Nobody likes being punished, so it’s amazing how hard some game designers work at punishing the audience of the entertainment they’re building. I’ve heard plenty of designers argue about how to punish players for making mistakes in their games, as if those players didn’t feel bad enough as it is for having made mistakes.
Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja, a DS Rogue-like RPG I played over the holidays, would be great fun if it weren’t designed by sadistic developers hellbent on punishing you for the smallest mistake. In Izuna, death is punished by throwing you out of the dungeon, losing all of your equipment. Killed by the boss on the 10th floor? Too bad, you have to replay the whole thing, with none of the equipment you picked up. Sure, a few masochistic hardcore players may get a kick out of the challenge, but most people just end up frustrated.
Sure, Izuna is an extreme example, but plenty of games punish players harshly for mistakes. How many games force you to replay the same 10 minutes of gameplay repeatedly until you’re able to get through a challenging spot? How many racing games condemn you to the last place if you hit a wall a bit too hard in the middle of a race?
Don’t do it. The temptation to punish players is hard to resist, but players don’t need to be punished by their entertainment. Instead, consider simply withholding rewards from the player: give a special reward for players who do really well rather than punishing those who do badly. The bad players already hate themselves for being bad, don’t add to their frustration.
January 10th, 2008 at 8:12 pm
Following that logic of never punishing mistakes, a monkey randomly pounding on the gamepad should be able to complete any game in a fairly short amount of time.
Is this desirable?
January 11th, 2008 at 10:53 am
That’s actually a good question
If a player can get to the end of a game, but never gets any of the cool rewards and gets a crappy ending (say “You survived but failed to save anyone and now they’re dead.”), is that bad? Basically you’re saying to the player: “I’m not going to punish you, but here’s all the cool stuff you’re missing on by not playing better.” And there are parts of the game that can require skill without punishing players, like puzzles and such.
Lego Star Wars is a game with basically no punishment of unskilled players, and everyone who played it loved it (everyone I know anyway).
That said, I’m not against some amount of punishment for players who are downright trying to not play the game, like your monkey example. But I think you shouldn’t underestimate the drive of players to do good in games — that’s why they’re playing. You can communicate to players that they’re doing badly without punishing them and more often than not that’s enough of an incentive for them to try and do better.
January 11th, 2008 at 8:20 pm
WARNING: Very long and overly pedantic meanderings ahead! You’ve been warned
*****
Well, I’d actually argue that showing a crappy ending *is* punishment, relatively speaking. Where’s the hard difference between the two, if both “punishment vs no punishment” and “reward vs no reward” systems differentiate skilled and unskilled players with respectively desirable and undesirable consequences?
Since games are fundamentally about choices and interactivity, we’re bound to have in-game actions that lead to consequences that are less desirable than others - so any player choice that results in the less desirable option could be seen as a punishment.
The only real way to prevent that would be to turn the game into a straight-up movie, where nothing the player could do would affect the outcome. Got shot in a shooter? No sweat, you’re invincible - losing hit points would be punishment, and that’s bad. Pulled off a well-timed counter in a fighting game? We can’t punish your opponent, that wouldn’t do.
Of course, I’m pretty sure you’re not advocating the end of choice in games, but when I hear about “don’t punish your players” and “games should be easy” in a general way, my left eye gets twitchy. How can we make players actually care about their choices when there is basically no risk to them? Why care about being ambushed by enemies if they can’t actually hurt you? Challenge in games does have a reason to be.
In general, I’m very uncomfortable about generalized statements about difficulty in games. I strongly believe that there should be easy games *and* hard games, and hopefully everything in between. Just as it would be silly for the latest movie tie-in game to offer higher than average challenge (because the point of such games is more about experiencing the whole story and universe), it would be silly for a competitive strategy game to try to avoid punishing players who make bad decisions.
*****
I *do* agree with you, though, that we should make a conscious effort to spin the consequences of good and bad choices in a more positive light. The player just perfectly nailed a challenge? Bring out the fanfare and confetti, the cool replays and shiny trophies - we *want* the player to remember that experience! The player then got caught completely off-guard by enemies? Go ahead and punish him somehow, but let’s try to not rub it in too much - let’s make it seem easy and desirable to win back the lost progress / items / hit points.
For instance, if, in a dungeon crawler, losing a battle means having to completely lose the last fifteen minutes of play, then it’s going to feel frustrating. But if you can actually keep a few trinkets from this loss somehow, like a few experience points or a slightly bigger exploration score, and then you spend the next fifteen minutes in a small side-quest to the armoury to regain all your lost items, then it’s going to make the pill much easier to swallow, even if you’ve still lost fifteen minutes after all. It feels a lot less like the definitive loss of fifteen minutes as a punishment, and a lot more like a tough challenge you just overcame at the cost of fifteen additional minutes.
January 12th, 2008 at 11:23 am
[…] wrote a very long and thoughtful comment to my post “Who Likes Being Punished” earlier this week. It made me realize that I wasn’t very clear in my post, so […]