At Businessweek, an interview with Peter Molyneux, Jonathan Smith and Simon Byron on game designs they dislike:
- Peter Molyneux picks cutscenes (that old chestnut).
- Simon Byron says stealth.
- More interesting, Jonathan Smith points to games that are too balanced(!).
Jonathan Smith’s basic argument is that if the game is never too easy or too hard, as a player you feel “you might not be there at all”. This is a bit controversial in relation to current research (such as Robin Hunicke‘s) of auto-adjusting difficulty, where the game is supposed to match itself to the player.
Jonathan Smith’s point ties in with Noah Falstein’s article in Steve Rabin’s Introduction To Game Development, where he describes the ideal game difficulty as one that shifts between being hard and easy. As I recall, the basic argument is that as a player I should first try something very hard, and then a bit later get the experience that a challenge has become easy because of my newly acquired skills:
That sounds like an argument against perfect balance and against automatic difficulty adjustment, doesn’t it? But perhaps the better conclusion is not to avoid balancing and difficulty adjustment, but to balance and diffulty-adjust as to aim for something like the ebb and flow in the model above.
Good balancing is paramount, but balancing should not aim for a straight line.
Yeah, I think the conclusion is clear: balance doesn’t mean sameness.
Even when not relating to difficulty, but rather to the power of different classes or races in an online game, the perfect “balance” is one where all classes have places where they shine and places where they suck, but in general they all have a similar overall.
Even the distribution doesn’t have to be the same for all classes: some classes may even have a more biased distribution for hardcore-r players, where it sucks in more places than most, but it’s pretty good elsewhere. Ditto for classes that are more “flat”.
You can (and probably want to) continue extending the irregularities in the whatever stuff you want to balance; provide a decent amount of variety while ensuring that the overall is reasonable.
Games have become monotonous and even hard core gaming fans like kids are swearing by the fact that games have become more voilent in content and i think it is the right time to introduce science games to kids where in the main target wud not be pump[ing in 500 bullets in 2 minutes but in fact finding out the trajectory of the ball or checking out if the lens the guy wears in concave or convex.
phillip
http://wonderwhizkids.com/Applets/Applets.html
I like Jenova Chen’s take on difficulty adjustment, where your design supports content which supports a range of play styles and players actively find their flow through play.
“Good balancing is paramount, but balancing should not aim for a straight line.”
A practical example, which reinforces this argument is the many roleplayers’ frustration with Oblivion’s dynamic levelling system. Gone is the feeling of building up gradual mastery because the surroundings just adapt to the player’s level. It’s still a beautiful and fun game, but the magic of letting a character develop is gone.
Its interesting, because I think that the model in Noah Falstein?s article in Steve Rabin?s Introduction To Game Development pre-supposes a linear based game, in which a player wants to use the same skills over and over again. I think there is value into a game that constantly takes a user to new expirences and rewards them for mastering skills once, but never requries them to be used again, or requires them only in the one section of an exploratory virtual world (the mini games in Final Fantasy 7 would be an example). The diagram is interesting, however, in that it is close to the narrative structure of David Ball’s triggers and heaps. (which would actually suggest a need for heavy use of narrative in a game with such a structure.)
The idea that there is some perfect difficulty level (or perfect pattern of difficulty, etc.) for all games is based on an extremely narrow prejudice as to what games are for. It excludes the idea that a game could be about maddening and frustrating players to extreme levels, requiring an emotional intelligence and control to overcome. It also excludes varieties of play that are not about overcoming challenges.
There’s no ideal difficulty level that maps to all games! Just as there isn’t an ideal purpose for all games (to be fun, etc.).
It could also be said that this one fixation with pacing is another example of pattern recognition.
If difficulty increases linearly, it’s essentially incrementing the difficulty by a tiny amout, very rapidly. This pattern of constant, small increase is recognized very quickly, and thus becomes a little dull. Put some infrequent difficulty peaks and troughs, and you have another, composite set of beats to recognize, but over a longer period of time. Gah. This is so much wider a phenomenon than just difficulty and pacing… sort of gets me annoyed that there’s such a fixation on this one thing.
What I never see mentioned much, despite loads of (accidental?) precedence, is that since these are patterns, they can be easily generated out of the natural flow of the game mechanics. So there’s no reason for us to contrive them, as so many linear shooters are forced to.
Good point about Jenova’s stuff, there. That’s one example where the player is empowered to create their own difficulty. Happens in World of Warcraft, too, as you naturally bounce back and forth between high risk, high reward, and lower risk, lower reward mobs. There’s countless other examples of low level mechanics which push back just as hard as you push them – far more elegant than complicated, top-down difficulty managers.
I mean, frankly, in an interactive medium, we’re able to let the player be the barometer of hardship, and thus we don’t have to worry about the subjectivity of a fixed difficulty curve.
aubrey, video games as a medium itself isn’t interactive, they are reactive. However,n the case of WoW, you aren’t interacting with the game, but other living players.
Ryan, I would say that video games are “interactive” – perhaps you are using “interactive” in a very specific sense?
I believe games are interactive as well, but I?ll like to know what is it that you mean by “reactive”, Ryan. Maybe interaction implies the reaction you talk about…I don?t know.
ryan, surely you’re interacting with other players THROUGH the medium of the game, rather than (or as well as) directly? There are many aspects of WoW (or any MMO of the Meridian69/MUD mold) where interaction is directly with a game system and where interaction with individual players is irrelevant or optional – killing mobs… buying and selling with automated shop keeper NPCs, or the basic physics of the game world.
Certainly I’d agree that WoW works on a social level as well as the game-qua-game level, but take away all the other players and my point on systemic pacing would still stand.
And yes Jesper, “interactive” by now is fairly hard to nail to one definition. It’s a shame, but also a bit inevitable. On the subject of whether or not games are interactive, I did write a little article about how games might not be considered interactive, in that your interactions do not change the game’s system… your choice interactions merely reveal different paths through the possibility space thrown up by a system – so you’re exploring a static possibility space. The only time this space may change would be in the case of meta-interaction… giving feedback to the developer who then patches the game to create a slightly changed space.
I think you may have read it, Jesper, and correctly surmised that it really depends on how granularly you look at things: the game as a whole may not be modified by your low level interactions, but the game state and all the variables that constitute that state certainly are interactive – their bounds and legal combinations are the only limits (implied by the overall system).
As far as I can tell, reaction is a prerequistite to interaction. I don’t like to put words in ryan’s mouth, but maybe he’s pointing out that a game doesn’t exactly “care” what you say… rather, it acts in the way it’s been told to act. And I can dig that. But taken to extremes, that means that absolutely nothing in the entire universe can be called interactive: We’re all deterterministic – complex, yes, but as predictable as clockwork. And at that point, whether complex (man) or simple (game system), we’re all just reacting to one another… a sort of “inter-reaction”. Also known as “interaction”.
I think the issue is one that gaming share with pretty much ALL art forms. Art, especially art where the experiences have a temporal aspect, almost HINGE apon the idea of Tension and Release. Having a constant level of difficulty is then like providing neither, it’s a monotone song with no variation.
Look at games with excellent pacing, like Half-Life, frenetic pacing, like Doom or Quake, relaxed pacing like a Final Fantasy game… Doom seems like rock (probably helped along by the NiN soundtrack) large buildups of Tension followed by huge catharic Release, rachet it up a notch and go again till it breaks over you, Final Fantasy like a nice classical piece, more relaxed about where it’s getting but no less tense for the ride (I can’t seem to find a musical equivalent for Half-Life right now, if you come up with one let me know.)