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Gameplay: the Missing Ingredient In Most Games
An anonymous reader writes "Game designer Tadhg Kelly has an article discussing the direction the games industry has taken over the past several years. Gaming has become more of a business, and in doing so, become more of a science as well. When maximizing revenue is a primary concern, development studios try to reduce successful game designs to individual elements, then naively seek to add those elements to whatever game they're working on, like throwing spices into a stew. Kelly points out that indie developers who are willing to experiment often succeed because they understand something more fundamental about games: fun. Quoting: 'The guy who invented Minecraft (Markus "Notch" Persson) didn't just create a giant virtual world in which you could make stuff, he made it challenging. When Will Wright created the Sims, he didn't just make a game about living in a virtual house. He made it difficult to live successfully. That's why both of those franchises have sold millions of copies. The fun factor is about more than making a game is amusing or full of pretty rewards. If your game is a dynamic system to be mastered and won, then you can go nuts. If you can give the player real fun then you can afford to break some of those format rules, and that's how you get to lead rather than follow the market. If not then be prepared to pay through the nose to acquire and retain players.'"
Sure but the article was about that there should also be more to a game than just "doing stuff".
Nope. You use metrics to analyse your freemium game to graph tedium against profit. If you make it just tedious enough, people will hopefully pay some money to avoid actually playing your game. Welcome to the modern approach to game design :/
The article claims that these games are popular because they are hard but it seems that nobody every talks about how challenging they are but instead they always talk about how creative you can be within the game. Both Minecraft and The Sims allow you to be infinitely creative in the way you approach and what you do in the game, and that is what has made these games so popular.
A few of us still believe in the old prophecy. Some day there will be The One, and he will find a way to take grinding out of video games. And the old times will come back. and we will have games like zelda (nes) and metroid again.
Yes, but they should be fun FIRST. I'm with you on the 'exploring the use of the medium for artistic expression' point, but just as a painting exists to be viewed (and thus should, on some level, be visually pleasing) and music exists to be heard (and thus should, on some level, be audiotorially pleasing), a game exists to be played (and thus should, on some level, be FUN to play).
Paintings which break this rule and are not visually pleasing are little more than novelties that are soon forgotten (see any number of pieces in abstract art). Same for music (who actually listens to the things Cage did to pianos?). If I want engaging narrative alone, I've got any number of superior novelists and film directors, who do a far better job than any game I've ever played on that single aspect.
Basically I want a game that rewards perseverance without demanding skill.
How is merely putting in time rewarding? In RPGs that's derisively called "grinding". There's no sense of accomplishment when you finish such a game, as there was never any doubt you could do it.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
He'd probably just as much watch a movie.
People who like hard games and puzzles like to be challenged. They are not discouraged by failure or if they are their competitive nature takes over.
You can divide the world into two kinds of people those who watch and those who like to do, only the ones that do things can fail or succeed.
The MMO world ~10 years ago showcased the difference. Everquest was really listening to it's hardcore players. Not willing to stay online and awake 36 hours straight? Then you won't get the boots that let you run a little bit faster. Not will to try 100 differnt approaches to a raid? The your guild won't get the prize. I knew people who were really into this, who actually collapsed from exhaustion while playing. The were unafraid to drive off the casual gamer.
WoW came along with "how about we do the same game without the grueling, annoying parts?". In the abstract, the gameplay of the two games was similar: same sorts of in-game objectives, same basic idea about the stuff you would do in game, but WoW was carefully tuned to be appealing to the casual gamer, unafraid to drive off the hardcore gamer.
The results of course were well know - EQ peaked at 3-400K subscribers, WoW at what, 12 million? 15? Everyone making games for money learned that lesson! For each person looking for a true challenge in a game, there are 30-50 people just looking for some entertainment.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
A lot of role-playing games are simply based on storytelling, and do not require skill. That's true even for table-top role-playing games.
It's not grinding either, you're just enjoying exploring and interacting with an imaginary world.
You're post is correct except you are missing two key definitions:
1. In MMO's grinding is just another form of gambling, aka, The Skinner Box. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber
2. Definition of a game: Unless you have a winning state then your game is really a toy, at best.. Interestingly enough, conversely a game doesn't need a losing state. A winning state is necessary, a loosing state sufficient.
i.e. MMOs are NOT games, they are toys. There is NO WAY to WIN at a MMO. You don't "win" at WoW or another MMO (although some people would joke that the only way to "win" is when you quit playing, but I digress. :-) )
Also, people want closure in movies, books, and games. That is not say an open-ended sandbox ala Minecraft, WoW, aren't fun. They are, but once you remove any sense of closure they have stopped becoming games and have become toys where you play. They are more about the journey then the destination. THAT is the key difference between a game and a toy.
I cordially disagree. Minecraft's gameplay (i.e. the rules that dictate how something is played) is subtle, but very present. And it's definitely a game, not just a toy, though it's hard to tell from the outside (I would know, I was a doubter).
The problem with many pure sandbox games is that they are simply too open-ended. Left with so many possibilities, many players face a paradox of choice and oftentimes cease playing the game before they accomplish anything much. Effectively, there is no "game" to it. It's just a toy, as you said. Kinda like Legos with no instructions. For some people, that's all they want, but there is no gameplay provided in that since there are no rules dictating how you put things together or for what purpose.
In contrast, Minecraft provides some initial gameplay to get people started, then gives them a structured and intelligently designed path to help them discover their own "emergent" gameplay. By adding hostile monsters to the game, Notch established a basic purpose for the player's actions: build things to survive. Establishing that as the basic rule acting on the player forces the player down the path towards creating a structure to keep them safe from the monsters. Stuck in that place, players naturally expand it and embellish it, which forces them to locate additional resources. To do that, they need to explore either outwards or downwards, either of which will involve challenging the thing that has kept them in their safehouse. And as they explore and find additional resources, they find new things that they don't understand, which forces them to experiment. In all of that, the player's actions have a foundational purpose of survival, but as the game goes on, additional forms of gameplay begin to emerge as players discover and create new rules to guide their actions and purposes for doing what they are doing, be it to create the best city, live for as long as possible, or find the most awesome pieces of terrain.
The genius in Minecraft is that it naturally leads the player down that path without the player realizing they are being led. To the player, it feels like a set of open-ended decisions in an open-ended world, rather than that they are being led down a path. In reality, their choices were guided by some excellent game design and a subtle application of simple rules to drive the player's actions in a certain direction. From the outside, it just looks like a box of Legos without instructions (and early versions of it were indeed just that), but it's much more than that. The game actually has exactly as much gameplay as it needs, which is to say that it has enough to prevent the paradox of choice but little enough that it allows for a lot of creativity.
As a quick aside, I don't believe that game difficulty correlates to good gameplay. There are plenty of examples of easy games with good gameplay (Minecraft, Okami, Super Mario Galaxy) just as there are plenty of hard games with great gameplay (Demon's Souls, Ikaruga, Super Mario Bros.). Instead, I believe that gameplay should be tweaked to make a game as difficulty or as easy as is warranted by the game itself. Were Okami frustratingly hard, the Celestial Brush would have become a chore to use, rather than being the charming and exciting gameplay mechanic that it is. Were Demon's Souls too easy, the oppressive environment and epic bosses would have felt trite and unsubstantial, leaving the game hollow.
I do believe there has been a recent trend to make games easier than is warranted, but that's another topic entirely.