whether you're solving mind-bending
puzzles in portal
managing resources in starcraft or
pulling off sick no-scope headshots in
call of duty
video games ask you to master skills to
overcome challenges
and how do they do this with carrots and
sticks the carrots are how the game
rewards players for doing well
think points better weapons unlockable
content the same way you'd give a horse
a carrot for
doing horse stuff the sticks are the way
the game punishes the player like being
whacked with a stick
lots of horse metaphors here and the
strictest punishment short of game over
the fail state death
so let's talk about fail states how
they've evolved and how they're
threatening the very existence of video
games as we know them but
don't worry it'll be fun part one the
arcades where
dying costs you literally let's go back
to the infancy of video games the arcade
failure costs lives and quarters but not
progress
if you die you simply respawn in the
exact same spot
minus one of some limited number of
lives lose enough lives and it's time to
hit up the change machine again buddy
this design was pretty smart arcade
games were meant to be quick and
digestible
and with games that sat in public spaces
the business model was built around
converting your frustration
into stacks of your hard-earned quarters
that all changed when games moved into
the home
odyssey a new dimension for your
television with the rise of console and
pc gaming
suddenly it wasn't necessary to focus on
bite-sized gameplay people were gaming
for long periods of time and i mean
long periods of time it would be decades
before developer revenue would be tied
to gameplay again
in the form of microtransactions
suddenly when you bought super mario
brothers outright you could die over and
over again
it didn't matter how long it took you to
kill that hammer brother you never had
to pay another
cent those changes weren't immediate it
would take years for games to slowly
outgrow their old contrivances
some games stayed with the three lives
in your out system for a long while
making many games impossible to beat
without cheat codes
everyone claims to know a guy who knows
a guy who beat contra without the konami
code but i have my doubts
still it was in this environment that
games evolved past the death and
quarters paradigm
and into the diverse offerings we have
today games could start to tell stories
part two checkpoints rethink and respawn
today failure usually means returning to
a checkpoint the clock and enemies are
reset and you get to try again right
it's like groundhog day or edge of
tomorrow or dating you get to learn from
your mistakes and take that wisdom with
you the next go around
i am an immortal the game provides a
little bit of punishment a minor whack
from the stick but doesn't prevent you
from completing it once you've developed
the skills there's no need to restart
from level 1-1
just dust yourself off and try again
sport even still those resets have
changed dramatically over the past 15
years
today setting you back even 5 or 10
minutes is likely to garner criticism
for poor checkpointing
or sucking ass and fosters a lot of rage
quitting and broken controllers
holy [ __ ] [ __ ] by contrast modern
games like arkham knight or tomb raider
rarely ask you to replay even 60 seconds
of gameplay this hasn't always been the
case
one of the most well-remembered console
action games has to be goldeneye for the
nintendo 64.
that game was awesome but goldeneye's
single-player missions were brutal
sometimes requiring perfect stealth
a failed mission would send you back to
the very beginning of the mission but
that sort of punishment wasn't so
uncommon for the time period until
things started to change
first game started telling more
intricate stories that's right
with stories as an increasingly critical
piece of the game's package developers
started to see how
challenging checkpointing could also
undermine storytelling
when a game has a narrative with a
beginning middle and an end replaying
the same part without ever seeing the
payoff lets all the air out and well
kinda sucks this is especially true as
games started to add cut scenes dialogue
and tremendous technical set pieces
no one wants to watch that same three
minute cut scene over and over again
the narrowing of checkpoints also
reflects an aging gaming demographic
when gaming was in its infancy it was
associated with children or young teens
for younger gamers
it's not a big deal to spend the day
replaying a mission to perfectly master
a level but i'm a grown ass man i've got
precious little time to game as gamers
get older they've become more likely to
have a full-time
job children of their own or other
obligations that would leave
less time for gaming for them being
forced to replay a lengthy section or to
continue playing for a long stretch to
reach distant checkpoint
creates fatal levels of frustration so
maybe this
narrowing of checkpoints is good for
gaming part three
frustration free gaming sucks as with
all things there are some downsides too
by smoothing over friction a developer
drops one of the most powerful
instruments in his tool kit
fear yes the fear of that stick we were
talking about earlier
since we're all just a bunch of horses
even in the virtual world of video games
dying means
loss lost money or loot or points or
respect or whatever in almost all cases
it means
loss of progress and time by minimizing
those losses games minimize the risk and
just like in real life you can't have
thrill without risk without the stick
the current wouldn't taste nearly as
sweet we all play games to engage with
that risk it's why we don't play games
on god mode without that fear of loss
there's no pleasure in the triumph
nowhere is this evolution clearer than
in the far cry franchise the console
version of far cry 2 was much maligned
by people who hated respawning enemies
dreary landscapes
and yes a jacked up checkpoint system
instead of dying an npc
friend would appear to drag you to
safety in some cases the npc could get
injured or even die in the rescue effort
nice work dude and when they did they
were gone forever if you died without an
npc friend to bail you out you were
forced to go back to your last stop at a
save cabin which could be far away and
make for tons of lost progress
to add insult to injury the map was
spread out with extremely limited fast
travel options
even getting to a mission in far cry 2
required crazy long treks across desert
and jungle where you could be ambushed
at any second
the result was a game where failure
could lose you substantial amounts of
time
effort and progress combat and far cry
could be terrifying just by virtue
of how much you could lose by failing
and fail you could
enemies were smart and accurate and how
about that infamous weapon degradation
your weapons rusted over time causing
older guns to jam unexpectedly
talk about getting the stick yet far cry
2 quickly developed a passionate cult
following
every firefight seemed to matter if you
didn't want to lose all your work and
time you had to plan
carefully to keep your wits about you
and to expect the unexpected some
masochistic fans even tried to take the
game's strictness a step
further with perma-death play-throughs
essentially these sick people would give
themselves one life
forcing themselves to cautiously inch
their way through the entire game
without a single death or reload
talk about fear of loss to this day fans
fondly
remember how engaging far cry 2 was
however they played it but as i said far
cry 2 pissed off many gamers and
developer ubisoft montreal responded to
those complaints in the franchise
sequels
far cry 3 and its successor far cry 4
removed almost all of the fear and
discomfort for which far cry 2 was known
producer dan hay even addressed the
issue directly in his interview with cvg
in the months leading up to its launch
we want to give the player the
opportunity to turn
on the action whenever they want we want
to make sure the ai
isn't just hammering you with bullets we
want to let you move around the
periphery of the area making the game
wait for you
regarding that crazy degrading weapons
thing he commented we don't want to
punish the player so the reality is that
when you pick up a gun you're going to
shoot it and you're going to be
successful
the buddy system was removed good
riddance and auto saves and plentiful
safe houses were added to the game
far cry 4 doubled down on that
modernization employing automatic
checkpoints before any significant
encounter
by far cry 4 failure rarely costs more
than a few minutes of progress the
marketing also played up the whimsy and
mayhem
the message was clear come have fun [ __ ]
[ __ ] up don't worry about making a
mistake
we won't give you a hard time about it
you have nothing to lose
and the message was well received far
cry 3 and 4 were incredibly well
reviewed and they are undeniably fun
games that anyone can casually pick up
and play for a few minutes on a relaxed
afternoon but after playing all three
games it's hard not to think that
something cool was lost when the harsh
edges of far cry 2 were sanded down
it's not just that the difficulty was
dramatically reduced it's that the
player was no longer compelled to learn
the fear of loss was gone too many
carrots not enough sticks
part 4 innovation new ways to avoid
frustration
given the fact that everyone likes to
win it's not surprising that developers
have continued to look for new ways to
help players finish their games without
pissing them off too much
games like bioshock and battlefield bad
company abandon the checkpoint for a
respawn system
instead of rewinding time the player is
remade in a fight that is still ongoing
it's almost like the old arcade games
but with infinite quarters
while common in multiplayer gaming such
systems have always been unusual in home
single player games it's like gaming
with training wheels
in bioshock dying would lead to a
respawn invited chambers without any
lost progress the cost was a little
in-game money but other than that you
could respawn infinitely you're more
like the agents in the matrix than tom
cruise's character in edge of tomorrow
the benefit
players never waste time they never have
to explore the same room listen to the
same dialogue or kill the same enemies
but bioshock's vita chambers is also a
great example of how reducing
frustration
undermines learning from risk you see in
traditional checkpoint games repeating
the same
failing strategy is bound to produce the
same result rush into a situation
without careful consideration and you
might find yourself facing a game over
screen but in a respawn game that isn't
true players can just whittle down
challenges by dying and retrying
essentially ramboing their way through
tough situations without ever
understanding
why the game keeps beating them you can
beat bioshock without ever
actually getting better at bioshock this
was incredibly apparent with the game's
big daddy fights
big daddies were the bullet sponge
bosses and they were unique in that
players got to choose when to fight them
smart players would lay traps for big
daddies and trigger them into fights
with enemy ai
beating them or at least devastating
them before firing a single shot
but a player could also rush in guns of
blazing without a thought to any sort of
strategy
the result player death lots of it and a
significantly weaker big daddy that
might be vulnerable to the second or
third attack upon respawn the player
could be rewarded for winning without
ever having to change
similar reasoning applies to the down
but not out systems that have been
increasingly common in
aaa shooters like kill zone 3 gears of
war 3 and halo 5 just to name a few
in these games instead of returning to a
checkpoint the player falls to his knees
and waits to be resurrected by an ai
controlled teammate besides the
infuriating weight for the slowest ai
buddy ever this has the same effect as
bioshock's vita chambers you don't have
to understand those games to be good at
those games to beat those games
where's the fun in that conclusion are
games still games
in an attempt to reach more players with
more diverse lifestyles and limited time
these attempts at time-saving features
are admirable but they also pose an
existential threat to what games are the
loop of learning and reward and
punishment is exactly what makes a game
a game
leave video games aside for a second and
think of a basketball you can dribble it
you can pass it you can bounce it off
your friend's forehead
but it's still a toy it's not a game
basketball becomes a game when it has
rules when is constrained by success
and loss risk and strategy this is why
the iliad is not a game
but chess is we risk nothing when we
read the iliad
except a possible paper cut it's worth
stating the obvious here it is no more
inherently wrong to reduce player
frustration than it is to say there's
something wrong with the iliad there's
nothing wrong with storytelling for its
own sake some of the most entertaining
titles of the last few years have met
that description
in gone home the player gets to inhabit
a woman returning home from college to
find revelations about her family there
are no puzzles or
fights you can't lose it gone home and
the only way to beat it
is to finish the story by the
definitions i've discussed gone home is
definitely not a game it's probably best
described as some new form of
interactive entertainment
we can make similar arguments about
games like the stanley parable and
journey
they're pretty far from being pure games
but they're still awesome but now you
see how removing the punishment of
failure in traditional games like
shooters and racing games undermines so
much of what's cool about playing a game
by smoothing
all that risk and loss we also smooth
out strategy and success
we lose engagement all because we're all
so eager to eat that damn carrot
hey guys thanks for watching we've got
more great stuff coming for you all on
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peace
you