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[PATV] Wednesday, September 25, 2013 - Extra Credits Season 7, Ep. 3: How Much Agency Do Games Need?
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
[PATV] Wednesday, September 25, 2013 - Extra Credits Season 7, Ep. 3: How Much Agency Do Games Need?
This week, we attempt to reframe the question of how much choice a game needs to successfully engage the player.
Come discuss this topic in the forums!
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You know why Menu Combat in RPG games is insanely boring? Because of the lack of agency you have over battles there. Enemies are usually weak to one type of spell, so the moment you get your "Fire1" spell, you will ALWAYS use that spell on your enemies, until you run out of MP. There is no choice there at all - you will use it. The moment you level enough, you will get "Fire2" which is basically a more damaging "Fire1" spell. Later you get "Fire3" and while that is an AoE spell, it deals MORE DAMAGE than "Fire2" so you will use it even against a single enemy.
"The obvious choice". Technically you have spells like "Ice", "Wind", "Lightning" etc., but if the enemy is weak to a single element, you will use that element. Always.
I am not trying to pick on Menu Combat games, just stating an example that shows a problem. That is why I used the example of Fire1, Fire2 and Fire3 doing ONLY more damage than their previous version.
I do have to acknowledge your point though - Menu Combat isn't something that is dead or "cannot be made interesting". There are games out there that try to battle the problems and I really applaud some of the efforts made there to make it interesting.
For your example, adding Weak and Resisting enemies of the same element are not exactly a fix HOWEVER if the designer is smart, he can just make all elemental spells AoE. That means that certain enemies will heal from our Ice spell, while some will receive brutal damage. Now if these enemies have different priorities that change depending on circumstances, the player solves a bigger puzzle, which makes combat more tactical and interesting. "Do I kill these guys first since their damage is obnoxious? Or maybe I should deal with the guys that cast stuns on my party, even though they are really tanky..."
On a side note, a simple exercise for this could be just using RPG Maker at its "default" without scripting and attempting an interesting combat system by just creating tactical skills and enemies that respond to it. It is not easy but it's a great practice realm for designers when you are forced to use "basic stuff" creatively.
Anyway, I am not trying to pick on games but highlighting a problem in the "designer mind". I think it was even previously stated in the episodes that making a "correct or wrong" type of choice is not a way to go. You cannot proceed until you "do the right thing".
It is not always storyline based though. We can't just focus on "story not having enough options here" or else we will create "boring games with a multiple-choice storyline". Sometimes even a perfectly linear story can be good if between story segments players have a lot of stuff to choose from, customizing their combat style, characters and so on.
For example, Rhythm games. You know exactly what you're supposed to do. You're just striving for the best possible attempt at it. And it's fun.
Because of that, this was the first episode i actually find boring - which is still a compliment considering all the episodes you already made. Just wanted to mention it.
In Operation, I can successfully extract the required piece from the board, or I fail to do so. There is no choice here, but agency is still derived because the result of my actions determines my success in the game.
So we have two types of agency: agency through skill and agency through choice.
If we've established this, then a game has enough agency when a player never feels at any point that their actions no longer have a meaning on the game world.
And so a game has enough skill challenges or choice in it when the player never feels this disconnect. Or at least, it has enough of such challenges or choices when all of those are effective. If the challenge sets the bar too high, or the choice disregards the player's decision, then that can break the agency just as much as if these were not even there.
Also, TGS is over and, as far as I can tell, nothing about The Last Guardian
I realize that this episode won't PREVENT next-gen AAA developers from relying on expensive skyboxes and cutscenes to carry their games, but maybe it'll at least remind them to occasionally switch up the combat. Not by stealing my my favorite gun and replacing it with some shitty gimmick, but by offering me the OPTION to pick up the shitty gimmick weapon, cycle it into my weapons rotation, and then rewarding me if I can figure out how to use it tactically to overcome a new challenge.
Or, you know, maybe, just maybe, they could make the gimmick weapon not suck in the first place. That would be nice, but we can't ask *too* much of these people. So one step at a time.
Simon is *not* the same type of execution challenge. Simon rewards speed and accuracy, not precision. It's like that "Quick Draw" game in Kirby. You know what you have to do, you know EXACTLY what inputs are required, and you're just trying to do it *correctly,* not *creatively.*
This is all an elaborate way of saying that some Execution Challenges require you to make choices and judgement calls on-the-fly, while others don't. So. Why does Agency require any choice at all? In some cases, it may not! But I think in the vast majority of cases, even games heavily rooted in execution challenges can benefit from a little leeway for creative player inputs.
Even more importantly than that, though, a game needs to telegraph what kinda challenges it's trying to present, and what options the player can expect to use overcoming said challenges. If there's only one way through, that's fine, but it should say that on the tin.
@zegota
My example doesn't speak of a FOO strategy.
If any game really makes you want to go find a guide to figure out how to beat it then you're looking for the optimal solution or paradigm. This means that you're looking for the correct answer because your sense of choice has become, or has been, non-existent.
Of course, this is all subjective, just like all games need varying choice to instill a sense of agency how those elements effect each of us differently.
My main character, a Blaster, had the whole fire blast primary set. His strength was middle to close range multi enemy damage, but if needed he could deal massive damage to a single enemy at long range to pull them away from a mob or create a patch of burning rain to slow down enemies and linked with the Energy Manipulation set, he also had potent melee attacks that could stun enemies.
Next to Champions Online, my 'specialist' (as freeform isn't that great to me) just uses whichever attack deals the most damage as my other abilities don't give me an advantage in a given situation and there's not really any practical chains of powers. I like the character and she is powerful, but she's no where near as flexible as my CoH Blaster. Even if I used freeform, the build of every fight in CO is 'build energy, use most powerful attack' while CoH constantly mixed up the fights and each enemy group had their own strengths, weaknesses and abilities to deal with, Malta Group Sappers that drain your endurance and Nemesis Lieutenants who cast 'Vengeance' on all nearby allies, making them more powerful, on death while CO only really has the occasional enemy that can cast a hold on you or self destructs.
Another thing CoH had is that any character or team build could work while characters and teams in CO are vague the same, just with melee or ranged attacks and if you don't have a defense power, you're as good as stuffed.
On a dark soul note, the last boss of the game demonstrate just how much choice you usually have, since it's the only boss in the game where you're forced to fight in a very specific way.
I agree with you to an extent but with execution challenges like Operation or Guitar Hero / Rock Band / Super Hexagon, whilst those split second decisions are being made, they're very dissimilar to narrative or strategy choices and should be approached separately.
The difference is that challenge "choices" are decided unconsciously. Things like muscle memory or a quick eye are learned, not chosen. There are still parallels; A skill challenge that is too hard is frustrating for the same reason that an ignored narrative choice is, and that is a lack of reward for effort. But without that cogent reckoning of the problem at hand, I think these are two very different things.
For example, would a reflex tester qualify as a game?
If we started seeing whose foot kicked the hardest when their kneecap is tapped, there is no choice there. The player has a very limited role in providing the knee to be tapped. However, should such tapping strengthen the response, and we introduced materials to be snapped in half reverse-karate-chop style above the leg to make it fun, does this then become a game?
If it does, where are the choices? What is creating the agency?
If it does not, then where does that place games like Super Hexagon where training various parts of your body to perform better are an integral part of the challenge?
As for everyone saying that rhythm games have no choice, the track list in Guitar Hero / Rock Band is an extremely important choice to that game. People would get sick of those games extremely quickly if they didn't have the ability to change the music to something they enjoyed or move from track to track as they wish.
As a counter-argument, you could frame it in the sense that in a game like Guitar Hero, you choose to either hit the note or not. That isn't really a choice though, since there is one obvious and definitively better course of action and the challenge is in doing that action.
I'd have a hard time disagreeing more, with both points.
In marathon Civ I'm typically just mashing "next turn" while I wait for buildings/technology to finish being built/researched and my small handful of scouting units go searching through the nearby fog of war to map out the terrain. Tedious in the extreme.
As for the end boss of Dark Souls, there are several options, though many of them exploit basically the same windows of opportunity, and using a shield certainly makes the fight easier (though that's true for 99% of the game in general), but none of them is required. Pretty much the only thing you can't do effectively against him is kite with archery/soul arrows, since getting any reasonable distance from him for more than a couple of seconds is nearly impossible. You can, however, stop-and-start kite him by dodging backward away from his attack at close range, firing your weapon/spell, letting him close the gap and repeating, just as an example.
There might be a "best" strategy, or one that a given player finds easiest, but that fight doesn't force you into a specific tactic unless you let it (for instance, if your character build can't accomplish anything else, but that's a result of your choices).
Maybe the term "Execution Challenge" is a bit loaded for the purposes of this conversation. Would it be helpful to divide it further into "Single-Acceptable-Route" and "Multi-Acceptable-Route" Execution Challenges?
Halo is the ur-example to me of the type of Choice I feel is optimal for a lot of games. (Mostly action games.) There's a bunch of guns lying on the ground. Pick any two. Hey, look. There's a sniper rifle. They hardly ever give you those. You don't *have* to take it, but you can if you want to. Maybe you can save it for the open areas where it works the best. But if you want to fire it at an enemy, or even skip it entirely, that's your call. You can still beat the level, and the game, no matter which weapons you pick up. It's all about choosing your tools and then using them effectively.
Super Mario 3 was the same way with power-ups, especially the ones you could use from your inventory on the map screen. I feel these types of choices are fantastic because even after you've made your choice, you're still playing around with, making those little judgement calls, all throughout the execution challenge.
It's very true that this paradigm breaks down considerably in turn-based games, or games like Simon and Rock Band that offer a very rigid criteria for success.
They've been doing extra episodes of Extra Credits to accommodate the Punic wars. So the last Punic wars one should appear this weekend.
I don't think there are "Multi-Acceptable-Route" Execution Challenges to be honest.
Take your Halo example. Execution challenges here cover a lot of the basic FPS mechanics. So you have to learn to aim, to take cover, to arc/lead with projectiles, to drive/fly and various others. These skills have to be learned or the player is going to be unable to complete the level or at the very least find the level very tedious.
It might be possible to avoid using missing skills, such as walking everywhere instead of using vehicles, or meleeing everything because you can't hit the broad side of a barn, but good game design is likely to discourage this. As the advantages of each skill should reward time invested in each skill, ignoring any one skill is likely to close some of these rewards off from the player.
The player can then use their proficiencies in these skills to drive gameplay choices. So they can choose to pick up the shotgun or the needler based on how easy they find each weapon to use. Or they can choose between fighting from cover or simply charging the enemy leader based on how quickly they can travel or how well they can arc a nade. But the proficiencies themselves aren't choices.
This is especially true when you consider that different players might have vastly different choices available to them based on their different levels of proficiency.
An inexperienced player may be unable to kill enough enemies in close combat to make a shotgun approach survivable. Whereas a good player may find that using a particular weapon in a particular environment is always the better option, whilst the bad player still has to experiment and choose different options in the same location to determine this.
So whilst the execution challenges can inform choices in the game, a "Multi-Acceptable-Route" challenge is still divisible into the execution challenge part, that assigns each route difficulty or even makes them viable, and the decision part, where the player acts to choose a route.
Thinking back, Extra Credits has already decided to preclude Execution challenges from the discussion with the removal of Calculations from the definition of choice.
Calculations are, to a certain extent, binary Execution challenges. The player either knows the optimal strategy or does not, and a large part of this is down to whether the player can work the math or identify that such a strategy exists in the first place. Execution challenges generally have a more gradual learning curve, but you can still build a game around Calculations and have them be engaging. Just look at managing a mana curve in Magic: The Gathering, or any economy in a Civ game.
So whilst Execution challenges or Calculations aren't choices, they still have to be considered when thinking about how engaging a game is and how much agency a player has.
The content of the episode aside, "Enthusiastic Mad Scientist James" is now one of my favorite art pieces of the series.
Next time, I feel like you should choose something multi-platform to illustrate the central principles of game design. Y'know, because you chose ONE CONSOLE-EXCLUSIVE EXAMPLE TO ILLUSTRATE A UNIVERSAL PRINCIPLE OF GAME DESIGN, emphasizing that everyone else can't really understand your point (even by watching online) and leaving every single one of them out in the cold.
This reflects pretty poorly on the grinding concept as well, as it shows a time to power rather than a choice to power mechanic.
While I see some of the points, I disagree with the conclusion of the TED speaker.
The answer is not artificially limit choice, either by redistribution of wealth (removal of the ability to take advantage choices) or by regulatory limiting choices. I instead think having a million possible combinations of stereos is good thing. While buyers remorse, regret, and disappointment. I think the better solution is to educate our youth on better decision making and choice evaluation.
As for the topic of computer gaming, lets looks at Diablo 2 and Diablo 3. In Diablo 2 there was more choice in the skill trees, they were also permanent and flaws in your choices were not apparent until 100s of hours of play were sunk; lots of regret. In D3 you can change skills anytime, no problems no regret. For some reason D2 seems to have been a more satisfying experience for many players.
I love games with free exploration, even if the main quest is step locked with no real choice. Though I would say I like games that let me choose sides (like Skyrim, which by the way is one of my favorite games)
On my first playthrough of New Vegas I wound up getting ED-E and Veronica in my party as my first companions (I simply missed all the others because I didn't follow up on their sidequests) as a result, I spent a LOT of time with Veronica and for more than just the fact that she is voiced by Felica Day, who I was just discovering through "The Guild" and "Eureka" (I waited a LONG time to buy the game okay?)
I found myself really liking the character of Veronica and at the same time I had decided to be taken in by Mr. House's power, intelligent conversation and seemingly fair-dealing with my character. As a result, this put me in a bit of a quandry. To complete the House questline and advance the plot, I eventually received orders to destroy the Brotherhood of Steel Bunker and kill Veronica's entire extended family.
I couldn't to that to her...
And since I'd decided to throw all my chips behind Mr. House (as it were), the Legion HATED me and the Wild Card quest-line was dead on arrival because I wasn't about to betray Mr. House either. In short, there was no way for this incarnation of the Courier to advance the main plotline and (technically) bring the game to an ending without betraying his closest friend or his new mentor.
As the realization slowly dawned on me that I didn't WANT to compromise the "story" I'd created in just so I could eventually hear Ron Perlman's ending narration (even though Ron Perlman narrating various endings is the reason I BUY Fallout games) I continued playing, eventually maxing out the character doing various side-quests and the DLCs
Along the way I started a second character with the explicit intention of following the Wild Card missions and developing a relationship with the Kings, and all the stuff I had missed out on the first time. Eventually I jut lost interest in New Vegas because I could see the "logic" behind each of the quests and I realized I was just playing to get the outcomes I wanted and all the immersion was gone. Each quest took place in its own little world and that none of the decisions I made in each individual sector of the map would add up to anything on their own. Even the three main "plotlines" were just isolated strings of pearls that rearranged the pieces in the game's final set piece.
I felt robbed of my sense of agency in the world even though I could quite literally choose any ending EXCEPT the one I wanted, and in the end wound up with an "impending battle" that never came after close to a full in-game year.
Anything like that happen to anyone else?
Spoilers included!
All scenarios in a game are problems, go from point A to point B to retrieve the X or to do Y once you get there. To do that, I may have to sneak past people or kill them. And if I have to battle with the enemy, I want as many options to do so, especially bosses (which I frankly hate, talk about rinse & repeat).
To be able to give the person this sort of agency, you have to have a world that has flexibility. Take Portal 2 for example. When there are many ways to solve a puzzle, it's so much better than when there's only one way (this is what I always hated about ScanTron tests in school when there were possibly 2 or more good answers). An example of games with limited puzzle solving is the recent Tomb Raider.
So if games are viewed to be problem solving endeavors at their most basic level (even if the problem is to kill the boss), there needs to be as many degrees of freedom for the player to solve the problem.
This gives a game Agency.
Have to disagree with your Portal 2 example. Many levels in the single player mission suffered from black-wall-itis such that there was only one solution because all others have been denied by black walls (where you can't place portals). As a result, the one solution intended by the designer was immediately obvious, and there was very little discovery in the game. The moment that stood out for me the most in this way was the "cube-in-a-glass-box" puzzle. Here, you're meant to break the cube out to activate a lift to an upper level. The upper level is on catwalks and has open areas down to the lower level so that it can access the repulsion gel in the lower level. Realistically, you should be able to solve the lower puzzle by placing a portal on the ceiling, a portal in the floor under said opening to the second story, jumping through the floor, refiring the first portal beneath you whilst you fall, and then using this momentum to fling yourself out of the floor portal onto the second story. However if you try this, you run into an invisible ceiling, instead of jumping through to the second story. In most of the story missions, there is only one way to get through most of the levels, and so I found myself not needing to solve most puzzles at all, and lacking that agency.
The only puzzles where I found I did have a good sense of agency, were the puzzles which had conversion gel in them or the puzzles towards the end of the story where multiple elements can be used out of the same constrained white panels, and so figuring out which to use is a particular challenge in and of itself.
Portal 2 is still a really good game, with the storytelling in the campaign being excellent, and the co-op puzzles as well as the user-made ones make up for the deficiency of choice in the story mode, but I would not point to the main campaign of Portal 2 as an example of flexible problem solving.
Portal though, you only have to look at the challenge missions to see how they've left other solutions in, instead of blacking out all the accidental ones.