I’ll preface this post with a quote from a wise, influential sage: “It’s fun to have fun, but you have to know how.” My argument is that modern game developers have forgotten this simple proverb. They don’t trust that their audience can discover how to have fun with a game on their own, and as a result mainstream games have lost an entire dimension of challenge.
Half-Life 2 is a good example of this, but let’s first refresh our memories of Half-Life. One of the mini-boss enemies is the Apache helicopter, an armored flying machine that’s mostly impervious to small arms fire. The easiest way to deal with it is to shoot it with rockets until it explodes; in fact, your first encounter with one is immediately after you pick up the RPG in a cliff side crag. But you aren’t handcuffed to your rockets. Its rotor and engines are actually vulnerable to pistol fire, if you are brave enough to stare it down. You could even try to air burst it with a few well-timed hand grenades. Contrast that to its HL2 analogue, the gunship. It’s only vulnerable to rockets, and there’s a convenient infinite rocket crate near every single gunship battle in the game. There is a certain technique to aiming your rockets so they can’t be shot down, but otherwise that’s all there is to fighting a gunship: shoot x3, restock at crate, repeat. Same goes for the Strider: the only interesting part about fighting one is the mad dash to the win button—erm, ammo crate, that is. (Final Citadel Strider battle excluded, that one was different and fun.)
As I said in my opening, modern games have lost a dimension of challenge. The dimension that HL2 lost is the balance of resource management, i.e. spending your rockets/cells/summonable ninja squirrels now or saving them for the next big boss battle. If there will be an infinite ninja squirrel token crate next to the mini-boss who’s only vulnerable to ninja squirrels, why even bother conserving your most potent ammo? Other games may have lost different dimensions of challenge, be it self-preservation, or directional awareness, or what have you.
That’s just one example of how modern games hold the player’s hand way too much. If you listen to the developer commentary in HL2 Episode 1 and the Orange Box, you’ll discover that they tweaked their maps to accommodate players who couldn’t or wouldn’t pay attention to their environment. This boiled down to looking up, or deducing that they were endlessly walking in a circle for 10 minutes. Around the turn of the century, video gaming got some much needed good publicity when studies reported that games helped hone spatial awareness and coordination. Can we seriously expect games to keep honing our real-life skills when developers are doing their best to remove the need to use them? Looking up is not “hard mode” for Pete’s sake! Doom 3 might have been repetitive and even a little predictable in the way its monsters popped out of every other wall, but at least it taught its players the valuable lesson: “Just because you’re looking forward doesn’t mean the monsters will conveniently appear at eye level.”
In a way, I think a lot of mainstream game development is being held hostage by the notion that games have to be art. Roger Ebert got gamers’ panties in a twist when he said that games cannot be art, and the industry started trying their darndest to prove him wrong, often at the cost of game play. I think a lot of games were designed to be “experienced” rather than “beaten,” which is to say their primary focus is just to entertain the player for 6-8 hours, rather than present challenges that the player derives pleasure from overcoming. That brings us back to my favorite quote in the world: “It’s fun to have fun, but you have to know how.” Modern games, I contend, are not designed for gamers who can walk up to a challenge and have fun conquering it; they are designed for a mainstream audience, not gamers per se, who (the developers believe) can’t have fun on their own. Well, maybe they’ll never even learn how, if developers keep it up.
The perfect hardcore game, in my opinion, is a sandbox with a goal in the middle. It’s also hard; not Nintendo-hard, but it’s a challenge that may require multiple attempts or a lot of problem solving. The worst possible game is a straight, narrow, corridor of game play, with the goal at the end, and which is consumed and subsequently discarded in 2-3 hours. STALKER and System Shock 2 stand defiantly close to the “sandbox” ideal, brutally slaying newbies yet gradually rewarding them as they master various skills; and I have a hunch that HL2:E3 and HL3 are wavering somewhere in the middle, not yet sure in which direction to fall. Modern mainstream games are not necessarily bad, but they are inching further and further toward the “narrow corridor,” as developers try to handhold players for the best “experience” rather than the best game.
Editor’s note: I’m glad to feature our first community column here on the blog. If you want your article to appear on the blog, feel free to either submit it to nog((at))deadworkers.com or post it at the forums! As always, feel free to comment here, or take it to the forums for more in depth conversation!
02/07/10
Heh.
When I saw the title, I thought it would be a rant by Spencer about handheld gaming devices…
Anyways, well written and I have to agree to some extent. I love sandbox games but sometimes it is nice know exactly where to go and to know for sure that you will somehow get the means to destroy a boss or obstacle without having to manage your resources/prepare a lot.
02/07/10
This article made me realize that when I play a new game, I want to have an experience, not a challenge. Only when I find a games mechanics fun do I want to experience a challenge afterward.
Bioshock is an example of a game I recently played only for the experience (I thought it was a fantastic game). I loved the story and the environments but I had no desire to let the game challenge me and did not enjoy the challenges from combat or navigating and liked any “handholding” I could get.
Portal (which was also a fantastic game I recently played) was I game where I liked both the experience and the challenge. I had a lot of fun playing the advanced maps and challenges even though it took many attempts to succeed and I liked pushing my own portal thinking skills as far as I could. And there are many many other games I can think of that I have looked for a challenge in.
So, if everyone was like me, then a game would always be enjoyable to me if it was an experience, but only sometimes be fun if it was a challenge.
02/07/10
As a game designer working in the industry myself, I think you’re wrong.
Yes, for a long while people have been trying to create games that fit the category of “Art.” But the mainstream titles that end up successful know not to go for this. The Tate defines Art to be “Something that has no purpose, other than itself.”
Looking at that, it would seem all games can be art. And yet, they’re not, because then they wouldn’t be games. For a game to be art, it must have no gameplay element. The closet you will get is perhaps being able to move around it. These things do exist. A couple of years ago, students ant the University of Portsmouth created a Half Life 2 mod: “Dear Esther.” This game is almost the very definition of what an “Art Game” can be. There are flaws with it, after all, it was only done with the funding of a grant that insisted there be certain types of game-like elements in the final version. So there are some initial stages that make you think like you’re in a game, mainly “where am I to go.” It is only when we get out of this objective based thinking that we can appreciate a game as a piece of art, and not anything else.
You’ve got to remember that the design of Half Life and Half Life 2 has a stark difference against other games, because it removes the inclusion of cinematic. The “tunnel” gameplay you see in Half Life is a new concept because there is never a break, never a moment where you are out of sync with what is going on in the story. HL1 is much more open than HL2 because of the technical reasons at the time. But even in your little Apache helicopter example, there’s still tunnelling going on you aren’t aware of. Why can the helicopter also be shot down by guns and other weapons? because the game is so open that you could miss out the rocket launcher. If you could only kill the Apache with the rocket launcher, but MISSED IT, you’re screwed. And though you can put that down to “the player isn’t good enough,” that’s bad game design. Because a player playing for the first time doesn’t even know it’s there. The fact that the launcher is actually made available just before the Apache fight anyway is still an example of tunnelling, as you can see the developer intends to train you up in using the weapon in the next big fight.
Half Life 2 does a much better approach through tunnelling, though it may seem like a bad one. The training process of taking one of these things down is much longer. You’re first confronted with a chopper towards the end of the Canals section of the game. You end up taking it down with the rapid firing machine gun on you’re hovercraft (which again, you are trained for when you see the same type of weapon in the control tower you use to open the dock gates)
The mind craves a better way however to take these enemies down, and for a while you see characters going about with the solution literally riding on their backs. When you finally get hold of them (after seeing a character fire one and then being killed) there is a much more satisfying feeling than if you were just given the weapon and left to your own devices. Again, the infinite ammo crates are a hint at what you’re supposed to do, because even though you are being steered more in HL2, the game still reaches choke points where players wonder what to do next.
The perfect illusion that is being created here is that the player is making their own minds up, and feeling good, or bad about their decision, even though we have lead them into making that decision. More “fun” is generated though that than forcing the player to think deeper about things that they don’t even know exist yet.
It’s all fine to rant that games are being repetitive. But just remember, you know the formula for taking down gunships because you’ve done it several times. Hell, you even did it with the commentary on. On first play basis (the first play being the most important point of contact between any game and player) The player believes they are recalling what they have already learned (in play testing, I’ve actually found that it gives people the feeling they no better than their enemy = more fun) and use that to take down their foe, even though we’ve guided them all the way.
Free will is an illusion basically, and even though you can get the feeling you’re not in control of events in a game (especially after the first few plays) I guarantee you will still be thinking on your toes, reacting to what you see in front of you, not what you know.
The next big step for games is developing on top of this sense of immersion. Games like Heavy Rain are doing this really well. We’ll know that there’s progress when games of an even greater mainstream market start to take this on board as well. The company I’m watching is Epic Games, because I think they’ve done some of the worst experiences in a game possible, but the best gameplay. Example of that? Well, the whole cover system thing of Gears of War is something that will remain a legendary and favourite element of the whole game, but the naive “choose which path to take” thing, as well as some of the most unlikable characters seen in games since the rise of the Crazy Frog obliterate it’s credibility.
02/08/10
Not what I was expecting to read, but quite interesting.
Normally I would disagree that HL2 is a “handholding” game, but after playing Minerva: Metastasis (a massive, amazingly designed mod for HL2), I actually agree. The difference between Minerva and HL2 is that I absolutely cannot get past the first 20 minutes of Minerva on hard difficulty, and I can beat the entire HL2 series on hard with little to no effort. Far from being frustrated by Minerva’s difficulty, the challenge of it makes me feel extremely rewarded when I manage to beat it. To me this shows that while a game can be enjoyable in a cinematic, non-challenging sense, I have a much better time when I can overcome challenges successfully.
However, I also think that a challenge is not the only thing a game needs to be fun. It needs to keep me interested enough that when I fail the challenges I am faced with I am motivated to try again, not to give up. Red Faction: Guerrilla is one game that made me want to give up every single time I failed or died. Whenever I would have to restart from my last checkpoint, I was frustrated because the gameplay was repetitive, unrewarding and overall lacked a decent story to back it. Thus, a game needs to reward and interest the player, not just challenge them, to be fun.
Basically what I think is that HL2 is one of the beginnings of a new genre of “movie games”. These games are easy enough that one rarely fails at them, and provide a cinematic and minimally interactive experience. I don’t have a problem with games like this. I loved the HL2 series, and have played through it multiple times. However, I recognize that challenging and difficult games are a must for gaming to remain fun. The last thing I want is for the gaming industry to turn into the new Hollywood.
02/08/10
Oh, I forgot this in my last post: Adam Foster, the creator of the Minerva mod, has some interesting stuff to say about level design, most of which I agree with. Check it out here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MINERVA_%28video_game%29#Design
Personally, I think his level design for Minerva is absolute genius.
02/11/10
I believe that what it all comes down to is a player’s personal preference. I know for myself an engaging story will occasionally take my mind off the difficulty level; challenging or easy. Although many people do not care as much for the story or characters, but rather on how much it challenges them in both a mental or physical(I mean Wii) aspect. I agree that many game developers have “dumbed down” many games and it has, in some cases, become a bunch of pretty colors. Wes had mentioned in Episode 4 that part of the game is figuring out the rules and it helps to stimulate your brain, and if the game developers take that away then games will become nothing more then glorified TV.
02/13/10
Tutorial levels are fine, but the handholding you’re referring to is appealing to the casual gamer, who just wants a fun game to play, not a challenge.
02/13/10
I am actually playing the hl2 series right now, on easy, and the gunships were not just fire, reload, restock. Two gunships were protecting eachother, and you had to run under cover to get to the infinite ammo box. However, there are missles easier to get to than the box of missles, but they are scattered around. The box is in the open so you can lose lots of health. The trade off is “do I search for missles, or do I hope to survive the trip to the box?” I ran for the box, and if I hadn’t ducked, would have had to restart back at the sewer entrance multiple chalenges ago.
???F ??F? 2 r??cs!
02/14/10
Games can be hard, but they should not be hard because it is difficult to understand how to play.
02/14/10
I think tutorials are best when they help you through the game’s early learning curve. One example is the Ratchet and Clank series: during early levels, they tell you basic stuff like “Press triangle to jump” or “Press R2 and X to throw your wrench”. However, if you don’t want to hear it, you can skip it. These tutorials are best because you can skip them if you want to figure it out on your own.
02/17/10
yeah its late bite me
Gaming has become almost childish to play. I play mainly RPGs and Final Fantasy is one of my favorites series, the older games actually required some notion of strategy to beat bosses. Now i find myself holding the X button to just beat the crap out of him.
Storyline based shooters are as simple as run duck shoot repeat. No real aiming required just don’t run out of ammo that your enemies so willingly drop.
Unlimited ammo crates, health pack every ten feet, ammo or mana potions around every corner. There is hardly any challenge to gaming anymore.
Even the hardest difficulty on a game is really just the same level minus half the health packs. The AI is a joke.
This may be more of a rant than an actual opinion but really developers need to stop thinking that were brain dead.