COLUMN: Design Diversions: Blame The Game, Not The Player
[‘Design Diversions’ is a biweekly new GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Andrew Vanden Bossche. It looks at the unexpected moments when games take us behind the scenes, and the details of how game design engages us. This time, he references Metal Gear Solid 4 to discover how difficulty changes can warp gameplay]
When we think about choice in video games, we tend to think in terms of narrative choice. Discussions surrounding the subject often revolve around the impact (or lack thereof) that the player has on the game world. This isn’t surprising; choices with an emotional component have a tendency to provoke strong reactions and when the subject is brought up they’re typically the first things we think of.
Most of the choices in video games, however, aren’t narrative at all. They are moment to moment choices, when players decide to block instead of dodge, jump far instead of short, or turn left instead of right. There’s not a lot of intellectual debate to be had in discussing whether you should jump across a bottomless pit or into it, but the real meat of a video game lies in these choices.
Now, once players figure out that the key is to jump over the bottomless pit, that obstacle loses a lot of its appeal as an interesting challenge. So rather than ask the player to discover a previously defined solution (such as in Space Station Pheta), games are more frequently asking players to construct their own solution from a variety of possibilities (Bioshock). From a narrative perspective there certainly isn’t much difference between flying over a pit or building a bridge over it, but having these different options allows players to exercise different skills and ways of thinking.
With this approach to design comes the challenge of balancing these options against each other. When games provide some choices that aren’t as effective as others, they discourage players from being creative. Worse, if there’s an option so much more rewarding than the others there may be no point in doing anything else. Sometimes the wrong choice leads to a fate far worse than defeat: boredom.
Liquid Easy
Metal Gear Solid 4 is an interesting game in this respect because its gameplay changes wildly depending on the game’s difficulty. Increasing the difficulty causes enemies to become more perceptive, resilient, and deadly, and most of MGS4’s gameplay involves using a variety of weapons and gadgets to avoid them. There’s quite a bit of depth here for clever players to exploit, but the difficulty setting doesn’t always make this challenge lesser or greater: sometimes it removes it altogether.
Once the game’s difficulty is set low enough, a combination of high player health and hilariously inaccurate enemies make the game’s stealth aspect seem ridiculous and unnecessary. There’s little point in avoiding enemies that can’t do anything to you. And when players learn they have more to lose standing and fighting than running to the next part of the level, the game becomes less of a tactical espionage action game and more of a headless chicken simulator.
Lower settings of difficulty don’t just make the game easier. They allow for a completely different playstyle that is as effective as it is boring. When the enemies are incompetent and weak enough, the easiest way to deal with them is to run past them until you trigger a loading screen and cause them to forget about you. There may be an incredible array of gadgets to use, but under these circumstances the best solution is to drop them and run.
Choosing the Impossible
Ironically, this is a form of emergent gameplay, albeit one that encourages players to be less creative and think less critically about their surroundings. You can skip a large portion of the game doing this and since even stray bullets can be recovered from fairly easily, it’s high reward with little risk. At this point players are barely even interacting with the game. And if it isn’t intended for players to be skipping most of the game, it might be argued that they shouldn’t be able to.
Of course, at high difficulties and under certain conditions, they can’t. As difficulty increases, combat becomes so lethal that even running from a pack of soldiers is suicide. Instead, the player has to be very clever with the tools at their disposal in order to advance.
While higher difficulties are commonly associated with more frustration, in this case they enable the sorts of challenges that engage the player even more. At a certain threshold, when it becomes more efficient to avoid or confront enemies than run past them, the player is finally engaged with the challenge the game is designed to pose. But unless a player chooses this path of difficulty, they might as well not be playing the game (at least, not the same game).
Don’t Blame the Victim
It’s impossible to blame players for running since they’re only doing what the game is asking of them: finding the easiest and most efficient solution to the challenge being posed. It’s what all games ask, really, although in games with player defined goals it’s the player both asking the questions and finding the answers.
One of the biggest challenges of game design is that if you give players the opportunity to do something they despise in order to get what they want, they will almost always do it. World of Warcraft’s design team, for example, is constantly faced with the challenge of forcing their players to have fun by ensuring that the best way of doing something is the most enjoyable.
So when players run by oblivious soldiers in Metal Gear Solid 4, it isn’t because they like it. They do it because the game all but asks them to. When one choice overwhelms all others in effectiveness, it’s no longer a choice, just like it makes no sense to jump into a bottomless pit rather than over it. Sure, a player can play on a more difficult setting to get a more full experience, but is it really okay to even give players the option of not being engaged?
Is a Gamer Not Entitled to the Sweat of His Brow?
Of course, this all provokes the question of why players would skip over all this content. Often, it’s because they just want to finish it, or especially in the case of Metal Gear Solid, see the narrative unfold. All kinds of gamers are interested in Metal Gear Solid’s story, and not all are necessarily highly accomplished at the game itself. Without the option of easier difficulties, a lot of fans are left out.
Perhaps this is a question of fairness. Is it fair to deny people the opportunity to experience the story if they aren’t good at the game? It’s a hard question to answer. If someone buys the game just for the story, it’s difficult to argue that they shouldn’t be able to see it.
But there’s no reason that the experience of the game has to be sacrificed for accessibility. Difficulty should exist as a way of crafting the experience to fit the player, not to shortcut the entire experience of the game for tangentially related rewards. A game should be an experience in and of itself.
DVDs don’t force you to jump through hoops to keep watching them, but on the other hand, jumping through hoops is sort of the point of playing a game in the first place. Designers cannot ignore this behavior. Filmmakers have it easy; short of looking away and covering their ears, viewers can’t help but see what’s on the screen. But a videogame can be a deep experience and players will still ignore it if there’s a flaw in design that lets them. The key, of course, is to not let them.
[Andrew Vanden Bossche is a freelance writer and student. He has a blog called Mammon Machine, which discusses videogames and obscure videogame related t-shirts, and can be reached at AndrewVandenB@gmail.com]
Comments
"A game should be an experience in and of itself."
My dad is a huge fan of the Halo story; he's spent more time and money on the franchise than any gamer I know, buying every novel, every art book, the collector's edition feelies off eBay.
He's also the most inept of them at all twitch games. Easy is impossible to him. He can't finish a level of a Mario game without save states and emulator rewinding. He is firmly a turn-based, slow-paced adventure gamer, always has been, always will be.
He's downloaded Halo trainers so he can finish the games on his PC, knowing they're infected with Trojans, knowing Halo will crash often while he uses it, and knowing he's going to pay money to get the packed-in viruses off his computer.
A Halo movie of the exact same story wouldn't excite him. For him, the experience is the point of the game - he wants to experience the Halo universe through Master Chief's eyes, go where Chief goes, hear it and see it all without needing the skills of a twitch gamer.
For him, the game is meaningless. This is an interactive virtual world to explore, and the enemies and health bars and ammo are such frustrating obstacles to his enjoyment of the experience that he'd do anything to quickly and easily circumvent them, in spite of the designer's desire to provide a deep combat experience.
Really, he wants Myst: Halo, and he wants it badly enough that he'll damn near destroy his computer to play it.
Is this an experience anyone else has come across? Does he represent a quiet minority that, say, Nintendo's rooted out with their self-playing game patent? Is he just a freak of nature? (That's my guess.)
And is there room in the game industry for a "no difficulty/exploration" mode?
Posted by: obo | July 29, 2009 9:23 PM
G'day Andrew, welcome to the fold. Nice piece.
"Sure, a player can play on a more difficult setting to get a more full experience, but is it really okay to even give players the option of not being engaged?"
This quote represents a point of contention though, as "engagement" and "full experience" are subjective terms.
Your article seems to imply that these terms are relative to the intentions of the game designer (ie. if I do what game design says, I will be engaged/have fun) rather than the player, which isn't necessarily true.
Games are an entertainment medium, so long as the player is having fun within the medium, they are satisfying the terms of playing a game, even if their method of play is oblique to the style intended by the designers.
Therefore, players who rush through MGS4 or spend their time to explore and understand the game are getting two different experiences, but neither is more engaging, creative, fuller or right - they're just different.
Same deal with meta-games: they work in defiance of regulated game design yet often so for the same means; enjoyment.
I don't mean to criticize, this is a great article, better than that Lingua Franca nonsense. ^_^ I just thought that there was a possible lack of clarity there.
Posted by: Daniel (Primed) | July 29, 2009 10:15 PM
It's interesting that you mention Bioshock in your introduction, because I think this particular game illustrates several of the conflicts that you raise over the course of your article. Playing it for a second time recently, I finally understood how its gameplay was clearly not about presenting challenge to the player (starting by effectively neutralizing it via the resurrection tubes), but about offering a flexible array of choices to fit one's temperament. This I fully sympathize with. However, being the type of gamer I am and feeling some compulsive need to collect every little trinket and search every corner thoroughly (which I am sure is the case with many people), I ended up as a virtual superman whose only pleasure left was to pick which of his too numerous powers he would unleash on the next fellow unfortunate enough to cross his path. Perusing all this power was not fun but lazy and complacent, and I felt that this killed the design's apparent purpose in the same way that you describe Metal Gear's easier difficulty levels.
At the same time (and contrary to MGS), it also occurred to me that the game probably didn't even NEED to feature combat of any sorts to warrant my interest. The main strength of the game is undeniably its offering of a story world to piece together, and although a case could probably be made about the "reasons" behind its action gameplay and the hostility of Rapture's surviving inhabitants, I'm sure there could have been narrative ways around it or other means to communicate similar ideas, whatever thay may be. This goes back to the case of the previous commenter's father, namely wanting to perceive the fiction of the game as an active experience, but without the hassle of game mechanics perhaps not even beneficial to the story's delivery and meaning.
I love Bioshock and I think it's a great game (as everybody critiquing it seems to assert), but maybe that is only because my familiarity with gaming has led me to tolerate some "obligatory" traits of mainstream design (i.e. "it won't sell if it doesn't have guns in it"). I think that before we ponder if a game design is successful on its own terms, what we really need to ask is if that particular system is even appropriate to the game's overall aesthetic and narrative proposition, and if it will succeed in engaging the variety of willing people that this proposition is prone to interest. Stubborn people like the aforementioned father are rare, and in an ideal world what we would have is not games that appeal to everyone, but games that are true to themselves and allow the right people to invest in them.
Posted by: Louis F. | July 30, 2009 3:39 AM
These were all very interesting comments- I thought I would drop in and say that since people tend to leave me such thoughtful ones.
obo's comment made think about how many communities seem to form around certain games. It may be the nature of the form, since the element of exploration common to so many games necessitates a carefully constructed world.
If games are going to use easy mode as a way to let people explore the game world rather than experience the thrills of gameplay, maybe a Myst style easy mode really is the best option. After all, there are a lot of people who are more interested in the atmosphere of a game than its gameplay, regardless of their level of skill.
Well, it's just a thought.
Posted by: Andrew Vanden Bossche | July 31, 2009 5:05 PM