LVL Headed

This week I got angry.  I read an article on Gamasutra by Ernest Adams (of No Twinkie Database fame) entitled “The Tao of Game Design.”  And during the process of reading, I felt the kind of inner-excitement I only feel when I disagree with something.

So to say that I became angry isn’t quite true.  It’s just that my vice is debate, and so when I spot something I disagree with I gain an urge to speak out against it, an urge that just won’t go away until I fall into temptation.

So if you now look at the end of the article in the comments section, you can see some of the “excited” messages I left.  If you need to know, I post under my name: Steven Turner.

Now it’s been a few days, and after looking back at it, I see what bothered me.  It wasn’t what he was trying to say, it was the details.  His point was good, but he lead up to it with things that, first of all, I still don’t think are correct (his observations about media, his juxtaposition of making a game fun or making it meaningful), and second of all, didn’t really have anything to do with his main point.  It was an awkward article, full of the kinds of assumptions that tweak me, full of filler, but with a decent (but definetly not eye-opening or discipline-expanding) conclusion.

To really get what Adams was saying, I recommend that you don’t read the article.  Instead, read the comment left towards the end by one Jacek Wesołowski.  You’ll get the point and you’ll understand it better.

For now, I’m going to try and let the technical stuff lie.  I know in my heart of hearts that Adams wasn’t really suggesting that fun games and meaningful games are diametrically opposed to one another, or that games are the only medium which require participation and thought from both the designer and the reader (technically, they all do), it’s just that he was probably trying to stretch out his essay a little bit.

So to Adams, who will very likely never read this…

Sorry.

Recently I’ve been playing Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door (after getting a cheap deal on Amazon), and the battle system has just blown me away.  The mini-game attacks, the way levelling up works, and all the subtle interactions between the types of enemies and the types of attack.  It’s fun, and it’s one of the rare games these days that I can’t stop playing.

But Paper Mario got me thinking about the other RPGs out there, and where all the fun was.  If you think about it, your average jRPG is like an easy game theory puzzle.  Forget the prisoner’s dilemma, in games like Final Fantasy you just worry about attacking or defending, or perhaps which method of attack to use.  Your attacks don’t take any skill to implement, you simply choose the option and it happens.  Why is this fun?

It’s gambling.  That’s where the fun is.  If the player knew everything in these battles, such as the enemy’s HP, whether or not the attack would be a success, whose turn was next, and so on, the choices would become obvious, and it wouldn’t be fun at all.  Instead, it’s all a guessing game in which the player puts their bet either on Attack or Defend, and then watches the outcome to see if they’ve made the right decision.

This is not exactly how Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door works.  Your attacks are more successful if you have good timing and you can see which special attacks enemies can use on you from the start.  There’s less of a bet here, and more need of skill, even if that skill is just pressing a button or releasing the joystick at the right time.

RPGs, or at least Japanese RPGs ask the player to gamble on their actions, and give the player options to better their wagers through the manipulation of statistics.  The fun in Final Fantasy is to try to make a perfect warrior through the acquisition of higher stats, better weapons, bigger spells, and better tricks.  The player attempts to better their odds in games of chance in which the odds are continually stacked against them.  Enemies continue to get stronger and meaner, and so the player adds their stats to make themselves stronger as well.

My wish is for RPGs to experiment more with their statistics.  I want a game in which the main object is to manipulate the system in your favor in each battle.  I want a game that incorporates gambling-style risk and reward, but not in a silly “let’s just put in an attack with a roulette wheel” sense.

And on the other hand, I’m having lots of fun with Paper Mario, which straight-up tosses most of the statistic-based play to the side in order to experiment with other gameplay mechanics.

Oh, and while I’m on the subject, let me say a few words about random encounters.  Paper Mario presents the player with a set number of enemies for each level that you can either rush into to fight or try to avoid.  This is a great system because it gives the designers more control over how the character levels up.  Random encounters give the player loopholes in the game, such as being able to run in a circle outside of a town for hours on end until the player reaches level 1000.

I should clarify, but I’ll leave that for a later rant.

Alright, so I was talking about Hardcore games and Casual games, and how they are played by people with a different state of mind.  The Hardcore game is played like you read a book.  You sit down, you have a few hours free, and you’re truly looking forward to immersing yourself in the title.  The Casual game, well, is more like a song.  While you could spend your time entranced with it, like some do, you could also just use it as background noise.  Something to keep you entertained while you take care of other things.

Casual games are popular with people who haven’t played before because they present the game in a familiar format.  Checkers would never take 40 hours just to finish, and neither will Diner Dash.  It’s not so much that the rules are simpler in these games, it’s that the games can be digested in smaller chunks.

Tell a non-”hardcore” person that you want to play a game, and they’ll think you mean something like checkers.  Pull out The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, and they’ll get annoyed because their assumptions aren’t getting met.  They don’t expect a story, and see the story as extra nonsense rather than anything important.  When they skip the story, they miss the clues and context which tells them their goals.  Without goals, they get confused and just give up.  They expect Chess, and they get The Godfather.

Casual games bring more people to the world of gaming, but they haven’t prepared those people to look at games in a new way, the way console and PC gamers have seen it for years now.  Casual games don’t prepare people for hardcore games because they affirm the idea that games should be consumed like songs, and not like books.

Nintendo is changing this with their games and the Wii.  The odd controller forces developers to re-teach all gamers how to play their games.  Wii Sports is a casual game which rewards players for more involved play by giving out and taking away points for overall wins and losses, with that “Pro” status hanging just above each player’s head.  Unlockables are becoming a great way to get casual gamers to put more interest in play while allowing them to play the same way they’re used to.  They create objectives, and lead players to understand long-term objective based play.

Super Mario Galaxy is a great example of a game which could introduce casual gamers to more hardcore styles.  The game has an over-all objective, but play is split between small galaxies which can be completed in a matter of minutes.

In the end, I think we need to train people how to play games, and what to expect from them.  We need a gaming literacy system, in order to break old ideas of what games are and to teach people what they have become: narrative simulations.  We need games which spread through the casual-hardcore scale, providing more ambient information, longer play periods, and long-term objectives that are tied within a plot, as the game moves up the scale.

Right now, it seems as if the two master-genres are moving apart, creating longer cutscenes that turn off even hardcore gamers.  I don’t really have anything else to say about it.

I just stumbled upon pmog.com, and I have to say the idea blows me away. PMOG stands for Passively Multiplayer Online Game, and is an attempt to create a game you play by surfing the web and doing all your normal everyday web activities. A game that you play passively is an interesting concept, but what’s really got me excited is the idea of using web space as a representation of a game world.

The odd thing about the web is that we all refer to it like it’s a physical location. We say things like “Go to google.com.” We don’t read or scan the web, we “surf” it. And now, when PMOG leaves Beta, we’ll be able to play it, too.

I can imagine going to Gamasutra only to be ambushed by a regiment of orcs, or trading wares with a fellow player I met while shopping for comics on Amazon.com. The organization of sites could also provide opportunities for gameplay. Large sites with multiple directories could act as dungeons, where each page is a different room. There’s also the social aspects. The PMOG site hints at user-created missions, which would drag players across all kinds of sites to complete an objective. Kind of like stumbleUpon with a purpose.

I see so much potential with this. I hope PMOG carries through. Hopefully, if I’m accepted for the beta, I’ll know soon enough.

-SKT