Just as the human body has its appendix, a knob of flesh that long ago lost its evolutionary function but at any time might burst and flood your body with poison, so videogames have their own redundant organs. They are cliches of gaming that have survived generations of programming only through a lazy reliance on familiarity, and a reluctance to challenge gamers with new ideas. What follows is only the beginning of a long list, but it would at least be a start if we never saw any of these again:

Turn-based battles

Not just random turn-based battles of the type that disfigure the otherwise beautiful Skies of Arcadia. But the whole idea of turn-based battles. Why do they belong in videogames at all? To design a turn-based battle system in 2001 is to deliberately turn one’s back on the unique property of the videogame form - real-time dynamic interaction between player and gameworld. If you’re going to take turns, why not just have characters play chess or Go? They are far richer and deeper turn-based games than any RPG magic system.
Historically, turn-based battle mechanics are a throwback to boardgames. Early computerized versions of Dungeons & Dragons-style romps were little more than electronic dice-throwers, and the turn-based mechanics got left in. And now, decades later, they’re still left in: a bizarre formal anachronism. Direct, real-time control can offer far more fluid gameplay, as Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Phantasy Star Online have already shown. We should expect it as standard.

Arbitrary withholding of information

This snappy coinage describes the practice, lamentably common in narrative-driven games, of having non-player characters who hoard a secret that is essential to the player’s progress, but won’t actually tell it until the player has achieved some totally unrelated feat. Until then, he remains infuriatingly dumb. Shenmue is splendidly full of this fault. Try to talk to the heavy-metal bikers in Dobuita, for instance, and you’ll get nothing but a torrent of repetitive abuse. But later on, in the arcade, one of the bikers will, for no good reason, come over all helpful and tell you where he got his tattoo. This ruins the illusion of an internally consistent gameworld, because behind the arbitrary withholding of information and its subsequent parcelling-out, you can always see the shadowy figure of a designer who is afraid to give his audience too much freedom, and so has to lead them by the hand as if they were idiots.

Save points

It is often argued that the ability to save anywhere in a game, for example in Half-Life, robs it of all tension. On the other hand, if I’m half-way through a level and want to go out to the pub, why shouldn’t I be able to preserve my progress? Saving a videogame ought to be just like pausing a videotape, or folding down a page in a book. Spreading save points around levels not only makes a nonsense of the fictional world - what on earth are those blue crystals in Tomb Raider supposed to be, exactly? - but effectively enslaves you to the game. It is no longer entertainment, but a job, where you can’t clock off until you’ve done the required amount of work.
If saving anywhere destroys the tension, maybe the game is using the wrong techniques to build tension in the first place - unforeseeable sudden-death situations, for example. But the player must be allowed to budget her time how she chooses. It’s my life, goddamnit.

Find the switch

The first Tomb Raider game was atmospheric and beautiful enough at the time for its rather basic lever-pulling combinatorials to pass muster. But when a supposedly next-generation game such as Oni can think of nothing original to add to the mix - find the console that opens the next door - you know it’s time to take stock.
A good experiment in design, along the lines of the blessed auto-jumping feature in Zelda 64, would be to make a videogame where no door is ever locked. Now how are you going to make it interesting?

Weapon crates

Terrorist organisations are oddly careless with their weapons, leaving them stacked in wooden crates that explode after a few well-placed gunshots. Luckily for you, however, these are magic weapons that can withstand the force of an exploding crate and lie there with a full magazine of pristine ammo, just waiting for a lone hero to pick them up. If I were an evil and slightly camp terrorist bent on world domination, I like to think I’d at least store my guns and ammo in robust metal boxes. Or even in an armoury. But no. Even Deus Ex relies on crates.
How about a simple rule that a new weapon can only be acquired from an armoury, or from the dead body of an enemy who was just using it? Oh, but then we couldn’t shift the crates around to perform obscenely tricky and annoying platform-jumping tasks. And we like those, don’t we?

The phrase “hardcore gamer”

This last one is not about games themselves but the playground wars between the folks who play them. People who call themselves “hardcore gamers” blame “casual gamers” for undermining the industry by buying bad software and liking Sony. But who is bringing videogaming into greater disrepute - the “casual”s, or those who describe themselves with an epithet, “hardcore”, which is normally reserved for the graphic depiction of tumescent, mucous-soaked genitalia?

On a related note, society’s worries about videogames’ harmful effects on children can hardly be mollified by gamers who celebrate favoured products with the word “addictive”. Sure, you may think of videogaming as a mind-altering drug, just as reading a novel or playing tennis can be. But if we use vocabulary like this, who can blame parents if they begin to think that videogames might be a combination of pornography and crack?

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