Solid and Self-centred Design Choices

Good design requires an adequate level of player empathy. Players want to feel understood and not feel abused by the games designers during play. But some developers evidently can't help themselves and have to tease and mock us by neglecting our mindset while trying to enjoy their game. On the other hand, some developers are quite excellent at extending a compassionate hand of fun and joy to enrich the experience.

For example, Ninja Gaiden was quite a challenging game. That was half the fun, methinks. The insurmountable challenge it presented was more of a dare than a taunt. It was really nice though. If you got to one part and you kept dying, it would ask if you would like to try the same section of gameplay on a lower difficulty setting. Waves and waves of love once again filled our hearts. I am indeed understood.

Super Paper Mario was an absolutely brilliant piece of software. Even more brilliant was the macro-choice to interweave a broken fourth wall into the narrative. We're always thinking "dude, if Mario is told to press (A) to use his flip ability, what would he think?" The game capitalizes on this, where the informant character replies "what is this (A) you speak of? Don't worry, the observer gets it, and that's the main thing". The entire game is full of these moments where the player feels completely included in the runnings of the game. Exactly what we've been thinking since Super Mario Bros.

I have no idea who invented it, but I need to shake their hand and buy them a nice present. The autosave. Best. Design. Decision. EVER. Instead of being ruled by the fear of AHHH I DIDN'T REACH THE LAST SAVE POINT AND NOW I HAVE TO PLAY THESE 7 HOURS ALL OVER AGAIN, games like KOTOR will automatically save your game at certain checkpoints. Genius!

Assassin's Creed was a great game. Unfortunately it is in the unsympathetic category, as it forces players to read and hear all dialog... WITHOUT THE OPTION TO SKIP. It was released in 2007 man. That's not right. That's just not right.

If you've been reading my past blogs, you'll know the KOTOR games are quite dear to me. Unforunately, KOTOR2 has a slight error in a small decision which puts it in this category. While you are given the ability to skip almost all passages of dialog, KOTOR 2 has one section where this alien that speaks another language cannot be skipped at all. It goes one up on Assassin's in that the alien makes the same long boring painful sound effect each time. Ouch.

As much as it pains me, even the Metroid Prime series had a design flaw. In Prime 2, the difficulty curve was just perfect. That is, til this boss character appears known as the Boost Guardian. You fight him in the dark world where there are light bubbles that keep you safe from the poisonous atmosphere. All except in this room. It doesn't sound like much, but when you are being attacked in a small room where these light bubbles aren't around for the first time in the game, the difficulty ramps up much faster than most players can adapt to.

Once again, flow seems to be the most critical aspect of enjoyable interaction. One small mishap and it really destroys the experience.

MMORPs

It has often been contested that Second Life isn't a game. Apparently it doesn't meet the proper criteria to be considered as such. A lot of people conduct a lot of their business on it. Some levels of file-sharing takes place through its ability to upload custom content. IBM and Sun Microsystems are watching it ever so keenly for effective business use.

Maybe it's the sophisticated interface which does it (sophisticated being there aren't any major weapons or crazy aliens or G-Man or cakes that don't exist). Maybe the fact that your character doesn't level up, but rather can earn some sort of legit currency does it. Or maybe it's just cause talking about using a game for businesses doesn't "sound cool".

I contend that if Second Life isn't a game, World of Warcraft isn't either. They are almost completely identical according to the criteria for games as systems. So let's see if we've moved from MMORPGs to just MMORPs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Plays).

System - Both SL and WOW are fairly complicated pieces of software. Everything functions together as a system - all the different classes and objects and methods and scripting fit together to form a functioning whole.

Me - 1, People who don't think Second Life is a Game (herein referred to as PWDTSLIAG) - 0

Players - Both titles (I almost said games cause, they are) contain a large amount of players. All of these players are involved in heavy interaction, such as trade, chat or task-based networking.

Me - 2, PWDTSLIAG - 0

Artificiality - This is probably the grey area which caused many people to be confused. People say that because real money can be used in Second Life, the fourth wall is knocked down. I'd argue that if this is justification for an OpenGL application with the same controls as a game, same feel and same options available, to not be considered one, World Of Warcraft also is not artificial. The copious amounts of earnings which can be made by gold farming, buying accounts or trading equipment equally, if not moreso destroys this fourth wall.

Me - 3, PWDTSLIAG - 0

Conflict - Both WOW and Second Life provide incredibly open ended gameplay (there, I said it). The main difference here would be that WOW provides some sort of context for contesting powers as part of the narrative. Horde vs. Alliance. People striving for the best gear. Player vs player quests. Lots of opportunity for struggle. Isn't this is the same in Second Life? Everyone's a captialist, striving to monopolise the whole game. People invest money to buy territory. You can create and upload your own scripts so your clothing is better than the Jones'. Just missing the narrative.

Me - 4, PWDTSLIAG - 0

Rules - As mentioned, WOW and Second Life are extremely open ended in terms of what can be done, but at the same time, adequately restricted to prevent them moving outside of the "game" mechanic. Eg. You can't teleport anywhere initially, content is usually restricted for editting by the owner etc.

Me - 5, PWDTSLIAG - 0

Quantifiable Outcome - Both titles don't have one, or nothing conventional at least. There is no "game over" screen. You just keep playing til you get bored. There are definitely quantifiable achievements and goals in both products. Just no real way to end them. If this stops Second Life, it also stops WOW and all other MMORPGs.

Me - 6, PWDTSLIAG - 0

So it would seem that either Second Life is a game based on these criteria, or WOW isn't. It's ok to use a game in businesses and still call it a game. Methinks we shouldn't destroy the entire MMORPG genre as a result.

(Criteria taken from Drennan, P. Fundamentals for Games Design Lecture 3 - Games as Dynamic Systems. 2008, accessed 16 March 2008).

What we have so far

If I were asked right now to create a game, as in, right now, I would probably pause. There is a surprisingly huge number of considerations in game design. Shigeru Miyamoto had it easy in the 80s, where he could just bash together a non-story with tight controls, fat plumbers and annoying mushrooms and call it a huge hit. Now that the business world have seen that video games are a huge market, there are much more stringent criteria to meet.

The image of "the man" in the current environment would probably be embodied by the CEO or one of the producers in a games company. If you can't sell it to these guys, your game isn't gonna get it past your drawings of an epic whale in a uni notebook. I would like to say I would be able to completely nail the premise of a game to design at the moment, but honestly it wouldn't move much past:

The main aim of the game is to provide an enjoyable implementation of one-to-one combat on the Wii. It would be a hybrid between a fighting game and an RPG, with heavy focus on character progression and excellent interaction. Character progression would be revolutionary in that...

... and that's where the pitch would sort of fade of. I really think that the leveling up of yore needs to be extended or changed into something...

And just like that, I've had my breakthrough. At least I hope so. It's an idea that would need to be explored for "funability". Rather than collecting copious amounts of experience points before reaching a new level and being able to enhance your skills then, the player may just gain all these points and be able to spend them all straight away, on a one-to-one correspondence basis. You would be able to pour more and more points into a specific attribute until the effect diverges on some value logarithmically. Any more points put into that attribute would cause it to grow more slowly.


This would empower a player to focus on certain attributes with a high level of customisability. Levelling up would still exist, and would change the gradient of the curve. In other words, this would enable you to reach a higher plateau of skill, yet still increase point for point.





So the elevator pitch becomes:

The main aim of the game is to provide an enjoyable implementation of one-to-one combat on the Wii. It would be a hybrid between a fighting game and an RPG, with heavy focus on character progression and excellent interaction. Character progression would be revolutionary in that it empowers players with an unprecident amount of customisability and control than provided by traditional means.

I think I may be on to something here. Watch this space.

Cloud rolls 20s

It seems like forever since we first played the first Final Fantasy. You just gained 67XP. Black Mage levelled up.

Then Diablo. You killed a skeleton. 120XP. Level up. New moves available.

Then even Pokemon. Pikachu gained 500XP. Pikachu levelled up. Pikachu is turning into an even larger rat thing. Congrats.

WOW. Your paladin gained 30XP. Paladin levelled up. Now you can buy those new skills.

...You get the point. Character progression in MANY games has been completely based on this original levelling up system. You are almost guaranteed of seeing this format in any modern RPG, and if you don't, then it's not worth playing (apparantely).

While tried and true, this would be an awesome spot for an innovation. Completely revolutionise character progression in RPGs. My problem is... I can't really think of how this could best be accomplished. A lot of other games have attempted something new though. Maybe I can find something by comparing all of them.

Final Fantasy X did something pretty different from the other FF games. It introduced the sphere system, where you could level up by going down a hierarchical tree. One part of the tree may be "increase HP by 50", which would then flow on to more related skillsets and rewards.

God Of War, rather than instantly giving you experience, has you trawling the environs for red orbs to power up your chains and your combos. You also get them for killing enemies.

Older shooter games such as UN Squadron on Super Nintendo and Raptor for PC had you shooting down planes and missile sites in order to get money. This money could be used to increase your power at the end of a level, buy new weapons etc.

One of the more original ideas I've seen recently was in a game called Dawn Of Mana for the PS2. Rather than the character gaining a whole level, the character has certain attributes which level up eg. HP and attack. The more of certain coloured medals are collected, the more the corresponding attribute levels up.

I guess to be completely different you'd have to push past this extremely popular mechanic. Maybe instead of levelling up, the character may need to keep doing certain things in order to prevent levelling down. This probably wouldn't be fun at all, but it would be something different. This is an area I'll keep thinking on for a while to come.

Drowning in sand

The sandbox game has become a dominant genre in the games industry. It started with GTA 3. Complete freedom. Non-linear story structure. No force pushing you towards a goal. Just you, your rifle and a thousand stolen cars, some dead cops, and violence that would make Jack Thompson run for the hills. I've noticed that since this game came out, non-linearity has started to become a requirement or an expectation for game titles.

A lot of reviews by GameTrailers, IGN, GameSpot and their cohorts have unofficially made this part of their stringent marking criteria. While games may play great, if they force a player towards any sort of goal, reviewers will take it upon themselves to lower their recommendation of a game. These reviews often have profound effects on a game's sales, and also subtlely sharing their idea of "21st Century games must always have elements of sandbox" with all their readers. A powerful vantage point, indeed.

Is having a defined and forced critical path really a bad thing now? A game like God of War, which has sold incredibly well even as a PS2 game in the "next-gen" scene, was about as far from a non-linear game as you could. Even so, it was ridiculously popular, and ridiculously fun. Having such clear cut starting and ending conditions as "start small" to "kill everything in your path til you get to the boss" provide ample opportunity for enjoyment.

Being told what to do isn't a problem when what you're doing is fun. Having a clear path to victory, or flashing signs telling you where to go is a lot easier for people to remember. Complete freeform is never fun.

I'm gonna tip some salt in the industry's eyes and say: Perhaps sandbox sometimes is a cop-out for poor game mechanics? Call me a sucker for ludus-based play (you're probably right), but it seems that "non-linearity" isn't a valid criteria for game reviews.

Waiter, there are air bubbles in my gameplay!

So it seems our pursuit for fun is really just a pursuit for knowledge. Knowledge of some kind anyway. A game is like an injection of stimuli for the brain, with some titles evidently containing air bubbles in the syringe. There's nothing worse for a game experience than these air bubbles, these pockets of the game where your mind is suddenly disengaged from play, and the flow of your experience is taken down.

This crossed my mind as I continued to play Knights of the Old Republic. Solid game. Great gameplay. Engaging story. I've played it many times through, but not in a while. Until you reach this one planet known as Manaan, which is essentially a huge ocean with some cities on the top of it. The story progresses very well... until you reach a certain place where you are required to cross between one underwater facility to another. This is done using a space suit across the ocean floor. It wouldn't be so bad if... you had some form of weaponry, didn't move at 1/200th of the original running speed, and if the area you had to cross wasn't so large. It literally takes about 6 minutes to walk through (which is incredibly painful if you get eaten by the sharks along the way).

It's funny that out of all the great gameplay of the game, one moment of dullness where the player's mind is not engaged can destroy the momentum. Even though the developers did well to continually engage the player to this point, this void of new information has a powerful influence on the level of enjoyment of the game as a whole. It really is very important to ensure that new stimuli (that isn't droll) is constantly provided to maintain the "fun factor", the whole point of the game.

KOTOR has been highlighting something I've been thinking needs replacing for a while... I'll put more up in my next post.

To tutorial or not to tutorial, that is the question

First impressions are incredibly important. I think this is a principle we have drilled into us from birth in our western societies. If the first experience you have at a new restaurant, or with a new boss, or a new job is poor, you are more likely to allow it to rule the rest of your experience.

I think this is also true of video games. If the starting portion of a game is poorly crafted, it tends to rule the experience. In a recent lecture, we were talking about starting conditions for players, and how the introduction of gameplay mechanics and story are fundamental to the experience. This led the discussion to the use of tutorials at the start of a game being required to progress through the rest of the game. Different games have handled this different ways, and with mixed results in my experience.

Take Second Life for example. I realise that many will not recognise Second Life as a game, but... I disagree. It can't be denied that it be played for the sure pleasure of getting your character to fly, then dropping them from some obscene height. In this regard, I hold Second Life as a game. Call it a real-time simulation featuring human interaction and business if you want. At any rate, I recently had to do a project in Second Life, and this required me to start my own account so I could get to a set-aside island, an area where we could muck around and do whatever we wished. I thought I'd just be able to sign in, teleport there, and get started. But no, I was abruptly interrupted by not just one forced tutorial, but four. Fairly mediocre at that. It required a lot of reading of arbitrary text, a lot of finding things on the hud, and doing things that just weren't that interesting at all. One of my friends attempted the same thing and found himself stuck in these tutorials for several weeks, just cause the experience was so poorly designed.

Dawn Of War for PC takes a slightly different angle on this whole idea. When you create a new player account and try to start a new game, you are prompted with "This is the first time you're playing. Would you like to play the tutorial?" You can then either just jump into whatever match you've started (heaven help you) or play through a very basic mission, which has you getting used to some of the basic tasks of the game. This was a better solution (as I already knew how to play when I installed it). That said, if you choose to do the campaign for the first time, the first mission is incredibly basic and also seems to walk you through the same ideas covered in the tutorial. Might be a bit of redundant information.

The best solution I found was in the Metroid Prime series on Gamecube and Wii. The way Metroid does it is by starting off the game, but places things in your path that will make you learn to play without pushing you too far. In Prime 3, in the first area you arrive in, you are asked to "calibrate your weapon by shooting these targets", which subtlely teaches you how to aim. The game doesn't force you to learn how to do things before giving you a practical situation to use them in. Rather, it flashes a small tooltip the first area you need to double jump, or strafe, and roll into a morph ball. This has the advantage of allowing more experienced players to bypass the "noobie" sections, without impeding on gameplay.

The main issue with the use of a tutorial or the use of some other mechanism is that of flow. The reason I probably like the Metroid style better is because there is no disruption of the flow of the game, and allows the game to seamlessly transition from the "intro" into a grander story, rather than having the player segment their experience. This seems to be the way games are heading now, and rightly so. Keep it coming!