December Days 04: Three Simple Rules

[silveradept]

[This is part of a series on video games, their tropes, stories of playing games, and other related topics. If you have suggestions about where to take the series, please do say so in the comments. We have a lot of spaces to fill for this month.]

I have three general rules for games.

1. Games should be fair.
   
   By "fair," I don't mean "easy," or "I get to win effortlessly." I mean that games should play by their own mechanics and rules, and not have separate rules for antagonists as for protagonists.
   
   This is harder than it looks, because playing any video game means playing against the machine that is processing your inputs. It is fairly easy to build an opponent that can react at computer speed and isn't affected by things that would affect humans and deploy them so that achievements or unlocking those characters depends on defeating a character that will play perfectly. Some groups use the idea of making intelligent mistakes so as to have their opponent characters behave more human. Others have done things like give the opponent a virtual controller, where they simulate the actual inputs at human speed and possible fumbles of those inputs. There's still not quite as much work that I've seen being done around making it so machine players suffer the same penalties as humans do when visual impediments come out to play, or getting AI players to be confused when trying to evaluate what action is happening.
   
   If the computer plays too much like a computer, or is set up to be able to cheat, it's not fair. For adventure games and Interactive Fiction and things like that, if a player can take an action that could hurt them and there isn't a clue somewhere that that action will hurt them, it's not fair. If a game requires the player to have outside knowledge from the game to win the game, it's not fair.
   
   And most importantly, if a game relies mostly on luck, like an RNG, for anything critical, it's definitely not fair. As someone who can roll crit failures with regularity at crucial points, I do not like being put in the position where I have to hope that the dice favor me, especially if there's not an easy save point nearby that I can reload from.
   
   If I required all my games to be fair, though, I wouldn't be playing a lot of games, because chance and randomization are a critical mechanic for a lot of games I enjoy. (I, admittedly, will often try to become as overpowered as possible so as to remove the influence of the randomization as much as possible, but that's only doable in some games.) So, we go on to rule two.


2. If a game isn't fair, it should be honest.
   
   If you're going to break the rule about being fair, be up front about it. State outright that "at max difficulty, the computer will read your inputs and react at machine speed to them," or "the optional bosses are always at max difficulty, no matter what difficulty you encounter them at," or other such things, so that the player does not have to determine this through trial, error, or looking it up on TVTropes or something similar. If the player is always going to be charged full price to build units, but the AI gets a discount, or, as happened in Warcraft, the player depletes resources from a mine at a normal pace, but the AI depletes them at one-tenth the rate while still getting full benefit, be up front about it so that the player knows going in how much the game is stacked against them. (Also, hiding achievements behind "defeat impossible odds with everything stacked against you" tasks is a way to annoy people. Don't do it, unless you are following rule one, or if you follow rule three:)


3. If a game isn't fair, and isn't honest about it, it should be winnable.
   
   There are exceptions, of course. Games with no win condition, or truly Hopeless Boss Fights aren't generally winnable, except for the high score or the need to advance the plot. Games where, for example, you have to follow a certain set of actions, and you can beat the otherwise unbeatable don't fall into this category, so long as that pathway is deliberately programmed in and the pathway is signaled such that a person could reasonably follow that path from the clues given. And, as is the case with some NIS grinders, what looks like a hopeless fight isn't, once you've ground out enough levels and enough cycles to take out the supposedly unbeatable character (but, then again, NIS tends to scrupulously play by its own rules, so it's a fair game, ultimately, even if occasionally you find yourself completely outleveled.)
   
   No, for these type of games, there is no pretense of playing fair, or of honestly telling the player that it's not going to fight fair, and therefore the gloves are off. Any cheese, any cheap, any way of exploiting the AI, finding a weakness or discovering that a very specific route will allow you victory against the otherwise-undefeatable boss counts. Because having violated the first two rules generally means the game design is not as good as it should be, and the players shouldn't feel bad at finding whichever way is necessary to win. Or at resorting to manipulation of the game state itself, with cheats, memory hacks, trainers, or other such things, because it's not any fun to fight a cheating opponent that's being passed off as legit.
   
   Some of the optional bosses in the Mortal Kombat series would fall under this situation. Losing to them didn't stop your progress, so they were more Easter eggs than serious fights. But it still isn't any fun when you can see that Smoke or Jade is moving twice as fast as you are and playing perfect counters to whatever you do. Sometimes, if you got into the right rhythm or pattern, you could beat them for one round, but then they'd come back and waste you for the next two. Those fights weren't fair, they weren't honest (because there wasn't any indication until you were in the thick of it that they were superpowered), and they weren't winnable, which made them fun to discover, but a frustration to try and actually win. And while I'm sure there are people who have done it, I play my games fairly casually, and so if defeating the character requires frame-perfect timing obtained only by playing against the highest-level difficulty characters for months upon end, I'm not interested. And stop hiding achievements behind this kind of task.

So, that's the base ideas I have in mind when it comes to the enjoyability and fairness of games. And if you hear me frustrated at a game not being fair, it's usually because despite my best attempts to play a strategic game that makes my advantage as much as it can be, I keep getting beat by "bad luck" or I have the suspicion that the machine is not playing like a human. And the game isn't being honest with me about how much it has rigged things in its own favor. It's not "I'm not having fun if I'm not winning," it's "I feel like my chances at winning are arbitrary or are actively being interfered with." Or, most recently, "Stop punishing me for playing strategically."

Comments

[batrachian]

I am reminded very much of a trend in the sort of TBS that is my Usual Stomping Grounds...

Wherein there is some flavour of stealth/camouflage/invisibility mechanic on some units. And it tends to be Completely Useless in single player campaigns because the AI will frequently and obviously name decisions that make it obvious that it knows exactly where the player's units are.

(They are perhaps more useful in multiplayer modes but my experience there is, unfortunately, limited.)

[silveradept]

Yes. That's a regular trend in games, period, it seems. If you are stealthed (unless you're playing, say, Metal Gear Solid or a game where the developers have made stealth a core mechanic), the computer will still target your units because it knows where they are and the developers did not program in checks to see whether or not that unit had been detected before being targeted.

In multi-player games, it works as intended, but I don't generally play multi-player, for reasons that are likely to be today's post. Or something.

[batrachian]

And then you realize that many of said units are weaker in other areas because they've spent build points on this useless sneaking and...yeah.

Am looking forward to your reasons for not doing multiplayer, curious if there's overlap with mine. :)

[silveradept]

Indeed. Playing with the stealth units is usually a matter of scripted missions where you have to, not because they actually are useful. And, of course, the computer player can build and use stealth units just fine.