On 'Patronizing The Player' With Ease
March 4, 2007 8:39 AM | Simon Carless
Tony Walsh has a well thought-out post over at Clickable Culture discussing whether 'game designers [are] going too far in rewarding players', and citing multiple possible examples of the above.
Firstly, he notes: "I was paging through last month's issue of Game Developer Magazine recently, and in a postmortem for Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam, found that the game had been designed to go easy on the player: "[I]n the name of making the game more accessible to a broader audience, we made it much more difficult to fall...we gave the players a much friendlier outcome..." writes Toys for Bob lead designer Toby Shadt. "Don't take players out of the action for too long; don't make them feel bad about themselves..." I absolutely agree with keeping players engaged, but not with shielding players from failure."
But Walsh worries: "Children are being taught that "everybody wins," and seem to be sheltered from competitive activities. In the real world, hardly anybody wins, let alone you or your kids. I see over-rewarding, over-patronizing games in the same light as non-competitive "we are all special" school-system doctrine." So... are we going too easy on our gaming subjects?
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3 Comments
If a game is too easy, it winds up being just flat out dull (regardless of how well executed everything else is). As a prime example, look at Okami, where the primary challenge is staying interested in it long enough to beat it.
I'm not saying games need to be exceedingly difficult (like the PS2 Armored Core games, which are built around raping new players and leaving their limp bodies lying in the gutter), but I think there's gotta be a nice happy middle ground (woo hoo for smooth difficulty curves!).
RoushiMSX | March 4, 2007 9:25 AM
Games these days are way too easy. Why when I was a boy...
Seriously I think there is a lot of truth to this. A game doesn't need to be challenging to be entertaining, but so many games these days are neither. The one thing that games have on other mediums is that they are interactive. They require active participation from the user and he must engage the game's rules on a personal, intimate level. Adding increased difficulty to a game, if done right, deeply enhances this element of the game experience and does much more to create meaning for the player than a well-told story or interesting characters. If you really have to work hard to learn a game's system before you can succeed at it, then the feeling of satisfaction you get by progressing is much more substantial and satisfying.
In my opinion Nintendo is the guiltiest of this design problem -- the last Zelda game that had anything resembling actual difficulty was probably Zelda II on the NES -- and I think as a result this trend has spread like a virus through the industry. I guess most gamers don't mind it, but would it at least kill developers to add a "hard mode" every now and then?
Toups | March 4, 2007 11:40 AM
I'm going to have to disagree with the assertion that easy games lead to giving the impression of life being easy. As others have argued even from an early age we are able to differentiate reality and fiction.
I'd also like to question why this goes directly to children? Is it any wonder that the industry is seen as making toys for kids when we ourselves associate our work immediately with them.
That aside I think the real attempt here is not to make things easier it is rather to remove the tedium from the game. A good example of this working is Geometry Wars, there are no major downtimes, but it still is challenging. A great example where difficulty becomes unimportant is crackdown, arguably the game is fairly easy, but it isn't about difficulty it's about the experience of being able to do these insane things.
Further consider any adventure game, their difficulty doesn't come from causing the player to fail, but rather in challenging the player to find a way through a problem. This generally extends to any RPG where you need merely keep up or ahead of the level curve to become powerful enough to easily complete any challenges. Do either of these genres gain anything by including more frequent player failure ?
I've yet to play Tony Hawk Downhill Jam, has anyone who played it found it to be too easy? Is it really about beating the game or is it about feeling like you are a pro level skateboarder?
CPinard | March 4, 2007 1:09 PM