Games Blog Update #1: Josh Bycer’s Blog (Gamasutra) and CGP
First time back in a while, but I plan to be updating with more frequency from this point on.
The two blogs that I have been following this semester are one of the professional blogs on Gamasutra, written by Josh Bycer, and the blog on the Critical Gaming Project (CGP) site. For the most part, I have enjoyed following these blogs, and I have found that I agree with many points raised by them and disagree with others.
Of the two blogs that I have followed, Josh Bycer has posted the most articles and has covered a range of ideas. While he has critiqued individual games, his posts focus on things such as what makes horror games successful, replayability, and randomization.
In his post about horror games, Bycer cross-examines what makes the horror genre successful, and what fails to fulfill that legacy. He uses games such as Amnesia, Space Hulk: Vengeance of the Blood Angels, Alan Wake, F.E.A.R., and Dead Space, as well as concepts like the human fight-or-flight reflex to prove his points. He argues five main points:
- The player has to fight back at all times.
- enemies have to fight at a different level than the player
- linearity should be avoided,
- if the player evolves, so must the enemies
- give the player downtime.
These “guidelines” that Bycer lays out could in fact drastically improve the horror genre. Random encounters, enemies with increasing difficultly, and facing the choice of fight-or-flight would create a greater sense of engagement for the player, mainly due to the fact that they would be facing a greater challenge. They would have no way to predict when they would encounter an enemy, what that enemy could be, and if they should fight or run.
In his two posts about replayability and randomization, Bycer critiques these two aspects of gameplay, looking at how they apply to games such as Din’s Curse, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Alpha Protocol, and World of Warcraft.
When talking about replayability, he references an earlier post he had made in which he lays out five tenets that he believes guides replayability:
- Escalation
- Competition
- Cooperation
- The Experience
- Randomization
He later edits this to include customization as well. Then in the primary article he chooses to focus on the difference between and impact of customization and personalization. He defines customization as “Giving players gameplay choices and allowing them control over what to use” and personalization as “Allowing players to modify choices by the designer to suit their preferences and stand out from other players.” He states that personalization is a step from customization and that the difference between the two is crucial to determining the replayability of a game.
He expands his thoughts on randomization in another post, using games such as X-Com and Diablo 2 to back up his points. He defines three levels of randomization: Low, Medium, and High. Low randomization mainly has to do with the placement of equipment and how often you can find them. Medium randomization expands this to include the placement of enemies, as well as the types of enemies faced. Finally, there is high randomization, which includes everything up to this point, as well as randomization of the world environment itself. He then addresses the pros and cons of randomizations.
Pros: greater replayability and a possible difficulty modifier.
Cons: The level can be stacked against the player (i.e. enemies, items, the map itself), the quality of the game environment.
He then finishes off by stating that “A well designed randomization system can be the cherry on top for your game design, giving players added value. However, like all good mechanics, it must be properly designed and implemented.”
The points raised in these articles could definitely be used to improve the replayability of games. I would love to be able to play a game like Final Fantasy and have a completely customizable character and randomized gameworld. However, the way that the story defines the characters and the world limit this. Randomization can add a great deal to replayability, but only if the limitations of the story and character development allow for it.
Onto the Critical Gaming Project, which addresses agonistic (competitive) play and choice in games.
In the first post, the idea of agonistic play is the primary focus. Referencing a recent Canadian study which concluded that competition, rather than violent content, raised aggression in players, the post talks about how attention is shifting from the representational content of a game to its primary form of play. As the post states “The new potential focus of popular moral concern is competitive multiplayer games, or games that facilitate Agon as the primary form of play”, referencing Caillois’ Man, Play and Games (1958). It then laments that agon is a form reinforced in many different aspects of daily life, such as economics, politics, and popular media.
The second post focuses on the effect choice has on gameplay. The post notes how, for many years, players have been craving more choice within their games; however, the author feels that having more choice does not necessarily guarantee a more meaningful or complete experience. They argue that games that pursue a morals system often suffer from poor design or ‘overchoice’, and argue that, in this day and age, limitation would be the radical choice: having fewer choices with more in-depth consequences.
The argument raised in this post raises some good points. Too much choice can be a bad thing, sometimes resulting in buggy programming, lack of direction, etc. However, too little choice does have its drawbacks. Replayability is greatly increased when there is a greater number of options to choose from. Too little choice can also result in linearity, which is extremely frustrating at times. In order for open-choice games to flourish, a balance must be found between too many choices and too little choice. If this can be successfully achieved, it would vastly increase the replayability of many games.
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