More questions stemming out of yesterday's question. Are games that are hard more fun? My initial feeling is that there's maybe a "sweet spot" between a game that is so easy that it quickly becomes boring and one that is so hard that the player decides that progress is either impossible or not worth the time investment (I quit the otherwise adorable Un Jammer Lammy because the learning curve was too fucking steep for me to play the second level one more time).
Raph Koster's lecture / series of doodles Theory of Fun for Game Design (largish PDF) puts this in terms of pattern recognition: playing a game involves puzzling out its rule or behavior patterns, which is fun as long as steady, non-redundant progress is being made on the task.
Tom Coates' Plasticbag weblog has a post on "things that aren't fun, and fun that is bad," in which he asks a whole series of interesting related questions (specifically on World of Warcraft):
"I've started wondering whether a game could still be considered good if you want to play it a lot but at the same time resent the time that it takes from you. What if you find it boring but still somehow can't put it down[?] Can you love and hate a game at the same time and still call it 'fun'? Can a game be a narcotic, or a guilty secret or an addiction? Can it be a fruitless activity without value that still feels good?"
Long, interesting comments thread follows.
| | Sleeping Jeremy (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1){kind=small} sleepingjpb) wrote, |
September 8 2006, 00:12:08 UTC 5 years ago
There is a sweet spot between being too easy and being frustratingly impossible. But I think that sweet spot is different for people, depending on their physical and mental development, amount of time they have to commit, if they are serious or casual players, and a number of other factors. Progress does need to be made, but often times it is repetitive - I'm thinking of Myst here, where I'll end up back at the same puzzle over and over again. I'm guessing that most people who play those types of games are willing to look past (or even embrace) a certain degree of redundancy, simply because they like the problem-solving aspects.
In regards to Coates' questions: You should read my paper on MMORPG addiction. There are factors inherent to the game that can contribute to addiction, primarily the shared rhetorical vision that teamwork is essential to the game. This leads to a sense of guilt when others are depending on you to be present in the game. This doesn't make the game itself inherently bad (although perhaps manipulative). I suppose it depends on how one measures what is "good."
September 8 2006, 02:08:02 UTC 5 years ago
"Hard" without being "repetitive" would be pretty great, although my own (admittedly limited) experience with the current crop of videogames reveals that this is still a bit of a holy grail. The thing that frustrated me about Shadow of the Colossus was not that the puzzles were too hard (exactly), it was that failing at them would result in a setback, which would involve having to complete a certain portion of the puzzle a second time (or a third time, or a fifteenth). If these earlier portions had shifted or varied somewhat it would have been more enjoyable.
Katamari levels are similar: fail to complete them and you'll have to repeat them, although the game is so crowded and kinetic that the repetition is less burdensome.
Perhaps this is part of why multiplayer games (Counter-Strike, or many MMORPGs) are so popular: if the "puzzles" of a game are in part formed by unpredictable human adversaries, that cuts down on the "repetitiveness" factor in a way that game-engine AIs just don't seem capable of doing (yet).
Repetition, though, for all its maddening faults, is also the unacknowledged linchpin of variation... this was once again made clear to me yesterday when I watched this video, in which someone has used the in-game-recording function of Trackmania Sunrise (which can replay multiple plays simultaneously) to display a thousand runs of the same course.
September 8 2006, 17:31:12 UTC 5 years ago
I agree that part of the appeal of multiplayer games is the unpredictable factor of human engagement and the challenge of working with others. There's nothing predictable about playing Halo with someone who gets a special kind of glee out of putting sticky grenades on the asses of others. Yeah, I'd be that player.
September 8 2006, 19:16:17 UTC 5 years ago
Yes, but also you can do things like lose your grip and fall from a great height—which then involves climbing all the way back up to where you were.
September 8 2006, 17:11:01 UTC 5 years ago
Quick answer: No.
Longer answer: If you're talking about games that you resent for taking your time - for compelling you to play them... That is not "fun". Addictions and compulsions are rarely fun.
If you're talking about a game that frustrates you by forcing you to repeat the same task over and over... It depends on how much hate the game generates and how much fun it generates. Units of "hate" cancel out units of "fun". If it generates more hate than fun, then it ceases to be fun.
September 8 2006, 18:11:47 UTC 5 years ago
I'm cautious about the uncritical use of the term "addiction"—it's a loaded word, with a whole set of ideologies built into it—but with some people claiming that up to 40 percent of World of Warcraft players are addicted, I wonder if any "theory of fun" doesn't need to be broad enough to at least touch on the boundary between "fun" and "addiction."
September 9 2006, 16:45:07 UTC 5 years ago
Many players may even claim to be "addicted," but it's a word that can be used lightly. Psychological addiction to anything is possible, and maybe those people are addicted because it's "fun." If we receive the endorphin rush from playing, it's both "fun" and potentially "addictive." So I suppose the "theory of fun" should at least touch on that possibility.
September 10 2006, 05:31:00 UTC 5 years ago
Yeah. I call that game "programming." Solving a bug is like peeling off a scab, in the way the pain blossoms into relief. Parts of MYST are like that.
September 10 2006, 17:08:14 UTC 5 years ago
So: is programming fun?
September 11 2006, 21:30:41 UTC 5 years ago
Oh, definitely. I forgot to make that clear, there, didn't I.
What isn't fun is meetings, emails, project plans, immovable deadlines, status updates, meetings, trouble tickets, and meetings.
Oh hey look: I need to run off to a meeting.
*sigh*
September 12 2006, 13:43:03 UTC 5 years ago