Difficulty and Rewards

News & General Discussion
1

I read an interesting article today about game design that I think is worth sharing:

Reward Players, Don’t Punish Them!

It’s an article by Chris Taylor from Gas Powered Games in which he talks about the trend towards games that focus more on player rewards than on player punishment. He also talks a bit about how to balance the difficulty levels in games a bit in order to attract (hopefully) a wider audience than you might otherwise receive. Worth noting is that they guys at shockwave.com have already echoed some of these thoughts to me in various discussions about games that would make it on to their site: offer the player rewards and more chances to succeed as games that do tend to attract more players than those that don’t.

I was also sufficiently inspired to write a new blog post with the same subject as this forum post, but with some extra commentary and some game examples:

Difficulty and Rewards

Hopefully it’s something folks find interesting, I think that this is a topic for everyone to consider and would like to hear from others. Do you consider game play difficulty and reward systems when designing your games? If so, has the focus been more about how you can make things difficult or more about how you might offer greater rewards (even if for simple successes)?

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Personally, I find it strange that people feel a need to point this out. If you find this information new or suprising, you’d do well to actually do a little formal study of game design and human pschology. You’d probably be suprised by alot. hehehe…

That aside, I ceretainly understand why people dig this idea. And I do as well, to a certain extent. But balancing difficulty really depends on your target audience and the context within the game and how far you want the game to go. While it’s good to get people to think about the nature of the reward cycles within their game designs, it’s also something you can’t really explore until your already knee-deep within a specific design. Like any product, and I’m a huge fan of Danc @ LostGarden’s promotion of games as product design, you need to understand your audince - even if that audience is a new audience. :wink: That’s when reward heavy games can come into play.

Games are interactive systems designed to create a sense of “fun” (I’m using that term in the as yet undefined academic sense) in those that interact with them. People experimenting with interacting with these systems, especially digital interactive systems, can be intimidated by them if they don’t have alot of experience with them. Because that system is virtual, they can’t analyze the system in any other ways than the ways you present or give them access to them. Sometimes ANY punishment can be too much to drive someone away; it really depends on the person and how “low” you wanna go to cater to them.

In all systems (life, games, etc), it’s about balance. Rewards are the other pole of punishments. You find a balance within your designs that are appropriate for your target at that point within the game.

3

Point taken, but I think one reason developers fall into this trap is that it’s easier to code for responding to “mistakes” and defining failure than it is to create open-ended successes.

Marc LeBlanc’s “MDA” model is actually a nice formal way to thing about balancing these things and not getting hung up on negative rules:
http://www.8kindsoffun.com/

4

This whole thing goes back to my reason for wanting my computer “games” to be more like “toys”. Children don’t get punished for playing with toy truck “wrong”, for example, by pretending it’s a spaceship instead.

And I personally like games like that … games should (IMHO) be play and entertaining, not an exercise in pointing out my repeated mistakes and inabilities and lack of dexterity.

I love the original Professor Fizzwizzle for these reasons. Level editor and no “failure” on a level. No “death” when you fall. Lovely game that.

5

pavlov’s dogs :slight_smile:

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Really? I felt the need to point it out after seeing more than a few game attempts over the years by relative newbies on up to quite experienced developers that don’t seem to pay much heed to this line of thinking. So while it might not be new information for many folks, it is likely new information for all whole range of others and only by having these sorts of discussions will the topic stay on people’s minds.

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I think each game has it’s own chemistry and should also work differently. One punishes you another one not. There are games around with a very restrictive gameplay almost annyoing but they are still fun to play. Both is okay if it fits to the game and the game just has it and works in a whole.

It’s nice to get insights to how different developers think about proper game design and i always found this entertaining and i thought you could learn something by this but in the end beside of some general stuff (which you also should be able to come up with some common sense) and trying to avoid faults they’ve done already or get inspired for a certain direction don’t overestimate this as a month later developer B will tell you something different and beside of some general stuff i doubt that you’ll make a better game by this at all. Avoiding some newbie faults: Maybe, making a good game: Nope.

Making a game is a complex task as it’s a mix of different disciplines and making something fun is even harder. You best learn this by doing so and trying to find out if you’re good in this or not. This is much more important than anything else.

Doing it brings you much further than reading about doing it!

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Games shouldn’t be anything. What’s ‘fun’ is not universal. Which is why that word is so hard to nail down a proper definition for.

There are distinct differences between toys and games. The main one being toys are open ended systems that usually leave a large part of the application of that system to the users discression, true games are designed experiences that have a defined intent.

I restate, if you find that thought intriguingly new, then you really should spend a lot of time formally studying game design, as there’s probably a lot more that would be new to you as well. It’s relatively new formal academic area, so it’s not surprising there is a gamut of people who don’t get this idea. But it’s taken from human psychology - so it’s certainly not new in that respect.

This is super true, there’s no better teacher than experience - HOWEVER - there is a lot to say for the formal study of game design. Games do have commonality and principles - learning from what came before and from those that have researched the field can teach you a lot of concepts that are very difficult to come by otherwise. Learning to design games, like anything else, is something that can help you bring your work to the next level. The more you know the further your work can go. ANYONE can design anything, but those who’ve studied design formally are better equipped for dealing with the challenges and making good decisions.

9

I’m sorry, but I have to completely disagree with both the article and the tone of this thread.

I am a hardcore gamer with relevance to these articles and ideas (Though I don’t own a PC or any consoles, and rarely play games). I believe that most games, when stripped of their challenge are nothing more than really really bad movies as far as user experience goes. Even games like the sims have challenge to them. Have you ever played the sims? If you want your sims to be clean, successful and happy all the time you have to have the strategy, skill and micro to be able to pull it off. One wrong move and you get behind with a friend sim missed, a mess uncleaned and your sim wondering when they get to relax and watch TV. Yet I have seen girl gamers absolutely work this game with the skill of a real hardcore gamer. Did they get “punished” by the game? I am sure they did a few times and had to restart to get the perfect setup. Would they still be playing it if they hadn’t ran into difficulty? I am not so sure. I know I wouldn’t have.

An example of a game that is extremely difficult and you might say “Punishment heavy” but which I think is a great, well designed game is the old ambrosia scrolling shooter Diemos Rising, which came on my eMac. I believe I started playing it within a month of getting the computer and I have never completely dropped it since. Here’s the rub: I have not yet beaten the game. I haven’t even gotten to the last 2 levels, even though me and my brother have played it on two player coop over and over with intense concentration and gaming skill. It is that hard. The question I end up asking is would I still be playing the game every once in a long while if I had beat it 3 years ago when I got the emac? I am almost certain the answer is no.

I can go on and on about gleaming crystal like fun growing in the burning hot, pressurized spaces of near impossible gaming situations. Like my even more pro gamer friend beating halo2 on legendary without dying, playing Stepmania speeded up and/or Flash Flash Revolution in general, playing Megapixel on difficulty level 9, etc. I think that difficulty in well designed games gives them long and possibly everlasting life of play, not sudden death.

You can probably tell what my difficulty in games ideas are after one run through Megapixel. It basically sums up all my ideas about games:

•Good games are not made by the number of textures, shaders, shadows and blooms, but by the beauty of the movement in the game and game characters.

•Good action games need to be able to be excruciatingly hard, but not all the time. (I agree with daveyJJ, games as toys are great too and by definition aren’t “hard” :). I just have never been blessed with any good ones of this type)

•Games are not defined by the imagery that they give. For example I would call Prey a badly designed shooter, not gruesome and scary. It would be just as bad with less blood, impaled people and with cartoon graphics, and I believe it could be made better by adding more actual gameplay elements and leaving the graphics the same. (Though I personally do not like the imagery of Prey, Doom or Postal)

•You can’t manufacture happiness by telling the player they did a good job, or by helping them along. In my experience the “reward” of happiness is generated when a player obtains complete control over the system in the game or is subjected to a new and interesting system/modification to the system and takes control of that system as well. The real meat of gameplay that makes games fun is the struggle to control the system. How that struggle plays out defines a good game versus bad.

•I think people presume a lot when they think that a game needs to be violent to attract the male audience and non violent to attract the female audience. Or likewise with difficulty. My mom plays Age of Empires 2 on hard religiously, and enjoys it.

Anyway, this is just my opinion. I have also experienced people who play games on easy and complete them quickly yet claim to enjoy it, and then the next day go back and buy another game. I guess these are the people who are talked about in the articles. If they are enjoying themselves thats great and they are possibly the new market mentioned in the articles, but even if I try my hardest I don’t think I will ever be able to make a game for them :(.

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It’s not that it’s particularly new to me (although I am always interested in reading more about game design topics), it just rung true based on my recent experience with a few games. Given that this is a community of game developers, many of whom are newbies, I thought it might be worth mentioning in case someone else finds a good lesson in it. I’m just not sure why it was strange to have felt the need to point this out, that’s all…

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Oh, and overall maybe I can claim mission accomplished in that at least it’s kicked off a discussion with a bit of debate. :stuck_out_tongue:

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I’m not knocking you for posting it - just some things seem common sense to me - but I’m certainly glad if it helps someone. I like the article personally. It’s certainly useful to those that don’t know. I’m ALL FOR any thing that educates. Game design still has some growing up to do - in the digital realm it’s less than 20 years old as a formal title on a game development team, and the more people know and learn about it - the stronger our games will become. Hell, we’re still fighting tooth and nail to establish games as art - which utterly absurd btw - just as film and television before us.

Yoggy, you’re kinda missing the point of the discussion. The article is talking mainly about bringing new people into the fold - a technique for growing the market. First of I’m arguing it totally depends on the game - because - as you clearly show, you don’t like the same things the casual market does. It depends on who you’re designing the product for. Also the reward cycle does not directly correlate to difficulty. Rewards in hardcore games are just the same as in casual games. The same principles apply.

I think it goes without saying that you usually want to provide a range of difficulty within the game play experience - this is level design. You make levels more and more difficult to attempt to keep the player engaged - though the core mechanic better be damn good if you’re gonna drill on that one mechanic the whole game. The Easy-Extreme mass difficulty adjustment is really just scaling the levels in mass - sometimes it’s more or less effective. But you can also just design one solidly balanced experience that starts easy and “flows” all the way up to extremely hard to end the game. Games that don’t do this well are bad games - regardless of how over or under the top difficult they. You need to start with a base level of your target audience and work your way up. In a hardcore market, the bar is higher because you’re generally operating in a defined genre with certain conventions you can rely on to make the experience more complex.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH… You just talked about one. The Sims is not a game. It’s a toy. It’s a sandbox with no objective. You can’t win.

I’m also not sure why you bring in the arguements about aesthetics (graphics, violence, etc) - I assume you’re just venting general complaints you hear about the hardcore segment from non-designers. I’d hope everyone here knows that the wallpaper doesn’t make the house structurally sound.

That’s a sad statement to make about your own abilities. You can’t understand how someone can just enjoy a designed experience? And you can design an experience for them? You should really broaden your horizons. :wink:

I’m a more of a hardcore gamer as well; I love complexity in my systems, but I can appreciate the whole spectrum. From board games to card games to toys to casual to hardcore. They’re all games and they’ve all got something to teach.

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Fair enough, I can’t argue with that at all. Yet as humans there are times when common sense items still need explaining, and that in all parts of our careers and lives. :stuck_out_tongue:

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But it depends of course on one’s personal definition of “winning.” Winning is playing and enjoying the game for me. I’ve stated that, in general, I personally dislike zero-sum games where there is one winner and one (or more) losers.

I tried to make sure that my opinion about games is just that, my own personal opinion. I want other people to like games for different reasons than me.

Some people love FPS games, to me, it’s all the same thing just with different graphics and settings. Halo is Castle Wolfenstein is Call of Duty etc etc etc.

To me anyway.

I like games (and toys) that break way out of the mold or completely redefine the genre they are fitted into. I’m just personally not much into being punished during my game … I like to play and explore and build more than compete. But that’s the child still in me talking.

But again, this is all my opinion … everyone should enjoy whatever games they like for their own reasons.

15

I agree mostly with dranore’s post.

I am not so sure… With a toy it is all about “Look at how cool this is!! Its fun!” Even though the objective is user generated content in the sims I think it is still very much a game rather than toy.

Yep you hit the nail on the head there :slight_smile: I guess it doesn’t make much sense for me to say that but I have been wanting to for a while. I typed it out as just another part of “What you can probably tell about me by playing Megapixel”.

Maybe I should. But I don’t want to :stuck_out_tongue: Mostly at this point I make games because I enjoy it.

Thinking more about what I said, I am realizing that what I don’t think I could bring myself to make is not really a casual game, but a casual game like all the others that exist right now. I bet I could make a game casual gamers could enjoy, but I couldn’t make Dodge That Anvil in it’s current state.

16

I’ve gotten a lot of personalized responses about Big Bang Reaction from older women who simply love it because they can’t lose.

A lot of the games Yoggy mentioned (the ones I’ve played) I’ve quickly brushed aside because I don’t get any enjoyment out of jumping through game developers’ arbitrary, sometimes poorly designed, hoops. There’s the personality type that likes “beating” a game, and there’s the type that doesn’t give a care about it. The article is reminding people about the underappreciated non-competitive gamer.

-Jon

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@Dranore
Yep it’ compareable to other fields as well and like there it’s also the same here: Some study it and can come up with something good or okayish, some still don’t get it and some just start doing it on their own and create much better stuff because they have a talent for what’s important in games.

Mostly those write and blabla about gamedesign who’ve never done a successful (or a game at all) on their own. And often you find those people teaching game design at game academies or at least talking a lot about it all the time. You really find those guys on each list: Never finished a game but talking about it. Draw your own conclusions…

And even if you hear speeches of people who know what they are talking about and proofed this for years in the industry. It’s just their way not yours. It might be right for project A but again project B is very different again. Even with guys like Miyamoto (and he’s so honest and points this even out).

For my taste i’ve found out that mostly the old guys in the business are still making the best games, not those coming from game academies or keeping in mind what might portals want. The early days breeded some special persons for this art form. Some of them are just im memories for the great game they once did but some still are making great games. In my opinion you often feel it and thouse game have more depth and something which makes click in your mind.

Anyway different people different tastes, everyone get’s the game he/she deserves! :O)

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well i wouldn’t mind studying under Miyamoto :slight_smile:

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Sorry this is a longer post, bare with with it…

While I mostly agree with you Taumel, I do so only to a point. Some people can begin a creative endeavor and just find success - for seemingly no reason. This ‘virtuoso’ experience is not the norm however - though we’d sure like it to be. People love the romantic notion of the visionary who quits his day job in accounting or something equally boring and instantly creates a master work of his new medium seemingly by himself with little or no experience. We’re talking 0.01% here. It does happen, but usually not. Most people start out with a certain degree of ‘craptacularity’ (that’s the scientific term) and improve based on their experiences.

Formal study can only take you so far - but it really does help. First of all, it needs to be combined with practical experience - you have to put what you’re learning in to practice in order to both truly understand the concepts you study and to take those ideas further in your own thought and practice.

Education is aimed at mediocrity - I don’t mean this in a negative way - it’s just how it works. Schools and education in general are designed to get you to a baseline - create a curriculum of established material make sure everybody who goes into the system understands that base level. They do not make you exceptional - they CAN help you to be exceptional however. It just depends whether you merely absorb that information or really evolve those ideas and do something new with them - advance the field. And while some people strive to do that through theory (and really don’t hate on the academics - it’s hard work in a new field), I think you really have to practice the art to actually make your studies worth while.

Studying the design of any medium helps you to both teach you how to think like a designer (which is not natural to most people in my experience), to teach you terminology so that you can speak with others about the medium so that you might find clear understanding and therefore more complex discussions about the medium, to examine established material in the medium in a critical way and to use your terminology to discus them critically in order to learn from them in a practical way, and to learn the theory behind the medium that has been established by academics. There has been a significant amount of critical theory related to games in the last few years, and learning it helps you to improve your work from the get go. It’s not all superficial semantics. Sure you can discover some of these principles through experience, but why reinvent the wheel? Academics isn’t designed to make you exceptional, but as I said it can make you exceptional by allowing you to go above and beyond the baseline, which feeds back into academics and raises the baseline advancing the medium as a whole.

Also if you’re in a good school studying, you have the advantage of getting to deal directly with professionals and academics who can directly share their experience and give you professional contacts and suggestions and help you deal with design problems that you haven’t encountered before as you work.

No, the famous game designers of today didn’t have the luxury of studying games formally. There was literally no material on the subject aside from perhaps technical articles. However, the medium is built on their work and the thousands of years of game design before that.

If you look at other artistic mediums, even younger ones such as film and television. You find people who study it formally and people who just happen into it. But more often then not, the really excellent, most compelling work is created by the ones who’ve taught themselves through school or otherwise to truly build an understanding of the medium.

In the classical artistic mediums (painting/sculpting/etc), dare I say, MOST of the work we consider significant came from people who had a formal study and understanding of the medium and work that came before. Why should games be any different?

NOW, there is material to study - more and more every year. Just because the famous game designers of today didn’t have the luxury of studying doesn’t mean there isn’t a distinct advantage. Why WOULDN’T you study everything you can!? I sure as hell do. I’d be a fool not to. I’m loaning a scheitload of money to go back to college - and I know exactly why (and it’s not specifically what I’m advocating by the way - I just personally was in a situation where I decided it was the best course of action if game design is really what I wanted to be my life’s work - and so far it’s something I can highly recommend). There’s still so far to go. We need all the help we can get.

Never stop learning. That’s my philosophy.

Designing for Motivation

Here’s an article posted today-ish on Gamasutra. It’s a nice compliment to our discussion so far. To me it’s completely impractical and a little hard to follow - but I think it is working in an interesting direction.

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Hopefully shorter answer from me… :O)

Mainly you’re right and i agree with you but on the other side i also have some personal disrespect for it.

It’s a little bit like with music. You can study music, attend something like a rock/pop academy (leaving classics out). In the end are these the bands whose music you’re buying and listening to? In my case definately not. All the bands i like found their way very different.

I still believe it needs something inside you that you can come up with a really good game and some have this talent and most don’t. Question is how many people who otherwise won’t make it would get lost if there would not be institutes which teach game development. I guess it’s hard to answer that.

Do we need the games from the rest? For sure not. It’s like with playing an instrument on your own. Some can do it very good and some can’t. If you’re just playing for your personal enjoyment i think there is no discussion on if it’s good or not. The only important thing is that it makes fun to you. But if you want to make music for others then it get’s relevant if you’re good at it or not. No ones needs unispired or medium entertaining games. It would be much better if those people would do it for their pesonal enjoyment but there are more serious and other interesting fields you can work on in the world. On the other side you also have to first find this out.

Maybe i just would do it like well known universities do it with art sudents and look much more after whom i let attend the school and whom not and i would prefer not breeding people who fit into this buisness. Instead they should learn to make games that are more unique and make fun. I bet these are smaller classes but as i said before i don’t think that you’ll really miss the rest. Of course this also will be unfair as such mechanisms never work 100% perfectly but which one is?

As for that games are complex. Obviously full price games are much more complex than they were a lot of years ago. They do have huge budgets and insane large crews for realising a game. But still these games are not more fun to play, actually a lot of them are even less fun. In some all this effort really show up and you today somehow also expect it to be this way but on the other side there are also so many games which are so lame and i bet you would have had a better output if you had split up the team in smaller subgroups and see what they could come up with.

I’m also looking forward to more complex stuff like for instance Little big Planet for the PS3. But i also enjoy more simple games like they are available on the Wii. Now if you’re looking at such a game and bear in mind the much more powerful tools i’m not sure that this is more complex than doing a game in assembler for the C64 for instance. Different yes but more complex, i don’t think so. And for casual games it’s defiantely the other way around. It’s much more easier today making such a game than it was years before.