Christmas 1968 with The Going Thing

I came across this recently and thought that it was oddly fitting for the type of music featured on Fallout 3’s Galaxy News Radio, especially the track The Christmas Waltz.  When I first heard it, I couldn’t help but conjure up images of walking the wastes in power armor, with radioactive, glowing snowflakes falling all around… (a tip of the hat to my brother Jonathan, who featured the track as part of his “christmas creep” radio episode on KLC radio)

As you could probably have guessed, I’ve been spending more time that I had ever thought possible playing Fallout 3 – despite its flaws, there is just something about it that draws you in – and the combat just gets better the more time you spend with it.  And the game is truly massive – after two near-complete playthoughs of the main plot, with plenty of supplemental wandering, I think I’ve uncovered perhaps half of the total locations in the game.

I’m working on a more complete accounting of my various experiences in the game, as well, and I promise that I’ll get over this Fallout 3 obsession soon – I have plenty more games to write about, such as my experience being a not-so-elite beat agent in Sonic Chronicles, among others…

When I first began playing Fallout 3, I couldn’t help but compare it to a similar game released some time ago: S.T.A.L.K.E.R, Shadow of Chernobyl.  After all, both games take place in an irradiated wasteland, both have strong RPG elements, and both have you running around a mostly open world completing quests and exploring the environment.

However, there are a number of immediately noticeable differences.  Most notably, up front, is that Fallout 3 will display at a full 1280×1024 resolution on my somewhat dated gaming PC, with reasonable textures and 2X antialiasing and filtering, and yet it still manages to render more than one frame every few seconds, even in intense firefights.  This alone is probably reason enough to prefer Fallout 3 over its theme-alike predecessor.  Add in the whole “not dying every few minutes from ridiculously overpowered enemies and random, invisible radiation pockets” thing, and you realize how great it is to be able to relegate the clumsy slag heap that is STALKER to the dustbin of gaming-flop history, and move on to a far worthier experience.  (Admittedly, I have not played the Clear Sky expansion, but it was probably wise of the company to release it before Fallout 3, as I can’t see it getting any reasonable traction next to this behemoth of a game).

I should also probably mention that, in anticipation of this release, I decided to pick up a copy of the original Fallout game from gog.com.  And, I have to say, if you like retro isometric graphics, as well as the feeling that comes from completely failing at a game over and over and over, then this is the game for you.  Honestly, it kind of felt like a game where you walk down the street, and the game throws spitballs at you for the first couple of blocks.  And then, when you decide to turn the corner and venture somewhere new, the game drops an anvil on your head.  In fact, no matter what scenario or setting I use, it always ends up the same – my character, in a desert, being slowly surrounded and hacked to death by radioactive isometric praying mantises.  

Needless to say, after that experience, I was slightly hesitant about picking up Fallout 3.  While it is obviously quite a different game, there was a bit of concern as to whether I could create a character that could survive longer than 5 minutes in the wasteland.  However, this feeling was tempered by anticipation, largely because the game promised to be an amazingly expansive experience, akin to Oblivion, but without the whole swords and sorcery thing (and let it be said that I hate medieval-themed games with a passion, to such an extent that I never actually did play Oblivion, despite all of the rave reviews – in fact, I normally don’t go near an RPG unless there’s some serious firepower involved, and I’m not talking about the type where you chuck fireballs around, either).  Eventually anticipation won out over caution, and I downloaded the game off of Steam about a half-hour after it was publicly released.  When it finished, I booted it up and played through the admittedly different intro sequence, and then sent my character, Zigmund Argon, into the wasteland, concerned that I might soon be staring depressedly at his corpse.

Luckily, this didn’t turn out to be the case.  It is worth mentioning, though, that even on the easiest difficulty setting, there is a very good probability that your character will end up getting fragged, especially early on in the game (hint: Deathclaws are not your friend; run away very, very fast.)  Although, to be fair, while getting bumped off will occur far more frequently than in, say, an RPG like Mass Effect (for one thing, the whole “no automatic health regeneration” factor), it is much easier to survive than in the initial game in the series.  In fact, the very first death my character experienced was one that should not have even happened – basically, I got rather creative while climbing about, and managed to actually fall off the edge of the game world.  Aside from that, though, there were only a couple of cases where my character died throughout the course of the main campaign, and those were mainly when I mistakenly wandered into an open area and became completely surrounded by enemies, with no cover and nowhere to run.  Otherwise, I took damage, but was always able to pull through, and only rarely had to run away.  So, while the difficulty curve initially seems a bit unfair, it generally lives up to its nature once you’ve got a bit more armor and ammunition.

The game is immense, if sometimes a bit sparse on content – there are many points where you can find yourself wandering around the barren landscape with almost nothing to do, aside from the rare irradiated creature wandering across your path, and it can get frustrating that the only way to chart areas you haven’t visited before is to trundle across a mostly empty wasteland, desperately seeking out something of interest on the horizon.  But, in general, there’s plenty to do, and more then enough creatures to shoot at once you figure out where to look.

One thing to note is that this cannot reasonably be played as a traditional shooter.  Unlike, for example, Mass Effect, you really can’t point and shoot with any of your weapons.  The reason?  Regardless of your skill in any particular weapon class, the weapons rarely shoot straight.  There are precious few scopes, and no iron sights, and the aiming caret is only a general suggestion of where your shot will actually go.  Enemies, however, do not often have this problem, so unless you’re literally within spitting distance, the chance of actually hitting an enemy by shooting at them is vanishingly low.

This means that, realistically, the only way to get through the game without expending a lot of ammo, or taking a lot of damage by charging in close (the satisfaction of a point-blank shotgun blast to an enemy’s skull notwithstanding), is to utilize the VATS combat system.  Surprisingly, though, the system is quite fun t play around with.  Like Mass Effect, you can hit a button to pause the fight and bring up a combat menu.  Unlike Mass Effect, however, you can then choose a specific body part on a chosen enemy to hit, allowing you to perform a set attack in the style of a “realtime” turn-based RPG.  And when you do, the game cuts away to various slow-mo cinematic shots of you, quite literally in some cases, tearing your enemy a new one (and seriously, especially with the Bloody Mess option, this game makes Soldier of Fortune look like a kid’s movie).  Eventually, though, you run out of turns, and then it’s the enemy’s turn – although you can keep shooting inaccurately at them and chipping away at their health until you can recharge enough actions to attack them through the VATS system.  Essentially, it’s a decent blending of RPG and FPS elements in a way that ends up being quite enjoyable at times – although it lacks some of the immediacy and fun of run-and-gun battles that you would see in a more traditional FPS.  Ultimately, I think that the gameplay is more enjoyable if you’re an RPG fan, and straight FPS fans will probably find it somewhat frustrating that they can’t just shoot at everything in sight and hope to be successful.

Overall, I have little to complain about in the game.  One thing to note is that there is a draw-distance glitch that is apparent if you try to play the game at lower settings – the enemies will not “pop in” visually until they are quite close to you, but they will shoot at you long before they can be seen – so you end up having to dodge bullets from nowhere, with no way to shoot back (you can’t seem to use VATS if the target is not visible).  Luckily, a quick manipulation of the Actor Distance slider (under the advanced graphics settings in the setup application) renders the enemies correctly and alleviates this issue.

No, the major issue I have is actually with the game’s plot (actually, I have several issues, but in order to keep this review spoiler-free, you can read about them here.)  Namely, the issue of the game ending quite abruptly, especially when there is so much more that you want your character to do.  Again, this has a lot to do with the game trying to decide what it is – a purely story-driven RPG, or an open-world game where you can choose your own path.  The GTA series, for example, tends to lean more towards the open-world side, and generally gets it right – usually, once the main storyline is over, you get a cinematic ending, some plot-finished bonuses, and are then let loose to do whatever else in the game world that you wish.  More RPG-oriented games, however, seem to forget about their open worlds, and at some point lock you into an end-game plot from which there is no escape.  Mass Effect, to its credit, at least gives you some options, and  lets you know fairly explicitly when you are going to transition from open-ended exploration to the point of no return (although, arguably, not quite early enough to allow for the completion of certain tasks).  Fallout 3, unfortunately, ends up more or less springing it on you – by the time you realize that you’re fully into the endgame, it’s far too late to back out, and the game forces you to finish.  Because of this, autosave-players beware – if you do not have games that were recently, and manually, saved, you will only be able to play through the endgame again and again, or revert to whenever your last manual save was.  

Personally, I find it somewhat troubling when an open-world game seems to give you full control, but then lock you into an ending that you don’t really want to go through with, and ending the game when you really want to play on – especially when you’re forced to watch a cutscene that explains the fruits of your main-plot labors, rather than letting you experiencing them yourself.  I honestly can’t figure out why they couldn’t let you have an “ending” sequence or something, and then let you loose again to explore the world, doing whatever else you wanted to do, and seeing firsthand the results of your actions.  I think the lesson that Bethesda Softworks, Bioware, and others should take away from this is that if your game is open and nonlinear, it doesn’t ever need to officially come to a close – and forcing players up against a wall limits their choices and destroys the illusion of an open world where player choice truly matters.

Overall, though, Fallout 3 is an immense and varied game – I ended up reverting to an earlier save point in order to further explore things, and I’ve already spent more time, I believe, than in my complete playthrough of Mass Effect. Despite that, I have probably only uncovered a third to a half of all of the content that the game has to offer, and the game continues to hold my interest, if for no other reason than the fun obtained in exploring every possible nook and cranny of the detailed and expansive game world.  The game is a joy to play, despite its quirks, and is absolutely worth it for value for money (Crysis Warhead, new: $30, 7 hours of gameplay – Fallout 3, new: $50, 30 hours of gameplay and counting, and that’s just for one character and play style).  So, if you like any sort of action RPG, I would highly recommend it – just remember to leave off the main story quest after you escape from Raven Rock, if you want to keep exploring the world without endgame consequences.

Overall rating:  Quite good!

Who can play it: On easy difficulty, most anyone with some experience in basic RPG mechanics.

Can most people get through the first-person storyline?  Yes, but you might not want to immediately.

How frustrating is it?  It depends on your gameplay style, but generally not too much, if you keep your wits about you and use VATS early and often.

How fun is it?  So much more fun than S.T.A.L.K.E.R., I can tell you that, and a shining example of the potential for RPG games using current gaming graphics and gameplay technology.

Click here to read the plot review for Fallout 3 (contains spoilers)

For quite some time, my friends have been encouraging me to play Gears of War, but seeing as how I only play on the PC (or my Nintendo DS), I never got a real chance to do a serious play-through of the single-player campaign.  Eventually, though, when it did arrive for the PC, I decided to give it a shot, and see if it lived up to the hype.  Long story short, it didn’t – and while I have plenty of criticisms to heap on it, perhaps the biggest one was that I was only able to play one-fifth of the game on the easiest mode available.

You see, towards the end of the first act, you end up in a building with a huge enemy that you can’t actually shoot – you have to lure it outside first so you can hit it with an orbital beam cannon.  Okay, easy enough, right?  You get to a point, the game saves its checkpoint, and then there’s a (luckily brief) cutscene of the enemy slamming through a wall, roaring, and then charging towards you.  

At this point, it’s probably a good idea to mention that if the enemy so much as grazes you, your character dies instantly.  And so the enemy charged towards me, my character died, and the game spent its sweet time reloading the save point, and playing the cutscene again.  I figured out how to sidestep, and managed to lure the enemy to the next room – where it promptly killed me again.  Painstakingly, being killed again and again, I was able to dodge long enough get the enemy to smash into the next of the series of chambers – where it promptly killed my character again.  Which meant waiting for it to load, watching the cutscene, and starting the challenge all over from the very beginning.  Not once, out of over twenty attempts, was I able to get any farther than that.

And so, with that, Gears of War went from a moderately enjoyable, by-the-book TPS into an object lesson on two of the most aggravating features of modern games, especially console ports: checkpoint saves, and enemies that can kill you instantly.  Either one can be aggravating but usually not insurmountable, but put them together and you get one of the biggest sources of frustration in gaming today.  

My first experience with this came when I was playing Halo, Bungie’s first game release after being bought up by Microsoft.  (As an aside, I was a big fan of their original trilogy, Marathon, the FPS game series that swept the Mac alongside Doom and Wolfenstein for the PC, and so I was dismayed that the spiritual successor to Marathon went over to the “dark side” and was years late to arrive on the Macintosh).  Being designed for consoles, it featured save checkpoints, instead of the more common save-anywhere feature used in most PC FPS games (admittedly, the original Marathon only let you save at certain locations, but you could at least choose the when, or backtrack to a save location if necessary).  And, a ways into the game, I experienced the thrill of making it most of the way through a battle, getting hit by a few random shots, and then having to do the whole thing all over again, an experience that did not especially enamor me to the game.  It was also an experience that grew far worse when the game introduced enemies (flood armed with rocket launchers) that could kill me instantly, at any time, forcing me to play through one segment endlessly, carefully sniping from a distance for a good while, only to get just a bit too close and get blown to smithereens by the same f***ing missile.  Needless to say, I eventually overcame it and went on to play through to the finish (it was a Bungie game, after all), but the overall experience of checkpoint frustration dulled the excitement of what could have been an enjoyable ride, reducing it at times to a painful slog of trial and error.  As a result, despite my once-respect for the game studio, I have had no desire to pick up another title in the Halo series, as I am hardly eager to experience two more games filled with the same level of frustration.

While I grouse about that, though, and complain about such features in general, in few games have I seen this combination used in a worse manner than in Kane & Lynch.  Yes, the game’s uneven reviews set off the biggest controversy in game-review politics in quite some time, but despite the mixed reception, I ended up picking it up on impulse after seeing a developer demo video on a game-trailer site.  

Here’s how the gameplay in one part transpired:  You are being chased by police, and eventually have to exit the vehicle and shoot out a police roadblock.  So you exit the van, and the checkpoint saves.  You spend a good deal of time weaving through cars, taking cover and exchanging fire.  And then, as you get closer to the roadblock, it appears.

It, in this case, being a little screen in the bottom left corner, showing a sniper scope rapidly zeroing in on your character’s head.  When it pops up, you have a scant few seconds to find adequate cover, or a sniper in the distance takes your head off – end of story, and back to the checkpoint you go.  And note that I said you have to find adequate cover.  This isn’t Time Crisis – you don’t just kick a footpedal and instantly pop behind cover.  You have to find something to cover behind, get behind whatever side of it actually blocks the view of the reticle, and hit the key that brings you into cover.  And if the thing you decide to take cover behind doesn’t sufficiently block the view of your head in the sniper reticle, boom – it’s all over.  Realistic, maybe, but it’s a lousy gameplay mechanic, and there isn’t the slightest thing fun about it – it interrupts the flow of gameplay, causes you to restart from a checkpoint and replay many minutes of the game just to get back to that point, and there’s no reliable defense.  You just have to keep trying to find cover, and through trial and error – and probably luck – find a way to make it through.  I finally did, gritting my teeth in frustration, only to move on to even more frustration.  One escort mission later (I’ll cover that horrible idea in another post), your character is placed in an even more impossible situation with the sniper reticle that I was never able to play through successfully – and, to boot, the last save point comes before a lengthy cutscene that leads into the shootout (okay, I did figure out how to skip it, but it’s the principle of the matter).  Because of the extremely poor use of checkpoints and insta-kill mechanics, I could only conclude that the game was irretrievably broken, and wondered why I’d picked it up in the first place.

The takeaway lesson here is an easy one: don’t make checkpoints the only save mechanic in your game.  Having a save-anywhere setup that also auto-saves in case you forget to is fine, but artificially restricting saves does not help your game move forward, and hours added in frustration should not reasonably count towards gameplay time.  If you really must use save points, at the very least, make them occur frequently and in sensible places.  And, for pete’s sake, you’ve already bought the game, this isn’t an arcade where people make more money every time you make another attempt.  Cut out the cheap insta-kill stuff.  It’s annoying, it’s the opposite of fun, and it adds nothing that I can see to any decent game outside of the platformer category (and I can’t say I even like it much there).

In the end, I finally had to undergo an elaborate save-game hack just to see any of the levels in Gears of War beyond that one boss battle.  Using the hack, I played a bit more, before coming to the realization that I could have been playing Quake 4 instead, given how the games seemed to me to be essentially interchangeable (and Quake 4 at least features an actual color palette and a slightly interesting set of weapons, along with enemies that have at least a shred of charisma and originality to them).  It’s possible that I might have played through it anyway, as it was fairly entertaining in a shoot-everything sort of way, except that my experience with one frustrating boss battle led me to expect more of the same.  I suppose, in a way, it’s fitting – I ended up buying the game for a fraction of the retail price, and in return got a fraction of the gameplay.  Had I bought it at full price, however, I would have been even more frustrated, and rightly so.  And I’m still kicking myself for paying full price for Kane & Lynch and getting a sack of ill-concieved frustration in return.  

Seriously, game developers.  You are developing a product that is supposed to be designed for people to enjoy, not for people to curse at as they slam their fists on the keyboard in anger.  Unless you’re a sadistic bastard like Takeshi Kitano and actively want to torture potential players, I would think you would want to create games that are a joy to play, both for your playtesters and for the general audience you are trying to convince to buy your game.  Of course, most of the examples I cited have sold countless copies (well, maybe not Kane & Lynch), so perhaps other people see something in these games that I don’t, or simply enjoy them enough that they are willing to suffer through some of the gameplay in order to enjoy the game’s other aspects.  But I’ve been burned often enough by the mechanics of console ports to be exceedingly wary of buying any in the future, without some assurances that the game will not end midway through in the usual endless loop of “reloading save point” screens.

On a related note, I would honestly love to see a full-fledged game review site written by non-hardcore game reviewers – heck, I’d even prefer one written by random people pulled off the street and plunked down in front of some new releases.  In essence, I would love to have a source where I could go and get my one simple question answered: will any gamer who plunks down the cash for the latest and greatest game actually be able to play all the way through and enjoy a frustration-free experience?  Graphics are all well and good, but almost no reviews seem to be able to answer this most basic of questions.  Instead, you’re left with the occasional oblique comment about the steepness of the difficulty curve, and must attempt to use that to judge the game’s overall playability at your particular skill level.  All I want is for some reviewer out there be able to state “I’m a casual gamer at best, but I was able to complete this one anyway.”  It’s such a simple thing, and it would make buying games so much easier for the non-hardcore gamer.

And finally, on a complete tangent, what’s up with the enemies in most gamers standing there and displaying no reaction when you shoot them over and over again, until they just keel over with the final shot?  Soldier or Fortune wasn’t the best game ever, but at the very least, the enemies showed some reaction to being shot.  There’s just something wrong with enemies that charge at you willy-nilly as they soak up ammunition, only to just sort of collapse with that one additional shot.  I know that games tend to cover up displays of violence “for the children,” but seriously, it’s like shooting at animated store mannequins.  That’s where games like Gears of War fail – you might as well be chucking cardboard boxes at the enemy for al the apparent affect it has, and it kind of kills the immersion, especially when each enemy can just stand there and soak up most of a clip before anticlimactically roaring and falling over.  Seriously, either you chainsaw your way though the entire game, or you end up wondering why the game has absolutely nothing about its combat mechanics to distinguish itself from any other shooter out there.  I mean, freakin’ Infernal, the game usually described as a tech demo on steroids, has more compelling gameplay than this.  And despite all of the reviews to the contrary, I’m honestly not kidding about this.  How did Gears of War get such widespread acclaim, anyway?  I’ve played as much of it as I could, and I can’t figure out how so many people could possibly have enjoyed it much once they got over the chainsaw, as I can’t really see anything at all new that it brings to the table.

What kind of gamer am I?  I think I’m kind of the opposite of the hardcore gamer.  

I’m the kind of gamer who wants to explore a new game as much as possible on my own, but I’m not afraid to bring in the big guns whenever necessary: codes, trainers, FAQs, walkthroughs, anything else I can muster.  I’m the kind of gamer who will ding the easy difficulty rating even though I could probably beat the game on normal or possibly even hard.  I’m the kind of gamer who loves sandboxes and lifted restrictions.

In short, I’m a gamer who wants to pick up a game and have pure, unadulterated fun, while eliminating the kinds of situations that would lead me to irately chuck my mouse at the screen.

Unlike the hardcore gamer, I’m only occasionally into games for a sense of challenge, or accomplishment, or achievement.  I’m not in it to overcome difficulty or frustration.  Because, you see, I’ve already got plenty of those attributes in my day-to-day life, and I’m not eager to add to them during the time I have set aside for leisure activities.  And generally speaking, if I do want to mix leisure with challenge, I’d much rather do it struggling to create a new piece of music or writing an interesting story or essay – you get the same feelings, but with a real sense of accomplishment, because you end up with something real as a result of your efforts.  Admittedly, when my sense of gaming and challenge converge, I do occasionally engage in multiplayer games such as Team Fortress 2 (which, surprisingly enough, I’m somewhat half-decent at).  

For the most part, though, I prefer single-player games, and I see them, reasonably enough, as a form of entertainment, and perhaps a form of catharsis as well.  I play them when I want to relax, unwind, and simply have fun.  And that, in essence, is the core of my philosophy – games are a medium of entertainment, and I have much the same expectations of them as I do of other forms of narrative media.  

That’s why I choose to play on easy, instead of on a harder difficulty, even if I am capable of doing so: I want to go around and enjoy what the game has to offer, instead of chafing at overly-restrictive rules and strict combat situations.  Take the original Halo, for example – I could get through it on harder difficulties, albeit by engaging in pitched battles, hiding behind things, firing judiciously, and being stressed over the difficulty level, always feeling as though my character was just barely hanging on.  Or, I could set the game on easy, and have a great time running around, shooting the heck out of things, and meleeing Elites in the face for kicks.  Is playing like this challenging?  No.  Does playing like this give you some sense of achievement for pulling through a battle by the skin of your teeth?  Probably not.  But is it incredibly, cathartically, fun?  You bet it is.

This, in essence, is probably why I’m playing Bioshock through for the third time.  By now, I practically know every plot point by heart, and that’s just fine.  Here’s the thing: while most single-player games have little replay value – the play-through was all right, and the story was decent enough, but there’s no real need to repeat it – the essential gameplay and environment of Bioshock means that it’s just something that’s fun to play around with.  

For an example, let me compare it to Half-Life 2: Episode 2.  Arguably, both games are excellent examples of their field – top-notch graphics and lighting, innovative gameplay, reasonably compelling storyline.  However, there’s a big difference – in Half-Life, you are constantly thrust into dangerous situations, where even on lower difficulty settings you are often fighting for your life.  And while set-piece battles like the antlion-turret showdown or the final strider onslaught can be intriguing in theory, you’re focused on just getting through them in order to advance the storyline, and once you’ve gotten through that crucible, you end up thinking “whew, that’s a relief!  I’m sure glad I don’t have to do that over again!”  And then you don’t.

In Bioshock, on the other hand, there are a few difficult-ish battles (generally involving Big Daddies), but overall, you can pretty much run around as a demigod, freely choosing any of a dozen creative ways to completely decimate your enemies, everything from long-distance sniping to up-close-and-personal melee combat, from hacking turrets and using deception to simply harnessing incredible physical powers to throw enemies around like rag dolls.  It’s a game where you can get to a point where you don’t really feel threatened, and you can play through it and crush your enemies with impunity.  You get to become your own crazed action hero, destroying the opposition in style, and it ends up being an incredibly fun ride.  Add to that gameplay an immersive, compelling environment and a story that becomes further unlocked the more you explore the environment, and you end up with a game that you want to come back to.  Suddenly, the virtual world isn’t a terrifying place where you must struggle to survive and move forward, but instead becomes an otherworldly playground that you can enjoy in whatever way you wish.  And, if you want, the challenge is always still there – you can always unlock a harder difficulty, or decide to play in a particular, challenging way (for example, I’m still contemplating trying a play-through where you don’t harvest a single little sister, or where you try to get by using nothing more than various tonics and the wrench).  But the key thing here is that you have a choice – you can choose whether you want to stomp through the game as an unstoppable juggernaut, or whether you want to scrape and scrounge and somehow pull through.  In a lot of games, you’re limited to that second option no matter what difficulty you choose, and that, in my mind, ends up making them something to simply get through, rather than something to have fun with.  And that, pretty much, is why I keep playing through Bioshock, and why I played through Episode 2 once and left it to gather dust.

That, ultimately, is what I want from games – for them to give me that choice that lets me play through the game environment the way that I want to.  When you are able to get this right – when you let people have fun with the game instead of forcing them through it in a certain fashion – you can end up with a game that is fun and enjoyable to play, even long after the story itself has become stale.  In short, my philosophy is this: I want to pick up a game, engage with it the way that I want, and simply enjoy the experience of playing.

Recently, the gaming blog Game-ism published an interesting article about balancing challenge and frustration in video games (http://www.game-ism.com/2008/08/19/challenge-vs-frustration/).  While the author comes at the question with a view that is not quite diametrically opposed to mine, he does make an important point, to an extent – a game that lacks any level of challenge or intensity can seem quite boring, especially if you are playing a game specifically in order to feel challenged.

Now, I will admit that for some games, challenge can be a motivating and enjoyable factor – there is a certain thrill and adrenaline rush, to be sure, when you finally beat a difficult part of a game level, a personal triumph of skill.  The problem is, in most cases, that there is an incredibly fine line between just barely triumphing over difficult odds, and slamming your mouse against the wall after an hour of frustration.  Get the difficulty just right, and there’s an interesting challenge to be had — but if you create one difficulty level for all skill levels of gamers, you will get a small subset that are satisfied, while gamers on both sides of that narrow range will be alternately bored or frustrated.

Admittedly, there probably isn’t much point to playing a game that requires no ability at all – if all that’s required of you is to press a single button to watch a cutscene of your character beating the level, you might as well just watch a DVD.  But on the other hand, you also don’t want a gamer reaching a frustration point and junking the game midway through.  I think what it comes down to is this – the player can be challenged, but overall, the player should always keep moving forward.  If the player slams up against a brick wall, you can have all the story and interesting environments in the world, but it’s all for naught if the player can’t enjoy it because they’re stuck repeating one section that, for them, is impossible.

My opinion is probably motivated by my own perceptions of video games, or at least their single-player campaigns.  I tend to see these campaigns as primarily an interactive experience – I play them to experience something new and interesting, and to take a break from reality by way of a virtual one.  For me, a game is often seen as a more interactive form of entertainment – for example, I tend to see a shooter as something akin to an action movie, but better, because I’m not just watching the battle from afar but participating in the thick of it.  Instead of being an observer, I get to be the protagonist, and fight my way to glory.  

But that’s just it – in a movie, the good guys always win.  Sometimes there’s struggle, sometimes there’s strife, but in the end, they win the day – or, at the very least, meet a poignant or interesting end, having been given the opportunity to finish the entire arc of their story.  Imagine, for a second, a movie where the good guys (oh, what the heck, space marines) go up against a tough alien monster, who proceeds to smack them around.  They retreat to their ship, lick their wounds, and rearm, ready to take their dramatic defeat and turn it into a charismatic victory.  And so they return, newly confident and desperate to renew the struggle – and the alien smacks them around again.  They lick their wounds and rearm, only to be foiled again and again.  They can never finish their story, and the movie ends with an endless loop of them fighting the same futile battle over and over again.

Perhaps such a movie would be interesting to those who are fond of experimental philosophy and the futility of the human condition, but any action-movie fan is going to walk out halfway through the film, muttering in disgust.  And that’s the main problem that I find I have with games – I get into the story, I get partway through, and then the immersion has its spine ripped out by mind-crushing difficulty that leaves me stuck in an endless loop of struggle, failure, and repetition.  It’s like psychological experiments into learned helplessness – if you’re always stymied, no matter what you do, you eventually just give up on the whole thing.  Luckily in my case, unlike the rats endlessly exposed to electric shocks, I can end my torment and simply walk away.  When I do, though, it’s with a bad taste in my mouth.  I’ve paid my fare, but my entertainment has been sadistically denied me – although some might say that I simply failed the game, I can’t help but think that it was the game that failed me, that it promised me entertainment and then let me down, cruelly dangling the rest of the story in front of me while always holding it just out of reach.

So, in my view, the player – the protagonist – should never lose, not entirely.  They should never be smacked away to a static screen of defeat, and then whisked back to a save point and made to retread parts of the game that they already completed, the infinite loop of penance for failing to live up to a game’s predetermined standards.  And the sad thing is, with proper game design, the determination between victory and defeat can be used to enhance and expand upon the game’s plot, instead of take away from it – and, regardless of outcome, can continue to move the plot forward.

With platform games which want to tell a story (as opposed to having the puzzle of the levels themselves be the sole focus of the game), the answer can be simple enough, and is exemplified to an extent with some games in the Sonic series – a “high” route full of difficult jumps can get you though the level quickly and with bonuses, whereas if you miss a jump, you can descend to a “low” route that is generally less difficult.  In place of the suggestions I’ve made previously, this multi-level paradigm can be added to allow less-skilled players at least one route where they can always make it through and progress, with accolades and bonuses if you take a higher route – but everyone can still enjoy the experience of making it through the level, and if you try for the higher difficulties and fall a bit short, you can still make it through, instead of effectively being scolded and told to go back and try it all over again.

For other types of games, you can actually make use of such determinations to create a more intricate storyline.  For example, you could have a shooter where you start off as a lone soldier, battling through a difficult commando campaign.  As you fight your way through, if you keep up, you stay hot on the heels of your adversaries, taking a straight and dangerous path to their field headquarters – or, if you become seriously wounded, you are medevaced to a field hospital, and reinserted to a different path, where you fight off their rearguard and pick up their trail again, taking on a less difficult campaign without disrupting the narrative, and allowing the story to continue along a slightly different path, with your character’s “death” a natural part of the storyline, as opposed to an unnatural, narrative-breaking obstacle.  

Ultimately, my point is this:  if a game has a story arc, like a movie, the player naturally wants to experience it from start to finish.  They want to experience the ups and downs, the challenge and the triumph, but they always want to keep moving forward.   When games enable that, they become engaging and fun, and when games artificially block that through poor design choices, they become an exercise in futility and utterly destroy the immersive story that they are trying to tell.  If your game has a story, let the player experience it how they want, and don’t put barriers of skill between them and the full experience of the virtual world that you’ve created.

I can tell you the exact point that I stopped playing Sonic Rush for the Nintendo DS.  Night Carnival Zone, Act 2.  There’s a part of the level where you hit a switch and go stand on a ledge.  To one side of you, there’s a bottomless pit (one of the horrible staples of almost every single platformer in existence), to the other is the way you came – and above you are a series of tantalizing platforms that you can’t jump high enough to get to, and which the game leaves absolutely no clue as to how you’re supposed to get up there.  And believe me, I tried – I hit just about every single button I could think of in conjunction with the jump button, tapping the up arrow like mad in a vain attempt to get my character to jump higher.  It was about then that I reached that point – the point where the game was so frustrating that there just wasn’t any fun to it anymore.  In a rage, I popped the cartridge out of the DS, threw it in a drawer, and it has been there since, except for one brave foray where I fired it back up, got to the same point, slammed my head against my desk, and gave up on it once again.

So it was, with some trepidation, that I spotted Sonic Rush Adventure on a rack at a GameStop I happened to be walking past in the mall (yeah, I know, but just try finding a locally owned game store around here).  All of a sudden, my memories of Sonic Rush came flooding back, and I hesitated – but I also recalled my time exploring and having quite a bit of fun playing the original Sonic Adventure.  Eventually, curiosity (and the fact that it was a few bucks cheaper used) won out, and I ended up bringing it home.  Upon putting the cartridge into my DS, however, I was hit once again with that feeling of trepidation – would I get partway through, only to be flummoxed once again?

Well, a number of hours of gameplay later, and I’m currently getting my ass handed to me, piece by piece, by Sky Babylon Act 2, but overall, I’m still happy – the reason being that Sonic Rush Adventure has a number of gameplay advantages over its predecessor.

First and foremost, in SR:A, when I’m ready to get back to the challenge, I can just open up the menu and select Sky Babylon Act 2.  In the original game, when I would bomb out on the second act, I’d have to start over from the first – only when you completed both acts were you able to save your progress before taking on the boss.  This made for a good bit of frustration, from having to replay a whole act just to take another crack at a part that was giving you grief.  Admittedly, the checkpoints in SR:A are still a bit too sparse for my taste, but not having to replay entire acts is a big improvement.

Another major enhancement is the inclusion of actual tutorials for the various gameplay modes, which walk you through all of the various moves that Sonic and his vehicles can complete.  Having a handle on Sonic’s moves is especially useful, as you have at least an inkling of what to do in difficult parts, instead of being completely at a loss.  As a result, I have yet to encounter a single level where I didn’t have even a clue as to what I was supposed to do next to advance (my current troubles have more to do with my complete inability to handle jumping sequences involving many tiny platforms than any particular lack of knowledge).

Another advantage is the plethora of other activities that you can do if you’re interested.  If I’m frustrated with a particular level for a bit, I can take a break, playing one of the vehicle mini-games, looking for new islands, trying mission challenges, and so on.  You can choose to do anything you want, at any time.  This is the bonus of having “adventure” in the title, I suppose, but it makes for a much more enjoyable experience than a linear series of acts.  I mean, c’mon, Sonic Advance had the chao garden thing, at the very least – you’d think they could have done something in Sonic Rush to give you a break from wanting to slam your DS into a wall.

Another thing that I personally appreciate, at least from a morale standpoint, is that there isn’t any big drama once Sonic has lost that last life to yet another stupid bottomless pit.  The original Sonic Rush takes the standard platformer attitude – flash up a quick “game over, sucks to be you, then kick back to the title screen and make you start everything all over again (at the very least, you could start up from the latest zone, unlike previous Sonic games where you had to start at the very first act all over again – which was a much, much greater pain, and usually led to me dropping the game even earlier than I did with Sonic Rush). In SR:A, there’s no gloom and doom, no humiliation of being kicked back to the splash screen to start all over again.  Instead, you simply show back up at your “house,” where you’re given the opportunity to try again or move on to something else.  Within the game narrative, the character’s “death” is reduced from the end of the game to a minor setback, encouraging you to continue your efforts even if you are momentarily stymied by a particular level.

Now, this isn’t to say that SR:A is perfect – you will have to play through a number of difficult levels to advance the storyline, and without such advancement, you’re still limited to a subset of the game – a much larger subset than with Sonic Rush, admittedly, but it’s still a bit of an arbitrary limit to exploration.  Given the way the storyline works, however, such linear progression might still be necessary, but it does mean that less-skilled players will have no way to fully explore the in-game world.  And while there are some difficulty-level settings which allow you to take all the time you want on levels and mercifully takes the boss difficulty from painful to just barely manageable, the platforming acts are significant hurdles in and of themselves.

Of course, this is one of the harder things to get around in terms of game design.  Platformers are on of the more “pure” games of skill – either you have it or you don’t.  The main struggle in such games is often you versus that bottomless pit, and without radically changing the layout of the level, or having different actual level designs based on different levels of difficulty (a la Sonic Heroes) taking up much more space on a limited cartridge, resolving this situation is often difficult.  Make the levels too easy, and the hardcore gamers complain that the game isn’t worth playing, but make it too difficult, and the rank-and-file gamers have a hard time making it through.  

I think one of the best solutions in this realm was first brought forth in the Prince of Persia series – the ability to rewind time a few seconds back, before you fell into that bottomless pit (or, in PoP’s case, a pit full of impaling spikes).  This would remove frustration greatly, and allow players to easily and quickly retry that difficult sequence of jumps without having to fall back to the checkpoint and play through a bunch of already-covered terrain to get back to the tricky part.  Of course, this makes things somewhat “easier” without actually reducing the difficulty of the level, and certain challenges could stymie certain players no matter how many attempts they took, but it’s a step in the right direction.  You can even appease the “hardcore” folks by making the rewind function optional, or giving special bonuses for completing a level without a single rewind.  For the majority of gamers, though, it would remove the annoyance of missing that one tricky jump considerably.

Overall, I think that Sonic Rush: Adventure is a step in the right direction – learning from the frustration of the original game, they added in a number of elements to ease some frustration and make for a more enjoyable experience overall.  While perhaps they didn’t go quite far enough, it’s a vast improvement over the vexing original.

P.S. On a personal note, I didn’t think that the original Sonic Rush had enough of a true “sonic” feel to it – and while the new adventure takes place in a completely different world, the levels on the whole had a much better design, focusing a lot more on speed and fun versus tricky puzzles, making especially the earlier stages a lot of fun to play.  Machine Labyrinth, especially, reminded me of a mix between the Chemical Plant and Metropolis zones from Sonic 2, which still remains my favorite game in the series, and the Coral Cave zone is a bit reminiscent of the Lava Reef zone from Sonic 3 & Knuckles.  Oh, and Marine is one of the most annoying sidekick I have ever seen.

Update 8/31/08:  As a result of the improvements, Sonic Rush Adventure is the first platform game that I have completed (from beginning to credit roll) entirely on my own merits.  I’m not sure what that says about my game-playing abilities, but it does indicate that a lot more thought and balance went into this game in terms of overall playability across multiple skill levels.

Update 9/15/08:  Somehow, building upon skills and ideas that I acquired in SR:A, I have now completed both main campaigns in Sonic Rush, from start to finish (albeit with a bit of Action Replay “unlimited lives” assistance, as it took me about twenty attempts each to get through the last couple of two-act sets).  And, oddly enough, despite all of the bottomless pits and cheap enemy placement, the game is starting to become fun again, now that I’ve got more of a handle on it…

What does it take for a game to be fully accessible?

For different types of games, it means that various features are provided to make the game possible for all levels, and to provide the minimum of repetition (having to play the same part of the game over and over again).

First-Person/Third-Person Shooters:
-Have a manual save system that allows the player to save at any point.  Barring this, have sufficient checkpoint saves that a gamer should have to spend no more than 60 seconds retracing his steps.
-Have varying difficulty levels, including an Easy level which anyone, including those without any FPS experience, can progress through the entire campaign.
-Do not have any enemies that can perform one-hit kills, especially if your checkpoint system sucks (I’m looking at you, Kane & Lynch!)

Real-Time/Turn-Based Strategy Games:
-Have varying difficulty levels, including an Easy level where anyone, regardless of experience playing RTS games, can complete all aspects of the single-player campaign.
-Have a save system that can save during a mission, and not just at the end of it, so that players are not forced to play a potentially hours-long mission at one sitting.

Sim Games (Sim City/Spore/etc.):
-Have a “sandbox” mode where a player can play around with all features of the game, with unlimited funds/resources.
-Allow a player to use the sandbox to build any type of thing in the game, don’t restrict certain types of content that can only be unlockable after meeting a certain challenge.
-Allow saving at any time.

Free-roaming games (a la GTA):
-Allow full access to the entire game world.  Do not lock away parts of the environment until a player has finished completing certain missions.
-Allow saving at any time, in any location, even if a mission is currently in progress.

Platform games (Mario, Sonic, etc.):
-Save the game after each completed act or level – do not force the player to successfully complete multiple segments of the game before they are allowed to save.
-Have sufficient checkpoints within the level to prevent a player from having to retrace considerable amounts of the level after failing to complete a single difficult jump or obstacle.
-Especially do not have a game situation where there are no save points at all – this is fine for an arcade which is trying to collect as many quarters as possible, but should not be acceptable for a game intended for personal use.

A couple of years ago, I wrote an article on my main site entitled The Casual Gamer’s Manifesto.  The article, and its follow-up, provide an in-deplth look at a number of the points that I want to make about gaming in general.  As the site where they were posted is no longer available, I am posting them here to provide some additional background on how I became interested in this aspect of gaming.

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Over the past week, I’ve come across a number of news items that seem to tie into what I was saying in my last post, The Casual Gamer’s Manifesto.

This week, Valve Software released a patch for Half-Life 2: Episode One. Based on an analysis of player success in certain areas of the game, one of the toughest areas of the game (the elevator-zombie sequence) was significantly toned down in its level of difficulty – more health was added, and the number of zombies was decreased.

On a number of sites, the debate raged on – the hardcore gamers deriding pretty much everyone with petty insults, while those on the opposite side attacked the hardcore gamers for being elitist and only wanting games that required massive amounts of practice to master. There were also a few people, though, who mentioned the fact that a large portion of gamers are now in their twenties, with real-life jobs taking up much of their time. Obviously, these people still have a great love of gaming, but simply do not have the time to sit down and become an expert in every single game. Essentially, they want to sit down and have a fun time with the game that they bought, which was the argument I was trying to put forward in the manifesto.

In fact, the Escapist Magazine, one of my favorite gaming publications (mainly because it takes issues in gaming seriously), published an article in this week’s issue (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_53/320-Kill-Your-Darlings) that touched on many of the points I made in the CGM. In fact, I would highly recommend this article, as it brings to the fore many gaming issues that I’ve longed to see change for quite some time, especially many of the false restrictions on gameplay (regimented save points, games that progress linearly regardless of player behavior, environments that are arbitrarily closed off, and so on).

One of the most telling parts of the article was this paragraph towards the end:

Videogames need to think less like part-time jobs and more like playground games – where the fun is guarded by flexible rules, but within those rules anything goes. The fun is in figuring out what to do for yourself.

Honestly, I couldn’t agree more. This is one of those areas where the GTA series, regardless of the controversy over their content, excelled. Yes, it’s true that you can spend your time in the game doing all manner of antisocial behavior – but, at the same time, you also had a fully realized environment virtually without limits. You can drive and explore everywhere, traverse land, air, and sea, and decide precisely how you want to play the game. You can play it as a shooter, a driver, a flight simulator, and most things in between. The key, though, is that you define your experience, rather than allowing the game to do so.

Take, for example, Half-Life 2. It’s a very fun game, but I’ve only played it through a few times – you can only play through the same exact sequence of events a certain amount of times before it becomes old hat. GTA: Vice City, on the other hand, has probably gotten many more hours of play-time, simply because I can play it differently every time – when I can call the shots and make up a new way of playing every time I fire the game up, there’s a considerably higher level of replay value.

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Also, while I was considering the flack over the HL2:E1 modification, I realized something while reading through the arguments – I had a great time playing through that area of the game, and I was able to get through it with no problems on the first try. I also realized something else – that I was somewhat disappointed in the change, because playing through the level with reduced difficulty would take away from the excitement and enjoyment of it.

Thinking more on this issue, I realized that it’s not just about getting through the games – it’s about getting the games to present the level of difficulty that’s right for you. Some of my most enjoyable gaming experiences have been games that were challenging, but allowed me to complete them – games where I was perilously close to defeat, but was able to somehow pull through. There were certain areas of Sin:Episodes that were like this, and certain areas of F.E.A.R. as well – some of the ambush sequences were incredibly intense and enjoyable. The key thing, though, was that I was able to fight my way past those areas – if I had died ten times before moving on, I would have felt much more frustration, and much less enjoyment. At the same time, though, if I’m just mowing through enemies with impunity, the game doesn’t provide that much excitement. There were many areas of Doom 3 that were like this, and as a result, many parts of the game felt more like a slog than an adventure.

There’s a concept in psychology called the Yerkes-Dodson curve, that seeks to illustrate an optimum level of stress for human performance. The optimum level is usually somewhere in the middle of the curve. With too much stress, you see people “burn out” or begin to suffer health effects from the burden. Conversely, with too little stress, people don’t feel challenged – they become lethargic, and their motivation, drive, and productivity end up dropping.

I’m beginning to think that there’s a similar curve that can be drawn for gaming. For a particular person, some games are going to fall to the high-stress end of the curve, leaving them with nothing but frustration. Other games, however, are going to give them far too little challenge, and they’re going to end up being bored and frustrated in a different way – frustrated that the game doesn’t give them the challenge they need, which motivates them to play it in the first place.

The unfortunate fact of the matter, however, is that as with the Yerkes-Dodson curve, the optimum-stress point is different for each and every person, so a game with a fixed level of challenge will only satisfy a narrow subset of the population. The debate over the HL2:E1 changes is a direct illustration of this – some games with a higher optimum level of challenge are angry that the game will seem less challenging, and therefore more boring to them, while the games with a lower optimum level are thankful that they can now get through a frustrating part of the game, and are puzzled by those who think it is now too easy.

Because of this, I now think that the ideal thing for a game to do is not merely to provide a mechanism to let you get to the end of the game. I think that the future for games is something that is at least initially embodied in the Sin:Episodes dynamic difficulty system – a game mechanism that learns from the gamer’s behavior and level, and adjusts the level of challenge on the fly. This way, any gamer, regardless of their optimum level of challenge, can enjoy the game at the level of intensity that is right for them. Beginning or very casual gamers can have a cakewalk until they get the hang of things, semi-casual gamers like me can have a good challenge without a ton of frustration or eating up excess time endlessly replaying a difficult section, and the truly hardcore gamers can take on the fight of their lives and blast through against overwhelming odds. This way, you end up with a game that can be accessible to anyone, while offering everyone a gaming experience custom-tailored to their optimum level of challenge and particular style of gameplay.

Of course, that won’t stop the hardcore gamers from ragging on those who play at a lower level of difficulty. However, gaming is no longer about just appealing to one minority hardcore group – gaming is well into the mainstream, and is as big a business as Hollywood. As such, it’s a business that needs to cater to everyone who wants to enjoy this form of entertainment. The technology is there to create games that can provide a challenging and enjoyable experience to every player, and it is a shame that such technology is not coming into greater use.

Finally, to the hardcore gamers, I will say this – being “hardcore” should not be the necessary prerequisite to finishing, or enjoying, a video game. In fact, I think there are only two things that should be required to have an enjoyable gaming experience – the money to purchase the game, and the willingness to play it through to completion. Skills beyond that are icing on the cake, and an advantage in multiplayer. To quote again from the article in the Escapist:

Let’s get one thing clear, games: I pay for you. You are my playthings. When I say enough, enough.

And that’s precisely the way it should be.

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Also, this last week, I finally gave in to temptation and picked up a Nintendo DS Lite (and, of course, some games to go along with it). I have to say, the DS is one of the nicest-looking gaming systems I’ve seen in a while (which, given that the last gaming system I played for any length of time was the Nintendo 64, probably isn’t saying that much). One of the coolest things about it is the fact that it doesn’t look like a toy – rather, it has a professional, iGadget sort of look to it, with a nice finish, and rounded edges that sit well in a pocket or pack.

Beyond just the system, though, the games are quite fun, and the dual screens open up a wide array of possibilities. I have to say, I had forgotten how much fun Mario Kart was, until I picked it up for the DS. Unfortunately, though, playing DS games is quickly reminding me of the control you give up when you go to a closed system.

Much like certain restrictive games, Mario Kart DS doesn’t just let you play through all of the game’s features from the get go – no, you have to earn it. Just to access all of the tracks, which are the game’s main content, you have to beat no less than six different racing circuits in the main racing mode. Want to unlock the rest of the content beyond that? Well, you’d better be a gaming god or have a lot of time on your hands, because a casual gamer is never going to see any of it.

On the PC, most of the time, such restrictions can be surmounted – either by a code added to the game by the developer, or, if the developer’s not being very accommodating, community sites with various codes, trainers, memory editors, and savegame files (note, once again, that I do not endorse these things for multiplayer games – but to fully access the single-player portion of a game that I bought, I have no qualms about using them). With the console, though, unless you’re in to some very low-level hacks, you can forget about it. Long story short – you’re paying the full price, to a game that only allows you access to part of its features unless you build up an incredible level of skill.

Also, touching on the difficulty levels again, just take any of the major platformers – for example, the new Super Mario Bros., or Sonic Rush. There are many areas where you can quite easily get frustrated, pounding through the same level again and again, only to get hung up on a certain sector and have to start all over again. Crap out on the very end of the second stage of a Sonic Rush level, and run out of lives? You’ll have to start all over again, and hit all those other areas that tripped you up perfectly as well, just to have one more try at that difficult point. It’s interesting that all the game designers would have to do would be to allow a free-play or a free-continue mode, so you can keep trying from a nearby checkpoint until you clear the difficult part, instead of starting all over again. In fact, if you owned an arcade game cabinet, you can simply flip a switch on the back to be able to do so indefinitely. If a multi-thousand-dollar arcade console can figure this out, why can’t the designers of a game that a much larger group of people are probably going to play?

Finally, we have the glitches, or the things that simply aren’t explained. Here’s an example from Animal Crossing: Wild World – at certain points in time in the game, you can go into a cafe and hear one of the characters play a variety of different tunes – after which, you get an item that lets you play that song elsewhere. Sounds simple enough, right? So, your character sits down to hear the music – and is told that he has to turn a timer off before the show. The only problem is this – the game never specifies where you can find this timer, or how to turn it off. In fact, you can look through every menu in the game, and through the game’s entire manual, without finding a single mention of it. Now, it’s always possible that I’m missing something obvious in the game, but no matter how you slice it, spending an hour poring through game manuals and interfaces in a futile search for something that isn’t explained sure isn’t my idea of fun.

Now, don’t get me wrong – the DS is a fun gaming system, and there’s something to be said for games that you can play in five- and ten-minute intervals, instead of getting sucked into an hours-long computer game. And, even with some of those frustrations, being able to play traditional-style Sonic games (as well as the new Mario Kart and finally being able to fully play through Mario 64) is a great experience that I haven’t had in a while. All things said and done, the DS is a cool system, and the fact that it is leading the way in some forms of innovative gameplay and interactions (Electroplankton and Brain Age are two standout examples here) says a lot about Nintendo’s commitment to innovation. Plus, I can’t think of a better way to informally play video games with friends, anywhere – just pull out the console, and you’ve instantly got an ad-hoc network. With some of the other innovations on the horizon (if the Opera browser shows up, suddenly you’ve got a very useful and portable device for hitting wifi hotspots while traveling), I would definitely say that this system’s benefits outweigh the drawbacks. Game designers, though, really do need to realize that people want to play the games how they want to play them, not how the designers want them to be played – and that means providing the whole game, up front, to those who want it, and to allow them to play without frustration or artificial restrictions. Again, the technology to do this is here today – and there is no reason, besides trying to eke some small amount of additional gameplay out of each cartridge, to make such arbitrary restrictions a required part of a console game.

A couple of years ago, I wrote an article on my main site entitled The Casual Gamer’s Manifesto.  The article, and its follow-up, provide an in-deplth look at a number of the points that I want to make about gaming in general.  As the site where they were posted is no longer available, I am posting them here to provide some additional background on how I became interested in this aspect of gaming.

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Well, I’ve tried to write this article a number of times, in ways that grew more and more complicated, and I’ve thrown my hands up in frustration an equal number of times. After recently getting schooled by the AI in Warhammer: Dawn of War, though, I decided to take another look at it (fun fact: I love RTS games almost as much as I suck at them).

Looking over the previous articles, I realized that with all of the specific cases I was mentioning, there was a single thread that applied throughout. No matter what game I was looking at, my frustration came down to one main thing: not being able to fully access the game I had bought.

The Casual Gamer’s Manifesto, such as it is, can be summed up in one simple sentence:

There must be some mechanism through which any player, regardless of skill level, can play through the entirety of the game’s single-player content.

Or, to put it another way: Unless I’m buying some episodic content, I am not buying one half of a game, or three quarters of it – I’m buying the whole thing, start to finish. As such, I should be entitled to the full single-player experience, even if I completely suck at that style of gameplay. You wouldn’t buy a DVD if the movie stopped halfway through due to a lack of some particular skill – why should we accept that from video games? Beyond anything else, games are a form of entertainment, and you shouldn’t be shortchanged because some developer doesn’t think you’re “leet” enough.

Some examples of what this would mean to various genres of games:

FPS – Be able to complete the entire single-player campaign.
RTS – The same thing, essentially.
GTA-style games – Allow the player to complete the campaign, or at the very least, allow the player access to all game areas.
Racing-style games – Allow the player access to all available cars and courses.
Sim-style games – Have a game mode that allows the player to build as they wish without constraints (i.e. sandbox mode).

The mechanism to do this would generally be simple, and would not take significantly longer to code – for example, almost all FPS games today succeed in this notion by having a console code that makes the player invincible, and thereby able to traverse even the most dangerous areas. In most other games, the premise is equally as simple – as the game’s content is restricted by default, and enabled at certain points in gameplay, it should be trivial to simply add a code that enables all of a game’s functionality.

The beauty of these mechanisms is that no one has to take advantage of them. If you want to be a dedicated gamer and push through without them, you can – and by the same token, if you’re a casual gamer who just wants to blast away at stuff without consequence, you can do so as well. The key here is that the game can be completed and enjoyed by people across the entire spectrum of gaming skill. And, additionally, codes can often be turned on and off, allowing you to take advantage of them only when needed.

Note that I specifically refrain from talking about the multiplayer aspect of gameplay. Multiplayer games, like sports, are intended to be a measure of skill, facing off against other real-life players in a true competition. In this sort of situation, “cheat” codes are obviously not appropriate. In a single-player campaign, however, there is no competition – it’s you against the computer. In that case, the game falls into the category of preset entertainment, like any other medium, where you should be able to enjoy the entire story. To me, cheating is where someone uses exploits, rather than skill, in a competition against other players, where people with higher skill levels are literally “cheated” out of a victory. I don’t honestly believe that you can “cheat” in a single-player game, as you are merely accessing a game’s content in the way that you wish to play it. If you wish to play a game halfway through and then erase it out of frustration, you should be able to do so – and if you wish to play a game all the way through by whatever means you like, you should be able to do that as well.

I’ll be honest – what often makes or breaks a game for me is whether I can find a way to complete it, or in the case of nonlinear games, to be able to play them the way that I want to. After all, the thing that separates gaming from other forms of media is interactivity – that is, to be able to engage with a game, to be able to play and explore in your own particular style. Games where I’m forbidden from doing that end up frustrating me quite quickly. In my mind, if a game has a campaign, I want to complete it; if it has a virtual world, I wand to be able to fully explore it; if it is a game where you build things, I want to be able to build whatever I want and see how it turns out. For me, that’s what makes a game enjoyable – having the latitude to play how I want, and not running up against artificial barriers because I’m lacking a particular skill.

Or, simply put: when I buy a game, I want to be able to have fun with it. I don’t want to be frustrated or driven insane because a game coder made a certain assumption about their potential audience. That is something I think a lot of game developers have forgotten, and I think that this is the true essence of the article – if you sell a game to an unrestricted audience, it should be fun, not frustrating, for anyone who picks it up off the shelf.

Lately, I’ve been seeing some hopeful trends in this direction. The debut of Nintendo’s W-2 (or Revolution, or anything else besides the official name) seems to indicate that one game company, at least, is looking into games that are appealing to all levels of gamers, with controls that are designed to be intuitive. Also, many game developers, especially for FPS games, have a plethora of available codes that allow for considerable customization of your gaming experience – going beyond basic cheat codes, modern games let you play with the physics of the game world, speed up or slow down time, and change most things in the game with a simple command. Even some sim games, often the worst offenders in these areas, are coming around – some, like Roller Coaster Tycoon, have a dedicated “sandbox” mode that allows you to build to your heart’s content.

Of course, there are always those games that do not conform to this – Warhammer is still driving me crazy, and I don’t think I’ll ever forgive GTA: San Andreas (Second Edition) for never letting me get out of Los Santos.

In any case, if you’re a game developer, please take note: by following just one simple rule, you can guarantee that your game will appeal to everyone who might be inclined to buy it – and I guarantee you that someone who successfully completes your game, rather than wiping it from their drive in frustration, is going to be considerably more likely to buy the sequel.

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One other quick point I’d like to mention: games that adapt to player failure gracefully are much, much, much more fun to play, and are a lot more believable.

For example, I’ve recently been playing through XIII (well, in between bouts of frustration). XIII is a game that does not fail gracefully at all. If you shoot an innocent person, the game does not adapt to that choice – it merely ends the level, and you get to go through it all over again. A smart game, on the other hand, should adapt to this – your actions, for example cause you to become a dangerous fugitive, and you have to face larger and better-armed numbers of policemen. Or, for another example, tripping an alarm causes a level in XIII to end abruptly as well, while a smart game would simply alert the compound, possibly locking down security doors and forcing you to find another way around.

The original game Sin, while somewhat rudimentary in this regard, made a solid effort to adapt in this fashion – when an alarm is tripped in an infiltration, the game doesn’t end, but the defenses are activated and sentry bots start swarming your position. In another part of the game, you can fail a mission objective, which actually branches your gameplay – if you succeed, a disaster is averted, but if you fail, you have to rush to another location to prevent the disaster from spiraling out of control.

Through this sort of gameplay, you can become much more involved in the story, as it reacts to the way that you play – when you run into programmed-in barriers and arbitrary rules, you immediately lose that level of immersion, as the game forces you down a particular path. In this day and age, with the storage and processing power available to game developers, there should be no excuse for commercial-level games that can’t take player choices into account.

Welcome to Fun or Frustration!  To start off, I should probably explain the name of this weblog.  Essentially, the situation is this:  You’re perhaps not an average joe, but you’re an average gamer – maybe you’re not the best with a mouse or a gun, or maybe you’re in the same boat as many young adult gamers: you want to play, but jobs and other responsibilities mean that you can’t spend hours at a stretch honing your skills at any particular game.  You’re in the market for a game, so you hop online, or go to your favorite local store, and pick up a nifty, newly hyped copy of Game X.  And then, once you’ve freed it from the shrink-wrap and you’re about to start it up, the question pops into your head.  “Am I going to have fun all the way through this, from the splash screen through to the credits?  Or is this game going to quickly turn into an exercise in frustration?”

And right there, in that question, lies the problem.  If you’re the kind of gamer I am, if you have limited time or inclination, or if the most important part of gaming for you is that you’re actually having fun instead of slamming your head against the wall, you probably know the type of frustration I’m  talking about – the impossible boss battle, the impenetrable puzzle, the area that’s blocked off until you complete hours of mind-numbing missions – the moment when a game is transformed from a fun, enjoyable, and perhaps even escapist experience, into an exercise in mind-crushing vexation.  And in that moment, perhaps you’ve had the following thought: why did I just pay good money for a game that’s causing me to go apoplectic?  Aren’t games supposed to be fun?

My argument, of course, is that they are.  In fact, my argument, simply put, is this:  I’m paying good money for a game, in some cases quite a considerable amount, $50 or more (and yes, I am one of those people who actually goes out and buys all the games that I play).  In return, I expect to be able to use every bit of the game I purchased – every level, every function, every mode.  If there’s a story, I should get to see it through to the end.  I should be able to experience the game, ideally, as I see fit, but at the very minimum, I should be able to complete the entire content of the single-player campaign, regardless of my skill level.

It seems like it should be a simple paradigm of entertainment, doesn’t it?  If I buy a music CD or a DVD movie, I reasonably expect to be able to access the entire thing.  If I was banned from seeing the second half of a movie because I didn’t insert the disk into the drive with sufficient speed and artistic flair, I’d be up in arms, and so would everyone else.  People often claim that games should be included in that category, as another legitimate branch of entertainment, and yet all too often they fail to meet this fairly basic tenet.

Remember, a game isn’t part of your job.  You aren’t making money (generally) by playing it.  You’re playing the game to have fun, and you’re (hopefully) paying for that opportunity.  At the very least, the game ought to owe you the chance to do so.

So, essentially, the intent of this site is to talk about the challenges and requirements necessary to make games playable and enjoyable for everyone who plays them, as well as to review games not on their graphical prowess, but on their gameplay and their ability to give everyone an enjoyable single-player experience.  I emphasize single-player here in order to placate the objections of hardcore gamers – I’m certainly not arguing for any modifications to multi-player games, where the entire idea is to test your skills against other players. I’m also not arguing that games should be exclusively easy; all I’m arguing is that games should include options – varying difficulty levels, free-play modes, and so on – to allow players at any level to get the most out of the gaming experience.

In any case, welcome to the site – I hope that I can engage you in an interesting discussion about how to make games, and gameplay, err on the side of fun rather than frustration.