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Comparative Ludology: Finding the Fun of Tetris in Hack and Slash
by Taekwan Kim on 12/29/09 11:17:00 am
 
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Posted 12/29/09 11:17:00 am
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The Question
In the assessment of Gamasutra's number five PC game of 2009 (Torchlight), the following was noted: “What makes a good loot-driven action RPG is hard to pin down -- there have been several solid efforts in the genre over the last decade, but until Torchlight, none of them resulted in the same satisfied, sleep-deprived nights to which Diablo II subjected me beginning in 2000 and lasting longer than I would like to admit.”
It’s a familiar question. What makes hack and slash fun? Mr. Crecente of Kotaku got a chance back in August to try out Diablo 3, and this is what he had to say about that experience: “[O]ver time it left me questioning what exactly I liked about Blizzard's famed franchise… I suspect that my enjoyment of Diablo III is more about reminiscence than it is dutiful gaming.”
I had a similar nagging feeling as well as I worked my way through the second level of Torchlight last week. I have to admit, I was actually rather bored at this point, though obviously less than an hour with such a game is not enough time to form any real opinion. But as the third level became the fourth, and that one the next, and so on, I experienced a considerable change in my level of engagement with the game. What was different?
Herding Mobs
It wasn’t until this point that I had begun to utilize my Vanquisher’s Ricochet skill, and the experience of herding mobs to quickly clear out the field with a few well placed Ricochets suddenly resonated with a fleeting notion I had come across before in Dragon Age with the Walking Bomb spell, in Diablo 2 with Lightning Javelin, and in WoW with my Retribution pally. These are all experiences of the same kind as can be found in the game of Tetris.
Tetris is a useful comparison because, due to its abstractness and straightforward simplicity, it is relatively easy to identify and encapsulate what exactly makes the game fun. While Tetris has many experiential components, in the end it’s really all about getting that line piece to obliterate a whole section of blocks. The fun lies in real time risk absorption to set up scenarios that achieve big payoffs. Or, conversely, to achieve an expert rate of clearance in order to preemptively minimize risks.
To be sure, the above generalized summation is so widely applicable that it could feasibly be mapped to any game, so, for the context of hack and slash games, it is important not to lose the mental image of that final piece falling into place that, by eliminating the danger they pose, makes the risks taken with all the other pieces worthwhile. It is an image which absolutely embodies the idea of a singular mechanical device that contains the threat to, the exercise of, and the restoration of player agency within a single interaction.
Dancing on the Brink and Laughing at the Face of Death
The most obvious corollary to this can be seen in point blank area of effect strategies in which a player aggros multiple mobs in order to decimate them simultaneously. If the vertical negative space left in a round of Tetris can be seen as the health bar, the growing number of adds as the growing space taken up by blocks, and the aoe spell or skill seen as the line piece, the correlation becomes quite clear. This is the most straightforward comparison, but all of the other typical classes in hack and slash type gameplay feature the same sort of thrilling race against loss of player agency. Something as simple as a slow but heavy burst hitting two handed weapon represents the same thing.
For ranged DPS, it’s getting the opponent down before the opponent has a chance to reach the relatively vulnerable PC. For roguelikes (excuse the expression), it’s getting off that critical hit or backstab to preemptively eliminate potentially fatal engagement in close quarters combat. Healers: bringing teammates back from the brink of death and successfully managing triage. Minion masters: keeping up the health of minions and landing that kill that allows the spawning a fresh minion and relying on them to keep the damage away/do the damage. Etc.
The effect of randomized Tetris pieces, then, is the same as randomized item drops. Since loot-driven action RPGs tend to be exactly that—loot-driven, that is, heavily reliant on proper equipment—the right item for the right build at the right time can make a build which might otherwise fail. The player makes use of the available resources/blocks to get by, but all the while he is waiting for that one piece which will solidify the strategy he has been investing in the whole time, which is where the risk lies. That item may never arrive at all.
Big Risks with Big Payoffs
I believe Mr. Ludgate was quite correct in noting that it’s really a duality rather than a trinity: it’s a difference in play/risk management style between burst and steady strategies. But perhaps his choice of the terms “offensive” and “defensive” was somewhat easy to misinterpret (the concept might be better communicated through the terms “aggressive” and “cautious”). With an “offensive” style we have the player that builds up more blocks in order to destroy more of them at the same time. With a “defensive” style we have the steady as you go, keeping blocks to a minimum style of Tetris. It’s the difference between a two handed weapon player and a dual wielder, for example.
These are not “offensive” or “defensive” per se, but there is a difference in the rate at which the player exercises his agency. The player concentrates either on dealing out more or retaining more agency than can be taken away from him in a given ludic event.
For example, under this understanding, Left 4 Dead 2 is, for all intents and purposes, essentially an FPS hack and slash dungeon crawler. Of course, the class system-like roles embodied by different weapons have been discussed before. But maybe more relevant for understanding what makes the game fun, though, is the tug of war between the exercise and depletion of player agency—that is, will the player’s risk investment decisions pay off?
Randomized mobs and items which may or may not be of use depending on those mobs, “investing” in “offensive” (shotgun/melee/defib/adrenaline) or “defensive” (sniper/magnum/first aid kit/pills) capacities, limited respec opportunities, and finally balancing the “herding” tactics between an offensive rush (at the risk of passing up items) or a defensive creep (at the risk of exhausting items)—these are all manifestations of that Tetris-like experience I described above of real time risk investment/management1.
Let’s Not Forget What Makes These Games Fun
Perhaps it is easy to concentrate on class systems or their short comings in these types of games when attempting to come up with new formulations. But this is somewhat akin to missing the forest for the trees—we should not forget the original interactive experiential component which makes them fun to begin with. And the fun in all of these games lies in making time dependent risky investments through meaningful expenditures of player agency which have no guarantee of paying off down the road.
Be it skills with cool down timers/mana costs or builds/strategies predicated on randomized item drops/limited resources, these are all scenarios in which a singular ludic device is both the bane and salvation of the player—a device which both expresses and limits player agency. We might be laughing from a successful flirtation with fate, but it’s a dance with death nonetheless. Remember, if all else fails, think Tetris.
Footnotes
1 The achievements and player statistics, then, serve as those tangible and visible game objects which provide boasting rights in a multiplayer setting (the “social” part of the investment).
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That's what more makes games enjoyable, at least for me. Even though, some often times, I over-expect something in a game and get to have an average following experience. In the case of Bioshock, I managed to play the whole first playthrough of the game using almost only the wrench, avoiding all counter attacks, and boosting all the characters skills to the use of such skills, so I could save enough ammo for the "hard days to come", which never came, and the game ended before I was expecting, and the real big challenges didnt come.
I had all my weapons, aids and everything full, plus a corner in each level full of more aids and that bio-thing, and ammunition, and a half-dozen disabled hacked detectives, and a pile of trash baskets and baodies from which I couldn't, yet, take the loots. My friend said I became one of the NPCs in Rapture, yealling around that the end of the world was approaching.
Similar thing happened in FEAR2, in which I went many levels using only the pistol (hardest difficult) and no bullet-time skill. My friend and cousin were watching and saying "hey use the bullet-time skill, it's part of the game, it's not cheating", I really was treating that as cheating, and the payoffs of not using that skills or other weapons until later in the game (where I got another pistol I couldn't find a way to keep using one single, so I went to other weapons) was merely psychologic, cause there was a huge ammount of ammunition and guns in the game, and the skill was unlimited in the long-run.
Another case was when I had to sell, or just throw around in the first enemy found, all those grenades in RE4, cause my inventory was really full of them and I couldn't collect anything else, having so many grenades of all kinds which I never used in the game, unless I could... manage to have many enemies in the same dead end so I could make a single grenade pay for a lot of ammunition, er... Tetris.
I think that's what's both great and potentially problematic about these scenarios where the mob spawns are finite. Within the scope of a scaling difficulty baseline, the player can make the game as challenging as he wants it to be. But sometimes that difficulty just doesn't scale up enough, so a player who chooses to play the game as conservative as possible and make every encounter as demanding as possible ends up becoming very overpowered.
A possible solution for a finite mob spawn game like Dragon Age, for example, which features persistent leveled monsters, is to set the difficulty of future leveled monsters by referencing the hardest monster defeated by the player. You'd still have the "uber" bosses like the High Dragon and Revenants scaled to be extraordinarily difficult, but the more regular mobs could be leveled much higher than they otherwise would be if the player demonstrates mastery over these uber bosses.
As far as wrench-and-pistol play, man, I always fall into that one especially in RPGs or Diablo-likes with enhancement systems. It's one of the reasons I stopped playing Fallout 3; I had a mental blue screen of death/red rings of death upon the realization that everything I would own in the game would eventually break in short order with my only alternative being running around naked and killing things with my fists.
On finite spawns and future difficulty, is it necessarily the toughness of the mobs (level, health, etc) or was the payoff more a function of situation and the behavior of the mobs? Player expectation and behavior (the surprize and unpredictability of beating a situation versus knowing a game is trying to be 'just right' for them). Perhaps playing as much if not more to expectations rather than pure numbers we can get finite enemy situations to retain their (perceived) difficulty and payoff.
About the difficulty problem, I was actually thinking more about player agency capacity than about the behavior of the AI, but actually that's rather the problem isn't it--that a game's difficulty is determined by static variables which are not responsive to the player's gameplay? Also, I believe the main cause of the "wrench problem" as we have identified it is that it is very difficult as a player in many of these games to really gauge the availability of resources until the player has completed at least one playthrough.
These two problems are quite related. While the player has difficulty judging when to expend resource, the designers usually have a similar problem judging how much resources a player will have/need at a given point in the game. There is basically a failure of "communication" between the player and the designer. The problem is that a player's resource management is usually fluid, but a game's predetermined resource output usually is not (which is why "infinite mob spawn" games seem to handle this difficulty disconnect problem better).
I believe there are two categories of player agency determinants, or "capacitors" if you will: “hard” determinants like stat points, level caps, number of skill uses per period of time, etc.; and “soft” determinants like gold, expendable item resources, etc. There’s usually a great deal of overlap between the two, but it essentially comes down to resources whose availability are largely predetermined by the designers (“hard”) and resources whose availability is largely determined by the player (“soft”). [For instance, consider the difference between gearscore and a player's actual skill in playing his class in WoW].
It's pretty easy to set difficulty based on "hard" factors, but this doesn't actually say much about the player's in-game agency capacity as this can vary widely depending on "soft" factors. For example, if you were carrying, say, 80 bombs in Dragon Age, separated into 4 sets of different bombs (acid, electric, etc.), you can just cycle through the bombs and spam them, allowing a significantly high damage output which has very little to do with the player's level. Equipped in such a fashion, a player could probably take on the High Dragon at a much lower level than intended. Which is exactly the problem--it's basically a given that a player will discover a means to do something which a designer did not intend.
A step towards solving this problem, then, would be to utilize more fully considered measurements of a player's agency, such as (for a game like Dragon Age) a player's level *plus* the quality of equipment he is using *plus* the hardest monster a player has defeated, instead of just the player's level. Left 4 Dead obviously does this pretty well--indeed it is the core of the game. And Mr. Newell has already talked about the importance of statistics in charting effective/dialogical AI responses (www.edge-online.com/blogs/gabe-newell-writes-edge). In a way, then, like many other industries are discovering, I believe statistics are probably going to play a lot bigger role in the future, particularly in creating responsive game design.