Within the first fifteen minutes of playing a video game, I can tell if it will be good. I have yet to decide whether this is a useful skill in the context of adult life.

Services like Steam and the XBox Live Marketplace have effectively streamlined the process of consuming game demos, often before a game is available for purchase. This strategy is part of any publisher’s winning marketing plan. Let the masses jump on the game to provide free word-of-mouth advertising, and then watch them argue ad infinitum in every corner of the internet, since no one can be proven wrong. This is the ideal way to arrive at launch day. The review scores hit the usual aggregate sites based on the media’s preview copies, and people rush to the stores not just to get their hands on the game, but to prove everyone else wrong.

I am not usually such a person.

I have played and reviewed many demos since the inception of this website. In fact, I find myself relying on them more for the 360 than when I was solely a PC gamer. New PC games don’t stay expensive due to the high shelfspace turnover at electronics and even specialty retailers, whereas console games seem to retain their price a lot better¹. When I’m thinking about a new game purchase, reading exaggerated reviews and watching video samples of the game in action aren’t enough.

This makes the demo extremely important to someone like me. And once I start making notes on my first impressions of a game, it’s hard to stop. Most demos I’ve bothered to play provided me enough information to settle on an opinion. I knew the games weren’t going to get any better. And in the case of Ghostbusters: The Video Game, I was ensnared by nostalgia in the hopes that I would be playing Ghostbusters III. I wish I could say that was true.

Then there was Batman, a license that wields even more brand power, arriving in the form of Arkham Asylum last month to an unsuspecting audience. There was suprisingly no hype to speak of; no previews out of the usual. The demo was made available two weeks prior to the full version’s release. It caught a lot of people off guard, myself included. Everyone was excited over the possibility that a video game starring Batman was actually good. Naturally, the initial impressions were positive – and they spread.

I played the demo the week it was available for download and was prepared to post a negative review based on my impressions. There is no way the game should be receiving overwhelming praise. Except something held me back. My experiences with the game felt unfinished.

Surrounding myself with the opinions of people I know and who had played the full version, my suspicions were confirmed: the Arkham Asylum demo was terrible.

In the anticipation of a game that is sometimes years away, arguments will erupt about its quality, often hinging on such damning empirical evidence like screenshots and whether they were faked or not. Massive armies of the overstimulated who have nothing better to do will swarm websites like Gamestop² and NeoGAF and Amazon leaving comments about a game that they haven’t played, and likely isn’t even finished yet. Meanwhile, our favorite video game news outlets will be given their monthly ration of screenshots to post, and the whole process begins again. This is how the machine works. And video game culture at large not only accepts it, they love it.

Back in the early days of PC Gaming, demos were essential for getting the word out about a game. This is how the Shareware scene started. Publishers would release the first mission or chapter of a game for free, and you would have to pay to play the rest of it. These chapters were often made up of sub-missions, and provided enough content to be classified as a game in itself. For a while, this was enough to support a fledgling game development community and allowed it to compete with the big studios and their boxed games available on store shelves.

Shareware was a sign of good faith on the Publisher or development house. They’ll give you a full-featured part of their game, with the intent that you will become a paying customer. Sometimes it worked.

The best part? By the end of that first mission you knew exactly what the game was about, because no features were left to be unlocked – there were just more missions ahead and you could easily extrapolate what the rest of them would be like. Does anyone remember that Quake was distributed as a demo? The full version was available on the $5 CD-ROM, waiting to be unlocked. Of course, that worked out really well for id when software pirates had cracked the key generator and people were playing the full game a day later. I saw this as the the start of the demo’s decline as an actual slice of the game. Sure, PC Gamer and other magazines included demos on disc, and as consoles started distributing games on CD and DVD their enthusiast magazines did the same. But a publisher’s approach to the demo was forever changed. It was more of a preview – not a sample of a game in its finished form. In fact, some demos go so far as to say that it isn’t even representative of the final game. So why release it at all, if things are bound to change?

Of course, the opposing argument is that games are just too big and complicated now, and there’s no way that you could convey its essence in something that is designed to be played in twenty or thirty minutes. Some publishers feel that a demo isn’t even necessary for their game, as it’s just not conducive to the typical mission-based shortening that occurs. Instead, they’d rather let their audience pick up the full version and try it for themselves. And then the game becomes another statistic in the “unfinished” pile.

A good demo should be long enough to allow you to gather some intelligence about the story (if any), get comfortable with the control scheme and mechanics, and show every feature of the game (within some reasonable constraints of the story revealed) to get a feel for what the full version has to offer. Usually that happens in the first mission of a game, because the beginning of any game should be the incentive to continue. I should not be spending the next eight hours trying to find some hidden brilliance to appreciate a video game. I do not have that kind of time. I don’t think anyone does. Unless they are masochists.

The demo for Arkham Asylum is horrible. It is poorly assembled and a woefully inadequate representation of the final game. If I had let the demo make my decision, I would not have been playing it the last two weeks. The demo is two gigabytes of nothing. It goes through the motions of an opening movie, some combat, and a stealth section that is actually a small part of a “stalking” concept used to great effect throughout the full game. It ends with the setup to a boss fight that never happens³. The demo is made up of sections that were actually much farther apart in the full version. Worst of all it was too short, which left me doubting whether the game was even worth my time. If a demo ever does that, it is doing something wrong.

If the creation of Rocksteady’s demo was so arbitrary, they could have picked better locations and scenarios to present the game’s features. There was combat, sure, but it was so rudimentary that it made their system seem so generic. There was no wall-breaking or climbing. There was no hunting for secrets or alternative paths of entry. The way the demo was constructed fails to incorporate Arkham Asylum‘s greatest asset: its focus on exploration. Instead, it feels like it was created to make the game seem safe – predictable, even. My biggest complaint was the inability to use shadows for hiding, but the game makes up for it once you learn to use Batman’s tools to surprise instead of stalk. You’d never know it from the demo, though.

Is the new driver behind creating a demo to keep as much as possible from the player, to ensure that curiosity wins out? Batman could have started with all of the gadgets so that they could be experimented with. There aren’t that many. Allow the player to set up explosive charges to stun enemies, instead of being limited to the Batarang or Inverse Takedown⁴. The demo for Ninja Gaiden II gave the player all the weapons⁵ and provided the first half of the first chapter in the game. By the end of it I knew I had to buy it. Not to learn more about the game, but to play more.

I finished Arkham Asylum last week. My experience with it was positive; I’m glad I bought it. But I almost didn’t. If it weren’t for recommendations from friends and seeing some impressions in the raw on Twitter, I would have stubbornly passed it by and missed out on a solid video game while the machine kept going.

Demos have evolved into barely interactive commericals. They are the music videos to a video game’s LP. They give you all the flash with no context, leaving you hanging to the point where you often have no choice but to rent or buy the game to make an informed decision. But the average game purchaser doesn’t always have that kind of money lying around, or time to spend making this determination on their own. So they turn to reviews and the often completely unrelated scores that accompany them in the misguided hopes they’ll provide that missing insight. The Hype Machine claims another victim, and keeps on going.

In the view of the massive, lumbering machine that is The Video Game Industry, demos are no longer a necessity to make a sale. In fact, they don’t have to exist at all. Some publishers don’t release demos until a game has been out for a month. But this is just a bonus. Those early adopters that have to play right now? The publishers already have their money, and these games are now stitting on a shelf in the “Used” section of your local video game shop. And that salesperson behind the counter? He’s telling the guy that just got $15 for a pile of recent titles about some screenshots for this new video game. Better put that money down now to reserve a copy. It’s this year’s must-buy.