Slashdot Mirror
Should Gamers Use Smarter Problem-Solving?
Thanks to the IGDA for its 'Culture Clash' column exploring the effect of technical and gameplay advances on videogame problem-solving. A situation regarding Deus Ex: Invisible War is discussed, where "...testers approached a T intersection: to the right were laser tripwires and gun turrets; to the left was a locked door; and directly in front was a (usable) window. He said every single one of them, without fail, went to the right." The author explains: "One can imagine how frustrated developers must occasionally get when they watch gamers consistently employ Neolithic problem solving tactics when modern development tools make much more advanced techniques available." Is this a problem that developers or gamers should work to overcome?
I like some of the ideas that are put forth in the article, but I think that people will gladly come up with new and interesting ways to succeed in games as the physics and AI models become increasingly complex.
My blog
I would assume that many gamers have been "trained" by linear games that the path requiring them to defeat various obstacles is the correct one, Otherwise why would the developers have spent the time populating that path with turrets and tripwires?
I think a similar test with non-gamers might have very different results, many gamers have a subconscious feel for how the designers want levels to flow, and most games reward that type of thinking.
Until games that encourage multiple solutions and alternate styles of play (stealth vs. shooting, etc.) are the norm I think the gamers can't be held responsible for dealing with problems in predictable ways.
The problem is that 90% of games require the "tripwire and turret" approach because they have no alternatives. Then, when a game offers such a choice, many players may not even recognize the options. They're so trained to go down the hallway with guns blazing that they don't realize there's a stealthier approach.
Of course, that was one of the great aspects of Deus Ex. There were typically multiple solutions to a puzzle, if you just looked hard enough. We just aren't used to looking for alternate solutions, since most of the time there aren't any.
Sure, it's easy enough to blame the testers. But let's face it, how many times have you had to find a "secret switch" of some sort in order to get through something in a game? It's maybe a slightly irregularly colored brick, or a knob on a bed, or a hairline door-shaped-crack in a wall. Or maybe it's something that's not even noticeably useful until u put the mouse cursor over it, like a candlestick.
What I'm saying is that if every door in the level is useless, you probably won't bother messing with the door right near you, either. And if all the windows are useless, you become unaccustomed to checking them as well.
In a game like Deus Ex, the level itself is your interface. There's no more reason to click on seemingly useless objects in-game than there is to try mashing all the vowels on the keyboard simultaneously every 7 seconds for an hour "just to see what happens". It's a waste of the player's time. And, if the level design isn't at least slightly clear (and a 100% decision rate amongst playtesters to take the "obvious" route indicates that it's not) then the designers are wasting their precious time as well.
This sig was blatantly stolen from someone else.
Hmm, something I just thought of: why would such a protected installation have a perfectly usable window there allowing intruders to gain entry?
Anyway, the key should be that as games continue to expand the range of what is possible in their system they must help the users discover and explore these new possibilities.
A Multiplayer Strategy Game for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux
Really this behavior is a byproduct of is the fact that in any game, there are almost never any useless items or empty hidden rooms.
I would have gone through the window, and then I would have come back and done the other 2 doors as well because I can't be sure that the developers didn't put something I am going to need or some secret mission objective beyond one of those obstacles. Gamers respond to the laws of the game world and the law of the game world says phat loot is always behind the most difficult to open best guarded door.
Put up a sign that says "do not push this button" and tell me how many out of 20 leave the button alone.
On Wall Street they say "buy low, sell high" On the pad we say, "buy high, sell high" Isn't that somehow better?
Part of the solution is to understand the game's audience. As many people have already stated, most gamers are trained to go for the NPCs to kill, or explosives to disable/sneak around, rather than for the (seemingly) easier solution. There are of course, audiences who would be more interested in problem solving. Such games as ATITD (www.atitd.net) have gameplay that would break down if the player base was that of normal MMOGs. ATITD, instead, has drawn a large audience of people who enjoy crafting and developing, and most importantly, working together with other players, and do not mind the lack of fighting. If the Deus Ex 2 developers wanted to get people to do more problem solving or exploring, they should have targetted the FPS audience less than those that enjoy theif, or perhaps fans of action-oriented adventure games (if there are any...)
1. The door on the left is the locked door, the player decides to open it. However instead of finding what hes looking for he find a room full of guards, some items he doesn't want, or simply failed to open the lock.
2. The window is straight ahead, and the player jumps through. However the height it too great and the guy takes damage from the fall, finds himself back at the beginning of the stage, or has actually jumped three rooms ahead and landed in the middle of 10 guards who were supposed to appear in grounds of 3 or 4 in the previous rooms. (Try playing any of the Hitman games and taking alternative paths/actions while killing seemingly random guards and that patrol that always annoyed you might not appear because you already killed them.)
3. The guy goes to the right having a 90% idea of whats going to happen and what the developers have setup in that hallway, the obvious and maybe a few guards that magicly appear and come through the door at the end of the hall.
The reason everyone takes the path with the turrets is simple: we have been conditioned thoroughly by prior experience.
... but that, that one door... you can explode. Of course. WHAT WAS I THINKING.
In every single other game where you have an intersection like that, the locked door's key is always after the turret area (having to return to points breaks up the walking a straight line feeling); the openable window at best leads to a small enclosure where I fight two or three guys to get at a medkit - I'm already at full health or I'm a maschoist, either way, I scorn your medkit window.
You want me to try blowing my way through doors, article writer? I do. After going through the turret area. Why? Because as a function of my time, 99% I'm going down that turret alley anyway for the key, that 1% of doors someone was bright enough to say, "Let's have them expend all their ammo testing which weapon and how many rounds thereof will be required to 'unlock' this door, it'll be clever," aren't exactly a silent majority there, presidentio.
As a simple (and I'm sure soon to be much maligned) example, take the Final Fantasy series. How often is the player provided choices? How significant is their impact on the game? Did you say to Bubba, "Man, I hate those pesky Killas." and go on the story arc that resulted in the village being burned to the ground? Or did you simply get a slightly different irrelevent conversation 10 gameplay hours later?
The problem has never been players unable or unwilling to experiment. It has been the glorious failure of one time gimmicks that trained us to shun experimentation. Oh, there's one door on level 17, third floor, fifth turn that you explode. Every other door on the level opens with a scripted event, key at the end of a turret infested alley,
Look, man. We've figured it out. You've got lots of dead ends, and those turrets aren't there screaming, "Wrong way!" The problem isn't gamers and our lack of problem solving ability. It's consistancy. Look at Metroid Prime. Every door I can remember that exploded under X circumstances looked the same (or had the same tell tale, or whatever). Imagine if none of the doors were marked. You don't need to fix gamers, man. You need to fix developers. CONSISTANCY. AFFORDANCES. STUDY HUMAN COMPUTER INTERACTION.
When I play games I try to cover an entire contiguous area before moving through a door into another. I don't want to trigger a boss battle or a level exit knowing that part of the level is still unexplored, and in the worst case now permanently inaccessible. In the case of the article, even though the right path might have been difficult and straightforward, it might have looked like less of a commitment. I would have taken it just to see where it led. Once I saw it all I would decide whether I wanted to go back and jump in the window, or take the door I found at the end of right path. Forks in the path of the game are cool, but I can't resist exploring both branches as far as possible before making my decision.
Give bonus points depending on how well they adapted. Have a door with tripwires on the other side so that you can't see them. Have a vent, easy to see but not necessarily notice, that lets you get in the room unharmed, killing the guards who are facing the wrong way with a silenced gun. Make AIs hesitate if you turn up unexpectedly. Give the player low health so that if you enter a room full of enemies from the door they blow your head off, but if you enter silently from the ceiling fan you can take them out before they have a chance to react. Put the best power-ups where you aren't likely to find them - like the 'Secret areas' in Jedi Knight and Jedi Outcast (among others, probably), but actual paths so that you can skip a hard part. Make them feel rewarded (even if they don't actually get rewarded - in Jedi Outcast getting secret areas was pointless, but it says how many you got, and that makes you want to improve) when they use their brains instead of charging in, and they'll leave the tripwires well alone.
I'm sorry, but this seems like Ion Storm's fault. They hired testers from a certain breed of gamers, the "casual hardcore gamers"; the type of gamer that spends a large amount of time with only a select few games, usually the most popular games at that.
If they had found people that had played similiar games, such as the original Deus Ex, Thief, or even Half Life, then 60 percent of the Thief gamers would go through the window while 80 percent of the Deus Ex and Half Life fans would have gone after the locked door expecting an item.
I'm sorry but multiple paths isn't a new conecpt, it was around in the oringal Deus Ex and Thief games, about 4 years ago. Invisible war being a sequal, I don't expect multiple solutions, I require that.
My personal problem with Invisible War was that the branching was pointless. All branches were shallow and did not require any special skills or abilities. If I'm given the option of blazing guns verse stealth I expect that choice to follow me for atleast 15 minutes, not the 30 seconds it takes to get past that one point. I wanted to feel like my actions defined the character, not always take the path of least resistance and then double back and make sure that nothing was missed with the second path that joined with the first after one room.
It's because many of the gamers of today were trained very poorly. The games they played through their childhood were like Resident Evil or Goldeneye. I played those too, but I was older then. I had been trained on things like Metroid, Mario 3 and Zelda. You know, before you knew where every secret was you bombed every wall, shot every guy, flicked every combination of switches.
Back in the day games required you to have advanced problem solving skills to win. In this day and age of arbitrary gaming and strategy guides it is very difficult to make a game that actually requires thinking. I'm glad the people are trying though, because that's my kind of game.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
And lots of games don't let you shoot out windows and go through them. If you want to let people do this, make it clear in the tutorial, or make it the only way to get through a section earlier in the game.
If you really want to make people go through the window and not through the war zone, make the war zone so incredibly difficult that nobody can get through. Eventually, people will look for another way.
I would take the laser tripwires path because I know when I'm being herded: the game continues in the direction that's the most-defended, everything else is always a dead-end. :)
I am sick of locked doors, unscalable short piles of office furniture, and unbreakable glass. I have grenades, you have technology. Stop making things indestructable! For gods' sake, I have a fucking CROWBAR, shouldnt I be able to pry something open?
As "interactive" and "dynamic" as half-life 2 claims to be, I know that it doesnt matter that "if it looks like wood, it splinters like wood!", because I'll still be herded along an unavoidable path full of enemies and scripted events. I would appreviate having the alternative method of reaching the end of the level by way of obliterating the entire building, thank you.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
First question: if I enter the T to examine the window, will I come under fire from the turrets?
Second question: Can I look through the window into the room beyond without breaking/opening it? I've not played Deus Ex, but in some games windows can be astonishingly opaque until smashed open.
In a fire situation, you neutralize the threats you can see first, then you look for the threats you couldn't see at first.
Here's roughly how I'd approach something like this:
At this point, if I start taking fire from the turrets I will HAVE to deal with them. IF this is how the setup worked it is little wonder most people dealt with the turrets first!
www.eFax.com are spammers
They removed the skill system. If every character is the same, the player will natually decide to take the way that is the most challanging or the most rewarding. If they still had a skill system than the player would most likely take the way that is most fitting to their character.
While they might have done it with good intent (to give the player all the choices all the time), the choice itself loses meaning and the player becomes frustrated that he can't see where the other paths lead to (unless he reloads and trys out all three of them - which is probably also not what Ion Storm had in mind).
I'm saddened to hear this complaint comes from Warren Spector. The obvious solution to the particular problem is to introduce or foreshadow ways through the door on the left in prior levels. This doesn't have to be (and probably shouldn't be) a seperate tutorial level, but can come in the forms of some hinting descriptive text on an item, or dialogue/demonstration from another NPC.
One of the primary roles of good game design is teaching the rules of the game / game world. Poor game design, as in the example, ignores this and hinges on the idioms and habits prior games.
What I hope to see in the future is management of the knowledge with a player mental model. Every time a game rule is described/demonstrated/achieved, the mental model takes notice. With this info, a game manager can make sure that the player is both knowledgable enough to attempt the next challenge, as well as checking that the player isn't so familar with the problem concepts as too be bored. When the gap between current and required knowledge is too great, the game manager has a checklist of skills to teach. These could then trigger mini-games, sub-plots, cut scenes, or new quests.
Further, you could extend the player mental model from just a skills check list into statistics of habits. Depending on the designer's bent, you could use this to encourage diversity (offer better rewards in non-standard routes), specialization (aggressive action receives offensive tools), provide bottleneck challenges (aggressive action leeds to a lockpicking bottleneck), and even attempt player matching in online games.
The long term outlook is to design a system that can keep players entertained even in the most open of worlds such as the massively multiplayer persistent online worlds.
Anm
PS - hire me.
In this example, I don't blame the players for choosing the laser/turret route -- after all, the hallway, though obviously deadly, is logically passable.
Most games don't have a full interactive environment where doors and windows can be used. How many times have you gone through game levels with structures full of obviously fake, useless doors? Or played a game that has useable doors, the majority of which are purposely and permanently locked?
Windows are often just (you're looking for a pun here, aren't you?) wall candy. Most games don't allow you to open or use open windows, so why bother? I think that's something gamers have learned over time. Avoid wasting time on Windows, it's useless.
Programmmers and level designers don't have the time or resources to make completely detailed levels with useable doors/windows. Most are rushed to the market ASAP to satisfy some parent company's money hunger-- so who has time to make real, working levels?
Maybe we've learned to live with limited-environment games to the point where we look for the obvious 'working' door, the hidden switch, or even the linear route. (linear... that's a different topic)
When I am employed on a project, I work a lot. When I come home, I like to unwind playing games a bit. Maybe I'm missing the point, but sometimes I just don't _want_ to solve a problem the subtle, elegant way--I played Deus Ex once, and after being told that it was possible to solve it without firing a shot, I resolved to finish the game in as violent, confrontational a manner as possible.
Why? Pure fun. From listening to friends who finished it, I believe there are plenty of intelligent, thinking gamers out there who will not put their head through the wall figuring out how to finish a game. Not me--that's (usually) not my style. I like the fact that less ham-handed ways of solving games are available, for the rare times when I feel like doing the intellectual thing, but usually, well, thag smash crush.
That said, Deus Ex 2 licked the sweat from a dead man's b***s. The plot, the dialogues, the voice acting, the characters were cheesy and contrived and the developers should look to themselves before criticizing the gamers. Maybe the people blowing up the turrets were just annoyed that they'd just spent 40 bucks on such a crappy game?
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
All things being equal, my bet would be that the window completely lacks what Don Norman calls "affordances": indications that a thing can be used, for what purpose it may be used, and how one should go about using it. Is the window open, or at least half open? Is there some appealing path or alluring object visible beyond the window?
This is the sort of thing game designers need to take into account, but too often they rely on trial-and-error gameplay or "herding" to direct the player.
"...testers approached a T intersection: to the right were laser tripwires and gun turrets; to the left was a locked door; and directly in front was a (usable) window. He said every single one of them, without fail, went to the right."
Do you have any idea how many games I've played where "going to the right" really was the only option to the player, how many game publishers I've had to deal with that believe that a game has to do nothing more than be time-consuming to be any fun? How many times have you come to a difficult spot in a game, told yourself "There's got to be an easier way to do this," looked around, and found no easier way?
If the publishers want gamers to use more subtle solutions they should put those subtleties into their games more consistently. In the example given, I wouldn't be surprised if the window wasn't used because it was the only time such a simple solution was put into the game at all, a gesture for the programmer to say "Ooh, look! I'm clever!" before going back to giving us nothing but hack-and-slash.
Not to go left or right, but why you chose to go the way you did.
I once had a roommate that managed to convince an entire Half-Life free for all that violence wasn't necessary. He maanged to get the the whole group to stop shooting, and dance on the extra-large table in the 'Rats' map. It was hilarious watching a dozen people swat their crowbars in a strange ritualistic dance.
Of course, my roommate proceeded to simultaneously blow them all to hell with a single rocket 2 minutes later. But it was funny while it lasted.
--LordPixie
Face it - forever and forever, gamers have been conditioned to believe that the greater the risk, the greater the reward.
If a hallway is empty, chances are nothing is important down it. Exploring it is largely meaningless.
If you see a spot where some massive split-second jumping timing is required to get to, past lots of nasties, there's a REWARD at the end. If you see the tripwires and all the crap you have to disarm, it's viewed as an indication that the developers WANT you to go that way.
The presence of a thousand signposts, saying "GO THIS WAY TO THE END OF THE LEVEL", would mean nothing if the opposite hallway was filled with traps/grunts/stuff to blow up - we will, by conditioned nature, want to find out what reward the programmers have put in should we manage to get past their little fun-obstacle.
Deus Ex games were always fundamentally different. I remember using up half a dozen resources in a couple places, to wind up with... a lousy box of bullets. But Deus Ex games are the EXCEPTION.
Modern gamers have been conditioned to linear gameplay, where taking the route of most resistance is the obvious choice. The trick, now, is to condition them (with games like Thief, Hitman, and Deus Ex for starters) that the EASIEST choice should be the first one.