next »

[Gnarf]

They can do that, but that's not the most efficient or practical way of doing it.

No. But it's a game way of doing it.

I think I have an idea of what you're getting at, but can you give an example? And explain why it is meaningful and is a good fit for games?

Like, the only way I can think of "meaningful games" (or whatever) are games that do interesting things with what games are good at, with what they are. To me, asking why not more games do like 1984 or what have you is like asking why not more music do. And the (easiest) answer would be that games are very different from novels are very different from music. The notion of games as "just entertainment" really bugs me if the only way they can be something "more" is by including something that has fuck all to do with gaming.

(That is, it depends on what other things you're calling just entertainment, but it comes off like games have to pretend they're books in order to be something more, while music can get away with being experimental.)

[Hajo]

They can do that, but that's not the most efficient or practical way of doing it.

No. But it's a game way of doing it.

Basically there are some ways to teach people:

1) Lead the person (do this/do it this way)
2) Set boundaries (don't do this/don#t do it this way)
3) Let them learn from failure

Games usually chose the 3rd way. This is the most challenging for the player, with the most emotions involved. Usually this is what gamers want from games, challenge and emotional involvement.

Games that use the first mechanic are quite often rather boring. I personally would really like to make a game that rather leads to a good end, than punishes wrong moves, but I always failed to do this in interesting ways.

A ground to explore might be the second way, where players are free to explore within limits, and able to experience good and bad outcomes, while the boundaries prevent the worst.

[Gnarf]

Maybe I'm totally missing your point, but I don't really see the relevance of the 2nd way there. There are always such boundaries, as the rules of any game defines those boundaries. It seems more a matter of balance, how bad you're getting punished for each mistake and so on. But you're still learning the game through failure. The "worst" tends to be having to start the game over, but whether or not that should be prevented depends on the game. A 12 hour long story-driven game should probably not suddenly require the player to start over. A 30 minutes to an hour long arcade shmup probably should.

Games that use the first mechanic are quite often rather boring. I personally would really like to make a game that rather leads to a good end, than punishes wrong moves, but I always failed to do this in interesting ways.

Maybe because it's not interesting Choices aren't interesting if the outcomes are all the same. And they're less interesting the more alike the outcomes are, generally speaking. Risks tend to be interesting.

[Seth]

Like, the only way I can think of "meaningful games" (or whatever) are games that do interesting things with what games are good at, with what they are. To me, asking why not more games do like 1984 or what have you is like asking why not more music do. And the (easiest) answer would be that games are very different from novels are very different from music. The notion of games as "just entertainment" really bugs me if the only way they can be something "more" is by including something that has fuck all to do with gaming.

(That is, it depends on what other things you're calling just entertainment, but it comes off like games have to pretend they're books in order to be something more, while music can get away with being experimental.)

Don't pretend there aren't similarities between games and novels and movies.  Most games include a narrative, like most books and movies, but most of the time fail to show that narrative in a compelling way that even compares to good movies or books.  So the question is, why not?  Are games trying to be too much like movies or books, and not telling stories in the best way games can tell stories (like how movies and novels and music all have different way of telling stories)?  Or should we even be concerned with games as narrative?  I'm not against non-narrative games, but I think as a medium games have much potential to tell compelling narratives, so I don't think it's out of line to compare (and contrast) them with movies or novels as a way of thinking about how to exploit games as a narrative medium.

[Gnarf]

Don't pretend there aren't similarities between games and novels and movies.  Most games include a narrative, like most books and movies, but most of the time fail to show that narrative in a compelling way that even compares to good movies or books.

A lot of games include a narrative. For those games it makes sense to discuss the narrative. In a lot of those games, story and setting are there more as a context for the game than as what the game is about. And then I don't think it makes sense to discuss it in any way near the way we discuss the narrative of a book or a movie. DOOM does not "fail" at anything story-wise, as its story achieves everything it is supposed to. Comparing its story to the story of a movie is missing the point. Same as complaining about predictable stories when watching the news.

Or should we even be concerned with games as narrative?

And then, some other narrative-including games really are about telling a story. It makes sense to be concerned with those games as narrative. But then it's a discussion about a very specific kind of game rather than games in general.

[agj]

My point wasn't that games shouldn't change the way people think. I think they should, but I also think the people should be the ones to make the choice if they want entertainment or enlightment.

I disagree. Most people never want to leave their comfort zones--this makes them manipulable sheep. The purpose of most art (in particular, the best street art) is to disrupt the appearance that everything is perfect in this world. This is, yes, often controversial, but a much needed activity.

People don't want their bubbles to be popped, but they often need it.

[GregWS]

That's what I love about street art, I'm just walking around on my daily routine, and then I catch something out of the corner of my eye and stop to look at it, usually walking away uncomfortable and disturbed...mission accomplished!  And you know what?  I actually like that feeling in that context, because I know the artist isn't just doing it for shock value or to annoy people, he's doing it to wake us all up, which in my opinion is a very noble task indeed.

The trouble with games in all this is that you pay for them, and no one wants to buy a game and then find that it makes them uncomfortable enough to avoid playing it.  So freeware (or maybe donationware) is great here because there's no commitment to keep playing if the player absolutely doesn't want to.

I do intend to make thought provoking, uncomfortable games, but I can say with a degree of confidence that I'll be keeping them free.  Now, for people like rinku who are trying to make a living off this, I don't quite know what I'd recommend.  A disclaimer goes against the purpose, so maybe having a few things happen in the demo would work.  I know you're a fan of big demos, rinku, and that may actually be the only solution to this.

[salade]

Who says there can't be a game that is both entertaining and makes you think about things? Most great art achieves both, that's what makes it great. That is where the conversation becomes more about whether games are art.

Part of the mystique of games is that they can be art, but at the same time are justified by just being fun.

So I have to disagree with the statement that it is the duty of game designers to provoke thought. it is the duty of artists to provoke thought, and games are just a possible medium for their thought provoking art.

[brog]

3) Let them learn from failure

Games usually chose the 3rd way. This is the most challenging for the player, with the most emotions involved. Usually this is what gamers want from games, challenge and emotional involvement.

What's important to remember here though, is that failure can be punished in many different ways, and doesn't necessarily need to be explicitly punished at all.

The punishment of "ok now you have to go through the exact same thing again" is truly horrific.  People understand now how bad this is, so they try to compensate by allowing lots of saving, but this doesn't really work.  If you load a saved game, you still have to go through the same thing again, so it's still horrible - less so than if you had to go through something longer, but still very unpleasant.  You end up with the situation of hitting quicksave every few seconds, which is pretty absurd and severely limits what is taught: it gives lots of practise at the fast reflex-based action, but stops the game from teaching anything about long-term planning and resource management.

Roguelikes have a better solution - if you fail you have to go back to the start, but everything's different this time so you're not doing the same thing over and over again.  You can criticise the exact implementation if you like; maybe it should be harder to truly fail, there should be less random deaths, whatever.  But in terms of teaching through failure, it does a much better job - failure means something, carries a high penalty but not a brutal and inhumane one, and it can teach long-term planning.
Strategy games do this too.  Usually they do allow saving so you could try scumming with that, but generally a loss comes from poor strategic decisions earlier on so there's no point - loading a recent game will just mean you lose again, and you need to go back to the start to try a different approach to the whole thing.

But there's an even better solution, although I guess it won't work in many situations.  Failure doesn't need to be penalised at all, it just means you do not progress yet.  This, I think, is the best way of teaching scientific thinking through games.  You have some kind of system, understanding how the system works is the key to progressing.  The player can "do experiments", try things, test their hypotheses about how it might work, and eventually they understand it and progress.  There's no need to punish them, send them back to the start, whatever, and it doesn't really make sense to do so.  Not understanding how things work yet is punishment enough, and they won't make progress until they do understand, at which point there's nothing further to teach them here and there's no reason to come back to it.

So this is still learning from failure, but the failure is just "I tried this and it didn't work", not "I missed a jump and now I have to start all over again".  I think it's a good way to teach things.  I've gone wildly off topic here.

[Gnarf]

The punishment of "ok now you have to go through the exact same thing again" is truly horrific.

I disagree. So there.

If part of the challenge is execution, it makes sense to require the player to get through sections (or all of) of the game in one go, which pretty much means starting over at the beginning whichever section when he fails. By requiring the player to get through a series of challenges in one go you can require the player to master something rather than just being capable of something. I can't see why that would be particularly bad. (and yeah, savegames ruin everything and can go die, often as not, but that's even farther off the topic )

I don't really see roguelikes as fundamentally different from that. The different parts of a game still play mostly the same way each time. Randomness makes a difference, but I still think it quite compares to progression in an arcade shmup or something. You tend to be able to get to a certain part of the game pretty consistently after having played for a while and so on. There's little "holy shit they're breathing acid on level 3 of the dungeon this time".

Your "better" solution is better for certain types of games. Ones where all of the challenge is to figure something out, to solve something. When there, after having figured that part of the game out, is no chance of failure at it, repetition of that part becomes meaningless. Though as far as I know that has been the trend in those kinds of games for ages anyway. Adventure games and that.

[brog]

The punishment of "ok now you have to go through the exact same thing again" is truly horrific.

I disagree. So there.

Fair enough.  There's an entire subgenre of shmups based on repeating levels over and over again to get perfect execution, and plenty of other games that do this as well, so I guess it's pretty clear that my opinions aren't universally shared.

I was thinking about how games can teach things; everything I said was in the context how how games can be used to teach things.  Although I guess mastering a physical challenge is teaching something as well, so I shouldn't exclude that.

[GregWS]

Hmm, I don't know.  I play enough "perfect execution" platform games (eg. Mega Man games), and yet for whatever reason I don't think I'd want to play a "perfect execution" shmup.  And yeah, in a weird way you could argue that being forced to play something repeatedly could be educational, but I think it would be a lot easier to argue that, in the case of games, pattern memorization isn't that educational.  Though maybe there are good things going on in your brain when you're memorizing patterns, so I could be way off.

[Gnarf]

But then pattern memorization isn't what I was getting at.

It's more about how having to do 10 difficult jumps in a row, restarting the sequence if you fail, requires more mastery of difficult jumps than getting through 10 difficult jumps one at a time (failure only resulting in not progressing to the next jump). And not really about memorizing where in the level those jumps have to be performed or any such.

[GregWS]

But then pattern memorization isn't what I was getting at.

It's more about how having to do 10 difficult jumps in a row, restarting the sequence if you fail, requires more mastery of difficult jumps than getting through 10 difficult jumps one at a time (failure only resulting in not progressing to the next jump). And not really about memorizing where in the level those jumps have to be performed or any such.

Well, as a Contra 4 player I definitely understand that concept, but I was more thinking about what exactly you get from having to get good at jumping in video games?  Other than being good at other video games?  (Once I got incredibly good at MM Zero, other action platformers because a lot easier, but that's about the only thing.  Oh, and when I listen to the remastered version of the soundtrack I get really pumped up; mental conditioning or something...huh.)

[Gnarf]

Getting good at videogames is super-valuable.

As a general thing video game skills don't translate directly into something you can use outside of games. Although I'd say you're training more general things as well. Like coordination, reflexes/reaction time in action games, and awesome planning ahead skills and something in strategy games, and those do apply when doing other things.

If we're talking about teaching the player something specific, and what the player learns has to translate directly to some outside of game activity, the same still applies. Like when you learn to play the piano, you really have to get through all of the song you're trying to play, with no mistakes. You can't just hit random keys, and just not progress to the next note until you hit the right one. You're not really learning anything that way (I suppose you could pretend the piano is an MMO and call that grinding).

Again, if execution doesn't enter into it, if you don't really have to perform anything, just solve/figure out/understand something, that kind of repetition is meaningless.

[Hajo]

As a general thing video game skills don't translate directly into something you can use outside of games. Although I'd say you're training more general things as well. Like coordination, reflexes/reaction time in action games, and awesome planning ahead skills and something in strategy games, and those do apply when doing other things.

It seems to have some effect (both links are on the same topic):

http://archsurg.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/short/142/2/181

http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/surgeon-video-game.htm

No idea how much there is myth and how is reality. But some of the games exercise the brain and such exercise seems to help in some domains.

[agj]

Getting good at videogames is super-valuable relevant if you're a surgeon.

[Gnarf]

Getting good at videogames surgery is super-valuable relevant if you're a surgeon.

[moi]

Getting good at videogames surgerydrinking your way out of trouble is super-valuable relevantsuper effective if you're a surgeon.

[Biggerfish]

The punishment of "ok now you have to go through the exact same thing again" is truly horrific.

I disagree. So there.

In the context of letting the player answer questions themselves, if you're trying to present to them something and getting them to think about it themselves, I think repetiton totally defeats the purpose. If you are trying to get someone to interpret something their own way, I don't think you should force them to try and do something the way you intended over and over again until they finally get it, it defeats the free-thinking aspect. I don't think that's what you were referring to though, so pardon me if I misunderstood.