Slothy

First things first, the Summer 2011 Census thread is up. Be sure to send me your entries sooner rather than later so I don't have to board the S.S. Professor and drum solo all of you into submission.

That out of the way, I wanted to get to the blog post I talked about making last time discussing challenge in video games and ways to affect it for better or worse. The reason why I think it's extremely important to address challenge properly involves both preserving the desired flow of the game or feelings you're looking to instill in the player, and something I'll refer to as failure tolerance. Essentially failure tolerance is how many times a player can tolerate failing before they either give up or take a break from the game. Now it's going to be different for everyone, but in general, the average player probably isn't going to put up with losing too often before they give up either temporarily or for good. Now there are people who live for challenge and will retry levels in games like Mega Man endlessly until they're successful, though even people who enjoy these challenges can have a low failure tolerance in certain circumstances, especially if they view the challenge as either something that isn't fair or which they literally aren't capable of completing.

So to that end, I've thought a lot about different ways to try and increase a players tolerance for failing in a variety of games and how it feeds into making the games that do these better in general. So far I've come up with five major factors to manipulate which are:
1) Execution barriers - Is the player even capable of performing the tasks you're asking of them?
2) Transparency - Does the player understand why they failed?
3) Punishment - How severely are you punishing the player when they fail?
4) Options - Is there more than one way to approach problems in your game?
5) Problem awareness - Does the player even know what you expect them to do right now?

I'm going to start with the first one today, execution barriers, and I'll do that by tackling a few examples and the implications they have on the overall game.

Starcraft 2

Starcraft 2 is an interesting one, but in order to talk about what it did in terms of manipulating the execution barriers I actually have to start with its predecessor, Starcraft: Brood War. Brood War (BW from here on in) is the game that essentially kicked off professional gaming in Korea, and it was for good reason. With three very different races there is a lot of depth in that game and huge potential for some interesting matchups. The game greatly emphasized strategy and being able to read and predict your opponents play to be successful. BW certainly deserved the popularity it gained as a competitive game if you ask me, but there was one thing you needed to be competitive at the professional level aside from the ability to read the game and utilize some good strategy. You needed to be able to perform a few hundred actions per minute. Probably in the range of 250-300 at the minimum.

So to put that into perspective you had to be able to perform 4-5 actions per second to compete at a high level at all. You could know the strategic side of the game inside and out, know exactly what needs to be done in every situation but if you can only make about 100 actions a minute tops, then you're already out of the game. There are just too many things to micromanage in BW for you to beat someone who can out action you by that wide a margin. This is a pretty huge execution barrier.

Now I want to point out at this point that an execution barrier isn't necessarily bad. Being able to master the controls and interface can sometimes create a satisfying challenge for the player. Learning how to master the controls in games like Mirror's Edge, or platformers like Mario 64 can give the player a tremendous sense of accomplishment as the player becomes better at the game. A bit of a higher execution barrier also meshes well with those games since the point of them is essentially to master movement through the levels. In these cases they do it by giving the player a lot of options for moving through a level which necessitates some complexity in the controls. In those cases, the game itself is one of fairly complex movement if you distill it down to it's purest form. So to understand whether a high execution barrier hurts or helps BW we need to ask what sort of game it's trying to be. It seems somewhat obvious that it's trying to be a game about strategy more than a game about clicking hundreds of times a minute. Now this isn't an argument for no execution barrier. One of the interesting things that developed in BW was people utilizing their ability to micro manage their units when attacking or defending, sometimes with such skill that they can win battles in which they have a unit disadvantage simply by outmaneuvering and out controlling his opponent. This sort of control is one of the aspects that keeps BW from being just a game of throwing massive armies at each other until someone wins and where a lot of the interesting action happens both as a player and as a spectator. So the question becomes one of how do you level the playing field so people who aren't capable of 300 APM are still able to manage their army sufficiently that they can be competitive against those who can act that quickly?

The solution Blizzard came up with by and large was to make it much easier to manage unit production and in game economy in Starcraft 2. For those not familiar with the series, each player essentially starts the map with a command center for their race and some drones to mine resources. As you collect resources you build buildings which allow you to build units for your army and buy upgrades. So one of the first things they did to make it easier to manage this whole process was allowing you to hotkey buildings. Instead of having to individually select unit producing structures and tell them what to build one at a time, you can assign multiple structures to hotkeys so that you can quickly select all of the ones you want with a number key, then simply press the keyboard shortcuts for producing the units you want. So I could be mid battle with my opponent in Starcraft 2, and as long as there's a bit of a break in the action I could just hit 4 to select all of my barracks structures and then start building marines to reinforce my current army. And by setting a ralley point for them to go to once they're finished being made I don't even have to go back to my base to tell them to get moving. Rally points are a bit of a carryover from the original game mind you, but setting them was the same procedure as building units. Click the barracks, select rally and click the spot on the map to send them to. Do this for every unit producing structure there is. In SC2, you set them all at once for every building you have selected at the time, and you now do it with a simple right click of the mouse.

Some other improvements made include drone units auto-mining resources if you set them to rally on the resource nodes. Before you would have had to tell them which minerals to mine manually, but now you can do the same thing as any other units and simply select the hotkey and start producing. Essentially, to make it easier for low APM players to compete, Blizzard made massive changes to the interface to reduce the number of actions you need to make at any given point. It sounds simple, but getting a nice fluid UI undoubtedly took a lot of time, experimentation and testing on their part. It's no surprise then that players who may average 80-100 APM can compete on a much more level playing field than before, and places the focus of the game more on the part about managing your army and outplaying your opponent than on seeing who can out click their opponent and win solely by being able to do more at once.

Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix

This is an example that goes along similar lines. For people such as myself who find rotating a joystick or D-pad for anything more than a quarter circle motion that you'd do to toss a fireball as Ryu, Ken, Akuma, or toss out Sub-Zero's freeze move in the early Mortal Kombat games very difficult, playing Zangief in the original Super Turbo would be damn near impossible. His spinning Piledrive required a 360 degree rotation followed by a quick punch input. His super move required a disheartening 720 degree rotation. Honestly, if I had to play Zangief in the original I'd probably give up and move on to another character pretty quickly. I have never been able to get moves like this out with much accuracy assuming I even get them at all. Sometimes even half-circle motions which can be fairly common as well are difficult for me, though not the impossibility that a full circle or more are.

Luckily, designer David Sirlin who handled the rebalancing of the game for it's HD Remix agreed that it may be a bit much for more new or casual players. And the reason is much the same as the reason for simplifying some of the more mundane elements of Starcraft 2. Now in a fighting game you don't want things to feel too easy to pull off or it would seem more like a button masher than what it actually is: a game about knowing your characters strengths, reading your opponent, and reacting appropriately. But as Sirlin put it, "I’d like ordinary humans to be able to play and enjoy Zangief, not just super heroes." So what he did was bring the spinning pile drive down from a full circle to a half circle motion. Still tricky, but most people should be able to do it with some accuracy after a bit of practice. And for his super move, it went from being two full circles with the joystick or D-Pad to two half circles forward. Again, still tricky, but most people should eventually become decent enough at it with practice to at least be able to do it most of the time. His reason for doing this was simply that at high levels of competition, players generally didn't have a problem executing full circle motions accurately and the interesting part of the game came from reading and reacting to your opponent. Some mastery of the controls is important because some challenge needs to come from being able to execute moves properly when under pressure, but the execution barrier was so high for Zangief that some people like myself never stood a chance unless we wanted to start practicing it for hours on end. By lowering the execution barrier, it makes it possible for slightly less dexterous players to play Zangief at a higher level, and like SC2, may even let some players play competitively who may not be able to otherwise since it shifts the focus from being really good at rotating the joystick when you have to to being able to use the right moves at the right time and out think your opponent.

That's it for this blog post. Next time I plan on taking a look at punishment and transparency to see what we can learn from other games that have deftly balanced these elements.