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| You know, you're kinda lucky Cody... | |
| Posted By: RC Master | Date: 12/13/10 7:52 p.m. |
In Response To: On Bungie and the Value of the Player's Time (Cody Miller) Well, lucky in the sense that, you're one of the types of people who don't need an overt 'player investment system' to derive enjoyment out of your games. You're independant. You've developed the ability to self-generate goals for yourself and go for them, regardless of whether or not the game is overtly asking you to. You can generate some of the conditions necessary for flow* to happen all by yourself. And by extention, get more enjoyment out of a game than other people that may have played once and given up on. You look at the campaign and you say 'hmm, how fast can I do this level on Legendary?' You get a time, you reasses, you try to beat your old time, try to discover new tricks or better ways of tackling situations etc. Some people, are not so lucky. Or rather, cannot self-generate these goals with respect to games. Theres a reason a lot of people buy game, beat it once, maybe a few times working their way up to the hardest difficulty, and then never touch it again or trade it back in to their game store. They've overcome some/all of the challenges the game has set out for them (that they can perceive) and... thats it. The game is over. Theres nothing left to do. Some people might stare at their game collection wondering 'what can I play tonight?' Not because they feel spoilt for choice at the range of exciting and interesting experiences they are presented with, but because there seems (to them) to be so little choice of oppurtunities for enjoyment there. They've overcome every challenge set by the game they can already, and either the remaining challenges seem unreasonably difficult or there are no apparent challenges left (and I admit to having had this experience myself many years ago,). Player Investment systems provide players with goals to strive for: 'I want this peice of armour because its shiney, so i need X rank and Y credits. To gain credits I can do these things...'
They are, yes I suppose, fairly cheap ways to get the player to play more of a game that, without the player investment system, they would have probably stopped playing before (i.e. shiny 'rank' symbols and superflous pieces of armour et al). But thats not inherently a bad thing. It can provide the goals, feedback and little extra reasons to play the game that previously they would not have had. Extra layers to the game that challenge the player to complete them (e.g. a rank system) with clear cut rules (do this, get that) and the player can work to try to master this element of the game as well (e.g. earning credits as efficiently as possible). This doesn't preclude real enjoyment at all. In fact it can work to set up the exact conditions to allow it to occur: see Beckx's post for a good example of this. You, in a sense, are free of these 'Player Investment Systems'; you play a game for its own sake, to master it, to discover its nuances, and can find/create challenges appropriate to your skills with little to no need of help from the game developer in the form of extraneous reward systems. Thats awesome. Keep doing what you're doing. Others are not so self-motivated. P. I. S.es help them to get more value out of their purchase of the game. Help them to discover different parts of the game or different ways of playing that they hadn't even considered before. Help them focus their time, direct their energy to some goal, provide feedback on that goal and make them feel accomplished when they achieve that goal. Even if the rewards the game presents in exchange for these actions are silly and meaningless, that doesn't matter, because, in the end, those aren't the real rewards, the reward is playing the game more, and having fun while doing it. These are admirable goals, and P.I.S. features are ones that shouldn't be dropped because they're missused sometimes or because some people don't need them or it sometimes feels like it is trying to get you to play for the wrong reasons. ... feel like didn't structure that as well as I could have. Hopefully I got the jist across.... Is Reach's Player Investment System ideal? eh heh. No, far from it. I certainly agree with you there. Many of the challenges are excessively grindy, some require an amount of time investment that is simply unreasonable for many players, or warp play in a way that is far from how the game should be played. Many of the commendations and challenges have exploits that mean that lose quite a lot of value as a challenge motivator in and of themselves (whats the point in going for an Onyx in Flawless Cowboy when some dude has cutscene-reload boosted/saved and quit near the end to hide his deaths to get it already?) At the same time, many aspects play that should be encouraged and rewarded from within the game is nearly entirely ignored by the investment system High Scores and speedruns are easy examples of the above unrepresented elements of the game in its P.I.S. The closest we get are occasional 'Points Pyramid' challenges for score and 'Not in the Face' challenge for a speedrun-ish. But it was kind of a joke to anyone in the know about Nightfall or who has dabbled with running past the enemies on Winter Contingency... Some of these issues will hopefully be fixed within Reach's lifetime. Ideally by a patch in the next few months coupled with a slightly different strategy on selecting daily/weekly challenges. If not, I'm hopeful that Bungie will learn from their mistakes for the next game. If nothing else, Bungie have a habit of always changing things! So, current systems leave a lot to be desired. Are they inherently evil? no. Can they be useful? Yes. Should they be persued and refined and done better and grander in subsequent games? IMO? Absolutely. I think you give Arcade machine games perhaps a little too much credit for what they do that may simply be no more than a happy coincidence of the business model adopted: The player is encouraged to insert another coin on the promise that if they do better this time, they'll get to play a little longer than they did last time. This model also has the downside that, if the game has some sort of 'continue' system, a player can simply buy their way through a game without necessarily improving their skills. I'm not sure how much online player numbers really matters to non-MS published games developers. In terms of the Major Nelson rankings, that only mentions a few dozen games a year, when there are hundreds of titles actually published each year. I'm guilty of using the NM rankings to prop up arguments in the past, and its probably all bull really. The rankings are so influenced by whats popular or what provides 'cheap thrills', or which title has massive marketing budget or what game provides the largest number of cheap reasons to play (*ahem* COD *AHEM*), rather than what is necessarily the best core gameplay experience. : Keeping the players
Eh. Arcade games where still there to make money. They weren't going to give away activity for the player to do, for nothing. They were made with fairly steep learning curves so that for everyone but the few who had the desire, time and innate ability to master it, they had to keep popping in quarters to play. : It started in Halo 3 with multiplayer achievements. These achievements were
I've said this before, but I hate most of the Noble Achievements too. : What should happen when the maps packs come out? You have 1000/1000 on Halo
Yeah I probably agree with this. But that is a system-wide issue with the 360 platform rather than a Bungie one. : It's not for your
In an ideal world yes. Hopefully I've explained above why it is useful and in the player's interest for some types of players above. : Their opportunity cost is being able to play a
Sometimes its good to do something relatively non-cerebral/physical performance related. To unwind, to relax. Very, very few people can keep up 'productive' activity from waking moment to the instant they fall asleep. : So even if Bungie's new game isn't an MMO (but especially if it is), I feel
Disagree. With reference to above where I mentioned a system that rewarded speedruns and high scores, you can encourage a player to develop their skills with the campaign, allow the game to set the player goals if they can't think of them themselves, interact with other members of the community to discover tricks and shortcuts and new strategies, and use their brain and think differently, all without making necessarily making it a repetitive grind. I have some ideas myself on how to do this that I may share at some point. In fact I would apply for that job if I had 3+ years games design experience with a launched title :( In fact, reading the job description there, its seems that Bungie recognises that Reach's P.I.S. isn't perfect; they want someone to help them improve what they're doing for the future. Heres some key phrases I picked out: "...fine line between a reward that encourages players to have fun and an incentive that enslaves them"
Sounds encouraging to me. Oh, doh. One last thing: By giving you larger and longer term goals other than the moment to moment action of the game and the measure of success having multiple facets other than "am I dead? I am winning?", stuff like cR and challenges and what-have-you can help soften the blow on the player of playing particularly badly, or getting particuarly mismatched opponents or in ultimately losing the game. Instead of going "aw this sucks :'( ", a player can go 'well, at least I credits/got towards that challenge/commendation/armour I want". Maybe you consider that cheap, or weak on the part of the players, or it feels like pandering or whatever, but at the end of the day, you gotta consider that the players are your customers and you're trying to sell them an experience that won't always enable complete success for them. You have to make sure that even in the event of failure, their experience isn't completely destroyed; they have to have some positive thing to look at or some encouragement to continue to play and be better when they're a bit down. Thats why, at a basic level, games generally don't go "HAHAHAHHA YOU DIED YOU SUCK LOLOLOLOLOL!!!!" at the player. Ah man, I had half a mind to play Halo 1 on Legendary this evening after someone on b.net said they thought it was harder than Reach Mythic and I was all 'WTFBBQ?' No time for that now :( ---- *forgive me if this seems a little "oh, I read about this theory and now I want to apply it to EVERYTHING!!!" in this post. I've been working my through Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's 'flow: The psychology of optimal experience' over the past couple of months (at Jaime Griesemer's suggestion :P) and I think a lot about game design issues, though less frequently commit my ideas to paper. It is my dream, one day, to improve a team that makes great games.
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