Sat 1 Sep 2007
In judging the entries from Intel’s Game Demo Contest, I couldn’t help but notice how hard the games were. In fact, several of them (each different genres, styles, etc) would kill me off within the first minute of play - either because I got shot up too easily, or drove my vehicle off the side of the track to sudden doom, etc.
I kept saying, Well that sucks! And then scoring the entry accordingly…
Wondering why these amateur/indie developers felt compelled to make their games so hard, I happened across the blog of Soren Johnson (of Civ fame) where he enumerates the greatest mistakes of game design. The first one being:
Hard-core game conventions: One of the most common pitfalls for a game designer is to fear that the game is not hard enough. This fear often leads to hard-core game conventions … that only put roadblocks in the way of the mainstream gamer who is just looking to have a good time. …
Why is that? Could it be that the line between hardcore gamer and amateur/indie developer is still so blurry that they are stuck in the “creating games for myself” syndrome? Or, do they assume that by making the game hard it means it is good/fun in some way? Or, is it some kind of Dungeon Master superiority complex of wanting to “dominate” the player?
To juxtapose, Wired did a massive cover feature on Halo 3 titled “How Microsoft Labs Invented a New Science of Play”. The article outlines how Bungie and Microsoft Game Studios extensively play test the game to iron out the design kinks, remove frustrating points in play, etc. It is about testing for fun/flow, not testing for software bugs…
So, here we have the next installment in one of the best game franchise sof all time with a battery of PhDs banging on it to, in essence, make it easier - or rather, less frustrating - to the player.
Can’t argue with 4 million pre-orders!
September 1st, 2007 at 2:35 pm
I don’t really think they make the games hard on purpose. I would imagine that for some of these games, they just haven’t had enough exposure to people outside of the game devteam and haven’t gotten their difficulty adjusted accordingly.
September 1st, 2007 at 2:35 pm
Yep, testing is a crucial point. Most probably these indie dev could not afford (in time or in ressources) to have play testers. When you playtest yourself a game that you know in details, you can’t help but feel it’s too easy.
Richard Rouse III is also pointing that out in his book “Game Design: Theory & Practice”, chapter 25, on playtesting.
September 1st, 2007 at 6:28 pm
Yeah, definitely agree with Kevin and Shawn. You can easily see that in the modding - anything which is singleplayer (maps, new weapons, enemies) are generally really really hard unless a team has put it together, or testing has been done.
I don’t think it always works out for big developers though. I’ve been vainly trying to complete the original Brothers in Arms this weekend. I can’t be that bad, but a combination of the aim being rubbish (it moves a lot…), meaning point blank with no cover (flanking the enemy at 10 paces…) is needed to hit anything, and your allies like killing themselves, making death a constant companion…reload 5 here I come…
A little testing goes a long way, for sure!
September 5th, 2007 at 10:18 am
i make my games for myself, and i like easy and contemplative games!
problem avoided.
September 6th, 2007 at 7:52 pm
I think it all depends on the type of game.
One can get a lot of pleasure from a game where the aim is simply to last as long as possible without dying, and where the satisfaction comes from a gradual increase in score each time. In such games, dying quickly on the first few attempts is a natural part of the system and the game can even work perfectly well if the length of each attempt is kept very very low (more later). With a good game of this type (e.g. Tetris) people usually pick up the idea so quickly they forget those first few necessary instances of tragic ineptitude.
I’d like to give an example, to try to defend these types of initially-difficult games, of which some of your “I kept saying, Well that sucks! And then scoring the entry accordingly…” games perhaps belonged to.
One of my favourite, most enjoyable games ever is crazygame.exe (http://www.psychonoble.com/archives/reviews/8.html), a very simple title in which one must just dodge projectiles for as long as possible. The enjoyment of this game comes from how, at the start, each “go” lasts a matter of seconds (yes, literally) but, after more and more playing, the average life expectancy is increased, first to the early teens (oh my! alive for 13 seconds!) then later to the satisfying stage of being able to survive for a good 30 or more seconds each time.
The point is that this can be thought of as an extremely “difficult” game, and someone judging it in a game design competition might play for 7 seconds, die and write the title off as too hard. However, this would miss the point, as the game itself is about repeated plays over and over again, improving skills, much like a child’s cup and ball toy infuriates in its initial difficulty but offers a “how many can I get in a row?” level of satisfying challenge within a very short space of time.
I think that it’s an old-fashioned approach to game design but still one with a place in the 21st century. It’s the idea that a game may not have an official “end” but is instead all about the personal satisfaction of refining skills within a restricted framework.
Geometry Wars is a recent success story for this type of game, but where Geometry Wars gets it wrong and crazygame.exe gets it so right is in the length of time of the segments. A skilful gamer will quickly get to the point on Geometry Wars where each “good run” they attempt takes them at least 15 minutes, whereas even the very best crazygame.exe players struggle to consistently survive more than a minute. The Geometry Wars player must invest about 10 minutes each time they play just doing the easy stuff to get to the point where they are being challenged and making plays which have a meaningful effect on their chances of a new high score - suddenly a minimum “session” time is imposed of about 45 minutes, to give time for at least a couple of unhindered attempts at “good runs”.
My point is that if I play a game and die immediately my reaction is usually not “that’s too hard, how annoying”, it’s a deduction that I’m playing a skill-refining game and, what’s more, I could be playing one of the good ones, where the session lengths are short.
Admittedly, all of this falls down for 95% of commercial titles which follow careful plot/gameplay progressions and in which a death 20 seconds into the game would be considered a failing on the designers’ part, but it’s a model of game design particularly suited to casual/indie titles because of the modest demands on content creation while still offering an enjoyable (and likely very compulsive/addictive) experience.
I would be furious to get “Game Over” just 2 minutes into Shadow of the Colossus, but when it happened on Ikaruga I was actually very happy, one might even say “encouraged”. (A 1-credit run on Ikaruga typically lasts 20 minutes, and the game can be split naturally into single level segments of 3~5 minutes.)
Like the cup and ball, the difficult but rewarding repetition videogame does, I believe, have a wider appeal than the environment-based modern game design approach gives it credit for.
September 13th, 2007 at 10:16 pm
Failure is part of learning, but failure without learning is frustrating. Making games too hard is everyone’s rookie mistake, but the thing that makes it so hard is often bad feedback. If you fail and you knew what went wrong, its ok because its your own fault and you can do something different. If you fail because…hell, why DID I lose?…thats not fun.
I give those a few tries then move on.
In the case of inbred designs that have not been exposed outside the dev team circle, the team can know too much. The player only knows whats in the box.