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Monthly Archives: May 2012
The Subjective & Objective in Video Games
05/24/2012 – 12:19 am
Can we all agree that when we type things into the internet, that the purpose for doing so is that we hope that the stuff we typed is of some kind of value to others? Slashdot has their “Insightful/Informative/Funny/Interesting”-based ratings system; things which are none of those are buried. One of the things that should always get “buried” is a comment that’s nothing but pure, subjective opinion.
A lot of people might find that strange coming from me, because a lot of people mistake me for “saying my opinion” a lot on the internet. While I certainly do that from time to time, it will almost always be in passing, as a bit of an aside to a larger comment that’s actually about something of substance. I have long understood that nobody cares what my, or anyone else’s opinion is.
The recent Diablo 3 situation is a good example. I wrote my article on it months ago during the beta, but it recently got a lot of attention due to someone posting about it on reddit. At about the same time I also was on a particularly critical episode of Roguelike Radio wherein Diablo 3 was thoroughly throttled. In both cases, there was a predictable amount of backlash. People were upset, thinking that I was saying Diablo 3 is “no good”. Actually, I’ve never said that the program isn’t “good”.
What I have said is that it lacks ambiguous decision-making, that it lacks a loss condition, that there is far too much noise in the system for it to be balanced or meaningful. These are not subjective statements, they are attempts at objective observations about the nature of that program. read more
On “Execution”
05/21/2012 – 4:17 pm
This short article is based on the premise that the most fundamental aspect of a game is the decision-making; specifically, ambiguous decisions. I created this chart, which I have published now at Gamasutra and inside my upcoming book, which is the foundation of this article’s premise.
So, I call an interactive system a puzzle if it has a problem that must be solved. If there is an element of competition, then I call it a contest. And finally, if you add ambiguous decisions, it becomes a game. This is, of course, a proposed definition. If you want to know more about this classification system, please read my article What Makes a Game on Gamasutra.
On to the topic of the day: execution.
Firstly, what is “execution”? Like most words, it has several meanings, but the meaning I wish to talk about could be described as “obstacles between yourself and putting information into the system”. The most obvious example would be complicated button inputs in a fighting game; stuff like “forward, down, quarter circle back to forward, then all three punches”. This is a situation where there was an obstacle put between the player and input intentionally.
Now, in contests, this type of execution makes a lot of sense. The difference between the winner and the loser of a push-up contest, a game of whack-a-mole,or a game of Dance Dance Revolution is the person who executed better – either due to having more strength, dexterity, or memorized patterns than the other person. Contests are not won by “he who made the better decisions”; contests are a raw measurement of something.
Games should be about the decision regarding whether or not to take a specific action. Being able to even perform the action should, ideally, be a given.
Design Process for AURO’s Skill Redesign
05/14/2012 – 5:37 pm
We’re reaching the part of development now where it’s really make-or-break time for our game’s design.
There has always been a very low level core philosophy about AURO. It’s one of the first things I laid out for the game, and it has remained consistent. While it is useful in always giving me a general design goal, it is too low level to actually guide the more specific game design decisions.
Basically, the process of designing this game exists almost totally in the world of the Disciplines system. If the Disciplines are fantastic, the game will be fantastic. If the Disciplines are weak, then the game will be weak. This is something that I’ve been aware of since the beginning, but we’re reaching a certain point now where things have to shine.
Quickly: a lot of people who may be reading this may be unfamiliar with what AURO is. Essentially, it is a single player, turn-based randomly generated dungeon-crawling strategy game (will be available on Windows, OSX, iOS, Android and Linux) that’s currently in alpha. Click here to learn more about it.
The Scoring System
We’ve been in a closed alpha for a few months now, and I’ve gotten some really good feedback from a few testers. I’ve also been able to dive into the code myself for the first time in my development history (I’m not a programmer, but I guess you could say I’m becoming one). This has allowed me a kind of flexibility in the “designing, implementing, testing, and redesigning” loop that I didn’t have with 100 Rogues. read more
Score in Videogames: Why No One Cares, Why They Should, And How We Can Make Them
05/09/2012 – 8:52 pm
Since I wrote my related post, “On Score“, I’ve come to a lot of new realizations about score and its strange, rocky relationship with digital games. Our history has been so rife with problems that there are many of us who believe that score is necessarily, inherently irrelevant. I know people who say that they “don’t care about score in videogames”, without even talking about a specific game. While I’m certain this is a faulty idea, I feel that I do understand why they feel that way.
Historically, videogames have done a completely awful job of implementing score systems. I’ll get into exactly why this is a bit later, but for now it should be no surprise that anyone is tempted to dismiss score outright, if they were raised in this time period with scoring systems like that in most Roguelike games or even Tetris. I can’t think of a single digital game that has a really great scoring system; probably the best ones are very early games like Galaga, but even they have issues.
It’s worthwhile to recognize that score is an abstract gameplay concept. It is not a thematic element, and it is (or at least, should be) implemented a bit differently in each game you play. To “not care about score” is similar to “not caring about position” or “not caring about resources“. These are abstract elements and whether or not you care about them will be based on what their endogenous meaning inside the system is.
Consider a sport like baseball, or football. Obviously, if you’re going to play one of these games, you’re going to care about score. Very, very few people watch a football game with no interest in knowing what the score is. If you’re going to watch a game, and not care about score, then what keeps you watching?
I’ve heard the argument that this is because those games are multiplayer. I don’t think that this is the reason, though, because actually, all score-based single-player games are technically multiplayer. You’re competing to get the new high score – a high score that has been set by another agent. That other agent may be another human, yourself, or one of those preset ones that NES games came with. You don’t play against each other at the same moment, but does that mean Golf isn’t multiplayer? read more
