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Olympia High School

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The evils developers create in games

Posted by Fooliolo - September 23rd, 2011


When I speak of the bad things developers do to games, it's all the stuff that makes people groan or put them off from a game. Realistically, I don't think there's any single game that has the perfect mix of elements that create maximum fun for the whole family, even if you ignored gamer preferences. I find that exploring these evils is interesting nevertheless, and some of them even apply to real life.

Grinding
This is a pretty strong culprit. Grinding games are very easy for developers to design and make, while increasing the apparent game time or value for little cost. In return, it sucks thousands of hours out of living creatures who could have otherwise been stimulated by something interesting. Granted, if you did anything enough times, anything can become a "grind". Hell, sometimes I look at my profile in League of Legends and go "did I really grind that many games?", even though the experience is almost never the same. That is, unless you play ranked games that aren't close to platinum levels.

In my opinion, having a little bit of grinding is okay. It affords the player a rerun of previous mechanics and allows mastery. This can be a great thing if you're easily overwhelmed by new information and having to try things on the fly (not the same thing as Time Tax, although it can apply too).

Too much grinding however leads to stagnation and the putting off of players. Why repeatedly kill monsters? Because you want to level up, earn money, and become more powerful and awesome. Oh, and if you want to see the story and beat the game, you'll have to do it anyways. But wait, why not just play that other game that offers the same goodies, but with a lot less genocide? Because you don't know that it exists or what it is called. But by all means, if you actually think grinding is fun, I'm not going to stop you from doing it.

Grinding, unfortunately, has seen reasonable success among game developers, and this success has been heavily dissected and adapted for the most notorious cases: MMOs. It works well in those cases because most of the time, their games are continually being developed and don't want the players to reach "end game" too quickly, while catering to the masses. And by the last clause, I mean that the vast majority of players make pro gamers go "omg y u so terribad"; they're going to be insignificant at doing what the game demands them to do, and the few shining examples will make them feel bad. Fortunately, even bad people are good at doing the one thing integral to grinding: wasting time.

Again, I'm not opposed to game developers introducing a little grind to their games. But in case you haven't noticed it, the vast majority of them are in it for the money. Fuck man, they even throw offers in there to make it less of a grind at the price of your wallet! I'm a cheap bastard, so I'm a bit biased, but this becomes ridiculous when they decide to charge you the equivalent of a monthly fee just so you can enjoy the game with others without the ominous feeling of being the one to drag down the whole operation. Example: money gear gives stats, but expire after 90 days or something.

The finer points of why grinding has a grip on many gamers can be explained by lessons in psychology. But I'll let your imagination and Google to lead you the rest of the way.

Random Number Generators
This may or may not be associated with grinding, but the fact that there's a ludicrous reward for doing a simple little thing makes this addicting. Or for the frequently unlucky (like me), downright rage-inducing. Because while you could win the jackpot in one try, it is also equally true that you'll never ever win the jackpot. Ever.

The amount of addiction to reward-based RNG mechanics, like say you getting a legendary item for killing a slime, is at its highest when it is pure random. Any other gimmicks like psuedorandom don't encourage this behavior as much, unless the odds of winning are ludicrously low. And if you thought us humans are moronic monkeys, anything else with a brain that lives for more than 3 years isn't free from this effect either. Mice and birds that learn doing X rewards you with Y randomly go nuts doing X.

Anti-patterns
This one is more like a group of patterns and behaviors than an actual single concept. But the effect is the same: less fun, or no fun. I can only give examples as to what this is, but they all can be pointed to have design flaws.

-- Melee character versus ranged character. If the mobility of each character is approximately the same, it probably won't matter that your melee character can 1-shot the ranged character: you're going to groan and yell at the screen while you two play cat and mouse. In the meantime, for the ranged character, he's probably going to just grind your health down to zero, and he won't exactly feel as much satisfaction out of it as opposed to skillful executions. While this isn't inherently broken or nonsensical, it's an anti-pattern.

-- Developer versus gamer. I'm sure many gamers that particularly enjoy indy or solo game projects have experienced this at one point or another. Developer makes a goal so ridiculous that no gamer will ever accomplish, and it isn't exactly skill-related either. Among the hardcore medal collectors in the NG circle, the Keeper of Secrets medal from Pico's Musical Experience is a good example of this.

-- Unclear optimal use. It's just not as fun to use a skill where you could have done something better nearly 90% of the time, as opposed to using a skill where the use it clear, or at least the optimal conditions arise 90% of the time where its complexity doesn't really matter.

Time Tax
This guy explains this shit.


Comments

You should make a blog or something like that.

I read the whole thing.