Are games too easy? Is the ease of games hurting our youth?
http://www.secretlair.com/index.php?/clickableculture/entry/patronizing_the_player/
Like the flOw guys postulate with their “flow theory,” I think there’s a happy middle ground that can be reached in games between the player’s abilities and the challenge of the game.
There’s a fair amount of effort going into that in games now with DDA (dynamic difficulty adjustment), but much of that is aimed specifically at making the game easier for those who struggle. Not enough attention, really, is given to those who aren’t challenged enough — which is just as much of a problem (at least according to flow theory and many hardcore gamers).
Like most things in our very conservative industry, we’ll need to see a number of blockbuster hits that do this right before it rectifies itself.
~Dodger
Actually, I was thinking about a related issue recently. Death in games, from MMOs with casualized death to NetHack with hardcore death and everything in between. The topic was spurred by this year’s GDC talk on Top Ten Research Findings. You can catch the slides at http://avantgame.com/top10.htm, but they’re only the slides. The #1 finding was that players want non-trivial death mechanics. Personally I’ve always felt that way about games, but it was interesting to see that many other gamers feel similarly. Obviously not every game should be NetHack, but trivialized death is rarely the way to go. For example, I loved Halo co-op but the fact that you’d die and then get right back up really took the heroism out of it.
As far as difficulty goes, I’ve always just had the approach of: I adjust the difficulty by choosing the game I want to play. It’s like choosing a book for your reading level. Unfortunately that doesn’t work from a marketing perspective.
In the past DDA has either challenged me not enough, or in one case too much. In one particular game I set some goal for myself, like never taking damage, and reloaded the game whenever I did. Eventually the difficulty got tuned up so high it was silly. In another game I was trying to run through an area without shooting back at the monsters, and kept dying. When I finally pulled it off, I realized that the difficulty had been tuned down so low that the next couple levels were pathetic. (Hmmm, those might have even been the same game, I don’t remember) Ultimately it’s really hard to figure out what wacky things your players will do with the game.
I much prefer the approach that Jenova Chen suggests, let the players tune things for themselves. I dynamically adjusted WoW’s difficulty (before level 60) by choosing which enemies to fight. I happened to like silly hard fights that I’d have to run from frequently, so I’d fight monsters a few levels above me. I could have easily killed weaker monsters, and probably even leveled more quickly, but that wasn’t the point. Of course that doesn’t apply as easily to linear games (like most FPS games), so they’re stuck offering the more bland easy/hard modes. Still that’s player tuning.
Perhaps there’s a compromise, perhaps you could have DDA but also allow the players to access the current DDA setting in a menu and change it. That might be interesting…
There seems to be an interesting learning curve when it comes to gaming. For those who are brand new to it and have never played a game, its quite steep. My first console was a PS1. I remember playing FF7 and bawling at the infamous Aeris scene, then dying immediately afterwards at the fight with Sephiroth, then watching the scene and crying, and then dying again, ad nauseum. It took me a couple years to really fine-tune my hand-eye coordination. However, now that I’ve been playing for a while there’s really nothing I can think of that I have to really work to overcome. Especially puzzles. Whatever happened to hard puzzles? I miss them. 🙁
Anymore, if you want a challenge in a game, like WarMage said, you have to create it yourself. Such as running into areas that are way above your level, purposely selecting sub-optimal gear and weapons, using fewer items, only using one weapon, etc., etc. I’ve been doing this with FFXII, there’s just nothing in it apart from collection quests that’s very challenging. Boo hiss, I say. Granted I spend most of my time staring at my party’s hair, but still.
I agree with letting players choose their own levels of difficulty, especially for the players that enjoy exploring just how many ways they can die in a game. I think it would be quite a disappointment after the joys of being macabre wore off.
As far as trivializing death, that’s something that I’m uncomfortable with. I predict that by about 2015 the technology used in gaming will be capable of some astonishingly lifelike graphics and sound. So real, in fact, that it may seem just like real life. Currently there’s something out called project Epoc, which is a headset that picks up on electric signals of the brain and uses them to control events in a game. There’s more about it at http://www.emotiv.com
With technology like this the subject of death in games worries me. If you play a game with a VR headset such as this one, if you consciously visualize yourself picking up a gun and shooting someone, and then it happens…that’s scary to me. If one becomes used to shooting people in an environment like that, where the lines between game and reality are blurred, then I think it might become easier for people to pick up a gun in real life. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a little blood and gore. But that’s with a controller, on my TV, on my couch. Not inside my head and controlled by my conscious thoughts.
There are some new and exciting things happening out there. For the most part I’m thrilled to see the new innovations in gaming that have come about. Still, I sincerely hope that developers and the public can reach a consensus on where the line between fantasy and reality will be drawn.
@1
In the flow article I linked to, they also mention the problem of death and time being bad indicators for a DDA system in certain cases:
“…Assumptions never work for mass audience. When a player enjoys performing a suicidal stunt in Grand Theft Auto, it would be ridiculous for a DDA system to assume that the player’s skill is too poor because of the death count.”
Basically, the DDA analysis can’t be a catch-all solution, but has to be tailored to the specific game and the specific mechanic.
The flow article also mentions the need to provide players with diverse gameplay choices, and to use the choices themselves as a way of figuring out how to tune the experience. By allowing the player to choose what they like, and then giving them more of that it theoretically buffers a little more against problems like the one you mention. Now that’s something that’s tough to pull off, but I could see how it could work.
The game flOw was apparently made with this idea in mind.
P.S Your Hero saga is finished. Its on the Forum Community board. 🙂 Enjoy!
You know, Mr. Platypus, your discussion of advanced technology and what simulated worlds will teach us actually reinforces the point to me. If you can use your brain to directly pick up a gun and shoot someone in a virtual manner so closely resembling life, it should not be trivialized. In real life all this shit happens if you shoot people, and it’s never a simple casual thing. So too should be in games. The last thing I want is a hyper-realistic GTA where you’re trying to shoot as many cops as you can.
As for your other comments on difficulty in general, and DDA in particular, I couldn’t agree more. 🙂
Mike, you’re absolutely right about mass audiences and faulty indicators, and I like that you mention death and time. When you brought up DDA I didn’t associate it with Fl0w, even though I suppose it fits the definition. Fl0w uses a whole different approach. It’s like playing Halo, but being able to skip all the vehicle sequences if you want to, or choosing not to fight the Flood because you find them boring. Fl0w and Halo are both linear games, but with obviously differing levels of freedom in progression.
Anyways, you’re right, DDA could be awesome, if it wasn’t the under-the-covers-make-it-easy-mode-because-the-player-sucks mechanic that I’m familiar with. Respect the player and let them choose, preferably without putting the choice in their face, how to tune the game themselves. 🙂
(Oh, remember when I was playing RC:2 at your place and insisted on trying to beat the Arena before I had the right gear for it, that was awesome! And also exactly what I’m talking about)
Most games are way too easy. Lets take Deadlocked for example even on the Hardest difficulty it was quite easy. The only recent games i can think of as actually hard are Halo 1 and 2 (on the Heroic and Legendary difficulty) and C&C 3 demo i still can’t beat the AI on hard i can’t imagine what Brutal is going to be like. But when i play some of the older games on my PC (600×400 FTW) I find them quite hard. Makes me wonder what happened why are developers making games so easy now?
@6
I think part of it is the diversification of the gamer pool. More and more people are playing games, so I think it would make sense to go a little easy on the people who are new to using a controller to play games. Plus, hardcore gamers and those that enjoy insanely difficult challenges make up a relatively small part of the gaming sphere. There’s no doubt that they are very influential, but the actual number of hardcore gamers is relatively few. Casual gamers outnumber them many times over, and casual gamers as a rule don’t enjoy spending hundreds of hours on a game or a play mechanic that is very difficult.
Those of us that are stuck in the murky middle between newb and hardcore seem to be a bit out of luck. 🙁 I’m totally for granting more independence to the players when it comes to difficulty. If DDA can do that, all the better! That way everybody can be satisfied. Theoretically. 🙂