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[PATV] Wednesday, September 11, 2013 - Extra Credits Season 7, Ep. 1: The Feeling of Agency
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
[PATV] Wednesday, September 11, 2013 - Extra Credits Season 7, Ep. 1: The Feeling of Agency
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The only good one was in Pokemon Black/White 2 at the start where your mum ask if you want to start Pokemon, saying no makes her jump backwards in shock
I'd like to see more of that kind of thing in the future.
For once your choice wasn't the be all end all of what happens to the world. Sometimes things happen either way, you're not god. Instead You were constantly reminded that you DID choose and there was no right answer.
Everyone followed the same path, but every player has their own story of their relationships and their regret.
Is it really a meaningless choice just because it didn't matter what you chose after the fact? Yes, more often than not your choices didn't change the course of the events of the story, but they were all meaningful choices AT THE TIME because they were YOUR choices at the time, choices you surely made with the intention of choosing the one you thought would give you the best outcome. Not to mention inevitability of death was a major theme of the game's narative (For Whom The Bell Tolls and all that), so your choices not making a difference to who survives by the end actually furthers that theme. I guarantee you TWD will show up in the episode covering "Illusion of Choice" and they'll explain why the choices are still meaningful despite not actually changing anything concrete much better than I tried to.
And man I wish more games had a better sense of Agency. Also, Skyrim sucks.
Still works for the context of "This talent tree is so bad, don't take it" though. Discipline was a better DPS tree than Shadow was in the day.
COME FORTH, AMATERASU! - Switch Friend Code SW-5465-2458-5696 - Twitch
My first encounter with this was with the Wing Commander games, in where you don't really have many choices. You play through any given scenario and how well you do determines the outcome. Or in other words your skill level determines how the game progresses. If you win a lot you get the 'good' ending, if you lose a lot you get the 'bad' ending, and if you win some and lose some you get a 'middle' ending.
A lot of games these days... virtually all of them it seems, spells out choices for people. The game makes sure you know what your doing, gives you all the details, makes sure all the consequences are known in advance. Takes out a lot of the meaning out of choices I feel.
I suppose what I'm seeing is "Choice = Skill" vs "Skill to get to the next Choice" and that too many games follow the latter.
head back to the start of the video where they discuss "choice in mechanics" as compared to "choice in narrative."
The WC series (at first, at least) had little or no narrative choice, but _plenty_ of meaningful mechanical choice. ie; decide to burn your expendable munitions early, or save them for unseen/faraway foes? Clear our light fighter-craft before taking on objectives, or rush for the goal while your wingmen distract the fighters? etc etc right down to the second-to-second choice you're calling skill: fire now, or lead a bit more? Dive or roll to avoid those shots? etc.
WC *was* kind of unique in that how well you made all the mechanical decisions added up in the end to a narrative difference; kind of a "meta-choice." I agree that there is sometimes a disconnect between the mechanical choices ("skill") and the narrative choices.
I had both trees and realized too late that I put the wrong one in the file :P
I used to be a Pally from Vanilla and played through Wrath. This brought back some hilariously bad memories.
I will use an example. In The Elder Scrolls series of games, there are simple and clear choices of races to make "better" characters if judged by stats alone, but when I ignored these rules in favor of a race that better suited the character I was building in my head, the story was vastly improved. By giving me a choice that was perhaps not intended to be terribly meaningful, or even more a choice that was intended to be meaningful, but which lost it's meaning by leaving room for mathematical exploitation, my personal choice as a player was made even more important. I can go ahead and play that race that's clearly better as a stealth caster for my all melee barbarian, but now I'm going to have to rely even more on skill to achieve my goals because I'm not just given the advantage based on race.
Anyway, I know that was a bit of a long one, but I always love watching and I hope this helps your discussion in some small way.
Game well.
-Strormer
"I would argue that you are presented with much more choice in other mediums and much much more interaction."
And then you don't argue that at all.
Having said that, I think the point of this video (and most of EC's discussions of Choice in general) is to try and identify design practices that will make it easier for developers to create good games. They want to entertain as many players as possible while spending as little time and money as possible. It's a trade-off.
So while it might be possible to create an Elf Barbarian in any game that has elves, barbarians, and character customization, consider two hypothetical games:
In Game A, creating an Elf Barbarian is all but a death sentence, and this is immediately obvious after creating a couple of characters.
In Game B, Elf Barbarians have their own special take on the Barbarian class, and handle differently from Barbarians of other races. They are just as viable as Orc barbs, but they favor a different playstyle, thanks to the magic of Incomperables. Also, this game has a Difficulty slider, and setting it to EXTREME is all but a death sentence for basically ALL character builds.
You can argue (quite correctly) that Game A is more meaningful for you personally, because you crunched the numbers, you DID the meta-gaming, and then you brazenly strode out in defiance of common sense, determined to tell the story of your misfit character. But the fact remains that very few players will want to play as an Elf Barbarian in Game A, whereas in Game B you'd expect them to get roughly the same amount of play as any other class.
This means that any story writing, art assets, or programming created for Elf Barbarians in Game A was wasted, or at best exists as an Easter Egg for the most dedicated of players to find. Whereas in Game B, the Elf Barbarian-specific content was time well-spent. It creates a viable build any player can pick up and figure out how to make work. So, essentially, it gives replay value to all players in a single-player game, or creates a more diverse playerbase in multiplayer games.
Extra Credits did not invent these ideas about Accessibility and Incomperables whole-cloth. These are concepts which evolved over years as developers looked at how players were using their games, often in surprising and counter-intuitive ways. Your unique gameplay experience is meaningful for you, and I'm guessing that part of what makes it meaningful for you is how it flies in the face of the psychology that makes people want to meta-game in the first place. In contrast, Extra Credits is trying to explain how developers can de-fuse that psychology, or even leverage it, to make better games with less effort.
Your argument works perfectly fine from a player's perspective. But from a developer's perspective, it starts to break down.
Beer is the perfect lubricant for twisted and vile animal gibberish. I use it myself when the times are ripe and my need great.
So if the player can calculate everything perfectly, they will no longer be able to master anything. Thus you would draw the correct conclusion in that meaningful choice = fun game, but its important to realize that meaningful choice = deep mastery = fun game. In a sense, a game needs the player to believe that they can reach the point of perfectly calculating how to play the game, but for it to be fun and meaningful, they should never actually be able to do it.
All of this is arguing about something you haven't actually discussed yet so ignore this if you are already on this page. I just think understanding the mastery step is very important to actually understanding what kinds of meaningful choices work well.
Note that this only applies to the big Choices the player encounters over the course of a game, the ones which alter the way the rest of the game plays out. Smaller, moment-to-moment decisions such as "Do I strafe left or right here?" CAN AND SHOULD have a correct answer. But those smaller choices are more correctly categorized as Calculations as part of an Execution Challenge, not a Choice, as viewed through the lens this video is talking about.
If, on the other hand, you have a game where the Assault Rifle is OP and the Shotgun sucks, knowing "Always pick Assault Rifle" is not Deep Mastery. Deep Mastery comes when you know you can get through the next part of the map using either weapon, but both options pose their own benefits and drawbacks, and are roughly equally challenging but require different skills on the part of the player to use correctly. More crucially, a Meaningful Choice means a noob player can pick either weapon arbitrarily, and work hard to learn to master the game by correctly leveraging their choice.
The whole point of distinguishing between Choices and Calculations isn't to say "our games should have all open-ended choices and no right way of doing things." It's to say "games shouldn't present Calculations to the player AS IF they were Choices. Know the difference. Then use the right tool for the job."