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Sin And Punishment In Games
Thanks to NTSC-UK for their article discussing how games punish players for dying. The article starts: "Repetition has always been considered to be a pretty basic form of punishment and is still quite commonly used form even today. Fail a task, go back to the start of the level. Fail too many times and you go right back to the start of the game." It goes on to highlight save/restart points as changing this dynamic, saying that "...the most controversial aspect of the save point's growing role in videogames was the confusion between its two roles: acting as a marker which players are taken to when punished, and as a point where players could stop in order to resume play later on." Is there such a thing as being able to save too often?
an iron ball chained to your leg.
there's various ways to get rid of it including burying it(dig a pit and push a boulder into it) eating it(polymorph into something that can eat metal), scroll of remove curse & etc.
seriously though, there's no such game as nethack as far as punishment goes. you play unprepared for everything, you die and start again. and die again and start again. that's not the punishing thing, it's the addictiviness of it, just imagine playing a random rick dangerous game for 10 years and still liking it, there's just something that must be bad in that kind of thing.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
"Is there such a thing as being able to save too often?"
Oh yes! Quicksaves are really convenient, but they take all the challenge out of some games.
- progress. save. progress. save. progress. die. reload. progress half as far. save. experiment. save. etc. etc.
There are two drawbacks to quicksaves, or saving too often in general.
- No risk experimentation.
The player really isn't afraid to jump out that window or off that cliff. They can dive into a room full of armed thugs without any fear at all. The lack of risk and fear of losing your "life" takes both immersion and reward out of passing an obstacle or event.
This is sort of a side-effect of having too many saves, but:
- Spoiled gamers? Not really, but in a way its really difficult to go back to games that don't offer such lenient save functions. I was just playing a game the other day who's title completely slips my mind, but it was a FPS with no quicksave function. It drove me nuts. Forced me to complete whole stages without using my magic F5 key (Oh the horror!). It really made me think of the impact it has on a player to be given such powerful tools and abuse them without knowing it. And when a game imposes stricter saving rules on the player (me), I get really peeved about it.
So in a lot of ways, saving too many times is more than just a placeholder so I can stop playing momentarily, or a punishment. It's a cheat.
Where death in games matter most is multi-player FPS titles. It is boring to wait for the next round once you have been killed. On the other hand, the game is pointless when there are immediate respawns. Counterstrike tries to solve this be letting you watch through the other player's eyes. RTCW tries to solve this by respawning in waves. The way I would like to see it done, is once you are killed in the 'real' game, you get transported to some secondary site with the other dead players. That way there is no down time when you get killed.
How about Sin & Punishment AS a game?
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http://www.nintendo.co.jp/n01/n64/software/nus_p_
As a parent of two I know what a burdon a game with not enough save points can be especially when it is time for the other child to play (or time for homework or bed) Games without an easy save system are simply banned.
"save where you like" can make stuff too easy and it is hard not be tempted to press f6 after every success. And I'm sure everyone must have pressed quick_save instead of quick_load and saved yourself dead or in some hopeless situation.
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In each new game I fear some mechanism that will lead me down a one way systems and my quicksave will be useless. Sadly, I've not found a game that does this, so all my file saving discipline is wasted.
I end up playing in bazai mode, run into every new room and spray bullets after so many times creeping round corners into no danger.
Seeing as games take like a zillion hours anyway anything that maximizes your chances you are going to take (well except invoke GOD mode, that's just *too* lame).
So, quick save good and bad. Be strong, don't save.
Remember this conversation (points for being either)
"Come on, we've got go now!"
"Hang on, I've got to get Cloud back to the savepoint."
Nowadays part of the skill of parenting has been the ability to asses the level of trauma proportional to the save point time expenditure. The boy used to try and hoodwink his mum by saying "I need to get to a savepoint" to get himself another 20 mins play-time. He didn't reckon on me knowing how to play video games.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
... what does that mean about playing Everquest?-)
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Hrrrummph! As usual, everything in RL is backward from video games.
Do you people even realize, if RL had savegame capability, how many times I would have blown away the idiot at Taco Bell who can't get my order right beause he's too busy IM-ing his girlfriend to be interrupted with customers?
Save points as punishment, indeed! *NOT* having save points is the *REAL* punishment!
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
In some games that enforce save points, even having to go back isn't really that bad. Final Fantasy VI returned te player to the previous save point upon death, but let him keep all experience and cash earned. (It made him lose items, however, which makes sense.)
But there is also a strong intuitive basis for save points, akin to not being able to rest just anywhere in a dungeon in a D&D adventure. A save point should be a "safe" location. Being able to put a bookmark in the middle of a series of tough battles breaks them up. If the player can just once get through all the hard parts of such a sequence without taking serious losses, then it's as if they don't exist! The player will then save at that point and not have to worry about going through it ever again. If those obstacles have a strong random (or not obviously deterministic) component, then this can break a level.
Let's say someone's challenged you to a little game -- if you roll a six-sided die ten times and never get a one, he'll give you a lot of money. In a computer game, the player would save after each successful roll and practically ensure an eventual win. Taken as a sequence, such an obstacle is more troublesome than if the player can bookmark after each roll.
Something in me kind of rebels against this question, actually, the assumption of "punishment." This question only makes sense if the listen intuitively accepts that all a "save" does is record the player's location and state, monster locations and states, which items are collected and the state of a few minor puzzles. In a more complex game (such as Black & White, where great portions of the game's environment is editable), you're saving and loading a lot more than just player location, and although B&W did have a quicksave feature, the idea of making a "bookmark" doesn't make as much sense. Although it is long, playing through the whole level each time makes a kind of sense.
Of course, understand that I'm a Nethack fanatic, and games which feature permanent character death appeal to me, so I'm obviously deranged.
But then you come across games with a very nearly impossible segment of the game...it's always nice to be able to get through just that portion with quicksaves, because spending those 3 hours to get to that point just for the slim chance of beating the level... well it sucks.
One game that suffers from this (and doesn't allow saving, either) is Super Monkey Ball 2 on the Gamecube. There are many levels where whether or not you complete the level is based entirely on luck or cheese. For example, there's one flat level where the goal bounces around, much faster than you can move. You basically have to run around and hope that the goal runs into you. Levels like that simply are not fun.
As a solution to the original problem, however, I've seen many games that implemented a "save anywhere" feature, but you immediately quit when you save and you can only restore from a given save one time. This means that you can stop your game and continue it anywhere you want, but if you die, you can't just restore the save again.
I really liked the approach that the earlier (dunno about newer) Wing Commander games took. Rather than worrying about making the game full of traps and difficulty that forces the player to save often, they used a rather extensive tree-based storyline -- it was possible to fail a mission and still complete the game. Heck, it was possible to fail every mission and still complete the game, you would just get a very lackluster ending where the Kilrathi rule the universe and the humans run away with their tail between their legs. :)
While not a magic bullet, I think this approach has a lot to offer, but has very rarely been used since. Even Deus Ex, hailed for its exceptional storyline where what you did made a difference, it was still very linear. You could make small changes and maybe save a few people here and there, but it still didn't offer much incentive in the way of replayability.
While in Wing Commander, it was still possible to 'cheat' the system by saving before every mission, and playing the mission until you 'won', it was not always clear which outcome was a win. And in any case, playing the game that way would clearly be a lot more frustrating than simply playing through and not caring whether you always win, and just do your best. In effect the players who try to 'cheat' the system in Wing Commander are actually punishing themselves with repetition of missions. The casual gamer never has to repeat anything.
Food for thought. I'd like to see more games like this. Even Wing Commander's storyline was fairly primitive. Only two branches per mission. There were no partial wins.
Random and weird software I've written.
After playing 9/10 of the way through a particularly long and torturous Halo level, I ended up in a Warthog, sliding sideways of a cliff, exactly when the final monster was killed (triggering the autosave).
This gave me the joy, delight and reward of a hundred or so attempts leaping from the falling warthog and just failing to make it to the top of the cliff.
If developers insist upon disempowering the users, they should at least try to ensure the users are not completely sabotaged.
Personally I have always found that over-use of a quicksave function makes it relatively easy for game designers to create "gotchas" that force users to restart a level (used all ammo, didn't flick the switch, whatever) - so I don't believe it is the game destroying function that other propose.
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How about this: Make it beneficial to NOT save. Resident Evil and Chromium both have the right idea: In RE, each save used up an item (an otherwise useless Ink Ribbon), which in turn used up an inventory slot. In Chromium, If you bypass a proctective sheild, you get another life. I like a combitation of theese ideas. Perhaps saving the game should require the sacrifice of a particularly powerful item (that may just save your life). This way you are left with two choices: Try to advance with the benifit of the item, or lose the item as an 'insurance fee,' with the benefit of being able to re-play that part.
The I-Ninja demo included in Soul Calibur 2 for the PS2 illustrates a great example of non-silly punishment. On one level you must roll a barrel of gunpowder to a set spot, then detonate it. It's rather like monkey ball, except you control the barrel/ninja rather than the level.
If you fall off or the barrel explodes, it doesn't force you to back track or anything else. The barrel dropper drops another barrel, and I-Ninja hops onto the barrel -- ready for another attempt. It also has a lot of cool moves (ala Jet Set Radio Future). It's quick, neat, and unfrustrating. A pleasant switch from all the linear platformers that stick with the jumping-puzzle-frustraction-factor gameplay.
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There's another solution to the problem. In addition to the "savepoint," there also exists a notion of a continue point. The idea is that if you need to stop playing for a moment, it is simple to save your gamestate, but it retains the element of risk, and avoids the introduction of more loadtimes into the game. Basically, the game allows you to save anywhere and removes your save when you resume. This has existed for a long while in many games. Some of the Dragon Warriors, the Mario sports titles for gameboy, and probably the oldest of titles, nethack.
Of course this does result in some side effects. For starters, the lack of permenant "saves" means that if you die you'll be sent off to the beginning to try again. The Dragon Warrior and Mario games accomodate for this by mixing in save points at places like right before entering a cave, or starting a new tennis match.
What designers need to focus on is what gives the game purpose. As much as I hate those academic cooks who talk about video game narrative, almost every game follows the same structure. Go from level to level, retrying until you find the end of the game. Failure in this situation has nearly zero meaning in this repitition model. I hear the Wing Commander games featured a system like this. Unfortunately, academics never get a warm welcome, in part because they have little experience, in part because they make little attempt to be accessible, and in part because they stray from the people's notion of a game.
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I present to the jury exhibit A: Neverwinter Nights by Bioware.
You shall observe that upon death, the player is not forced to replay anything, or to restart the game. They are merely returned to the local temple, less a few XP and gold, ready to return to the fray if they so choose.
In my personal experience, the only times I will save the game, is when I must leave to do something else, since death is handled in the game in a just manner.
Like the article says, quicksaves/unlimited saves are a double-edged sword. On one hand, it allows players to leave at any time and come back to the game without losing too much progress (or having to go back to the last save point), but on the other hand players get complacent: save, try something, die, restart from save, try something else, until you've brute-forced your way through the whole game. Autosaving makes matters even worse by taking control from the player while still offering the same measure of safety.
Many people have posted many examples of the suspend save as a compromise: the player can save their game at any point, but as soon as that suspend save is loaded, it disappears. When you die, you return to your last "real" save point. The fact that you can save anywhere allows, say, the 8 year old to save as soon as his mom calls, but it doesn't allow people to game the system and keep trying something until it works, with no lost time.
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