Folderoltasticness

NOTE: the following contains some very, very small spoilers about a couple of games. Nothing big, just wanted to warn you.

A lot of what I think about in games is story - big surprise, me focusing primarily on the writing side of game design - but not just about story, but the ways in which it comes across. People point typically to RPGs for depth, as a main expected point of them is story (at least in common interpretations of the RPG, which is an entirely different topic I’ll go into later)… but I can point out exceptions to the rule very easily, in both games of the game genre that lack it and others that don’t. I’ve heard Half-Life 2 lauded for its story, although in all seriousness the writing in it is not something the player runs into all that much - it’s the setup for it, really, the fact that the world is unfolding around us and that we’re a part of the action. Of course, this means scripting out the proverbial wazoo, and doesn’t always work, and at times as a player I’m reduced to running around in circles until a scripted non-cutscene cutscene finally draws itself to a close… is this narrative that really engages us? So many people do it wrong. But I digress - I was talking about depth, so, well - back to that.

I guess what I mean about unexpected depth is another form of how one unexpectedly learns more about a story in a game like Half-Life 2 - it’s not rubbing human emotion and backstory in our faces (so many games do this), and it’s not even overly melodramatic. It has the luxury of being subtle (and trust me, especially in this industry, being subtle is a big, big luxury), in that it’s not a main component of the action. My explanation is getting muddled at this point so I’m going to hop to the two examples of games I’ve played lately that I feel are noteworthy.

Pikmin. Story isn’t key to Pikmin: you’re a guy stranded on a planet, your spaceship done got smashed, you have 29 days to get all the parts to it or you’re going to die, and all you have are these little plant-animal-things called “Pikmin” to help you out. The mechanics are straightforward, the gameplay fun, and aside from an unforgiving timer and some irritating pathing issues the game is absolutely awesome.

Here’s the thing that intrigues me about Pikmin in this context: the stranded guy, Captain Olimar, could have just been a nameless, faceless schlub and the game would still have been great. But that’s the thing. Everything about the game - even the tutorials - is done in Olimar’s voice, from his observations about Pikmin types to the fact that you can only have 100 of them out at a time. We as a player are discovering things as he does - but we only know as much as he knows. Every night, when the player returns Olimar and the Pikmin to their respective ships, Olimar ends the day with a diary entry… sometimes he speaks of his determination to get home no matter what the cost, sometimes he speculates on the nature of the planet and the role that the Pikmin play in it, and sometimes he talks about his family, and how much he misses them. It’s something you can skip past with a quick B & A button press, but - so much depth is there. Without forcing the player to angst over Olimar’s plight in a cutscene, they’re allowed these glimpses into his thoughts and observations, which are surprisingly well-written. They don’t nudge the player’s attention away from the gameplay, but they don’t seem entirely peripheral: they are as much a part of the game world as anything else, but it’s in the player’s hands how much they really want to notice these things.

(Oh, and if you accidentally leave Pikmin behind at the end of the day, you see them running for the departing spaceships, too late to be saved, and they get one last moment to fall down and look up in anguish before the hostile creatures in the area descend on it and devour it. And when Pikmin die, they made a horrible sad little squeak… and a little Pikmin ghost ascends. My God, does one ever get so pissed when an enemy kills their poor, precious Pikmin… and man do you feel like a douche if you accidentally leave any behind!)

Another game that has this surprising depth is Animal Crossing: Wild World - not so much with the animals that move into your town (although they have their own interesting personalities and eccentricities), but with some of the permanent residents. When you first meet Brewster, the pigeon that runs the coffeehouse in the basement of the museum, he barely gives you single-word replies. However, if you make sure to visit him frequently, he begins warming up to you, at last telling you why he wanted to name the place “The Roost” and calling you by name. It’s not actually Brewster himself that tells you more of his backstory, but Blathers, the owl museum curator. When you speak to him, he has a moment when he seems down - you can inquire as to what’s bugging him (and thus get the backstory), or snap at him to get back to work, and help you out. If players don’t care what’s bugging an animal, they never have to ask - but if they do, they’re given a look at the deeper nature of one of the characters, a little bit at a time. My favorite example is actually Sable, the older of the two porcupine sisters that run the clothing shop. Like Brewster, she’s taciturn at first, but quickly warms up to you if you come by and speak with her a lot (her sister Mabel even teases her a little for looking forward to your arrival). Little by little, you learn that Sable is ten years older than Mabel, and has been taking care of her since their parents died - she never harps on this fact or wails about it… it’s subtle touches, like her repeating her mother’s sayings or detailing stories about her father, that shows how close she was to them. At one point, Mabel even enters the conversation, quietly expressing her regrets that she didn’t know them better… and Sabel’s own gentle reassurance that they’d have been very proud of her.

In case you missed it? I’m talking about Animal Crossing: Wild World. Yes, the game on the DS where you’re in a town full of animals, and you make money digging up weird robots called “gyroids” and picking fruit and wearing funny hats and shaking trees with the hope that money will fall out, and not, say, a beehive. DEPTH! SUBTLETY! Holy crap in a hat, where did it even come from? Startling, but not distracting - an unexpected joy.

I’m not saying this kind of depth works in every single game, or that it should be the point - the main focus of the game should be rock-solid before these kinds of embellishments are laid on… if the foundation isn’t solid, the extra touches won’t be joys but leave people feeling like they don’t fit, or that the time of the developers would be better spent elsewhere. But I wish it was around more often. You could say “oh, this game is too light-hearted for something like that” but my god, Pikmin and Animal Crossing: Wild World - not exactly M-rated titles, you know? And this really touching opinion piece about Princess Rosalina’s role in Super Mario Galaxy is another excellent example of subtle, well-done storytelling with unexpected depth.

(It hasn’t escaped my notice all three examples are not only Nintendo games, but first-party ones. This makes me both nod in appreciation and furrow my brow that it’s hard for me to think of any other publishers OR developers who have put in such depth - but without making a huge deal about it. Remember what I said about subtlety being a luxury? Sigh, indeed.)

Anyhow - I’m going to be on the lookout for more clever, subtle bits of depth in games. I open the floor to the peanut gallery for recommendations on anything you guys think are excellent examples (do warn about spoilers if they’re used, please!).

Wrote this the other day, and wanted to repost to further share.

So people are posting moving eulogies to Gary Gygax, and I can’t match them and their eloquence.  I can say only this:

When I was maybe 8 years old, I ran across my older brother and a few of his friends playing a module called Storm Giant’s Keep (I think).  I was so fascinated that I begged to be allowed to listen.  I was, with the caveat that I be entirely silent the whole time - a feat nearly impossible for me at that age.  Somehow I managed, and listened, rapt - thinking as well “If I were playing, I could do this better than them.”

I loved it so much I pleaded to be allowed to play, and had my brother point to the “Ages 10 and Up” on the box and say I couldn’t until I turned 10.  Immediately on my 10th birthday, I asked to roll up a character.

I played D&D in 5th grade with a friend in the playground on Wednesdays.  I even did the Weis/Hickmanian thing and started writing a novel about the adventures I had with my character. [NOTE: it was terrible, and entirely lost now.  Just letting you all know.]

Without Gary Gygax, not only would I not have my job, I might have even been… kinda normal.

Thank you, Gary, for saving me from such a fate, and giving me something I love so dearly.  For all the jokes about you having failed your Fort save, I just think you were taken away too early - but it’s always hard when an icon dies, and you were an icon to me.  And now I’ll never be able to mock the early “head of one thing on the ass of another” creatures that were such a big part of the first edition D&D Monster Manual without feeling a little sad.

Enjoy your new journey across the planes, yo.

(NOTE: I wrote this entry back at the beginning of January, and FINALLY found it again. Hopefully now that I feel this gap in progression has been filled, I can actually post shit again. Wonder of wonders, huh? Anyhow)

Here’s a question: how predictable does one want a game to be? Doom 3 took hits for being too predictable – power-ups in plain view would inevitably have a demon near them, ready to pounce (although in all fairness, this has been countered with those saying that particular setup was only common for those who played on the Hard difficulty, leading one to believe it was balanced towards Normal, which begs another question of “how do you properly make a game harder,” which I’m not going to try and tackle now [NOTE: there’s actually a good article on this in the February Game Developer Magazine, which is pretty boss and you should all read if you can]). But make a game too unpredictable, and it becomes pure luck: the player feels that their success is merely based on chance, not skill, and likely gets discouraged (the only place I’d say this works is on slot machines, and even then, it takes a particular type of personality to be really attracted to those – and I think some of their allure is making the player believe that somehow they DO have the power to affect the outcome).

So how do you balance these? This question came to mind for me because I’ve been playing a lot of Persona 3, who has some really nifty system design, but who also has some situations where the best-laid-plans of the player are sort of disregarded. The game progresses in a day-by-day format, where usually you can decide what to do after school, in the evening, and later at night – but occasionally you have situations in which your after-school plans are curtailed without warning, and you as a player don’t know until after the event how much time of yours was taken. And in the other half of the game – a dungeon crawl through a monster-filled tower called Tartarus – occasionally bizarre things will happen to the levels. The party gets separated; enemies are fewer; enemies are multiplied; no exit to the first level appears (meaning you need to go up the stairs and hope the next level has one); or Death appears (basically an unwinnable battle if it catches you). As a player, you get no warning for these (with the exception of Death, which occurs when you’ve spent - I believe - about 10-15 minutes on a floor), only a notification when you reach the floor (or, for the lack of exit, when you’ve explored the entire floor and realize oh crap, I’ve got to go up another story). Persona 3’s systems encourage you to use your Spell Power frequently (unlike other RPGs, physical attacks aren’t all that useful on a regular basis), but items to refill that power are few and far between. And you can’t go simply to any floor you choose: you have to find a special floor (usually where a boss is) and activate a machine. Most floors have a device where you can return to the base of the tower to recover – but unless you’re on one of those special floors with the machine, you’ll lose your upward progress. This sort of puts visits to Tartarus in two categories: an XP grind, or a mad dash upwards - avoiding as many encounters as possible in order to save your strength.

Now, if this sounds like I’m crapping all over Persona 3, I’m really not trying to: it’s a great game. It’s just HARD. And I mean it makes no bones about that fact. It’s sort of oddly refreshing: the game will occasionally do something really cheap (like having your instant-death and status effect skills hardly ever hit an enemy, while theirs are preposterously more accurate) but somehow be able to get away with it with a sheepish shrug and a kind of “that’s life!” look. If you’ve been going up floors in Tartarus at a rapid rate, your “handler” character will warn you to be careful and take a break if you’re tired (which is another thing about Tartarus – characters will get tired in there, which affects their stats, and if you can take them along the next day, and it’s complicated and really annoying at first but it makes sense – except for the fact that it’s hard to predict WHEN a character will get fatigued – another part of the game going “whoops, guess what, this is tricky!”). The only concession it makes is to warn you to “be prepared,” the most predictable thing about it is that certain things are unpredictable. And I guess that makes sense: as a player you don’t know WHAT could wipe your party out – only that if you don’t be careful and watch out for certain things, that it’s a very real eventuality. Even fighting lower-level enemies, sleepwalking through battles rarely happens: which is likely what makes it succeed at being something as simple as a dungeon crawl.

By the way: Persona 3 is really good. It’s just HARD. And it’s unforgiving. But somehow it’s fairly unfair – or, er, it’s fair about being unfair. You know what I mean.

I wonder what it would take to try and get systems like that to work in another game: what does it require? So many games shoot for challenging and just get frustrating, aim for the occasional bit of chance and end up too unpredictable. I’d say you need to keep as close an eye on your systems meshing together as Persona 3 does (if the game required you to use SP as much as it does but items to refill it were plentiful, would it make having to watch out for ambush or character fatigue seem more unfair?), but that’s sort of a thing one would hope a game does ANYWAY. Is it a cultural thing that Westerners expect Japanese RPGs to have a certain level of difficulty from the start, where Western games seem to have a lot more adjustable difficulty (well, this isn’t ALWAYS the case, I know, but I’m thinking about RPGs here in particular. But there’s that question about difficulty again. Hm.)? How much difference does it make that you get a sort of warning from the game itself (in Persona 3, your teammate’s comments about being careful), and how should that warning be delivered – in character or as a tutorial? How often – and in what way – do we want the player to be surprised?

I wish I could spend more time ANSWERING questions in this blog instead of just ASKING them, but with a lack of caffeine in my system currently I fear I’m far better suited to navelgazing at the moment than coming up with answers. Maybe I could hack it on a case-by-case basis when I’m this tired. Hm. But instead of answering that positively or negatively, I’ma get some tea. Hooray! Talk amongst yourselves.

“It’s like how you can laugh at a video of a guy getting kicked in the nuts, but actually getting kicked in the nuts is not fun.” - Travis Stout

So I was just pondering the question of “guilty pleasure” games - something I’d started chewing over in my brain earlier on today - when my coworker Travis just got a free copy of Godzilla Unleashed (courtesy of an Atari producer we’d worked with for NWN2’s expansion pack), and said “Yay, free game that got a 3.5 on GameSpot!” That led another coworker, Constant, to ask us if we ever enjoyed bad games, and Travis and he immediately started trying to delineate what separated truly “bad” games from one who were not great but still fun, and if something could be fun because it was bad instead of despite it being bad, and so on (look at quote for Travis’s most excellent response to that query). If there’s anything that could be a from-on-high-flick-on-the-back-of-the-ear to write a post, it was that.

So - bad games. What good are they? And at what point does a game become unforgivably bad, where no enjoyment can be wrung from it - or even when we as designers can’t learn from it? I think often we can learn more from bad (or, in all fairness, mediocre) games than from really exceptionally good ones, because our brains seem to better process stuff that is WRONG than stuff that isn’t - we’re natural critics. Our keenly-developed sense of Schadenfreude makes us, as designers, look at something craptastic in a game and go “whew, we’re not gonna do it that way” just as we see a dude get drenched by a car’s passing through gutter-water and consciously move further away from the curb. This doesn’t safeguard us from anything, mind - we often have woefully short memories when it comes to recalling why stuff works and why it doesn’t - but it’s there all the same.

So - bad games. Though I kvetch about my time spent working on the never-released Taxi Driver game, and whining about it a good deal (despite affirming at the same time how hard the team was working to make is as good as we could), I did learn a lot from it. There’s my joke “The number one thing I learned from working on Taxi Driver is NOT TO MAKE A GAME BASED ON TAXI DRIVER,” but that did honestly teach me part of how difficult it is to work with a license that people feel very strongly about (and then I moved on to Neverwinter Nights 2, and holy god, can the forums get fierce). I learned what parts of action combat are solid and which are flimsy, I learned why sandbox systems don’t always work (in the immediate post-GTA3 era this was a difficult point to argue with almost any publisher, methinks), and I learned that when people put in the phrase “I’m talking to you” - despite me editing it out a million times - makes me want to stab everyone in the eye… er. Which is to say: writers in the industry get very little love, most times. But yeah. We can learn stuff - and thankfully, we don’t have to make the bad games to learn from them.

So - at what point does a game stop being mediocre and really start being BAD? I have “guilty pleasures” in there, and had it in mind as bad games actually played for fun - but that’s the thing. Can bad games actually BE fun, or is that part of what makes them honestly bad? That they fail at the main function of a game - which is to be enjoyable? This profession of ours isn’t just about the incredible possibilities of an entirely new and interactive medium, it’s about making something that is entertainment (which I see as being no more “shameful” or “bad” as writing a book or making a film).

So I’m moved here to ask two questions:

ONE - what do you think makes a game honestly bad?

TWO - what games would you call your “guilty pleasures” - games that aren’t really arguably good, that you would rate at maybe a 6, 7 absolute tops in being generous, maybe even a 5 out of 10 - but you’re moved to play anyway?

For me, I’d say when it feels like you’re fighting against the whole system in order to succeed, it kills a game for me (part of why I mourned Breath of Fire V: Dragon Quarter so very deeply) . For a guilty pleasure… oh man. Hm. I did really enjoy Contact for a while… hm. I’ma think about this one. Back to you later. But in the meantime - discuss!

So I’m mad at the people behind Ninja Warrior.

You’re probably going to want me to give you some background here so I will.

Ninja Warrior - called Sasuke in Japan - is, as Wikipedia puts it, “a Japanese sports entertainment show.” Basically, 100 competitors come from all over Japan (and the world) to ‘compete’ in a series of obstacle courses. I say ‘compete’ loosely here, since their only adversary is the course itself, not each other: on the contrary, the group of the most skilled competitors - dubbed the “Ninja Warrior All-Stars” - have become good friends, and hang out and train together occasionally (even though they might live halfway across the country from one another, which might not sound as significant to Americans in our hugenormous country but I assure you this is still a big deal).

The courses come in four stages of increasing difficulty: about 80-90% of the competitors are eliminated in the first stage, about half of the remaining 20-10% in the second stage, and nearly all of the remainder eliminated in the third stage - perhaps one or maybe two people will make it to the final stage. The show has been going on twice a year since 1997, and only two people have ever completed the Final Stage. Intimidating - but not impossible.

In fall 2006, one Ninja Warrior All-Star, Makoto Nagano, actually completed the Final Stage, becoming the second person to do so (the last one was Kazuhiko Akiyama in October 1999). Nagano makes the run look incredibly easy, but that’s because the man has been competing for years, and spends a preposterous amount of his time training for the event: with that kind of skill and deduction, he should be able to beat it - and yet, if you look at his run, it’s obvious it takes a lot out of him, that it’s still an immense challenge - he is, if you will allow me the term, so badass that he can successfully make it all look that easy.

Since Nagano’s win, however, the Ninja Warrior staff redesigned not just individual obstacles within each course (as they have done each competition), but the entire run of each course. And frankly, I think they screwed the pooch on it. Yes, a fan’s opinion. But I think they’ve made a series of systemic mistakes on it that lessen my enjoyment of the series.

From the Wikipedia article, regarding the first stage:

“. . . the first stage was thoroughly redesigned to be much more difficult and prevent large numbers of people from moving on. In fact, a recent G4 special inside the making of the Sasuke competition revealed that the redesign of the first stage for the 18th competition was done with the intention of seeing all 100 challengers fail it. This did not happen, however, and that has only spurred the production team on to make this and all stages to follow even harder . . . That goal was almost met in the 19th competition, where much to everyone’s surprise, only two competitors cleared the first stage . . . . Executive producer Ushio Higuchi said in interviews later that even he was surprised at the results, anticipating that around 10 to 12 people would survive in spite of the production team’s attempts at making the first stage unbeatable.”

That’s the thing. Unbeatable. The first stage shouldn’t be fucking UNBEATABLE. In fact, I don’t think anything in the course should be labeled as such. I don’t think any designer should look at any game (or competition, or whatever) and think “let’s make this unbeatable.” That’s broken thinking. Hard, sure. Taxing, demanding, yes. Toeing the line of frustration, certainly. But not unbeatable. The spectators should look at it and think “my god, how could you do that?!” But those who know what they’re doing, those who’ve got the skill to truly be a contender - the path should be clear to them. It should tax them, it should challenge them, it should be a test of all their might - as it was for Makoto Nagano - but it should not be UNBEATABLE.

Sure, sure. “Annie, you’re overreacting, that’s just a word, the translation could have been off.” I grant you that. It is just a word, and words are malleable. This was the thing, though. I’ll outline to you what I’ve felt the stages tested in earlier editions, why it took them a while to find their stride, and why their previous forms were so excellent (and then, of course, I’ll tear down the other ones) [NOTE: these are also each described in greater detail in the Wikipedia article, which is insanely in-depth]:

First Stage. This should be very basic - shaking the tree, so to speak. Basic physical strength is tested here, but it’s more about dexterity, and the base ability of the player to plan out what they’re going to be doing. Early competitions made this run more like Most Extreme Elimination Challenge! in that it was too gimmicky, and didn’t really test the competitors all that much: obstacles like the Sextuple Step (sequence of slanted wall jumps) are perfect starters, because they require dexterity and that the people involved plan where their feet go - sounds easy, but nervous ones speed through and stumble and BANG, they’re out - which is good, because this one also keeps you from getting really hurt should you screw up on something so basic further on. Other standby obstacles like the Log Roll do more to shake the tree, and test grip as well as the player’s planning. Obstacles like the Jump Hang (where you jump from a trampoline to catch a slanted, horizontal net) have been an excellent test for even the most seasoned competitors, because it requires strategy far more than brute force - if you put weight, not momentum, into the jump on the trampoline, you’ll get height instead of length, and you’ll fall short of the net you’re supposed to catch. And the net itself is a suitable obstacle, not because it’s hard to cross (unless you go underneath instead of over, in which case you have to be very careful not to even brush the water beneath you) but because it’s a timesink… approach it incorrectly, and you’ll lose valuable seconds. The Warped Wall (a sort of half-pipe of a wall you run up and haul yourself over) is the penultimate endpoint of the first stage - there’s a damn good reason it’s been in nearly every iteration of the First Stage, and always at the end. You can’t brute force the thing (well, not unless you have the height of someone like Paul Terek, who’s 6′3″, and most Japanese contestants don’t have that - and even Terek knows not to tackle the obstacle that way) - you need to know not just to run up the thing, but to sort of lunge and grab at a certain juncture. From there on it’s strength - but getting there to begin with needs that basic planning. Again - even All-Stars can fail here. That’s as it should be, if they’re rushing, if they took too long on things like the Jump Hang, or if they’re not thinking about it. Once they get it, though, they usually don’t fail here again (unless they’re getting older, like Kasumi Yamada, or have deteriorating eyesight like Kazuhiko Akiyama - but those are exceptions, not the rule).

Stage Two.This stage is far more demanding of dexterity, and speed - you need to be quick to get through this stage, and know how to tackle certain obstacles (although there’s far less thinking demanded here than just pure speed). The thinking comes in recognizing what obstacles are the biggest timesinks, and how to approach them: do you put the sticky spray on your hands and feet for the Spider Climb, or do you take your chances without? The only thing that emphasizes anything other than speed here is the final section, the Wall Lift (where competitors have to lift a series of 3 walls, weighing 30, 40, and 50 kg) - this is a base test of strength, but also a gating mechanism for speed - if you’re pressed for time, you have to be strong to get through these before your time is up… and even if you’re not, struggling with them will probably torpedo your chances at the third stage anyway - which makes sense because the plain fact is if you can’t handle the weight of those walls, the structure of the Third Stage would not be something you could complete. You don’t walk before you crawl, etc.

Stage Three. This one isn’t timed for a good freakin’ reason - it’s the most intense test of upper-body strength I’ve ever seen. This stage, however, isn’t just about brute strength, although it definitely seems that way at first. The first obstacle is one of the trickier ones in the course, and determines the player’s success in the entire stage. Sure, they can rest as long as they want at points in the stage, and after that first go: but resting or no, they have a finite amount of strength, and if they don’t tackle that first obstacle in the right way, it’ll sap up all their energy. Little bits of finesse hang in the obstacles: where you grab on the Curtain Cling (too high and there’s not enough slack, too low and the pleats aren’t firm enough), how you hold your arms on the Cliff Hanger (more than a 90-degree-angle means trouble), and how you position your hands on the Pipe Slider (having to jump from a horizontal bar on a track across three feet of open air to the finish platform - swing your body too little, and you’ll miss - too much, and you’ll start to slide backwards). Strength is the base requirement to get through the stage, but like everything else you can’t brute-force it, and like pretty much everything else, luck has not a damn thing to do with one’s success or failure.

Final Stage. Use first the Spider Climb, then a Rope Climb to ascend 70 feet in 30 seconds. Speed, yes; strength, yes; but most of all, your form has to be AIR TIGHT to get through this. There’s a reason only two people have finished: it requires a perfection of form, strength, and speed that few can aspire to. But it’s not unbeatable. You can look at when people have failed and know why - they were great at the Spider Climb but they weren’t using their legs properly for the Rope Climb, they went up that rope like nobody’s business but they had an awkward start on the Spider Climb. This one has some degree of luck in it, but more timing and practice than anything else. The only time losing felt cheap was when Nagano lost in 2003 by 3/10 of a second - his hand missed hitting the finish button by a foot. That seemed an issue of semantics - they make it to the top in time, they put their arm through the opening at the top of the tower - that should be the end. The buzzer is a formality. But yeah.

The new stages, however, screw up this mechanic backwards and forwards. The first stage has a harder Spider Walk in it than the second stage did - it doesn’t account for disparate heights of the competitors (taller ones have to jump harder and higher, and there’s no room to get distance - plus the more people go, the more scraped the sides of the walls that one is supposed to jump into become, making it unfair for later contestants). The Pole Maze doesn’t account for weight, as slender contestants have to struggle far more to get the obstacle to work than heavier contestants do. The Flying Chute seems awkwardly designed and something having nothing to do with skill but instead luck - depending on if previous contestants have made the slide slicker with sweat, on what the contestant is wearing, etc. The course is also set up in a twisting, switch-back fashion, different from the straight shots of the previous designs - less room to maneuver, more wasted time turning, more wasted momentum. In a phrase: the new first stage doesn’t seem to take SKILL into account as much as dumb luck, and it seems set up for good contestants to fail for stupid reasons. You can’t predict the course, and it seems like you have to wrestle with it and hope instead of approaching it intelligently.

I can hardly talk about the Second Stage, since in the 19th (latest) competition, nobody was able to pass it. The Salmon Bridge obstacle took out both remaining competitors: one wherein you have to swing a horizontal bar up to different pegs (oh, hell, describing it does me no good: look at around 4:21 on this video to see what I mean)… something requiring brute strength and little finesse… where if you screw up and get the bar on two different levels by accident (a very real possibility), you’re entirely screwed, and there’s no way around it. There have been technical issues within reasonable obstacles before - the first Rolling Log had no rails to keep it from falling off the track, and the lack of slowing drops sometimes rammed the rider into the ending ledge at too high a speed - and the Devil’s Swing in the third stage could get stuck on a bar and largely prevent the competitor from continuing - these issues were fixed. The problem here seems that the obstacle itself is simply too hard. There are seven steps on that bar - that they put in an obstacle requiring brute strength in a level - oops, course - designed for speed and expect things to work, they are indeed aiming for something that is “unbeatable” - and disappointingly so.

Anyhow. I’ll cease my whining shortly. To me, this isn’t just about a fan’s disappointment at seeing a good show lose so much of its savor, and the Ninja Warrior All-Stars (all awesome guys) fail. It’s about watching a system get better and better designed, to see talented people approach the challenges and figure out logical ways around them (with skill, not twinks or cheats) - to see success and feel it’s been justly earned… or failure and to know how it came about, why, and how to fix it, failure that does what it’s supposed to and teach us a lesson about how to do it better next time.

And then to see that whole system get a big fat wallop right in the nuts.

It’s the patch that kills the fun of the game, the expansion that ruins your character build, the sequel that changes the whole theme of the series. It’s the hunter nerf, it’s the Warrior Within, it’s the Devil May Cry 2, it’s the latest Eve patch (well, maybe not THAT bad…)(and yes, I went there). It’s any time there’s a solid concept, a really nicely finessed idea, and someone comes along who entirely misses the point and screws everything up as a result. Things in Ninja Warrior fit together before: now they seem disparate, unhinged.

Furthermore, it’s that which is “unbeatable”: frustrating and not demanding, unreasonable instead of challenging. Where the fun vanishes and it becomes a grind, where skill vanishes and dumb luck takes precedence. A little luck, okay, sure - but I don’t feel like one should ever have to count on it. Where you feel like you’re struggling against the system, instead of working with it - where the problem lies anywhere but on you.

I don’t like the new courses in Ninja Warrior (yes, that should be obvious by now) and I hope they fix them real frickin’ quick. But - if there’s anything that can be gained from my frustration and yelling at the TV and ranting in this blog - it’s how their systems worked, and why they don’t now: and how I can watch out for such failings in the things that I make.

And I suppose that’s comfort enough for now.

I have trouble beating games. Not in that I’m not good enough to beat them - I certainly put enough hours on them, if nothing else - but because of other reasons. One is my magpie-like desire to always try more and more new games without yet finishing old ones - the other, I think, is this weird fear of ending a particular experience. Nothing to be afraid of - not like I wouldn’t replay it, I can say to myself: but I don’t. I’ll restart games I haven’t beaten many times - but when I do beat something, I usually pack it away and move on, even if I honestly do want to go through it again. I’m struck by a desire to go back and play Fallout 2, to play Vampire: Bloodlines and see what life is like as a male Malkavian (who is cheated from hell to breakfast - another thing I never do anymore). Childlike, I don’t want things to end, so I go back and start it all over again.

Sure, this can be positive, in an academic sense: I can get a better sense of what I like, and what works, and why. But its drawbacks are obvious. Live in the now, woman, and finish what you start! And when you try something new, get something really new on your plate, like an RTS. Expand your horizons already!

On the other hand, there are those games that I don’t finish simply because they’ve lost me by the end. Fun becomes a slog, or somehow shot in the nut. I love Psychonauts like CRAZY, but don’t get me started on the last level. It is horribleness. And I still grieve for not having finished it. That’s yet another game I’m going to restart and finally beat one of these days.

How do you get a player to finish the game? To keep them going throughout so they never feel a disconnect from events? To prevent any kind of “this is the last area” telegraphing? Or is that practice more beneficial because it lets players ready themselves fully for what’s to come? I suppose that changes by genre, but I have to wonder how much that contributes to people ceasing play. Probably not as much as a dramatic shift in gameplay type (I shake my fist at you, Meat Circus!) , and for genres like RPGs it probably does way more good than harm (although how does one balance for the player tendency to save all those Megalixirs for the very end?)… but I have to wonder.

And I need to beat Psychonauts. Mrrrr.

I’ve seen fishing used as a mechanic in many games, and I have to admit that I don’t find it actually fun in real life. But in terms of a game – why should that matter? I don’t find arranging blocks or pulling weeds fun in real life either, yet Tetris and Animal Crossing are fun. And I imagine killing monsters is a bit of a tedious process, yet – well, hell, you get the idea. If something is boring in real life, the best way of making if fun is a game. (Chore Wars isn’t a perfect example, but boy howdy it comes close)

Now, I should clarify that I’m not going full GDC Game Design challenge here (although as a side note, Clint Hocking wins my eternal respect for coming up with an idea for a DS game about Emily Dickinson – I’d seriously play his game). I’m curious about a fishing minigame, which should involve less in-depth mechanics and should be allowed more leeway to sacrifice realism for fun factor. As mentioned, a lot of games have a fishing minigame, and most of them are about as fun as hammering a nail into my eyeball.  Here’s a quick rundown off the top of my head:

* Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. I can’t tell you how many people I talked to who said they got the crit path fish and then called it a day and never fished again. The starter rod (which has no reel) is unintuitive, and when I tried it I was flailing around and leaning backwards with the Wiimote, trying to get it to register my pulling motion.

* World of Warcraft. You have to open a menu (or directly drop an icon in your hotbar – any mods that make this easier are banned, for fear of exploitation by bots), click on an icon, and then wait for the little bobber to dip underwater, then click on it. It could take twenty seconds for the damn thing to bob. TWENTY SECONDS. Then maybe the fish got away! Oh gee. And if you do get it, you get a fish (the recipes for which, by the way, are a pain in the patookus to find) and one point of fishing skill. And we’re talking something you skill up to – what is it now, 375? Sure, over 70 levels, but unless you pace yourself and take the time to fish every time you log in, you’re going to be standing in front of a pool of water somewhere, eyes glazing over as you click on a little bobber in the water. If anything feels like a grind in WoW, it’s fishing. Ugh.

* Contact. Follows the WoW model, except less intuitive – you tap the A button sometime when the bobber sinks, and gee, if you don’t get it just right (and sometimes even if you do) you lose the fish. The general problem in that game of having a very high failure rate (hooray, I tried to cook and got a charred hunk of crap, and didn’t raise my cooking skill at all, so I just lost a pair of rare ingredients, oh hoo-frickin-ray), and that extends to fishing as well.

Contact breaks my heart for numerous reasons, and though fishing isn’t one of them, it’s symptomatic of it. Plus you need a certain costume to fish that you can only put on at the boat, which you have to teleport to, and you can only fish in an area of the level you have to walk to, so god forbid you get there wearing another costume, because you will have to go back which means all the monsters will respawn the second you leave the screen.

Anyhow.

Now let me tell you about a game that does it well – so well, in fact, that I have a heck of a good time playing it, and have spent gobs of time monkeying with this element of the game alone:

* Breath of Fire IV. Actually, the fishing mechanic in this isn’t just one, but several mini mechanics bound together: the line’s tensile strength (don’t let it go too loose or the fish will get away, or too taut and your line will break), the location of your cast, your type of bait, and the rhythm of your reel. …No, seriously. The tensile strength - right, very easy. Location of cast - sure, some fish will like shallow running water while others like deep pools, right. Bait - just bugs and such you find normally, different fish prefer different bait, I got it. Easy!

But the rhythm of the pull – now that’s interesting. Reeling is just a single button, but once you cast it, different sequences of taps attract different fish, and things are set on a simple musical rhythm. One fish will like a sequence of quarter notes, another a sequence of eighths – and this pattern is based off of the slow, easily-trackable tempo of the music that plays in the background. I actually picked up this mechanic without knowing it existed: I was reeling in casually and discovered it. Because the main fishing mechanism (the reeling) is relatively easy to master, and the actual process of fishing requires real player interaction, you don’t get bored doing it – and even waiting for a bite is an active process.

And to top it all off, the fish you get are actually extremely useful, restoring health and mana and such - outside of combat, I’m likely to give my characters fish to eat instead of using up healing potions. It’s a good mechanic for balancing the economy of the game as well.

As I’ve been given to understand it, the Breath of Fire series was known for having actually interesting fishing mechanics – I’d like to look at the earlier games and see if this pattern is actually a continuous one (and then I’ll cry a bit at how bad Breath of Fire V was - alas!).

Anyhow – that’s my idea there. Taking a mechanic that’s difficult, or something we don’t like in real life, and making it intuitive, active, and above all, FUN. What’re some other mechanics that are annoying and games have done poorly (and possibly well) and why? I’ma work on this one for a while.

[EDIT: Removed the part where I was talking smack about Animal Crossing’s fishing mechanic being crap, because I was talking about it with some friends and I found out I entirely misremembered how it worked and actually it was kind of neat, and similar to Breath of Fire IV in several respects, including reeling.  I’ma cease talking about it since the point has been made that my memory of it is not as solid as it was, so that’s enough of me there.]

One thing that makes me wonder a lot in games - especially RPGs - is if we as designers have lost sight on how to do simple things. Systems have a tendency to get really complex, and it seems a lot of times we’re more thinking of how to explain a convoluted, complex system rather than how to make it simpler and easier to use.

Been playing puzzle games like Tetris DS and Puzzle Quest lately, and have been particularly impressed with not just their base mechanic (which I realize is silly to say about Tetris, because everyone knows its mechanic by now - but sit and think of how preposterously elegant it is… there have been countless versions of it and permutations on that single base theme, but it remains instantly accessible to almost everyone. I have stories about how addicted my mom got to that game back in the day, but those are tales for another time), but with how different areas/types of the game change it. Puzzle Quest has multiple versions of its base system: the battles, the crafting, and the spell-learning (I don’t include sieges or mount training here, because they use the same battle mechanic, only timed for the latter, which is indeed an interesting variant but not a significant switch in gameplay) - each tweaks how you play the game slightly.

Tetris DS, however, has ENTIRELY different methods for how you play on each mode. I think it’s more to do with the fact that it has a simpler base mechanic than Puzzle Quest does (and actually, you spend so much of your time battling that when switching to the other modes, I find myself very much wishing I had the benefit of my spells: it’s the function you’re the most used to), and there’s a game mode that uses the base mechanic by itself - nothing is subtracted, only added. Another advantage is that pretty much everyone on the planet knows how the hell to play Tetris - it’s the job of the different mechanics to offer something new. The versus mode employs the classic “what I destroy gets sent to you” mechanic that I think has been around since the legendary illegal Tengen copy of Tetris for the NES (that supposedly had a bitchin’ two-player mode that I sadly never got to access personally), but the designers actually expanded the classic Nintendo properties theme of the game by adding in items . Oddly we’re familiar with the look of these items, but not what they do: mushrooms (which give a boost of speed in Mario Kart, which is basically where one can draw analogs from) speed up your opponent’s blocks, a turtle shell clears out the bottom two lines of your board, a star gives constant long pieces. Very basic “how would I win more / how would I screw my opponent up?” ideas, which are a compelling thought. Nifty as well is the “hold” button, which also works with the tendency of one to go “NO! Not THAT piece! I have nowhere to put it!” and the inherent nature of a well-organized board being screwed up by one single piece being awry. I’d say the benefit of this is mitigated somewhat by the fact that it’s a feature that one needs to get used to and understand fully in order to properly exploit, and that the player isn’t always best served by coming up with the biggest tower to get a Tetris with, but instead to build the fastest in order to get a Tetris first (and send blocks over to their opponent’s side). The other methods - Strategy, Catch, Push, and Puzzle - are all excellent and very varied permutations on this same theme (even the Touch Puzzle, which is what it sounds like, uses the tetronimos in place of simple ordered blocks).

I’m getting into way too great of detail here, but basically the idea of coming up with a solid, creative system - one that can be added to and tweaked to provide variations on the familiar (where the base mechanic is the game, but one’s goal changes). The skills in Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus spring to mind: how you’d get a new skill at the end of every hub, but collecting “clues” rewarded you with new optional skills. At first they were stand-alone abilities, such as the mine-hat: but later, the player is awarded with power-ups for existing skills - a skill that made you invisible used to require you to stand still, but the power-up let you move while remaining unseen. There are a lot of different skills introduced in the Ratchet & Clank series (another favorite), and I’m compelled to play through them in order to see how they started out, and where they moved from there. (of course, in both games there are rewards for extensive exploration, and I’m curious about how one makes exploration compelling without assuming it just “will” be in and of itself)

Anyhow - running in mental circles at this point. Want to do some game research in the next while, get a sense of these things - maybe even attempt to run an experiment where I create something simple and interesting and fun, kick it around for a bit and see if it works. Look at its guts, poke around, see if it works and why it doesn’t. I’m not experienced with systems design, and I want to improve at it: after all, it used to be the heart and soul of what every designer did, back in the day… makes sense to get cozier with it.

This will be my random thought dump, probably circling around thoughts regarding stupid ideas for game development, assorted rants, possible pictures and/or dumb comics, and other things I don’t mind sharing with the world at large.

Be warned, humanity. I’m very weird.