or a game with fifty that worked all the time? Is the reduced feature set worth the reliability? It would appear that most gamers would answer "no" to that question, based on what we've been seeing lately in terms of game features and game stability.

But Is That What We Really Want?

I really don't think so. Sure, it's nice to have a game that does all kinds of neat stuff, and has a bunch of cool features; who wouldn't want to buy and play that? I know I would. However, pushing the edge of the technological envelope doesn't necessarily make a great game. It certainly makes a pretty one, and a cool-looking one, and a great-sounding one, but a great game is more than the sum of its parts, and I can think of any number of great games -- released over the past year or two -- which aren't really what one would call "cutting-edge" in terms of technological advances. They are, however, great games, in no small part because you can trust them to work.

What Can We Do, Then?

So, let's say we wanted to buy and play good games with less bugs. How would we go about doing that? Well, the Internet is one great place to start. Publishers and developers have commented, time and again, how nice it is that they have the capability of getting in touch with their fans to see what it is they (the fans) want in a game. Remember, though, that it's a two-way street -- if they can get in touch with you, you can get in touch with them. I don't know many developers who aren't interested in a gamer's opinion, especially if that gamer has purchased their products in the past.

Realize, though, that developers and publishers are very busy most of the time -- making the games you want to play. This isn't an invitation to mail every developer under the sun with a laundry list of desires. This is, however, an invitation to make your voice heard. Check out developers' and publishers' web sites; many of them have messageboards they frequent. There are many forums on the Web -- some open, some not -- as well as the appropriate Usenet newsgroups. Often, they'll have a "feedback" email address you can use to give them creative and constructive suggestions. Sometimes they'll even have polls, and, if you're lucky, there will be a text box you can use to type in your thoughts. There are other ways as well, but these are the most common.

It may take a little while, but if we simply and politely state our desires -- to play fun, interesting, and bug-free games -- and state them often enough, who knows what'll happen? With any luck, in a year (or even less) we may not have to download a single patch unless we wanted to.

Wouldn't that be nice?

Conclusion: Bugs in games are an ongoing issue. Standards are steadily declining, but whether it's anybody's fault -- or everybody's fault -- is anyone's guess. The thing to do is not point fingers and pass out blame, but to address the symptoms one by one and, perhaps, fix the cause. It's taken a long time to get to this point, and it'll take a long time to get out of it, but we, as gamers, must begin insisting on games that perform without mishap. Maybe it'll take longer and more intensive quality-assurance testing, maybe it'll take longer and more extensive public beta testing, maybe it'll take a couple of demo releases, or -- worst-case -- maybe it'll take a boycott of companies that are unable or unwilling to release playable products. In any case, it has to start somewhere. Letting developers know buggy games are unacceptable is a good start; if enough gamers voice their displeasure, in a level-headed and mature way, the situation will begin to change. After all, how can they sell something to you if you don't want to buy it?