Interactive cut scenes

When I started playing Brothers in Arms: Road to hill 30, I had already watched the tutorial that came with the game and knew fairly well what I was supposed to do. I start the game and me and my friends are under heavy attack from the enemy. Someone screams that we're going to die, and that I need to do something. I immediately try to select one of my squads and come up with nada. I figure that since this is the first level, I probably don't have a squad yet. I start to fire at the enemy to little effect. I'm to far away to hit them (something that should have been reassuring if the converse was true). I realize that I'm behind an obstacle (our make shift cover) I cannot move over it and must try to find a way around it. I run to the left, it's a dead end. With slight panic by now (the ground is littered with corpses and they are all American), I run to the right and find another dead end. What to do? At this point, one of my friends (the only guy with glasses) looses it and after some screaming more or less commits suicide. At this point I realize that I'm watching a cut scene. This was not a good experience. You should never put the player in a situation that he or she cannot affect, and certainly not ask the player to do something that he or she cannot possibly do.

Progress and the lack there of

Progress and failure are related subjects, and failure normally means a lack of progress. On the other hand, however, lack of failure is not necessarily a sign of progress. A player needs to make progress in the game if he or she is going to keep his or her interest. Lack of progress will often lead to the player dropping the game before finishing it. What progress means may vary from game to game. In level based games, it means getting closer to finish the level. In sandbox type of games, there might not be any goals set by the game's designers, and the player is allowed to create his or her own goals. But even so, it is still just as important that the player can track his or her progress against these goals.

There are a few, commonly occurring, situations where lack of progress happens in a game.

• Excessive failure. This is the most common variant and occurs frequently. See my post on failure for a longer discussion.
• Game is lost, but failure has not yet been detected by the game. This is a common state in strategy games. For instance, when I played Civilization IV, I put to little resources into building military units. The computer opponent recognized that I was military weak, and attacked. At that point, I had already lost the game. There was no way I could make peace with my enemy, beat him in the field or make another civ join the war on my side. I could continue playing the game for many turns before I was completely conquered, but it was just prolonged losing.
• Player get lost, or don't know what to do next in order to create some progress. This happens frequently in games that are heavy on puzzles. It isn't always clear what is expected of the player, where the actual puzzle is, or how to manipulate the environment in order to solve it. A special kind of puzzle that easily halts my progress is when I have to run back and forth through one or more empty levels to deliver something picked up at one point to another point. Legacy of Kain, Defiance had a lot of these puzzles, and even though you always had access to a piece of text that explained what to do, finding a specific point in a maze with no map or compass proved difficult at many times.
• Player is making progress, but progress is painfully slow. Some times, the rate of progress is just to slow. There is a certain satisfaction in seeing new things and accomplishing new feats. Looking at something static, however, is not much fun. When I was playing SimCity 2000, I came to a point where the only new, and exciting thing I could build was the giant (half a million people) condos. I'm not sure how long time I would have needed to play in order to gain enough funds to build one, but at the rate I was gaining funds, it looked like I would have to be playing for months, or years before I earned one.
• The player is actually making progress, he or she just don't understand that he or she is. Some times, games have bad feedback systems. The player can make all the progress in the world and not appreciate it if he or she is unable to recognize the progress done. Many games have scenarios where the player is told to defend a position from enemy attack. If the game does not explain to the player that he or she is making progress by killing the enemies, the player may start to look around for that enemy spawner that must be shut down or that lever that shuts the gate or any other thing that might solve the situation. The same way goes for games where there is an enemy spawner that must be killed and the game does not clearly communicate this.

Failure and Games

Most games involve the threat of several kinds of failure. The underlying principle is that a player cannot enjoy success if there were never a chance of failure. I agree with this reasoning with just a slight difference. For the player to fully enjoy his or her success, there must be a perceived chance of failure. Note the important difference, the player must believe that there is a real chance of failure, there must not necessarily be one in reality. Why not, you may ask. Well, it would certainly be simpler just to allow the player to fail, then to make the player belive that he or she could fail when this is not really the case. The problem with failure is that failing is not rewarding, avoiding to fail is. There are a lot of games out there whose designers have failed to grasp that difference.

There are all kinds of failures in a game. If the player, in a calm moment tries to push a button to call an elevator, but misses and nothing happens is a minor failure. If a player misses a jump and falls into the flow of molten lava below (we all know the abundance of these kind of environments) and die, the it is a fatal failure. The worst kind of failure, that I'll call catastrophic, are failures that makes it impossible to finish the game. For instance, if you did not pick up that key in the first scene, 20 hours ago, then you can't get through the door in scene 64, and there is no way to get back to the first scene. Repetitive failure will make the failure more severe, for instance, if it takes the player more in the elevator button example a full five minutes before he or she manage to call the elevator, then the aggregation of those failures will be much worse than a single failed jump in to the lava.

It might be important to add that when I talk about failure, I talk about player failure. It is a failure that the player could have avoided if he or she would have been more skilled, more perceptive or just plain more lucky. Since it is a player failure, it means that the player is most likely to acknowledge that it was he or she who failed, and being inadequate is never fun.

Each failure comes with some kind of cost. Most commonly this is the cost of the additional time spent making new attempts. This a greatly underestimated cost. Trying to do the same thing over and over again quickly becomes boring and the game loses its entertainment value. The time spent between each new attempt is even more important. If the player has to reload the level, pass 3 minutes of easy obstacles every time before he or she can make an attempt at the difficult part, then each failure will cost him or her three minutes of entertainment and only award him or her with frustration. Some people find great enjoyment in overcoming such a great obstacle, but to me, who's just looking for a quick fix of relaxing entertainment after work, the prospect of trying to make a difficult jump over a lava stream just sounds too much like a duller version of work. In fact, this is painfully similar to Dante's story about a man's punishment in hell where the man had to push a boulder up a hill for eternity (note that this was supposed to be a description of hell, not one of a man having a good time).

The bottom line is that continuous failure is not fun or entertaining, and as long as game designers fail to understand this and work to minimize it, were going to have dissatisfied customers.

I'm right handed

Now there's a confession! Well, I, like most humans, am right handed. That means that when it comes to tasks that require either strength or precision, my right hand is the hand of choice. I've been playing Secret Weapons over Normandy (on the XBox), an arcade WWII air combat game. This game comes with one controller setup. It puts pitch and roll on the left analogue stick of the controller, leaving the right side in control of the throttle. The player's primary means of controlling the airplane he or she is flying is by adjusting the pitch and roll of the aircraft. Since this is a game about fighting aircrafts, the core gameplay element is trying to aim your aircraft towards the target that you want to destroy, preferably while avoiding the terrain and enemy fire. This requires some motor skills and precision, and all of that is put on the players left thumb.

There is probably a little more thought in this than you might think at first. The game requires you to switch target and fire your secondary weapon with your right hand. The designer probably thought about that and decided that you would not want to remove your thumb from the aiming when you wanted to fire. This is probably true and if had my will, I'd move the secondary fire to the left trigger and the switch the controls of the left and right thumb stick.

And why can't I? Most game engines separate the reading of the input device from the control code and have a translation module inbetween. This makes a lot of sense from an engineering point of view, and it should be easy to add even if your game engine currently does not have this separation. This design also makes it easy to create different control schemes, in fact, there's nothing preventing you from allowing the player to create his or her own controller setup. Letting the player select the most suitable controller setup for him or her removes the responsibility of the designer to perform the impossible art of creating a controller setup that suits everyone. You would not have to choose between making the controller left or right handed, and it would also allow for more exotic demands like those of people who do not have complete mobility in their hands and fingers or may have lost a finger.

Saving

Saving has always been an infected issue in game design. I used to believe that not allowing the player to save the game whenever he or she wanted was a serious mistake. I have since come to realize that having fixed save points that you need to reach adds an additional excitement and challenge to a game and stops you from slowing down your progress by saving all the time.

Now, having said that, there are numerous ways to use save points in a bad way. As an example, I'll use "Prince of Persia, Two Thrones" (XBox version if there is any difference). In Thrones, you have two kinds of save points, the hard save point (my terminology) that allows you to save the game to disc, and the soft save point (my termonology again), which allows you to restart from that point if you die as long as you don't turn off the console. I love the new Prince of Persia games, especially "Sands of Time" was brilliant, yet they are far from free from serious flaws.

I got stuck in Thrones and have quit playing it, and I think it is very sad, because I enjoyed that game a lot. So what happened was that I reached this hard save point and consequently saved the game. First thing after that save point is a long chariot race. Chariot races are a minigame in Thrones that has little to do with the actual game. This, the second one in the game, is particular long and difficult, and there are a lot of opportunities for fatal mistakes. I've manage to complete the chariot race twice, and I've tried many more times than that. You reach a a soft save point once you finished the chariot race. Then, immediately, there's a boss fight, and a difficult one at that.

The problem here is that whenever a player have managed to get by a particularly difficult part of the game, he or she should be allowed to save. They should also be allowed to save right before a difficult part. This is because losing progress is not entertaining, and doing things over and over again isn't either. These are strong arguments that there should be a hard save point between the chariot race and the boss fight.

Now, suppose that a casual gamer's gaming sessions last between 30 and 60 minutes. This means that if your game should be easily enjoyable by casual gamers, then they should be able to make significant progress in those 30 to 60 minutes, progress that will not be lost to the next gaming session. Considering that most gaming sessions probably aren't exactly 30 or 60 minutes in time, but vary from 10-15 minutes to a couple of hours, the rule of thumb should be probably be that you should be able to make significant progress in 10-15 minutes and that this progress should be possible to save. Also note that this isn't 10-15 minutes if perfect play and continuous progress, but that the player might well fail a couple of time in the process.

Given this, is it reasonable that it took me about two hours of frustration to succeed with the chariot race in Thrones the first time I tried it? How many other players got stuck there?

How I judge something to be a design flaw

Millions and millions of people play and enjoy games. I will not pretend that I know what everyone would like best. Realizing that this is all subjective, I decided to be subjective too. Every suggestion I will post in this blog, will be based solely on what would improve my experience of the game in question. I am prepared, and willing, to take a discussion about any suggestions I make. You might have a better one, or you are able to point out flaws in my argument. That is all fine, and I will listen, and you might even change my opinion, but before you start arguing, remember that this is all about what I would enjoy more, and that, is not necessarily the same thing as what you would enjoy more.

What is a casual and a hard core gamer?

There is a lot of talk about casual and hard core gamers in the computer games industry. The hard core gamers are people who take their gaming very seriously. They spend a lot of time honing their skills and like to compete and compare with others. For them, games is almost more than a hobby, it's aching to a way of life. As a contrast, the casual gamer plays enjoys playing games once in a while and uses games as an alternative, among many others, for entertainment and enjoyment. Understanding the difference between these two types of gamers is key to understanding many design decisions. A hard core gamer would find much enjoyment in spending hours honing hundreds of a second of his or her lap time around an F1 circuit, while this would have little appeal to a casual gamer who, to begin with, probably don't even have hours to spend on a game at any single gaming session.

As you might expect, hard core gamers make up a smaller part of the over all game audience. Hence you'd be tempted to think that most games would be geared towards the casual gamer. However, things are a bit more complicated than that. Much of the industry is made up of hard core gamers (after all, if you make games your career, then you'd really have to like them, wouldn't you?). When your trying to decided if something is fun, you usually use yourself as a frame of reference. To make matters worse for the casual gamers, most of the gaming press is written by hard core gamers, and most gaming communities on the Internet are run by hard core gamers. This imbalances the power between the casual and the hard core gamers to the hard core gamers' advantage. This results in a lot of games having elements that are not particularly suited for casual gamers, and it are those things that this blog aims to point out.

What is entertainment in the context of computer games?

The reason I play computer games is to be entertained. It is an alternative to reading a book or watching TV. As such, it helps me to relax and to forget about my every day worries for a while. The game cannot be too stressful or give rise to too much worries by itself in order for this to work. Of course, games generally depict very worrisome and stressful situations (wars for instance), but they seldom do this in a way that put that burden on the player. Instead, the are other, quite different things, that causes games to lose their function as entertainment.

All games, at their core, have a more or less abstract gameplay mechanics, and many of them also have a story that acts as a frame of reference to the game. When I play a game, I do this because I appreciate both the gameplay mechanics and the the story. Unfortunately, many games contains elements that gets in the way of the core of the game. These things would often be fairly easy to fix, as I will show on this blog.