297: Green Barrels Don't Explode

[Tim Latshaw]

Green Barrels Don't Explode

Players may sigh when they see yet another crate or barrel, but without those familiar gaming landmarks, it's easy to feel lost.

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[Phishfood]

Well, swapping red explosive barrels for green ones seems a bad way to attack convention. Might as well have a driving game where red lights mean go and green means stop. Thats not so much making a statement as being confusing.

Why are medkits white with red crosses or vice versa in most computer games? because they are in real life. Well, the one near me is green with a white cross just to defy me....wheres my paint?

Some conventions should be challenged. e.g. having a health bar that goes between 0-100. Changing that worked great for Halo. Having a game designed for multiplayer coop worked great for L4D. But changing things that are pretty standard in not just computer games but the world is silly.

 

[therandombear]

Green barrels used to explode...Doom and Crash Bandicoot had that.

I loved the Zak and Wiki game, my mother tried it and she was stuck on several places namely because you have to flip the crank to fit it into the hole.

 

[IvoryTowerGamer]

There's a fine difference between a trope and a cliche. Generally a trope is something that uses its familiarity to help the player, whereas a cliche simply bores them.

It may be a bit absurd to have exploding barrels and item crates in nearly every FPS, but I honestly don't think that removing them would help the genre.

 

[Eleuthera]

I've always gone with the trial and error approach to exploding barrels. I'm colour-blind and never knew which barrels would explode and which wouldn't. Unless they had some sort of icon on them (a flame or explosion).
Still I just give most barrels or crates or other "interesting" object a try, some might explode, some might heal me and some just sit there and do nothing, colour-coding doesn't exist in my world. Then again for people who do see the difference I can imagine it might be confusing, welcome to my world

 

[Formica Archonis]

"We worried about the crate cliché a lot during development," Gabe Newell said in the coffee-table book Half-Life 2, Raising the Bar. "Finally, we gave up, and one of the first things you see when you start the game is a crate. We figured this was the ... equivalent of throwing yourself to the mercy of the court."

Time to crate! THIS is why Old Man Murray is notable! (Damn Wikipedia admins.)

 

[Grouchy Imp_v1legacy]

Doom had exploding grey barrels filled with green goo. Green goo is always bad, especially if it's bubbling- it's the exception that proves the red=bad/green=good rule. Presumably then this means that the most explosive of all exploding barrels would be a red barrel filled with bubbling green goo?

 

[Nocta-Aeterna]

Green barrels used to explode...Doom and Crash Bandicoot had that.

Crash Bandicoot also had red exploding crates I believe. Red ones had a count-down timer and had TNT written on them, the green ones exploded on touch and were marked with Nitro. So apart from their different colour, they were still clearly marked as explosive.

OT. Interesting read, though I believe the exploding barrel conundrum, specifically, has been tackled before.

 

[HentMas]

I dont really thing of it as a "convenient" way of putting something in a game, I do think that people are made out of habits, and if one has learned that the red barrel explodes, its really hard to change that perception

and an habit is much more hard to change than a simple rule

all this years we have worked hard to learn and master the rules that are implemented into the game, yes, the games have changed more and more, and with each installment, we have grown, and we know our games, we love them, even with its cliché barrels and such.

but one has to wonder, if after the first game that created "explosive barrels" there came a seccond game where the "explosive barrels" where something else entirely, would we as gamers have accepted it?, would we be more willing to accept change in our games?? or we would have probably dissmissed the idea entirely and focus on the next big game with "explosive barrels"?

check out the dead franchises, I can assume most know that if an idea is too weird or too different from the norm, people wont buy it.

 

[Scorched_Cascade]

I thought red barrels were red because in the natural world red equals danger? If memory serves biology tests have proven that our eyes pick up red, particularly moving red, much faster than other colours.

In the natural world red means either Danger! or Poisonous. Fire extinguishers are coloured red so you spot them when you are otherwise panicking.

It, therefore, always made sense to me that relevant items you don't want to miss (e.g explosive barrels and med kits) were coloured red.

Green barrels would just confuse me because I would expect them to contain acid because pop culture for years has told me that green equals acid.

As a side note blue is Electricity. Not sure how you can keep electricity in a barrel but they managed it in borderlands.

 

[Dastardly]

Green Barrels Don't Explode

Players may sigh when they see yet another crate or barrel, but without those familiar gaming landmarks, it's easy to feel lost.

Read Full Article

It's hard to know when and how to innovate... and it's even harder to know if a change is "innovation," or just "bucking the norm to be a dick." It's really a fine line to walk.

I think the mistakes that most folks make, in any medium, when they're trying to "shake things up" are pretty common. You see it in reboots of franchises, retellings of classic stories, and in games that try to set a new standard by challenging the old. Those mistakes, in no particular order:

1. Trying to change too many things. If you're going to make changes, you make them one at a time. There's no law that says you've got to build everything from the ground up. Your audience needs to have a few familiar landmarks, and a few "anchors" that keep them from feeling lost. And the bigger the change you're going to make, the fewer other things you should tweak for now. Save some for the sequel. Maybe a game in which players use the environment to construct creative "skill kills" isn't the best time to change up cosmetic features like barrel color...

2. Trying to change too small a thing. Overreaction to fear of being guilty of #1, usually. Rather than make one change that matters, you make several small changes to things that are largely inconsequential. Change a color here, a name there, just tiny stuff. And either your audience doesn't really notice (in which case you really haven't made any changes)... or they go "Why on earth would they bother to change this and leave everything else the same?" Is there a reason to change the color, other than saying "We don't have red barrels like those sell-outs," or something? If not, consider leaving it alone and innovating elsewhere...

3. Changing something without letting the audience know it. You're not just changing one thing. You're also challenging a ton of prior knowledge, experience, and instruction that have gotten your audience used to a certain expectation. You've got to prepare for that transition if you want your change to work well. If you want exploding barrels to be green, include some content that demonstrates this for your player...

 

[TheKruzdawg]

I've definitely felt the pull towards the familiarity of the red exploding barrel. I was playing through Half-life 2 the other day and there were some barrels near some enemies who hadn't seen me yet that seemed red, but were more rust colored. I was disappointed to find out that they wouldn't explode no matter how much I shot at them (by this point I was discovered).

But this illustrates how much we (or at least I) subconsciously rely on the red exploding barrel to explode. I saw a color similar to red on a barrel and I instinctively tried to blow it up. After that experience I took a minute when I entered the room to give a quick look over any barrels in the room to make sure if they could explode or not.

 

[megs1120]

I wonder if anyone else shot the green or blue barrels in Borderlands. If Gearbox put in any sort of telemetry, it'd be interesting to see a comparison of exploded barrels by color.

 

[JonnWood]

I watched an LP of Halo 3, where it had blue and purple "energy cores" scattered about. He never recognized them. Not once.

 

[The Random One]

Game design is an art and a science. You never know what will happen. I was playing the Crysis 2 demo this week and it was a nugget of such discoveries. On the first demo, back in January, people didn't use the invisibility and armor upgrades, because they were trying to play it like Medal of Honor because it looked like it. (Of course it made it more fun for those of us who did learn to use those features.) But the more damning thing is that the level they were showing off, Skyline, and a huge outdoors area and a huge indoors area, both similarly designed. No one stays indoors. Apparently people hate it! The creator commentaries in the Orange Box also repeatedly pointed these things out, and how they pretty much had to figure it out from playtesters firsthand how people would react to things.

I thought that a good way to see if a people has the skill to solve a problem by thinking outside of the box would be to create a text-based escape the room adventure. You have to find a key to open the door; the key is taped to the ceiling, and you can't reach it, but there's a ladder in a crate; you can't open the crate, but there's a crowbar under the bed, etc. You could solve the game by completing all the actions, but one of the items you'd need would be a screwdriver, and the best solution would be to use the screwdriver to remove the doorknob/hinges to escape.

 

[fanklok]

Green barrels totally explode they're just filled with highly corrosive acid, red barrels are filled with fire, blue ones are filled with lightning and yellow barrels are full of raw nitro glycerin.

 

[vxicepickxv]

They use the red because it's easier for the human to detect brightly colored objects faster than darker colored ones, as they generally stand out more. I associate green with explosives, but that's because it's something I've seen before. Well, not so much seen, but I've been trained about it. Compressed O2 is a dangerous thing.

 

[Tim Latshaw]

"We worried about the crate cliché a lot during development," Gabe Newell said in the coffee-table book Half-Life 2, Raising the Bar. "Finally, we gave up, and one of the first things you see when you start the game is a crate. We figured this was the ... equivalent of throwing yourself to the mercy of the court."

Time to crate! THIS is why Old Man Murray is notable! (Damn Wikipedia admins.)

Ha! I was wondering if someone would mention Old Man Murray. The full quote, as you may know, says, "We figured this was the Old Man Murray equivalent of throwing yourself to the mercy of the court." but I cut that part out for fear many people wouldn't know the reference.

I thought red barrels were red because in the natural world red equals danger? If memory serves biology tests have proven that our eyes pick up red, particularly moving red, much faster than other colours.

In the natural world red means either Danger! or Poisonous. Fire extinguishers are coloured red so you spot them when you are otherwise panicking.

You're very much correct, at least human-wise. We likely notice red so quickly and associate it with danger in so many things we have made because it is the color of blood. Is it as perceptible a color for poison in the natural world, however? I'm not so sure. A lot of food is red, and many toxic animals use a variety of bright colors, including yellows and blues, to designate they are toxic. Some poison arrow frogs and the black widow do have a tell-tale red to them, though.

Snip

That's an excellent little checklist of dangers that can be faced when trying to design around tropes. I really wanted to get the point across that it's not as simple as "Screw trends and be awesome." A myriad of effects and ripples must be considered.