Is 'Safe' Gaming The Best Kind Of Gaming? 126
An anonymous reader writes "James Portnow has written up an in-depth article about 'risk in game design'. He discusses the concept of the safe game, 'any game where given X hours (with minor variance for skill) any player will beat the game and get the prize.' Do you prefer your games tricky and studded with failure points, or does smooth and easy win the race?"
Beat the game? (Score:3, Insightful)
If it's good, I might finish it.
I Prefer games with skill level controlls. (Score:3, Insightful)
Multi-Player Handicapping (Score:3, Insightful)
I've been playing a little BF2, and I'm not very good (but I enjoy it nonetheless). With games like BF2 having user accounts and tracking all kinds of stats, it came to me that it would be possible for the server to give handicap to a team based on the stats of the players in it. Say in BF2 for instance, the server will have access to the player's kill-to-death ratio, not only for the current session, but back to the beginning. Based on this it could, for instance, open additional slots on a team -- effectively giving them a handicap -- if they're "too low" in this ratio. Or give that team an extra vehicle, etc.
This could be fun for both good players who might enjoy and even seek out the opportunity to play the 'underdog' to a team with a numerical advantage, and for new players who risk getting frustrated and even bored if they're on the losing side all the time.
As it is now, the server relies on the random allocation of players to a side to 'balance things out', but I postulate that it might actually make the game more fun to bias this to give it that 'skilled underdogs vs overwhelming force' tint. As a server option, of course.
Any MP games out there doing this already?
Author's concept of "game" seems narrow (Score:4, Insightful)
For one thing, the concept of "beating" a game only really applies to the ACSPE, where there is "content" to burn through that usually doesn't merit a second look, like most movies. I think this is one of the main problems of gaming today that leads to lack of variety, a narrow audience, and excessive time commitments in order for a game to be fun.
Consider the pre-computer era definition of game: A game was something that was played against someone else, could have been physical (sports) or purely cognitive (board/card games) and almost always lasted less than a few hours (obviously, cricket strains this definition). Early computer games followed this pretty closely, replacing the human opponent with an AI (chess simulators, combat simulators, etc.).
The advent of paper-and-pen RPGs, and their subsequent translation into CRPGs changed all this. Persistent state that spanned play sessions, extemely large time commitments, and the elmination of what was traditionally thought of as competion created something that arguably should never have been called a "game" (how many of you were ever asked "How do you determine who's the winner" when you first explained RPGs to a layman?). These ideas soon bled over into most of the other genres, as they proved to be very effective in building franchise loyalty. Today, it's difficult to find a "serious" game that doesn't incorporate the features of "leveling", "extrinsic reward" (e.g. cutscenes, loot, etc.), "guaranteed success" (the main idea of the article) or "hidden rules" (my personal pet peeve), common in many Japanese games - the techique of withholding the rules of the game from the player, forcing them to "discover" them as a part of the process of playing, essentially turning rules into "content". I realize "hiddne rules" is a mainstay of some genres (fighters and Japanese RPGs comes immediately to mind), but I find them unforgiveable gimmicks for milking extra play-time out of a system, and forcing the player into an OCD-like monomania in order to actually get their money's worth (thereby wasting their time).
As popular as the ACSPE is, thousands of years of human history shows that the other sort of "game" (directly competitive systems, or abstract puzzle) can be quite successful as well, but it's been overlooked by almost everyone other than the online Flash/Java minigame market. Is this really the only venue for this type of fun? Even systems that would seem to be ideally suited for this type of game (e.g. the GBA or mobile phones) have precious few "strategy" or "puzzle" games, compared the mountains of action and rpg ACSPEs that have always struck me as inappropriate for systems that seem designed for short games with other people, as you're usually out in public with a few free minutes when you have the opporunity to use these.
Anyway, my overall point is, if developers would expand the types of games they'd develop beyond the ACSPEs focused on in this article, many, if not most, of these points would become moot. I also think that the emphasis of the effort would move from content generation to game design as you reduced the number of art resources required to produce a title. I see this as a good thing, as the content creation is probably the largest cost component of most modern games, the most time-consuming, and the least able to change dramatically if large changes need to be made during the middle of development to accomodate new ideas.
-BbT
Difficulty as the Inverse of Plot (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Multi-Player Handicapping (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately the next Battlefield incarnation (2042?) is going the other way.
The career mode will be tightly linked to in-game upgrades and capabilities.
This means that the non-casual players, who play longer and get better at the game, get access to better equipment. This means they have the advantage of superior equipment AND the advantage of greater experience.
I see this widening the gulf between hard-core and casual players, and as someone that doesn't want to spend 20 hours a week on any given game this disappoints me. If the game goes live with that system in place I just wont buy it - why spend money for an online experience where I'm pretty much guaranteed to be at a disadvantage.
For multi-player gaming, especially PvP (player versus player), base the game on player skill, not on cash/time spent. If someone beats me because they're a better player than I have the incentive to get better. If they beat me because they have better equipment, then I have no incentive, as I'll never have a level playing field. (Especially when getting that equipment involves hundreds of hours of gameplay against people that already have it).
World of Warcraft PvP suffers an identical problem. Unless I abandon all my friends, weasel my way into a top-end guild, play for 3-4 hours every night for 8 months and get lucky on certain drops, I can never have a fair 1v1 fight with certain other players. Forgive me for not finding that fun.
Re:Multi-Player Handicapping (Score:3, Insightful)
Usually the only frusterating time in an online game is learning how to play and getting through that initial ass beating you are going to receive when you sign into a server. We all know it's coming, and you really have to just hope the game is fun enough to endure it before you can start handing out judgment.
But what happens in ranking systems is they tend to appease the more talented players by allowing them to find good games with their stats, and crushing the newbies because lots of good players constantly resetting their stats or starting new accounts.
People do this to either have better stats, or to just have the satisfaction of playing against people who aren't any good at the game. I remember way back when playing subspace, people would create new accounts if they died once, trying to achieve some sort of 100:0 kill ration or whatever to brag to their friends.
From personal experience I saw this a lot in warcraft 3. Just trying to get a comparable team 2v2 match when we had no record was rediculous. From reading, it looks as though halo 2 also suffers from this problem.
Honestly the only way for this system to work is to make it extreemly difficult (or costly) to make a new account, which will work somewhat, or, completly hide the stats and never tell anybody that the system exists, though people will find out sure enough.
Well anyway, I guess the games are still better then completly unranked ones, and hopefully developers will keep coming up with ideas to curb the problems.
Re:Beat the game? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Beat the game? (Score:2, Insightful)
Exactly my point. You see, there is more than one song. There's even more than one type of song. Heck, I can even. . . invent my own!
An unscripted RTS can be varied in thousands of different ways to give a different experience every time, just as a flute can be played differently.
Myst was dead for me in one evening.
But even with just one song it need not ever get boring, because there is always some available goal within the performance of the song that one has not yet reached. Perfection can be chased, but it cannot be caught.
Lap times are never 0.
Please do not get the impression that because I favor a different sort of game that I am criticising your preference and thus you personally. To each his own. I am merely standing for a point of view that appears to be foreign to the article author. There is a tendency for gamers to think of their prefered sort of game as "gaming."
This is an error.
There are comparitively few really good open ended games on the market though. Publishers don't like them for a very simple reason; they cannot be effectively used to rape your boredom for profit. You buy 'em once and play 'em forever.
KFG
Re: It's not just a question of difficulty (Score:3, Insightful)
Bosses always have a hidden "trick", something that once you learn it, the boss goes from challenging to easy in about 3 seconds. Once you realize that a certain footwork pattern means "Get out of the way uberattack coming", the boss is much easier, because unless you happen to miss the "tell" (to barrow a poker term), you'll never be hit by the attack. Or if the way to survive the ride through the angry marine base is to take out the platforms they stand on, (one puzzle in Oddworld) the level itself becomes pointless -- it's almost impossible to lose.
On the other hand, there are games (I've seen it a few times in sports), where once the AI realizes it's losing, it suddenly gets much better at the game it's playing. In a fighting game, it might gain some new moves or have a move that takes 1/4 of your health etc. That's annoying, 'cause I'm not losing so much because I suck as because the game is cheating.
I don't mind a game that's hard on its own, but I hate games that are difficult for cheap reasons. I hate not being able to defeat a boss because I haven't figured out the "correct" answer yet -- or realized the tell for the special attack. I hate games that cheat me out of a victory by cheating. If the game is hard because the designer thought out the challenge and made it harder be requiring me to be good at the game, rather than good at guessing the solution that the designer had in mind.