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Giving this Gamasutra blogging thing a whirl. :)
So, because the big project at the new place is large and Flash-based, right now we're doing a systematic analysis of Ferry Halim's Orisinal games. They're some of the most beautiful and innovative Flash games on the market, so worth studying when it comes to thinking about what kind of interactive mechanics you can put into a flash game environment.
This is only explain, though, why I'm taking a screen capture of the flash index to the Orisinal website and chopping it into its components. It's simple grunt work, but there are 56 icons there -- a lot of chopping.
I've been on this kick lately of reading about cognitive processing in a deeper way than I did in college. For some reason it just didn't stick at the time -- I think part of it is that the friends I had who were learning about it were mostly talking about John Searle, whose thinking seemed entirely wrong to me in ways I couldn't immediately articulate, so I just dismissed the whole field.
I borrowed The Mind's I from a Erik few months ago and started reading it, though, and it's sparked a much deeper interest and investigation. On the basis of that book I looked up Douglas Hofstadter (the editor of that essay collection), who was known for getting the Pulitzer in 1980 for Godel, Escher, Bach -- I ordered a used copy of that, but I started reading his more recent I Am a Strange Loop because it was immediately available on Kindle. Also on Kindle was Bertrand Russell's The Analysis of Mind, so I've started that, too.
There's lots to talk about all of these, but suffice it to say that I've been thinking more about the basic components of thought and what the mind is doing when put to a particular task.
Language is a whole massive kettle of fish, but something simple came up when I was pulling out these icons -- the title of one of the games is "The Perilous Voyage", which, when I was saving its icon, I transposed to "The Perilous Journey". The cognitive element in that error is very interesting. Because I was distracted (I might even have been thinking about writing this post) I substituted a synonym.
There are a lot of reasons why this could have happened -- maybe I've heard "perilous journey" a lot more often than "perilous voyage", so there was an existing brighter neural pathway that I defaulted to when I wasn't paying full attention. But the nature of error in language is very interesting and is perhaps tied to the way language tends to mutate and, for instance, how people frequently misquote things others have said, in movies, etc.
Anyway, what was more interesting was the optimization process I automatically fell into while doing this annoying task. If I had to repeat something more than three or four times, I started altering how I was performing it, in an attempt to try and get it done faster. By the time I'd gotten through all of the icons, I estimate I was chopping about five times faster than when I started -- maybe even more.
I started by figuring out how I could use keyboard shortcuts rather than clicking around with the mouse, and at one point realized I was redrawing the copy box every time instead of just moving the one I'd created for the last icon -- anyway, it was incremental and should-have-been-obvious stuff that only became apparent once I'd repeated a task three or four times. But it was a very basic training behavior at work.
We harness this in games in a variety of ways. A basic IPM chart (introduce - perform - master) lays out this successive learning process system even for something as simple as a side-scroller. The challenge in a larger system is to create an environment with a sufficient number of variables to be able to reward experimentation. Then you lay an achievement structure on top of it (in my case I had to get through 56 icons) and away you go.
But I was lucky in that there were enough avenues for optimization available that I could keep figuring out ways to make the process go faster. If my attempts at optimization had failed, or, worse, actually made the process slower, my frustration threshold would have ramped very quickly.
I wonder how often we think about game mechanics in terms of optimization. It's common to think about it in terms of the performance of a basic mechanic, but most design seems to rely on accidental emergent behavior out of a system rather than actually orchestrating levels of variability. It's a little unintuitive because you almost have to design the system in reverse -- its optimized state, and then its base state, with strata in between.
This can also be a way of measuring difficulty of an action. One of the trickier things in system design is balancing difficulty. But if a system can be solved through a slow method (rather than having only a fast method and a failure state), the risk of losing the player to frustration greatly diminishes, while achievement markers for an optimized state can keep a sharper player satisfied of continuing challenge. Not that knowing this makes it easy to accomplish. :)
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I have on a couple of notable occasions, both involving optimizing my attacking ability. One of the later Soul Reaver games had interesting power list: telekinetic bolt, a long-jump attack, etc. So naturally I tried to string them together in a combination, such as a bolt attack, followed by the long-jump which would hit at about the same time, segue into the standard canned melee combo. But the game seems to specifically disallow this. It not only messed up my "flow", but a magazine reviewer was sufficiently perturbed by it to dock the game coolness points.
Even something as simple as Zelda:TP disallowing me to throw a boomerang and swing the sword simultaneously disrupts my blitzkrieg.
"[Emergence:] you almost have to design the system in reverse"
Totally. But it's worth it!
I think it's common to design systems in reverse, but again you run into those levels of complexity -- it's a problem that goes back as far as games themselves, and was maybe most evident in text adventure games, where you literally had to extrapolate what exact phrase a player might try to use and set up a system response for it, knowing the whole time that probably 90% of your non-primary-action use-cases would never get explored. :) Modern physics engines allow us to use the rely-on-emergent-behavior approach in a way you never could with those older games, or at least not nearly to the same degree.
An example of this might be minimizing ammo waste in an FPS or maximizing point allocation usage efficiency (points spent versus advantage gained) in an RPG. In my view, playing a game that encourages maximum efficiency in resource usage is where the fun factor lies, and if a game does not allow it or hinders it, the experience becomes very annoying. In many cases, it just seems like the developers only considered one way of playing their game rather than allowing players to choose how they (the players) wish to play it. This tends to limit audience appeal, though.
Games without play options tend toward frustration, which is suicide in a competitive market.
The original Half-Life changed the usual health and damage of enemies for Hard difficulty, as I recall, but one explicit change that was readily apparent to the player was the drop in energy for each battery pack (from 15 to 10 units). Bungie did even better with the original Halo when they altered the actual enemy group composition depending on difficulty level. This is the bare beginnings of the type of approach that should be taken for difficulty levels, at least in my view, but it needs much more development. As I said, I seldom see even this basic approach taken. Instead, all that happens in most popular FPSes is a multiplier of health, damage, etc for enemies.
Even something like Mass Effect merely changes enemy level relative to the player's, but that still has the same basic effect of simply altering health and damage rather than actually offering a different game experience and requiring different strategy. Of course, Mass Effect is merely a hybrid of Deus Ex and Starflight, but I'm just using it as an example of one approach that is taken today, an approach that I feel is rather pointless as far as efficiency / optimization is concerned. I will say that I think that Mass Effect's dynamic leveling is better implemented than some titles such as Oblivion, but that's a bit different topic than analyzing whether or not the game allows the player to choose to play in a manner that optimizes efficient use of resources.
In any event, I have not seen FPSes actually alter the availability of health, ammo, etc, with the exception of Doom 3's flawed Nightmare setting. Even if they did this as a rule of thumb, I'd like to add that this approach to difficulty as well as the approach I've seen (i.e. changing enemy health and damage) are both flawed, anyway. Adopting either of these ideas means that the designer is making decisions based on their view of what is sufficient or constitutes an enjoyable (or "challenging") game experience rather than allowing the player to make choices according to the player's individual needs and playstyle. I'm not interested in playing a game the way the designer would play it. As a game player, I want to play games the way I wish to experience them (within reason, of course... I'm not talking about cheats or exploits or similar methods often employed by various players).
I agree with your observation that games without play options are suicide for companies. However, I would argue that the play options offered in many (perhaps even most) modern games are superfluous and do not actually allow players to have options. Instead, the options provided are dictated by developers who force players to fit into their view of how the game should be played rather than allowing the player to make their own choices about how to customized the experience and meet their own perception of what is enjoyable.
The quandary many designers encounter is the challenge vs. accessibility balance. There is only so much gameplay choice a designer can include in a given game. He is restricted by the technology available, storage space, time, funding, etc. A design paradigm then must either focus on making the player be efficient, or allowing for more players to enjoy the game from beginning to end. With today's production costs most development teams opt for accessibility over pure challenge (Ninja Gaiden is a notable deviation). A perfect balance is rarely achieved.
Western RPGs are all about choice, but they usually focus that choice to allow the player to finish the game in multiple, equally-valid ways instead of focusing on a player's choice to make the game more challenging. A class based system is great for changing player challenge, but that necessitates purposely gimping a certain class, thereby making the game harder when using that class. Is it worth the time and money involved to fully flesh out a gimped class that only a small percentage of your audience will use and appreciate? That depends on the development team, but in this day and age a vast majority of teams will not spend the time on such a feature.
When it comes to player choice then you have to include enough game mechanics for even the most inefficient player to finish the game. There must be choice for every level of player, not just the optimizer. Ultimately there is enough player choice in most of the games you mentioned for a player to decide his own level of difficulty within the given game mechanics. In any FPS it is merely a matter of choosing not to use certain weapons or upgrades. You may choose to play the game with only pistols and melee attacks, which should provide quite a challenge. I realize that is no substitute for graduated, designed levels of challege, but it exists none-the-less. In an RPG such as Mass Effect you can choose not to upgrade your characters abilities (or set a 50% cap), or not utilize newer, more powerful equipment. Again, it is not going to feel as organic as a designed approach, but the choice is there.
One game that does a solid job of providing choice and challenge is Fallout 3 (as did 1 and 2). You can take advantage of every single game mechanic available and still make the game incredibly challenging. If you focus your character on the personality-based skills and attributes you can play the game within the rules given, to their full extent, and still have a massive challenge in combat. Unlike Oblivion, where just swinging a sword improves your skill, Fallout makes you actively assign skill points to increase effectiveness with certain weapon types.
I do understand your frustration with the rather tepid and forced nature that most games provide for increasing the challenge of the game and rewarding those efficient and optimal players. However, I think it's hard for developers to justify features that have a very small potential to sell more games. Creating unique avenues to ramp up challenge tend to fall easily by the wayside.