Should Games Just Abandon Storytelling?

Celia Wagar8 Comments

Since you believe that dissonance between story and gameplay is inevitable. Should games just abandon storytelling?

No, we just shouldn’t care so much about dissonance or the limitations that stories and settings place upon games. We should be free to come up with whatever gameplay mechanics we want to, whatever level structure we want to, without tying it back to consistency with a story, without worrying about it seeming “too videogamey”, without contrivance being disdained so much. We should stop complaining about all this “it doesn’t really work that way” bullshit when we know damn well that there’s a good reason for it and we wouldn’t have a game without it. Like all the complaints about the shrine of Winter. Like someone thinking, “oh, it’s dumb that samus loses her powerups every game, in Other M, lets have them be authorized at specific points in the story instead”

Game constructs are totally made up. They don’t have to relate to anything. We aren’t bound by physical laws when making them like we would be in conventional engineering. We might as well accept that and use it to our benefit.

But should we get rid of stories completely? I don’t think we should do that either. I certainly think we shouldn’t invest as major development resources into them, but they have practical benefits in the form of setting up mental relationships between different objects in the setting, being an inspiration for systems of play, and guiding the player goal-wise. That and like music and graphics, it’s a tangential benefit to the work as a whole.

We just need to stop viewing storytelling as the reason for the medium to exist, since that’s not going to happen.

Axiom Verge Boss Review

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What do you think of these bosses from Axiom Verge? I think they’re some of the worst designed bosses I’ve ever seen due to their lack of moves, boring repeditive attack patterns, and bullet spongey nature.

I commented on this when I reviewed axiom verge, these are some seriously disappointing bosses. All of them have you be extremely passive in fighting them, which is lame.

The second boss, Telal, is notable, because you can damage boost through it to get to its opposite side. It cannot turn around, so you can stand behind it and shoot its weakpoint and there’s nothing you can do about it. Also his pattern just has you standing on top of a platform and jumping when projectiles come at you.

Uruku, the third boss, is easily defeated by simply using the address disruptor to create a platform in front of it. This platform never disappears, then you can position your gun diagonally, and shoot directly at its weak point, and none of its projectiles can harm you. If you don’t realize you can do this, then you can simply stand by some of the higher up platforms and shoot at him when he’s not using the laser.

Gir-tab, the fourth boss, is wrecked by the hypo-atomizer, which shoots forwards and sends extra projectiles out off its main path, so it reaches under him and hits the weak spot very directly. Also you can damage boost through him and deal a ton of damage with the kilver or drill. This boss and Telal really seem like lazy design. They have projectiles shooting in places you have little to no reason to be, and there’s phases you can just shoot at them without worrying about projectiles. A common theme with many of the bosses.

Ukhu Variant is the next boss, and the only one with a cool kill strategy. You can glitch the wasps it releases to become explosives, and they float upwards. If you shoot them when they’re near its mouth when it’s open, you insta kill the boss. This is the only cool thing in the entire game. Boss tracks you too closely on hard mode, makes many of its attacks impossible to avoid.

Similar deal with sentinel after it. The guy in this video just sits in the corner and shoots at it while tanking its projectiles. The fast strat for this guy is to jump up at his center and mash up on the dpad to teleport through it, because your teleport moves really far and does a ton of damage at this point. Either way, lame boss.

The final boss is even more lame, it almost used to be basically impossible to beat him unless you got into a safe corner of the room where the robots can’t shoot you. They’re playing against the patched version of the boss in this video. Those robots also show how a ton of enemies are in this game. They swarm on top of you, and you need to kill them before they can hit you.

The common theme is that it’s like there was no regard given for interplay between how the player would attack the boss and how the boss would attack back. AM2R bosses are just as complex as these bosses, or even simpler, but they all show how to avoid these mistakes. Except for the Omega Metroid, that one was just poorly considered.

Even the Alpha Metroids can be weaved around and opened up more easily than the Omega Metroid.

How should we form values to judge games by?

Celia Wagar2 Comments

How is it possible to establish which values we should hold games up to in order to figure out how good the game is? You can point to the best games and say they have X value, but in order to establish that those games are great, you have to presume a value by which to judge it.

It’s based on people. People tend to like certain things, we notice what those things are, we attempt to establish what values within those things are desirable, we produce new work based on those values, we see if our work is effective, and refine our model.

It’s a big cycle that informs itself. We need to build models, and refine them based on observation and experimentation. Nothing of what exists today came to exist in a vacuum. We’ve gone through millennia of cultural evolution. I think that the base desires that motivate us have stayed relatively consistent on a human level (though this is debatable, and also culturally influenced) and we’ve steadily found things that we respond more strongly to, then we had children, who also responded strongly to those things, either because culture informed them they should, or because it’s a human desire, or both, and the previous generation died. So the next generation is stuck with preexisting works that express preexisting values, and does not begin totally from scratch. We’re born in the middle of a chicken and the egg problem. Objects from the prior generation are already considered valuable by the time we get here, and we need to individually interpret whether that value is true or false. I wasn’t around for the NES, I came to the conclusion NES games were good based on playing them myself.

I’ve selected values based on what I think the most important aspects of games are across observation of a bunch of games, and tried to separate those values from the influence of culture. These might just be what I personally value more than anything else, people have certainly accused me of that in the past, and will again in the future. However I try to separate it from my own value system by acknowledging that not all games I’d consider good are necessarily games that I like, and not all games that I like are necessarily good. I think that the values I’ve chosen tie back to human nature, or exist for practical design reasons. I recognize that human nature varies a bit on an individual level, but I think we’re similar enough as a group to attempt to make general value evaluations.

I think what people get hung up on with your way of thinking is that you think of the word ‘good’ as objective while things you ‘like’ are subjective, whereas to most people they’re both subjective and pretty much the same thing. Why bother ‘liking’ things if you can’t call them ‘good’?

Because the qualities I admire in them don’t outweigh the negative aspects of those things, but are unique to those things. Or I liked them as a kid and still unironically like them even though they’re fucked up or kinda lame. Like Dungeon Keeper 2, even though everyone else seems to prefer Dungeon Keeper 1 and DK2 itself is kinda broken and one dimensional in a lot of ways.

I think most people connect things that are good to some type of objective basis. I think that when you assign something a property, you’re saying that belongs to the object, not to your perception of the object. Rampant subjectivism comes from recognizing that we assign properties to objects based on our perceptions of objects, so it is assumed that especially for non-functional or impractical objects that their properties are indistinguishable from our unique perception of them, which is unmappable to other people’s perception of them. I’ve explained my reasons for disagreeing with this in the past and don’t really want to repeat myself.

That loltaku post you linked on twitter is dumb. no good first year philosophy course will tell you “nothing is objective.” he also equates objectively quality with how the “average person” sees art.

http://loltaku.tumblr.com/post/150517665399/opinion-reviews-can-never-be-objective

I’m pretty sure the implication is that first year philosophy isn’t good, it’s introducing people to basic philosophical concepts, not all of which are in agreement with each other. That and haven’t we gone over before that nobody can be perfectly objective off the bat, but we can use various methods to get closer and closer to objectivity and refine our models until we approach analysis more descriptive of the world as it is and detached from our individual lens?

“Roger Ebert, on more than one occasional, gave movies he personally disliked a thumbs up, and movies he liked a thumbs down, because despite his personal enjoyment he could recognize the quality of the movie and how the average person would feel after seeing each.”
loltaku is coming at this from a pretty standard perspective, where the problem isn’t the methodology of the reviewers, the problem is that they give the wrong scores relative to common consensus, which is why people like older game reviews and dislike modern ones. They perceive that old game reviews were more in line with public opinion, or at minimum that reviewers were more direct and honest.

And the concept of a general audience reaction thing is a type of objectivity, I mean, I’m pursuing a slightly different standard in my own writing, more about the way a game appeals to the base instinct of fun, but both of these are about generalities in relation to people.

That and the important parts of the post to me were,
“yes, reviews can never be purely objective, but if we want to get into intolerable first year philosophy, nothing can really be objective. That doesn’t mean you can’t attempt to judge things with an objective eye.” with that last sentence being the operative part of the paragraph.
and
“The ability to detach yourself from your personal preferences and view things objectively, as well as the ability to articulate why you think something is good/bad are what is SUPPOSED to separate a professional critic from an amateur one”
and
“Roger Ebert, on more than one occasional, gave movies he personally disliked a thumbs up, and movies he liked a thumbs down, because despite his personal enjoyment he could recognize the quality of the movie”

What do you think of weak points?

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What do you think of enemies with weak points?

I think weak points help focus you on specific things. Like Dracula needs to be hit in the head, a bunch of bloodborne enemies are weaker in the head, many FPS enemies get wrecked by headshots. When you have weak points it can add an element of risk versus reward, time and space your attack well to get bonus damage, or maybe not get damage at all. Weakpoints can put you in harm’s way more, like how to get the most damage on shmup bosses, like touhou bosses that have tiny hitboxes, you need to stay directly beneath them, or close to them, which exposes you to more projectiles.

Weak points can even be used as an optional difficulty thing, like in Megaman ZX, where hitting the enemy weak points will take the boss down faster, but also hurt your grade and consequently the power of the biometal you receive. Some bosses in that games have weak points positioned that are very hard to avoid.

Weak points can be used as a constraint, like Dracula’s Head or Duke’s Dear Freja from Dark Souls 2. There’s a few different ways to hit each of the weak points on these bosses, but if you’re off then you get no damage. In Duke’s Dear Freja’s case, your sword will bounce off the other part of the enemy, even if you would have hit the weak point. This was fun with a greatsword.

The thing to avoid is making the constraints on the weak points so restrictive that they can only be damaged 1 way. This is when you get to Zelda style boss design. To avoid this I’d say, have ways to damage the boss that aren’t the weak point if the weak point isn’t always exposed, or have the weak point always be exposed, or expose itself irregularly during phases where the player also is doing other things. The point is to make the player question whether they can get damage right now, and how much damage they can get right now. This makes it an interesting choice.

What do you think of escort missions?

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What do you think of escort missions?

Everyone knows to avoid making them by now basically because it’s irritating to make mission completion dependent on an entity which you have no control over. Like you can’t realistically make this other entity avoid damage. This is more a matter of technology and user perception than an actual mechanical issue with the concept of escort missions. The issue is that players don’t feel a strong connection between their decisions and outcomes.

The annoyance of escort missions is mitigated as the behavior of the entity to be protected is more consistent and predictable. Escorting something that moves on a totally fixed and unchanging path is usually less aggravating than other possible cases, where the escorted target can wander off on its own, get stuck on geometry, engage enemies it should avoid and get itself killed, etc.

Also irritating is if you’re not allowed to move too far ahead of your escorted target, and generally if it does a shitty job keeping up with you. Emil is like this in that one isometric dungeon in Nier. Many games mitigate this by teleporting the escort to you if you’re too far ahead, though this can sidestep the point of an escort mission.

The abstract idea behind the escort mission makes sense, target separate from you that can take damage, it pairs up with a lot of story concepts, like protecting things, fighting alongside a buddy, etc, it just usually doesn’t work out for an assortment of technical reasons, or poorly considered design.

This page lists a bunch of examples, and happens to be nice enough to categorize them by what’s annoying about that particular escort mission.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EscortMission

What do you think of checkpoints?

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What do you think of checkpoints?

Checkpoints and death are about creating context and building consistency.

When you screw something up, you repeat it. In a broader sense of fun, fun comes from succeeding at things intermittently, and succeeding more frequently over time (building consistency). So when something is screwed up, you repeat it to build the skill. Through iteration, you learn to overcome it. Guilty Gear Xrd’s missions are a great example of this in effect. They have you perform a simple task that builds a skill for a situation, like performing a specific combo, confirming whether the enemy is hit or blocked, performing a reversal from knockdown, surviving an enemy wave of attacks when you cannot attack. They then have you repeat this ten times, whether you succeed or fail, and judge you based on how many times out of ten you succeeded. All 10 is an S rank. You can repeat these missions whenever you want to.

Death just means sending the player back to a prior point. This can be a checkpoint, the beginning of a level, a mission select screen, or the beginning of the entire game. When you send the player back further, when you space checkpoints further apart, you are creating a context that bridges all the things that happen inbetween. This is especially true if there is health, or other semi-persistent variables that go up or down as you progress. When you have say 10 challenges in a row, and 5 hitpoints, you’re saying that you need to complete all 10 of these challenges, and only allowed to fail 4. Hitpoints allow you to fail in a small way and create this longer bridging context between encounters. Healthbars allow you to have bigger failures or smaller failures, so you can have different types of enemy attacks that are easier or harder to avoid and create challenges of mitigating damage instead of strictly avoiding it.

The key thing is though that when you have widely spaced checkpoints, you ask players to be generally consistent across a set of challenges rather than able to succeed at one. If you have checkpoints directly in front of and after every challenge, players can succeed at that challenge once and continue, if you have checkpoints placed further apart, then they might need to succeed at that challenge many times before they can continue. Across repeated playthroughs of a segment, players might die in many different places in many different ways, because they might have a general consistency at any one challenge, but when asked to do multiple in a row, they need to achieve a higher level of consistency to succeed overall. This is the path to mastery.

A corollary to this is, if there is a checkpoint directly after anything, the player is not expected to master that thing. Bosses have checkpoints after them because they are difficulty spikes to be overcome once, not basic challenges to become consistent at overcoming.

Please play Rolling Thunder on NES. It sort of has the lagging checkpoint system you described. When you beat a stage, you get a password for THAT stage, so when you continue you have to beat it again. Basically you have to beat two stages in a row to make progress.

HAH! That’s funny! I guess it makes sense that it comes from the password era, they did a lot of weird checkpointing things back then if I recall correctly. Dunno if I want to play it just to see how the staggered checkpoints work though, it looks kind of simple. Isn’t Code Name Viper better known for this type of gameplay?

Puzzles vs Games

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Layton is awesome. You don’t classify puzzles as games, right? But as something sort of a sidestep away?

Yeah, I don’t think they’re really the same type of thing, or at least, can’t be judged the same type of way. Puzzles tend to focus on a small number of solutions, and games tend to focus on a large number. Puzzles have a spoiler effect, where once you know the answer to a puzzle, it’s trivial; where in games even if you’ve done something before, it can still be extremely difficult.

You could also say there’s a continuum or spectrum between the two. After all, I frequently point out elements in games that are more puzzle-like.

I think Tetris being labeled a puzzle game, as well as other falling block games similar to it, is a complete misnomer.

I like good puzzles, but I think they need to be judged on a set of standards and criteria that isn’t the same as games. Something like depth (as I’ve defined it for games) is no longer a factor for whether a puzzle is good or not. Though then there’s weird exceptions like portal which clearly benefit from depth in a manner similar to games. A large state space in of itself can help prevent a puzzle from being brute forced, by trying every possible solution. A lot of Layton puzzles for example just involve inputting a number, but they are still frequently good. I could probably ruminate on good puzzle making until I come up with something satisfactory with a lot of research, but currently I regard that as outside my scope.

Though now that I think about it, I can see a connection between many puzzles and complexity class, as pointed out by Raph Koster in his Games are Math talk. http://www.raphkoster.com/2009/09/22/gdca-games-are-math-slides-posted/ A lot of good puzzles (and good games) regard problems that are difficult to process in terms of state size, but there are exceptions to that too, like simply figuring out connections between established mechanics.

I know you’ve said several times that you don’t consider puzzles to be real games, but do faster-paced versus puzzle games like Tetris Attack/Puzzle League or Puyo Puyo exceptions? Come to think of it, do they even fit into your definition of puzzle games?

Okay, Tetris, Panel De Pon, Puyo Puyo, Magical Drop and so on, I don’t consider these to be puzzles. I think that’s a misnomer based on their similarity to abstract puzzles. Many people call these action puzzle games. They’re totally games. There’s really no point of ambiguity about them, the same way with puzzles.

I’m fine with misnomers as long as we’re all clear it’s a misnomer and it’s a clear self-contained category (Like Role-Playing Game, or Action Puzzle Game, which both are misnomers, but it’s also really clear exactly what you’re referring to).

Could you shit talk that group of Golden Age mystery novel writers that considered their books to be games played between the author and the reader?

I’d say it’s more like a puzzle or riddle than a game. I mean, Phoenix Wright is built on a similar principle and I’m okay with that.

The trouble with mystery novels, unlike games is, you don’t have repeated chances to solve a generic version of a problem. You have one chance, and you get it, or it’s spoiled for you. You can’t go back and retry because you know the answer. You can theoretically grow the skill of seeing the patterns writers leave for you to have a higher success rate at guessing what the answer to the mystery is, but theoretically, it’s also kind of a crapshot because circumstances are unique to each individual book.

Like, similar to a game, these mystery novels do have something that you can be consistent or inconsistent at, but unlike a game, they have no possibility space.

They’re cool being what they are in my book, even if I might get a bit technical about the terminology.

How come you are so kosher towards Ace Attorney even though it’s almost a visual novel and has no depth?

Don’t forget Professor Layton and The Witness as well. I’m fine with puzzles in general even though they have no or little depth. If you’ve been following along, you’d know I’ve covered this before. I think puzzles probably follow different principles than games and I appreciate a good puzzle. I’m honestly not sure exactly what makes a good puzzle, I just know one when I see one, and I consider the problem of what makes a good puzzle outside the scope of my writing here. Trying to figure out the underlying principles there seems like a hard problem that is way more soft than something like Depth.

Ace Attorney has you thinking in a problem-solving mindset. It’s kind of tricky to figure out the answers, even if you can ultimately brute force everything when it comes down to it. And usually the answers are pretty fair and understandable rather than, “how was I ever supposed to make that connection?” (not always unfortunately). It has its roots in the same sort of mental mechanism that creates fun in games even if the same principles can’t completely overlap.