Various Stuff

Good to hear from Raph in the comments!  By the way, anybody who hasn't checked out his slideshow on small-world-networks and gaming should:  http://www.legendmud.org/raph/gaming/index.html, go to Essays and scroll down to the one on small worlds.  It gave me a new lens with which to view the world.  Sorry if I misinterpreted you, Raph, but didn't you say something along the lines of us having to discard dressing if we truly wanted to approach game development as an art?

Speaking of terminology:  I'm told that board game guys have been using the word "color" for what Raph was calling dressing since the beginning of time.  And, as for the "salad" - I always used to call it "gameplay."  That's what I said in *Difficult Questions About Videogames*, and a few others seemed to agree with me.  Others, however, think of "gameplay" not as the formal abstract core systems, but as an activity.  The act of engaging with the game. Down to the feeling of the controller in your hands.  At first I thought those people were just wrong.  But then I decided we should throw "gameplay" out as an overused term.  (One of the guys in *Difficult Questions* - I forget who, I don't have the book on me right now - said that we all use the term, thinking everybody knows what we're talking about, but we all have our own definitions.  He was right on the money.)  Instead, how about "game mechanics" as a term for the salad?

One other thing about save-anywhere:  dozens of hugely popular games don't have it.  Let's take an irresponsible look at the Best Games Evar from gamerankings:  Zelda - nope.  MGS - I forget.  I don't think so.     Metroid Prime - nope.  Resident Evil - nope.  Halo - nope.  Grand Theft Auto - nope.  Half-Life 2 is, in fact, the first game on the list that does have save anywhere.  Now I'm not one to say that just because all these great, massively popular games don't do it, it must be wrong, but it can't be the enormous issue that some of you have made it out to be in the comments section.

Speaking of irresponsible looks at gamerankings, I was just wondering:  how important is variety in games?  Some games are basically the same thing over and over (driving games) whereas others strive to give you mini-games and the like to change it up.  My first instinct when thinking about having mini-games is to say NO!  If people wanted to play Battleship they'd play Battleship;  they wouldn't play the Battleship minigame in Wind Waker.  If they wanted a rhythm game they'd play Parappa or DDR or Amplitude rather than the rhythm missions from San Andreas.  If they wanted a stealth game they'd play Splinter Cell instead of the stealth missions from True Crime.  And so on.  But maybe I'm wrong about people.  Maybe your mass market game consumer only wants to buy a few games, and he wants those games to be swiss-army knives:  you can get your racing, shooting, stealth, rhythm, dating-simulation, extreme sports tricks, role-playing, and territory conquering strategy all from *San Andreas* - why spend more money on other games just because they do those subgames better?  Plus, from a production point of view, Erik Bethke's argument for a lean, tight feature set - so those features can be high-quality, high-polish - is pretty compelling.

So I'm looking at top games on gamerankings and asking myself: How many sub-games do these games contain?  What constitutes a sub-game is tough to define (each boss fight in some of these games could almost be considered its own mini-game), so your mileage may vary.

Zelda, Ocarina of Time:  fighting, puzzle-solving, nonlinear exploration, horseback riding, stealth, boss fights.  6+

MGS:  stealth, shooting, boss fights, nonlinear exploration.  4

Metroid Prime:  shooting, jumping, nonlinear exploration.  3  (Correction:  boss fights, ball-modes, both side-scrolling and straight ahead.  6.  Good point.)

Halo:  shooting, driving.  2   (or does flying / tank driving count as a separate game?)

Half-Life 2:  shooting, driving, ant-lion/squad herding, "Don't walk on the sand" stealth, physics-puzzle solving, automated turret placement.  6.  (Does the gravity gun count as a separate game?)

San Andreas:   I counted eight up until my PS2 threw a rod the other day.  I'm not sure if I want to buy another PS2 just to finish this game...

Wind waker:  Ocarina of Time plus some more mini-games and sailing.  8+

Pro Skater 2:  Tricks.  Collecting.  2.  (Side note:  the highest rated of the Tony Hawk games has the fewest sub-games:  Tony Hawk 1 had racing, and then Tony Hawk 3 and on started adding new kinds of challenges.  Not that this anecdote proves anything.)

Half-Life:  Shooting.  Xen.  The "get past the tentacles" puzzle.  The final boss fight.  4.

Vice City:  Driving, shooting, rail-shooting, remote control vehicles, buying property.  5.

Prince of Persia:  Fighting, navigating terrain.  2

Knights of the Old Republic:  Fighting, nonlinear exploration, leveling up, talking, space combat, racing, a couple mini-games here and there.  8+

So...my new stance...a game needs to contain at least two games to be popular, and more sure doesn't hurt.  And if those games aren't polished (San Andreas's aren't, although they're well tuned) it's not the end of the world, either.

Comments

[Sören Höglund]

The thing about save points (as opposed to save anywhere) is not that it's intrinsically bad, but that it's really, really easy to mess up. And when you do screw up the save system, you get incredibly frustrating sections that can make the player give up on the game. It's much easier just let the player save anywhere instead of paying that extra bit of attention to balancing and testing. The games that end up on top of gamerankings are usually the ones that polish things to perfection, so it's not really surpising that the save system isn't an issue. (Nitpick: Zelda does let you save anywhere. You just have to continue from the start of the dungeon, or some pre-determined spot in the metalevel.)

And yes, game mechanics is a much better term than the hideously vague gameplay, which must be banished from all existance.

[Origence]

Various game mechanics, sub-games, whatever we call it backed up with a well designed game tend to be very massmarket and in nearly every game reviewer more tickets for get a good score.
The same happens with other medias like movies, e.g. Star Wars, The Incredibles or many Disney movies, most comic based movies like Spiderman, heh. They have their action, some love affair, some funny jokes, etc.

Anyways this matter is more noticeable in videogames, imho. Why? I think one of many reasons can be the lack of gaming culture and lack of games being stablished in society's habits. I say this after taking a look at monogame products that have success like driving games, sports games, fight games, rythm games in asia, mmogs in korea, etc.
The passion for driving, sports and fights are not new. They were there and games simulating them can heritage that passion. Simulating without adding too much abstract or novelty things. Futuristic games in these genres don't have much luck.
I don't think my comment is a big point. Just a comment that appeared on my head thinking about the great success in both critics and units sold of monogame mechanic titles like Soul Calibur, Gran Turismo, Madden, Fifa, Pro Evolution Soccer, many "bemani" type games in Asia, etc.

Li'l comment: I think Metroid Prime(s) have way more sub games. Boss fights are a completely separate experience, then there is puzzle-solving and the morph ball is a more drastic change than Zelda's horse riding or sailing.

[Nathan McKenzie]

On multiple game types in a single game:

Go take a look at Actraiser for the SNES and the Guardian Legend for the NES. They're both games that, really, should NOT work - and yet I really like both of them, and I think they're both remembered pretty favorably.

TGL is particuarly interesting, in that, normally, I'm not especially drawn to forced-progression top-down shooters - but apparently the moment you interleave that with Zelda-style exploration, I'm in LOVE with the top-down shooting (and interestingly, they included a mode in the Guardian Legend to let you excise all the Zelda-style part if you're not into it).

The funny thing is, Actraiser (which is part side scroller and part strategy), isn't really strong at either. If it only had one mode or the other, it wouldn't be exceptional at all (which is sadly proven by Actraiser 2, where they remove the strategy part). Likewise, TGL's shooting sections are really very good for the NES, but its Zelda segments really pale in comparison to Zelda itself... but at least for me, it doesn't seem to matter.

Warioware is another pretty fun example for this - if ANY of those games lasted substantially longer than 3 seconds, the game wouldn't be particularly fun. None of them are close to good, in a conventional sense... and yet, glued together the way it is, I find it pretty addictive.

I think it's just a pacing thing - no matter how super amazing fun your activity is, people need a break. It's no different than a horror movie including lulls in the horror or even some black comedy to help keep things from becoming monotonous, I think.

[Joel Martinez]

Just wanted to cast my vote on the "sub-games". I absolutely love the way I can just pop in san-andreas and play the game in so many different ways.

To me it's not just about having mini-games as filler, it's about allowing the player to play the game in their own way ... to do the things that are fun to them.

[Darren Korman]

*Quote* It's much easier just let the player save anywhere instead of paying that extra bit of attention to balancing and testing. *Quote*

I don't think there is a programmer on the planet who would agree with this statement. In the projects I've been on with "save anywhere", some poor programmer gets locked in his office from alpha to gold master trying to figure out every stupid little save game bug that comes along.

[Raph]

Sorry if I misinterpreted you, Raph, but didn't you say something along the lines of us having to discard dressing if we truly wanted to approach game development as an art?

Not exactly. What I said is that if we really want to advance game design (as a whole) as an art, then we need to pay more attention to advancing game mechanics, and less to advancing the dressing. We make quantum leaps on dressing all the time. Advances in mechanics are fewer, and they seem to be stumbled into, and we rarely see someone consciously attempting to make a paradigm shift.