game design

The Problem with Retro Games

RinkuHero — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 11:34:21 -0700

There was an interesting discussion about retro games over in the TIGSource forum. I'd like to quote Chris Whitman's post about it, an opinion I strongly agree with, and then one of my own, because I feel that this is an important subject. Here's Chris's:

Personally, I don't mind if someone decides to knock out a retro game now and then. It's nostalgic and fun, and I don't have a problem with that.

Besides the nostalgia factor, many mainstream games were, in fact, better then (although we tend to ignore the majority of SNES movie license platformers, for example). There are a variety of reasons why this was so. For one thing, if a game was focused around action and reflexes, typically you actually got to play the damn game instead of having a cutscene rammed down your throat every ten minutes.

HOWEVER:

The problem is that it has become a superstition, really. I mean, say you need rain to water your crops, so you do a dance and it rains. From then on whenever you need rain, you just do the dance. Sometimes it rains when you do the dance, so you figure that you did the dance particularly well that day and got some rain.

The endless tide of retro platformers are a bit like the rain dance. Old platform games were awesome (sometimes), so people hope that if they make something with lo-fi graphics, they'll get something great too. Except that it wasn't the lo-fi graphics that made the games great (after all, those graphics were usually cutting edge at the time), it was gameplay and fun and the desire to make a well-crafted game.

But for many people it's a crutch. Instead of analysing what makes a game 'good' (for whatever your personal definition of good is), people just adopt the entire mantle of retro platforming, taking both the good and the bad things, and end up with yet another identical game to be thrown on the enormous pile of retro crap. So no one ever expands their horizons, no one ever tries to make the best art they can muster, no one ever really does anything but make the same thing again and again, constantly hoping it will, in a manner of speaking, rain. I don't mind it when someone does a well-thought out, retro styled platformer once in a while, but I do mind it when everyone does poorly planned, hopelessly derivative retro-styled platformers all the time.

Just... game design-wise we are still depending on very basic, well-established methods of creating interest. Almost all games cast you as a little man who has to fight guys. I think that there is definitely a place for that. I enjoy action-platformers and I don't want to see them go away any time soon. However, I can't help but feel that the whole community would be better if people put more effort into branching out and trying to create things which were important and perhaps spanned at least somewhat more of the enormous gamut of human experience.

And here's mine:

Although it's true that it's not the low-fi graphics and scanlines that made the games good, I feel that the brain is a malleable thing, and sometimes things which are not inherently pleasurable can become inherently pleasurable through association with pleasurable things. This is a standard idea in behaviorism, with the bell creating the saliva and all that. Fetishes also work in that way. The brain's weird like that.

So I think that has also happened in many people, and that the retro game elements themselves have become inherently pleasurable in many people just through association with pleasurable games, so games which nostalgically contain retro elements and nothing else can give pleasure through association to people who have become wired that way. And I think making games which appeal to that is fairly limiting, because they often aren't pleasurable in themselves, they are mainly pleasurable because they remind people of old games. I mean some games are literally just retro graphics and sounds and have nothing else of value, and people eat it up because of pleasure by association.

Games and Value

RinkuHero — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 19:00:23 -0700

I want to write about the topic of a conversation I had with TeeGee, another indie developer friend.

The question was whether people have the right (through games, for instance) of trying to take people outside of their comfort zones -- to get them to think harder about things, to get them more aware of the world, to do things unexpected, to do things that they might not enjoy at first but might find memorable or valuable later, and so on, or whether games should focus just on giving people want they want: entertainment, fun, relaxation, since that itself can be valuable to people.

One of his points was that we can't be sure that games which provoke thought will always have good effects; conceivably they could have negative as well as positive effects. For instance, some art has been known to provoke people into suicide. My response to that was that it's better to focus on doing good than avoiding bad, and that I'd rather take the chance and try to do good, even if it means some bad might happen as well, and that it's superior to avoiding doing anything significant, and that most people are happy and content as they are and don't need to be changed.

His main point though was that we don't have the right to change others or to get them to think differently. I didn't think it was a matter of right, it was more a matter of duty: I believe we've a duty to do good, like if we see someone dying on the street we've a duty to help them. Similarly, if we see someone asleep so to speak it'd be cruel to leave them in that state when we could enrich their life, and that they'd appreciate it much more later on, more than if we had just given them what they wanted with no surprises, something that amused them for a time but didn't impact their lives significantly one way or the other besides bringing temporary pleasure.

Another point of his is that it's annoying when someone tries to get others to think the way they do. I agreed, but said that the goal wasn't to change people's thoughts in that way, but to just provoke thought, not to get them aware of any particular things or get them on any side, but just to increase their awareness as a whole.

My point was that it is crucial to improve people's awareness, because most of the problems in the world come from a lack of reflection or forethought, and that anything that can make people live less on automatic pilot, like sleepwalkers, and more on manual pilot, more appreciative of the beauty of reality, is a good thing and good for the world, even if doing it causes temporary discomfort and and even some terribly bad effects here and there. That's my main motivation for making games.

I'm not trying to totally dismiss his point. To be fair, it's an understandable position that we shouldn't have the right to change the way other people think, that a game has no right to give anyone anything that they don't expect or desire, and that we should just meet their expectancies and desires rather than experimenting on them, and that to make entertaining games is just a service we were providing for people on demand, and to go beyond that is to violate that relationship. So in a sense I agree that it's rude to do otherwise, and it's reasonable to dislike someone who tries that on you. But I think it's important to do anyway.

I think it's important because the world is already oversaturated with anaesthetic media: mainstream movies which always have happy endings, music which doesn't break any conventions or harmonies, in general media which doesn't require much thought to interpret, because it's designed to fit into someone's worldview without stretching it very much. I view such media as forms of thought control, and I think that such things perform a disservice toward mankind, because we are not fundamentally thoughtless beings driven by automatic impulses, we have consciousness and curiosity about the world, and culture should foster that essentially human element rather than suppress it, and that to create games which just give people entertainment without giving them anything of greater value than that is a form of suppression of those important human qualities, and just adding to all the other information that has the same goal. And that, especially with indie games, we have the freedom to create works which make people more wise and more human rather than less, and it'd be a pity if indie games just became budget or "lite" versions of mainstream games instead.

TeeGee's response to reading this entry:

"My point wasn't that games shouldn't change the way people think. I think they should, but I also think the people should be the ones to make the choice if they want entertainment or enlightment.
The discussion was spawned by speculations if a casual game should feature death and other heavy topics that might be unpleasent but ultimately thought-provoking. I claim that people should be able to just have fun if they want to.

"One of the analogies I used, was that if in the Indiana Jones movie Indy would suddenly die during a chase, people would feel cheated, unhappy and guilty about enjoying the chase scene. And all they wanted was to spend a nice evening.

"Though, I also believe people should be able to pick Bergman's Seventh Seal over Indiana Jones. Thought provoking art should definitely be there, but I feel no one has the right to impose it on people who just want to have fun. Enjoyment, in my opinion, is equally important and a value in itself.

"So yeah, please, do bring more Psychosomniums and Graveyards. Just don't make my Kratos or Bejewelled diamonds suddenly preach me about the meaning of life."

Game Challenge

RinkuHero — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 13:33:30 -0700

There's a lot of talk about a game's "challenge".

I think real challenge is a game which challenges you to improve, something that forces you to become a better person in order to surpass it. Not a game that just requires quick reflexes, trying over and over until you time it right, or trying everything until you happen upon the correct solution, or requires you to read a FAQ to solve sole obscure puzzle.

I'm not saying I don't enjoy that form of stuff to some extent. I've finished notoriously hard games. I got through the "hell" level of Cave Story, and even made "hell" levels in my own games based on the idea. I finished Super C for the NES. One of my favorite games is the danmaku / bullet hell game Shoot the Bullet. I go for high scores in cactus's games and Ms. Pac Man and tons of other high-score based games. I got to Gannon in the first Legend of Zelda game for the NES, without a sword. I beat every high-score that came with the SNES game in Super Punch Out!!. I finished the notoriously random "open the map, open the bucket" game Shadowgate on the NES, without a FAQ. I finished TMNT on the NES, I finished Persona 1 for the PS1. But I wouldn't call that type of stuff challenging, because it isn't. That type of thing doesn't challenge anything other than your persistence and ability to jump through hoops. Real challenges challenge you more than that, but games that have those types of challenges are rare.

A real challenge, for example, is to finish your first game, or to successfully market it. Those are types of challenge that require creativity, gathering empirical evidence, hard work, and rational thought. The "challenges" in games are entirely different in type than real-life challenges, "hard" games don't demand much out of a person, and what they do demand it doesn't make *sense* to demand.

It makes little sense to enjoy the kinds of challenges in games (even though I do enjoy them from time to time), because those challenges are completely artificial, utterly unlike real-life challenges, and do not impart any skills that are applicable to real life. There are exceptions, there are some games that do impart valuable skills and challenge you in the ways that life challenges you -- Chess helps one's long-term thinking, FPS's probably make you better at aiming and shooting guns, and so on. And dealing with the frustration of "hell mode" challenge probably helps develop one's patience. But most game challenges are usually of the trial and error and persistence sort, the time-wasting sort, not the thought-provoking and genuinely challenging sort.

I'd like to see more games with challenges akin to the challenges we face in real life, but I'm not exactly sure how we can do that yet. I do experiment with it, though.

Oldstyle Game Development

RinkuHero — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 09:58:58 -0700

Interesting quote by Ste Pickford, found via Oddbob in the indiegamer forums.

"...when John and I first met Rare in the late 80s they introduced us to the NES. We'd already developed dozens of games on the 8-bit and 16-bit home computers, and thought we knew what we were doing, but these console games represented a massive step up in user-friendliness and playability compared to what we were doing.

"Rare explained to us that every game had to be bug free, and had to be able to be completed - they even had to send a video of the game being played through to the end as part of the submission process. In those days we, the devs, never expected to be able to complete our own games. We just presumed that some expert player out there might be good enough to get to the end. Often we just made each new level more difficult than the last by increasing a value controlling speed or number of enemies, presumably until the player died or the game crashed.

"It was a real eye opener to start thinking about the actual experience of the player - the customer - rather than just showing off how many sprites we could get on the screen or what clever screen scrolling systems we could program."