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Can Illogical Videogames Still Be Enjoyable?
Thanks to Skotos for its editorial arguing that there's a certain level of 'realism' that all games must stick to in order to be enjoyable. The author starts by suggesting: "Bringing realism into a discussion that includes fireballs, trolls, energy swords, blasters, and nanotechnology is, at first glance, totally out of place", but goes on to explain: "Fun [videogame] environments both surprise and reassure us. They surprise us by working on rules that are very different from those of the real world, and reassure us by having an internal consistency and logic that is reminiscent of that we find in the real world." Are there some games which break all rules of logic and still remain addictive?
Now off to RTFA ;)
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"Are there still games that break all rules of logic ..?"
I don't know about today, but definitely in the earlier, 2D era there were plenty of games that had at least completely illogical aspects to them. I recall that being a huge draw to games for me. There have been a number of recent articles concerning this very same subject, and while some of these have expressed a desire to see more "realistic" content, I say we should try to hold onto that original nonesense to some extent.
Take, for example, Super Mario Brothers 3. As far as I know, this is held as the best 2D Mario ever conceived. The game worlds were plentiful, varied, and fresh. But take a moment to look at the actual gameplay, specifically the logic employed in it:
In order to obtain the powerup that allows mario to fly, one has to first obtain the *leaf* object. One the leaf is obtained, Mario acquires a *racoon skin cap*, and by batting the tail on the hat up and down fast enough, Mario is able to lift off the ground.
There is a certain logic in this over time as the player is introduced to the game vocabulary, and experience with past platformers gives them added intuition, (like the ability to grasp the concept of powerups and other platform style gameplay).
However the symbolism involved is just... what? Leaf? Racoon hat? What?
Beautiful!!
Of course there is the underlying logic found throughout the game that the article speaks of, and this I can agree on simply because it's a logical assumption in itself to have common and established ways for the game to communicate to the player. Otherwise there will be no progress, and then no one will play it.
I find the less realistic ones more fun, Zleda, FF7, Mario and such. Games where you can do completly unrealistic things like have mushrooms fall through your head that make you grow bigger, or gamws where you play little songs on instruments and are transported to different places, not everybody likes those kinds of games. But I think they are the best.
I've gotta go with Spock, really. Logic, even if it's not real-world logic, is a must, because it enables you to actually learn and adapt new strategies to fit a game. A game has to be predictable, not in a plot sense, but in the sense that, once immersed in the game world, you should be able to expect certain reactions and consequences from certain actions.
There's not much more satisfying than grokking a game's engine or AI or setup well enough to use its own internal logic against it. But in a legitimate way, not cheap exploits like fake-talk or rocket-jumping.
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The first and foremost rule of SciFi (and fantasy) is exactly this.
While a SciFi story tells of something that cannot happen in the real world (at least as of the time it is written), it will first set the rules, define what can and cannot be done. This can include adding technology that doesn't exist in the real world, yet-undiscovered scientific discoveries or even completely imaginary impossible concepts such as magic or the force.
But once the pieces are set, SciFi takes extraordinary care to play fair by those exact rules. The moment this unwritten law is broken, we, the spectators/readers, instantaneously lose interest.
Try and remember how you reacted in Matrix: Revolutions when we found out Neo can make a quadgizillion sentinels explode in the real world with sheer thought alone.
We lost contact with the movie at that moment. It became illogical, according to the rules it itself had set forth. It lost consistency. And in doing that, it lost us. Doing that in any form of SciFi/Fantasy work - whether movie, book or video-game instantly repels the spectator because he cannot put himself in the shoes of th ehero and follow any of the plot when the director/writer throws "Oh yah, we didn't tell you but the hero can destroy all the bad guys instantaneously with a twitch of a finger"-type twists.
We lose interest. Most SciFi writers/producers are well aware of this, and have been since the birth of the genre. It's anything but new.
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"Realism" is not "logic" is not "consistency". It's a vocabulary list. :) The article and summary seems to just confuse all these things. There isn't any connection between them.
:)
A game can be consistent, unreal and illogical. Super Mario 64, for example.
A game can be consistent, unreal and logical. Someting like Unreal or Quake comes to mind.
You can have various combinations of the above and still have a successful game, though I'm betting an inconsistent, unreal and illogical game would not be very easy to play.
When trying to understand Mario logic it helps to eat the mushrooms.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
The correct way to write "tanooki" is "tanuki".
In the japanese mythical stories, "tanukis" are creatures with transformation abilities.
One popular site dedicated to geekish errata features a game called Karma Whoring. The rules often change, and the system slowly adapts to ensure that older methods of gaining "karma" become less and less effective over time.
However, the methods involved in gaining these "karma points" often defy logic. From bashing large corporations to posting urban legends ("X is slow because it's network-transparent!") to the foolishly mundane ("You're new here, aren't you?"), there are many methods of gaining karma.
Unfortunately, the methods involved for losing karma are nearly as abundant. From asking why people care about a given topic to using in-game artifacts known as "flames", there are many ways of reducing your supply of karma points.
Sometimes previously positive actions will lead negative results. For instance, all searches for karma start with a story relating to something called an "article". Previously one could be assured a high karma bonus by locating an article (which to many adventurers is easier said than done) and making a copy of what it contained. However, the system seems to have adapted to this method of gaining karma and now generally uses an attack (known as "redundancy") to counteract it.
Sometimes methods can have unpredictable results, depending subtly on exactly how the move was executed (such as the increasingly popular "Michael is the suxx!"). Karma Whoring has an unpredictable scoring system and changing rules, yet is played by thousands on a daily basis.
Somebody get that guy an ambulance!
But once the pieces are set, SciFi takes extraordinary care to play fair by those exact rules. The moment this unwritten law is broken, we, the spectators/readers, instantaneously lose interest.
Try and remember how you reacted in Matrix: Revolutions when we found out Neo can make a quadgizillion sentinels explode in the real world with sheer thought alone.
Playing devil's advocate here, but who says that the writer has to delineate the rules to the reader/watcher/player? The characters were going by what they thought the rules were, and something came along to break the rules, thus keeping things interesting-- and forcing the reader/viewer/player to re-evaluate what the rules are.
Personally, games that change the rules on you-- like Metroid, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, and some of the really old shooters-- are my favorite types simply because it's a challenge to figure out how to adapt to a new situation and scenario. Certainly you can do that in a game like chess or Uno-- but if there's a twist to the rules that doesn't come into play for a little bit, then you have to re-evaluate your entire strategy and gameplay.
Admittedly, you don't want all the rules changing at once-- there has to be some consistency-- but that's probably what sets a good game aside from a great one. If you think of it that way, then shaking things up every once in a while is a really good thing.
"Why Subscribe?" Good question...
"logic" is a broader concept than "consistency".
When you say something is consistent, you have to establish what with, or you don't know what the claim means.
When you say it is logical, you sound like you're appealing to a universal concept - you don't have to ask what it's "logical about".
So when you talk about realism and logic in games, you don't necessarily mean correct physics or real-world stuff - but someone might. If you mean internal consistency, call it that. It's precise and accurate.
I don't think any game could be much fun without internal consistency. I can't solve any problems if I can't rely on experience in the game-world, except through fluke. The number of times I've been annoyed with a game because something works everywhere but the place you're stuck in, apparently just "because"...
That said, if I'm not looking for internal sense, I don't mind. I can bumble randomly just seeing what goes on. But that's not the same kind of game - there's no skill, no judgment, and no real rules. It's just an experience.
There's lots of games which are full of illogical things, in a broad sense, but I don't see how that matters.
Realism is not required for enjoyment - as with most things in life entertaining (fiction writing in general - tv, books, etc - and paintball) - it is people doing things or thinking about things that they normally can't do. Video games allow the immagination to wander in a 'new', interactive dimension. I would argue that realism, in most cases of fiction will hinder rather than help - until you start talking about virtual sex and other reality/pleasure based 'games' where realism combined with configurable fantasy is key.
But the topic of 'fun' is what I am curious about. There is something decidedly and disturbingly addicted to making abombinable snowman smack a falling penguin with a baseball bat. It isn't particularly fun, yet it is higly addicitve. There is little-to-no skill involved, yet I have seen people 'play' for hours.
So is there a different between addictive and enjoyable? SSX is fun, hitting penguins is addictive. What do you think?
Even mid-1990s games avoided the "realism" fad thats still going around today. Half-Life is probably the most recent and clear example of this fact, a scientist with knowledge on weapons ranging from pistol, to rocket launchers, to alien weapons saves the world from alien invasion while fighting off U.S. military forces and special op soldiers with a crowbar in hand. Not exactly America's Army realism there.
Gravity. Momentum. Lighting. I can go on. Certain basic elements are just about impossible to violate while still having a game make any kind of sense, and even then it's usually by making a game so simple that they don't apply (checkers).
This is the empty head problem, just about. By removing all bias (in this case the attachment to real world causality), you lose your frame of reference, and can't do anything!
And no, GTA3 does not come anywhere cloes to violating real-world logic: it merely relaxes some aspects of it (sometimes heavily), such as the response from law enforcement.
Violating one aspect of logic doesn't make a game fail this test. You still can have plenty to go on to jump right into the game world and have it make sense, even sans manual.
You seem to have not understood what this article was all about. The main point you brought up is that a leaf that leads to a racoon suit does not seem to follow any reasonable symbolism in the real world. This type of statement shows a distinct lack of understanding. The article is discussing logical consistencies within a game. The leaf is logically consistent because whenever you get it, you are rewarded with a racoon suit. If you got the leaf and sometimes got a racoon suit and it modified the gaming experience in truly random ways, then you would have a logical inconsistency. Symbolism really has nothing to do with it in this context.
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Could this also be a discussion of the acceptable level of abstraction? Lots of the games mentioned still had relatively grounded concepts guiding them: Pac Man has eating and running away from things chasing you. All of the platformers mentioned involve some physics, like gravity for instance. Puzzle games can be quite abstract, but many are still addictive and enjoyable. Tetris has "gravity" though. Would it have worked as well if the blocks fell up? Could the reasons some critically acclaimed games, like Frequency/Amplitude did so poorly is because they were too abstract with too little grounding in reality?
Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle. Most warped type of logic in an adventure game *ever*, and yet one of the most enjoyable ones.
Silly? Maybe, but let's take each of these individually. I bet we can learn something from them anyway.
Illogical? Chess is such a logical game that it risks being boring. Except for one or two exceptions (en passant captures and castling), each piece's moves are the same throughout the game. The board remains constant. (And while there are variations from Steve Jackson Games, even they have their own internal logic.)
That depends which version of Tron you're talking about. The premise of the movie may have been far-fetched, but the arcade game was a collection of minigames. They don't necessarily have to have anything to do with each other; the story serves as a unifying theme.
The later arcade game Discs of Tron was also very highly logical. It was a shoot-em-up with various challenge elements that had to be dealt with, including barriers appearing across the playing field and varying levels of platform.
I can't speak for Tron 2.0, but it probably has its own internal logic too. (Would some poster confirm this please?)
Ah, now this is an interesting choice of game to bring up under this topic. Like Tron (the original), it's a collection of minigames. But where Tron has four games, Warioware's number in the hundreds. And it's hard to demonstrate any logic, internal or otherwise, when the games are changing so quickly.
Or rather, it's hard to find the logic in Warioware until you step back and take a look at the big picture. The mini-games are individual challenges which seemingly have nothing to do with each other. In fact, they seem intentionally disassociated from one another.
Here's a game to compare it with: Trivial Pursuit. The questions fall into categories, but they don't necessarily have anything to do with one another. The questions aren't the game. The game is an overall test of knowledge. Likewise, in Warioware, the minigames themselves aren't the game. The game is an overall test of mental agility and the ability to switch quickly from one task to another.
Trivial Pursuit : questionsSomeone else posted, and I generally agree: the games need some sort of internal logic in order to be comprehensible. In the case of Warioware, though, the game itself is the ability to deal with the apparent illogical barrage of activities.
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Whether the game makes sence in our real world logic, doesn't matter so much as if the rules in teh game behave the same way or at least if they don't we are given a bare minimum of explanation why.
A great example of something that doesn't make sence in our world, but is consistent and makes sence within the logic of the game is, as Poole discusses in his book Trigger Happy, is rocket jumping. In our world shooting at your feet would blow your feet off, in FPS games, however, there is (typically) no way to shoot your own legs off, which may be illogical, or unrealistic, but the effect of combining the recoil of the rocket launcher with jumping is consistent to the rules set forth within the game.
An example of inconsitency that really irritated me was in the first Soldier of Fortune game there is a level in a subway. In one area you enter the restroom and when you start to leave, a bad guy blasts through the wooden entry. Nowever else in the game can the player do this and I think that even the bad guys only do this in one other situation. It is inconsistent. Sure it was done to surpize the player, but it is a cheat if that is the only place it can be done and even if you reload the game to before that, you cannot shoot through the entry (even though if you look close enough you can see the cracks where it will be blown off). It was inconsistent and irritated me. Of course consistency is not a magic bullet. Games can be consistent and still be bad.
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Are there some games which break all rules of logic and still remain addictive? Yes, the game called "dealing with women."
Are there some games which break all rules of logic and still remain addictive? The game of love, (love), love, (love), la la la la la love.
The writer doesn't have to dilineate the rules to maintain consistency. George Lucas never established exactly what powers 'the Force' conferred on its manipulators, yet no-one was particularly bothered by the much more liberal force use in the prequels.
What a storyteller must do however, is to provide consistency and plausibility. The Wachowski brothers explained Neo's vaguely defined super-powers in the Matrix as being the result of his ability to manipulate a false-reality through a form of subconscious computer hacking. People accepted this, as they did 'the Force', without a second thought.
However, at the end of Reloaded, and repeatedly through Revolutions, Neo demonstrated super-human powers even when he was outside of the 'false' reality of the Matrix. Most people felt this 'cheated' them of cinematic weight and emotional investment. Without explanation, without clarification, of why the old rules were able to now be violated, the audience felt as if the change, the surprise, was designed solely to fool them, not to enrich the storytelling experience. This generally arouses naught but contempt in the audience.
Zion was repeatedly established as being 'reality', as being our world - and accordingly we cringed with the characters from the sentinel onslaught. The humans had only one effective weapon against the enemy, and using it would render them helpless to any second wave.
Now however, there were mecha, rocket launchers, mystical powers. Hovercraft used mounted weapons to defeat many more sentinels than the relative few that Morpheus could only repel with an EMP. The audience felt foolish that they ever regarded the sentinels as truly dangerous, now that they could be blasted out of the sky by 19th century technology.
It isn't change itself that offends the audience. It is destructive change, that which retroactively destroys the emotional value of the prior experience.
Audiences revile at the 'it was all just a dream/game/etc'-style surprise endings (e.g. 13th floor). In those types of situations, the change robs the previous content of cinematic weight. The character we used to care about and root for turns out to be nothing more than an avatar in a game, or a shadow of reality. The audience is essentially instructed that nothing in the story prior to the change mattered in any way. The participants were not real, and were not in real danger.
This starkly contrasts even fiction in which the unreality of the setting/participants/story is established at the outset. E.g. the Princess Bride, the Neverending Story. We knew that the story was a fairy tale, and were unsurprised when Wesley was allowed to cheat death in a story that otherwise contained no such fantastical diversions.
Changes in gameplay should be handled according to this well known maxim - changes should be constructive, rather than destructive.
Constructive changes will be things that do not force the fiction back to square 1.
A new level may yield a new weapon or new units that change the players tactics - but it should never render the player's previous choices moot.
Deus Ex shouldn't have a level in which the computer systems are hopelessly alien, effectively destroying any character who chose to specialize in hacking.
A roleplaying game should not hand-wave a character's capture and enslavement via cut-scene and remove all their equipment and experience -forcing them to start over.
Those changes would obviate the investment of the player.
Tetris might have a change that requires players to match blocks of colors to score, instead of making lines. This could be a constructive change to gameplay that would create more depth in gameplay. Yet if this new goal was switched to without any notification to the player, they would be justly pissed off that their carefully constructed Tetris block was not rewarded. The unforseeable, unavoidable change would have destroyed the prior effort of the player.
Changes can be good. But it, more than most other aspects of storytelling or game design, must be done well to not have a detrimental effect on the experience.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
So the answer to the slashdot article would appear to be, simply, "No." An illogical game would only be frustrating, but a logical game not based on reality can be fun (Qix is my favorite example). Probably, however, it would have to be fairly simple (again, like Qix) otherwise the player would probably lose interest before the non-reality-based rules were understood well enough to simply play for enjoyment.
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
A game without rules or consistency is called play or perhaps art. Computers don't do this, although they can facilitate it.
Children make up games that are pretty illogical and inconsistent when playing. I'm remembering playing Dune/spaceship in the disconnected console room of a water treatment plant. It had multiple stations, lots of levers, dials, knobs and guages.
There are some Calvin & Hobbes cartoons that describe this sort of play beautifully. Google calvinball for examples. Watterson gets it.
Otherwise, games are defined by rules. Even in games whose rules change as you play, the rules are the game.
In the childrens play, it's about fantasy and exploring different roles, or just doing stuff. Convenience and other considerations facilitate this, so the dead spring back to life, roles are reversed, time is turned back as needed, and events are replayed until a satisfactory conclusion is reached, or boredom is achieved. Really, even these games have more rules than it appears, it's just that those rules are inconsistent over time, because they change quickly, and without any acknowledgement.
Art is similar. In art, each piece can have its own dynamic rules. Those rules can be photorealism, or a coloring book page filled in by someone enjoying the color and texture of a red crayon, and ignoring the lines completely. Much art is play.
This is also why playing games with children can be so exhausting for adults. It can be difficult switching gears so quickly. For kids, each one is in his own fantasy world, and any part of the game that is convenient is ignored, until that becomes impossible.
"No, I don't want to die. It's your turn to die."
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
Paragraph 1:Fantasy vs. Reality gets talked about a lot.
Paragraph 2:Too much fantasy is bad. Too much reality is bad. You have to balance them, otherwise people complain.
Paragraph 3:I like neuropsychology. I read things that told me that brains like to figure things out.
Paragraph 4:If brains can't figure something out, it reacts negatively. Brain like to make sense.
Paragraph 5:Never mind what I said previously, because games are fun because they are goal-oriented and brains like that.
Gah! Five paragraphs with no real point. Nothing to back up any claims made... and I'm not sure what those claims are. In fact, the person submitting the /. asks a question that isn't even addressed in the article. Are there games that make no sense logically but fun? Sure, take the H2G2 adventure game where the solutions make no sense. (Stick a fish in your ear? Towels? Fluff? Brownian motion?) There's your answer.
The Fantasy vs. Reality argument is really a non-argument because it doesn't exist. Well, at least the vs. part because they aren't against each other as much as they compliment each other. Every game has portions of fantasy and reality and strike a balance somehow. It would have been far more interesting to see an article written about the design decisions that go into balancing the two or when one prevails over the other. Instead there's a lot of Dr. Phil talk about an argument that doesn't exist.
Use the shadow of a talking skull to talk a bride into rejoining her jilted groom? What?
And let's not forget the breath mints from "Secret of Monkey Island" - poor Otis...
The puzzles do make sense, and are completely logical...after you solve them. I can't complain, though...the games have been great for years, and will hopefully continue to be.
Goo goo g'joob.
Incredible Crisis is one of the coolest games ever!
They don't get more illogical that that..
End of line..