Development

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.

From the Last.fm forums:

I took a look in the iTunes log and it says exactly why it doesn’t scrobble: I had MobileScrobbler installed. That’s true, when my iPod was jailbroken. However, I restored my iPod so that it’s not jailbroken anymore, but MobileScrobbler doesn’t do his job anymore and now Last.FM won’t either.

I also had a jailbroken iPod which I restored two weeks ago so I could be ready for the new v2.0 software. But since I’m running stock v1.1.4 now, this shouldn’t be happening. But there it is: “Mobile Scrobbler detected on iPod Touch - client scrobbling not needed.”

This highlights a fundamental problem I’ve seen with Audioscrobbler from the very beginning: in their quest to prevent spam, they prevent data from getting into their system in the first place, instead of storing the data and applying spam filtering on what was received.

Imagine if instead of Gmail putting spam in a spam folder it simply rejected the message in the first place — sure, it works great in general, but it sucks for all those false positives, right? As a result this site has never worked for anything but the core use-case: someone who listens to their music only when sitting in front of a computer, where they have a live helper application watching their every play.

Because Last.fm outright rejects data that looks “spammy”, there’s no opportunity to correct it when, in fact, it was system-, computer-, or even user-error. That data is lost for good. I’ve had days of listening lost like this because just one play on a desktop had been “newer” than my iPod sync, and the program thought I was trying to sneak extra listens in.

But this is the wrong way to run the service because not only does it severely punish the user for common mistakes, but it forces them to change their behavior on how they consume music to meet Last.fm’s strict patterns — just so they can’t spam the service and manipulate the overall charts. Not to mention, there’s an extremely easy way to handle that: it’s called sandboxing. Does it look like spam? Don’t count it. But don’t throw it out either. Put it in a space that can be counted for the user, but doesn’t affect someone else’s stats.

So we’re back at the quote at the top of the page. In a rush to keep duplicate entries from getting into the system, it falsely assumes the tracks were already submitted just by looking at the iPod itself and nothing else. Of course, Mobile Scrobbler keeps its own log and preferences on the device. There’s probably some magic it can do to see if Mobile Scrobbler was on, or if the tracks it was about to scrobble were logged as scrobbled by the app, but hell, it’s not even doing a good enough job to see if the app itself is still installed on the device. If Last.fm could sandbox submissions, it could submit those tracks and then see that, hey, those tracks were never actually submitted, so let’s keep them around after all. Instead, I just lost three days of tracks.

I should be used to this. It’s happened before. This is what I wrote in 2006 on this very same issue:

I literally think “Oh my god, did I update the iPod?!” before playing files in iTunes. Three or four days of straight iPod listening would be erased in a heartbeat because of a careless what’s-that-song-again double-click on the computer. This is a horrible thing to feel and I’m so glad to have finally stopped caring enough about my profile to finally get away from it.

And to the use-case point, I immediately got a nasty comment from some freetard saying that I should stop whining that the site makes me do things their way, and that I should just write my own.^[1]

Having been a user of the service for over five years total now, I’m finally ready to toss the entire thing to the curb. This doesn’t need to be the end, however, but it requires Last.fm to stop treating all users like spammers, and actually build some real intelligence into track submissions and chart creation.

[1] Oh yes, as a working IA professional, a former employee of a Webby-winning music portal, and a passionate user of social media, I am more than ready to write an alternative. VCs or startup CEOs, give me a call. I’ll hook you up for sure.

[Edited 2008-08-15] Russ from Last.fm responded to this post, clarifying: “The (possibly misnamed) spam protection wasn’t created to stop people falsifying scrobbles — it was created to prevent buggy plugins from mistakenly submitting tracks twice, which was an annoyingly common occurrence for a lot of users.”

Responding to the idea of a PSP-branded Sony Ericsson phone, the head of Nokia games said at a recent press event:

I’m not scared about anybody. The real question is how do they do it? Can they create a link between the PSP games and a phone? Can they do the multiplayer and online stuff? We’ve been doing this for two years and it hasn’t been easy.

So again, Nokia is showing us why this revival of N-Gage still doesn’t have us feeling more confident than their first go at it.

Nokia is having problems with N-Gage because they are a phone company first (cramming a gaming platform into a device that isn’t natively designed for it) and they have almost no gaming experience except for the original N-Gage devices which were considered failures by the gaming industry.

If they are not scared, it’s because they looking too closely at the engineering challenges, and are thinking that Sony Ericsson would try to do this by themselves.

But any PSP-branded phone would like be a PSP… with, you know, a phone. Sony Computer Entertainment wouldn’t want to fracture game development, and there’s definitely other reasons why they recently launched the ability to download titles from an online PSP Store. Just look to how download-only titles on Xbox Arcade or Playstation Network work on their respective consoles, and you can see how a small-screen PSP phone with no UMD disc could co-exist with a “big screen” handheld PSP console.

Just think of it this way: SCEJ can provide a PSP platform with hooks for telephony, which they may already have begun with the latest Skype support, and Sony Ericsson does the cellular engineering and design around it.

There’s no expectation that this phone be Symbian, Java, BREW, or anything of that ilk, and after seeing Apple’s success in starting fresh, why would Sony want to stick with the old, especially with this brand? After all, this is a company that has made not one, but two mylos!

Nokia, however, is entrenched in S60. They don’t have an SCE, or similar division with 12 years experience, to fall back to when it comes to video gaming. And they continue to think there is a serious audience interested in gamer points and online matches on cellphones when phones have yet to provide any hits bigger than Tetris or Bejeweled — the stuff they’re working so hard to perfect may not actually be what those players want.

Which is why they should be scared, or at least concerned.

Gearlog posts a story that shows Apple’s stance on the modding their hardware:

I asked [Apple’s Greg Joswiak] about independent, native software development for the iPhone. He said Apple doesn’t oppose native application development, which was new to me. Rather, Apple takes a neutral stance - they’re not going to stop anyone from writing apps, and they’re not going to maliciously design software updates to break the native apps, but they’re not going to care if their software updates accidentally break the native apps either. He very carefully left the door open to a further change in this policy, too, saying that Apple is always re-examining its perspective on these sorts of things.

This is pretty consistent with previous devices (Apple TV hacks, the existing Linux-on-iPod project). By being neutral to software development they allow the minority who “need” custom features to still get them in some fashion without being beholden to support them officially. For example, Apple never had to add OGG support because those few who needed that audio format on an iPod were likely satisficed by the Linux project. Apple is focused on the mainstream, and being developer-neutral allows them to trend-watch their devices from a extremely safe distance. If a feature is a) important enough to risk breaking the thing and b) is popular enough to be rapidly adopted by users and developers of the hacked devices, they know it is a feature that might be worth developing internally or with a partner that will help the bottom-line. It can also help fine-tune and set priorities for existing projects already in the pipeline (just think of every late-to-the-party feature of .Mac service, and the quick upgrade to the 160 GB Apple TV after hackers learned how to upgrade the HD).

I take their statement to mean what I’ve been assuming all along — if we are to ever see an official iPhone SDK released, its countdown is in years, not months.

Especially after this update in the same article:

Apple says “software updates will most likely break” native apps as they go forwards.

Here I was, all about to move my domains over to GoDaddy.com — and yet the checkout page doesn’t work. I’m using Firefox on a PC to do this, and I’ve filled out everything there is to fill out, but what do I see? A javascript alert window for some client-side validation script that says “Please fill in all required fields.”

It doesn’t tell me which field to fill in. It doesn’t highlight the field with the problem. In no way does it help me locate where my error is, it just simply says, hey dummy, you screwed up — now you go figure out what you did wrong.

The only thing I can tell is happening is that it is removing all of the “-” characters from my daytime phone number, but it doesn’t change my nighttime number at all. Clearly, this is a bug.

I’ve appreciated GoDaddy’s ongoing sponsorship of Diggnation (and their one-time sponsorship of The Show with Ze Frank — do it more, you guys), and wanted to use that promo code to show that podcast sponsorship is indeed a Good Thing(tm), but alas. I can’t. It won’t let me.

Sponsor all you want, but when it comes to checkout, you better be prepared to seal the deal. There goes my business.