Sometimes it's the best to just look at opinions, and not financial sales.
Discoverability in games encompasses a whole lot of ideas - discovering that a game is good, that it's mechanics are sound, the aesthetic of it... all of the frameworks and ideas come down to that. It is important to analyse the behaviour of consumers, the growing and changing trends of who will buy what. Of course, there will be outliers who choose to go their own way, and that's fine. But what is most important is looking at them and trying to figure out what makes them tick. What do they like in a game, what do they want more of ?
Sometimes it's the best to just look at opinions, and not financial sales.
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Four players is usually the epitome of any game, video or board. It's an even number, just the right amount enough to have a reasonable and fulfilling game but small enough to not take up too many spaces and artificially lengthen it. The four man team has been staple of many co-op games, including Valve's excellently crafted 'Left 4 Dead' series, where players take on the role of four survivors braving the zombie apocalypse in late 2000's America. Having yourself and three other friends is a fun time, even with the same campaigns over and over again, mostly due to Valve's ingenious 'Director', who randomizes the levels each time you play.
However, the three player conundrum sucks. Being down one person isn't very fun, and it also disrupts the game by throwing the even number into an odd one. A board game with three players is going to be very lopsided and three players when there's supposed to be four isn't fun either - even though there are AI players that fill in the last gap, it's just better to have a player come along with you. How do you fix it? Well, aside from the aforementioned AI, there isn't really one unless you decide to build your whole game around accommodating three players... then what about when a forth one wants to play? There's just no winning in this. Playtesting is needed. There is a reason it is called quality assurance in the video game industry, and why games are doomed to fail if the developers pay no attention to the QAs and their reports. Playtesting is used for a vital number of reasons - to iron out bugs and flaws in gameplay, to observe how people react in an environment and other such variables that designers would not be able to get at first glance. I'm reminded of in the commentary for Half Life 2: Episode 2, one of the mappers talks about how a part of the map early on in the game had an intersection where one of the playtesters would always go around in a circle, prompting them to remove that path and forcing the player down a more linear path to the destination.
That is just one example. Dice rolls were (and are) commonly used in tabletop games, mostly RPGs (because the style of play facilitated that). But the trend of this rolling over (no pun intended) into video games has been a divisive one - the early Elder Scrolls and Fallout games adopted this style of play as a transition method. Looking over in all those games, there was clearly a big emphasis on following the GURPS format (Generic Universal RolePlaying System) and how it was adapted into a virtual space. These kind of games achieved a sort of cult following on their release and many players do enjoy the dice roll aspect of combat and non-combat situations.
But to yours truly, it feels a bit counter-intuitive to have dice rolls in a game where there are also stats; for example, if I have a high Charisma level then a dice roll should not factor into whether I successfully talk my way through something. The only time a dice roll could truly benefit from its inclusion is probably a sort of luck counter, but that's just how I feel about it. We all play video games for a variety of reasons - to chill out and relax after a stressful day of work or to push ourselves in a variety of ways. Humans are intrinsically wired to seek out ways to improve themselves and their skills, and video games are no exception to this. However, the definition of 'skill' in video games is a hard one - does skill means memorising the game mechanics to their full advantage, or even exploiting them? Does it mean making a choice with no information and ending up at the correct path? It could be widely accepted that it means that you're able to use advanced tactics in a game to gain an edge and ensure a steady path to victory. However, this would mean requiring a mastery of the mechanics at hand, even beyond it. For instance, the mechanics for the Soldier in Team Fortress 2 allow him to use his rocket launcher to 'rocket-jump', meaning firing at his own feet to launch himself into the air. Mastery of this mechanic allows players to scale heights in a multi-level map, escape danger instantly and a variety of uses that encompass skill on behalf of the player.
All games start with an idea.
An idea needs to be solid. But how do the creators know that the idea is a solid one? Obviously, they themselves will think it is a solid idea but creators are biased. So what do you do? Make a prototype, of course! A prototype is the bare minimum of what the game is, in such a way that it conveys the idea of what they're trying to get across for the testers to digest it in a tangible way. This is vitally important to make sure that the base mechanics of a video game won't belly flop in the pool of mediocrity. Of course, once the idea feels pleasing enough to go ahead, that is when the developers should adopt the MDA framework to further refine the product. Skill is important for veteran players, while Chance is important for new players. It can be seen as a crutch by benefiting new players for some, but chance can be seen as an important measure to ensure that new players do not get burned out on a video game provided they're not willing to put in the time. Making a video game marketed towards an audience is difficult, because no one customer has the same expectation as the other; while one is happy to push through the unrelenting barrage of new-player-hostile mechanics to better themselves at the game, some will prefer a more relaxed and friendly approach to a game that eases them into the mechanics.
It is probably the best of both worlds to incorporate both, and that's a challenging part of designing a video game - how do you make a game super fun to play for new and old players alike? There have been a number of mechanics introduced by different development teams that attempt to balance skill and chance in their games, but hey, if you don't agree with that, there's always house rules. Inclusion is an important thing in video games. After all, a game with a high difficulty curve at the start doesn't make for good first impressions, but it has to stay exciting after a large amount of hours have been put in. What do you do? If you make the video game based solely on chance, it would get unpredictable and frustrating quickly. After all, who wants to stick around for a game that could be won or lost without any recognition of your own personal skills?
But if you make a game based on the player's skill only, introduction of rigid set of rules and situations is introduced and it becomes too easy for veteran players to dominate the field. In a team based co-op video game with multiple players on each side, this is not a good thing; the introduction of trickling mechanics such as random critical hits (for example) would enable a more even playing field for low level players against high level players, ensuring that while they can achieve victory in battle and not feel overwhelmed at being far less skilled than their teammates and enemies, the random nature of such does not guarantee that the lower level player will always win and they have a chance to adjust to a situation accordingly and learn to play the game. Game mechanics are pretty nifty - they ensure that the game functions correctly in a manner of ways that helps the player have fun through the use of visual and audio representation of certain things; for instance, you have the audio mechanic in the Thief games. Due to a lack of a radar or any sort of detection system, the player must utilize an intricate set of mechanics that allow them to hear enemies precisely and judge with accuracy where their position is. Due to the prolific nature of stealth games which use an external means of judging the position of enemies, using your own ears to successfully stealth through a level is a unique mechanic that hasn't been used much in modern gaming.
But for this sort of thing to work, the mechanic must be solid. An entire system built around sound and accurately telling which sound is coming from what direction is vitally important. MDA (or Mechanics, Design, Aesthetics) is a set of rules that theorise how designers and consumers should approach games. For designers, a primary focus on mechanics in their video games is key to success; if a certain game mechanic is not working properly, then the design and aesthetic of the game overall would be diminished for the consumer. Despite this however, it can be observed that consumers involve themselves in the process except in reverse; through the use of marketing from publishers, the first thing that consumers will see is the aesthetics of the game before experiencing the design and mechanics of it. Of course, this makes sense; people who are not involved in the process of creating a video game whose first sight of it will be usually through the lens of media. It is only when they invest in a game that they will be able to experience the design and mechanics.
This presents a situation where polar opposites occur by design of the MDA framework, and that aesthetic is an important junction that designers must consider to draw consumers in. |
AuthorJack Mannix is a twenty-two year old Game Studies & Design Student at JMC Academy. Tends to go off point on topics and make bad jokes. Archives |