Thelo 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 I’ll answer this comment directly here.
Thelo said:
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.
He’s quite right: the difference between punishment and reward is shades of gray, not black & white. Saying that games should have no punishment whatsoever means that it should be all rewards all the time, and I disagree with that for obvious reasons.
To clarify my previous statement, instead of “avoid punishing players” it could be “avoid making players feel punished” or even “minimize punishment”. Some examples of games that did it right:
- Lego Star Wars: One of the least punishing games ever, dying has very little adverse consequences, yet it’s fun. I’m not saying all games should go that far, but it’s an interesting avenue for some games.
- Halo: The very regular checkpoints of the single player campaign reduce punishment while keeping the challenge intact. Even if you die, you won’t have to replay more than a minute of gameplay. The recharging shield also avoids punishing you throughout a level because of one tough fight early on.
- Sid Meier’s Gettysburg: In this RTS, failing a mission doesn’t end the game and force you to restart, you just go to a different battle than if you’d won. The overall result of the war depends on how successful you were in all battles, but you’re never stopped because of a difficult battle.
- Project Gotham Racing 4: The season mode is played day by day and if you fail one race then you just move on to the next day of the season with a slightly poorer overall ranking.
- Mario 64: You must find only a fraction of all stars to finish the game. If you can’t get one in particular, you just ignore it and find another one, you don’t get punished for it.
Basically, I think it’s fine if the player feels that the bad things that happen are the direct result of his actions. If it feels like the game developers are slapping the player in the face for his failure, that’s bad.
A lot of games have a very black and white separation between success and failure: either you die or you’re the hero who single-handedly saved the world — there’s nothing in-between. I think many games could gain by having different levels of success. Instead of having bad players downright fail, you let them finish the game with a poorer ending and you reward players with a great ending, with a few different levels in-between, for example.
Multiplayer is another place where some amount of punishment is unavoidable: if somebody wins, then somebody loses. That’s a problem: I’ve tried quite a few multiplayer games and abandoned them after getting my ass kicked repeatedly. Too much punishment, not enough rewards. It’s a hard problem to solve, but I think the matching system of Xbox Live is a good approach. It matches similarly skilled players together and avoids multiplayer becoming only the realm of the hardcore players.
January 12th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
Yep, you hit the nail right on the head with this one
Halo’s regenerating health system has particularly impressed me for another reason: it puts the consequence of failure very near its cause.
In health-pack-based shooters, you can lose 99% of your health in the first encounter and get away with it, then save, and then fifteen minutes later get stuck in a nominally easy part because you’re still at 1% health. So basically, you’re punished fifteen minutes after your failure.
In Halo, you regenerate in about five seconds of not getting hit. That means if you die, it’s because you’ve very clearly screwed up *in the last five seconds*.
That’s pure genius! For the player, it’s then *pretty* tough to miss the link between poor tactics and failure, or to feel their death is arbitrary