The Stairway

There's no such thing as too hard.

I'll say that again: there's no such thing as too hard.

It's perfectly acceptable for a game to require players to have savant-like intellects, superluminal thumbs, and a latent ability to predict the immediate future.

That's the beauty of games. Doing what we never thought was possible. Threading the eye of the storm with perfect lucidity. That's the gaming high, and it's the reason we keep coming back for more.

The catch is this: difficulty must be a stairway. Games must start at the bottom and they must introduce each new concept incrementally. Every escalation in complexity and difficulty must be discrete, and each plateau of challenge must be eminently reachable from the one below it.

If you set the bar low and raise it by slow and unflinching degrees, you'll soon have players vaulting higher than they could ever have imagined.

This is part of the unheralded genius of Guitar Hero. From a beginner's standpoint the songs on Expert difficulty look impossible, but as you play through the game skill sneaks up on you and soon you're ready to go toe to toe with sequences that previously moved too fast for your brain to process. The songs themselves teach you the skills you need; if you haven't learned how to do hammer-ons by the time you hit "Jessica" on Hard, you'll discover an unthreatening environment that trains you in them just in time to put them to use in "Freebird" a couple of sets later. Similarly, your fingers learn simple note progressions in early songs that are repeated faster and longer as you enter the higher tiers.

It's also what made Guitar Hero 3 not quite as good as its predecessors. Note maps are apparently set out with the intention of thwarting players rather than challenging them, and ridiculously hard chokepoints are inserted amongst comparatively forgiving peers. I speak from personal experience when I say it's possible to complete every normal song on the Expert difficulty and still be blocked by the end boss of Hard.

There is no limit to what you can train players to do. Aiming high is the mark of a memorable game. But once you've set those goals, you then have to bring your players to them, and suceeding at that is the hard part.

The ambitious game builds a long and epic stairway. But in the end the good game - and I mean the really good game - walks beside you while you climb it.

Please visit the Round Table's Main Hall for links to all entries.

The Selfish Gamer

But what can they do for me?

Probably the hardest thing about creating likeable characters in videogames is answering this question. What can they do for me?

Characters who are defined by their need to be helped are rarely likeable. There's a whole quest-giving escort-requiring tribe of these layabouts out there, with Mario's passive-aggressive taskmistress Peach at their head.

On the other hand, powerful characters can be just as problematic. If an NPC can do what the player does, only better, they risk trivialising the player's experience. Characters who give out benefits as if they were candy become little more than glorified vending machines.

One answer is to divorce characters from the game mechanics; have them neither help nor hinder the player, but merely talk. If your characters are more hated than Hitler due to their poor AI and complete inability to defend themselves from the most low-level goblins then you might be well-served by this possibility. But for everyone else, it's a cop out.

Players can be friends with characters; they can even do this when characters interface with gameplay. Ico did it reasonably well. The World Ends With You did it very well. And Wing Commander did it perfectly.

I love Wing Commander. It's almost entirely beyond criticism, as are its first two sequels and all of their expansions. The space dogfighing action is very good, especially considering the technical limitations of the time. But what makes it excellent are the wingmen.

You can't think of Wing Commander without thinking of Paladin, Maniac, Angel, Bossman, and the other pilots of the TCS Tiger's Claw. Each has their own backstory, their own relationship with the main character, and their own unique flying style. Between missions they talk about their hopes and expectations, and in battle they back you up to varying degrees.

One of the reasons that Wing Commander's wingmen work so well is that they didn't ask for the assignment. They haven't "tagged along" or imposed themselves on you. In many cases they'd rather be flying solo. They don't want to have to rescue you any more than you want to rescue them.

Another factor is that they don't need to excel to be useful. They're helpful just by being there. Flying with a wingman means that you're taking half as much enemy fire, and enemies are much easier to shoot down when they're chasing someone other than you. If your wingman happens to make a kill, that's icing on the cake.

But probably what works best of all is that they're all annoying in different ways. If you're frustrated that Angel can't hit the broad side of a barn, you'll at least be grateful that she doesn't abandon the mission to chase every enemy she sees. If you're ready to throttle Maniac for completely ignoring your orders, you'll at least be impressed by his above-average kill count. And the wingmen don't try to pretend that they're perfect; the crew of the Tiger's Claw are more than aware of each other's faults, and won't hesitate to bitch about them.

If all that's not enough for you, you're welcome to let the wingmen get killed off. They'll get a moving funeral sequence, they'll vanish from the break room, and any future missions you would have flown with them you'll instead be working solo. But each time they survive, it's another story you can tell. The next time you fly with them, you'll be thinking, "I remember the last time I flew with this guy."

So the selfish gamer asks what can they do for me? The answer is simple; they provide company. They work well because they're such fully realised characters. When you can look out of your cockpit, see only one other ship in all the darkness of space, and know the name of the person behind the stick, it makes all the difference in the world.

Please visit the Round Table's Main Hall for links to all entries.

Flawless

Like a force of nature.

If you're a gamer, you've felt it. The horizon where skill and intuition coincide and you become brilliant, unstoppable, and archetypal.

If a game's good, you can expect that as the sun begins to set on the narrative, that moment will be waiting in the twilight. If a game's good, it will take you on a journey to that curve in the land where every twist and turn in the gameplay is illuminated in a hyper-real light.

But if a game's very good, that's where you'll start.

Superhero games labour under a curse. Straight up, they're licensed properties, so creativity is constrained and development schedules are tight. And for reasons of intellectual property and business, they often end up being developed by very mediocre companies.

Iron Man is the latest superhero-themed game to take a long bath in the mud-pool of averageness. Reviewers agree that it's repetitive, clumsily structured, and stupefyingly difficult.

Difficult? This is Iron Man. The most difficult situation this man faces is deciding what type of cocktail to have with his breakfast. Iron Man should have been a game about heavily customising a high-tech metal suit, and then flying it around New York. Followed by more customising. Then some flying. Actual combat could have been a side-quest and the game would still have been gold.

Games don't have to be difficult. Look at kids. Kids don't enjoy difficult. Did growing up change us? Taking two toy cars and ramming them together is not fun despite being easy, it is fun because it is easy. The magic of telling stories with dolls or toys is not that you can influence the narrative, but that you are in control of the narrative.

Superhero games are the apex of this theory. Throwing a tank at another tank is not awesome merely because you can do it. It is awesome because of how easily you can do it. Superhero games should be massive sandboxes designed for the sole purpose of giving the player total intuitive control of their amazing powers from the moment they power on the system through to the inevitably fantastic ending.

Anyone who's played a Grand Theft Auto knows that the excellence is not in the missions but in the freedom and control that comes between them. Anyone who's played Katamari Damacy knows that time limits and scores are just window dressing on the visceral fun of pushing around a giant ball.

Not everything needs to be challenging. Not everyone needs to be mortal. Not always must you take the lows with the highs.

Sometimes it's okay to be flawless.

Please visit the Round Table's Main Hall for links to all entries.

The Second Level

There is room for a thing to be about more than what it is about.

And you don't have to be frightened of that, and you don't have to say it out loud. It's not an enemy to fight, and it's not a flag to salute, and it's not a check box at the bottom of a form. There is room.

I think people are scared of this. I think writers of movies and creators of TV and developers of video games are a little scared of it. I think they see a line, and on one side is Die Hard and on the other is Schindler's List. Your creation is entertaining, or your creation is moving, but it is not both. But they are wrong. There is room.

Fight Club is an action movie about male identity in a post-nuclear world. Dawn of the Dead is a zombie flick about Western consumerism. Cloverfield is a monster movie about September 11. Depth is not a characteristic delineated by genre. There is room.

The key is honesty. Creating engaging material comes from honestly identifying and exploring that which holds power over you. Each level that you abstract a thing from its emotional base drains that thing of its essential value. You don't have to abstract it. You can stay true to that core. There is room.

Halo, Final Fantasy X and Gears of War were all good games. They were all games that weren't afraid to mix a story into their gameplay, all games that were given the time and the money to do things the way that they wanted to do things. But they could they go a step further, and be about more than what they are about?

Yes.

There is room.

Please visit the Round Table's Main Hall for links to all entries.

Trinity

Unless you're one of those too-smart-for-your-own-good bloggers who nobody likes, you've probably been wondering what the coloured icons attached to some of my last posts were. The answer is this:

I have in the past been a contributor to the Round Table of Bloggers, run by Corvus over at Man Bytes Blog. This month, Corvus challenged contributors to choose three of a set of nine Rorschach-like images and write a short passage of prose or verse about what they evoke in the writer. Like any good blogger, I've taken that idea and completely ignored what Corvus intended. Instead I've written no less than three articles on game design inspired in a very loose sense by Corvus' odd little pictures. They are:

Downhill



Hybrid Gameplay



The Player In The Box



Now, having taken the intent of the topic and done a merry tap dance upon its grave, I'm not at this stage sure whether my entry is going to be accepted, but really I wanted to write those articles more than I wanted to be on topic this month, so we can all wait and see with suspended breath what occurs. In the mean time, if you want to check out what else is going down in the Round Table, you can draw strength from the drop down menu included immediately below.

The Player In The Box

The absolute biggest problem, and by that I mean the 100 pound gorilla that cripples your pets and eats all your cereal, involved in writing rules, settings or scenarios for tabletop roleplaying is this: that you can't fit the GM in the box.

Lackluster systems and dry settings can be spun into gold by a talented game master (or dungeon master, if you prefer, or referee, or storyteller). Likewise literary gold can be churned into unusable muck by a bad GM.

You can load a system to favour storytelling. You can give GMing advice in the rulebook. You can shift some component of creative control to the players. But none of these address the fundamental problem that your game is only going to be as good as your GM, and if you're a player who has a bad GM you're out of luck, because you can't pack a good GM in the box.

Screw that. Who wants to be a player anyway?

Now, as someone who runs games more often than he plays them, I am not without a large helping of appreciation for the merits of a good player. A good GM makes a game good; but when you have good players as well, that's when art happens.

But while ideally every game would consist of groups of perfect people sitting down to play perfect games, if I have to short one side of the equation, it's the players. I want good players, but if I can't get them I'd be perfectly happy to settle for something pre-packaged.

So is there a way that we can put the players in the box? If you have an answer, then blog it. I want ideas, and there's a lot of very talented game designers out there. Think laterally. Can an offline solo roleplaying experience be designed which casts the consumer in the role of GM?

Hybrid Gameplay

While the rest of the world wallows in the sty of God of War 2, I’m sloughing my way through the original, and finding that the hype is very much overrated.

The action, it must be said, is superb. God of War takes everything that worked in the Devil May Cry franchise and ratchets it up a fairly meaty notch. Controls are responsive, attacks are spectacular, and enemy executions are blisteringly satisfying.

Where it goes wrong is that it does all this, and then thinks it can be a platformer, too. You’re expected to jump from moving platforms like some kind of rabid monkey, scale vertical walls, rappel along ropes, and tiptoe your way along razor-thin rafters. Mistakes generally result in instant death, and you’ll be doing it all under the view of a camera that changes angles like a schizophrenic Hitchcock. It’s small consolation that some even more intense platforming levels were wisely cut from the game prior to release.

You get used to it. You shrug. Sometimes the fun will stop, and the platforming will begin. This is how life is.

But it’s what turns a potentially perfect game into one which is merely memorable. Hybrid gameplay. The developers wanted their game to be too many things and suffered as a result. After all, what’s an epic Greek adventure without a downfall brought about by hubris?

It makes me wonder whether diluting gameplay purity is perhaps by definition a bad thing. I’m looking at the games I’ve enjoyed the most this year, and there’s no question that they share something in common: Guitar Hero I & II, Ossu Tatake Ouendan, Elite Beat Agents, Excite Truck, Trauma Center, and Disgaea – they all have an unquestionable purity of gameplay. They take a central core concept and iterate it until it bleeds fun. They are definitive. They are archetypal.

There is no question that Disgaea is a turn-based strategy RPG. In fact, there’s no question that it is THE turn-based strategy RPG. It stakes out a space of gaming ground, and it does it better than anyone else. Excite Truck is a game about monster trucks flying through the air, and by golly never have there been more trucks flying through more air.

And that’s what these games do. They don’t need to muck around with minigames, or interludes, or pacing – they just serve up what’s on their stove in steadily increasing quantities until the player has some kind of culinary gaming orgasm.

If you’re making a hardcore action game, why on earth would you waste time on some half-assed platforming when you could be making the slice-and-dice festivities rock just that much harder? If leveling up is your goal, what possible use could there be in fumbling around in the world of dodgy rhythm-based extreme sports? Who wants a wide variety of mediocre instead of a single pinnacle of excellence?

It’s the traditional failing of movie license games, which feel the need to capture every element of a movie experience within a single game. It’s the failing of copycat games, which model themselves after a genre leader with no real ability to exceed the standards laid down by their predecessor. It’s the process by which good software is turned into unappealing crud.

I don’t need your hybrid gameplay. I don’t want my bloody haze of battle to rise while I navigate a platforming puzzle. Leave me to tremble in the ecstasy of non-stop over-the-top violence. I’m sure there must be a game out there like that.

Weren’t we due for another Dynasty Warriors game some time soon?

Downhill

One of the things that's been bothering me in playing Half-Life 2 is this: it's a great game - so why is it always so hard to get motivated to sit down for another session?

And I think the answer is this: that it's never downhill.

It's a matter of game pacing. Sure, it's great knowing that there's a massive challenge ahead of you. It's fantastic walking into a big, empty arena with lots of RPG ammo on the ground and then hearing the whining of approaching enemy helicopters. The moment of, "Oh shit, now things will be hard," is one of the best parts of gaming.

But you know what's also good? The moment when you know from here on in it gets easier. The downhill moment.

Anyone who's ever played a real time strategy knows what I'm talking about. Building up your base is good, repelling the enemy forces is just fine, but what you're really hanging out for is the bit at the end of each level where you steamroll anything standing in your way.

Or if you've played an RPG - the uphill grind through each level pays off when you get that level up and suddenly everything that used to be hard is now comparitively easy.

It's doesn't always have to be challenging. Sometimes it's fun when things are ridiculously easy.

In Half-Life 2, and for that matter Episode One, it's all uphill. It never gets easy. Even at the end of Half-Life 2, when you're wreaking havoc with the upgraded gravity gun, you're still in very real danger of falling to your death or being the victim of a stray explosion. It's never about what you've just accomplished - it's always about what's next.

It's just it would be nice if sometimes the path went downhill.

The Ghost Train

[Game Design]

The most important rule of the ghost train is this: keep your hands inside the car at all times.

Which is to say, the ghost train is a ride, not a game. And this is why, I think, so many horror-themed videogames go so very, very wrong.

Good horror is about helplessness. It's about the inevitability of fear. It's about opening the rattling locker even though you know there's something horrible inside. Horror is what happens when your feet keep walking forwards when your brain wants to retreat.

There are a wide variety of horror games now on the videogaming market. Probably the most successful have been the Resident Evil and Silent Hill franchises. And I think the reason that these titles have continued to thrive and flourish while their competitors have died off is that they've grasped the concept of the ghost train. Horror games should be an experience, not a challenge.

You can't prepare for horror

If you're a survival horror afficionado, you owe it to yourself to check out Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem on the GameCube, which is, for about 90% of its length, possibly the greatest horror game ever made, for a variety of reasons. Where it falls down is the endgame. As you progress through the game you learn a variety of magic spells. One of these is a shield. The way this works in the game mechanics is that the shield takes so long to cast that you really have to cast it when you're not fighting. Then you enter combat, and it soaks up the first couple of hits you take.

In the endgame, the difficulty of Eternal Darkness ramps up steadily. What this means is rather than progress through a series of increasingly tense and climactic encounters as a good cap to the rest of the game, you'll be inching your way through dull and repetetive combat by casting your shield, fighting one monster, and then waiting around for your magic to regenerate so you can cast shield again. By allowing your engagement with the forces of evil to become a methodical routine, the game strips almost all of the horror out of the final levels.

What is scary is not death, but the fear of death

Forbidden Siren is another example of a game where the fundamental gameplay is the antithesis of horror. Successful progression requires memorising enemy behaviour and using it to avoid detection in a Metal Gear-esque stealth fashion. And once you know that a given minion of darkness patrols a residential block in an unwavering straight-line patrol, it's really hard to actually be scared of that minion.

But that was actually the least of Forbidden Siren's many failings (which was a shame, as it had some great ideas). The real crazy, runaway, drooling-at-the-mouth disincentive to playing through the game was the difficulty. In the course of just the first three of the game's levels, you will die many, many times - and it gets worse from there onwards. Each time you die, you go back to the start of the level. They're not particularly short levels, either. That's not scary - that's just frustrating.

It's ironic that a prerequisite to fostering a fear of death in the player is making sure that they don't actually die that often. Games are more effective when they keep a player on the edge of death, constantly guzzling a diminishing supply of healing items. Always there are reminders of the player's mortality - a red tinge to the screen, a controller vibrating to simulate a sped-up heartbeat, or in the case of Eternal Darkness the very memorable hallucinations that occur when your sanity ebbs away. Always you know that the game could kill you at any second. And yet, in the best horror titles, it very rarely does, as long as you keep dancing to its tune.

In good horror, death is used not as a punishment for failing the challenge, but as a stick to keep a player acting in the spirit of the game. Death occurs when you stay too long in one spot, or when you try to explore areas that you clearly aren't meant to, or when you're too trigger-happy with your ammo instead of fighting the undead with a knife. Sometimes it may come from nowhere and without warning, just once, at the start of a segment of a game, to underscore the danger of everything else that's coming up, but it's rare that you'll die of the same thing twice, and reloading your save game will be a rare exercise.

Probably the best example is the original Silent Hill. You die once, right at the start, no matter what you do - and then, if you're reasonably competent, you'll be fine the rest of the game. But you'll never forget those zombie-things dragging you to the ground in that back alley...

Good fiction is about defeating the reader's expectations

And that's doubly true when the fiction in question is horror. It is absolutely key that what comes next is substantively different from what came before. The game state needs to keep changing. If you talk to anyone who's played a survival horror, they're unlikely to rant about how excellent the basic mechanics were - they'll tell you about the one-off occurrences, and the way that things got crazy near the end of the game.

If there's one thing that's memorable about Silent Hill 4: The Room, it's the gradual descent of the titular room from a game hub and place of safety into a nightmarish hell-area more dangerous than what lies outside it. It's a fantastic design choice that makes up a great deal for some of the less inspired levels that make up the rest of the game.

Eternal Darkness mixes defeating the player's expectations into the basic gameplay. You have a sanity meter that drops whenever you see a monster or use magic, and goes back up when you cathartically chop a monster's corpse into small pieces. When your sanity meter drops too low, you're likely to experience hallucinations. These range from seeing cockroaches crawling across the inside of your TV screen, to entering rooms and seeing your character explode into chunks (and then reappearing intact back outside the door, as if you'd never entered), to, in one memorable example, the game pretending to reset and then crash. There's a huge variety to these, and you're unlikely to see them all in a single playthrough.

The Suffering, Silent Hill 3 and Half-Life mix a number of scripted sequences into the basic level design. These vary in effectiveness. Half-Life, not a horror game per se, still manages a fairly regular catalogue of scares from suddenly bursting pipes, collapsing walkways, and ubiquitous headcrab attacks. The Suffering I recall as being very effective when I actually played it, but now, about a year later, I'm hard pressed to remember any parts of the game worth mentioning. Silent Hill 3 has a very slow start, but has some fantastic vignettes later in the game, notably the ghost house and the room with the mirror.

Sit back and be scared

I guess what I'm saying is, in designing horror games the focus needs to be on providing a consistent, coherent, and well paced experience for the player, rather than on creating a challenge. Game mechanics should be focused on causing horror-friendly behaviour in the player - keep them moving, keep them on the verge of death, and rarely let them feel safe or well-prepared. Basic game tools which make for scary or disturbing situations are probably a better investment than scripted sequences, although there's a place for both.

And make sure the player keeps their hands inside the car at all times.

This post is The Dust Forms Words' entry into the October Round Table of Bloggers.

Blogs of the Round Table

Corvus, over at his site Man Bytes Blog, has for some time been hosting a project called Blogs of the Round Table. It runs monthly. Corvus sets a (game-related) topic, and if you want to join in you blog on the topic and then notify Corvus of your post. Starting in April 2006, I climbed on board that crazy horse and started flogging it for all it was worth.

April 07 - Trinity
Topic: "Three Colours"

December 06 -March 07 - no entry
I was offline!

November 06 - The Citizen Kane of Games
Topic: "Where's Your Grammar?"

October 06 - Ghost Train
Topic: "This Time It's Fright Night... For Real"

September 06 - Game Design With Balls
Topic: "Conventionally Speaking"

August 06 - No entry
Topic: "Sports Coat, No Tie"

July 06 - The Dawn Of An Age
Topic: "It Was Great When It All Began"

June 06 - The Skull Beneath The Skin
Topic: "The Jolly Reaper"

May 06 - The Pigeon And The Seed
Topic: "Social Issues And Games"

April 06 - With Friends Like These
Topic: "Your Friendship Is A Game To Me"

Visit the homepage of the Round Table! (link)