In the first case, I failed and most likely my flow was broken, but everything that happened was well within the boundaries of the Mario universe. My experience was disrupted a bit, but the immersion wasn’t broken. There’s little to fix here.
In the second case, immersion has just taken a severe hit. I DIED! How horrible! I guess I should be shaken. Oh, wait – I didn’t. I just re-spawned at the latest checkpoint. Sooo… why was it necessary to decapitate my avatar again?

Keeping the universe intact

In a game of Super Mario World, many players may say things like “I just died 50 times on level 3”, but what most actually mean is “I just failed 50 times on level 3”. Even though they apparently “died” and were reborn shortly after, the immersion wasn’t truly destroyed. Little harm was done. Mario lives on. That’s just how the world of the plumber works.
For the more hardcore players, the mechanic is too transparent to actually represent death, since the game obviously continues, and for the more casual ones – who are positively oblivious to game mechanics – the animation just doesn’t represent death either.

There is no actual “death” involved here; it is just a figure of speech. Thus what needs to be handled is more accurately “failure”, not “death”. So if you want to keep the player playing and in a positive mindset, try telling him “you have not succeeded (yet)” instead of “you failed”. That should be less of a disruption and actually help the player feel and succeed better.

… or not

However, if the setting of the game is so realistic that it involves what can clearly be visually and acoustically identified as “true tragic death in that universe”, things are different.

With the casual players you will face the problem that they will be shocked, as they have just “died” instead of failed, which is something that few other games (e.g. board games, or sports) ever do to them.

Whatever you did to get them playing such a game in the first place, most likely they won’t be too eager to continue at that point, since most people (speaking of the general population) don’t play games to experience “dying” in the first place – they came for fun and entertainment. So unless conveying this message once was your goal in the first place, or your game is about dying instead of about kicking butt, you are now officially in trouble.
Also, as a side note, most forms of death probably aren’t exactly pleasing, so in addition to being shocked they will most likely be disgusted as well because of their expectations being to completely violated, and will walk away with a less-than-positive picture of video games.

For the hardcore players you will face a completely different problem: Since they know most genre’s mechanics inside-out, in order to cause the feeling of “death” instead of simply “failure”, the sensation will have to be so very strong that you will have real problems conveying it – especially since most gamers probably haven’t experienced real biological near-death yet and thus have nothing to compare the game’s equivalent to. The permanent death of a character that the player leveled for weeks, or even months, might come close, but will probably not suffice.

That leaves us with the question of why to include “death” – especially the frequent kind – in the first place, if not for audio-visual impressiveness or shock-factor (which you might deem an appropriate reason). In most cases I suspect the reason may be trying to stay true to the universe to save immersion, since there is very little actually “cool” for the player about being killed, so it can hardly be for the player’s enjoyment.

But let’s face it: the immersion is gone in most cases anyway. “You just died! Oh, wait, you didn’t. Oops.” How many more effective ways to kill the illusion can you think of?

Some ways to fix it

If you definitely want to stick with the immersion-oriented solution, I would recommend trying something less jarringly disruptive. Recent games have demonstrated realistic and “real-world-fitting”, but far less drastic ways of the player becoming incapacitated, like falling “unconscious”. Of course it’s still quite a stretch, but at least not THAT bad.
Many others have introduced new and unrealistic, but relatively immersion-friendly representations for stopping the action and recovering balance, like rewinding time in Prince of Persia, re-tuning into memories in Assassin’s Creed or spawning at a Vita Chamber in Bioshock.

Such kinds of “incapacitating” the player, in conjunction with giving him the information that the mission has failed already anyway (e.g. a radio transmission, or the enemy triumphing loudly), thus removes the need to actually take the immersion-threatening action any further.

The other way of preventing the immersion break is simply keeping the player alive and rocking for longer in the first place. There are lots of ways to keep the balance from spiraling out of control, making the player fight first against the setback and afterwards for a comeback. Recent first-person shooters have included mechanics like de-saturating the screen completely, making continuing to fight rather difficult, but running away to recover still quite feasible.

So if it is your plan to portray a relatively real-life-like universe, please don’t accidentally destroy it while actually trying to keep intact.
For those of you who are working with one of the more crazy settings out there, rest assured that even though it’s a lot of work to create something fresh and consistent yet transparent, there are also quite a few things that just won’t cause you as much of a headache as they would have to somebody working on “Super-Realistic Shooter 3”.

How to handle in-game death

In regular single player games it can be hard to discern player types as single player games seldom allow freedom of personality, and because they guide the player through a predefined rule-set. Having a pre-defined rule set brings (most often) with it a defined rule set for reward and punishment. And since most singeplayer games are about progressing they would have a punishment system based upon that. Which also seems to be the main way we talk about the notion of “punishment vs reward”. We use hardcore vs casual dividing, which really is a crude tool if you think about it.

We might call facebook games  ”casual” but they also are more geared towards social player. These players that might not like the achievement paradigm that most single-player games follow.  And that paradigm also involves the regular reward punishment way.

A very quick and dirty evolution of games could be that games are moving towards other play styles rather than just casual and mass market. A larger player base that don’t naturally like the idea of  ”you must achieve to feel good”.

I personally think reward vs punishment is a universal “thing” of game design, but it doesn’t have to be the ol´ death/health/hard/easy discussion. Instead I mean action and reaction, effect and cause, action and consequence, challenge and reward.

An example would be facebook game X that’s geared towards social play. It tasks the player of doing task Y. Making Y hard to do with lots of reward/punishment would be the old way of doing it. Instead doing Y could be very open ended without any punishment for doing it “incorrectly”. That means the “how” of completion of Y is not important. Instead when its done, other players review your effort and give you praise or criticism. That would result in the reward/punishment being moved from execution of tasks to a more social tool.

What I am proposing is, stop thinking about punishment vs reward as a way of making the game hard or easy in the old sense. But look at what player type you are geared towards and then make conscious choices about what types of challenges they like and how they like to be rewarded.

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.

At work, I do one joke all the time. Well, it’s not really a joke but rather an observation I find funny. There was a german game (I truly don’t remember which one, may have been “Patrician” by Ascaron, although I am not 100% positive) that would not only display the word “Bankrupt” if you mismanaged your comapny but would display a skull behind the text. What’s funny is that the word Bankrupt did not suffice, it seems like. There had to be the extra bit of humiliating punishment. The only thing missing was the computer exclaiming “Loser! Loser! Loser!” and laughing hysterically.

To me, this is a perfect example of old school german video game design that still is in practice with a lot of german people. That of course has its reasons. Mainly: The people who play these games, make these games. I vivdly remember a german animator, arguing that what we, the designers, did on a certain game was “for pussies” and that he was “disgusted” by what we had designed.  That was the time when I thought that you should not – under any circumstance – frustrate the player. My mind has changed, and here is why.

1. Jonathan Blow gave an eye-opening speech at GDC that was about why games are deeply conflicted. One of his reasons was that games do in fact try to tell a story, which always is a linear progression and on the other hand we try to challenge the player and thus working counter to the linear progression of the story. We’re undermining it as we play the game. What was really interesting about this, was his clear position on difficulty or more so challenge. He stated that modern games not really are challenging and that they presented the player with what he called “faux-challenge”. By that he meant that it LOOKS like the player has a hard time, due to great staging and cinematic elements, but in truth the player is always in total control and hardly challenged. The reason why he obstructed to this was that challenge is the one thing games as a medium have exclusively. No other medium can provide such a challenge – so why watering down what defines our medium?

2. I have played Demon’s Souls. Demon’s Souls is such a hard game, it will relentlesly kick your ass. It will break you down, make you scream and cry and I still loved it. Why? Now, here comes a realization I made very late (yeah, i stand by that!). It’s totally okay to be hard if you remain readable to the player. In Demon’s Souls I can almost always (there are some instances when this won’t work) understand why I died! I can absolutely see what I have done wrong. Also I always know what is at stake. If I die, I know where I will respawn and how much progress I will lose. I can work with that. Almost calculate that risk. It’s perfecty clear.

So, if you remain clear about readability and consequences, making a very punishing game is legitamate. And reward comes automatically with beating that tough S.O.B.

I recently listened to well known indie developer (if you’re into that stuff) cactus talking about abusing the player. One game that he took as an example is I Wanna Be The Guy. If you haven’t heard about this game before, it’s a game considered to be one of the hardest game ever made. Seriously, try it. Now.

Done? Now, why would anyone in their right mind want to play this game, that pretty much only punishes and abuses you? As far as I know you never get any power-ups and the game never congratulates you in any way for beating an area (well, I haven’t finished it so I don’t know about the ending). In fact, it mocks you if you play on easy.

I think the answer simply lies in the title: you wanna be THE guy. Not just in the game, but in real life. You can tell your friends that you managed to beat this game.

I think this is very interesting, as it is an out of game reward which you must collect yourself in a way. You need to go tell your friends or internet buddies how awesome you are and they will be in awe. You do probably have a sense of instant gratification when you manage to beat the game, but I think this simply come out of the bragging rights that you know possess.

Personally, I found this game quite humorous in the way that it killed me in surprising ways but in the end my patience just couldn’t take it. However, I really can’t blame it on bad game design as it’s obvious what this game is going for…

Making you want to be The Guy.

I want to discuss a common problem I see in games, to which I don’t have a great solution; We often make the weak even weaker and the strong even stronger.

Shouldn’t we encourage the weak to keep trying and give him some help? But then, if I get rewards for playing badly, why should I try to excel?

If I’m playing a game I’m good at, I feel that it’s nothing short of damn right that I get to have the good stuff in the game. I’ve earned them. While playing Gradius and managing to keep level up my weapons, I’m on top of the world when I’m maxed up. But when I die, I lose my powers and the game gets a lot harder.

Now, in games like those Shoot ‘em Ups it might be taken to the extreme, but the effect is most often there in games. If I’m a really good shot, I don’t need as many bullets to kill my enemies, resulting in me having more bullets left to spend. If I’m a bad shot, I spend more bullets, making me have fewer left while I would need way more.

It’s a natural way of things. Of course we want to create incentive for the player to play as well as he can and try and not to screw up. But some people just can’t help themself from screwing up and what are we going to then? We could just say “Well, then you’re not the right kind of person for this game.” or we could give him a bigger gun and say “Okay, try again.”.

I’m both pro and against the use of auto adjustment of the difficulty level. It’s a great thing since, assuming it works, all players gets the “right” difficulty, but in a way, increased difficulty can be considered a punishment.

RPG’s and other games where you can level up have a way of fixing this: Grinding. If you’re beat, then just stay where you are in the game untill you’re stronger and then continue. People complain about “grinding” but that’s a topic on its own. Either way, it works.

But really, both the difficulty adjustments and the grinding aren’t solutions for the problems with rewards and punishment, only whether or not the player can beat the game.

Some games, like Ninja Gaiden Sigma starts helping you out if you die too much (which I did…) where they basically say “Wow, you really suck. Do you want to admit your failure and play on the n00b-difficulty? We’ll give you some health potions.”, whereas I chose to accept.

So, in a way you get rewarded for not making it, but the reward isn’t worth much. But at least it’s something positive.

I’m not a fan of punishing the player as long as he’s trying to play the game (cheaters, etc. deserve it). I think it’s better to “not reward”

As I said, I don’t have a great solution, but I think it’s important to look at the situation and think long and hard about it. If the game is already hard enough, it shouldn’t get even harder if you’re a bad player.

Reward and Punishment

Look forward to it!

I recently had the pleasure of playing video games with somebody who hadn’t played video games before. Of course this wasn’t the first time for me, but all those other encounters happened before I joined the video games industry. In other words, back then I lacked the experience and knowledge to truly appreciate how precious those moments were.

I got a lot of feedback that I expected, though I underestimated the amplitude quite a bit. There was way too much punishment for failure? I guess the latest “Prince of Persia”, auto-play mode in Mario Brothers Wii and that new MegaMan title featuring super-easy difficulty weren’t an accident then.

The difficulty and complexity ramped up too quickly, especially in the opening moments and first minutes? When we say “it’s so easy my grandma could play it” that usually means “a pro could play it with a single hand while watching TV” – because you still got to know all the basic concepts and controls when you pick up the controller. If you have to look at the controller while the action is unfolding, you are screwed, if only psychologically and not pure gameplay-wise (but that is more than enough).

But what truly got to me was the innocence that I witnessed regarding the unwritten rules of typical games. More complex concepts like “Respawning”, “Aggro” and “Quests” that have become second nature for every console and PC player are still completely foreign territory for non-gamers, and usually they aren’t introduced and explained that well.
I heard lots of comments like “why are those guys attacking us? We didn’t do anything to them” or “no, there aren’t any more herbs to pick – I just got them all”.

Don’t get me wrong – I do not say that every game has to be (or even should be) enjoyable for everyone. I also don’t say that every single bit of information the player might ever need has to be given to her when she might first make use of it. I’d just like people to think more carefully before saying “my grandma could play it”, because frankly, she probably can’t – and definitely not all by herself.

Yet don’t give up on the casual and non-gamers (and their money) yet. Actually we have a great opportunity here – who could better explain the intricacies of a game to a completely new player than someone who is experienced with the game just as well as with her? And what would be a better way to teach all those concepts than playing the game together? Just give the target group the proper tools to expand itself.

Basic coop support would already make me a happy guy, but if you want to really ensure that I’ll buy two copies on street day, please offer different roles for different skill sets, or at least empower players to distribute the work load themselves, allowing the more experienced gamer to pave the way, to ease the learning curve.

With that in mind, I am looking forward to a great year 2010, hoping for lots of new games with coop play support that I can spend my time and money on. I’ll do all I can to expand our target audience.

What about you?

I’m no expert in predicting the future, but I think 2010 is going to expand on the whole social media-thingy that’s so hot nowadays. Right now you can have your PS3 post your new Trophies on Facebook and I recon all the big three and Steam will deliver even more such features. I have no doubt in my mind that soon I’ll be bombarded on Facebook, Live Messenger, Twitter, blogs, etc. about each and every little thing that all my friends do, even though I don’t really wanna know.

Web-integration into the console is a good thing if you ask me, but I don’t want to use it for Facebook. I want to have my save-games online and stuff like that.

Something I also expect to happen, even though I have nothing to show for it except for a “gut feeling” is that all these music games will have it’s last year of glory. But hey, I might be waaaay of base here. But I think 2010 is going to be the year when there’s just going to be too much, so it finally crumbles.

One can’t be sure, but I think we’ll see a huge amount of great iPhone games this year too, but they’ll be hard to find amongst all the crap that’s also released.

And finally, Microsoft’s Natal. Will it be all Microsoft says it will? I hope so, but I don’t think so. I’m very sceptical as to how well the technology actually works and I haven’t had the chance to try it out myself. If it’s actually as accurate as claimed, so it can detect movements on my wrists and fingers then it just might be the best thing since Surround-Sound, but if not, I find it hard to be “all that”. But I’d love to do “iPhone-manouvers” in the air and navigate on the TV. I don’t however, want to swing my arms around simply to browse some pictures.

Oh, and one last thing. 2010 is going to have a GREAT first half with a bunch of GREAT games!

Now, let’s see if I’m all wrong on all points.