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The Player's Bill of Rights
Gamasutra has a Designer's Notebook column up this week offering up a Player's Bill of Rights. Written by Ernest Adams, the article decries the many indignities that we as players should never be forced to suffer. From the article: "The Right to Feedback: The player has a right to know how she's doing, and in particular, to some means of determining if she's in danger of losing the game. If the player doesn't get feedback, she can't adjust her strategy, and the outcome will feel random. Players need to know whether their approach is working or not."
You do have that right. Just go to the homepage section of your user preferences and scroll down. To the right, you should see a list of authors with check boxes. Uncheck the box labelled "Zonk".
you forgot
1. the right to not be exposed to the same story more than once
This and other bills are too long. I think that all of the points in all of these bills will be addressed if we only get the right to
(0) Return a game for a full refund if we do not like it.
I just knew someone would reply like this. Look at what website this is posted on. Look at the name of the column. Now, actually read the article.
It's not a list of demands to game companies. It's some tips for game designers, like pretty much everything on GamaSutra.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
is this intended to mean that women need these things and men dont?
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
I disagree with that "right"--I still can't believe I'm replying to a post about a Player's Bill of Rights, only on slashdot. In some games, insulting and being insulted by NPCs is an important part of the game. Take Neverwinter Nights as an example. Depending on whether or not an NPC insults you or is ill-tempered, you might make different choices, ultimately causing a different outcome. Likewise, if you insult an NPC they may not be very helpful, which could change the outcome as well. Overall it was a good list of what should(n't) be done in a game. I especially liked the Right to Control Cut-Scenes, that's a must-have.
-William Brendel
The Dragon's Lair/Space Ace Games were really rotten on that point.
Of course I know what it SAYS, but no game desginer that MATTERS will give a shit.
Im sure you'll have a few small-fry operations make some crappy 3d game (like yet another doom clone) that'll listen. But I know, as well as you, that until the big guys listen to that, this'll go nowhere.
Fuck, according to the EULA, its against the rules to even know what HP/MP/XP levels you have on Evercrack... Everquest. You have to use a linux box as a shim and gui to see the datastream and decode it from there. And for Sony, their group of addiction psychologists say that's better for revenue.
The points forwarded in the article are mere childsplay. For the most part, game designers have been doing all of these things for years; we're talking standard fare. Individual games and genres tend to suffer differently in these cases, but I don't think the problem is as rampant as the author makets it out to be. Right not to be insulted? I've never played a commercial game worth a lick that was like that; the best example they could come up with was a cell phone clone of minesweeper? Apparently this is not such a big problem.
Instead of focusing on things that games ALREADY do, I'd rather like to see some rights that consumers need such as the right to fresh, creative content. It seems like the most popular games today are sequels and/or rehashes of old game engines and ideas. Where's the excitement?
Also, gamers should have the right to OWN their games. That's right folks; they should be able to pay once and get a full copy, preferrebly with source. Along with this goes the right to play your game; I own dozens of Windows and DOS games that are no longer playable on my current systems. More games should be liberated so that we can port our treasured games and continue playing them.
See, now we're talking about rights, not this "I can't figure out what the buttons for my game" nonsense.
I'm looking through my collection of games right now (from all the major consoles), and I can't find a single one that didn't come with a playing manual
Most used cartridge games nowadays are sold without a manual because the cardboard packaging that was common when those games were sold new did not make it easy to keep the manual next to the game. Or by "all the major consoles" do you refer to disc-based consoles (PS1, PS2, GameCube, Xbox) and absolutely nothing else?
didn't allow you to save your progress
Most NES games did not contain a battery. Zelda, Final Fantasy, and friends were exceptions, not the rule.
or which I felt was impossible to beat.
Tetris, one of the hottest selling games of the late 1980s, did not have an ending to speak of (other than the various missile or shuttle launches), and very few people have mastered the game enough to be able to succeed at insane speeds for the several minutes that it would take to top out the score at 999,999 points.
Likewise, game designers should not needlessly impair the player's progress. Designers should keep the characteristics of the player-character in mind and design environments accordingly. If I am playing a fireball-hurling Mage, a wooden chest should not prove too difficult for me to open, key or no key. If I am playing a human, when confronted by a waist-height fence, I should be able to hop over it if I choose instead of worrying about the silly lock. (That doesn't mean I shouldn't be looking over my shoulder when I get to the other side, watching for dogs, guards, or laser turrets.) Any player should be able to ask, at any time, "Well, why can't I do this?" and receive a better answer than "Because you're not supposed to do it that way" (e.g. "Because you won't fit there" or "Because you'll die"). Being blocked by an invisible wall for no apparently good reason is frustrating and insulting. Put some thought into it and make a game that we can get into.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized!
Software generally has a return policy of a) no returns if it's opened or b) exchange for the exact same title (to protect against defective media).
OK, so how many exchanges for the same title does it take to convince a store that every copy of a given work will be defective in the same way?
Any player should be able to ask, at any time, "Well, why can't I do this?" and receive a better answer than "Because you're not supposed to do it that way" (e.g. "Because you won't fit there" or "Because you'll die"). Being blocked by an invisible wall for no apparently good reason is frustrating and insulting.
What about because the player is skating away from the ****ing park? Should the game just let the player fall off the edge of the map?
I especially liked the Right to Control Cut-Scenes, that's a must-have.
Some of the shorter unskippable cut scenes have a purpose: allowing the game to load data while preserving immersion. I play one game, Katamari Damacy, that inserts ten-second cut scenes (<King> "Your clump has reached 3.0 meters. Still just a toddler, but now there's a way through here.") every five minutes or so, so that it can load more parts of the game world that it keeps fenced off until you get a large enough clump to roll over the fence.
I like going barefoot but I won't cry about getting kicked out of Best Buy for that because I respect their right to be selective.
What about a customer with a disability that prevents her from wearing shoes, such as severely deformed feet, or prehensile feet developed as a compensation for deformity or loss of both hands, or the like? Then your business might run up against applicable anti-discrimination laws.
But the article wasn't written 20 years ago.
Jakks Pacific's Plug and Play TV Games use technology from the NES era in order to let the company push the price below $20 per unit. In fact, a lot of the electronic games sold today are handheld games with large, custom-shaped LCD pixels, which is Game & Watch technology developed 25 years ago. And how can a web game allow saving without cookies, which unknowing users like to delete first and ask questions later?
From the first right: >>The majority of the time a player spends in a game, he should be making decisions, exploring, creating, overcoming challenges, or otherwise acting upon the game world in some way. Players come to play, not to watch cut-scenes. Notice that I say the majority of the time. Non-interactive elements are not forbidden, but they should not take up more than 50% of the playing time of the game.
Maybe I'm the minority, but I like cut-scenes. I play games instead of watching movies or TV. While I enjoy action games, I love JRPGs that have hours and hours of cut-scenes, and I really wouldn't notice if the cut-scenes took up more than the 50% of the game (though I usually do all the sidequests, so I highly doubt even close to the time I spend is half cutscenes). I could even imagine a developer making a RPG-like game that didn't have battles, just exploring and cut-scenes for non-gamers. My point is that people like different things, and that as a group demanding that games have a limit to cut-scenes is about as pointless as demanding no more Ecco the Dolphin games. If you don't like it, don't buy it, but trying to stop if from being made makes no sense at all.
Of course, it's not like this matters as all, this article will be forgetten by the time the next thing is posted on slashdot (or it will be the next thing posted on slashdot), but I just felt like giving out my two cents.
"What is Internet Explorer 7? Are you saying we can't access the normal internet?" - I love tech support. Really.
The Right to Instructions. ... The instructions don't have to reveal everything about the game, but they must tell the player which buttons, commands, or menu items do what.
Would these instructions be part of the game program, or would they be printed in a paper manual accompanying the game? In the former case, the recent Tony Hawk games have a nice way of doing this, by putting a big, labeled picture of a controller on the loading screen, but it wouldn't be feasible in the case of really small systems such as a Tamagotchi. In the latter case, the publisher can't control whether a game sold in the used market includes a manual.
The Right To Control Cut-Scenes. This right also applies to long monologues by mentor characters, mission briefings, scrolling text, and any other period in the game when the player can only sit and watch.
Would you want to watch the mission briefing that the game presents while it copies models and textures from disc to RAM, or would you rather skip it and see a blank screen with a progress bar?
The Right to Quit, Pause, Save and Resume the Game. In a single-player game, the player has the right to start and stop the action at will, including switching the machine off and coming back to the game later, i.e. saving and reloading.
This would defeat the purpose in a stamina based game such as Pop'n Music, Dance Dance Revolution, Pump It Up, Stepping Selection, or In The Groove. If you can't get through an eight- to ten-minute "marathon" course without a break, then you need to train more on the easier levels.
I will make one exception about saving, for games that last 30 minutes or less. Other than that, you must allow him to save.
Which means that most handheld games are exempt, as they're typically designed for 10 minutes or less of play at a time. Even games such as Katamari Damacy are not affected, as the longest ordinary level in KD has a 25 minute time limit before the King gets impatient.
My point is that people like different things, and that as a group demanding that games have a limit to cut-scenes is about as pointless as demanding no more Ecco the Dolphin games.
The article isn't about demanding fewer cut-scenes included with a game. It's about demanding a fast forward button. How many times have you used a summon in one of the disc-based Final Fantasy games and waited a whole minute for it to play out? Is it really covering loading for the whole time?
So, I pretty much already have that "right". :)
"The Right to Play." - Taste is like the bottom on this one (split). If the game promises gameplay and only have "intermission" videos then I'll be disappointed, but if I like stories and the game promises that I might enjoy it just like I enjoy a movie.
"The Right to Win." - I guess most of the offenders here are old shooter games with 100 or 255 levels of invading pixly monsters. Not sure if I have seen it in any new (big) games.
"The Right to Instructions." - I disagree about the "bad games, period." part here. I figured out Utopia K240 without instructions (read: I didn't own the manual *cough*), and a lot of other games, and they were very good games, I still play them. Most new games have pretty decent ingame tutorials/manuals or they are self explainatory due to the low complexity. I really miss games of K240's complexity. Just imagine what could be done with that concept today!
"The Right to Feedback." - I agree here, but I hope developers doesn't take this point as "Put as many numbers and bars floating over the head of the players as possible".
"The Right To Motivation." - I disagree. Adventure, Exile (2D game mind you), Zelda 1, Metroid 1 and ome older RPGs were good (appealing to me) just because they didn't herd and nanny you around. They just went like: "Here's a world and some stuff, have fun!". I remember first playing Zelda 1, walking straight to the first level right away. Maybe I was just lucky, or maybe the map design was so clever that it tilted me in that direction. It felt awesome finding it all by myself anyways.
"The Right to Make Decisions." - I agree with this one, especially the mole-whacking analogy. A shooting course with flat figures that pop up might be another fitting analogy. That's how I feel playing most games today.
"The Right to a Swift Death." - Exile (old 2D game) didn't kill off the player if things were hopeless. The player was responsible for his actions and didn't get nannied by the game. If it's impossible to mess up without dying the game is probably too limited for my taste. I'm not much for 65536 damage invisible forcefields.
"The Right To Control Cut-Scenes." - I think most people agree with this one. I think another should be added, namely the right to skip ESRB notices and stupid DVD menus, but that's a different discussion. I just wanted to RAGE a bit about that. I'm done.
"The Right to Quit, Pause, Save and Resume the Game." - This is a tricky one isn't it? Being able to save anywhere makes you behave sloppy, the game feels pointless cuz you feel you just can reload anyways, and you never get the same feeling of excitement when you're SO near killing the boss.
On the other hand it's very annoying having to repeat things when you die. There's a few other solutions, like a limited amount of 'save-coins' you can use, or the Exile approach where you just teleport, or the Nethack-ish 'permadeath', to mention a few. In anyway I don't think being able to 'save-state' anywhere is an ideal solution.
The Chair Corp. comic(*00-12)
Don't forget:
1. the right to make a backup of your disc.
2. install and play your game without having to reinstall bare Windows to do so (Starforce: hostile anti-user copy protection and Punkbuster, which currently hates GetRight of all things. Both quickly pronounce users as guilty of hacking without a trial)
3. install and play your game without needing ANY kind of internet connection whatsoever. Half Life 2 and the (currently vaporware) Prey will never touch my systems because of that.
I think it's highly insensitive to pander to the few female gamers and ignore the masses of males that play most games.
Have we gone completely Politically-Correct Banana's here? If I were a "she" gamer, I would take offense to all these 'sensitive' game reviews/etc. that act like female gamers are the norm.
Let's get fscking real people. We aren't idiots, and women can see through the pandering you dolts make when you try to make statements to the effect that "She" is the stereotypical gamer.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
(Seriously, your ability to get personally offended by a set of guidelines in a game developer magazine is impressive.)
Final Fantasy X
Not sure on this one, unless he means arcade-style games that don't have an end. Perhaps he's referring to games which have a bug that prevents finishing, none of which I've had the misfortune to encounter yet.
Mortal Kombat, Tekken, and other fighting games that make you figure out the combos by trial and error.
Bushido Blade
Sim City, Populous
Not sure, unless he means rhythm games like Parappa the Rapper or Space Channel Five
Sierra's Quest games (especially Space Quest) and any number of old adventure games.
Final Fantasy X
Final Fantasy games, Tomb Raider games, and lots of other console titles. Not to mention a horde of games based entirely on checkpoints. These are why at least one PS1 emulator comes with a "save state" function.
Checkpoint-only games like Killzone
Lots and lots of console games. Final Fantasy Tactics comes to mind. Non-console, X-Wing comes to mind.
Never encountered this, myself.
Exile II? Hmmm, are you talking about the topdown RPG Exile? It's new to me, I only knew there was a version of Myst called Exile. Apparently Exile II has a teleportation plot aswell, that might confuse my post further.
m
The Exile I'm talking about never had a sequel, just a lot of ports. Some fan page:
http://exile.acornarcade.com/index.html
My own Exile project page:
http://www.itchstudios.com/psg/exile/exile-ish.ht
The Chair Corp. comic(*00-12)
Here's my bitch list... err, gamers bill of rights I mean:
Physics: If you are going to try to make a realistic combat simulation game, make sure that those nicely detailed 50 ton tanks don't come to a dead stop when you run into a wooden crate! (Battlefield 2)
Keyboard Controls: If you are going to make a racing game that allows keyboard controls, make sure the controls are usable on more than the 100hp car you start out with. Nothing sucks quite as much as spinning out on every little turn. This one is for Juiced. NFSU2 got this right.
Splash Screens: If you want me to know that X, Y, and Z all made parts of the game, give me a way to skip past them! I don't want to sit through 30 seconds of mandatory splash screens each time the game loads. This is really sickening when the game has a problem and keeps crashing. I didn't spend a ton of money on a PC that can load stuff damn near instantly just to be delayed for marketing purposes. At least make the video files easy to find so I can delete them.
I think the best thing we could do is come up with a set of new, gender-neutral-only pronouns
Everything2.com, a user-created encyclopedia/blog which was started by some people associated with Slashdot, seems to have standardized on the Spivak pronouns (e2 article | wikipedia article).
But does the player have the right to play as a character of either sex?
Sure, though the Pokémon series does allow for saving at almost any time, "the vast majority of console games" don't, but they also don't have 40 GB hard drives to persist huge amounts of game state. Most cross-platform games are limited to 8 MB memory cards, and players expect several saves to fit on one card. In addition, the article makes an exception for missions that definitely take 30 minutes or less, such as all missions in three out of the four PS2 games I own (Katamari Damacy, Frequency, and In The Groove).
The word "they" is plural, and not all sentences can be reworded to apply to multiple players rather than one player without sounding awkward. In addition, "the player" every time can become just as awkward.
Right to Motivation: Sim City
SimCity games have all sorts of info screens. The manual for SimCity (classic) for Super NES encouraged the player to set her own goal to maximize this or minimize that. For example, a lot of people play to see how fast they can get to 500K population. In addition, each game has a scenario mode that gives the player specific goals to be graded after 120 months of game time.
Right to instructions: Mortal Kombat, Tekken, and other fighting games that make you figure out the combos by trial and error.
This happens mostly when you buy a game used and don't get a printed manual. I bought Super Street Fighter II for Super NES when it was new, and it listed every button combination in the printed manual next to the picture of the character, although I never managed to pull off Cammy's knuckle-buster nor Zangief's circle moves with any regularity. Tobal No. 1 listed its characters' combos in the manual as well.
Right to Make Decisions: Not sure, unless he means rhythm games like Parappa the Rapper or Space Channel Five
Beatmania IIDX and Pop'n Music have enough keys that the player has to decide on which fingers go to which key. Even in a 4-key game such as DDR you have to make all sorts of decisions: should I double-step this Left-Down-Right, or should I do a crossover? At a higher level, should I approach "Exotic Ethnic" with stamina-draining double steps the way I do "End of the Century", or should I take the risk of performing complex crossovers and misreading the sequence? Even higher, should I drop down to standard for the next song to recover stamina, or should I push it and try heavy to get more unlocks?
Right to Win Not sure on this one, unless he means arcade-style games that don't have an end. Perhaps he's referring to games which have a bug that prevents finishing, none of which I've had the misfortune to encounter yet.
I actually have played such a game that was reasonably recent, called Sanity: Aiken's Artifact. Rather than use pre-rendered cinematics, all interactions were done in-engine. It was probably a 15 or 20 hour game that I got through and beat the final boss. At this point, there was to be a final interaction, which would presumably show everything going right and so on, except for the bug that in this final interaction that hero was a touch too close to a cliff and would die during the conversation, thus making it so nobody could see the ending. Arrrrghhh!
More accurate but having the same problem as saying 'the player' would be: "To some means of determining if he or she is in danger of losing the game.
We have an indefinite pronoun, 'one'. But it would sound frightfully English if it were used widely in publications about gaming:
"To have some means of determining if one is in danger of losing the game."
Correct, elegant. But too subtle and antiquated for the average person.
Read Pynchon.
the right of players to be able to start the freaking game right away without seeing your damn dirty logos and advertising (the way it's meant to be skipped).
what moron thought it would be good to have company logos, production house logos, nvidia logos, EA sports challenge all that's not annoying, that take 30 seconds longer to get to the main menu without being able to skip it. not only that, why the hell should we have to sit through it more than once?
if a player pays for the game, the advertising has to go too. i don't care who made the game or who published it... there ought to be a website dedicated to producing patches for games that strip out these unwanted elements.
this industry is becoming more and more customer hostile each year and the above isn't even an example of such behavior...
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
How about the right to save and quit when I damn want to, or _need_ to. I remember one game which made me go literally for 10 (yes, TEN!) hours before it gave me a save point.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Sheesh dude. I was trolling. If you post early, and post often , and most of all, post negative, you rake in the luzer comments at you. I actually laugh at em sometimes.
Instructions: While technically any game came with a manual, I can think of several which came with piss-poor manuals, including one whose manual seemed to be made for a completely different game. It described stuff that didn't even exist in the game, or didn't work even vaguely like in the manual. I can only assume that they made the manual at a very early point, and changed their mind about half the design by the time they finished it.
Winning: I can think of a lot of games which, while technically weren't impossible to win, felt a need to throw some massive tantrum at you at some point, that was out of your control and nigh impossible to recover from.
E.g., try playing China in EU2. Everything is fun and games until the 1600's, when the game suddenly throws some scripted events at you that raise dissent sky-high and drop your stability in the basement. I mean so high that you literally can't recruit an army any more, and your tax income drops massively. Any conquests you did to that point _will_ be lost, as everyone revolts, _and_ the only way to stabilize the country into something even vaguely playable at that point is to basically move the army out of the capital and hope the rebels kill your government.
While technically it doesn't necessarily mean you've "lost", it sure feels that way.
Or take "Crusader Kings" where, since you're playing a dynasty as opposed to a country, if one of your emperors doesn't have sons your game may well be over. Literally. (Or some other unpleasantries, like finding yourself allowed to continue playing as the Baron of East Bumfuckistan, instead of the empire you've worked on building so far.)
In both cases we're talking stuff that's basically outside the player's control. E.g., in EU2 all that condensed nastiness in the 1600's is on timed scripts. It doesn't matter if you're the best emperor ever and your population loves you, it doesn't matter if your policies don't reflect the historical causes of those revolts, you _will_ have those and your work _will_ be undone as your empire crumbles before your eyes. It will happen no matter what you do, and even if you had any feedback in advance (but you don't) you couldn't prevent it.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
You'd be surprised how many major full-price PC or console games violate at least one of those points. Sure, if by "rampant" you mean "everyone violating most of them", it's not that bad, but violating at least one happens often enough to make me happy that someone wrote that list. I wish they could also make it mandatory reading for every wannabe game designer.
Sure, you're right in that it all sounds like common sense, and it's stuff that's been "discovered" two decades ago. Nothing new and revolutionary in any of those points.
Yet people still come up with cretinous ideas like "I know, let's make our piss-poor 2-hour-long game seem longer by disabling save and making the player have to replay the whole level, again and again, until he discovers the right solution by trial and error. That'll make it longer."
Or take decision making. We all know that gameplay is about decisions, even minor ones like whether I drop this piece here or there in Tetris, and that Sid Meier quote is anything but new. But then it's actually rampant to have games where basically you have only an illusion of choice.
E.g., RPG dialogues where you get 2 or 3 choices, but only one works, and the others just get you asked again. Sorry, that's _not_ a choice. And I don't just mean Japanese console RPG's, btw. E.g., in "Vampire, The Masquerade: Redemption" you had such choices as whether you want to save some people from a golem. But saying "no" just made you do it anyway.
E.g., choices of the kind Brian Reynolds (designer of games like Alpha Centauri) called a non-choice. If a piano falls on top of you and you have an option to jump out of the way, or stay and be squished, it's not a choice. Choices like that, where one alternative is there just as a sick joke to tell you "you should have picked the other one" are more common than you seem to think.
E.g., insults: I can think of a couple of games which give you, the player not your character, a "title" based on your score. Some being just a barely more diplomatic way of saying "wow, you really suck".
Etc. I see no point to go through all his list. Let's just say I find each and every point to be there for a reason. People still do those mistakes in major releases, not just in cell phone Minesweeper games.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Hey, this is slashdot. It can be hard to distinguish between trolls and genuine ignorance.
You seem to define "deffective" as in "the CD was physically unreadable", which is just about the only thing that would be solved by giving someone another copy. What if the software itself is broken and deffective? Because that's the actual product I bought there, and the CD was just the medium it comes on.
E.g., the german version of Victoria threw a script _syntax_ error right at the start of a new campaign. Yes, you've read that right. Not a crash to desktop, not some graphics glitch, _nothing_ even remotely blamable on my hardware or drivers. A script _syntax_ error. That game couldn't work as released on _any_ hardware.
E.g., a german version again, Everquest 2 was released with a completely broken translation, which actually did impact gameplay. NPCs and items would be named completely differently in the quest text and in the actual game, making it literally impossible to do what you were told. The NPC you were told to kill simply didn't even exist in the game. (And generally, you know it's bad when even the few fans tell you to try translating it word-for-word back into English, to figure out some texts.)
E.g., Phantasy Star Online Blue Burst doesn't seem to be able to connect at all on my XP machine, although it works flawlessly on my Windows 2000 machine. (So, no, it's not a case of ports being blocked by the router or ISP.) Mind you, I needed to dig through tech support faqs even just to get it to the point it would try to connect: first it didn't even let me input my name and password. No, literally, typing anything in those input boxes was a futile exercise. The only key they accepted was basically escape to cancel it.
E.g., to take an older game, take The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall. The collision detection was so bad, that you'd fall into the void even when running on flat groud, or when teleporting back to town. I'm picking on it, instead of newer ones, because it's a clear-cut case of deffective software, and can't be blamed on drivers or hardware. It took many _months_ for Bethesda to try to fix it, and eventually they gave up and made a cheat code to teleport you back to the beginning of the map if you fell into the void.
E.g., Morrowind was shipped with a pretty nasty race condition that resulted in a crash to desktop when zoning. But as is usually the case with race conditions, on different PCs it produced wildly different results. On some you had a crash every couple of hours, but some people couldn't even leave the starting ship at all, because the game would crash when they went through the hatch. I'm not even going into the aspect that a game that crashes at all _is_ deffective, but the fact remains that some people just couldn't play it as shipped.
Etc.
So giving them a replacement CD is gonna solve... what? No, seriously.
Yeah, they were sooo trying to rip you off, by not accepting a game they couldn't run at all. Not. Geesh.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Well, then, if "he" can be used to mean any gender, then why can't "she" be used in exactly the same way? It's just as clear, it's certainly familiar (it's one word you hear every day), and it's just as concise (one extra "s" now and then won't lengthen the whole article by any significant amount. And when you read it, it's still one syllable.)
Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating either of them as such, but I _do_ find it peculiar that someone would need to throw a "what's with this 'she' crap?" tantrum. Using 'she' was insulting... how?
I don't know, I'm a guy myself, but I find it anywhere between hillarious and idiotic (or most often a mixture of both) the way some guys absolutely have to defend their supremacy in some field as if their manhood depended on it. As if, god forbid, even acknowledging that women gamers exist (e.g., by using a 'she' now and then) could make their dick shrivel and fall off.
Let me rephrase that: I don't even think it's a "guy thing" as such. It's not about "guys" as such, it's about complexed insecure guys who need to put someone down just to mask their own insecurities.
And you'd thing that what with being the victims of that, nerds would know better than to do that. In practice, frankly, it's the exact opposite. When you see someone blanketly insulting whole population segments, for the most idiotic and irrelevant pretexts (e.g., that they don't use vi, or that they play on a non-PK facet in a MMO, or whatever), chances are it'll be a nerd.
To anyone falling in that category: folks, get a life. Gaming is just a passtime, no more. It doesn't make you a "man" or anything, it just makes you less bored. Noone will come and beg to carry your baby because of your clan's scores in CS or your Linux PDA or whatever.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The "interesting" decision-making in rhythm games comes in the song-select screen. You choose a song, difficulty, mods, etc.. and with In the Groove marathons, mod choices are elevated almost to an art of strategy, choosing the ones that will best counter what you see in the course.
Most of action games, as I pointed out to some foo in another post on this topic, are just performing learned technique. The interesting choices, even in "open" games like GTA, come when you get to make macro-decisions on where you're going and how you get there. Only in a few rare cases do the macro-decisions collide with the technical aspects, and oftentimes the result is some kind of exploit.
This can also be said of many strategy games(usually the poorer ones); the macro decisions are small, the technique needed is large. Civilization manages to be addictive because it has a lot of good macro-decisions, but they get padded out with the heavy turn-by-turn micromanagement.
I'm not even sure why people persist in the save game tradition. It's not like it's actually needed any more, and I can think of even Japanese console games (e.g., "Persona 2: Eternal Punishment") which do just fine with a PC-style save-anywhere scheme.
I can see how that madness got started, back in the days when it would be a point where you got a code instead of actually saving. I can even see some point later, when flash cartridges were a few k and every byte counted.
But nowadays they're not even needed any more. Any console game actually saves the map and coordinates anyway. It's just an extra check in the program, which can invariably be disabled with a cheat code, and the game still runs flawlessly.
And even as gameplay devices:
1. They don't really act as deterrents. On the contrary, they actually make me save more often. In games without save points I can go for an hour or two without saving. In games with save points I just have to save at each point, and sometimes go back a room or two to save after each event. Just because God knows when and where the next one will be.
2. It's a prop _in_ the game world for an _ooc_ (Out Of Character) action. It's something that just doesn't belong there, and as such it doesn't help with suspension of disbelief. (Yes, a lot of games did try to offer some in-character explanation of what those are, but frankly, it invariably ended up so lame and unnatural, that it was even worse than not explaining anything.)
So why do designers insist on having those?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
See, what annoyed me the most about FFX wasn't the quantity of cut-scenes as such, but the frequency with which they interrupted me for one.
Now I can understand that FF games are also a tech demo for Square's game engines, in much the same way Id's games are tech demos for Id's 3D engines. So Square presumably wanted to show off what they can do with their character's animations.
But here's the major difference: Id's games are quite enjoyable as FPS games go anyway. FFX for me was just an annoying turn-off after another.
I'd go 5 steps in one direction, Tidus would stop to stretch and say something. Do some 5 steps more, whop-de-do it's another short cut scene. Lather, rinse, repeat.
It's that kind of constant interruptions that annoyed me far more than the total time spent in cut scenese as such. I've played games which had more minutes total spent in cutscenes, and/or more percentage of the total time spent in cut scenes. (E.g., "Sword Of The Berserk" on the Dreamcast was literally 75% cut scenes. It had about an hour and a half worth of FMV for about half an hour of actual game.) But, you know, they let me play a whole level before giving me a long-ish FMV, rather than interrupt me every 5 to 30 seconds for yet another brief and pointless pause.
It's also a matter of what they're used _for_. I can understand using cut-scenes and/or FMV for stuff that delivers some cinematic storytelling, for major plot elements or twists.
E.g., since I've already mentioned "Sword Of The Berserk", I actually liked the cut scenes there. They told a story, and told it well. You could piece them together and actually get a pretty good movie. Any way I want to imagine delivering that story in-game, e.g., by running around and clicking on NPCs, it just wouldn't be the same thing.
By comparison, in FFX the vast majority of interruptions seemed to be there _purely_ to showcase the engine, and didn't really do much for the story or plot. Tidus stopping to stretch and yawn, or whatever, just wasn't _necessary_ there.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Picture this: so yesterday I re-install Planetside and its Core Combat expansion pack. And, naturally, spend almost two hours after that downloading patches. But I figure, wth, that's pretty much normal and expected for a MMO these days.
And what am I treated to? Some _long_ advertising movies I can't even skip. The first for some other expansion pack, the second for the Battleframes (think: mechs) that were introduced some time later.
Yep, some idiot at Sony's marketting dept decided that obviously "gamer" means I want to watch their idiotic ad movies, instead of playing the game I've paid for.
And for the real slap in the face, re-read the first paragraph. I've spent almost two hours downloading WHAT? Ad movies. (And presumably also the new maps with billboards, so Sony can advertise in-game too.)
Dunno, I found it to be nothing short of a slap in the face.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
"Dude, you missed the goal! Loser"
"No, no, I meant to do that!"
"Whatever, dude."
Well, DW is by and large a collection of jokes and parodies. E.g., yeah, Terry Pratchett pokes fun at quicksaving there, just like he pokes fun at murder mysteries, vampire novels, and just about everything else. The DW world itself is a disc on 4 elefants on a Turtle, and in Small Gods you have people fighting the Inquisition's dogma that the world is round.
Basically you're not really supposed to take DW seriously.
I guess the same applies to games. I can accept OOC stuff in a game that is a parody. (E.g., in "Bard's Tale" the hero's talking to the narrator, or poking fun at such stapples of the genre as finding a whole chest and 20 items inside a wolf.)
The problem is that a lot of games are supposed to be taken more seriously, and their explanations aren't a parody or funny. They're just some mumbo-jumbo that doesn't even make sense in-character.
Since you mention Anachronox, it isn't the most guilty there, as it doesn't really go into much depth or detail. The most anyone says in-character about those critters is that they pet them for good luck, rather than them being save points. Weird superstitions existed IRL too, so I can live with that.
What I had in mind was more along the lines of Chrono Cross, where they even squeezed in some Big Brother kinda organization watching over you through those save points, to justify them. The fact that it broke the story, if you think about it logically, doesn't help there either. At that point, the whole "alternate universes based on different outcomes to one event" theme just didn't make any sense any more.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I'm looking through my collection of games right now (from all the major consoles), and I can't find a single one that didn't come with a playing manual, didn't allow you to save your progress, or which I felt was impossible to beat.
ET
I think this article is silly but brings up a few interesting points. I do disagree with the "Right to Instructions" however. I think too many games these days have annoying hand-holding tutorials that the player is forced to endure for up to the first couple of hours of the game. Fable is a good recent example of this.
I really think that with some forethought, many games could be designed to allow the player to learn how to play the game without handholding. An obvious example is to simply make things easier on the player at first - avoiding allowing opportunities for any major player decisions or actions early in the game that can severely stunt or otherwise negatively affect the player's progression later on. I remember playing Arcanum and not being able to leave the first town because I hadn't concentrated on any one skillset enough to get past the goons guarding the exit - I'd have had to start the whole game over and lose a couple hours of gameplay.
I can live with optional tutorials, but it's my opinion that they're still indicative of a lack of good game design. I think the best approach is to include a manual and just make the game a little more forgiving in the beginning without doing any overt handholding. Draw the player into the world instead of destroying the immersion with silly tutorials.
Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.
I have problems with all of these requirements. There are real exceptions to every single one of them. This shouldn't be called a Player's Bill of Rights, it should be called "General Guidelines For Video Games." Bill of Rights implies it's always valid.
The Right to Play.
Choose your own adventure books are a type of game. You spend 99% of your time reading the pages, but rather often make a decision that changes the character's path. The videogame equivalent seems fine to me, just so long as you're given several opportunities to change things. Sure, it's not as interactive as some players might like, but that doesn't make it a bad game, just a different game.
The Right to Win.
Victory can be defined in a lot of ways. If you were playing a game where your character is a tragic hero or, for some important plot reason, is supposed to be defeated, that doesn't mean the game's bad. If this was a rule, you could never have Hamlet the video game.
The Right to Instructions.
I played a game called Zone of the Enders. It begins with a kid falling into a spaceship and having to fight an enemy having no idea how to control his ship. After you defeat the enemy, the instructions start, but for a moment, you're actually supposed to be a confused kid figuring out the controls. There really are ALWAYS valid exceptions to the rule.
The Right to Feedback.
There's a track in Mario 64 that has several twisting, different routes to the goal. It is by design supposed to be confusing as to which route is best. The progress bar that is usually present is replaced by question marks because, gasp, it's sometimes good for the players not to know for sure how they're doing.
The Right To Motivation.
The article quotes Sid Meier a little later, which is funny because this rule blows his games out of the water. There are purely explorational games. Sometimes they're awesome.
The Right to Make Decisions.
Well, so much for the platformers. Most of them were totally linear and, while I would've liked some branching, they're a genre of game. They're a POPULAR genre of game. Deal with it.
The Right to a Swift Death.
This one I mostly agree with, although I know of one or two games where it was violated to good effect.
The Right To Control Cut-Scenes.
I think it's kind of funny that the author is concerned about "destroying immersion." Surely nothing breaks immersion more than carefully replaying cut scenes with a pencil writing down valuable hints. I mean, I like skipping cut scenes all the time, but I don't think we ought to require a replay option for every single friggin' cut scene. Final Fantasy VI didn't offer it, and it was a fantastic game anyway.
The Right to Quit, Pause, Save and Resume the Game.
Nethack. Doesn't require being in one session, but half the fun is not being able to backup your character.
The Right to Choose Not to Save the Game.
I personally like regular auto-save, so long as it's done in a seperate save slot. I fail to see how it's necessarily a right to have an annoying "would you like to autosave?" bit come up every time.
The Right to Reconfigure the Input Device.
For the PC, I agree with this. For anything else, I disagree.
The Right Not To Be Insulted.
This is part of the game's tone. It can choose to insult the player if it likes. Art is about invoking emotion, and if you want the emotion you invoke to be annoyance, disgust, anger, or anything else, that's up to your game.
The Right to Play.
Non-interactive elements? I haven't played many games where cut-scenes overrun the game. Anyone have some good examples of this...
The Right to Win.
Here is something else I haven't seen, is an impossible to win game. I am sure they exist somewhere, the game the developer screwed up so you couldn't beat, or intentially made that way...
The Right to Instructions.
Yes everyone has a right to know how to play. This is another one of those where I fail to have much of an example.
The Right to Feedback.
Ok this almost goes against the way many games work based on their example. I mean if every game kept giving you feedback then what would be the fun of learning? Seriously, if RTS or RPGs gave too much feedback everyone would win them all the time, and there is something to be said for those people who actually PLAYED the game.
The Right To Motivation.
Sometimes the game isn't suppose to tell you what to do. I don't see many games without motivations, the motivations may be obscure but they usually exist.
The Right to Make Decisions.
This really depends on how far you want to take the idea of decisions. Both KotoR I and II give you plenty of chances to make decisions that effect the game. Actually most RPGs allow for this to some extent, even to the point of near total independence (Morrowind). But some degree of control is needed in some games, and the way some FPS and RTS are set up there need to be minimal decision making beyond standard gameplay decisions. BTW, are there seriously people who don't know what Whack-a-mole is?
The Right to a Swift Death.
Now I cannot be certain with respect to all games, but by and large this mostly applies to RPGs I would believe. Most mission based games let you know of failure pretty immediately and some RPGs let you know if you made a no-no (Morrowind again) so you could go back. I do not believe death is really a necessity hear, but some sort of a message saying OOPs would work.
The Right To Control Cut-Scenes.
Ok this one I can kind of see. There are too few games that let you rewatch cut-scenes at will and pausing would be nice for when that pesky phone rings. Truly what I want from cut scenes are Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight cut-scenes. Live acting how I miss thee. It added a different dimension and flavor to the cut-scenes and games and is something that should be considered eventhough it is probably a cost issue.
The Right to Quit, Pause, Save and Resume the Game.
No No No. Games need to be a bit hard. What challenge is there if i can hit save every two seconds. Besides this is only a problem in some games and probably overstated here. By saving whenever and wherever you have the situation that everyone gets into in playing on emulators where you save-state every two seconds and do things perfectly without fail. I mean isn't this how the 8 minute (or however long) Mario 3 was done.
The Right to Choose Not to Save the Game.
Can someone give me an example of this. Everygame I think of with auto-saves has an auto-save slot and you can still have your own save slots. Also, a bit of whining tying this back into a previous "right". I do not see the problem they do with this. Also if you get the other right doesn't sort of cover this too?
The Right to Reconfigure the Input Device.
Examples please. Most the games under this category that I can think of are OLD.
The Right Not To Be Insulted.
Ok for the situation they give this is somewhat understandable. When a game is insulting for no reason it is pointless and rude and often can remove fun factor. There are games particularly RPGs where the attitude from NPCs is a nice touch and somewhat necessary to have a good game flow.
Seriously, this seems like a lot of griping, missing a lot of examples. Maybe if there was some more substance to some of the reasons with valid examples then this wouldn't sound so much like some 12 yr old whining about losing too many games of Mario because they couldn't save, or didn't know to hold up after Bowser fell at the end of Mario 3.
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
1) The right to not be lied to/misled about the in-game quantities of items/npcs/monsters/etc.
I REALLY REALLY hate it when they say "contains over 300 superfabulous artifacts!" when really there's really only 20 base types, each with 15 different color schemes. Except the ultimate weapon, which bumps the total to 301. So you have "over 300".
2) The right to not be lied to as to events in the game.
Ever see those games that show a plethora of screenshots depicting a massive battle of orcs vs gnomes? Yea. That was likely either pre-rendered or it was the final battle in the game, which will render at 2fps on even the most bleeding-edge box two years hence.
I'm really tired of seeing beautiful vistas and breathtaking scenes, and all manner of awesomenesses only to find that they happen once. And you can never go there again. What the hell?
3) The right to not be misled by the game mechanics.
When I buy a game that says I can program my own robot ai, I don't expect that by "program" they mean "buy a robot" and by "ai" they mean "randomly does stuff". I won't name games, but imo there hasn't really been a 'program the ai' type game since carnage heart for the ps1. (talking about console games here). I also don't want to see "fully immersive non-linear game" when by "non-linear" they mean that you can choose between two heroes in the beginning. that's bs.
4) To not be lied to about the game length.
When a game says "40 hours" these days, I generally assume that they take into consideration putzing around, doing sidequests, getting uber-leet ultra weapons of mass vorpalization, maxxing out spells/skills/etc. They should instead tell me how many quests/goals I have. That's a more truthful representation even if its going to be twisted so that every npc chat is a 'goal' in the game.
5) To not need 5 patches before I can get to level 2.
Self-explainatory. QA should've picked up on this LOOOONG before the decision to 'go gold'. If they can't put out a beatable game, I'm not going to buy it.
There's more, but that generally sums up why more and more people are willing to 'pirate' and 'steal' games. Turnabout is fair play, no?
1.) Thou shalt not suck
2.) Thou shalt not covet another game/genre unless you do something new or different.
3.) Thou shalt not delay your release by more than 3 months.
4.) Thou shalt not glorify "smackin' a hoe," "clocking a grip," or "Bustin a nut."
5.) Thou shalt honor good game design over flashy graphics.
6.) Thou shalt not involve Mary Kate and Ashley, Britney Spears, or any other pre-teen/teen manufactured idol/heart throb.
7.) Thou shalt not overhype your creation only to produce a shiny turd.
8.) Thou shalt put effort into mini-games/extras or just leave them out.
9.) Thou shalt end your game with some sort of closeure other than just the names of the artistic director.
10.) Thou shalt not produce endless sequels in which you add a "quirky" sidekick.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
I have the right not to be subjected to female third-person pronouns when the antecedent is of indeterminant gender.
Now you know how it feels.
Besides, the article used both at random.
Now you know how it feels.
By that you are implying that women have been subjected to a "male" pronoun for indeterminant-gender antecedents. But as "he" in such contexts IS gender-inspecific (hence my inclusion of the quotes), such an implication is incorrect.
Besides, the article used both at random.
Yes, I already know that the writing was poor. I don't need a reminder.
Reasonable style is to use the so-called "male" pronoun, period. Anything else gets in the way of the message. Yes, for some hypersensitive audiences, the "male" pronoun may get in the way; in such instances, the correct option is to use the "plural" forms -- they/them/their -- e.g.:
"The player has a right to know how they're doing, and in particular, to some means of determining if they're in danger of losing the game. If the player doesn't get feedback, they can't adjust their strategy, and the outcome will feel random."
That's perfectly legitimate, but too unwieldy, IMO. But it's far superior to using the female pronoun, which is far superior to switching back and forth: the point is not the gender, and using the female pronoun (or, to an even greater degree, switching back and forth) just emphasizes the gender as though it matters, and it diminishes the actual message. The author chose the absolute worst of the available choices.
All of the choices in rhythm games are done outside of the internal context of the game - when you plan things out and think about foot positioning, etc, you aren't thinking in terms of the game.
Now we're getting into a philosophical discussion of what is considered "the game". In a pinball table, the game's computer is aware only of when the ball runs over a sensor, not the cartesian coordinates of the center of each ball. (Video pinball obviously excepted.) Thus the ball is just a component of a fancy input device, and the flippers are just a means to hold it.
It's the equivalent of choosing a way to hold a controller or which handedness you'll use on a DigDug arcade machine.
Likewise, in a Street Fighter style 2D fighting game, a player will often use different grips on the joystick for normal movement, "fireball" type rolls, and "dragon punch" type Z-moves, but these are decisions made by the player that affect performance.
All of these choices have nothing to do with internal game logic.
"Internal game logic" includes how the steps are designed: "Afronova" heavy encourages crossovers, while "End of the Century" heavy encourages double-stepping. Movement of the player's body in ITG or DDR is only "outside of the internal context of the game" as much as movement of the ball in pinball is "outside of the internal context of the game", right?
Rhythm games are simply whack a mole - you cannot develop internal strategies or think about your actions.
You think people can't develop strategies to beat "Max 300" heavy? Guides for this and other difficult DDR songs can be just as deep as any FPS walkthrough.
3. The Right to a Swift Death
One game i played that managed to break both the above rules to some degree as well as the rule that should have been included, "The Right To Not Do The Programmer's Job For Them."
Inindo was a game from Koei that seemed like a cool combination between an RPG and one of their normal strategy games. You spend most of your time doing RPG type things with your character, fighting monsters, leveling up, dungeon delving, but occasionaly you could take control of armies and fight like in the Rot3K and Nobunaga games.
In theory at least. I never got that far because in one of the required dungeons there's a locked door which requires you to go on a fetch quest to get the key. When i returned with the item the guy with the key told me to make sure i had room in my inventory to hold it. This seemed dumb, but i checked, saw i had room, and got the key from him. I headed off to the locked door and stopped by the save point on the way.
When i got to the door i found that it wouldn't open. I checked my inventory and there was no key. I went back to the guy and he seemed to think he'd already given me the key. As far as i can figure out what he'd _meant_ to say was "Make sure that your _first_ _character_ has room in his inventory." My first character's inventory was full up, but i had two other characters with empty slots so i figured that was okay. The key apparently got sent off to the item netherlands with no error checking by the programmers and i had then saved the game in that state. No way to convince the guy to give me anothey key, no way to go back to a previous save (which was partly my fault, but only partly) and the entire game was screwed about five or ten hours in. All because the programmers decided to give the player some unclear instructions on how not to screw everything up rather than take the time to deal with the issue themselves.
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