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Should Computer Games Adapt To the Way You Play?
jtogel writes "Many games use 'rubberbanding' to adapt to your skill level, making the game harder if you're a better player and easier if you're not. Just think of Mario Kart and the obvious ways it punishes you for driving too well by giving the people who are hopelessly behind you super-weapons to smack you with. It's also very common to just increase the skill of the NPCs as you get better — see Oblivion. In my research group, we are working on slightly more sophisticated ways to adapt the game to you, including generating new level elements (PDF) based on your playing style (PDF). Now, the question becomes: is this a good thing at all? Some people would claim that adapting the game to you just rewards mediocrity (i.e. you don't get rewarded for playing well). Others would say that it restricts the freedom of expression for the game designer. But still, game players have very different skill levels and skill sets when they come to a game, and we would like to cater to them all. And if you don't see playing skill as one-dimensional, maybe it's possible to do meaningful adaptation. What sort of game adaptation would you like to see?"
What if the game taught you to be a better player? For example, it could slant the gameplay to teach you one strategy, then once you'd mastered that, move on to teach you a different one. If you do well enough, it starts to require combined strategies, etc.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
I was intrigued by the concept of adaptable games until I played Oblivion. Granted, Oblivion made the worst possible decisions when it came to adapting Mobs to your level: it had an uneven leveling "curve" to the point where gaining a level could make previously easy monsters into a nightmare. It used obscure leveling mechanisms where you could gimp your character to an unplayable point if you didn't happen to pick the right class or jump often enough between leveling.
Since then, I don't care about adaptive leveling, because it is a much harder problem than it appears to be on the surface. Part of the fun for me is to go from getting stomped by the computer to stomping the computer, just because I got better at the game. Sometimes I want the challenge, but then I select it, not the game. Judging from the amount of Starcraft games that are labeled "7v1 stomp the comp", I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in this.
Adaptive difficulty should really come only in two flavors: select an overall game difficulty, so that you know what to expect; or enter some dungeon or bonus level/path that you know is much harder than what you've done so far. Don't force me into a harder game just because I've been doing so well so far. It could have been just a lucky streak, in which case I'll get really frustrated with the sudden ramp-up in difficulty.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
When we developed Tracers back in the '80s we tuned the reward system so that the game would just run at a higher speed (voltage, in the circuit-board language of the game)... every time you won a level, the voltage would ramp up, when you lost a life it would ramp down. Most people found themselves in a cycle where the game would get harder until they started losing lives, and then it slowed down again until they started winning levels again.
The higher the voltage, the more points you got for blocking off and killing an opponent... but we found that the best players quit paying attention to the score. The challenge in the game was pushing the voltage higher and higher. That number was the thing to beat.
I don't like games that try and hide the mechanics of the process from people, but when it's exposed like this it can be extremely effective.
For multiplayer, all I've seen in the past are ways to set the overall arena difficulty, not to set the players separately. It's no fun as a new player playing against a seasoned vetran - no matter where you set the difficulty it's not a fun game for either player.
Quake 3 did. When I played it against my friends, they put me on a 30% handicap (so I had 30% of their health and did 30% of their damage) because that's the only way they could avoid me from wiping the floor with them. There was something about that game that just clicked with the way I play - I wasn't nearly as dominant in Counterstrike, in fact I was regularly thrashed by one of them, but I tore through opposition in any id game like soft fruit through an old granny.
Call me old-fashioned but I've always believed that one of the pre-requisites of calling something a "game" is that it should challenge you. Give you something to learn and get better at. There was no adaptive difficulty on Mario, Zelda, or Metroid. If you wanted to advance in the game (or even beat it), your only choice was to practice, explore, learn from your mistakes, and hopefully get better. A game that automatically makes itself easier when you do poorer isn't a game, it's just a time-waster. In the same class as the click-on-the-pretty-pictures web games and every board game that boils down to sheer chance.