Folderoltasticness

Here’s a question for you – how do you differentiate “Normal” difficulty from “Hard”?

Too many games that I’ve played have handled this distinction poorly, or treated “Hard” difficulty as something that the player only chooses if they’ve already played through the game once. Even with reactive difficulty that adjusts on the fly, it almost seems like there’s something ham-fisted about that upper tier of difficulty modes.

…bear in mind here that I’m not talking about the highest tier, the “Insane” or “Impossible” difficulties. They’re named that way for a reason – some might as well just dispense with the ego-primping and call themselves “Unfair.” You know what you’re getting into, when you select those modes – some might not even be available from the beginning. “Hard” is something infinitely more tricky… even its wider range of descriptions – “Mature” “Experienced” “Advanced” – calls to mind an expectation on the player’s part, one that references but does not necessitate prior experiences with the game. So it’s shaky ground already!

Let’s iron this one out. Let’s say that on any game that has adjustable difficulty levels (and frankly, I prefer games having this option, for reasons touched on later) should have the following:

EASY – this is the game experience in a lighter, get-to-the-good-parts fashion. It’s for someone who’s not familiar with the genre, or who wants to experience the title in a way that offloads the frustrating elements until they’re more confident of their footing. I credit Bioshock for the best description of this mode – and the first two Civilizations for its best AND worst implementation (because if you went any further beyond Chieftain difficulty, you relied immensely more on luck than on strategy or skill… simply put, the AI cheated. But don’t take it badly, Maxis, in that era, AI couldn’t really do much more than cheat).

NORMAL – this is really the true, unvarnished, initial concept of how the game should flow. Concepts should have been plotted and tested in this space, with these expectations. Even a newbie should enter this level and feel the challenges facing them are rough, but not impossible – they may not be able to initially grasp the schema that would make them an immediate success, but it’s not beyond their comprehension. For example – to the initiate, watching someone play on Hard should seem amazing, and on Impossible, exactly that… but Normal should be a bar they can see themselves reaching, albeit with practice.

HARD – this should not be impossible. Note that – even in the absence of a truly atrocious setting, it should not require perfection. The truly devoted will require that of themselves, and they don’t need a game’s permission… you ever hear of the “White Mage Runs” in the first Final Fantasy? All four characters, only white mages! Or a solo run through Disgaea, using only the main character in what is ostensibly a group strategy game? Players are wonderful and devilish creatures, and they will build a wall to the heavens just to try and top it. What this mode should be is a challenge, true and exact – the honed, more precisely demanding core of the game’s systems. It’s not enough to use them, not now – you must really understand them. I think Ninja Gaiden (apart from mocking you with its difficulty) epitomizes this well – fight smarter, or die. It’s not enough to fumble through the blocking system… you’ve got to really know it – and when you mess up, you know exactly what it was you did wrong.

That’s really the key to me – knowing what you did wrong. That’s a symptom of knowing the systems within the game well, and being aware of what strings you pull change what facets in what way. In a perfect world, we’d know every bit of our games inside and out… but I’m digressing. Or really, perhaps I’m best off making my point with games that do difficulty wrong.

EASY WAYS TO RAMP UP DIFFICULTY

• more enemies
• enemies have more health
• enemy hits do more damage
• less player health
• less player damage
• less power-ups (items)

Those all work, but a lot of times, to me, Hard mode is a grab bag of all of these elements, in no particular order, and it equates to some terribly awkward and unfun moments. The “more enemies” is used the most rarely, actually, and when it is used, it’s one of the more egregiously unbalanced offenders… either the guys added are mooks, just more warm bodies thrown in to get slain, or are of such a power that a formerly mid-ranged encounter is almost prohibitively punishing. The most annoying I’ve run into, however, is the “more health” + “less player damage.” That’s a recipe for repetition, and battles that lose all their flavor ages before they’re finished.

I think too many times, difficulty is purely handled in a by-the-numbers, programmatic fashion, necessitating manipulating these elements by percentage. While I think this can be manageable, too often I feel those percentages are too unsubtle – a slight change to enemy health (no more than 25%) is acceptable, but then don’t dare change player damage. Increased enemy damage is workable, but adding that and something like critical hits (an element of which I admit I have a base irritation with, by and large – a half-way decent idea rarely implemented well) goes overboard.

I like the concept of multiple passes for difficulty, triggered spawns for certain enemies and power-ups dependent on the mode chosen: and for this I prefer the “adding” method for power-ups – your first pass should be the most severe, with more triggers added where they’re needed – and the “subtraction” one for enemies, ideally by elements within encounters instead of scripting totally new ones. Doom 3 actually suffered in player opinion because of its high number of “monster closets” – which was later attacked as only seeming that way because most players were playing on Hard, expecting that they would require a challenge (and be best suited for it!).

In my mind, as game designers, we need to welcome players into our scenario with a Conan-like fervor – which is to say, when we intone “what is good?” they can repeat back the high points with precision. If they know how important blocking is, it’s because we’ve shown it to them – how a well-used power-up can turn the course of battle, because we’ve helped make that clear. And in addition to this, we can’t just whip-crack that pain from the word go: I feel like to some degree, every game’s gotta start out easy, no matter what mode you choose – let you feel out the particulars of the systems, experiment, learn and consider… and when we turn up that heat, it’s gradual, but it’s clear to the player that things are getting harder, and precisely how those demands are unfolding. If we turn up the difficulty to pressure the timing of those hits, made power-ups rare and precious things to be used with cunning and care, then – at least to me – it seems like we have a chance at better making the Hard difficulty something that is more of a challenge and less of a frustration.

More on this when I think of some awesome examples of good Hard modes vs. bad ones. There are altogether too many examples of the latter, I just want the WHY and the HOW of it.

…OH RIGHT! Here’s a great Hard mode – Batman: Arkham Asylum. The game’s combat is about countering, and the stealth mode about awareness. In Hard mode, not only is the critical “counter warning” absent from enemies’ heads – requiring the player to concentrate not only on the single individual they’re currently fighting but all of his attacking buddies as well (and at the same time) – but enemies are more alert for stealth attacks, requiring the player to utilize many more tricks in the environment (instead of simply dropping down and assaulting the enemies one at a time).

More examples! Plz to give!

UPDATE: This is how awesome my fellow designer and all-around awesome guy Paul Streifel is - he could zing out THREE examples of additional interesting ways to ramp up difficulty.  Perfect Dark and Black apparently layer on additional mission requirements (that the first time through in Normal, it’s a simple objective), and then additionally add time restraints.  Good stuff!  I think it also works along the same lines as what the game helps to teach the player while still giving the feeling of adding NEW elements.  Good, good idea!

FIRST: before I natter further, I want to turn your attention to this excellent, illuminating article: a review (and evaluation) of the collected brainstorming notes for the story of Raiders of the Lost Ark.  A fascinating read for anyone (especially fans of Indiana Jones, and let’s just act like the fourth film never happened, shall we?), and I think there’s a lot in there game developers should absolutely take to heart.

Now, I know, I know - there are far too many examples where games are trying to act too much like films and turn out something uninspired and unfun, clunky and unpolished.  And certainly I’m sick of games being treated like cinema’s bastard child or unwanted stepkid - certainly anyone familiar with the unique demands of the medium should realize that games need their own schema for creation and evaluation (shame, shame, Roger Ebert, for attempting to parlay your cinematic evaluations to games - as anyone who’s studied film should know, it had its own growing pains to free itself from the same old restrictions of the stage and theater, and the need to develop a new method of study!).

That being said - there’s a lot in this for those in games to pay attention to… good ideas aside (and there are many there), the plain fact of the matter is that for as different as games are from the cinematic medium, the closest relation gamers have (well, at least the generation that’s 20+, who recall when games weren’t photorealistic, and we still described graphics as something with “bit” in the description) to actually relating to the action on screen.  I think in many ways games surpass that, but when you make a movie-based game, what will the player instinctively want?  Why do they buy it? To do what they saw on screen.  Anyhow.  Moving on!

One thing that caught my eye the most was this phrase: What happens in the past, off screen, good or bad, does not affect sympathy. It’s what we see the character do in the present that determines how much we will or will not care about that character.
That says so damn much! It explains why I can’t stand Kratos, why (despite my boyfriend’s hope that I get into the manga series Berserk) I so heartily dislike Guts, and why I don’t give two craps in a hat about Conan.  Whoop de doo, tragic past, blah.  Right now what I’m seeing is them being a jerk to everyone and everything.  I hear tons about Kratos’s tragic past from other gamers, but when I was playing God of War, I couldn’t even GET to that point.  Too many cut-scenes of him just being a completely rampant jerk for no reason, blood splashed upon his uncaring face, jeeeeeeez I get it already, the man is a soulless douche.  In my defense, yes I know God of War is a remarkably well-done title that basically pioneered the Quick-Time Action Sequence (of which I think now the game market has been intensely inundated), and had well-done gameplay, but honestly speaking - I couldn’t stand playing Kratos.  I don’t have to be a flower-loving puppy dog, but as a gamer I feel like I really should care whether the guy I’m playing lives or dies.

…okay, also it was the fixed camera in a dippy jumping puzzle, and the fact that while I can feel pretty rad one moment yanking the wings off a harpy, if I die because I fell off of a log the next moment will kind of erase the savage glee of the former, at least in my humble opinion.  Hells, I think the fact that I as a game designer said “I didn’t like God of War” will write me off in many devs’ minds, but all the same I hope I’m heard out.  I just think it was overdone.  He doesn’t need to be an aggressive douche so constantly - you got a great hook in him attempting to kill himself in the beginning - follow that up with something here and there, maybe?  I once griped about the sex scene with the two women to a fellow co-worker, who hesitantly offered “well, every woman sort of… reminds him of his wife now?”  I sneered “Apparently those two did at the same time.”  So, yeah.  Not won over.

But back to my point.  It’s the moment that matters the most.  If you want to make your character a good but flawed person or a complete jerk, it’s what they do right then, the options presented to them while the player can see and interact with it (or, well - not).  If you want the player to be aware of a backstory, thread it in somewhere, consistently, and early on.  The exchange with Marion and Indy is a great point where the past is brought up (without the need for a possibly clunky flashback) and enough is said that the viewer gets the picture, and hears both sides of the story:

INDY: I never meant to hurt you.
MARION: I was a child! I was in love.
INDY: You knew what you were doing.
MARION: It was wrong. You knew it.
INDY: Look, I did what I did. I don’t expect you to be happy about it. But maybe we can do each other some good.
MARION: Why start now?
INDY: Shut up and listen for a second. I want that piece your father had. I’ve got money.
MARION: How much?

Yay good dialogue!  Indy’s not even really apologetic, and yet he doesn’t come off as a stupendous jerk.  And it’s the fact that although she has the pendant he wants and she’s not really willing to part with it - as you can read in the article (which you should have read by now!) - he doesn’t do something really jerky like steal it.  If that was a gameplay option, you could allow the player to steal it, to try and bargain with her some more, apologize, etc.  Put the option (to be a jerk, or not?) into their hands.  But knowing that although what’s gone before gives motivation (the character-centered player will say “well, I was a jerk before, maybe I can talk to her,” but the action-centered player will be like “gah, screw this - I’ll just steal it”) but it’s up to the designer to either build the character themselves with telling moments like these, or provide them for the player do to the building.  Background is very imporant - if Marion was, to pull an industry phrase, a bog-standard NPC with no connection to the main character - she becomes a simple roadblock, and stealing the item from her becomes the far more desirable path.  A penalty here for being a jerk seems overly severe, and carries no weight (becuase the relationship of the characters to one another carries nothing as well) - but if they know each other, it’s far more significant.  Making the player give a crap about the people they interact with should be a prime goal for nearly any designer… especially, as a side note, if they want to allow the player to do truly evil things.  Which is another discusison entirely, but I just wish to note it here.

Another delicious point: start big and end BIGGEST.  Lots of games, because of the nature of introducing the player to the action and controls, pretty much necessitate a non-critical tutorial level.  Folding this into the game itself is tricky in the extreme… how do you balance a low-pressure learning section with an exciting, action-packed beginning?  Games that include a tutorial as an optional section and opt for a challenging beginning are often scolded for starting off too hard - but games that necessitate a slower tutorial opening are then trashed for being “too slow.”

Furthermore, another section of concern is the construction of games.  Unlike movies, which often film scenes out of order and edit them together later, much of game creation is done beginning-to-end (mostly because the risk of putting things together out-of-order for games can lead to unbalanced, inconsistent, and differing gameplay).  Not only can this lead to games with elaborate beginnings and afterthought endings, but the other way around - a spectacular end boss battle that nobody will get to because the beginning is such a bore.  Also - notice in that article that action pieces fill the whole middle, and at no point does it appear to sag (it’s like Wii Fit keeps telling me - core muscle strength is important!).

To me, the key is the fact that this conversation exists: that there’s planning of the whole thing, instead of a “wow this beginning!” or “yay this end!” and then nothing in the middle.  I’m not saying that the leads should iron out the whole process and prevent any other design input, but that you should have a basic skeleton in mind, with “setpiece” moments throughout - once that’s in place (and art and programming leads confirm those can be done!), bring in the whole design team and hack through the whole mess together.

And that’s the crux of the issue for me - and why just reading the quotes in that article is so fascinating.  If you’re over eight years old and you’ve watched the original Star Wars trilogy and suffered through the prequels, it’s very likely that the penultimate thought in your mind was: “What the HELL was George Lucas THINKING?!”  And when you start to read that he basically locked himself away to write the prequels and allowed no other input that it starts to make sense.  The same with Steven Spielberg -  how many people in Hollywood now have the balls to suggest that one of his ideas wouldn’t work so well, or that they have something better in mind?  If you imagine that doesn’t happen in the game industry - that a big name or a “I can kill your job in half a second if I want” doesn’t exist - you’re so wrong that I want to cry and pat you gently on the head for your sweet naiveté.

Civilization as we know it didn’t come about as the result of any one culture, but the interactions of many: Rome, long held in such high regard, rested on a base of Greek learning, with input from not only all over the Mediterranian, but through trade routes and territories throughout Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East - not to mention a system of government that allowed the continuation of life and customs in conquered areas.  China, which to many seems just a massive ubiquitous power, has an amazing history of the collaborations of many cultures - Mongolia, the Han and Wu cultures and their interaction, Korea, and the many other tribes and cultural identities and inventions in the area.  Nothing is one giant, created-from-whole-cloth mass.

The power that I’m trying to say moves the gears of civilization is collaboration - one greater, gestalt thing from many parts.  Leave a thing alone and it doesn’t advance, or does only in degrees.  Add something new to the mix and everything changes.  That’s why I love game development so much (and also why it frustrates me to no end) - that same collaboration.  It’s never easy, in fact it’s hard as hell, but the second you can’t give feedback or opinion or take one party’s word as complete gospel - it begins to deteriorate.  Mind, there are points where a design needs to be finalized and locked-down and not dithered about in blue-sky mode: but what I’m trying to elaborate upon here is that when ideas are thrown about, nobody should consider themselves above criticism.  Even ideas that don’t fit can be used somewhere (as evidenced with the unused ideas for Raiders appearing elsewhere in the Indiana Jones series), and stuff that doesn’t fit at all can be used - via its contrast - to help define the borders of the desired game and its ideas.  Half of what helps define a thing is not what it is but what it isn’t, and suggesting something to that nature shouldn’t be hissed and booed at but used as an example to clearly dictate 1) what’s being aimed at and 2) why it doesn’t work.  Heck, look at this pendant discussion:

G — It would be nice if they left in a huff, they fought or something. He left rather pissed. I don’t think he would leave without the pendant. That’s the only thing that bothers me about that.

S — So he goes upstairs and stays up, plotting how he’s going to take it off her.

G — That makes him into a real rat.

L — That’s all right. He never does it. What he does is just the opposite, save her life.

G — No matter how you do it, the fact that he thought about it is the rat part.

S — Rhett Butler was a rat.

G — He wasn’t a real rat –

S — He proved himself by raising her family. Before that he was a gambler, dealt with cheap ladies.

G — There’s a difference between being a rat and somebody who’s having fun. He never hurt anybody.

L — I’m a little confused about Indiana at this point. I thought he’d do anything for this pendant.

G — But he still has to have some moral scruples. He has to be a person we can look up to. We’re doing a role model for little kids, so we have to be careful. We need someone who’s honest, trusting and true. But at the same time he’s confronted with this difficult problem. We have a great thing when she won’t give it to him. She doesn’t like him.

Excellent distinction there (emphasis mine).  Jones is driven, maybe not the best of guys, but he’s not a rat, not a jerk - it’s a point of disctinction that he’s a role model.  Maybe we don’t want this character to sneak up and snap the guy’s neck because he still has some qualms about killing… even though the enemy is a bad man, and he knows this, he doesn’t want to kill him when he can just knock him out… he’s not that cold, not that blasé about killing.  He’s new at this - it bothers him.  And maybe just the actual physical act of the neck-snap is more cold-blooded to him, far more intense than just pulling a trigger.  (plus it’s actually really really hard to snap someone’s neck in real-life, but that’s another story).

Anyhow.  I could, quite obviously, go on for days about this, but the best points are in the article, which I again ask you to read if you haven’t already.  Or RE-read it.  I’m going to right now.  In the meantime, discuss!

Back in 6th grade, I had a tae-kwon-do teacher who was from somewhere in far east Europe (I don’t remember which because 1) I didn’t ask him, and 2) I was 12, cut me some slack). His location of birth is relevant because it gave him a cool accent, which unfortunately was turned into a droning whine while I was doing training exercises. There is only so many times you can do back kicks (which I hated then and still do today because I am seriously not convinced they could every do anything more than awkwardly foot-paw someone’s thighs and not actually hurt them), especially when you are 12, shorter than everybody, and don’t relish the idea of being really tired when they put you in padding way too big for you and make you “spar” with someone, which you know is upcoming after this eternally-long exercise.
Ahem. Anyhow.
Instead of saying how many of whatever kick we’d be doing, the master would bark out “ONE MORE TIME!” in his unique accent, and my level of preadolescent irritation would rise precipitously. I wondered more than once why he couldn’t just count like the other masters, and also, why that phrase got under my skin so much more than the plain fact of having to do X number of kicks. He wasn’t any harsher than any other masters, that I can recall - just yelled “ONE MORE TIME!” instead of normal counting.
Why do I remember that as being so obnoxious? It’s not just his accent - that just made it etch into my mind more easily. It’s the plain fact of being told to do the repetition. So here’s my question - to myself, and to everyone -

When does something go from being fun to being repetitive?

A lot of criticism I hear about this or that game is that it’s “too repetitive” - which makes me wonder what the boundaries are. Certainly a game needs to have some repetition - core gameplay - or it’s a damn mess. But at what point do you expand, at what point do you constrain yourself? Certain games work okay with a single - or set - of systems, which can indeed be repetitive. Diablo II jumps to mind, but hell - what about Pac Man? World of Warcraft? What is Halo but shooting guys, and then shooting other guys? With this blurry definition… where do we draw the line?
Sure, we can say stuff crosses over when it stops being fun. But I don’t trust any eye-ball impression when someone looks at a game and says “looks repetitive.” I think you’d be bored watching me kill stuff in Diablo II, but hell, I’m having a good time. And even with open-world games like Saint’s Row, yeah you’re doing a million different things, but it’s more about the experience of being involved in it… I sometimes actually find those harder to get invested in as a viewer, because I can’t grab a narrative thread or sense of linearity… unless the player states a clear objective, I don’t know where they plan on taking things. Which is fine, but in terms of - as I said - simply eyeballing something for a sense of “that looks repetitive” (and by extension, boring) - leads me to distrust the sentiment.
Sure, I’ve played repetitive games and disliked them greatly. Halo bored me.  Breath of Fire V: Dragon Quarter was a colossal disappointment. And even my much-loved Civilization 2 becomes a bit of a shore near the more technological ages (but then I just start over again). But where’s the distinction? Is there a definition - a line in the sand - that we can draw that separates good from bad as a rule, not just on a case-by-case basis?

I aim to give this more thought - but for now, I’m putting it out there. Whatchu think, world?

I’ve been reading a lot of it lately, so documentation is on my mind.

I don’t think anyone would argue it’s worthless in a project, but it begs the question - as I’ve worked on projects that both hardly have any and others that are immersed in it - how MUCH documentation is appropriate?  How do we even determine this?

Of course, there’s the “no duh” things like scale and type of game. You nail down the obvious ones - Characters for an RPG, Weapons for an FPS, things like that.  But at what point do you cross the line from Too Little to Too Much, when even just maintaining the things becomes a chore?  In the beginning, they’re everyone’s friend - but near the end of the project, they seem to most often get discarded.  How do you most decide what you need, what works for updating it, WHO updates it, and how to keep the evolution of the doc up to date so it’s consistently helpful?

I know this is case-by-case to the point where some might even think the discussion of such is kind of moot - but things don’t seem to improve on a case-by-case unless at least SOME attempt is made to look at them in a larger scale (at least in my view).  So.

I’m going to make the key assumption here that there is an easily-accessible location for all the documentation that extends BEYOND a simple shared drive, or perhaps even a source-control solution like Perforce, AlienBrain, SourceSafe, etc.  I’ve had personal experience with SharePoint, and although it is not my favorite tool ever, I can understand its utility, and have to admit it’s helpful to see it marked when a new document has been added, and when an existing one has been changed (and by whom).  I believe SharePoint even allows you to tag certain documents to have an email auto-sent to you when they’ve been updated, which is helpful (in certain situations - I’d say when it’s an important doc that either everyone has access to but only a few can edit, or something only a few people can access and their changes are super-important).  Obviously if a team is not communicating in person, there’s not all that much documenation can do.

So - what CAN it do, beyond a preproduction standpoint?  Obviously it can help newcomers to the team get oriented and management see where things are going, but I’d argue as well that documentation - stuff outside the specifics of department, “translated” for everyone to read - is beneficial.  I can’t understand the specifics of programmerspeak (although I should always strive to try), but having documentation that combines intent with a projected direction is valuable, and should always be valuable.

That said, as much as I like to document things “just in case,” I’ve also run into situations where files can pile up into a mess.  I’ve been in attempts to collate disparate docs into a single file (which has led to its own share of complications, I tell you what)… and though I suppose perhaps doing something like collecting major elements together into a Master “Story Doc” (for example) might not be a bad idea, it also comes with its share of issues.  If you’re on a Source Control System (and YOU SHOULD BE) only one person can tackle changes at a time - and if it includes a lot of systems that are still in flux, that could be problematic.  Second, there’s the basic fact of human nature that most of us don’t like reading long documents.  If I just want a basic character overview (that’s say, 5 pages), but it’s in a 40+ page Story doc, I might balk at such.  Clear formatting and Ctrl-Click to Follow options in a Table of Contents should be involved, but those seem more like a stopgap and should be secondary to collating things at an appropriate time.

[Crap.  I think my brain ran out of juice.  Going to get some more caffiene, pick up rant again later. In the meantime, you gab about what docs you feel are the most important for different genres, what you’d imagine should stand alone always vs. get folded together, when and why.  Probably only interesting to me, but what the hell :)]

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.