Video Games

Lately it seems as though the hardcore gamers of the world are lamenting the difficulty levels of current A-list titles, calling them too easy, or too focused on the mass-market. There’s a very good reason why this is happening, and there really isn’t a reason why it should ruin anyone’s fun.

See, I don’t know about you, but I apparently suck at Shadow of the Colossus. If you’re unfamiliar with the game, Shadow of the Colossus (SotC) involves your avatar adventuring through a desolate realm where larger-than-life “monsters” known as Colossi roam. It’s one of the key titles used in the games-as-art debate, and whether looking at it or playing it, it’s hard to deny; the game is simply gorgeous in its design and elegant in its execution.

Shadow of the Plotline

The “game” portion of the title is often described as being a series of boss-battles. In fact, each Colossi is a puzzle that must be solved, as the key to taking down a Colossi involves mounting and climbing the beast in order to reach it’s weak spot, displayed as an ancient sigil, and then striking it with your sword until the creature falls. How to use tools or the environment to get it to appear, how to avoid its attacks, how to get close to it, how to climb and stay on it as it tries to shake you off — these are all part of that puzzle.

In the game’s opening sequence, our hero brings a woman who is presumed dead to an altar inside a temple within mysterious lands. Through dialog with an unseen force, we find that he seeks an entity called Dormin, which legend says can control the souls of the living and could bring her back to life. The price, Dormin tells him, may be more than what our hero is willing to pay.

And that’s where the narrative ends. Each “level” starts with Dormin giving you a hint on where to find the next Colossi, and ends with the creature falling, and a mysterious black force attacking our hero. He falls as well, but then wakes up in the temple, where Dormin tells him of his next challenge. That’s it. No explicit story is told during the body of the game (i.e., once control is finally handed off to you the player), underscoring the mystery surrounding the game’s circumstances.

120’ between victory and failure

I’ve been stuck at the final, 16th Colossus since I first picked up the game back in 2005. In case you haven’t seen what this Colossus looks like, he is a gigantic tower at land’s end. Approaching him, he’ll instantly fire bolts at you, so there is a long process of learning where cover is and how to sneak up to him through a series of tunnels without being blasted to death. Once at his base, you need to scale up levels of platforms and moving gaps of armor. Past the lowest of the armor, you start a series of attacks, leaps and grabs to move from the small of his back, to a hand, to an arm, all the way up to his head. Any slip, and you plummet back to the ground where you are most likely in his sights again, and the bolts can hit you, killing you. And once you are dead, you start from the beginning, from that initial approach. Yes, the beginning. There are no checkpoints.

I really can’t tell you how many times I fell off his arm. As you can imagine, it was enough to convince me that I had seen enough of the game, and that I really didn’t need to make myself even more frustrated by forcing myself to finish it.

But here’s the problem: when you finish the game, which effectively ends at the defeat of the final Colossus, the game gives you a thirty-minute ending sequence. During this sequence, the entire point of the game — all of the story which is alluded to by your missions and actions — is revealed.

I know, because I caved in and watched a video of it online. It moved me, and then, in a way, it annoyed me.

It annoyed me because it turns out the game did have a point to make. A really good point. A salient, well-planned, well-executed story arc that requires your complicity in the actions of the character. Throwing him against larger, more dangerous challenges time after time (level after level) is in fact development around an agreement between Dormin and himself that we don’t get to understand until the game wraps itself up.

In other words, if the story of SotC was like drinking a glass of lemonade, the intro would be getting the pitcher and the glass, the entirety of game play would be sloooooooowly pouring that lemonade into the glass, and the ending would be actually drinking the damn thing.

Cost of entry = your skills

Because of the game mechanics, the skill level, the patience and control needed, I never got to see any of this until now. In fact, once I did see it, it took me a long time to connect the plot points together because it had been 3 years since I had seen the first half of the story, back when I started the game.

So right there and then, the difficultly of the game had become a barrier to the narrative structure that the pacing of the game was meticulously designed to reinforce. In fact, I could say of all elements of the game, this was the most risky and daring move on the part of the developers. The game was designed to give you an ending that was an experience, one that was a culmination of all the actions that you are forced to go through. E.g., his connection to the woman is never explicitly explained because it is not necessary. What he does for her, by way of the game play you have put him through, is more than enough to tell you was his connection to her is. It’s character development by doing, not telling.

But it’s an experience that must be earned, though the challenge of the Colossi and the literal struggle of toppling them. If it wasn’t challenging for the player, you wouldn’t make the connections you need to make for the story to make an impact. The developers knowingly made the game hard,^[1] even though it came with a risk that some people wouldn’t ever see the culmination of their work.

This is a serious game design challenge for modern developers: When faced with a story that matters, with a point to make for players to hear, what is more important: a challenge of skill that makes it a game, or the assurance of completion that will let it succeed as narrative?

We’re all wearing yesterday’s “Large”

What we’re seeing at ground level, is the redefinition of “Normal,” and the reaction the gaming community is having to what “normal” means. “Normal” was challenging. “Normal” was a solid, palm-sweaty, suspense-filled setting for everyone except the super-skilled video gaming masters who demanded everything kill you with only one touch. Today, “Normal” is turning out to be “just hard enough to keep you on your toes and entertained, but not too hard that you’ll stop playing.”

The community has mostly reacted to this in the same way that many Americans react to the continuing enlargement of “Medium” sized clothing. It’s insulting, they may think, because it implies that we are making extra consideration for the gaming equivalent of an overeating majority that can’t handle the emotional pain of needing to wear larger clothing now.

It’s rare to find a gamer that doesn’t want a good story with their game. The hardcore, however, do not want the presence of story to compromise its design. Most games of skill don’t need story anyway — with them, the story is a reward, an acknowledgment of the player’s skill, and solid closure for his travails. It’s more important that the game was beaten.

Sharing is caring

We’ll continue to see some developers like those behind SotC not compromise their narrative designs to make a game more accessible, to make the act of beating a game a truly valuable achievement. But if games need to keep evolving and developing great story lines with their game play, and if developers must spend tens of millions of dollars making them to “next generation” standards, and if gaming wants to be accepted as a narrative medium with other arts, then they need to be accessible to all. That means letting folks who accept that they aren’t the greatest gamers in the world in on the fun, too.

If game developers and designers keep an eye on difficulty levels, by starting tough and recognizing when players are struggling, offering to adjust with them (God of War implemented a very straight-forward version of this), or simply by providing a wide range of difficulty settings from the start without needing to unlock them, we should make this painful process of redefining what “Normal” means that much easier to get through.

[1] Note that I didn’t tell you the length of time it took me to beat the 14th, or 15th Colossi, nor how long I played the game in total before deciding to stop. I have to save some face here.

Edited 2006-08-06, While adding some sub-heads to help pace the writing, I noticed something wrong. Originally I wrote about gaming wanting to be accepted as a “true medium,” when I meant to say “narrative medium.” That was the point, after all.

Welcome to my first full-on gaming post here on the blog. I wanted to finally get this off my chest as I know it’s a regular problem with gamers, so as you can imagine, it might be a little rambly. And don’t mind my crappy drawings, it’s just that the only pen tablet I have is my Nokia N800 and it’s rudimentary Sketch app, so I can be only so precise drawing on it.

The question is: When you push up on a joystick, where do you think you’re going?

Unless you’re playing a 2D-style title, the answer is always “it depends.”

There’s two control scheme issues with games — which I’ve dubbed Craning and Twisting — and they all both with perspective. They both deal with the same subject, that being what you believe you are controlling. The simple answer is always “the character” but the complex one has two interpretations: you either control the character’s body, or the character’s view.

This only becomes an issue when you can’t immediately discern which one is active.

This first example shows Craning as the classic problem of putting flight controls into games:

To savvy game players, the “inverted” or “pilot” controls on the left make immediate sense. Pushing up on a joystick pushing the nose of a plane down, thereby making the world past the viewport seem to scroll upwards as the plane dives. Of course, the plane is now moving down, the opposite of the literal stick movement.

“Standard” ordinal controls would dictate that pushing up should move the plane up, so the focus of the user actually becomes the the reticle of the gun. By pushing on a joystick, the movement is translated into a 2D-like command of moving the reticle in the matching direction. In this case, pushing up moves the reticle up (by pulling the nose of the plane up, causing the world behind to appear to scroll downwards).

But the joystick evolved as a metaphor for the pilot, a body, a standing object — e.g., pulling back = leaning back. Which is the right mental model here? Do I control the body of the character (lean forward/look down, lean back/look up) or his eyes (eyes up/look up, eyes down/look down)?

Now let’s look at the second example, Twisting, shown as rotation in a 3D platformer:

Planar movement in a 3D platformer usually comprises of a two-joystick scheme, one to control movement and the other to control view. Over time, this has settled into a traditional scheme of the left joystick controlling literal movements of up/down/left/right in relation to the game environment, and the right joystick handling “looking” around the character with a camera.

But really, we’re still talking about the body/eyes issue, here. In a game where I don’t have to worry about body rotation (because pushing left always moves the character left on the screen) the question becomes what kind of rotation is the camera performing?

Most of the time, cameras rotate around the character, as shown on the left. Like rigging a real camera in orbit around a person, pushing left on the camera joystick would move this suspended camera left, making the world appear to scroll from right to left.

This seems to be a contentious control scheme, as I’ve been seeing more and more games take a more first-person view for these third-person view titles. I’ve added a reticle on the right to help explain, although it is almost never present in actual titles. But as you can see, the popular view these days is to move what feels like the character’s view to the left, causing the world to rotate/scroll left to right.

This works fine when the character is facing forwards (his back to the player), but in 3D platformers, character location has nothing to do with camera, and this breaks when the character is facing backwards (eyes to the player). Without a reticle to focus on, players may focus on the character’s view (and desire to turn the character, not the camera, around) and in this orientation, the directions are swapped.

Sadly, unlike flight controls, this is rarely a user preference, and sometimes you are simply stuck with what the developer put into the game. It’s something that I recently muddled through in Uncharted for the PS3, but ultimately got used to.

Back to the title of the post…

The problem is perspective. More specifically, are you in the body of the character, or the head of the character? Do you control how he sees, or how he is observed? This is all managed by proper camera design, and the proximity of the player’s view to the person they are controlling. The closer to the character, the more the player will feel as if they are controlling his or her view, Craning or Twisting the figure as needed. The further away the camera is from the character, the more the player is an observer, simply pushing the character and rotating the game space around.

The worst offenders in games are those that can’t manage a good, constant distance (or as constant as can be when dealing with clipping and camera obstruction issues) from the character, or don’t lock a perspective behind the character causing players to change their model of what they are controlling at a rapid pace when the game isn’t changing a thing. When a character faces the player, the player can only see what is behind the character and a model is broken — and pushing the “eyes” left doesn’t make sense unless you take the extra thought to place yourself within this inverted space, like combing your hair in a TrueMirror.

In the end, what matters is consistency. As long as we can consistently observe what we are controlling, we will learn the language of necessary motions to make that object move where we want it to.