[MUD-Dev] Uniqueness of Games

[Ling Lo]

On Mon, 8 Oct 2001, Adam Martin wrote:
> [John Buehler]

>> 3. Remove the artificial rewards that encourage frequent killing
>> of animals.  No experience for killing animals that is
>> interchangeable with experience from blacksmithing, hiking,
>> political lobbying, sword and shield play, engineering, etc.  No
>> gold, no gems.  The reward is the meat and hides, which should
>> have a value that permits a character to reequip, but certainly
>> not gain wealth.  Gaining of wealth should be restricted to those
>> who engage in commerce.

> The enjoyment I get from the arcade is that the games are very
> similar to Wipeout - they are racing type games but with a
> "floating" feeling in terms of the responsiveness of the controls
> (Wipeout simulates anti-gravity drives in a believably different
> way to tyre-racing games, and the skiing game simulates sliding -
> especially sideways slippage - that convincingly gives a
> low-friction feeling).

I wouldn't be surprised if the game designers did some tweaking with
the physics to add gameplay...  Would you be upset to discover that
the physics they used distorted real world values?  What if the
physics was faked?  Or more to the point, would you care?  See notes
below.

> My point is that the closer successive arcade games come to real
> skiing the less inclined I shall be to play them. I believe this
> is for the same reason that various friends prefer to play
> "original" tetris, and whilst fancy versions with 3D graphics and
> stunning backdrops are tolerated (NOT enjoyed any more), those
> that subtly alter the gameplay (in any attempt to
> improve/elaborate) are not tolerated. Example: Yahoo's Tetris
> derivative.  Response of everyone I know who has tried it
> "Whoa. Thats weird. Hang on, this is a completely different game;
> I'd prefer Tetris, thanks.". They actually enjoy a game which is
> deliberately as simple as merely falling blocks that you rotate in
> an attempt to create complete lines.

Now you've just spelt out the funny game design stuff.  Adding all
those fancy things a better game does not necessarily make.  A
random point I'd like to make is that very often derivatives are
just that.  They take an existing concept and extrapolate.  Very
easy to do, hardly any thought involved.  Just look at all those
never-will-be-completed open sourced projects.  Bigger, bigger,
bigger...  You can't mess with Tetris, I suspect the guys who did it
in the first place had already tried a number of those variations we
see in the freeware/shareware market.  In the same way we see the
curent bunch of badly executed 3D RTS's flooding the market.  For
the ones I've played, the extra dimension created additional
difficulties with the interface - ever so important.  I now see this
fascination with 3D repeated again and again.  There's been a
suggestion on the Java3D list to create a generic 3D gui suite,
quite unaware of the complications with a user interface that is
_in_ 3D.

[snipped a chunk]

> To be clear, I'm not contradicting John at all - his phrase simply
> sparked my thinking - and IMHO Everquest and others are too
> shallow (for my tastes) on simulation, but I think one can very
> very easily swing too far into simulation if you lose sight of
> "what makes a GAME version of something different" and more
> importantly WHY you want it to be different. It is definitely not
> merely the "removal of bits that are less fun whilst retaining the
> fundamental enjoyable bit" - that can be true, but we have so much
> more freedom to do more than that, with much greater affect on
> playability/fun. I think its a generic expression of many people's
> dislike with the transition from paper RPGs to CRPGs.

Simulation or not, it's the perception of simulation that matters.
Why should it be a simulation?  Does that offer a better gaming
experience for everyone or is it the designers who achieve the
satisfaction?  Should it be realistic?  Should the player need to
spend time running from A) to B) just like in the real world?
Should the player eat, sleep, work?  Should the player live life,
sharing both the joys and tradegies, within the simulation to a
degree of intensity that matches life?

Coming from the sci-fi/engineering skool, I personally think I'd
appreciate more simulation.  However, when I play a game, the gamer
side takes over and I don't mind the lack of simulation in games.
In fact, I am actually more likely to be frustrated by realism.  As
a side note, I've worked with military simulations and they were not
as much fun as working on games.  Simulation, in the military
context, means using numbers collected from life and plugging them
into statistical algorithms.  ZZzzZzzz...

Simulation and fun needs to be balanced.  Sometimes the fun is the
simulation itself, see all those sims that exist in the market.
More often than not, simulation impedes.  For instance, take
Mechwarrior...  It has big robots (I like), it's realistic within
its own context (nice), but that means these mechs quite literally
have to run up next to each other before firing (doh!).  Take real
tanks, they often have a range of several kilometres.  Try Quake,
maybe carrying a rocket should slow you down (buzzz! wrong answer!).
SimCity, the major (and hence the player) dies of old age...  I
realise this strays from the above point but bear with me.  There
are a lot of suggestions from players of muds concerning "what
really happened in ye olde times", going into details of precise
harvest productions and so forth - this might make things more
realistic but quite frankly I don't think the players truely want
this sorta thing.  They want to be legends, forever remembered by
bards and retold to each generation for centuries to come!

On a related note, my favourite definition of realism within games
comes from an rpg writer: "Realism is defined as what the player is
willing to accept."  A pleasant definition.  I felt this was
especially true when a reviewer of Heavy Gear 2 compared it to
Mechwarrior 3, complaining that sneaking around in 4 metres of
exo-suit (HG) wasn't realistic compared to milling around in a 100
tonne fusion-powered lump of metal (MW) that had a maximum range of
a few hundred metres!

I would also ask what would be the context of the game.  Why not go
for Hong Kong action-film, everyone knows martial arts (and happen
to speak Cantonese no matter the nationality :).  Or John "reloading
in western films is so restrictive" Woo, guns blazing manically
whenever there's a fight?  Or anime-style where everyone has strange
hair/eye/skin colour, able to make great leaps without even doing a
run-up, and the archvillian are always long-haired pretty boys?  Or
maybe dark and broody gangsters, teetering on the edge of film noir?

I would suggest sectioning off different parts of the game into
different "feels" but that can only be possible when the population
has reached some sort of critical mass.

--
  |   Ling Lo
_O_O_ ling at slimy.com


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