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Avoiding Wasted Time With Prince of Persia
Zonk pointed out an interesting video presentation by Shamus Young on the importance of the new Prince of Persia, calling it the most innovative game of 2008. Young brings up the fact that many of today's games punish failure by wasting the player's time; being sent back to a check point, the beginning of a level, or sometimes even further. This cuts into the amount of time players have to enjoy the meat of the game — the current challenge they have to overcome. Unfortunately, as Young notes, modern controllers are designed for players who have been gaming since they were kids, and have evolved to be more complicated to operate than an automobile. The combination of these factors therefore limits or prevents the interest of new players; a problem Prince of Persia has addressed well through intuitive controls and the lack of punitive time sinks.
What Prince of Persia does different is that it in cooperates its reset mechanic into the game world. In other games you die, then see a game over screen, then restart the game at the last save point, in Prince of Persia on the other side you simply can't die, there is no game over screen, its all handled fluently without interruption in the game.
He SAID he wasn't an experienced gamer and that is precisely what qualifies him to make the statements he has made.
He challenges the concept of how games are played and analyses the psychology of gaming. He supposes that a great deal of it is likely stuff that was carried over from more simple times when game systems were less complex.
He also never claims that Prince of Persia was the ONLY one doing what he believes is unique and/or innovative. What he claims is that Prince of Persia is a very good example of a departure from what quite often puts off new gamers to the scene. And I have to agree completely.
I recall my first experience with Halo3. I consider myself to be a somewhat experienced gamer though I no longer keep up with the latest anything. I was playing against my son who had been playing it for quite some time and was already very adept at it. I had played Halo2 and was reasonably comfortable with the game. However Halo3 is a different game and has some different features and different tools and weapons and of course different maps. These differences represent a learning curve. My 17 year old son was killing me left and right and I asked him to take it easier on me but he refused (though he said he would). I knew nothing of where to find any given weapon on this arena of this new game. I knew nothing of how to use many of the new tools and weapons. I was defenseless because I had no base knowledge of the environment or how to use it. This made playing with him significantly more frustrating than it needed to be. I played with my son for as long as I did attempting to learn but was effectively prevented even from learning due to the punishing nature of the game... get killed, lose everything, reset to original spawn location, meanwhile other players keep what they had, their location and everything. My response to him was to quit. After trying to play with him for at least 30 minutes, I just quit and told him I would never play against him ever again because he was brutal, unkind, and deceitful. But how many other gamers have this sort of experience with games or other gamers? Overcoming challenges, having some learning curve and some degree of difficulty is indeed part of what gaming is about...part of it...but by no means is it ALL of it. But how much is too much and for whom?
The psychology of gaming needs further analysis. Some games compensate by running you through tutorials and lessons to get you up to speed. I do not recall this in Halo3 -- my first experience with it put me off considerably. I may try again at some point in the future, but for me, I prefer games I can play alone where my only foe is the game itself because even though there are variations in complexities and learning curves and that sort of thing, at least I am granted opportunities to learn that are generally acceptable by me. But I can most certainly identify with the author's perspective on the matter and how some people have a lower tolerance for things that are too difficult to overcome and punish the player too much for failure.
Punishment. What an interesting choice of words. It brings new meaning to the old word itself and also adds new meaning to understanding gaming psychology and philosophy. Punishment can drive people to overcome or it can drive people away. I suppose the key is to moderate the degree of punishment so that it doesn't cross the line to driving people away.
Well, what made Braid one of the best games of 2008 was the fact that it continually expanded the scope of this feature in order to never allow it to be used for exactly the same purpose level by level.
I saw it as one of the most inspired uses of current generation of hardware (speed of caching and disk storage). The insinuation that it was "for the casuals" is off-base imo because even I, an extremely seasoned gamer was enthralled by the mechanics which pushed me to expand my way of thinking about games and level design (and story telling) in order to finish.
I think pressing the quicksave button is itself part of the challenge. Do you want to overwrite your last save with this new one? What if one of the choices you made between it and where you are now was what determined your game ending?
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
Now see... for me, the "fun" part isn't in defeating the hard part, though that is gratifying, it's in finding out what happens with the story line and the characters. The best game out there is going to come out with a really involving and interesting story line, and if it has challenging gameplay so much the better. That's why, on my Wii, I have spent *many* more hours playing through Bully than I have on Mario Galaxy. It's just a better story. (Mario Galaxy basically tells the same story of *every* Mario game since the original Donkey Kong) And I'm just not interested in games where the object is to run around killing things. Hell, the last shooter I played was either NOLF2 or Thirteen on the PC.
Different kind of gamer, I guess. I won't play PvP games at all, because there's too many 13-year old retards out there (mindset, if not physical age). And I get tired of people asking me to get on voice and cyber when they find out that women actually do play games. Closest I get is WoW, and I play on a non-PvP RP server. *shrugs*
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
Prince of Persia is a huge bomb sales wise.
Now the question is why?
This analysis would lead us to understand that it was on the wrong console then.
Especially this tidbit from the OP: "as Young notes, modern controllers are designed for players who have been gaming since they were kids, and have evolved to be more complicated to operate than an automobile. The combination of these factors therefore limits or prevents the interest of new players; a problem Prince of Persia has addressed well through intuitive controls and the lack of punitive time sinks."
There is the problem. The audience to whom this was adressed, is not on PS3 or XB360. The game didn't solve anything, as the people scared by these modern controllers just won't buy the consoles that come with them. There's only one home console this generation that solved this, and this is the only one where Prince of Persia wasn't released. Go figure.
So basically, they published a game that solves only half of the problem, but unfortunately, they released it for the wrong audience.
The audience on PS3 and XB360 is not scared by these old mechanics, and don't want what they think are dumbed down mechanics. Those that are veterans but still wanted this to change also bought a Wii, but they're not the bulk of the audience needed.
This just shows this PoP was a very stupid move, these 3rd parties look more and more stupid as time passes.