Surgency Games

At the beginning of this year, Nintendo filed a patent for a game mechanic that would allow the player to relinquish control of their character over to the game. This would allow the user to bypass difficult sections of the game after becoming stuck or unsure of where to go next. In essence, this allows the player to see the entire experience the game has to offer, to “get their money’s worth” and not risk running into frustration or a shelf level event.

In my time working within the industry, I had heard this idea pitched numerous times by numerous companies, going back as far as three or four years ago; just around the time everyone realized games were no longer just for the hardcore. This idea, at the time, was reviled. It was laughed out of the room, so to speak. That Nintendo has taken the reigns of this idea most recently, only serves to highlight the company’s mad dash to get as far away from the core video game consumer as possible.

Having the ability to suddenly stop playing a game, in order to progress forward, in order to bypass challenge, is the first step in undermining the fundamentals of what it means to be a game. Imagine chess. Imagine, during a game of chess, you could simply stop playing and let a grand master computer simulation decide your next move. The game would be meaningless. Every move you made would be more worthless than the last. You would not be learning how to play chess. The mechanics that form the core of what we (as Man) find to be so intrinsically satisfying in playing games would simply disappear.

There is a difference between chess and Mario, granted. There’s also a difference between challenge and difficulty. What Nintendo aims to do, if this patent does go through and they do start using at the core of their games, is to excise challenge. Difficulty leads to frustration and shelf level events. Challenge leads to good game design. Which one should we really be trying to get rid of in gaming?

Humans learn from play. Even the youngest of children play games; games they have created within their own mind as they go about their daily routines. As we age, games are an integral part to our learning experiences. Through challenges and obstacles, we learn how to succeed. Games teach us logic, reasoning, decision-making and whole list of other advanced abilities that have a considerable worth in the real world. Video games are slowly becoming a part of culture, taking over the traditional board game night the average family enjoys.  Interactive games will become the best method of play for humans within the next one hundred years. Maybe sooner.

Removing challenge from games is the death of the medium. As soon as games begin to coddle and hold hands and make it so that nothing you do in the game has consequence, the act of play becomes meaningless.

I am all for players getting to the end of the games they buy. Right now, the industry competes, on a daily basis, with some of the best creative culture the world has ever known. Movies, music and books can be delivered instantaneously. Social networking sites have taken over the Internet. Every industry associated with pop culture right now is figuring out the best possible ways to separate consumers from their disposable income.

Games have to be able to compete. Someone who buys a game wants to get their money’s worth. They don’t want to be cheated out of an ending they deserve and they don’t want to be endlessly frustrated. They want to have fun. They want to be entertained.

Back to where we started: the future of games can be found (although briefly, and not fully explored) in Dead Space and Fable 2. Both games offer the player a built-in GPS system, displayed within the game world, which points them to their next objective. In Dead Space, the GPS was optional; you pushed a button, it appeared as a line drawn along the ground, and it disappeared a few seconds later. In Fable, it was always present. You could turn it off in the menu, but that defeats the purpose of the mechanic. I prefer how Dead Space handled it; Fable 2 sold a lot more copies.

Games like GTA have been using GPS systems for years. What I like about Dead Space is that it is built into the fiction. There is no abstract UI element in the corner of the screen. If you want to use it, you can; if you don’t, then don’t. This is similar to the idea Nintendo has: it is an opt-in, user-based decision to activate the mechanic.

Dead Space and Fable both realized that the fun and challenge in the game was not in navigating from Point A to Point B.  It was in the journey. It was in the excitement of the worlds. It was in surviving to get from Point A to Point B. Dead Space is the first survival horror game I can remember playing where I never once was at a loss of where to go, or what to do. I finished the game. Same with Fable 2.

The GPS in Dead Space came from necessity. The rooms in the space ship on which the game takes place all look very similar to one another. I imagine, at one point, play testers got lost, frustrated and eventually gave up on the game. I bet some low-level designer offered the suggestion of a built-in GPS system. I bet he was laughed at. I bet everyone told him the game wouldn’t be difficult to play if the user always knew where to go next.

I bet, when the GPS was finally implemented, everyone looked at that kid like the genius that he was. Either that, or the guys who made Dead Space are just plain smart, and knew going into the game, that challenge comes mastering mechanics and learning how to become better at the game. Difficulty comes from everything else.

The idea of a built-in “path” in every game is ridiculous on the face of it. This is but a stepping stone. Helping players understand what to do next, where to go and how to do it is what “the path” represents.

In Call of Duty 4 most friendly characters can be seen running in the direction of the player’s next objective, or shooting in the general vicinity of the player’s largest threat. This is a path of sorts.

In Mario Galaxy, the player mostly needs to run forward. The camera always points towards your next objective, or the level design is so smart, the largest, brightest piece of the environment is where you need to head next.

Ninja Gaiden 2 is both a challenging game (in that the best way to be successful is to learn the fighting mechanics and make tactical choices, albeit very quickly, as to how to overcome the situation at hand) and a difficult game (because objectives are never clear, the camera makes it hard to perform combo moves and certain enemies do not have their weaknesses explained until after they kill you).

The Path in Dead Space can teach us a lot. Make the game about what the game is about. Find the challenge in mechanics, not in the abstraction or obfuscation of rules, goals or limitations. Find challenge in teaching the user how to play and in assigning them tasks that require logical, progressive thought. Decrease challenge through adaptive AI, puzzle hints, subtle suggestion towards success, followed by obvious suggestions toward success.

Never remove the controller from the player’s hands. If you do, they will never learn. Games can be as easy we want them to be or as challenging as we want them to be. But never, ever, take the controller from the player’s hands.

Nintendo, in the last two years, has been wildly successful. They seem to be smart enough to know exactly what the public wants or smooth enough to tell the public what it wants. But this patent is ridiculous on the face of it. It makes games into not-games. Into nothing more than interactive movies. The type of experience where nothing is learned, where little fun is to be had and difficult choices are frowned upon.

Look at The Path instead. It has real answers.