Does static info work anymore?
The short answer is “no.”
One of the interesting questions that came up in the discussions on cheating is basically the issue of whether you can have a game design that limits information flow, in today’s Internet-based social gaming world. Does it make any sense to have games that rely on hidden static info?
Keep in mind that by saying no, you’re effectively throwing out a huge amount of types of games. After all, designers don’t want to invest in making gameplay that is designed to be circumvented. All static content puzzle-type gameplay goes out the window. So do many forms of narrative gameplay, since spoilers are rampant. That’s a lot of types of gameplay to lose.
Many of the counter-arguments to the idea that walkthroughs were cheating were based on the idea that “you still have to kill the mob.” But we also don’t necessarily want to land in a situation where killing the mob is it, especially when the lore is one of the chief attractions of WoW, IMHO.
It’s possible to model info within a game system, but it won’t be what we actually recognize as information. We can easily give an in-game token or flag that is “this character has heard bit of info XYZZY.” But at that point, info becomes just a fetch-and-carry — the worst and simplest sort of quest. In fiction-writing, we speak of “plot coupons” to collect, and all agree that’s the worst sort of plot; it often makes for a poor quest as well.
So is there a middle ground between plot coupon/key and completely static puzzle? Probably, though I don’t quite know what it is. One possible way to think of these is in terms of cryptography; you could think of the plot coupon as being like a one-time pad — the flag uses the character itself as part of the “pad,” so it is guaranteed unique. On the flip side, of course, plain old static data is not encrypted at all.
It seems that in some ways what you want is people to know some of the info. You don’t want them to know the solution to the puzzle. But perhaps the general approach. I am reminded of the old InvisiClues hint system for Infocom games — incremental info release.
Consider these sorts of puzzles:
You go to Bubba, and he tells you, “24. Now go to Buffy.” When you talk to Buffy, she says “what is 6 x 4?” You then have to tell her “24.”
Keep in mind that the math problem here is a stand-in for any sort of puzzle — a “press the buttons in sequence” puzzle, a “pick the right door” puzzle, a “choose the right conversation branch” thing… The strategy guide tells you where Bubba is, where Buffy is, and what to tell her or do. You could skip Bubba altogether. In fact, it’s possible that you did accidentally, which can put a damper on the narrative flow.
To fight that, we use flagging, which is kind of the default right now.
You go to Bubba and he tells you, “24, now go to Buffy.” You go to Buffy and she says, “I see Bubba told you the answer to 6 x 4.”
The strategy guide now tells you where Bubba is and where Buffy is. The solution now is just rote, though. You don’t have to “solve the puzzle” (meaning, do any math). The narrative flow is excellent, though, because we get to deliver whatever we want. Of course, since there is no puzzle-related content in the narrative, it is pure window-dressing. You probably don’t bother reading it.
(Sharp readers will have noticed that the step of “find Buffy” is itself potentially a puzzle of one of these sorts. If you have a waypoint right to her, well, then, it’s a plot coupon. You are pushed through the walking process to get to her, but it’s just rote too. The puzzle of “find Buffy” has been elided from most modern MMOs because”finding” is regarded as a tedious sort of puzzle most of the time. Note that it doesn’t have to be.)
There is an interesting extension to this one that some quests do:
Bubba hands you a token that says “24” on it, and tells you to go to Buffy. Buffy takes the token and says “Ah, the answer to 6 x 4.”
The main difference here is that you can give the token to someone else. It enables a sort of “information economy.” You “lose” the knowledge of what 6×4 is, and someone else gains it. It can be traded for money.
OK, so what’s a sort of half and half solution?
You go to Bubba, and he tells you, “4. Now go to Buffy.” And Buffy says, “What is 6 x your number?”Ā In this scenario, the 4 is different for everyone. When you come to the puzzle, it is tailored to you. The strategy guide can’t give you the answer, but it can give you, well, a strategy (“use multiplication!”).
This is akin to what happens with combat in a quest chain. “Kill the vampire blocking the way to Buffy!” is essentially a half-problem, because half the puzzle is what your capabilities are. The vampire is the “6” and you provide the “4.”
There’s interesting stuff you could do mixing this with the “info as object” thing.Ā What if there were not one token to gather, but hundreds, and you assembled some of them as a poker hand, so to speak?
You visit Bubba, and he gives you the violet leaf. You visit Boffo and you get the purple leaf. There’s blue and red and green ones out there too — a whole rainbow. You visit Buffy, and she says “Violet plus the pink I have… and the purple means addition. Using additive blending, what’s the final color?”
Now, part of the trick to using this sort of gate is that the stuff that you bring to the challenge has to be pretty diverse. It can’t be a simple limited set.Ā It effectively has to be a repeatable problem with statistical variation. In effect, it has to be a game system now, and not a puzzle. The different color leaves is not very different, from a game grammar perspective, from bringing different classes or equipment to a fight.
Making a game for every quest is a tall order.Ā But a bigger question is whether you can find a game system that fulfills the “quest itch” — after all, the people who quest are often doing it because they enjoy the puzzle-solving process. An exercise to go through might be to take a classic adventure game, like Zork, maybe, and try to find “game’ equivalents for each of its puzzles.
38 Responses to “Does static info work anymore?”
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Some gamers are so completely helpless that they can’t solve a quest without someone holding their hand the entire way. Others like to at least take a crack at exploring the landscape, in order to find the foozle or the npc we’re looking for.
WoW, for those who bother to read the quest text, lays things out pretty well. When the quest says to go look for the hermit living near the grove of trees just north of Nelfburg, it only takes a little searching to find the hermit. I sometimes still do have to resort to hitting one of the spoiler sites. But, one of the first ways that WoW stood out for me, compared to previous games, was that the quest tells you where to go, and it’s almost always easy to find the solution, if you read and follow the directions.
So. You don’t have to “spoiler proof” your quest content. You just have to create good quests. People who want to explore your landscape to look for the target will then have the option to do so. People who want to be spoon-fed will head for the spoiler site. Speaking for myself, I’ve been playing these games for a while, and nowadays I find it more fun to try a new quest first, and only resort to spoilers if I’m pressed for time and/or can’t figure out what to do. Especially in a game like WoW, where they usually give you all the clues you need up front.
Hmm, I would actually say that in WoW, there is no puzzle to finding the hermit and equivalents. They always tell you exactly where to go. š No exploring really necessary. I am not sure that is “a good quest” by definition. It’s barely quest-like at all. If you know exactly where to go, why not just get teleported? If you know where to return to, why have to walk? In CoH you can just use a phone. š
Something that’s interesting to me about this whole debate is how we’re dealing with similar questions in the Education field. Actually a *lot* of the challenges faced in game design are similar to the ones I’m encountering in Instructional Design. But then that shouldn’t really surprise anyone who’s read Raph’s book.
Anyhoo, there’s a real question right now about how Google & other quick, efficient forms of data retrieval are changing the nature of education. Some think we should bar access to such resources to preserve the integrity of the educational process. Others think we should shift our focus to teaching students how to solve problems by applying the information regardless of how they obtain it. It’s an interesting challenge, and there are compelling arguments on both sides. I’m pretty sure the answer lies somewhere in the middle.
Well, I don’t really like NPC chatter as I find it less immersive, but if one insists then I think a quest generator with natural-language generation will be the best solution.
Just make it hard to identify which quest you happen to be following. Like a murder-mystery. You don’t know what comes next. So you can have a relatively static design of the dramatic components, but replace all the “nodes” with generated content.
You’ll need a lot of quest-designs for this to work, of course. Around 1000 perhaps.
I have a hard time calling those things you get from punctuated WoW npcs “quests” but they certainly are good. They are the most ergonomically-designed xp grinding affordances I’ve ever experienced.
Not to get too off topic, but…
“Some think we should bar access to such resources to preserve the integrity of the educational process.”
Wow, I think that’s just silly, not to mention basically impossible. The information is out there and it’s only going to get easier and easier to access. Really, we should be learning how to tell (and confirm) information is accurate, as well as what we should do with it once we have it.
Anyways, on topic, a majority of WoW’s “quests” were what I would call “XP tasks”. They were basically a pre-written version of SWG’s missions (ie: go kill/do A because B). In SWG you would get an exact waypoint, in WoW you have directions and/or a website quest guide. The only reason people really do them is for XP/rewards, not because they are fun to do on their own.
However, in WoW, every so often there would be a “puzzle” like quest thrown in. I can remember in one instance you find a bracelet (or ring?) with someone’s initials on it. I remember running around Ironforge looking at NPCs until I found the right little gnome (actually, the little yellow dot appeared on my radar and ruined it). While it wasn’t terribly exciting, it was kind of fun. Of course, when my girlfriend did the same quest, she immediately asked who and where he was (to her, I was a handsome alternative to Thottbot). With her, it wasn’t fun to have to run around looking, it was easier to just lean over and ask me.
I think generated content has its place (and again, I lump most of the generic WoW “quests” into this category). Sometimes you just want to do a quick task for a quick reward, and not have to think too hard about it.
What we really need is both. Have a bunch of generic WoW/SWG type tasks you can do for a quick reward, but then also have larger more involving systems with what Raph was speaking about. It really doesn’t have to be one or the other as long as the rewards are fair.
I’m in Australia. Most US TV shows are shown 6-ish months later here than in the US. I could go easily go online and learn the plot well ahead of time, but I don’t.
Why? Because knowing the plot harms the experience.
When playing WoW, I only used Thottbot when I was stuck (such as not being able to find an underwater treasure that I needed for being a druid). Conversely, my friends used it all the time, to choose which quests had the largest payoff.
I think it comes down to the player’s personality and game design. If players see the game as being about getting to level 100 the quickest (aka: achievers) or defeating other players (aka: killers), then static sources don’t work. If the game ISN’T about that, and doesn’t encourage that behavior, then it should work.
Great post.
However, you picked number 24 to prove a negative example which could be transcribed as 24 negative one, or 24 – 1 = 23. Raph Koster is illuminati. Ultimate proof.
One of the things we are doing in LunarQuest (an educational MMO experiment) is to hinge progress around the player’s ability to acquire knowledge, which only comes from playing small flash-based mini-games embedded in the MMO’s UI. The games are designed such that it isn’t an “If it is question 5 the answer is B” type of challenge which helps guarantee the player themselves (as opposed to Google) has solved the problem.
That said, because the games aren’t built around fixed answers, if the player does look online or asks their teacher or a friend for help, that’s actually a good thing. The outside knowledge isn’t solving the problem for them, but rather helping them understand how to solve it themselves. The textbook becomes the “cheat guide”, which is good if it gets the student to read it. Who is going to complain if the student says, “I couldn’t figure out the vector addition game, so I read chapter 12 and figured out how it works and now I solved it.” anyway?
Progression and leveling is tied explicitly to these knowledge tests, so if a player is level 10 we know they got there by explicitly showing mastery of a number of subjects via the minigames. You can’t level up by doing 100 addition problems instead of the 5 hard linear algebra problems for example. We integrate them into the storyline so there is say a problem with robots getting off course when they cross an ore conveyor belt on the lunar surface, and need to be “reprogrammed” to not drift off course on the conveyor, just like a person swimming a river. The player does this in a minigame that teaches them about vector addition. Once completed the player gains the “Robot Programming” skill that lets them go have fun with robots in a non-educational way, so again progress into new areas of the game is tied explicitly to showing knowledge mastery.
Wouldn’t forking the quests give you a lot more variety?
You go to Bubba, and he tells you, ā4. Now go to Buffy. Or maybe Fluffy, her sister.ā And Buffy says, āQuick, give me the number x 6 so my sister doesn’t get it, I so totally hate her.ā
Btw exploring with rewards is easy in WoW. Just don’t read the quest descriptions! Go to a new area, pick all available quests, go explore around. When you’ve satisfied your curiosity and returned the quests you bumped to accidentally, go and read the descriptions of the less obvious quests.
Trenton wrote:
Fun makes you laugh. Pleasure makes you smile. Wii Tennis, for example. Fun comes from competitively whacking the ball around. Pleasure comes from achieving higher and higher scores. We, as humans, naturally and ultimately seek pleasure. The problem with a lot of games is that they make experiencing pleasure too simple and easy, and thus, the fun is generally too brief or left out entirely. If there’s a destination, then the journey to that point should offer moments for players to remember. Unfortunately, most of these journeys are plain, boring, and nothing special.
Franz wrote:
This Illuminati? Or he could have been thinking of television shows…
Like any MMO, there’s good quests and there’s bad quests. There are a lot of good quests in a lot of worlds. They’re just lost under the huge quantity of so-so and flat-out boring quests. Yet another example of signal/noise.
This is a catch-22. Why spend development time you know nobody’s going to read. Why read quest text you know isn’t going to be interesting?
To me, the answer is deeper. If you want quests to be any more than window dressing around tasks, you need to bring back accountability. Quests, static or formulae-based, need to branch, to change the character’s standing in the world in a real way (not just whether you advanced a rep grind or didn’t advance a rep grind). Players need to be given actual choice with real impact on what they do. If you want to get them to read the text, you’ve got to immerse them in a story relevant to the medium.
And if you do that, you also need to let players slide towards one side or the other, rather than forcing them to make an uninformed choice when they first launch the game.
Yes, this is a lot more taxing on resources than simply continuing the linear pure-positive reinforcement model we have. But with WoW having capped that particular path, I think it’s finally time to move on to something new.
A Tale in the Desert did a bit of this – most of the game systems were fairly decipherable, but several were never described in any detail and were complex enough/hard enough to observe that they were never figured out (as far as I know, mushroom growth patterns are one example of this). Paint-mixing was unique for every player, and I think some of the other chemical processes are similarly driven. But IIRC one of the larger-budget MMOs (AC?) tried something like that with the whole magic system and was too-quickly reverse-engineered. Why – size of playerbase? payoff from decipherment? social contract?
[…] have no idea what he means by that, but I’m confident that he agrees with me. Go read his entire article and then come back. You’ll appreciate my smaller words and smaller concepts. I guarantee […]
@Tom
Yeah, Asheron’s Call had ‘individualized’ components for the magic system. I remember standing in a mana pool fizzling my way through different colored tapers…
Actually there’s a strong argument for *not* randomly generating WoW’s quests, and that’s SWG’s mission terminals. One of the strengths of WoW’s quest system is how it moves you around from area to area and gets you to fight a variety of mobs. In SWG you kept refreshing the list until you got the mobs you wanted in the location you wanted; essentially you got to hand-pick every quest, and since the optimal path to advancement is to sit in one location killing the best mobs for your level… well, that’s when it really becomes a grind.
Of course you could just not let people choose new random quests until they did the old one, but then you’ve got the problem of making it difficult for people to group together because they won’t be in the same areas or after the same objectives. Then you could let people share their random quests, but that means everyone effectively has 5x (or however big your group size is) as many quests available. So then you cut back on quest rewards to compensate, and all of a sudden you’re forcing everyone to group in order to level.
And everyone still hits Thottbot to find the general areas where their random quest targets might be found.
So random content is doable, but it’s got a whole host of issues of its own that must be designed around.
Regarding the education thing, yeah, I know it’s night impossible to block people from accessing information in today’s connected society. But a lot of folks in education don’t; all they see is the incredibly difficult process of completely redefining the fundamental nature of education. I happen to believe that this paradigm shift is for the better, and is actually long overdue. Still, there is a legitimate need to prepare people for circumstances where they don’t have web resources to fall back on. Game design and instructional design have a lot in common, but MMOG designers have a lot more room to change the game to suit the demands of their players while educators must prepare their students for an external reality that isn’t usually as easily changed.
Accepting multiple solutions is one way to preserve the value of static information. For example, in Bioshock there were several combination lock puzzles. If you’d found the combination, you could just enter that and open the lock. Alternatively, you could hack the lock, and play the hacking minigame. Or you could just pay the cost to autohack the lock. The player chooses whether to use knowledge, skill, or money to solve the problem.
I think one needs to make a distinction here between “puzzle” and “quest”. Finding the hermit is clearly not a puzzle in any strong sense. But I think it *can* (depending on implementation) be an excellent quest.
“Quest”, to me, implies a certain amount of narrative/story content. But this content need not (and often *should* not) be word-based. The terrain you go through to get to the hermit can tell an effective story, which is why it is worth walking there as opposed to teleporting.
Even in the largely excellent WoW, such narrative-by-environment is more the exception than the rule, but I think it’s worth recognizing as a powerful tool.
What’s wrong with looking it up if that helps them learn how to solve it not just the answer? Textbooks are essentially cheat guides. Don’t block it, work with it.
I’m imagining a system where the player and choose what quest (or job or minigame or whatever) they play next by combining a token from one resource (NPC or location or achievement or whatever) with any other. So you’d need to build n^2 (-n if you can’t double up) of the quests (or maybe less if some token combinations were mutually exclusive) but then there’d be this whole meta-puzzle of trying to map out what combinations result in what options and who likes what things and so on. Even cooler if you can spend tokens essentially as powerups during those quests and the powerups are variably helpful. SO that layers on risk-reward of spending potential access to other quests/games for advantages in this one. And the whole economy implied by “info as object” is another huge game — presuming there are several kinds of currency to exchange.
Above, Tom mentions ATiTD. That’s the first thing I was thinking of in response to some of your discussion. There mostly aren’t little quests in the nature of WoW, CoH, et al. but instead, huge collaborative puzzles that might take teams of smart and dedicated players years to finish — or they might never. How many overlapping things like that do you need in a virtual world before you have sufficient content for the players to chew through? I could see how *maybe* devising enough of this kind of content would cost a dev team fewer hours than would devising the massive array of more questy content that would occupy a player-base for the same period. Yes, no?
This is intriguing, but I’m not sure I get it. I don’t really remember the actual puzzles, but if one is like: go here to get this thing (maybe a rock), go over there and use it in some novel way (say, to break a bottle) to produce a new thing (broken glass — a lens or blade) so that you can transform something else into another (sunlight into a flame or hide into leather strips), then how do you create a game (system?) to replace it? How does the new game tie to the old puzzle?
What about looking at the definition of “quest” itself? We may be all assuming we mean the same thing when we talk about quests in MMOs.
By and large, MMO mechanics simply haven’t evolved… Lum’s old toilet scrubbing analogy could still apply. You advance by thwacking stuff, and advancing means getting to thwack stuff that’s bigger or differently colored (rinse, repeat). The limitations of this mechanic impose limitations on what a quest is then able to be.
On the other hand, since WoW was mentioned, I know that WoW’s quests were likely the only reason I got a character to max level (first time I’d done so in any MMO, truth be told). For me, the primary purpose of the quests (the personal purpose I had in doing them, I mean) was to give my actions context and purpose: I was playing to uncover more plot, to find out what happens next, such as why the goblin needs these dang lizard scales anyway. WoW was *great* about that, as I could trust that the resolution would be interesting or amusing. The quests were, essentially, the storytelling mechanism, and I didn’t look for them to be anything else.
Now, if the purpose of a quest is to deliver story bits at specific intervals, WoW’s did that. If the purpose of a quest is to channel player behavior (such as where they go and when), they did that too. But, if the purpose of a quest is to propose a challenge for the player to attempt, WoW’s only rarely did that, if ever. Killing X number of Y critters isn’t a challenge if both the quest and the critters are color-coded to tell me whether or not I’ll win (putting the discussion of choosing to attempt an out-of-depth encounter aside).
From this, my thought is that “quest” is going to have different, situational definitions, with situational constraints. This may be stating the obvious, I dunno, but some of it is going to come down to what the engine allows, some is going to be what the designer(s) feel quests ought to be in their game (what definition they should use), and of course the players are going to have different demands for what quests ought to be (What should quests award? Should they be optional or required? Etc.). It might be okay for quests to be static, or spoiler’d, or simple, if the purpose for having the quest there is still served. And yes, fun is a purpose for having ’em, but I’m not takng a stab at defining fun. š
I mean, one could make a game where all the quests were mechanically encrypted, but that could be like sandblasting a soup cracker in practice. Shouldn’t it be more about what purpose you’re having them serve?
I was thinking in terms of stuff like picking up the bar in the echo room. There’s a complicated puzzle involved in removing the echo from that room. Is there a way to turn that into a game, rather than a puzzle, so that there isn’t just one solution to it?
Lockpicking is an example of something that has turned into a minigame in recent shooter/RPGs. You have hacking minigames in BioShock and Mass Effect, for example. The advantage here is the repeatability. Could we come up with a set of 20 minigames that covered all 20 of the treasures in Zork?
[…] Cheaters, the lot of you! I normally disagree with him pretty strongly, but I’ve found these two posts by Raph Koster rattling around in my head quite a bit this morning. I agree with the cheating […]
An old game that stands out for me is Dreamweb. One detail that always separated it from other adventure-like games was the sheer abundance of items. Every room was literally littered with pixel-sized interactive objects. Perhaps one of them was useful to progression. While the overall story was directed, it didn’t feel like it. Or perhaps it’s probably just nostalgia talking.
The problem with quests is repeatability. Even if they have randomized clues, they are still just randomized token paths.
Original System Shock also featured such detractions with cyberspace and hacking, which was present just enough not to be a nuisance. But too often, in such games, the choices are far too expensive, perhaps the lock-picks are so rare that player only gets two during entire game, so one saves them till very last moment, and ends up not using them.
Challenges are transient. One either overcomes them, or fails. The “Quest For Fire” was once great achievement, and only the bravest and strongest men of the tribe dared capture it. These days making a fire is trivial and irrelevant. No matter how interesting one makes the journey, nobody will find making the fire trivial. Except if one is Tom Hanks grouped with Wilson. Same applies to every quest in MMO. It doesn’t matter how convoluted it is, it’s just an reward bag, with nothing else. It was done before and will be done again, and is being done at this very same time by 5 other spawn campers.
Probably the greatest obstacle here is the persistence and immutability of the world. A player is never allowed to change anything permanently, and saving a dying brother in the last second just to see him being mortally wounded two seconds later gets old quick. Oh, you’re here to fight Napoleon? The line starts back there, it should be about 2 hours. He’s only been defeated 58 times today, and a ninja looter is camping it for greens.
A great way to spice things up would be to conjure up a solution which would allow players to semi-permanently affect the world. Stopping the plague improves the farm’s lands, crops grow, water turns from green to blue. For me, that would be considerably bigger improvement to quest rewards and purpose behind them, with either boring or interesting mechanics. As long as this quest is semi-one-time only. For example, the result of quest for plaque may diminish over time, and plague returns, but it’s not removable through same quest from same NPC in same way.
Perhaps an impossible task, perhaps even a non-desirable task, given that many players prefer rigid walkthroughs and abstraction of quests as time deterrent to max level.
Having recently played Zelda Phantom Hourglass, it occurs to me that it is almost entirely static puzzle. It also aggressively avoids “plot coupons” – indeed, it has the clever system of allowing you to write on the in game map to record your own notes.
I’d actually argue that there are very good qualities to static information. It’s information that can be discussed, it creates a predictable world with familiarity etc. I don’t see a crisis in static information at all.
I think more than static information we have a problem with too designer-centric assumptions about what fun is.
Let me give an example: Portal. This is actually static design so I could go to a strategy site for assistance. I didn’t. I played it for a while but then stopped. I realized that I wanted to play games that mostly relax and solving portal riddles was too mentally straining after a long day at work. If portal was less static it wouldn’t have helped at all with that mismatch in what the game was designed around and what I wanted from the game. In fact I could probably stomach some more portal, but only because it is static and I can look for help that’ll reduce the mental load that I don’t actually want.
I think portal is a good game, but it’s good independent of it’s staticness. In fact staticness gives more fine control over the quality and difficulty which in my mind is why WoW is so static, it does have a lot of fine tuning in difficulty for it.
And static information does support the meta-game and social exchange, because someone else can help by sharing information. That’s actually good.
That gamers might know things through someone else helping is actually not a bad concept at all and I think it’s smart to embrace that rather than try to hide information or make it excessively dynamic.
As for questing, I think there too are multiple motivations why people like it, and puzzle solving is but one of them. Other possible reasons are lore/storyline related to the quest, seeing new aspects of the game, prospect and actuality of short-term rewards, additional structure instead of killing 1000 times the same mob.
Only the puzzle motivation would suggest complexifying quests, people who see short-term reward or want to progress their story line may find it frustrating to have to mull over a complex puzzle when solving complex puzzles is not their prime motivator.
I look at it as a matter of purpose and positioning. If the puzzles are positioned as “gateways”, as Raph put it, then the natural tendency is an attempt to circumvent.
If however the puzzle brings with it a memorable experience and a deeper learning which ultimately helps during the game then I tend to engage.
Instead of singular outcomes, as in the example a number, if we modeled the solution in a multivariate manner. Where there is no single best way to solve the puzzle, but a multitude of combinations ultimately leading to a memorable experience. This could drive better usage. To simplify, if the puzzle / mini game produced a set of skills which aided the player along the journey, which is signified by a score, or other such measure of the experience, then circumventing doesn’t hold as much value especially when other mini games become increasingly difficult and rely upon previously learned skills.
Another thought would be to ensure that a mini game be customized to the player and the memory of the experience threads through into the continued story line. Perhaps this could be extended even further to the point that the player’s experience with the game affects the lore of the world.
[…] has an interresting post about game design, where he talks about different puzzle and questing techniques that game […]
I’ve always thought the obsessional energy people have for solving game puzzles could be used in education. It seems kids especially are hardwired to soak up every minutiae of lore surrounding them. Probably some evolutionary selection pressure going on there.
I’m glad people like Tim at Lunar Quest are using this to teach. Maybe we should make games with some puzzles that require level 3 in Electronics or Chemistry with realistic outcomes being the metric of success. (Say rewiring an alarm or repairing some equipment.)
That then turns the ‘problem’ of players learning the static content into an educational solution.
It also means we’re actually doing something constructive with our time learning things with some real use afterwards. That has to be better than mindlessly killing things. I no longer want to play games that reward me for killing things, especially as they become more realistic. Teach me electronics in a fun way, and I’ll pay to play that ‘static’ content.
Tom,
Good point about players reverse engineering (or trying to) interesting game systems. For me, by far the most enjoyable game mechanic in MMOs, if not games as a whole, was Bioengineering in SWG.
If you aren’t familiar with it, basically you went out and “DNA sampled” five wild critters. Each sample had a whole bunch of stats (over 20) which weren’t described in the manual. The samples were “combined” in an order which was significant but not described in the manual. You could then “experiment” to tweak the stats of the resulting template and use it to create a pet that you could sell to other players.
Bioengineers spent a considerable amount of time running the numbers and trying to figure out what all the stats did, how they combined, what the effect was of the order of slotting them. Reverse engineering the system, basically. And we almost did it. We could make a pretty accurate estimate as to the result of combining any given samples and we were able to use that knowledge to plan out and fulfill custom orders from players who wanted to buy animals with specific stats. But we never cracked the challenge level calculations and we never quite figured out why the game would allow us to make level 10 animals (the highest that could be called by players who hadn’t invested skill points in Creature Handler) with insanely high stats.
The Bioengineer loved the aforementioned mission terminals. They were an easy way to get an exact waypoint to a particular mob type. But not all mobs appeared on the terminals. The career Bioengineer knew in which regions of which planets to find specific mobs in the wild, and was by necessity a master of aggro management.
The actual game mechanic to support this was, when you get down to it, pretty simple. A bunch of stats and a black box with some formulae inside. Yet it kept me busy for months and months. I would literally spend entire play sessions just running around sampling random mobs and recording their stats. It was much more interesting than the “go here, do that” quests that I’d do once and forget about. There’s nothing as boring as a problem already solved.
furrycat, sounds like breeding Flax (and bugs and other things) in A Tail In The Desert. Some serious research got done to find out how to make best yielding Flax and so forth.
Yesterday I got stuck on this new RPG I just purchased (Monster Hunter). Was stuck on a Quest and went online and read a walkthrough to get me past it.
Now, its okay to present a dynamic puzzle if its a side quest I suppose. And then it would have ‘meaning’ if the gamers get past it. You could give them ‘badges’ and titles (like Problem Solver).
So, for “required Class Quests” I would let those remain Static perhaps. So that those that get stuck can acquire help. However, if it is a dynamic puzzle I suppose the bonus is they would have to pay/hire someone to help them get through it. But you see the challenges developer’s face here.
I wrote a blog similar to this on my site called “Optimization, Patters, and Routine” a few months ago. The basic thing I was talking bout if players “know” of challenges in advance then they can optimize how to get around. Tactical Transparency = static. Dynamic = realtime problem solving and sort of breaks optimization (unless there are emergent patterns).
I love topics like this keep it going
[…] Raph had a post that got me thinking. All of my games feature some kind of information system. That’s a bit misleading, though. All games are entirely about information processing. […]
Portal did ridiculously well and the puzzles in it are as static as they come.
There will always be people who would rather solve a puzzle than look up the answer; niche audiences continue to grow as far as I know.
I think the actual issue is the fact that in WoW and similar quest-driven games.. it’s multiplayer. There is a strategic advantage to be gained by solving puzzles frequently and as fast as possible. The root of that strategic advantage is the fact that you gain things from the quest that do not actually relate to the quest at hand.
“Go give Thromus this message and you can have this hammer and some experience.”
But according to that logic, the only solution would be to.. not reward players for completing the quests. Which seems very counter-general-MMO-ideology, since most gain their appeal by simulating advancement.
Kinda sketchy and just thrown together, but it seems to me that you would have to ACTUALLY reward the person playing with an enlightening experience.
Difficult to say the least, and people still make strategy guides for Myst.
One of the problems with multiplayer situations is that someone else is likely to spoil the puzzles for you whether you want it or not. For example, there are lots of static puzzles in D&D Online missions that present challenges the first time through, but get one person in the group who’s been there before, and the experience changes.
The player who wants to solve puzzles on his own shouldn’t have the experienced spoiled by other players, which I guess is an argument against static puzzles.
I posted some thoughts back in June about modeling natural obstacles in an MMO, and one of my criteria was “spoiler resistance.” I think the question of static vs variable information depends to some extent on how active the solution is. A hole in the ice is pretty easy to avoid once you know where it is. Freezing temperatures can’t be avoided, but can be mitigated. Here the challenge is a) finding the right equipment to deal with the temperatures, and b) continuing to operate effectively with this handicap. Knowing that it’s going to be cold only gets you so far.
This discussion seems closely related to a lot of the ideas I’ve see in game-vs.-world arguments. I imagine a very “worldy” game is spoiler resistant because its simulation has higher fidelity than a very “gamey” game. In a “world” the NPC wants you to do things for him because of a complex motivation system that takes into account the NPC’s personality, the PC’s identity, politics, economics, ecology, etc. Of course, such a “world” is (so far) impossible to simulate with enough precision, so designers approximate.
On the other hand, WoW is a “gamey” game in which NPCs want you to collect [1-20] [animal] [body parts] because [motivation]…and because that’s what the designer plugged into his MadLib quest template. These low-fidelity quests encourage you to do stuff, but are highly susceptible to documentation and don’t offer much in the way of alternative, creative solutions because the simulation can’t support it.
I like mini-game style quests or crafting systems because they’re seated nicely in the middle ground. Oblivion’s mechanic for influencing NPCs was pretty silly to me, but I admired the fact that they didn’t just implement an “Influencing…” status bar that filled to 100% over 30 seconds. I may not have slipped a veiled threat into a conversation that scared a diplomat into compliance, but I did beat the minigame using some amount of cleverness.
If anything, I feel like that’s where cookie-cutter quests fail the worst: they don’t give players the ability to react creatively. If anything, that’s a fine excuse for most people to go hit up Wowhead and walk away guilt-free.
I used to try to solve games without looking at the walkthru, then I played Suikoden II. Missed the gun toting character and got to the end of the game with only 107 of the possible 108 star characters. Couldn’t go back and retrieve him, he was available only in that chapter of the game. So I was stuck with the choice of the less than happy ending or playing the game again from less than 1/5th of the way thru. Never played a game thereafter without at least scanning the walkthru first.
My girlfriend plays WoW and I sometimes look over her shoulder. We both play FFXI. I can’t get myself excited about performing any kind of task for the reward of a text window. To me, games replaced TV and Movies. I’m watching a story where I have influence on the the story arcs presented. FFXI’s full motion cut-scenes are the reason I even play the game, and I go back to the replay characters and re-watch the cut scenes I’ve unlocked. I really have zero interest in getting gear or leveling other than that it unlocks other cut-scenes or provides “your character trained hard” background between story moments.
To me, Ralph’s original post presumes that I am dis-satsified if I’m not surprised. The transaction I think I’m making is that for what I paid I get to be the hero and get to decide where the hero journeys on the way to the ending of my choice. Talk about surprises and I imagine being stuck unable to get the happy ending without starting from scratch, or some other sucky revelation. My choice in gaming is based on the quality of presentation (cinematography, npc character development, background music), not the ability of the provider to hide the plot points until I open them.
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