Logic in Gaming

[JDLY]

I think logic in gaming isn't neccesary. But it sure helps a hell of a lot. I think presence of logic while gaming is one of the key things that separated "hardcore" gamers from "casual" gamers. Either the casual gamers don't have the time or money to play more in depth games, or they don't have the logic to know what to do.

I have always considered myself a very logical person, but I have some friends who have proven they aren't.

Example (this is an extreme case):
I can play any game I want and be able to do what I'm supposed to without detailed directions.
But what I don't get is how, when playing a game with one of my friends, we can go through a door and end up in an empty room with one other door and the following happens: I go through the door when he wasn't paying attention, he gets confused, doesn't know where I am or what to do, so he goes back through the door we came through, and goes back all the way to the beginning of the level, looking for me all the time.

Is it that hard? Let's see. You came through this door. There is another door you haven't been through yet. GO THROUGH THE F***ING DOOR.

I can get through an entire level in Splinter Cell the first time without getting caught. Simply because I have enough logic to look around for cameras and people before I run through a lighted area.

QUESTIONS: So what do you think about the place of logic in gaming? Is it neccesary? Is it helpful? What does it determine about the speed and efficincy you get through games with?

 

[Avatar Roku]

My god, I had a very similar experience with SC: Chaos Theory. I guess, my friend can't remember a simple map; and I'm talking really simple, like three parallel hallways with two perpendicular hallways.

 

[crimsondynamics]

Try applying logic to any SCUMM game and see how far it takes you.

 

[Altorin]

My god, I had a very similar experience with SC: Chaos Theory. I guess, my friend can't remember a simple map; and I'm talking really simple, like three parallel hallways with two perpendicular hallways.

you lost me at perpendicular.

 

[cobra_ky]

first of all, logic is essential to functioning as a human being. a solid grasp of logic is one of the most important you can have in life and it's a shame schools don't teach it.

that said, the examples you're describing seem to have more to do with visual/spatial orientation. it's really easy to get disoriented when your physical body isn't actually moving and you have no peripheral vision or inherent sense of direction. it also doesn't help that a lot of the time every door and hallway looks exactly the same thanks to lazy texture artists.

the people who really need to apply logic are level designers who design mazes of twisty little passages, all alike. basically nothing in real life is designed that way, and for good reason. if architects built buildings the way some developers design levels a lot more people would look like idiots in real life too.

 

[JDLY]

first of all, logic is essential to functioning as a human being. a solid grasp of logic is one of the most important you can have in life and it's a shame schools don't teach it.

that said, the examples you're describing seem to have more to do with visual/spatial orientation. it's really easy to get disoriented when your physical body isn't actually moving and you have no peripheral vision or inherent sense of direction. it also doesn't help that a lot of the time every door and hallway looks exactly the same thanks to lazy texture artists.

I know everybody has some logic. It just seems some have less than others.

P.S. this was a Splinter Cell game so there is some sort of peripheral vision. But the thing is this was one room with two doors and he knew which one he came through.

P.S.S. Trying not to sound like a prick.

 

[Eternal_Rapture]

I don't think logic is necessary but its going to take people who aren't very logical a heck of a lot longer to beat a game than me. And its probably necessary online, or you'll get owned.

 

[cobra_ky]

I know everybody has some logic. It just seems some have less than others.

P.S. this was a Splinter Cell game so there is some sort of peripheral vision. But the thing is this was one room with two doors and he knew which one he came through.

P.S.S. Trying not to sound like a prick.

sorry. somehow i forgot splinter cell wasn't an FPS. also i took a ton of symbolic logic courses in college so i apologize for any prickery on my part. (i was hoping this thread would be about boolean symbols or formal arguments or something :c )

 

[Avatar Roku]

My god, I had a very similar experience with SC: Chaos Theory. I guess, my friend can't remember a simple map; and I'm talking really simple, like three parallel hallways with two perpendicular hallways.

you lost me at perpendicular.

Picture # with one more line going one way. That's how the halls were set up, and he couldn't remember that.

 

[Eternal_Rapture]

What I want to know is where do you draw the line between not having logic and stupidity. I was playing horde with two of my friends. I got downed on a walk way that is not big enough for two people. My friend walks up the walk way saying where are you? Why cant I move up the walk way, I cant walk through this dead body. That's when i began banging my head against the wall.

 

[Skarvey]

Well, what you guys seem to be arguing is logic vs. common sense and in-game experience vs. expectations. Logic differs from person to person, seeing as one guy can solve a Rubics cube in 45 seconds, and another can spend an hour on it, get frustrated, dump it in a tin of paint, and spend the rest of the afternoon having sex... so who wins the logic war there?

Common sense, is just that, common. Its everything dear old dad taught us before that incident with the blender and ended up ruining Thanksgiving because, for all his knowledge, he didn't have the common sense to put the top on when he dumped a can of cranberry spam in there. But disirregardless, its the stuff everybody's gotta know to go out into the world and survive. Now, is it really logic that led your friend to pick the wrong door, or was it common sense that did that? Obviously we've heard the logical arguement but I know when I lost something, I'd always retrace my steps, so its easy to see where your friend might've gotten confused there. Its hard to sling mud at a casual gamer for following a real life approach to loss and recovery when its just as much of a stretch to assume that he's automatically going to follow the same path as you. You may operate on logic, he may operate on common sense, both are equally good ways of acheiving your goals.

The second issue is that of ingame experience vs. expectations. I can imagine being a casual gamer dropped into a game like splinter cell with no prior knowledge. Its dark, there are enemies around, I'm decked out in bad ass combat gear and I have what looks like a machine gun on my back. Sounds like a 3rd person shooter to me. How am I supposed to know there are cameras, laser trips and wall mines? The thing is, if you're a hardcore gamer, and he's a casual one, who's to blame when someone screws up? More to the point, who here can't wait for the next splinter cell game to come out?

 

[RinrIck]

The amount of logic you need per game is going to vary...

Is it needed YES! Why? I think that is what developers are taking into effect when they say 50+ game hours. They expect you to be some brain dead idiot so they can easily put less into the game and get more end result, a.k.a running back to the beginning a few times.

Take example L4D where this is really becoming apparent...A fellow teammate is being swarmed with zombies do you (A) Shoot directly at him to remove zombies or (B) Shoot zombies around him...

You will be surprised(or not) that most people plainly choose choice A very quickly and kill their teammate.

/rant

 

[vede]

I've never had problems with people using logic in gaming, but I think that may be a problem...

I think that more games should require more brain function on the part of the player to be successful, instead of games just being mindless entertainment. When all the logic required is "enemy went left, I go left to chase it," something is wrong.

It's partly an AI problem. Enemies are usually either fighting like a robotic killer or getting the fuck out of the way as fast as possible. How about enemies actually being strategic? Getting wounded and fleeing through a hall, only to stop and wait with your shotgun aimed where the player's face will probably be anyone? Or maybe we could incorporate more environmental tactics, and make sure that the only way to get through the game easily is by making creative use of the environment, past "rock = cover, I hide behind it." Perhaps, alien with turret gun, stationed below another alien with a turret gun which is on a platform held up by poles. Both aliens have impenetrable shields, so you have to shoot out the poles. Except don't come out and tell the player about environmental objectives, just make them figure it out. The example above was a bit weak, but it's hard to do unless you've got the context of the rest of X game to go with it.

See, if players use logic and strategy (both of which can be implemented into even the most mindless of shooters), they end up with better functioning gray matter in their heads. Perhaps we should try to combine problem-solving skills into more games, and leave behind the idea of a divide between games with problem-solving and games with shooting Y until their eyes no longer exist.

See, I want to have to figure out just how I plan to shoot them 'till their eyes are naught but vapor.

Sorry if this is way off-topic... I just started typing and didn't stop...

 

[The Potato Lord]

I've found Fallout 3 good in terms of thought-fueled gaming. while you can go on the blatently obvious path and finish most quests with ease and a mediocre reward a little investigating and experimenting can lead to a much more interesting and lucrative conclusion.

MINOR SPOILERS FOR FALLOUT 3





The tenpenny tower quest is a prime example of thinking a bit more and shooting less can give you a much better reward.There are three definite ways to do the quest which are spelled out for you.
1) Help Gustavo and kill Roy- easiest by far and gets you 500-700 caps
2) Help Roy and slaughter Tenpenny tower with his feral ghouls by opening the gate. gets you a ton of loot from the dead people and thier homes plus a zombie mask that keeps feral ghouls away from you.
3)lobby for Roy and get him into the tower peacefully. 500caps and the zombie mask.

but with a little planning and some cleverness I recieved the 500-700 cap reward from Gustavo, but I also have an army of feral ghouls set to attack the tower at anytime I want thus giving me indirect dominance over everyone in the building.

Bit of a tangent but it does illustrate my point.

 

[Dr Spaceman]

You know, I wonder if the "logic" everyone is referring to is really an inherent/inborn ability or something that we've all acquired over time. What I mean is that when I started playing video games I really sucked compared to the way I am now. Splinter Cell would've absolutely bewildered me 15 years ago. Now, yeah, I'm pretty good at snapping necks and avoiding cameras. But that's 15 years of training. There are few other things I've been doing consistently for that long, so naturally I understand what's going on.

For example, I'm really not that great at Halo. Well, I'm not that great at Halo when I play online against 12-year-olds. (How the hell do kids that young get so goddamn good?) However, I generally crush my friends simply because I have "gamer instinct" and I have a better grasp of spatial relationships in games, have a better memory for game maps (as a result of being used to video game architecture/geometry), and can figure out quickly which the best weapons are. My friends, who mostly have less (much less) video game experience play roughly as well as I think my mom would. They're smart guys, many who have earned, or will earn, college degrees in logical fields (like engineering, math, etc.).

Lastly, I just want to send a quick recommendation to the OP. Interesting topic, but it took me a while to really grasp what you were saying. You probably want to take a look at your topic and see if it flows logically (ba-dum-bssh!) from point to point. But yeah, I don't really want to criticize, so take it as you will.

 

[742]

to ps3fanboy:
this seems like basic fucking intelligence and the ability to think for ones self, it is quite rare, but even so when i see someone without it i break out the fire. and for the games where it isnt helpful... theres a name for those, two actually "button masher" and "crap".
and i dont think most of us care if your a prick, as long as you meet the pretentiousness quota.

 

[L.B. Jeffries]

Isn't what we're talking about really patience? I know that if I just wait around the right moment will deliver itself in Splinter Cell but sometimes you're just tired and want to get into the action.

Plus...hours with the Persona games have taught me that the cuter the creature is, the more likely it's going to tear my face off and piss on my corpse.

 

[Roger T. Houston]

I kinda agree with Dr. Spaceman.

After several years as a gamer, I believe one evolves a "gamers intuition", based on experience. One learn to read the clues given, visually or by audio (audially?), more or less without even noticing. If there is a piece of wood laying over a log, we instinctly know that we are supposed to use stones to counterweight it, and hold it down on one side, if we see a button we start to look for ways to push it, and we quickly discern between stuff that can be used/searched/something, and things that are there just to make the game look pretty. We somehow "know", even in the first play-through, where and when enemies will come to eat faces(although it is not a perfect science.)

When I played Portal for the first time, I seldom got stumped. I would consider it a pretty easy game, with a few challenges thrown in. I made my brother, and my brother-in-law play it, more or less the first time they play a game since the Amiga 500 stopped being the greatest thing, and their first FPS/wasd+mouse game, and they went past important stuff (buttons, companion cube etc.) despite being told visually and by sound that these are important, while using much time on the nondescript electrical boxes hanging on walls in all FPS. This is not due to them being stupid, they are both highly educated, they are just not "trained" to catch those clues.

A surgeon will probably easier detect and recognise an inner bleeding than a lawyer, not because he is smarter, or more prone to logical thinking, but because that is what he does.

 

[GloatingSwine]

MINOR SPOILERS FOR FALLOUT 3

The tenpenny tower quest is a prime example of thinking a bit more and shooting less can give you a much better reward.There are three definite ways to do the quest which are spelled out for you.
1) Help Gustavo and kill Roy- easiest by far and gets you 500-700 caps
2) Help Roy and slaughter Tenpenny tower with his feral ghouls by opening the gate. gets you a ton of loot from the dead people and thier homes plus a zombie mask that keeps feral ghouls away from you.
3)lobby for Roy and get him into the tower peacefully. 500caps and the zombie mask.

But then, of course, you lose the opportunity to put a bullet in Tenpenny's brain for Crowley, because Roy will always kill him (and everyone else), and if you didn't do it early enough, you won't be able to enslave Susan Lancaster.

The directest method, in this case a short conversation between Roy and Eugene, turns out to be the right one.

 

[fedpayne]

Try applying logic to any SCUMM game and see how far it takes you.

You totally just reminded me of a dream I had last night. It was weird. In my dream, I was in court and had to get the judge to take this case to appeal or something, but he wouldn't do it just be talking to him. So I thought 'ah! And used law book with stand', and then, in my dream, watched Guybrush reading the law to the Judge. wtf? Then I woke up in my dream (I was still dreaming, dreamt I woke up) and I was at my grandparent's house, and I'd been shaving in my sleep, but only got half of it, and there was shaving cream everywhere. And ultimately I decided that it was not worth saving the extra time shaving asleep to get shaving foam all over your bed and walls. So there we go. Find some logic in that. I hope I haven't just laid some murderous psyche out for all to see.