Abusing Players = Sales?

Earlier on in the month I noted one intriguing thing: that players will take a lot of torment with respect to difficulty before they give up. In fact, more abuse can sometimes result in a more thoroughly enjoyable experience. Having now had a look at the fact that the amount of stress and required level of skill (forming the absolute difficulty of a game) needs to be well thought out, do I change my mind? Once again, I turn to the industry for help here.

And I don't know why I'm constantly drawn to this game, but I just cannot help but think of Guitar Hero here, specifically the third one. Now, the game is fairly easy on the easiest setting. Nothing too complicated. The player has to press one of three notes and strum to some sort of rhythm based on the song, but really not a high level of skill is involved. Also, the stress levels placed on the player are fairly low. This is somewhat maintained on the medium setting, adding another button and slightly increasing the stress in the way of increased notes and faster timing. As you'd expect from a "medium" difficulty. However, the last 8 songs see an even higher increase, while still contained within the medium setting. Hard and expert follow a similar pattern, with expert literally making it impossible for humans to get 100% on certain songs. Some of my gamer friends won't go past medium, as I thought I wouldn't, but the extremely satisfying reward created by the culture of gaming beckons us forward. Yes, Through the Fire and the Flames is an abuse of players (which the developers acknowledge by labelling one of the solos "What the?!"), but it has been a great selling point for this title. All you have to do is Youtube this song and you'll see that there are literally millions of views.

The example of Guitar Hero was an easy example to think up. The next ones were a bit harder. I think that this exploitation of human limits also takes place in a 2D space shooting game called Ikaruga for Gamecube, and now X-Box Live Arcade. Similar to games like Raiden and R-Type before it, this game took human reflexes and multiplied normal human processing power by 500. The game from the offset requires an extremely high level of intrinsic skill, even on low difficulty settings. Your ship is constantly being bombarded with literally dozens of lasers at a time. Rather than just having to dodge them, your ship is able to absorb some of the shots, depending on the colour. There are only blue and red coloured shots, hence only two types to try and absorb. However, when this is added to the sheer magnitude of attacks coming at you, you quickly learn that only the elite will get through to the end without cheating somehow. However, it seems again that the rewards of glory created by the surrounding culture thrust players against high difficulties, just to get their prowess recognised on Youtube.

It seems Youtube has been quite a powerful tool in reinforcing a culture around gaming. It seems that because of Youtube, the once unnoticed communities devoted to finishing Mario 64 in a ridiculously fast time, or topping out the times in F-Zero, have now been put in the spotlight, and the reward significantly increased. This has given me a great idea that I can't believe hasn't been done: why don't games have an interface for recording games to AVI? I know Mario Kart and Gran Turismo have the ability to record a "ghost", which is a virtual run of what you did that other people can compete against, but it seems that Web 2.0 is where the culture is gaining its full strength. It just HAS to be done.

Something interesting came up in both titles, and many others like it. The culture of gaming that forms around a title can greatly influence the success of a game. This begs the question, how can games be designed to target this culture and its creation, and how can this culture be encouraged to be driven by the rewards of glory? If these didn't exist, it can be assumed that the tolerance of abusive levels of difficulty in games would diminish.

But we won't let that happen on our watch, will we?

(Rewards of glory, hierarchy of challenges and absolute difficulty by Penny Drennan from ITN016 lecture 7, culture of gaming from ITB750 Lecture 3)