You know, just because you can spew 3 insults per paragraph, build straw-men, name drop ("Peter Molyneaux cried when I told him what his career meant to me last E3"), and use vague appeals to authority ("For example, my mother is a clinical psychologist who's trying to track down the genetic cause of schizoaffective disorder."), you still don't impress me. I've seen worse fanboy fits.
If you think you have a point, actually argue that point, don't just throw insults around and pretend your point is right just because you say so.
"I find this sort of malarky offensive. Yes, a lot of companies ship crap." And two paragraphs later, "Oh, shut up. Almost nobody's being sloppy."
You know, it's very very sad when you can't even keep the same idea for more than a paragraph.
"Peter Molyneaux cried when I told him what his career meant to me last E3"
Ah, yes, classic fanboy. I don't doubt that it filled your life with "meaning" to have the opportunity to sit, beg and wag your tail at the master. I swear some people should have been born a dog, the way they need to sit and beg at a master.
Not that there was any doubt, given the whole "Holy Defender Of The Throne" tone of the rest of the message. Your kind disgusts me, fanboy.
"If you're that good a game designer, design a goddamned game, or shut up."
Ah, more of the standard canned fanboy drivel. Your kind isn't very imaginative, unfortunately, so I've read that before.
Here's an idea, fanboy: it's not _my_ job to do their design. I'm the consumer. I pay for that stuff. It's _their_ job to catter to me, not my job to catter to them.
Repeat after me, fanboy: I don't have to be a watch maker, to say a brand of watch doesn't keep the time right. I don't have to be a portable console maker to say that the PSP has dead pixels. I don't have to be a cordless optical mouse vendor to say that Brand X has too high latency for games. Etc.
The fanboy idiocy that goes basically "design a better one or join in acting all grateful" is just that: fanboy idiocy. Never was the way any other industry works.
"If you think two quickly corrected crashing bugs on obscure platforms aren't reasonable for a project of that size, my dear boy, you don't know software development."
First and foremost: it's a straw man anyway, since we were talking design problem, not crashing bugs. So address the point being discussed, please, or spare us all the fanboy fits.
Second, while you think you're oh-so-great just for being some celebrity's fanboy, I actually work as a programmer. So, heh, go preach how smart you are about software development to someone who cares. Me, I'll keep on calling a bug just that: a bug.
"Er. It was, dumbass. The game has worked that way for almost 20 years. Frankly, that's how it should work - there are examples of that sort of thing happening in real life, and it happens in game very rarely."
No, "dumbass", it never happened in reality, and never will. 200 men with spears winning against 20,000 men with tanks, assault rifles, machineguns, howitzers and helicopters, never won, never will.
If you actually know at least _one_ historical example, _then_ I'll be willing to take your point. Otherwise spare me the childish "It's so because I SAID SO, GODDAMMIT" tantrums. Here's a lollypop, go back to your mommy.
"Do you have any idea how ridiculously and non-productively difficult setting up an interface for large-scale user replacement would be? (No, of course you don't.)"
My dear fanboy, I've actually _coded_ more interfaces than you can even count to without taking your shoes off.
And, no, it is actually very easy to allow even interface changes if you have a modular design. It's even been done before. Most modern FPS engines for example have an API and allow you to write DLLs for almost anything you can think of.
Have a look at some UT or HL mods and you might be surprised. Some
Well, call me a bitter old cynic, but I've pretty much given up on any hope that PC games will start being anything but unfinished stuff shoved out the door. So, well, I'll hope they're at least moddable.
Plus, even if someone actually stopped being sloppy, it can happen that the "flaws" in a game are actually WAD (Working As Designed.) I.e., it's not buggy or untested, someone actually wanted it to be like that. In which case it's easier to just mod the game than argue against their grand vision.
E.g., what if 200 man Phalanxes winning against 20,000 man Tank divisions, on plains, in Civ 3 was actually _intended_? Firaxis sure didn't want to fix it even in the expansions. It was much easier to just roll my own exponential mod than to wait for Firaxis to fix it.
E.g., Black And White had an interface that was broken by design. PM's grand vision was an interface without any icons or buttons taking up screen space, and the players would have to just memorize gestures. EA's internal tested showed that even their professional testers had trouble using that, so for Joe Gamer it just couldn't possibly work. So they demanded icons on the screen. However, PM's ego being the size of a continent, he wasn't going to just give in: he put the icons on the screen, but didn't let you click on them.
Think about it. So they _are_ painted on the screen. They _do_ take screen space. But since they're not clickable, Lionhead and a few fanboys could spew idiocies like "if they're not clickable, they're not icons, and if the game has no icons, they don't take up any screen space." Ergo, an interface image painted on the screen doesn't take any screen space. Utterly idiotic.
I wish they had just let me mod the interface instead of uselessly arguing why that doesn't work. For that matter, I wish they had let me mod the creature's AI. Or at least try to fix the other couple of dozen major flaws. (E.g., you know resource usage in a game is hopelessly screwed up when even the "nooo, the game is perfect" fanboys tell you to use the turbo-click infinite wood/grain exploit to have any chance.)
But the game had a lot of potential. It could have been saved by a good modder or two, and there were a helluva lot more of us willing to try.
Etc. There are a lot more games I can think of, but let's stop here with the examples.
Basically while moddability _is_ very nice to have in a game that's good and reasonably balanced to start with, like R:TW that you mention, I'm _especially_ looking forward to it in games that aren't.
Additionally, there's something which they invariably seem to miss every time that stupid idea comes around _again_. (There's hardly been more than a couple of months without someone coming up with the exact same "I know, let's make the player kick/swing a sword/run on a treadmill/whatever to make it really immersive" idea.)
That something is: physical effort involved.
Do you fancy playing that kind of game for 12 hours on a weekend? It doesn't matter if you're athletic or non-athletic: even among pro athletes noone trains in 12 hour sessions.
And it can go even more downhill in other kinds of games. E.g., two of my COH characters fight with a 4 ft long by 4 inch wide bastard sword, and one with a big-ass morning star (spiky ball onna stick, not flail) that would make Sauron proud. I don't think it would be a hit if you made people swing that kind of a beast around IRL to play the game.
"But if you know kung-fu so well as the handsome player on the clip in question then why would you want to play someone who does?"
Another good question. As a substitute for training at the gym? I don't think so. A martial artist would IMHO more likely train the moves and katas he/she needs for the next belt, rather than whatever hit works the best in the game.
Dunno, that whole planning session got me pretty much on Leroy's side.
From my experience with MMOs, if you can summarize your strategy into a simple sentence like "ok, you pull around this corner, you tank, and you heal the tank" or even "ok, everyone take the boss out first", your chances are probably good.
But moment you actually need to spend 5 minutes describing a plan that requires perfect coordination and timing, it's time to rethink it all or take another mission, because you _are_ going to get wiped out. If not in this fight, in the next one.
Basically you _need_ to have a safety margin for when things don't run as planned. A player loses connection. Or lag hits. Or the whole group is hit by the dark side of the pseudo-random number generator and pulls a string of misses. (Chances are with WoW's population, there's someone somewhere right now missing 20 attacks in a row on an equal level opponent.) Etc. There are _lots_ of things which aren't as deterministic as they may seem.
So IMHO if you can summarize it in a simple one-phrase plan and feel confident about it, chances are you have that safety margin. You have room to improvise and fill in the blank when the feces hits the ventilation device. If you need to come up with a two page plan requiring perfect timing and coordination, you don't have that margin. You can't improvise anything without screwing the plan, anyway.
_Any_ battle that actually requires that kinda planning is a symptom of being in the wrong group. Either you're doomed anyway, or you're grouped with people completely lacking clue. (By that occasionally including the complete control freak team leader who needs to have everyone executing some precise script, even when it's not needed.)
So, well, personally I actually was on Leroy's side there. The whole thing looked like something _I_ might have done in a situation like that.
So I too grew with a bunch of violence on TV. My parents had some... unorthodox views regarding censoring TV. For example, I was allowed to see wild west movies (lynchings, shootings and all), on account that there the good guys always win.
I saw my first horror movie on VHS at the age of 10. Two of them, in fact. My brother was 6 at the time. Okay, so he was scared into shock. I was a little more robust, presumably on account of being older.
Even earlier, we occasionally had the honour of seing grandma chop the head off a chicken to make food, on the summer vacation in the country. Oooer. Now that was a crying festival for me and my brother.
(Which brings me to another question: the why the heck is it OK for the kids to watch Tom And Jerry and other violent cartoons? One thing I still remember is that kids are very good at anthropomorphising. See the crying festival for the chicken, or when grandma's cat got poisoned. So why isn't anyone worried then about violent cartoons?)
Etc.
So more than two decades later, I haven't killed anyone, haven't assaulted anyone, and generally I haven't even had a jaywalking ticket yet. I'm a firm believer in, well, what can be best described as a "lawful good" approach to the world. Though even that most likely due to mom preaching that, than because of those western movies.
Ditto about my brother.
An older family friend, now that was a bit more nuts. Taught his 2 year old son to play Wolfenstein 3D. (Not "Return To".) I doubt that the poor kid even understood what was happening there, but did as good a job of spraying lead everywhere with the machinegun as the stereotypical gangster-movie mobster.
As far as I know, the kid hasn't killed or assaulted anyone yet.
So, well, ok, I'm willing to take your point that maybe I'm blinded to whatever grievous damage all that did to me, my brother or the other kid mentioned. Well, then you tell me, please: _what_ symptoms should I be looking for?
Because so far it seems to me like while, yes, a game or a movie (Tom And Jerry cartoons included) _can_ give someone ideas and questions, those ideas (or any other ideas) don't exist in a vaccuum. They're judged and fit into the general framework that that person has. As a kid, the framework that their parents and environment gave them.
You're not an automaton which simply executes anything without thinking. If you played a game about jumping off bridges (e.g., City Of Heroes heroes never die when falling), you won't just jump off a bridge to get down faster. Even if the idea does briefly come to mind (I'll admit, it did come to _my_ mind), it'll be judged against that framework you have, filed under "you'd break your legs or die if you tried that", and dismissed.
So for someone to get influenced by, say, GTA (a game which explicitly tells you that that stuff is illegal) to the point where they get their parent's gun and shoot a car driver, that framework must be deffective or largely missing to start with. If a game explicitly tells someone "this stuff is illegal. It's a crime. It can get the cops all over you" and they still do it, you have to wonder if the whole meaning of "illegal" and "crime" was missing from their mental model.
Yes, that's just what gets me wondering. As you've noticed, a certain segment of the game industry seems to live _only_ to one-up last year's ultra-violent game. Games are made and advertised with the _only_ claim being "we're even more gruesome."
It's not even that new an issue. Soldier Of Fortune, for whatever other merits it may (or may not) have had, was AFAIK only marketted as basically "hey, look, we have more blood and gore textures than before."
Which, on one hand, doesn't scare me or anything, since like any FPS gamer I've been largely desensitized by now. Meh, another game with lots of gore. Nothing new here.
But on the other hand it gets me sorta wondering where it will stop. As I've said in the above paragraph, "like any FPS gamer I've been largely desensitized by now." That's the whole issue: you've seen it once, you got used to it, next year they have to claim even more blood and gore to make the news.
We're already years past the point where kills are surrealistic. You have people being split into "gibs" by sniper rifles. (No, even emptying an AK-47 clip into someone wouldn't gib them IRL.) You have more blood sprayed around than a human physically has. Etc.
Well, what next? Up to what point _can_ this farce continue? To the point where they paint the whole map red with the blood of the first kill? Or?
"The gaming industry deliberately invokes this kind of "negative" publicity to move product. [...] I guarantee that sales will be higher for the game as a result of CNN's free publicity."
Actually, I'll be even more cynical and say that it's probably a deliberate PR coup.
PR companies are a wonderful thing. They can generate a lot of hype all over the news, by masking it all as a news instead of as an ad. We've become desensitized when it comes to ads. "News" on the other hand, give you far more bang, for far less buck. (Think of how much it would have cost to get this much screen time for ads instead.)
So what I'd be willing to bet is that the whole scandal and frenzy was deliberately started. I wouldn't be surprised if some helpful PR company gave the media and everyone not only a tip of the game, but also conveniently the photos of dead cops and everything. Just to be sure it does explode with a big flash and a loud bang.
"Sims Online seems like an extreme example... how many female FPS players are there (or RTS players, etc..)... examine the different genres for female gaming enthusiasts..."
In Quake 2 they had over 30% females among the people who registered the game. I.e., about 1 in 3 players of that FPS. I think that's not quite the answer you already had in mind, right?
"except in [...] games which cater more toward females... the client base for most games will be predominanetly men".
In other words, if you make games for males, yes, mostly males will buy it. Perfectly logical, yes.
Thing is, that's the whole problem.
Consider this: back in the days of Pong, they had a clean 50-50 between male and female players. Also see blips on the radar like what I've mentioned above about Quake 2 registrations. So gaming being for men only, isn't as set in stone as you seem to assume. It certainly didn't start true.
The effect you _are_ correctly noticing is caused by the fact the industry ever since has mostly been churning games made by men for men. And indeed, most of them didn't sell that great to women. Quite unsurprisingly, I would say.
"Saying "Oh yeah, take SIMS ONLINE for example" is like saying "Oh yeah, take BARBIE for example" when it comes to female playership."
And that's the whole problem. The publishers by now would _love_ to get some money from women too. But by now they don't even know how to start. _How_ would you make a Barbie game that actually appeals to young girls, for example? (Matel would love to know the answer to that.)
So far most games for girls have been abhominations that should have been taken out, shot, and burried at crossroads with a stake through the chest. That bad.
In all fairness, most software for kids is crap, because it's designed by people who've forgotten what it's like to be a kid, and bought by parets rather than kids. But games for girls (Barbie stuff included) are trully the bottom of the proverbial barrel, because most are designed by some 40 year old _male_ that has no clue what girls like. So they start with vague ideas like "uh, girls like dolls, don't they?" and it goes downhill from there.
The problem is that the industry has concentrated for more than two decades on on making games by immature boys for immature boys. They have no clue what to make for women. Even when accidentally end up with something that sold well to women (e.g., Quake 2), the guys are clueless _why_ it sold well and _what_ did those women see in it. And then just to prove that they didn't understand anything, or didn't even try, they make a sequel which loses all that female market share. (E.g., Quake 3.)
So at this point the "except in cases like Sims Online or other games which cater more toward females" part is clear to them too. That's exactly what they'd like to make more of. They just don't know how.
_The_ worst games ever produced are the ones where the designers obviously aren't in the target demographic. That's been a major problem in the industry for more than a decade: a bunch of lemmings decide to clone Game X because it sold well last year, but manage to miss every single element that made Game X a success. Why? Because they don't actually have a clue _what_ those players liked.
E.g., speaking of The Sims, I know of at least 3 games which tried to include elements of it, just because it sold, yet managed to miss the whole point. They made something non-fun and "streamlined out" every single gameplay element that made it fun.
(And not even only games. If I look at the frameworks, libraries, tools, etc, I use at work, _the_ crappiest ones were the ones where marketting was at the wheel, instead of those who actually use it. _The_ way to make an utter crap web application framework, for example, is to have it designed by some marketroid who's never actually coded a web app. It'll have all the buzzwords that woo an idiot PHB, but none of the qualities that would actually make it useful to those who actually have to use it.)
Just taking a wild guess at someone else playing the game doesn't even start to cut it.
E.g., my father still refers to Chrono Cross as "that game where you whack rats with a frying pan". And more than once he's expressed opinions like that maybe I'm into RPGs because I somehow like whacking rats with a frying pan. (*sigh* Yes, dad, Lena had a most unfortunate choice of weapons in that game, but FFS it's not even a main character.) Or that it's those games where they just spew lots of pointless text and never get to the fighting part.
Want to bet what kind of an RPG he'd design, if you asked him to design one? Well, I can tell you that no actual RPG player would want to touch it with a 10 foot pole.
E.g., your own "My observations point to them enjoying the fact that the game is braindead easy, obvious, and akin to playing house as a little kid." Being a die-hard The Sims player myself... let's put it as diplomatically as I can: good grief, I hope noone asks you to design a The Sims clone. Ever. Because again, no offense, you illustrate just the point I was making: you're missing all the _real_ points.
That's the problem: the whole game industry itself is an example of what happens when you ask the _guys_ to design a game for _women_. They have no clue where to even start.
We're talking an industry which started with a clean 50-50 gender distribution among gamers, and ended up with "chicks don't play games." Why? Because the males can't even start to guess what the females like to play, and viceversa. Not being in the target demographic tends to have that effect.
The publishers did give males almost 3 decades to try to guess what makes a good games for women. They failed. Utterly. They actually _lost_ that market. Now someone's finally got a brain and figured out "ok, wth, let's give women a chance too. Maybe they know better what they'd like to play."
A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, Bartle divided MUD players into: socializers, explorers, achievers and "killers". The twist being that "killers" doesn't mean PvP players, but people who actively seek to harrass, humiliate, annoy, and even hopefully drive people out of the game altother. (Others call that type of player a "griefer".)
Basically long after "online gaming" ceased to mean only MUDs, we're basically stuck with a signifficant portion of any online game's potential player base being "killers". People who _will_ go to ridiculous extremes to get you pissed off.
E.g., people have been known to blow real money on a new Ultima Online account just to scam some newbie. Reading some of the UO griefer sites was downright surrealistic. People were actually _planning_ to eventually get an account banned (i.e., also the money it cost) just to play it as disruptively as possible and cause as much grief as possible until they get banned.
So personally I wonder if there aren't better way to deterr griefers than even banning hardware ids. Like, if it's possible to make a game that isn't attractive to griefers in the first place. My theory, supported by my limited observation in all these years of online play, is that games can (and _do_) differ vastly in how attractive they are to each of the categories.
E.g., at one end of the spectrum, you have Counter-Strike. Now the game does have its merits, and there are some very good players playing it, yes. On the other hand, it also attracted arguably the highest percentage of annoying players. Why? Beats me. There is _something_ about its gameplay that suits the "killer" type very very well. (Maybe the fact that you can actually prevent another player from playing the game for a while?)
E.g., on the other hand of the spectrum you have games like the first incarnation of PSO, where it was pretty much impossible to harm a player in _any_ way. You can't kill them, you can't lead a train of monsters to them, you can't block their retreat, you can't do anything to them. So killers would come, whine a bit, spam the lobbies with pornographic "smilies" (e.g., I've seen some running around with a very graphic and animated representation of male masturbation), but pretty soon get bored and leave. So the average PSO player was a very nice and friendly person.
Other games, like the non-PK facet of UO, were also remarkably "killer"-free. Partially via not having much thing to do to other players, partially via Origin's policing the realm: the idiots who got creative and "tested the limits of the games and found new bugs" to harm newbies, found themselves banned to the PK facet.
And various other games fall at various points in between.
So basically that's what I'd like to see more game designers devoting thought to: how to make a game that isn't attractive to idiots to start with. Probably won't get past a publisher, though.
The idea is good, I will admit, but from my experience with online players and MMOs (which have exactly that kind of levels)... well, let's put it like this: Some people will then see that level number as representing their e-penis in inches. So you start getting:
1. people cheating to get that number up at all cost.
Partially also because:
2. people with a huge ego, treating you like you're an insect if your number is 1 point less than theirs.
Don't get me wrong, I'm willing to give some respect to a more experienced player and listen to what (coherent) advice they can give. But some don't just act like a more experienced player, and often aren't a better player, they just expect everyone to bow and grovel because his number is bigger. Sorry, nope.
Especially when, again, they're not a better player to start with. Some people in MMOs reach mid- to high-levels without even learning the bare basics of the game. How? Like this:
3. people being power-levelled by someone else, with no effort or skill required on their part, just to drive their level higher.
For example in City Of Heroes (the game I currently play), an older player can get a lot of experience to a low level player, while the low level player is sitting and watching at the mission door. Get someone to sidekick the newbie, leave them at the door, proceed to clear a huge mission by yourself while the newbie does nothing whatsoever. They just sit in a safe place and watch the "You gained x experience and y influence" lines rolling by in their log.
Now to COH's and Cryptic's defense, it must be said that they did do a good job of making this more work than it sounds. The xp and money that the newbie gets is scalled down to their natural level, so they won't get xp as fast as you'd expect from that exercise. So it'll take many hours to bring someone to any reasonable level like that.
But, still, regardless of how long it takes, said newbie did nothing whatsoever to actually learn the game. You end up grouping with people in the 30's levels (and that's a lot in COH) who don't yet even have a clue what to do and don't have the bare minimum survival or team-work skills.
Either way, to cut a long rant shorter, I'm willing to bet that the same would start happening in any other games that keep track of levels. Maybe not in the same form, but don't underestimate the inventiveness of people when it comes to undeserved ways to increase their e-penis.
But, eh, even that required Bob to be logged on while being power-levelled. An even more sad case are:
4. People who just _bought_ a high level char on ebay, because they too want to brag about being high level. And there are a _lot_ of them in any MMO.
And I'm willing to bet the same would happen here. When you see "Player: Bob, Level: 10", it can just as well mean that the real Bob played until level 10, got bored, moved to another game. And the person you're really teaming with now, is really Jake, who just bought Bob's character.
You may see that Bob had 7 victories in Team Death Match, but you're playing with Jake. And Jake can't even aim, isn't yet sure how this team thing works, and hasn't yet digested fine points like "if they're dressed in your team's colours, don't shoot them."
"Finally, there is nothing remotely "silly" about a web browser. You may only use it to make snide comments on Slashdot, but web browsers support hundreds of billions of dollars in business, which, I would argue, is far from silly. The security and availability of such a program is quite important, really."
Here's an idea: paper supports even more business (faxes, letters, manuals, printed invoices, etc). Yet you don't see fanboys waging flame-wars along the lines of "Paper Brand X is teh antichrist! It must be destroyed! Everyone not using Paper Brand Y is an idiot!!!"
Here's another idea: keyboards support at least 10 times as much business. For every man-hour involving a web browser, there are some 10 man-hours somewhere involving a local program. Yet you don't see Logitech-fanboys-vs-Cherry-fanboys flamewars, do you?
That's what the browser is too: just a tool. A means, not an end. It's just a window into the web, no more.
Not even _that_ crucial a tool. Don't think for a moment that those corporations actually making those hundreds of billions, are suffering some eternal torment because IE fails to render some obscure tag juuust right. Trust me, they just make those intranet/extranet sites for what works, and that's that. (If anything, it's supporting obscure third party drivers that's rising their costs. Coding for the dominant browser is _not_ the problem.)
Or to put it otherwise: I haven't seen many CEOs saying they're going bankrupt because of IE. It's invariably some nerd that doesn't make a dime with it that's raising hell.
Either way, it's just a tool, no more. Just like a shovel, a pencil sharpener or whatever. No more.
And seeing whole flamewars waged about it... well, I won't call it "silly". I'll call it outright sad.
Point well taken, but the post I was replying to said that Sony was somehow synonimous with quality a couple of years back. Now I know that "a couple" is a very fuzzy interval, but I figure about 5 years back is a reasonable starting point to safely cover most definitions of "a couple of years".
And yes, they're a prime example of the company's current state of crappiness, as you very aptly put it. That's what the last couple of years (well, ok, more like over a decade) of Sony has been all about: lots of marketting, inflated prices, and crap quality.
Now if we're talking the 70's and 80's, ok, maybe Sony was better back then. But that's IMHO a lot more than "a couple of years ago".
... that a lot of us actually enjoy Will Wright's games.
Since you've linked to Penny Arcade, I trust you've read their blog entry for that day, right? Because there Tycho says that only Gabe feels that way about Will Wright's games, whereas he (Tycho) actually likes them.
Any way you want to slice it, The Sims is _the_ best selling PC game _ever_, and that's not even counting the 7 expansion packs. So Will must do _something_ right.
Actually, let me even comment on what he's doing right: most criticisms of The Sims seem to revolve around "but it's not even a game! What are the winning conditions? Losing conditions? Challenges?" Well, that's exactly it: The Sims isn't really a "game", or not a traditional one, it's more like a virtual toy box to use as you see fit.
That's exactly what Will Wright did right: realized that a helluva lot of us actually don't even _want_ a traditional game. Judging by the sales numbers for The Sims, I'd say it's safe to say that the market for basically non-games exceeds the one for traditional hard-core competitive challenging kick-me-in-the-pants games by a wide margin. By a _very_ wide margin.
And there's a lot of design that went into that. If you've read his interviews, you'll notice that the guy actually studies what people do with their computers, and how they entertain themselves _without_ a BFG and lots of gore.
E.g., the house building/decorating thing in The Sims comes from noticing that a lot of home-design programs are used basically as entertainment by the buyers. So he set up to make one which is easier to use by people who aren't 3D CAD experts.
E.g., all his interviews and speeches about dynamics, interactions, etc, may seem boring and off-topic. But they're actually reflected in the games he produces. All his "games" (well, non-games) are all about giving you a lot of such possibilities and a whole matrix of dependencies and interactions.
So in my book he fully deserves God status. Or at least demigod. Because while the rest of the bunch was busy just cloning whatever sold well last year, and usually cloning it badly, he was actually studying what _else_ can be done. That deserves lots of bonus points in my book.
And to come back to that PA strip, you know what? If that guy made a game about pee, I'd buy it. Seriously. Chances are it would be something that's innovative and great fun to play.
"A couple of years back the name Sony on any product meant that it was higher priced than its competition but the extra quality of the Sony product usually made up for the extra cost."
Let me tell you what Sony meant a couple of years back.
For example if you bought a TFT. Everyone else quoted TR+TF as latency (time to rise + time to fall). Sony was the only company left which quoted only either TR or TF. So your l33t 25ms TFT with a Sony logo would typically have _higher_ latency than a 40ms from Iiyama, LG or Samsung. (Which also cost less than half the price.)
For example if you bought a Sony "MP3" player: it was the only "MP3 player" which couldn't in fact play MP3. Sony actually stuck to their own crappy codec, which is arguably the worst at a given bit rate, and capped to some 64 kbit/sec anyway. So you'd rip your MP3 at, say, 192 kbit/s, and get a little audio loss. Then you'd upload it to your l33t Sony MP3 player, and it would get uncompressed and recompressed to Sony's codec, at a whole 64kbit/sec. (Actually lower on some models.) And get a LOT of audio quality loss extra.
And so on. Sony never was that big a name for quality, it was just a name for big marketting and high prices. All you got for that extra money was the name "Sony" and quite often _less_ quality than an equivalent product. (E.g., again, see how Sony's "25ms" wasn't quite the same "25ms" anyone else used, or that the ISO standard defined.)
Don't get me wrong, I still did like their Playstation and PS2, because of the massive developper support they had. But if we're talking Sony's own part in it, again, at launch they were shamelessly mis-represented as being far more capable than they realy were. Typical Sony marketting running amok, really.
Well, I didn't say it was easy, but it takes a certain mentality in the first place to come up with an idea like "I know, let's give them a quarter of the XP if they play on easy." It's not exactly rocket science that the bugger will have 3 levels less at the end of the game, and his "Turn Undead" won't actually hit any undead any more.
Basically what I'm saying is "stop 'balancing' the easy mode against the hard mode. Stop even trying to assign penalties to one." If the description for easy mode starts with "enemies do half damage to you", resist the temptation to finish it with "but you only get 1/4 of the xp for them."
Those modes aren't supposed to be a balanced choice to start with. They're not called something like "convex vs concave difficulty curve", or anything that would suggest a balanced trade-off when choosing one over the other. It's called "easy vs hard". I expect one of them to stay consistently well below the difficulty of the other, not take a sharp rise at the end and in fact surpass the other one.
It's IMHO not even a matter of testing. Test whichever mode you feel comfortable with (e.g., hard if by now you're god-like at it.) Then make the easy mode just easier across the board. Cut the damage output of enemies to half, give the player health regen, whatever. And _only_ that. Don't even try to balance it by some negative aspect to that choice.
The moment you try to "balance" that choice, it becomes a problem of mentality.
Now complexity, yes, that can add richness to a game. But you can have a complex game without dumping people into a situation where they don't know where they are, what they're doing, what _can_ they do, etc. Because that's what "steep learning curve" really means, and that's why some of us are against it.
As an extreme example, consider this: there was one map, among the many many user-made maps for Doom 1, that made you start in what seemed like a square room with no exits, facing a huge demon. No weapons other than your starting pistol and knife, no health packs, nothing. You had about 10 seconds to discover that there is a secret door, and where it is, before the demon made mincemeat out of you.
That's a (very extreme example of a) steep learning curve. And not only newbies gave up there, I know at least one review where the reviewer didn't find that there was more to that map either. And we're talking a die-hard gamer there.
Even if you remove the demon from there, it's still something that is a nightmare for a new user. If you don't already know about secret doors, you're seemingly trapped in a room with no exits. Try to think like a real newbie there. You're in a situation where you can't even _start_ to guess what's expected of you, or what kind of solutions to even think about.
That's the problem with steep learning curves. It's effectively just more tedium: it's minutes, maybe even hours, when instead of enjoying the game you're just clueless, overwhelmed and often just stuck.
As I've said, though, that doesn't mean "please dumb down games". You can have a very complex game and still keep it manageable, by lengthening that curve. Spreading it over more time. Give the user the information in smaller portions, and let him assimilate the old stuff before requiring him to learn new stuff.
E.g., since you mention WoW, you'll notice that it first let's you discover combat on non-aggressive targets, before letting you into a world where you can draw additional aggro by just being there. E.g., it first gives you quests that don't require more than 100 yard trips, before letting you loose on the big map.
Again in WoW, you may notice how instead of dumping all info on you at once, it delays a lot of it until the first time you actually need it. E.g., it won't tell you how to reply a tell from another player until the first time you receive a tell.
That all means just that: flattening the learning curve by spreading it over a longer time.
Other design elements can reduce both the learning curve and the tedium by, for example, letting you learn to recognize and use whole categories instead of invidual objects.
To give you an example from another game this time, in City Of Heroes they have missions requiring you to interact with a variety of objects: defuse bombs, search crates for contraband, get incriminating information off a computer, open body bags to identify the body, etc.
And here's the good design element there: _all_ of these goal objects have the same slow-blinking glow (hence being called "glowies" by some players) and the same soft sound. Nothing else glows like that or emits that sound. So after a couple of missions, you don't even need to think about it any more: if it glows like that or sounds like that, you know you have to click on it. So instead of having to learn the intricacies of each object type separately, or discover a new one, you can mentally file them all under "glowies" and move on.
This not only cuts down on the learning curve, it cuts down on tedium too. If, for example in the name of realism, you were actually required to open every single box in a warehouse, that would be pure tedium. Like this, they can give you 4 to 6 such glowing crates and pretend you searched everything.
E.g., also from COH, one thing I _love_ about that game is the abbundance of instanced missions. Starting at level 1, about 3 out of 4 missions you can get are in instanced dungeons. The advantage? Everything you need
While he indeed picked on the difficulty, as opposed to the learning curve that was the real topic, I think he does have a point, though. IMHO:
1. The difficulty can make a lot of people get frustrated and abandon a game even if the learning curve was ok.
2. More importantly and more on topic, difficulty levels can in fact ease the learning curve. A game, let's say an RPG, that a master can beat on Hard by min-maxing their char and knowing the exact best combination of spells, potions and attacks, becomes manageable on "Very Easy" even if you didn't learn all that. Lower the difficulty enough and a newbie can just run around poking things with a wooden sword, and not worry (or even bother knowing) that he was really supposed to use some complicated combination of spells, skills and special equipment there.
The problem is that most of the industry can't seem to get their head out of their ass^H^H^H mentality that "waah, but a challenge is all we can offer the players! without a challenge a game is nothing!"
Well, no, they need to get over it. Something can be entertaining without requiring more skill than operating a remote control. See the hordes of people who find it perfectly entertaining to watch football on TV or a movie on DVD without needing to learn arcane button combinations or overcome heroic challenges.
_The_ most sold PC game ever was The Sims. Funny thing is: it's a game with _zero_ challenge. You have to actively try hard to "lose" the game. Otherwise you could pretty much do what you wanted, take it at your own pace (e.g., if you wanted to give a party instead of making Bob Newbie learn for a promotion, go ahead and do just that) and the negative consequences would range between non-existent and mild/short-term.
Think of other games that sold well. Diablo? It was really one of the least challenging games of that era, and you could win pretty much no matter how you built your character. Max Payne? If you died often enough, the game basically automatically put you in God mode.
On consoles, you know what sells remarkably well? "Cheat" programs like GameShark, Xploder or such. A helluva lot of people are willing to even fork over cash to be spared from a challenge they don't want.
But, no, most game designers are still locked in a mentality that "nooo, it must be challenging and difficult!" So even when they do offer a difficulty setting, they just have to over-balance it to discourage people from using it.
For example half the RPGs actually get it backwards: it's actually _more_ difficult to finish the game on the "very easy" setting. Because they also cut your XP in half, so by the end of the game you're 2-3 levels lower than the enemies, your status effect spells (e.g., "turn undead") don't stick, your warrior can't actually hit the enemies (3 points of THAC0 can make a helluva lot of difference), etc.
Congrats, they've just kicked someone in the nuts when that someone basically chose "I'm a newbie, I don't want a challenge." Is that stupid, or what?
And again, this affects the learning curve too. Because that kind of game starts easier, but becomes harder than normal by the end, the learning curve actually becomes more abrupt in that mode. Someone who played on "very easy" will have to do _much_ more advanced tricks to be able to survive by the end, and will have to learn them very very fast.
They're only getting easier for those of us who grew up on old-school die-hard kick-me-in-the-pants games with insane difficulty levels. We already know what to do there, and have already seen worse. But here's the scoop:
1. You're then talking about someone with 20+ years of experience, not about a new player. It's like saying "but the Unix CLI is very easy to someone who's worked as a Unix admin for 20+ years." Well, yes, very true, but that's not the experience someone brand new will see.
Humans are still humans. The species hasn't seen any evolution in 20 years. There's barely time for a new generation in there, so no time for natural selection or anything. And being a l33t gamer wasn't a natural selection factor to start with.
So basically what was difficult to a new player back then, will still be difficult to a new player today.
2. Perhaps more importantly, back then a game only had to sell a few thousand copies to be a success. Selling 10,000 copies was a _huge_ success.
Basically at that point it was ok to catter to only an elite (or elitist) minority, even at the expense of driving everyone else away. It was OK if a game was not appealing to 99% of the potential market, because we didn't need their money. We'd just look down upon them and laugh at them.
So for a while games were made by l33t boyz for l33t boyz, and alienating whole market segments was ok. Those who weren't l33t boyz should (and did) just stay away from games.
(E.g., here's a thought about alienating market segments: in the days of Pong the gender distribution of gamers was an almost clean 50-50. Then at some point the l33t boyz making the games decided that "chicks don't play games" and it was ok to make whole games where the _whole_ purpose is to see pixelated boobs and put women in demeaning roles. After all, it's only the 16 year old boys who play games, right? No point in worrying about women, since they don't play games anyway, right? Well, it wasn't true, but after enough games like that, the balance did start slanting in that direction. The game industry cheerfully gave away half the market. But again, that was ok, since you never needed more than a niche for any game.)
The problem is that it's a model that no longer works. With production costs in the millions, and sometimes tens of millions, you have to sell a lot more copies. And the number of masochists didn't increase.
That's why there's all the talk about casual gamers lately. The industry can no longer afford to make games only for the l33test boyz. They have to also sell those games to those who _don't_ find an insane learning curve fun, nor an insane difficulty level.
So what's the point of this long rant? The point is that the average skill or patience of the average gamer didn't "evolve", it actually went downwards. Some 20 years ago "gamer" meant one of the die-hard masochist minority. Now it also includes moms playing "You don't know jack" or Backgammon online, couch potatos playing "Deer Hunt", etc. The industry can no longer afford to catter only to the 1% far end of the l33t skillz Gauss curve. Far from counting on an evolving market, it actually has to lower the bar enough to get those too.
The problem isn't the length of the game, but about interface complexity and learning curve. If you put it in terms of time, it's the length of the time needed to learn even the basic controls or interface, i.e., time _not_ actually spent enjoying the game.
I figure I might count as a die-hard gamer, having played computer games since 1983 and currently totalling some 60+ hours of gaming a week. (Ok, so I don't have a life.) But even for me a lot of games are basically non-fun because they expect me to devote a few days just learning what my options are, wtf I can do and how.
I can think of games that were long and yet had a gentle learning curve, and which basically you could play right away. E.g., Diablo is the classic example.
E.g., I once nagged mom into trying Tropico. The game isn't short and isn't simplistic. For that time it was IMHO _the_ most complex city-building simulation. And yet lemme tell you after the tutorial and a few hits from me, mom was playing like a pro and enjoying it. Sure, didn't yet know _all_ the options and subtleties, but knew enough to build a city and learn more gently along the way.
E.g., I decided to one-up that experiment by introducing grandma to Sierra's "Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom". We're talking an 80 year old woman who is completely computer-illiterate and doesn't even own a computer. Ok, so it took a bit more tutoring, and every once in a while she'd hold her fingers wrong and use the left mouse button instead of right or viceversa. (Ok, Apple fans can feel vindicated.) Well, it was the first time she ever held a mouse, so can't blame her. But still, she did get the general idea, was doing an adequate job of building farms and roads, and most importantly was having fun with it.
That's basically the point: a game can be complex and it can be long (mom got about 2 months of playing out of Tropico) without having a vertical learning curve. It just takes good design, you know.
The trick Sierra's city building games did, for example, was to flatten the learning curve along the whole campaign. You start with just needing to build a well and houses in the first mission, and every subsequent mission gives you just a little more complexity, and a little bit more to learn. You can start to enjoy your game long before you know half the possibilities.
"This after news that Microsoft will be entering the "security" market.
Coincidence? I think not. They were just waiting for the bar to be lowered enough so their crappy product would be marginally crappy compared to the current offerings."
Yes, I know you're just trolling, but: actually, the bar was always low enough.
The current news is that the security holes in such a product, totalling maybe tens of thousands of lines of code (and probably a lot less if you discount the GUI), is getting higher than the number Windows has for _millions_ of lines or code. I.e., per thousand lines of code, these "security" panacea are _orders_ _of_ _magnitude_ worse quality code than Windows is.
Consider this: it didn't get there overnight.
IMHO we're talking at least half a decade of self-proclaimed security companies actually writing _more_ insecure code than MS, if anyone compared them on a per-thousand-lines-of-code basis.
Which (at least this time) doesn't even mean I'm praising MS or anything. I'm just saying that the clueless monkeys at these "security" companies are actually orders of magnitude worse than the worst you can think about MS. If you're one of those who think of MS as the security antichrist and incarnation of the devil, then, well, that would make these guys a darker shade of black than the devil. That sad.
So MS didn't really need to wait for the bar to get lower. The bar was lower than MS's standards for years already.
The points are well taken, but IMHO still don't quite apply to more than a minority of players.
1. a. Actually, I don't know if all the next gen consoles will have a hard drive. In the current generation only the X-Box had one by default, and even the X-Box 360 looks like it's gonna have models without one. Both the PS2 and GameCube shipped without a HDD and took no firmware updates ever. (You could technically buy a HDD for the PS2, but noone actually did, and the firmware certainly wasn't HDD-based.)
b. I'm a console gamer myself, so I can understand the point you're trying to make. Still, the problem is that there is zero incentive to leave the console running when you're done with the game. Unlike a PC, (A) a console boots much faster, (B) it's booted at the start of each game anyway, and (C) the load time is basically the time to load the game from DVD. So basically unlike the PC you have no real incentive to leave it running over night.
What I'm getting at is: would I get a game that was $1 cheaper for having something like that in it? Hell, yeah. Would I actually leave the console running idle for hours with it? Hell, no.
2. There you IMHO miss the points that
(A) only a _minority_ of gamers actually give a damn about playing online. A very vocal minority, and pretending they're the only ones that matter, yes, but a minority nevertheless Even CS at its peak or World Of Warcraft accounted for only a small fraction of the world's gaming.
Or let's put it like this: even the most optimistic forecasts predict the online gaming market to reach some 28 million players in a few years. PC _and_ consoles combined. Contrast that with almost 100 million consoles sold right now. (Not in a few years.) Or contrast the sales of whatever online PC game you wish, with a purely off-line game like The Sims whose sales numbers say it's _the_ number one game ever.
(B) Out of the online players, only a fraction actually give a damn about clans. Take any online game you wish, and for every die-hard clansman I'll show you at least 10 players who don't actually give half as much a damn about the clan than you think.
(Even if they might be registered as some clan, it doesn't mean they'll actually give a damn about it. Me, I was technically a member of our company's CS clan, but in practice I played UT instead on random servers.)
Basically if your target market is those who (A) are die-hard online players, _and_ out of those only those who (B) are die-hard dedicated clansmen, you're looking at a small slice of the market. A very loud-mouthed and self-centered slice, yes, but nevertheless not even coming close to describing the majority of gamers. PC, console or whatever.
3. What I'm saying actually is that IMHO, unless it's a zero-effort thing (see point 1 again), the problem becomes more like "so what does it do for _me_?" If you expect "Joe 6-pack" to bother inserting a SETI DVD in, well, let's put it like this: he'd be interested if it calculates _his_ taxes or loan or whatever, but IMHO not something which is for the greater good of humanity. Most people are willing to put only so much personal effort into any greater good. Charities, global warming, SETI and FAH included.
Of course, again, this is revolving around whether it is a zero-effort thing or not. If it doesn't actually require swapping a disk or anything, they might of course be more inclined to run it.
1. SETI on a PC is something which requires practically zero effort. You download it, start it, that's it. (And then, if you're not a geek, go nag one as to why your computer is so slow now.)
It's easy to get people to do stuff that requires no effort. If just clicking here once makes my score go up ever after, heck, sure. Why not?
On a console you're asking him to mod it or stick a SETI@Home CD in it after each game. You may find people a lot less inclined to do that.
2. Score in a game is something people take pride in not because of some fascination with numbers, but because it's something to compare _personal_ achievement with someone else.
People aren't fascinated with score as such, as some people try to mis-represent it (e.g., when whining about "numberchasers"), but because it can be used to say "_I_ am x% better than you at this game." I'm level 50, you're level 37. I'm exactly 13 levels "better" than you are.
SETI scores and benchmark scores are often used to the same effect: to reflect a personal achievement. "My computer can process x% more packets than yours." And make no mistake, there's a whole willy-waving mine-is-bigger-than-yours market of compulsive upgraders and overclockers. People have bought a cascade cooling (basically refrigerator engine, more than one stage) rig just to brag about having a bigger 3DMark score. But again, the underlying reason is not a fascination with numbers as such, but a way to quantify "I'm l33ter than thou."
Now throw it in a world where everyone has the same CPU, can process exactly as many packets per hour as any other PS3, and the only score difference is how much time you left it running. What's to brag about that? Where's the _personal_ achievement?
I think you may find people a lot less interested in that.
3. Snide remarks about Joe 6-pack and such are good and fine (if nothing else, to illustrate the whole "I'm better than you" thing I was talking about.) But it's missing the real point by a wide margin.
The point being that it's something ultimately useless and pointless. And see point 1: you can get people to run pointless stuff a lot easier if it doesn't actually involve any effort on their part. You may find the exact same people a lot less willing to do that pointless stuff, regardless of whether it's SETI or computing lingerie for Lara, when it does require active intervention to run.
Is it possible to make it require no intervention. Well, yes, if it comes built-in from the manufacturer. Whether that'll ever happen, that's a different question. But still, it has nothing to do with _what_ it's calculating there,
"And what about the XBOX,Playstation 2, Gamecube Linux communities? There are probably thousands of people who have modded their game consoles to run linux. If they take the time and energy to mod their game consoles for Linux, who says there won't be people to mod them for Distributed Computing?"
The reality check being: "... out of almost 100,000,000 game consoles sold."
We're talking... what? A whole 0.01% of the market? (That is, generously assuming that "probably thousands" to be a whole 10,000 modded consoles for Linux.)
Or, what, a whole 0.1% increase (or so) over the already existing PC user base?
That's the kind of reality check that this kind of projects misses by a mile. The percentage of users who will take a console apart just to brag about running Linux on it is so insignifficant, you can't really use that market segment for much.
And certainly they can't extrapolate it to mean "hey, we can get X gazillion bazillion packets processed if we ran it on _all_ consoles ever sold." Because that minority is more like lost in the decimals than being _all_ the console users.
Let's face it, any console's load time is (A) faster than even the 30 seconds of XP, and (B) dominated by the time to read the game from DVD anyway.
So basically there is _no_ reason to leave a console on all the time. You'd save, what? A whole two seconds of Sony logo? Actually, not even that, since it'll "reboot" and display that logo anyway when you put the game DVD in.
So WTH is the point of leaving a console on?
And how would they use all those "unused resources"?
Require the user to put a SETI DVD in when they're done with the current game? That saves time... how? Unlike just leaving a PC on, here we're talking _extra_ time and effort to start that distributed computing crap on your console.
Require the user to mod their console? Yeah, some of us are sooo just waiting to invest effort, pay money, void warranty, and potentially ruin compatibility with future games, just to run some pointless useless distributed computing project. Not.
Basically, while I normally do define myself as a "terminal nerd", it's stuff like this that makes me ashamed of that label. Some people have exactly _zero_ grasp on reality. It's stuff that assumes that everyone will surely invest time, effort or money in some stupidity that has _no_ use other than "hur hur hur, we're soo l33t and k3wl, because look what arcane stuff we can do". It so lacks any kind of reality check, such as "well, and what's in it for the user, then", it's not even funny.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, just because you can spew 3 insults per paragraph, build straw-men, name drop ("Peter Molyneaux cried when I told him what his career meant to me last E3"), and use vague appeals to authority ("For example, my mother is a clinical psychologist who's trying to track down the genetic cause of schizoaffective disorder."), you still don't impress me. I've seen worse fanboy fits.
If you think you have a point, actually argue that point, don't just throw insults around and pretend your point is right just because you say so.
"I find this sort of malarky offensive. Yes, a lot of companies ship crap." And two paragraphs later, "Oh, shut up. Almost nobody's being sloppy."
You know, it's very very sad when you can't even keep the same idea for more than a paragraph.
"Peter Molyneaux cried when I told him what his career meant to me last E3"
Ah, yes, classic fanboy. I don't doubt that it filled your life with "meaning" to have the opportunity to sit, beg and wag your tail at the master. I swear some people should have been born a dog, the way they need to sit and beg at a master.
Not that there was any doubt, given the whole "Holy Defender Of The Throne" tone of the rest of the message. Your kind disgusts me, fanboy.
"If you're that good a game designer, design a goddamned game, or shut up."
Ah, more of the standard canned fanboy drivel. Your kind isn't very imaginative, unfortunately, so I've read that before.
Here's an idea, fanboy: it's not _my_ job to do their design. I'm the consumer. I pay for that stuff. It's _their_ job to catter to me, not my job to catter to them.
Repeat after me, fanboy: I don't have to be a watch maker, to say a brand of watch doesn't keep the time right. I don't have to be a portable console maker to say that the PSP has dead pixels. I don't have to be a cordless optical mouse vendor to say that Brand X has too high latency for games. Etc.
The fanboy idiocy that goes basically "design a better one or join in acting all grateful" is just that: fanboy idiocy. Never was the way any other industry works.
"If you think two quickly corrected crashing bugs on obscure platforms aren't reasonable for a project of that size, my dear boy, you don't know software development."
First and foremost: it's a straw man anyway, since we were talking design problem, not crashing bugs. So address the point being discussed, please, or spare us all the fanboy fits.
Second, while you think you're oh-so-great just for being some celebrity's fanboy, I actually work as a programmer. So, heh, go preach how smart you are about software development to someone who cares. Me, I'll keep on calling a bug just that: a bug.
"Er. It was, dumbass. The game has worked that way for almost 20 years. Frankly, that's how it should work - there are examples of that sort of thing happening in real life, and it happens in game very rarely."
No, "dumbass", it never happened in reality, and never will. 200 men with spears winning against 20,000 men with tanks, assault rifles, machineguns, howitzers and helicopters, never won, never will.
If you actually know at least _one_ historical example, _then_ I'll be willing to take your point. Otherwise spare me the childish "It's so because I SAID SO, GODDAMMIT" tantrums. Here's a lollypop, go back to your mommy.
"Do you have any idea how ridiculously and non-productively difficult setting up an interface for large-scale user replacement would be? (No, of course you don't.)"
My dear fanboy, I've actually _coded_ more interfaces than you can even count to without taking your shoes off.
And, no, it is actually very easy to allow even interface changes if you have a modular design. It's even been done before. Most modern FPS engines for example have an API and allow you to write DLLs for almost anything you can think of.
Have a look at some UT or HL mods and you might be surprised. Some
Well, call me a bitter old cynic, but I've pretty much given up on any hope that PC games will start being anything but unfinished stuff shoved out the door. So, well, I'll hope they're at least moddable.
Plus, even if someone actually stopped being sloppy, it can happen that the "flaws" in a game are actually WAD (Working As Designed.) I.e., it's not buggy or untested, someone actually wanted it to be like that. In which case it's easier to just mod the game than argue against their grand vision.
E.g., what if 200 man Phalanxes winning against 20,000 man Tank divisions, on plains, in Civ 3 was actually _intended_? Firaxis sure didn't want to fix it even in the expansions. It was much easier to just roll my own exponential mod than to wait for Firaxis to fix it.
E.g., Black And White had an interface that was broken by design. PM's grand vision was an interface without any icons or buttons taking up screen space, and the players would have to just memorize gestures. EA's internal tested showed that even their professional testers had trouble using that, so for Joe Gamer it just couldn't possibly work. So they demanded icons on the screen. However, PM's ego being the size of a continent, he wasn't going to just give in: he put the icons on the screen, but didn't let you click on them.
Think about it. So they _are_ painted on the screen. They _do_ take screen space. But since they're not clickable, Lionhead and a few fanboys could spew idiocies like "if they're not clickable, they're not icons, and if the game has no icons, they don't take up any screen space." Ergo, an interface image painted on the screen doesn't take any screen space. Utterly idiotic.
I wish they had just let me mod the interface instead of uselessly arguing why that doesn't work. For that matter, I wish they had let me mod the creature's AI. Or at least try to fix the other couple of dozen major flaws. (E.g., you know resource usage in a game is hopelessly screwed up when even the "nooo, the game is perfect" fanboys tell you to use the turbo-click infinite wood/grain exploit to have any chance.)
But the game had a lot of potential. It could have been saved by a good modder or two, and there were a helluva lot more of us willing to try.
Etc. There are a lot more games I can think of, but let's stop here with the examples.
Basically while moddability _is_ very nice to have in a game that's good and reasonably balanced to start with, like R:TW that you mention, I'm _especially_ looking forward to it in games that aren't.
Additionally, there's something which they invariably seem to miss every time that stupid idea comes around _again_. (There's hardly been more than a couple of months without someone coming up with the exact same "I know, let's make the player kick/swing a sword/run on a treadmill/whatever to make it really immersive" idea.)
That something is: physical effort involved.
Do you fancy playing that kind of game for 12 hours on a weekend? It doesn't matter if you're athletic or non-athletic: even among pro athletes noone trains in 12 hour sessions.
And it can go even more downhill in other kinds of games. E.g., two of my COH characters fight with a 4 ft long by 4 inch wide bastard sword, and one with a big-ass morning star (spiky ball onna stick, not flail) that would make Sauron proud. I don't think it would be a hit if you made people swing that kind of a beast around IRL to play the game.
"But if you know kung-fu so well as the handsome player on the clip in question then why would you want to play someone who does?"
Another good question. As a substitute for training at the gym? I don't think so. A martial artist would IMHO more likely train the moves and katas he/she needs for the next belt, rather than whatever hit works the best in the game.
Dunno, that whole planning session got me pretty much on Leroy's side.
From my experience with MMOs, if you can summarize your strategy into a simple sentence like "ok, you pull around this corner, you tank, and you heal the tank" or even "ok, everyone take the boss out first", your chances are probably good.
But moment you actually need to spend 5 minutes describing a plan that requires perfect coordination and timing, it's time to rethink it all or take another mission, because you _are_ going to get wiped out. If not in this fight, in the next one.
Basically you _need_ to have a safety margin for when things don't run as planned. A player loses connection. Or lag hits. Or the whole group is hit by the dark side of the pseudo-random number generator and pulls a string of misses. (Chances are with WoW's population, there's someone somewhere right now missing 20 attacks in a row on an equal level opponent.) Etc. There are _lots_ of things which aren't as deterministic as they may seem.
So IMHO if you can summarize it in a simple one-phrase plan and feel confident about it, chances are you have that safety margin. You have room to improvise and fill in the blank when the feces hits the ventilation device. If you need to come up with a two page plan requiring perfect timing and coordination, you don't have that margin. You can't improvise anything without screwing the plan, anyway.
_Any_ battle that actually requires that kinda planning is a symptom of being in the wrong group. Either you're doomed anyway, or you're grouped with people completely lacking clue. (By that occasionally including the complete control freak team leader who needs to have everyone executing some precise script, even when it's not needed.)
So, well, personally I actually was on Leroy's side there. The whole thing looked like something _I_ might have done in a situation like that.
So I too grew with a bunch of violence on TV. My parents had some... unorthodox views regarding censoring TV. For example, I was allowed to see wild west movies (lynchings, shootings and all), on account that there the good guys always win.
I saw my first horror movie on VHS at the age of 10. Two of them, in fact. My brother was 6 at the time. Okay, so he was scared into shock. I was a little more robust, presumably on account of being older.
Even earlier, we occasionally had the honour of seing grandma chop the head off a chicken to make food, on the summer vacation in the country. Oooer. Now that was a crying festival for me and my brother.
(Which brings me to another question: the why the heck is it OK for the kids to watch Tom And Jerry and other violent cartoons? One thing I still remember is that kids are very good at anthropomorphising. See the crying festival for the chicken, or when grandma's cat got poisoned. So why isn't anyone worried then about violent cartoons?)
Etc.
So more than two decades later, I haven't killed anyone, haven't assaulted anyone, and generally I haven't even had a jaywalking ticket yet. I'm a firm believer in, well, what can be best described as a "lawful good" approach to the world. Though even that most likely due to mom preaching that, than because of those western movies.
Ditto about my brother.
An older family friend, now that was a bit more nuts. Taught his 2 year old son to play Wolfenstein 3D. (Not "Return To".) I doubt that the poor kid even understood what was happening there, but did as good a job of spraying lead everywhere with the machinegun as the stereotypical gangster-movie mobster.
As far as I know, the kid hasn't killed or assaulted anyone yet.
So, well, ok, I'm willing to take your point that maybe I'm blinded to whatever grievous damage all that did to me, my brother or the other kid mentioned. Well, then you tell me, please: _what_ symptoms should I be looking for?
Because so far it seems to me like while, yes, a game or a movie (Tom And Jerry cartoons included) _can_ give someone ideas and questions, those ideas (or any other ideas) don't exist in a vaccuum. They're judged and fit into the general framework that that person has. As a kid, the framework that their parents and environment gave them.
You're not an automaton which simply executes anything without thinking. If you played a game about jumping off bridges (e.g., City Of Heroes heroes never die when falling), you won't just jump off a bridge to get down faster. Even if the idea does briefly come to mind (I'll admit, it did come to _my_ mind), it'll be judged against that framework you have, filed under "you'd break your legs or die if you tried that", and dismissed.
So for someone to get influenced by, say, GTA (a game which explicitly tells you that that stuff is illegal) to the point where they get their parent's gun and shoot a car driver, that framework must be deffective or largely missing to start with. If a game explicitly tells someone "this stuff is illegal. It's a crime. It can get the cops all over you" and they still do it, you have to wonder if the whole meaning of "illegal" and "crime" was missing from their mental model.
Yes, that's just what gets me wondering. As you've noticed, a certain segment of the game industry seems to live _only_ to one-up last year's ultra-violent game. Games are made and advertised with the _only_ claim being "we're even more gruesome."
It's not even that new an issue. Soldier Of Fortune, for whatever other merits it may (or may not) have had, was AFAIK only marketted as basically "hey, look, we have more blood and gore textures than before."
Which, on one hand, doesn't scare me or anything, since like any FPS gamer I've been largely desensitized by now. Meh, another game with lots of gore. Nothing new here.
But on the other hand it gets me sorta wondering where it will stop. As I've said in the above paragraph, "like any FPS gamer I've been largely desensitized by now." That's the whole issue: you've seen it once, you got used to it, next year they have to claim even more blood and gore to make the news.
We're already years past the point where kills are surrealistic. You have people being split into "gibs" by sniper rifles. (No, even emptying an AK-47 clip into someone wouldn't gib them IRL.) You have more blood sprayed around than a human physically has. Etc.
Well, what next? Up to what point _can_ this farce continue? To the point where they paint the whole map red with the blood of the first kill? Or?
"The gaming industry deliberately invokes this kind of "negative" publicity to move product. [...] I guarantee that sales will be higher for the game as a result of CNN's free publicity."
Actually, I'll be even more cynical and say that it's probably a deliberate PR coup.
PR companies are a wonderful thing. They can generate a lot of hype all over the news, by masking it all as a news instead of as an ad. We've become desensitized when it comes to ads. "News" on the other hand, give you far more bang, for far less buck. (Think of how much it would have cost to get this much screen time for ads instead.)
So what I'd be willing to bet is that the whole scandal and frenzy was deliberately started. I wouldn't be surprised if some helpful PR company gave the media and everyone not only a tip of the game, but also conveniently the photos of dead cops and everything. Just to be sure it does explode with a big flash and a loud bang.
"Sims Online seems like an extreme example... how many female FPS players are there (or RTS players, etc..) ... examine the different genres for female gaming enthusiasts..."
In Quake 2 they had over 30% females among the people who registered the game. I.e., about 1 in 3 players of that FPS. I think that's not quite the answer you already had in mind, right?
"except in [...] games which cater more toward females... the client base for most games will be predominanetly men".
In other words, if you make games for males, yes, mostly males will buy it. Perfectly logical, yes.
Thing is, that's the whole problem.
Consider this: back in the days of Pong, they had a clean 50-50 between male and female players. Also see blips on the radar like what I've mentioned above about Quake 2 registrations. So gaming being for men only, isn't as set in stone as you seem to assume. It certainly didn't start true.
The effect you _are_ correctly noticing is caused by the fact the industry ever since has mostly been churning games made by men for men. And indeed, most of them didn't sell that great to women. Quite unsurprisingly, I would say.
"Saying "Oh yeah, take SIMS ONLINE for example" is like saying "Oh yeah, take BARBIE for example" when it comes to female playership."
And that's the whole problem. The publishers by now would _love_ to get some money from women too. But by now they don't even know how to start. _How_ would you make a Barbie game that actually appeals to young girls, for example? (Matel would love to know the answer to that.)
So far most games for girls have been abhominations that should have been taken out, shot, and burried at crossroads with a stake through the chest. That bad.
In all fairness, most software for kids is crap, because it's designed by people who've forgotten what it's like to be a kid, and bought by parets rather than kids. But games for girls (Barbie stuff included) are trully the bottom of the proverbial barrel, because most are designed by some 40 year old _male_ that has no clue what girls like. So they start with vague ideas like "uh, girls like dolls, don't they?" and it goes downhill from there.
The problem is that the industry has concentrated for more than two decades on on making games by immature boys for immature boys. They have no clue what to make for women. Even when accidentally end up with something that sold well to women (e.g., Quake 2), the guys are clueless _why_ it sold well and _what_ did those women see in it. And then just to prove that they didn't understand anything, or didn't even try, they make a sequel which loses all that female market share. (E.g., Quake 3.)
So at this point the "except in cases like Sims Online or other games which cater more toward females" part is clear to them too. That's exactly what they'd like to make more of. They just don't know how.
_The_ worst games ever produced are the ones where the designers obviously aren't in the target demographic. That's been a major problem in the industry for more than a decade: a bunch of lemmings decide to clone Game X because it sold well last year, but manage to miss every single element that made Game X a success. Why? Because they don't actually have a clue _what_ those players liked.
E.g., speaking of The Sims, I know of at least 3 games which tried to include elements of it, just because it sold, yet managed to miss the whole point. They made something non-fun and "streamlined out" every single gameplay element that made it fun.
(And not even only games. If I look at the frameworks, libraries, tools, etc, I use at work, _the_ crappiest ones were the ones where marketting was at the wheel, instead of those who actually use it. _The_ way to make an utter crap web application framework, for example, is to have it designed by some marketroid who's never actually coded a web app. It'll have all the buzzwords that woo an idiot PHB, but none of the qualities that would actually make it useful to those who actually have to use it.)
Just taking a wild guess at someone else playing the game doesn't even start to cut it.
E.g., my father still refers to Chrono Cross as "that game where you whack rats with a frying pan". And more than once he's expressed opinions like that maybe I'm into RPGs because I somehow like whacking rats with a frying pan. (*sigh* Yes, dad, Lena had a most unfortunate choice of weapons in that game, but FFS it's not even a main character.) Or that it's those games where they just spew lots of pointless text and never get to the fighting part.
Want to bet what kind of an RPG he'd design, if you asked him to design one? Well, I can tell you that no actual RPG player would want to touch it with a 10 foot pole.
E.g., your own "My observations point to them enjoying the fact that the game is braindead easy, obvious, and akin to playing house as a little kid." Being a die-hard The Sims player myself... let's put it as diplomatically as I can: good grief, I hope noone asks you to design a The Sims clone. Ever. Because again, no offense, you illustrate just the point I was making: you're missing all the _real_ points.
That's the problem: the whole game industry itself is an example of what happens when you ask the _guys_ to design a game for _women_. They have no clue where to even start.
We're talking an industry which started with a clean 50-50 gender distribution among gamers, and ended up with "chicks don't play games." Why? Because the males can't even start to guess what the females like to play, and viceversa. Not being in the target demographic tends to have that effect.
The publishers did give males almost 3 decades to try to guess what makes a good games for women. They failed. Utterly. They actually _lost_ that market. Now someone's finally got a brain and figured out "ok, wth, let's give women a chance too. Maybe they know better what they'd like to play."
That's all.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, Bartle divided MUD players into: socializers, explorers, achievers and "killers". The twist being that "killers" doesn't mean PvP players, but people who actively seek to harrass, humiliate, annoy, and even hopefully drive people out of the game altother. (Others call that type of player a "griefer".)
Basically long after "online gaming" ceased to mean only MUDs, we're basically stuck with a signifficant portion of any online game's potential player base being "killers". People who _will_ go to ridiculous extremes to get you pissed off.
E.g., people have been known to blow real money on a new Ultima Online account just to scam some newbie. Reading some of the UO griefer sites was downright surrealistic. People were actually _planning_ to eventually get an account banned (i.e., also the money it cost) just to play it as disruptively as possible and cause as much grief as possible until they get banned.
So personally I wonder if there aren't better way to deterr griefers than even banning hardware ids. Like, if it's possible to make a game that isn't attractive to griefers in the first place. My theory, supported by my limited observation in all these years of online play, is that games can (and _do_) differ vastly in how attractive they are to each of the categories.
E.g., at one end of the spectrum, you have Counter-Strike. Now the game does have its merits, and there are some very good players playing it, yes. On the other hand, it also attracted arguably the highest percentage of annoying players. Why? Beats me. There is _something_ about its gameplay that suits the "killer" type very very well. (Maybe the fact that you can actually prevent another player from playing the game for a while?)
E.g., on the other hand of the spectrum you have games like the first incarnation of PSO, where it was pretty much impossible to harm a player in _any_ way. You can't kill them, you can't lead a train of monsters to them, you can't block their retreat, you can't do anything to them. So killers would come, whine a bit, spam the lobbies with pornographic "smilies" (e.g., I've seen some running around with a very graphic and animated representation of male masturbation), but pretty soon get bored and leave. So the average PSO player was a very nice and friendly person.
Other games, like the non-PK facet of UO, were also remarkably "killer"-free. Partially via not having much thing to do to other players, partially via Origin's policing the realm: the idiots who got creative and "tested the limits of the games and found new bugs" to harm newbies, found themselves banned to the PK facet.
And various other games fall at various points in between.
So basically that's what I'd like to see more game designers devoting thought to: how to make a game that isn't attractive to idiots to start with. Probably won't get past a publisher, though.
The idea is good, I will admit, but from my experience with online players and MMOs (which have exactly that kind of levels)... well, let's put it like this: Some people will then see that level number as representing their e-penis in inches. So you start getting:
1. people cheating to get that number up at all cost.
Partially also because:
2. people with a huge ego, treating you like you're an insect if your number is 1 point less than theirs.
Don't get me wrong, I'm willing to give some respect to a more experienced player and listen to what (coherent) advice they can give. But some don't just act like a more experienced player, and often aren't a better player, they just expect everyone to bow and grovel because his number is bigger. Sorry, nope.
Especially when, again, they're not a better player to start with. Some people in MMOs reach mid- to high-levels without even learning the bare basics of the game. How? Like this:
3. people being power-levelled by someone else, with no effort or skill required on their part, just to drive their level higher.
For example in City Of Heroes (the game I currently play), an older player can get a lot of experience to a low level player, while the low level player is sitting and watching at the mission door. Get someone to sidekick the newbie, leave them at the door, proceed to clear a huge mission by yourself while the newbie does nothing whatsoever. They just sit in a safe place and watch the "You gained x experience and y influence" lines rolling by in their log.
Now to COH's and Cryptic's defense, it must be said that they did do a good job of making this more work than it sounds. The xp and money that the newbie gets is scalled down to their natural level, so they won't get xp as fast as you'd expect from that exercise. So it'll take many hours to bring someone to any reasonable level like that.
But, still, regardless of how long it takes, said newbie did nothing whatsoever to actually learn the game. You end up grouping with people in the 30's levels (and that's a lot in COH) who don't yet even have a clue what to do and don't have the bare minimum survival or team-work skills.
Either way, to cut a long rant shorter, I'm willing to bet that the same would start happening in any other games that keep track of levels. Maybe not in the same form, but don't underestimate the inventiveness of people when it comes to undeserved ways to increase their e-penis.
But, eh, even that required Bob to be logged on while being power-levelled. An even more sad case are:
4. People who just _bought_ a high level char on ebay, because they too want to brag about being high level. And there are a _lot_ of them in any MMO.
And I'm willing to bet the same would happen here. When you see "Player: Bob, Level: 10", it can just as well mean that the real Bob played until level 10, got bored, moved to another game. And the person you're really teaming with now, is really Jake, who just bought Bob's character.
You may see that Bob had 7 victories in Team Death Match, but you're playing with Jake. And Jake can't even aim, isn't yet sure how this team thing works, and hasn't yet digested fine points like "if they're dressed in your team's colours, don't shoot them."
"Finally, there is nothing remotely "silly" about a web browser. You may only use it to make snide comments on Slashdot, but web browsers support hundreds of billions of dollars in business, which, I would argue, is far from silly. The security and availability of such a program is quite important, really."
Here's an idea: paper supports even more business (faxes, letters, manuals, printed invoices, etc). Yet you don't see fanboys waging flame-wars along the lines of "Paper Brand X is teh antichrist! It must be destroyed! Everyone not using Paper Brand Y is an idiot!!!"
Here's another idea: keyboards support at least 10 times as much business. For every man-hour involving a web browser, there are some 10 man-hours somewhere involving a local program. Yet you don't see Logitech-fanboys-vs-Cherry-fanboys flamewars, do you?
That's what the browser is too: just a tool. A means, not an end. It's just a window into the web, no more.
Not even _that_ crucial a tool. Don't think for a moment that those corporations actually making those hundreds of billions, are suffering some eternal torment because IE fails to render some obscure tag juuust right. Trust me, they just make those intranet/extranet sites for what works, and that's that. (If anything, it's supporting obscure third party drivers that's rising their costs. Coding for the dominant browser is _not_ the problem.)
Or to put it otherwise: I haven't seen many CEOs saying they're going bankrupt because of IE. It's invariably some nerd that doesn't make a dime with it that's raising hell.
Either way, it's just a tool, no more. Just like a shovel, a pencil sharpener or whatever. No more.
And seeing whole flamewars waged about it... well, I won't call it "silly". I'll call it outright sad.
Point well taken, but the post I was replying to said that Sony was somehow synonimous with quality a couple of years back. Now I know that "a couple" is a very fuzzy interval, but I figure about 5 years back is a reasonable starting point to safely cover most definitions of "a couple of years".
And yes, they're a prime example of the company's current state of crappiness, as you very aptly put it. That's what the last couple of years (well, ok, more like over a decade) of Sony has been all about: lots of marketting, inflated prices, and crap quality.
Now if we're talking the 70's and 80's, ok, maybe Sony was better back then. But that's IMHO a lot more than "a couple of years ago".
... that a lot of us actually enjoy Will Wright's games.
Since you've linked to Penny Arcade, I trust you've read their blog entry for that day, right? Because there Tycho says that only Gabe feels that way about Will Wright's games, whereas he (Tycho) actually likes them.
Any way you want to slice it, The Sims is _the_ best selling PC game _ever_, and that's not even counting the 7 expansion packs. So Will must do _something_ right.
Actually, let me even comment on what he's doing right: most criticisms of The Sims seem to revolve around "but it's not even a game! What are the winning conditions? Losing conditions? Challenges?" Well, that's exactly it: The Sims isn't really a "game", or not a traditional one, it's more like a virtual toy box to use as you see fit.
That's exactly what Will Wright did right: realized that a helluva lot of us actually don't even _want_ a traditional game. Judging by the sales numbers for The Sims, I'd say it's safe to say that the market for basically non-games exceeds the one for traditional hard-core competitive challenging kick-me-in-the-pants games by a wide margin. By a _very_ wide margin.
And there's a lot of design that went into that. If you've read his interviews, you'll notice that the guy actually studies what people do with their computers, and how they entertain themselves _without_ a BFG and lots of gore.
E.g., the house building/decorating thing in The Sims comes from noticing that a lot of home-design programs are used basically as entertainment by the buyers. So he set up to make one which is easier to use by people who aren't 3D CAD experts.
E.g., all his interviews and speeches about dynamics, interactions, etc, may seem boring and off-topic. But they're actually reflected in the games he produces. All his "games" (well, non-games) are all about giving you a lot of such possibilities and a whole matrix of dependencies and interactions.
So in my book he fully deserves God status. Or at least demigod. Because while the rest of the bunch was busy just cloning whatever sold well last year, and usually cloning it badly, he was actually studying what _else_ can be done. That deserves lots of bonus points in my book.
And to come back to that PA strip, you know what? If that guy made a game about pee, I'd buy it. Seriously. Chances are it would be something that's innovative and great fun to play.
"A couple of years back the name Sony on any product meant that it was higher priced than its competition but the extra quality of the Sony product usually made up for the extra cost."
Let me tell you what Sony meant a couple of years back.
For example if you bought a TFT. Everyone else quoted TR+TF as latency (time to rise + time to fall). Sony was the only company left which quoted only either TR or TF. So your l33t 25ms TFT with a Sony logo would typically have _higher_ latency than a 40ms from Iiyama, LG or Samsung. (Which also cost less than half the price.)
For example if you bought a Sony "MP3" player: it was the only "MP3 player" which couldn't in fact play MP3. Sony actually stuck to their own crappy codec, which is arguably the worst at a given bit rate, and capped to some 64 kbit/sec anyway. So you'd rip your MP3 at, say, 192 kbit/s, and get a little audio loss. Then you'd upload it to your l33t Sony MP3 player, and it would get uncompressed and recompressed to Sony's codec, at a whole 64kbit/sec. (Actually lower on some models.) And get a LOT of audio quality loss extra.
And so on. Sony never was that big a name for quality, it was just a name for big marketting and high prices. All you got for that extra money was the name "Sony" and quite often _less_ quality than an equivalent product. (E.g., again, see how Sony's "25ms" wasn't quite the same "25ms" anyone else used, or that the ISO standard defined.)
Don't get me wrong, I still did like their Playstation and PS2, because of the massive developper support they had. But if we're talking Sony's own part in it, again, at launch they were shamelessly mis-represented as being far more capable than they realy were. Typical Sony marketting running amok, really.
Well, I didn't say it was easy, but it takes a certain mentality in the first place to come up with an idea like "I know, let's give them a quarter of the XP if they play on easy." It's not exactly rocket science that the bugger will have 3 levels less at the end of the game, and his "Turn Undead" won't actually hit any undead any more.
Basically what I'm saying is "stop 'balancing' the easy mode against the hard mode. Stop even trying to assign penalties to one." If the description for easy mode starts with "enemies do half damage to you", resist the temptation to finish it with "but you only get 1/4 of the xp for them."
Those modes aren't supposed to be a balanced choice to start with. They're not called something like "convex vs concave difficulty curve", or anything that would suggest a balanced trade-off when choosing one over the other. It's called "easy vs hard". I expect one of them to stay consistently well below the difficulty of the other, not take a sharp rise at the end and in fact surpass the other one.
It's IMHO not even a matter of testing. Test whichever mode you feel comfortable with (e.g., hard if by now you're god-like at it.) Then make the easy mode just easier across the board. Cut the damage output of enemies to half, give the player health regen, whatever. And _only_ that. Don't even try to balance it by some negative aspect to that choice.
The moment you try to "balance" that choice, it becomes a problem of mentality.
I obviously meant "hints" not "hits". Funny what a missing letter can do :P
Now complexity, yes, that can add richness to a game. But you can have a complex game without dumping people into a situation where they don't know where they are, what they're doing, what _can_ they do, etc. Because that's what "steep learning curve" really means, and that's why some of us are against it.
As an extreme example, consider this: there was one map, among the many many user-made maps for Doom 1, that made you start in what seemed like a square room with no exits, facing a huge demon. No weapons other than your starting pistol and knife, no health packs, nothing. You had about 10 seconds to discover that there is a secret door, and where it is, before the demon made mincemeat out of you.
That's a (very extreme example of a) steep learning curve. And not only newbies gave up there, I know at least one review where the reviewer didn't find that there was more to that map either. And we're talking a die-hard gamer there.
Even if you remove the demon from there, it's still something that is a nightmare for a new user. If you don't already know about secret doors, you're seemingly trapped in a room with no exits. Try to think like a real newbie there. You're in a situation where you can't even _start_ to guess what's expected of you, or what kind of solutions to even think about.
That's the problem with steep learning curves. It's effectively just more tedium: it's minutes, maybe even hours, when instead of enjoying the game you're just clueless, overwhelmed and often just stuck.
As I've said, though, that doesn't mean "please dumb down games". You can have a very complex game and still keep it manageable, by lengthening that curve. Spreading it over more time. Give the user the information in smaller portions, and let him assimilate the old stuff before requiring him to learn new stuff.
E.g., since you mention WoW, you'll notice that it first let's you discover combat on non-aggressive targets, before letting you into a world where you can draw additional aggro by just being there. E.g., it first gives you quests that don't require more than 100 yard trips, before letting you loose on the big map.
Again in WoW, you may notice how instead of dumping all info on you at once, it delays a lot of it until the first time you actually need it. E.g., it won't tell you how to reply a tell from another player until the first time you receive a tell.
That all means just that: flattening the learning curve by spreading it over a longer time.
Other design elements can reduce both the learning curve and the tedium by, for example, letting you learn to recognize and use whole categories instead of invidual objects.
To give you an example from another game this time, in City Of Heroes they have missions requiring you to interact with a variety of objects: defuse bombs, search crates for contraband, get incriminating information off a computer, open body bags to identify the body, etc.
And here's the good design element there: _all_ of these goal objects have the same slow-blinking glow (hence being called "glowies" by some players) and the same soft sound. Nothing else glows like that or emits that sound. So after a couple of missions, you don't even need to think about it any more: if it glows like that or sounds like that, you know you have to click on it. So instead of having to learn the intricacies of each object type separately, or discover a new one, you can mentally file them all under "glowies" and move on.
This not only cuts down on the learning curve, it cuts down on tedium too. If, for example in the name of realism, you were actually required to open every single box in a warehouse, that would be pure tedium. Like this, they can give you 4 to 6 such glowing crates and pretend you searched everything.
E.g., also from COH, one thing I _love_ about that game is the abbundance of instanced missions. Starting at level 1, about 3 out of 4 missions you can get are in instanced dungeons. The advantage? Everything you need
While he indeed picked on the difficulty, as opposed to the learning curve that was the real topic, I think he does have a point, though. IMHO:
1. The difficulty can make a lot of people get frustrated and abandon a game even if the learning curve was ok.
2. More importantly and more on topic, difficulty levels can in fact ease the learning curve. A game, let's say an RPG, that a master can beat on Hard by min-maxing their char and knowing the exact best combination of spells, potions and attacks, becomes manageable on "Very Easy" even if you didn't learn all that. Lower the difficulty enough and a newbie can just run around poking things with a wooden sword, and not worry (or even bother knowing) that he was really supposed to use some complicated combination of spells, skills and special equipment there.
The problem is that most of the industry can't seem to get their head out of their ass^H^H^H mentality that "waah, but a challenge is all we can offer the players! without a challenge a game is nothing!"
Well, no, they need to get over it. Something can be entertaining without requiring more skill than operating a remote control. See the hordes of people who find it perfectly entertaining to watch football on TV or a movie on DVD without needing to learn arcane button combinations or overcome heroic challenges.
_The_ most sold PC game ever was The Sims. Funny thing is: it's a game with _zero_ challenge. You have to actively try hard to "lose" the game. Otherwise you could pretty much do what you wanted, take it at your own pace (e.g., if you wanted to give a party instead of making Bob Newbie learn for a promotion, go ahead and do just that) and the negative consequences would range between non-existent and mild/short-term.
Think of other games that sold well. Diablo? It was really one of the least challenging games of that era, and you could win pretty much no matter how you built your character. Max Payne? If you died often enough, the game basically automatically put you in God mode.
On consoles, you know what sells remarkably well? "Cheat" programs like GameShark, Xploder or such. A helluva lot of people are willing to even fork over cash to be spared from a challenge they don't want.
But, no, most game designers are still locked in a mentality that "nooo, it must be challenging and difficult!" So even when they do offer a difficulty setting, they just have to over-balance it to discourage people from using it.
For example half the RPGs actually get it backwards: it's actually _more_ difficult to finish the game on the "very easy" setting. Because they also cut your XP in half, so by the end of the game you're 2-3 levels lower than the enemies, your status effect spells (e.g., "turn undead") don't stick, your warrior can't actually hit the enemies (3 points of THAC0 can make a helluva lot of difference), etc.
Congrats, they've just kicked someone in the nuts when that someone basically chose "I'm a newbie, I don't want a challenge." Is that stupid, or what?
And again, this affects the learning curve too. Because that kind of game starts easier, but becomes harder than normal by the end, the learning curve actually becomes more abrupt in that mode. Someone who played on "very easy" will have to do _much_ more advanced tricks to be able to survive by the end, and will have to learn them very very fast.
They're only getting easier for those of us who grew up on old-school die-hard kick-me-in-the-pants games with insane difficulty levels. We already know what to do there, and have already seen worse. But here's the scoop:
1. You're then talking about someone with 20+ years of experience, not about a new player. It's like saying "but the Unix CLI is very easy to someone who's worked as a Unix admin for 20+ years." Well, yes, very true, but that's not the experience someone brand new will see.
Humans are still humans. The species hasn't seen any evolution in 20 years. There's barely time for a new generation in there, so no time for natural selection or anything. And being a l33t gamer wasn't a natural selection factor to start with.
So basically what was difficult to a new player back then, will still be difficult to a new player today.
2. Perhaps more importantly, back then a game only had to sell a few thousand copies to be a success. Selling 10,000 copies was a _huge_ success.
Basically at that point it was ok to catter to only an elite (or elitist) minority, even at the expense of driving everyone else away. It was OK if a game was not appealing to 99% of the potential market, because we didn't need their money. We'd just look down upon them and laugh at them.
So for a while games were made by l33t boyz for l33t boyz, and alienating whole market segments was ok. Those who weren't l33t boyz should (and did) just stay away from games.
(E.g., here's a thought about alienating market segments: in the days of Pong the gender distribution of gamers was an almost clean 50-50. Then at some point the l33t boyz making the games decided that "chicks don't play games" and it was ok to make whole games where the _whole_ purpose is to see pixelated boobs and put women in demeaning roles. After all, it's only the 16 year old boys who play games, right? No point in worrying about women, since they don't play games anyway, right? Well, it wasn't true, but after enough games like that, the balance did start slanting in that direction. The game industry cheerfully gave away half the market. But again, that was ok, since you never needed more than a niche for any game.)
The problem is that it's a model that no longer works. With production costs in the millions, and sometimes tens of millions, you have to sell a lot more copies. And the number of masochists didn't increase.
That's why there's all the talk about casual gamers lately. The industry can no longer afford to make games only for the l33test boyz. They have to also sell those games to those who _don't_ find an insane learning curve fun, nor an insane difficulty level.
So what's the point of this long rant? The point is that the average skill or patience of the average gamer didn't "evolve", it actually went downwards. Some 20 years ago "gamer" meant one of the die-hard masochist minority. Now it also includes moms playing "You don't know jack" or Backgammon online, couch potatos playing "Deer Hunt", etc. The industry can no longer afford to catter only to the 1% far end of the l33t skillz Gauss curve. Far from counting on an evolving market, it actually has to lower the bar enough to get those too.
The problem isn't the length of the game, but about interface complexity and learning curve. If you put it in terms of time, it's the length of the time needed to learn even the basic controls or interface, i.e., time _not_ actually spent enjoying the game.
I figure I might count as a die-hard gamer, having played computer games since 1983 and currently totalling some 60+ hours of gaming a week. (Ok, so I don't have a life.) But even for me a lot of games are basically non-fun because they expect me to devote a few days just learning what my options are, wtf I can do and how.
I can think of games that were long and yet had a gentle learning curve, and which basically you could play right away. E.g., Diablo is the classic example.
E.g., I once nagged mom into trying Tropico. The game isn't short and isn't simplistic. For that time it was IMHO _the_ most complex city-building simulation. And yet lemme tell you after the tutorial and a few hits from me, mom was playing like a pro and enjoying it. Sure, didn't yet know _all_ the options and subtleties, but knew enough to build a city and learn more gently along the way.
E.g., I decided to one-up that experiment by introducing grandma to Sierra's "Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom". We're talking an 80 year old woman who is completely computer-illiterate and doesn't even own a computer. Ok, so it took a bit more tutoring, and every once in a while she'd hold her fingers wrong and use the left mouse button instead of right or viceversa. (Ok, Apple fans can feel vindicated.) Well, it was the first time she ever held a mouse, so can't blame her. But still, she did get the general idea, was doing an adequate job of building farms and roads, and most importantly was having fun with it.
That's basically the point: a game can be complex and it can be long (mom got about 2 months of playing out of Tropico) without having a vertical learning curve. It just takes good design, you know.
The trick Sierra's city building games did, for example, was to flatten the learning curve along the whole campaign. You start with just needing to build a well and houses in the first mission, and every subsequent mission gives you just a little more complexity, and a little bit more to learn. You can start to enjoy your game long before you know half the possibilities.
"This after news that Microsoft will be entering the "security" market.
Coincidence? I think not. They were just waiting for the bar to be lowered enough so their crappy product would be marginally crappy compared to the current offerings."
Yes, I know you're just trolling, but: actually, the bar was always low enough.
The current news is that the security holes in such a product, totalling maybe tens of thousands of lines of code (and probably a lot less if you discount the GUI), is getting higher than the number Windows has for _millions_ of lines or code. I.e., per thousand lines of code, these "security" panacea are _orders_ _of_ _magnitude_ worse quality code than Windows is.
Consider this: it didn't get there overnight.
IMHO we're talking at least half a decade of self-proclaimed security companies actually writing _more_ insecure code than MS, if anyone compared them on a per-thousand-lines-of-code basis.
Which (at least this time) doesn't even mean I'm praising MS or anything. I'm just saying that the clueless monkeys at these "security" companies are actually orders of magnitude worse than the worst you can think about MS. If you're one of those who think of MS as the security antichrist and incarnation of the devil, then, well, that would make these guys a darker shade of black than the devil. That sad.
So MS didn't really need to wait for the bar to get lower. The bar was lower than MS's standards for years already.
The points are well taken, but IMHO still don't quite apply to more than a minority of players.
1. a. Actually, I don't know if all the next gen consoles will have a hard drive. In the current generation only the X-Box had one by default, and even the X-Box 360 looks like it's gonna have models without one. Both the PS2 and GameCube shipped without a HDD and took no firmware updates ever. (You could technically buy a HDD for the PS2, but noone actually did, and the firmware certainly wasn't HDD-based.)
b. I'm a console gamer myself, so I can understand the point you're trying to make. Still, the problem is that there is zero incentive to leave the console running when you're done with the game. Unlike a PC, (A) a console boots much faster, (B) it's booted at the start of each game anyway, and (C) the load time is basically the time to load the game from DVD. So basically unlike the PC you have no real incentive to leave it running over night.
What I'm getting at is: would I get a game that was $1 cheaper for having something like that in it? Hell, yeah. Would I actually leave the console running idle for hours with it? Hell, no.
2. There you IMHO miss the points that
(A) only a _minority_ of gamers actually give a damn about playing online. A very vocal minority, and pretending they're the only ones that matter, yes, but a minority nevertheless Even CS at its peak or World Of Warcraft accounted for only a small fraction of the world's gaming.
Or let's put it like this: even the most optimistic forecasts predict the online gaming market to reach some 28 million players in a few years. PC _and_ consoles combined. Contrast that with almost 100 million consoles sold right now. (Not in a few years.) Or contrast the sales of whatever online PC game you wish, with a purely off-line game like The Sims whose sales numbers say it's _the_ number one game ever.
(B) Out of the online players, only a fraction actually give a damn about clans. Take any online game you wish, and for every die-hard clansman I'll show you at least 10 players who don't actually give half as much a damn about the clan than you think.
(Even if they might be registered as some clan, it doesn't mean they'll actually give a damn about it. Me, I was technically a member of our company's CS clan, but in practice I played UT instead on random servers.)
Basically if your target market is those who (A) are die-hard online players, _and_ out of those only those who (B) are die-hard dedicated clansmen, you're looking at a small slice of the market. A very loud-mouthed and self-centered slice, yes, but nevertheless not even coming close to describing the majority of gamers. PC, console or whatever.
3. What I'm saying actually is that IMHO, unless it's a zero-effort thing (see point 1 again), the problem becomes more like "so what does it do for _me_?" If you expect "Joe 6-pack" to bother inserting a SETI DVD in, well, let's put it like this: he'd be interested if it calculates _his_ taxes or loan or whatever, but IMHO not something which is for the greater good of humanity. Most people are willing to put only so much personal effort into any greater good. Charities, global warming, SETI and FAH included.
Of course, again, this is revolving around whether it is a zero-effort thing or not. If it doesn't actually require swapping a disk or anything, they might of course be more inclined to run it.
1. SETI on a PC is something which requires practically zero effort. You download it, start it, that's it. (And then, if you're not a geek, go nag one as to why your computer is so slow now.)
It's easy to get people to do stuff that requires no effort. If just clicking here once makes my score go up ever after, heck, sure. Why not?
On a console you're asking him to mod it or stick a SETI@Home CD in it after each game. You may find people a lot less inclined to do that.
2. Score in a game is something people take pride in not because of some fascination with numbers, but because it's something to compare _personal_ achievement with someone else.
People aren't fascinated with score as such, as some people try to mis-represent it (e.g., when whining about "numberchasers"), but because it can be used to say "_I_ am x% better than you at this game." I'm level 50, you're level 37. I'm exactly 13 levels "better" than you are.
SETI scores and benchmark scores are often used to the same effect: to reflect a personal achievement. "My computer can process x% more packets than yours." And make no mistake, there's a whole willy-waving mine-is-bigger-than-yours market of compulsive upgraders and overclockers. People have bought a cascade cooling (basically refrigerator engine, more than one stage) rig just to brag about having a bigger 3DMark score. But again, the underlying reason is not a fascination with numbers as such, but a way to quantify "I'm l33ter than thou."
Now throw it in a world where everyone has the same CPU, can process exactly as many packets per hour as any other PS3, and the only score difference is how much time you left it running. What's to brag about that? Where's the _personal_ achievement?
I think you may find people a lot less interested in that.
3. Snide remarks about Joe 6-pack and such are good and fine (if nothing else, to illustrate the whole "I'm better than you" thing I was talking about.) But it's missing the real point by a wide margin.
The point being that it's something ultimately useless and pointless. And see point 1: you can get people to run pointless stuff a lot easier if it doesn't actually involve any effort on their part. You may find the exact same people a lot less willing to do that pointless stuff, regardless of whether it's SETI or computing lingerie for Lara, when it does require active intervention to run.
Is it possible to make it require no intervention. Well, yes, if it comes built-in from the manufacturer. Whether that'll ever happen, that's a different question. But still, it has nothing to do with _what_ it's calculating there,
"And what about the XBOX,Playstation 2, Gamecube Linux communities? There are probably thousands of people who have modded their game consoles to run linux. If they take the time and energy to mod their game consoles for Linux, who says there won't be people to mod them for Distributed Computing?"
The reality check being: "... out of almost 100,000,000 game consoles sold."
We're talking... what? A whole 0.01% of the market? (That is, generously assuming that "probably thousands" to be a whole 10,000 modded consoles for Linux.)
Or, what, a whole 0.1% increase (or so) over the already existing PC user base?
That's the kind of reality check that this kind of projects misses by a mile. The percentage of users who will take a console apart just to brag about running Linux on it is so insignifficant, you can't really use that market segment for much.
And certainly they can't extrapolate it to mean "hey, we can get X gazillion bazillion packets processed if we ran it on _all_ consoles ever sold." Because that minority is more like lost in the decimals than being _all_ the console users.
Let's face it, any console's load time is (A) faster than even the 30 seconds of XP, and (B) dominated by the time to read the game from DVD anyway.
So basically there is _no_ reason to leave a console on all the time. You'd save, what? A whole two seconds of Sony logo? Actually, not even that, since it'll "reboot" and display that logo anyway when you put the game DVD in.
So WTH is the point of leaving a console on?
And how would they use all those "unused resources"?
Require the user to put a SETI DVD in when they're done with the current game? That saves time... how? Unlike just leaving a PC on, here we're talking _extra_ time and effort to start that distributed computing crap on your console.
Require the user to mod their console? Yeah, some of us are sooo just waiting to invest effort, pay money, void warranty, and potentially ruin compatibility with future games, just to run some pointless useless distributed computing project. Not.
Basically, while I normally do define myself as a "terminal nerd", it's stuff like this that makes me ashamed of that label. Some people have exactly _zero_ grasp on reality. It's stuff that assumes that everyone will surely invest time, effort or money in some stupidity that has _no_ use other than "hur hur hur, we're soo l33t and k3wl, because look what arcane stuff we can do". It so lacks any kind of reality check, such as "well, and what's in it for the user, then", it's not even funny.