Do you hunt and grow your own food? If you don’t, you DO cut your own fire wood, right? Or at least you shift gears manually in your car, because, let’s face it: Super-markets, electricity, and automatic transmission are for sissies.
Oh my, you ARE one of those guys, aren’t you! You like doing things the easy way, taking the path of least resistance. I bet you also play games on beginners’ mode, then!
Or maybe you don’t, because you take pleasure in seeking out your own challenges without making each and every part of life as difficult as you can – because, you know – that would be rather tiring, possibly even borderline stupid.
So why was it again that people who like their games to be easy are looked down on? That would be like disrespecting someone for using fork and knife to eat a steak when all he wants to do is satisfy his hunger, not give his enormous jaw musculature a workout.
Not all people who like to play games are also looking for a serious challenge. Maybe they just want rewards, preferably without punishment in between. Giving them just that might not exactly be a good way to make them more adept at anything, other than enjoying themselves, but neither does eating beans out of a tin can instead of off the ground.
Yet both give you something that might be just as valuable: easy food saves you time that might be better spent elsewhere, and easy fun allows you relax from whatever stressed you out and recover your good mood, which is just about always helpful.
However…
There’s a line that we probably should not cross. It is one thing to make things easy, to remove barriers and freely give out rewards and success. At worst, if somebody avoids all challenge in life, he won’t find any here either. It happens dozens of times on a daily basis, for all of us.
It’s like eating candy. It tastes pleasant, but doesn’t do you any good in the long term, but then it didn’t promise to either. Or think of driving around in your car while being protected by dozens of safety mechanisms, like ABS brakes or airbags or other stabilizing devices. They sure make your life easier, but they (hopefully) don’t tell you that you would make a great race driver, because that probably wouldn’t be right.
It is a completely different matter to make success easy and then sell said success as a major achievement. There should not be a discrepancy between perceived and actual reality for the consumer of your product, be it food or a car or games, because that would probably cause quite some harm down the line.
“Openly easy success” is to “easy success disguised as being difficult” what candy bars are to drugs. If your car manufacturer would hide the existence of all those useful safety devices from you and instead would install another one that told you that you drove like a world-class race driver whenever climbed behind the wheel, your next trip without those safety devices would most likely end up at a tree.
It is dangerous to deceive the consumer regarding his own capabilities, just to enhance short-term business. Gamers might not end up at a tree (unless it was a racing sim), but they sure might misjudge their abilities in many other fields that are just as important down the line, like logic, physical fitness, memory or similar. Whenever we are giving out easy rewards and success, we should be sufficiently open about it.
Openly lowering the difficulty setting automatically because the player failed 20x is a great tool to get the player into a state where he can make progress more quickly (e.g. because he is no longer frustrated, easing the learning process) and ultimately be more satisfied.
Doing so behind his back however will cause him to overestimate himself badly the next time such a situation pops up – which it will, especially in cases of multiplayer-capable games, where such systems are useless.
There is nothing worth having that the games industry might gain from that – unless you want to sink to the same level that drugs are on.
I’d rather not. But please, that does NOT mean I like being punched in the face by punitive games in my spare time, unless your next steak also fights back.
Arcade
Arshak Ardeshir
Gustav Ziolkowski
Severin Brettmeister
Andre Beccu
You always seem to take a philosophical standpoint in your posts Andre, and your thoughts on the high level of accountability a designers should have are also very clear =).
I cant really discern how symbolic Vs practical your points are meant to be in this post. The drugs/racer similarities are rather blunt, don’t you think? I’m referring to the “magical circle” that games/play often involves; people understand that game have their own rule set. What is the consequence of kids running around playing make believe “hunting the dragon” Vs the consequences of “misjudge their abilities … like logic, physical fitness”. In the long run everything is about what you think you know, applying it, understanding it sufficient or not, and then adapting.
I agree with your thoughts, but not the practicality of them. Calling it “dangerous” is slightly “worried mother” syndrome.
And on another note: I don’t think auto balancing tools are useless in multi player games. Mario kart is one example. You might not like it, but its successful.
The drug/racer comparison isn’t exactly perfect, but the bottom line stays the same – don’t fool the player. This is about meta-level fooling, not in-game.
Imagine the following scenario: Some newbie plays poker with some strangers for money. He wins his first 5 games, then goes in big time. Suddenly he loses. All the money is gone. THAT is what I am taking about. They let you win on purpose, then take you out. That is not make-believe. That is fraud.
Or another one: A child plays with his friends, and they wrestle around a bit. The other guys let him win, causing him to vastly overestimate his own capabilities. Then, a week later, he gets beaten up badly because he thought he could hold his own in a fight.
Of course that isn’t any more “dangerous” than selling chocolate and putting “0% fat” on the box, knowing well that there is tons of sugar in there.
There are already games out there that tell you how to work out, fish or flirt with a woman… only that they don’t.
The short version, I guess, is: Don’t purposely lie to your player regarding his own capabilities – regarding neither out-game effects of games nor in-game performance.
Your suggestions are theoretically valid, but practically of the mark because it feels as if your examples are exaggerated to make your point.
How many games let you win on purpose and then take you out, as you explain in the poker shark example. Your example is very real in worldy situations. But what purpose would taking you out have in a game?
Yes, games tell you how to flirt with women and fish. But how many people go out thinking they are Casanova after playing a dating Sim?
In games you would have to project avatar abilities to actual player performance, which I believe is rather hard in the “magical circle”.
Sure I played RE4 with my non gamer friends and laughed at how good they thought they were. But I knew the gamed had switched to an easier setting. But they enjoyed it, how does affect them negatively IRL?
Could you give an actual in game example of how a game has/would lie to a person about his IRL abilities?
It is not the point that those games later take you out – other games do, or somebody does in multi-player.
I personally hope that not too many people let themselves be deceived by games regarding their true skill. I just want to make sure it stays that way, which is slowly but sure becoming more important, as games are starting to blur the lines.
Just think of the microwave-tunnel scene found in Metal Gear Solid 4. I am quite grateful that in that particular case you only had to mash a button, not do something complex. Button mashing is rarely useful in real life.
There are dozens of television shows out there that draw their cast as well as their audience off the fact that people think they are way better than they are. Just take those pop-star shows. The ones who go there to sing get destroyed publicly, and those who watch think of themselves to be much better than those who were actually crazy enough to go there.
Who wins? Well, the company who does the show. But just about nobody else.
As games get more and more realistic, chances are the related skills might as well. And even if they don’t, there are just enough games out there who teach you that with enough investment of time will get you what you want – hello, MMOs. Only it doesn’t exactly work like that in real life.
Even if you don’t think that games influence players, at least think of what non-gamers see here – which is that gamers are being taught how to shoot guns, or that playing 16hrs a day is better than playing 3h, or that internet friends are about as good as real ones.
Don’t get me wrong – I think internet friends actually are – but please, not because some game designer attached a 25% XP bonus to them. That doesn’t teach the value of teamplay and social behavior – that’s just cheap.
All right, I understand your point better now.
Though you use TV as an example. I believe there is a large difference between TV and Games, but I see your point. In general I do very much agree with you that Games can teach incorrect things to players, as I write about in my post “are we capable of portraying engaging subjects in games yet?” But I have a hard time seeing a game teaching players a false “technical skill”.
For example, I do believe that putting enough time into something will get you where you want to be. Sure the MMO version of this is skewed but I believe that players/people can extract the correct wisdom from it, i.e. practice makes perfect.
And I think people understand that its, socializing, network building, teamwork etc etc, they actually learn from MMO, rather than boar killing.
The issue of teaching false skills might arise in the future when game controller input becomes more complex and life like, you have a point there. Many Guitar hero players think they are good at playing real life guitar. (But that is not entirely a bad thing). But sure, if was a very realistic “Surgeon Hero”. (Trauma Center) it might become dangerous =)
Also about the Mario Kart example: They use rubber-banding like HL2 Ep.2 does in the last mission, which isn’t great because it isn’t transparent at all, but at least it is quite possible to lose.
The second you start playing multi-player, though, the only thing that might save the rubberbanding-expecting player is a blue shell, since the top players sure won’t drive any slower just because of him.
A great mechanic, on the other hand, is the wind shadow one where you can more easily overtake people. The blue shell is also ok, but quite a bit frustrating. I think they overdid it with this one.
It is completely possible to “auto-balance” with the player’s knowledge. Just take games like Unreal Tournament where the worst player gets more points per kill, or the best player is worth more when killed. Both mechanics keep the field together without lying to the player.
Okey, I understand your point. I thought you meant that auto balancing CANT be done at all in multi-player games, which I thought was a bit extreme. But you mean you prefer to have it transparent and visible. And I agree with that.
But having it invisible in single player is sometimes important in order to not loose the suspension of disbelief
Yes, you are right that it certainly might harm suspension of disbelief. I just want to bring attention to the fact that suspension of disbelief by itself doesn’t do any good. If it improves the entertainment value only, that doesn’t help the customer in the long term. If it improves learning, things might be greatly different.
I have to agree with Arshak. Normally, I do agree with André, since I really like to apply certain ethic standards to design (see my “what does your design say about you” post) but this time, André, your theory is a little far fatched. I’m not even sure I would agree with the general notion that a design shouldn’t “lie” to the player. Games like Dragon Age for example do in effect lie to the player, pretending player driven non-linearity when in reality they are simply employing branching storylines that will eventually lead up to necessary plotpoints.
I think it is completely appropriate for games to keep up an illusion, since in games it is not important what is there but what the make believe tells you is there.