To be honest with you all, I began thinking about writing this after I watched a youtube video about the recent Thief remake called Thief vs. AAA Gaming.
I apologize to the person who made this video, but I just could not watch this video in its entirety. The creator of the video argues that the navigation in the original Thief game is better than the navigation systems in all modern triple A games today. He even says the phrase "Waypoins are the laziest kind of design" as if he was trying to make his opinion more myopic than it already is. In my opinion, it falls into all of the traps that I am talking about. My biggest problem is that the creator does not seen to even understand why the navigation system in the original Thief worked. The navigation system in Thief is meant to be a puzzle. The game gives the player a basic layout of the environment without even telling them where they are in that environment and ask them to find landmarks and figure out how to get from one place to another. This type of immersive navigation puzzle is really cool, but not all gamers want their navigation system to be a puzzle. This is where we start to understand how different taste can cause the Thief system to be bad for some gamers because the system is meant to create an element of challenge for the player, but not all gamers want to be challenged by their navigation systems. Some gamers just want their navigation system to be a functional tool, which is why a waypoint system is sometimes the best solution to the problem. In games like Skyrim and Fallout where the world map is huge, a player might just see a place on the map and want to go there, and they might want to do it is the least challenging way possible. Some might ask why someone would want their game to be less challenging, but I would ask them why they thought exploration had to be challenging? I mean, shouldn't exploration be engaging in in of itself, without the need for challenge. The engagement that someone gets from exploration is the feeling one gets when they discover something new. Now, I am not saying that the new Theif game is good or bad, I am saying that dismissing waypoint system entirely just because you don't like them might be a little shortsighted.
You might think that this is a mistake that is only done be lesser known critics like the one above, but you see it everywhere, even by very well known critics. If you have ever watched Zero Punctuation by Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw, then you might have also read his ariticle on regenerating health. Yahtzee ues the length of the article to explain why he thinks that regenerating health in shooters is fundimentaly flawed. Again, this is an example of another critic not recognizing the upsides of a technique. Regenerating Health can be a useful tool in a game designers tool kit and it can do a lot of things for a shooter. For example, regenerating health can allow a designer to tune an encounter more tightly since they will always know how much health a player will have when they enter the encounter space, which is something you don't all ways have in a game without regenerating health. Regenerating health can also give the player better feedback to wheather or not they are playing the game well. Whenever you die, the game basically tells you that you were in a situation where you were being shot too many times in too short a point of time. Regenerating health can really help get rid of a lot of variables that can cause a game to become too frustrating, but you will never understand this if you have already decided that the technique is bad.
I don't think people who make these kinds of argument understand how pretentious they can sound by doing this. When a critic says that a technique is bad, they are basically saying that everyone who likes the technique is somehow wrong, but this in in of itself is wrong. There is no such thing as someones personal taste being wrong, and I think the reason this happens is because the way the gaming community goes about game criticism might actually be the thing that is flawed. Game criticism seems to always be about trying to convince your audience how you think games should be made as opposed to just telling your audience how a game made you feel as an individual. On animenewsnetwork.com, during one of their ANNCast podcast about criticism, Zac Bertschy, Executive Editor on the site expressed that, to him, criticism is an expression of how a piece of art made you feel as a person. I agree with this statement a lot and I feel like critics would be doing the gaming community of favor if they started writing with this mentality in mind. Criticism should be about empathizing with another persons experience and using your understanding of their taste to figure out whether or not you will like a game or using their experience to start and interesting discussion.
If you have already decided that I technique is incorrect, then you have destroyed the ability for an interesting discussion to take place because you have already decided that all the points that the other side might have must obviously be incorrect. If critics and gamers continue to talk about games along these lines, we will continue to have problems understanding the different taste and viewpoints that we should all know exist in our community.
So people dismiss the waypoint system because they "don't like it", and your counter-argument is that some gamers might like it? I don't understand how that's an argument at all. Heading to a waypoint isn't "exploration" in any sense, the inclusion of a waypoint system precludes the possibility of exploration.
ReplyDeleteYour defence of regenerating health doesn't make sense either. If the game designer can balance a fight based on the player having full health, why can't the game designer balance a level on the player starting the level with full health? Why shouldn't it be the player's job to make sure they retain enough health for difficult later fights? Peppering health pickups around the level is a part of balance, one that game developers had already nailed a decade ago. Why would regenerating health give the player "better feedback"? Surely losing 25 health points gives the player more specific and useful feedback than turning my screen vaguely red-ish for a couple of seconds?
"Getting rid of a lot of variables" is bad game design. Those variables are where the player gets to interact with the videogame. They're the fun, interactive part.
People have already decided that these techniques are bad because they've been used for years now and have only produced bad results. If games had come along that used these techniques well, that would be one thing, but they haven't. They've only been used to make existing game genres less enjoyable.
You should really watch the rest of the video. It gets better as it goes along, and raises even more salient points about the decline of game design.
Thank you for committing. I appreciate the response, but I don't entirely agree with what you said and I would like to respond. The biggest problem I find with you argument is this quote:
Delete"People have already decided that these techniques are bad because they've been used for years now and have only produced bad results."
Yes, these decisions have produced "bad results" but ONLY from your subjective viewpoint and the viewpoints of the people how agree with you. You should NEVER treat these opinions like they are some sort of objective fact, even if the opinion is widely held. The majority can never reflect the feelings and experiences of the entire whole of the gaming community.
""Getting rid of a lot of variables" is bad game design. Those variables are where the player gets to interact with the videogame. They're the fun, interactive part."
Again, subjective. There are a lot of games that have a lot of variable to manage and they are really good. Grand strategy games are an example of this where there are a lot of variables the player need to deal with, but not everyone likes grand strategy games do they. Mario games are a good counter example to this. Mario games don't throw many different things at the player at once, most of the time the player only has to deal with one or two obstacles at a time, but people still find them fun. That's because the appeal of the game comes from the mastery over those one or two obstacles in you way.
This comes from someone who isn't a fan of the Mario games, but that's ok. I can empathize with the viewpoint of the people who do and, by doing so, better understand why they as people like that experience. And at the end of the day, that is what my article was all about.
Thank you for reading my response.
Thank you for committing. I appreciate the response, but I don't entirely agree with what you said and I would like to respond. The biggest problem I find with you argument is this quote:
Delete"People have already decided that these techniques are bad because they've been used for years now and have only produced bad results."
Yes, these decisions have produced "bad results" but ONLY from your subjective viewpoint and the viewpoints of the people how agree with you. You should NEVER treat these opinions like they are some sort of objective fact, even if the opinion is widely held. The majority can never reflect the feelings and experiences of the entire whole of the gaming community.
""Getting rid of a lot of variables" is bad game design. Those variables are where the player gets to interact with the videogame. They're the fun, interactive part."
Again, subjective. There are a lot of games that have a lot of variable to manage and they are really good. Grand strategy games are an example of this where there are a lot of variables the player need to deal with, but not everyone likes grand strategy games do they. Mario games are a good counter example to this. Mario games don't throw many different things at the player at once, most of the time the player only has to deal with one or two obstacles at a time, but people still find them fun. That's because the appeal of the game comes from the mastery over those one or two obstacles in you way.
This comes from someone who isn't a fan of the Mario games, but that's ok. I can empathize with the viewpoint of the people who do and, by doing so, better understand why they as people like that experience. And at the end of the day, that is what my article was all about.
Thank you for reading my response.