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?

Comments

Too much of a good thing...

[neostorm]

"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.

Re:Death in gaming

[qengho]

Where death in games matter most is multi-player FPS titles....the game is pointless when there are immediate respawns

That's one of the things I hate about them (aside from the fact that I suck). There's no rankings penalty for getting killed a lot, so players just go kamikaze and boost their kill count. The old Air Warrior game had a statistic called "kills-to-death ratio" that was universally respected. It rewarded self-preservation and was a true indicator of skill.

If repetition is punishment ...

[Lumpish Scholar]

... what does that mean about playing Everquest?-)

Other reasons for save points

[MilenCent]

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.

An interesting approach

[Cecil]

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.