Wall of Text time kiddies. Brace for impact in 5…4…3…the one before 3…1…

Spotted a link on the Codex to a rather controversial piece Jeff Vogel posted up on his blog recently.

Well, when I say controversial, I mean most of the hardcore Codex crew immediately imploded with rage. The general response is “OMG, selling out to the casuals/mainstream! Spit spit spit!”. They’re a whimsical, fun-loving bunch, eh?

Anyway, Jeff’s point was that he believes that, as a game developer, you should make your game easy. Well, that’s the way the title makes it sound, but it’s phrased provocatively for effect. What he is actually saying is this :

A sub-optimal character played by a sub-optimal player should be able to complete your game on ‘Normal’ without dying much, if at all.

I half agree with that, actually. Before anyone starts lighting their torches and gathering a mob, let me discuss why. I don’t quite agree with the way he’s phrased it, but that is more a matter of dealing with conventions and terminology than anything else.

Firstly, lets discuss ‘Normal’ difficulty, shall we? It needs to be examined because there is a fundamental disconnect between what designers mean by ‘Normal’ and what gamers think of as ‘Normal’ difficulty. Normal difficulty for most game designers is what they think the average player of their games will find comfortably challenging. Not punishing, not a cakewalk, but moderately challenging.

Now, what do you think a gamer sees when he reads ‘normal’ difficulty? If you said ‘what I personally would find moderately challenging’ you guessed right! You win the prize, well done!

You’ve realized the obvious problem there, right? The player is going to feel unsatisfied by this ‘Normal’ difficulty in direct proportion to how much they differ from the statistical average. Now, let us return to our friend, the hardcore gamer. Take a moment to consider where such a person sits on the range of player skill levels. Yeessirrree, right at the far end, somewhere in the ‘expert’ range level.

Have you noticed how games are too easy these days? I have. It’s weird, this feeling of modern games being easy continues to grow as my experience playing them steadily climbs to over a decade and a half. An odd coincidence, don’t you think?

I mean, I play Dragon Age on ‘Hard’ difficulty and it feels just right to me. Not actually hard, the number of times I’ve died in the game I can count on one hand. But the ‘boss’ fights are challenging enough to ensure that I can’t do them on autopilot, that I need to use health potions and tactics and suchlike.

But this is ‘Hard’ difficulty I’m playing on, not ‘Normal’, even though it feels like ‘Normal’ difficulty to me. Clearly, this is because modern developers are sell-outs catering to the mainstream and can’t be bothered to provide me the same challenge as those games I vaguely remember from my ill-spent youth. Game designers have changed man, they’ve totally changed, and it’s so lame.

So the point I was making there should be obvious by now, as I am a total master of subtlety, no? If you’re a hardcore gamer, chances are your views on the issue are skewed just a bit and you should probably keep this firmly in mind. Since most people are the very yardstick they use to judge things against, the easiest conclusion to leap to is that the world is changing around them, instead of it being they themselves who are different (why, back in my day kids had it tougher, let me tell you sonny!). Let me be clear, I do believe that games are generally becoming easier. But the perception of this shift is being magnified by the fact that year-by-year I drift further and further away from the statistical norm of gamers.

So, returning to ‘Normal’ difficulty. If it isn’t clear by now, calling it ‘Normal’ difficulty is a silly idea, driven by a lack of understanding by game designers about the psychology at work around their naming choice. You should name it based around expected player experience in the genre, with complete descriptions elaborating on that. ‘New to RPGs’, ‘Some Experience with RPGs’, ‘Comfortable with RPGs’, ‘Veteran RPGer’, ‘RPG 9th level Black Belt Master’, that kind of thing.

Now if becomes much clearer to the player which level they should be playing at, and much clearer to designers how they should structure their challenge levels. Designers can build their games keeping in mind that the people who consider themselves ‘veterans’ or ‘masters’ of a genre are the ones who most crave serious challenge, who won’t have trouble keeping track of all the variables at work, while the ones who are starting out generally want a more gentle introduction as they learn the ropes. Now, if Jeff Vogel were to make the statement that the ‘Some Experience with RPGs’ level shouldn’t be particularly punishing to your sub-optimal players, your hardcore fanatic can read his statement without smoke coming out his ears. We hope. You never know with these guys. They’re pretty flammable. I keep a few in my basement in case the power trips and I need to do some cooking.

Before we leave the discussion on ‘Normal’ difficulty, it should be noted that, while hardcore RPGers sit on the expert end of the scale, chances are good that the game developers themselves are total masters of their own system. They’ve built it, they’ve played it for years, they know the intricacies. There is a very real danger that the developer’s perception of how hard their game is, is skewed. We saw this recently in the AoD combat alpha test. The general report from the first round by testers, including myself, was ‘dude, super punishing and frustrating’. Yet the ITS team could successfully and repeatedly overcome the combat challenges. Unsurprising. Luckily, they could use this feedback to adjust the system to a level their players find comfortable. The lesson to take away there is that, if you’re going to stick with the ‘Easy/Normal/Hard’ difficulty naming convention, you need to realize that what a developer considers ‘Normal’ should probably be the ‘Hard’ setting.

The other thing I wanted to talk about in regards to Jeff’s statement was about player death. Honestly, I believe there is a fine line there. I don’t think that seeing the reload screen every 10 minutes is particularly awesome. But it needs to be a palpable threat otherwise you lose all sense of challenge because you can beat fights while watching TV or eating dinner. The trick is to try to manage what live human GMs do in Pen and Paper roleplaying. You see, actual player death in PnP is fairly rare, too. My characters died only a handful of times in the nearly a decade that I played almost daily. Yet I had both fun and experienced challenge during those sessions. Howso?

Firstly, death in PnP is just about the ultimate punishment, not the first line. There were many ways to gradually wear away at a player, even if it is just forcing him to expend more of his resources to survive an encounter, leaving him weaker for later encounters. This was the one I most commonly faced, as a wizard character. Which spells to cast, and when, because burning everything I had in one battle meant I had nothing left for later. I learned to be frugal.

The modern trend for games to restore a character to full health/magic after a fight, and to make healing potions abundant, is the primary culprit in weakening the effectiveness of these forms of punishment in computer games. Who cares if you lose half your health in a battle, wait 5 minutes and you’re ready to go. Or drink a healing potion, you’ve lost count of how many you’re carrying, anyway. When your character resources are scarce then, ironically, the game designer has a greater range of ways to punish poor player decisions without resorting to player death. Without this, designers are left with players either coming out of combat in perfect condition or dead. Which means they end up dead a lot more, which in turn means that they hit reload a lot. And everyone loves watching loading screens, am I right?

So I agree with Vogel in that sense too. During normal gameplay, even for your sub-optimal players, you should rarely see a death screen. I’d much prefer a gradual loss of resources which allowed a player to adjust his play style to something more conservative, to play smarter. A gradual failure feedback mechanism instead of a sudden, sharp end. Prince of Persia, the Sands of Time was a great example of this. There were a vast number of opportunities for you to get the prince dead, failing most jumps would result in him plummeting to his ‘death’.

But, and this is the genius of their design, that is forgetting about the titular Sands of Time. Using stored sand, the prince can unwind his mistakes, essentially giving him another try without actually forcing him to reload from the beginning of the level. So you didn’t actually die, you simply used up some of your sand resource. The sand was limited of course, you could run out, and you’d begin to play more cautiously as you neared empty, but it worked well to create a gradual failure mechanic instead of a binary, alive/dead one. As the game progressed the challenges got harder but you gained the ability to store up a bit more sand, in the same way that RPG characters gain more health but face more ways to lose it quickly at the hands, fangs and blades of enemies or traps. (There was also a neat trade-off in the fact that sand powered other special abilities so you had to choose between your super powers and your safety net, but we won’t get into that.)

So in PnP death is less common. But there is another aspect. In live roleplaying, you have a GM. And one thing a good GM learns is how to ‘fudge the numbers’ occasionally to prevent player death. You can’t do it all the time, but most GMs will, at some point, change things to keep the party from dying when a run of bad luck leaves them unexpectedly tottering on the brink. A complete party wipe just isn’t a satisfying conclusion to months of adventure, most of the time. GMs will often think of ways out for the players, things like the enemy capturing them and taking them to their camp, giving players a chance to fight their way out. The only game I’ve ever see do anything even close to that is how the Gothic games have human opponents knock the character out and take some of their gear instead of slaughtering them outright.

But, returning to the idea of ‘fudging the numbers’, some players will instinctively hate the idea of anything like ‘level scaling’. Well, I think they’re wrong. The problem isn’t that concept of adjusting the game to the capabilities of the player, it’s the way it has been presented in games like Oblivion, slapping the player in the face with how artificial it is. It has to be done cunningly, as a human GM would. The best example of how it is possible to do this well is Left4Dead, by Valve. Smart chaps, Valve.

That game has an ‘AI Director’ running things in the background, acting like a human GM. It analyzes how the players are doing, altering the challenge level they face gradually to keep things exciting. It doesn’t do this in a crude, obvious way. Zombies are spawned in their dozens regardless, it’s hard to tell as you’re playing that the horde is 20% larger than it was previously, or that there are 30% more special zombie encounters this time. It is also more cunning than simply creating a global increase in enemy difficulty. As any good designer knows, in order for a game to be fun you have to mix difficult challenges with easier ones in order to create a fun rhythm, an ebb and flow to the action. Keeping encounter difficulty uniform results in boredom. But the AI director is again adjusting this mix, throwing in more high difficulty spikes for experienced players. It’s very clever and I am quite keen on L4D2, where the director can not only do the above but can actually change the layout of levels, even the weather. Valve have done something very clever with this series and I really think more games should emulate that design. It’s a wonderful use for AI that makes you ask the question “Why haven’t more designers thought to use global AI managers in games outside the strategy genre?”

So, to summarize, I agree with Jeff, sorta. We need to better categorize difficultly levels to match gamers with the level they will find most satisfying, understanding what drives the different types of player. We also need to understand how our design decisions ripple throughout our entire design. In order to return death-as-a-punishment to its rightful place as the most feared (and rare) punishment you can inflict, we need to make design decisions that allow for gradual, accumulating punishments for a player within the game context, instead of outside it, in the meta-layer of menus and loading screens and quicksave slots.

Madcap Adventures is what I’ve decided to call these comics. If I ever do enough to make them worthy of an archive I’ll put them up under that name.

I’m playing with art styles, colour vs no colour etc. I’m trying to find a style that feels most comfortable while being quick to draw. I’m a man with a lot of hobbies and side-project, you’d be surprised at how long it can take to do these comics, shoddy though they look. So I’m trying to find a style which retains a clearly readable comic style while minimizing the time I actually have to spend getting an idea down. I think I’ll probably stick to the black and white, sketchy style, minimal shading and whatnot. Colour takes a fair amount of time.

Anyway, enjoy.

(For those who don’t get it, the new Twilight movie opens in cinemas soon. God help boyfriends everywhere. I nearly didn’t survive being dragged to the last one by my ex. Singledom has its advantages.)

I suppose I should have added an explanation of this aye?

Well, it’s a Bane. A Bane is essentially the memory of a strong emotion, imprinted into the ambient magical field and thus granted a semblance of life and will. Banes do not originate from a single individual, rather they require the accumulated emotion of many individuals to form, and generally do so only over a lengthy period of time. Banes have been known to arise in the sites of major battles, or in places where great tragedies occurred.

The interesting thing about a Bane, from a both a player and designer’s point of view, is that it doesn’t follow the typical cRPG design philosophy for “monsters”. Banes aren’t things you can defeat with force, you see.

I talked about this a bit in my Legendary post, how breaking everything down into numbers has robbed a lot of fantasy of its genuine sense of, well, fantasy. It’s all about whether your numbers are higher than your opponent’s numbers, isn’t it? Your damage output vs hitpoint ratio, that type of thing.

Well, Perseus didn’t go into the Medusa cave contemplating whether he had enough hit points for the encounter. His primary concern was how to deal with the unique abilities of his foe, abilities which required thought and planning to deal with, not “more experience points/level ups”.

Banes are kinda like that. You can’t just stab them, you can’t just blast them with magic. They’re an emotion, a taint that permeates the rock, the soil, the very air in a place. Most of the time you won’t even see them; if you’re perceptive you might notice their effects on those around you, how that taint creeps into the mind and souls of your friends and enemies, infecting them and feeding the Bane in the process.

If they manifest physically and if you can destroy that manifestation, you’ve achieved little beyond a temporary reprieve while the energies coalesce again. To destroy a Bane you need to figure out how to cleanse the area of it, you need to trace it to its root cause, seek out its heart. Anything else is simply stalling for time as the Bane continues to grow. In some areas, the only way that people have found to counter a growing Bane has been to abandon the land entirely, move away so as to deprive it of new minds to feed on, leaving it to slowly fade away over time.

It probably says something about human nature that Banes only form from negative emotion, the large scale of emotional energy needed to form one seems to be found only in situations of hate, pain and suffering, never love or joy.

(If this sounds a bit like the plot of The Grudge, well, nyah to you I really don’t know why the protagonist had such a hard time dealing with that ghost girl, it was clear she was just searching for her hairbrush.)

You may have already seen this, it’s pretty amusing.

Well done, you brave crusaders of the internet. You sure showed them.

Which reminds me of another argument I see fairly commonly online, one that I find quite entertaining. The argument goes “It is stupid trying to stop piracy, as the type of person who pirates every game wouldn’t buy games anyway!”

Riiiiight. That is so hopelessly ignorant of basic human nature that I struggle to contain my amusement. That type of hardcore pirate is as hopelessly addicted to games as I am. The idea that, should games suddenly become impossible to pirate, these types would calmly wash their hands of the hobby that they had devoted so much of their free time to…well, it’s as stupid as believing that the type of person who is so passionate about Call of Duty : MW2 that they bother to take part in an online boycott won’t be playing it when it gets released.

Sure, they wouldn’t buy every game that they would have otherwise pirated, that is impossibly expensive. But you can be pretty damn certain that they would buy some of them.

And all those guys who signed the “We hate the Diablo 3 art direction” petition? Yeah, guess what they will be doing on day 1 of D3′s release?

Listening to feedback is important. Understanding human nature? Vastly more important.

Doodles!

I’ve written about Failure before on this blog, but the general consensus in the comments was “yeah, but it’s easy for people like Michael Jordan to say that, the man was born with so much talent!”

Let’s address that for a second. Firstly, you need to keep in mind that someone who has achieved the dizzy heights of success is always going to look like they were “born talented”, in hindsight. But that’s just hindsight, we see these people’s achievements and think that they have to have stood out from the crowd for their entire lives. What is the reality?

Consider Abraham Lincoln. A list of Abraham Lincoln’s Failures:

- Lost job, 1832
- Defeated for legislature, 1832
- Failed in business, 1833
- Elected to legislature, 1834
- Sweetheart (Ann Rutledge) died, 1835
- Had nervous breakdown, 1836
- Defeated for Speaker, 1838
- Defeated for nomination for Congress, 1843
- Elected to Congress, 1846
- Lost renomination, 1848
- Rejected for Land Officer, 1849
- Defeated for Senate, 1854
- Defeated for nomination for Vice-President, 1856
- Again defeated for Senate, 1858
- Elected President, 1860

That is 8 defeats in government, count them. 8. Not including being fired, failing in business, and having a nervous breakdown. If you’d have happened to come across the man in 1843, or even 1854, would it have seemed likely that he would stand out in history as one of the greatest statesmen ever? In fact, ask yourself an even more meaningful question : If that was you, at which point would the accumulated failures and disappointment cause you to give up, to declare that you should just accept your lot in life, that it “wasn’t meant to be”?

Once you start investigating, a pattern begins to emerge that is somewhat surprising. The greatest people don’t seem to just rise naturally to the top very often. Many seem to experience even more failure than the average person.

I’ve talked about the 10,000 hours of practice principle before as well. Kris asked the question “what about intelligence?”. I’ve been reading Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘Outliers’ (highly recommend it) and it addresses that aspect in the book. Basically, researchers have found intelligence to be significant as a threshold, nothing more. There appear to be 4 significant ‘tiers’ of intelligence. Mentally disabled, average, bright and genius. If you meet the minimum requirements for the genius tier, for example, that is all that really matters in terms of how it affects your success in life. A man with a 180 IQ isn’t more likely to succeed than a man with a 140 IQ. Being intelligent definitely helps, but only to a degree. Once you meet the “minimum requirements” for some endeavor, other factors become vastly more important.

There have actually been studies conducted on this. A group of candidates were tracked through their lives. These were in the top 99th percentile of the top 99th percentile, all frighteningly intelligent, geniuses amongst geniuses. In their younger years, they excelled at everything, easily, and it was predicted that they would be the movers and shakers of their generation. They weren’t. In fact, it was later shown that if they have taken a completely random selection of students, that random selection would have achieved almost as much success, on average, as the hand-picked geniuses. Some of the geniuses did well enough, but none were the type of shooting stars that researchers had expected them to be.

It makes the most intuitive sense for us to think that the people in the top 1% of success must have been born with some rare spark, some innate thing which drove their success. But the data just doesn’t support this belief. In fact, 2 candidates that had been rejected from the gifted group I mentioned above for not having high enough IQs went on to be Nobel laureates.

Coming back to the idea of the 10,000 hours of practice, if our intuitive idea of “innate talent” were true then there would be candidates in these studies who rose to the top with less effort than the 10,000 hours, and some who never reached the top despite putting in those 10,000 hours, representing people who naturally “had it” more than others and some who were just never going to make it due to a compelete lack of “it”. But they couldn’t find any. Everyone who’d put in 10,000 hours of real, hard practice was better than the ones who’d put in 7,000. They were forced to conclude that once you had met the minimum threshold required to be able to perform the activity (sport, musical instrument, writing, whatever), it was practice and perseverance that made the difference. I won’t claim that someone who is completely tone deaf will ever master the guitar, or a midget will triumph in pro basketball. But if you have the basic ability and are willing to put in the time, then it seems to be that it is literally just a matter of time.

There was another section of the book which was interesting. Researchers had noticed that 70% of all elite Canadian hockey players were born in the first 6 months of the year, with 40% being born in the first 3 months. In some rosters it was as high as 65% born in the first 3 months of the year.

Why was this? Because the eligibility cut-off date for age-class hockey is Jan 1. If you have a boy born in January, and another born in November, both of them can be 4 years old but the first has almost a full year’s physical development on the second. When try-outs come, he’s just bigger and so outperforms the others. Which means he gets put into the better training courses, the extra training for the “gifted”, he gets to play in more games. And, by the time he’s in his teens, he’s seen vastly more practice than the kid who was born in November. It becomes self-fulfilling.

And this pattern can be seen around the world, in just about every major field of sport. If it were really some magical spark, some lighting that just strikes at random, why does that extra practice make such a profound difference?

And they found this with other types of endeavors. Poor kids tend to struggle more in school, but they found that it’s overwhelmingly due to the lesser opportunities outside of school for those kids. Middle class kids do extra lessons, have books around the house, have parents who are more involved (on average), get exposed to so much more in their non-school lives. The poor kids perform around the same in the classroom but the cumulative advantage of being born in the middle class begins to overwhelm them. They fall behind, and because they fall behind they get less opportunities, and so they fall behind some more.

The difference that putting in the extra practice makes is profound. So profound, in fact, that in hindsight it can mean the difference between people saying you were born talented, and not.

The Beatles got an opportunity to play in Hamburg, long before they were famous. They’d travel over there and play in strip joints. They played 8 hours a day, 7 days a week. By the end they’d totaled 270 nights in a year and a half. They’d performed live together 1200 times by 1964, their first big success. That’s more times on stage than most bands play together their entire lives.

I’ll leave you with these. Notice the pattern? Notice the prodigies who simply float up to the top of their fields with ease, having been considered talented at it their whole lives? No?

These people fail and they fail and they work and they believe in themselves, and eventually the rest of the world believes too. It is a common pattern, far more so than any notion of inborn talent. Rowling’s speech is especially interesting. Notice how she only achieves her full capabilities when stripped of any excuses, when shocked out of her comfort zone? How it forces her to focus on what really matters to her?

( Sometimes I think a comfortable existence is as much a curse as a blessing. Too easy to drift along. I’d not want to give mine up, I’m as afraid of losing that comfort as anyone else is! But I’m not sure it’s a really a good thing. )

Turns out, the female brain doesn’t respond to video games the same way as a man’s does (women, they always have to be contrary, amiright lads?). Specifically, the parts of the brain that generates feelings of reward is more activated in men than in women during gameplay.

Which could explain why, when you try showing your girlfriend some cool new video game, most of them give you that “yes dear, I’ll humor you for a bit before going and watching some TV” smile. It also explains why LAN parties tend to be total sausage-fests. Men are about 2-3 times more likely to feel “hooked” on video games.

It is important to note, however, that the game they performed this experiment with involved “capturing territory”, a traditionally masculine pursuit. Perhaps the results would change if they redesigned their test game?

I’d suggest a game where clicking on the little balls in time moved a credit card closer to a shopping mall. I think that would change up the results a fair bit.

Disturbing news friends, disturbing news. Apparently, a Hooters restaurant is opening not 10 minutes from where I work!

Foul Play

Shocking!

I don’t know about the rest of you, but for me, as a sensitive, new-age male, the opening of an institute designed solely around exploiting the looks of pretty young women horrifies me!

I mean, can you imagine the plight of these girls? Through no fault of their own, they were born winners of the genetic lottery, growing to have the kind of physiques that would allow them to earn a not-insignificant wage performing the most trivial of tasks, while all of their peers earn their livings as soul-destroying office drones! Posing for photos, standing and smiling next to cars at trade show, serving fried chicken in restaurants! The horror! These poor creatures, taken advantage of in that way!

Why, this whole situation is so disgusting that I’d…I’d…I’d burn a bra in outrage! Yes, that’s what I’d do, if I was wearing one. (That’s only for Saturday nights, down behind the bar, and you’d have to call me by ‘Susan’ if you ran into me.)

Durban guys! We must rally to support of these young women and their struggle! The only decent thing to do is go down there right now and give them the most generous tips we can, so that they can afford to keep themselves in nice clothes and put themselves through higher education without taking on the back-breaking bank loans that the less endowed have to endure!

So, lads. Who feels like some some chicken wings?

Spotted this article link on Rampant Coyote’s blog about why you don’t want to work in the games industry :

Bruce on Games : You don’t want to work in the video game industry

Some good points there, especially the parts about how every enthusiast wants to be a “game designer”. You see that mindset fairly often in the indie scene, some eager youth has a design document and “just needs some artists and programmers to make their game, it’s a guaranteed hit, they’ll all share the profits evenly!”. Yeah, uh-huh.

Truth of the matter is that “game designer” is the job almost everyone wants, but that requires the least practical skill (which is much rarer). It’s a pipe dream to imagine that your personal ideas are so amazing, creative and revolutionary that you can get away with only contributing “ideas/design” to the mix when everyone else is slaving over a compiler/3D Studio Max for 3-5 years. At best you will spend a couple of months doing design in the beginning and then “tweak” occasionally. For the rest of the time, either you contribute something practical or you are dead weight, plain and simple.

Anyway, coming back to the article, some gamers with stars in their eyes may find it a little enlightening, at least. I learned about most of this stuff many years ago, in fact it drove my decision to become “an indie” (aka to get another job and try make games in my personal time). I was in my final year of University and I had the application forms for I-Imagine, SA’s only “real” game development house at the time, as well as a few overseas companies. I had the skills they required, but I decided not to apply, based on what I’d read about the inner-workings of the industry. Working in a sweatshop has never been an ambition of mine.

As the article in that link indicates, working in the games industry is generally going to lead to a lower quality of life and earnings than in the rest of IT for 95% of game developers. There are a few rock star devs and a whole whack-load of drones. In fact, even as an indie game dev your QoL will probably be a fair bit lower. The only reason I’d be willing to make that kind of sacrifice is if I could work on my own ideas and designs, for the creative fulfilment that would bring me. Because, just like every other hardcore gamer, I want to be a game designer! If all I wanted was to program I’d stick to the mainstream, there are plenty of creative programming challenges to be had there. If all I wanted to do was write, I’d write a novel. (I will probably write a novel, one day. Game dev first. )

So that’s why I went indie. Because I realised that if I wanted to be a designer and work on my own designs, I’d probably need to do the rest of the work too. It’s really tough, but it could be worse. I mean, I could be working on Madden clones in an EA sweatshop, ugh.