Too Much Success

[MaximillionMiles]

In my time games used to frustrate! They used to challenge! They used to be good, not like this modern, newfangled "games for everyone" nonsense! They don't make games like they used to, no sir. Oh, those were the days, when you could spend days trying to get past a stage, and if you died you had to do it all over again from start.

It's games like Mass Effect and Portal are ruining our youth with their easy-peasy challenges and their save points and their achievements and... Bah! Get off my lawn you casuals! And don't come back until you've played a REAL game!

/sarcasm

Now, to add my 2 cents to the academic issue: This is a bunch of nonsense. Or, to put it more politely, it's classic generation-gap misunderstanding leading to one side saying nasty things about the other (in this case that today's youth is apparently too lazy and complacent, and too pansy to have their ego challenged to boot).

I'm willing to admit games are not quite as punishing as they were before, but since when has that been a bad thing? Games have been growing steadily more popular and more widespread in popular culture, so games becoming less punishing certainly hasn't crippled their development, their sales or even their cultural influence.

And the challenging games are still out there. Super Meat Boy, Spelunker, Demon's Souls too many multiplayer games to mention. And they still get a fair bit of attention and sales. They may not be the big games in the yard anymore, but there's clearly still an audience there, and developers willing to carter to it.

Difficult games are not for everyone. This was true back then, and is still true now. The hardcore challenge seekers have always been a niche, a vocal and influential nice, but still just that. Niche. NOT THE MAJORITY. There is a small group of bikers that are hardcore and ride 5 miles every day, but nobody is saying that every biker should be hardcore, that every bike rider needs to put in as much effort in their sport/transport as the hardcore crowd. So why should the games industry carter to this small market?

Oh, and children being bored in class is, quite frankly, not a new phenomenon. Trust me on that one.

Sort version: Difficult games are a niche, not the golden standard of gaming. And this new generation won't be any better or any worse than the one before. Deal with it.

 

[kugelfaenger13]

Fable series every sequel is easier than its predecessor

 

[Heathrow]

Nice to see this traditional puritan model for motivation is managing to worm its way into the gaming community; it brings me no end of pleasure to know that we will always have people telling us that the only way to be successful is to be frustrated and miserable.

 

[Llil]

In my time games used to frustrate! They used to challenge! They used to be good, not like this modern, newfangled "games for everyone" nonsense! They don't make games like they used to, no sir. Oh, those were the days, when you could spend days trying to get past a stage, and if you died you had to do it all over again from start.

It's games like Mass Effect and Portal are ruining our youth with their easy-peasy challenges and their save points and their achievements and... Bah! Get off my lawn you casuals! And don't come back until you've played a REAL game!

/sarcasm

Drop the "/sarcasm" and you're good.
But seriously, we need both kinds of games. The problem isn't that there is so many easy games, but that there's so few hard games. Some of us need our punishment fix.

 

[JakobBloch]

Hmm This rings with something I read a few years ago in a danish newspaper.

A little background: The danish system of teaching to some degree attempts to make learning a game. This would show in different ways but the one I remember best was "Reading Weeks" (weeks might be wrong... could be month) which basically work in the way that you got a score. Every book you read earned you a points and there was a sort of leader board (no reward if I remember correctly at least not beyond winning) with different "leagues" based on the difficulty of the books. The system was also set heavily in favour of getting everyone to the same level of education. There was some advanced placement courses (which just meant you were offered more lessons) for smarter students. So everyone would get a good basic education. And the system works. For the most part. And this is where the article comes in.

It spoke of a boy who was a trouble kid. He was disruptive in class and had a hard time sitting still and concentrating. Teachers and school nurses suspected he had ADD or some similar condition. So he was tested and indeed he had many of the symptoms for ADD but not to such an extent that a clear diagnosis could be reached. On the advice of a specialist they also tested his intelligence. The boy was thought to be average, maybe even a bit bellow. It turned out he was not. He was highly intelligent. Not enough to warrant extra classes but close. It turned out that his bad behaviour had not come from frustration but from boredom. The normal classes were not enough to challenge him. On an impulse they also tested the mother of the kid and lo and behold she showed the same gifts. She also remembered have had similar problems as the kid in school and as him had been branded a problem child.

So how does this pertain to this matter? Well for this connection I have to move onto myself. I remember having similar problems in school. Most of my school time (at least in "Folkeskolen" - the first 10 years of a childes education in Denmark) was spent looking out the window (or at least a lot of the time). Anything and everything I was presented with came easy to me. Nothing really challenged me. So I grew lazy and complacent. This all continued all the way up till the time I went to university. Here I suddenly meet challenges for real... and I crashed and burned completely. I had not developed the determination and grit necessary to soldier through. So me with my towering intellect was left in the dust while my friends went on to get their bachelors and masters degrees (one was even encouraged to try for Phd. He didn't though).

I see the danger of this happening to others as an effect of easy games but also because of the drive towards gamification. We are walking on unexplored ground here and I fear there may be sink holes.

 

[rembrandtqeinstein]

Somewhat on topic I came back to WoW post cataclysm after not playing since Burning Crusade. My gawd did they "streamline" the early game. This isnt a bad thing but they also took 100% of the challenge out of the instances.

They appear to be diablo like zerg fests where you just mash your buttons and you win if you have good enough gear.

I'm going to miss the strategic CC and tanking where one uncontrolled mob caused a wipe and aggro management actually mattered.

In my opinion flattening the learning curve is a good thing, but not to the point where there isn't a noticeable difference between an expert and a novice. Instead there should be a gentle, skippable ramp up to a high degree of difficulty.

Making learning not boring is one reason Portal is such a good game.

 

[Sartan0]

Since when has Kirby ever been hard?

I knew there was a reason I never played any of those games.

 

[MaximillionMiles]

I snip myself!

Drop the "/sarcasm" and you're good.
But seriously, we need both kinds of games. The problem isn't that there is so many easy games, but that there's so few hard games. Some of us need our punishment fix.

I agree that both kinds of games have a right to exist, and a world without those exceptionally challenging games would be a duller one. But as I said before, hardcore gamers are a niche. A relatively small group. Not the majority.

What do you want? That the developers focus most of their efforts on a small group while ignoring larger and more profitable markets? Sorry, not going to happen. In a way, I recognize this is unfair, I happen to enjoy bizarre and original games and there's certainly not a big market there. But that doesn't entitle me to say all games should be bizarre and original and carter to my tastes (as wonderful as that would be to me on a personal level).

 

[Unhappy Crow]

I purchased Kirby: Epic Yarn this Sunday because I love playing Kirby games. I don't care if this game is easy, all that matters to me is how the game is. Difficult or not. That's how I am with all my games.

 

[Llil]

snip

But the more profitable markets, those other people, they're not... me.
I'm just bitter, because I feel I'm being horribly underestimated, that's all.

 

[Dastardly]

Too Much Success

Everyone likes to succeed, but games may be trying a bit too hard to make every player feel like a winner.

Read Full Article

On an individual level, I agree with you. Fact is, each person has a "reward threshold"--an amount of praise they're just fine with. Coincidentally, they also have an "effort threshold"--a maximum amount of effort they're comfortable (important word) putting out. How these two interact are what determine a person's motivation.

For instance, it doesn't matter how high a reward you offer, most people aren't going to bother trying to lift a building by hand. Too much effort, so they know they're not going to get the reward anyway. You've exceeded their effort threshold.

Now, trying to lift and carry something very large? Yeah, it's more effort than I'm comfortable with, so I'm not going to do it for some pat-on-the-back reward. If you offer me a larger reward, I might consider it. But let's say you offer me a reward of $100 to lift this heavy thing... but I know that I can get $60 for lifting a much lighter thing. Well, for minimal effort I can get $60, and maybe that's okay by me. I've met my "reward threshold," so there's no need to put in the extra effort.

When we over-praise, that's what we're doing. We're reaching the reward threshold before we get to a place where we can push that person's effort threshold. (This is also why we tend to pay people after the job is done, in a sense. They'll be less likely to do minimal work if they feel it could diminish their pay.) This happens a lot in schools.

Little Johnny has a problem hitting people. His parents won't do anything to get him to stop, citing they "just don't know what to do." In desperation, the school offers an incentive--every week Johnny doesn't hit anyone, he gets a candy bar. Prior to this, school was about learning and gaining skills, so that you can maybe succeed in life... but that's too much effort, and we've just distracted Johnny with a more immediate reward. So now, school is about "not hitting anyone." And one day, we stop the candy bars and he continues his "not hitting people," right?

Why? It's better for him to keep this reward structure in place by struggling just enough that you can't end it. You've permanently handicapped his motivation by over-praising. (The other thing we tend to do in schools is reward effort, instead of rewarding achievement. We should always try to praise effort, but we should only reward achievement.)

____

Now that I've gone too long on that, it's time to talk about the flip side. On the other extreme, our society bases too much on competition. We act as though it should be a universal motivator, appealing to the competitive spirit in all of us. Except not all of us have it, and those that do not to the same degree. Again, think back to school. Did you ever have spelling bees in class, maybe in 4th/5th grade? I did.

And everyone learned real quick who the handful of folks were that would be winners. Everyone else? They were just putting off the inevitable. As long as Kid A was just 1% better than Kid B, Kid A was going to win. After awhile, Kid B learns this and doesn't take much interest in the competition.

See, competition only motivates the top 10% of any given group. That's because competition produces one winner and many, many losers. Furthermore, not being "the winner" essentially invalidates all the effort and achievement that went into competing--you lost, whether you lost by one point or one-hundred.

What's the point of all this garbage? What does any of that have to do with the article or thread? It's a bit abstract, I know, but I feel that sometimes we confuse "Person not motivated by competition" with "Person who wants to be rewarded for nothing." These are two extremes, and (as usual) the truth lies somewhere in between.

Video games are going through a sort of "adolescence." We're swinging from one extreme (hardcore, competitive focus) to the other (gentle, rewarding effort). While I agree that the issue you're talking about is problematic, I would caution against over-compensating by swinging to the other extreme.

After all, one of the defining features of most extreme positions is that the think of themselves as "the middle."

 

[EternalFacepalm]

Difficulty settings would solve all of those problems, yet too few developers seem to have the patience to add that. It really doesn't take too much, just make the AI damage more or something; seems to work for Minecraft.
Many indie games seem to keep the traditional difficulty, though, so there's that.

 

[Bluecho]

Well I certainly think it's not good to pander to the public's obsession with maintaining self-esteem. Not only will they not even try difficult tasks at all, but those that do and fail will have their fragile self-worth shattered and will refuse to ever touch it again. So if their self-esteem is low, they don't try; and if it's high, they run through without trying, fail, and then give up.

This is not the kind of attitude we should be encouraging. Yes, the old games were hard, but when you punish bad behavior, lo and behold, the players stop doing that bad behavior. What a surprise!

Same thing with the school system. How about instead of adhering to this asinine "No child left behind" policy and mentality, why don't we just make it possible for the brats to fail. If you don't complete your work and pass your tests, you don't get to move on to the next grade! You know, what we were doing decades ago!

 

[Taunta]

I agree. People shouldn't be afraid of challenges. The easy road is not going to be the optimal one. The bigger the challenge, the better you feel about yourself when you finally beat it.

I played IWBTG, and it doesn't lower my self-esteem when I fail at it (and I do, a lot). It just makes me laugh, honestly, because the game is so ridiculous.

The new raid tier in WoW? Yeah if you thought Cataclysm was kicking your ass, Firelands is going to do so extra hard. And I'm okay with that, because I'll feel great when we finally down those bosses. Let no one say that they aren't challenging.

 

[Zom-B]

Kirby's Epic Yarn is an okay game, but I don't understand why it's so "good". It's nice for a little burst of fun when the wife feels like playing a game, but aside from that, for someone like myself who has been playing games for decades, it's really just boring.

Contrast that with the current poster child for "hard" games Demon's Souls. Yes, it's hard, but not in an insurmountable way. It just takes more patience, thought and resource management than most games, where you can just run at enemies and hack and slash until they are dead. Demon's Souls doesn't let you do that, so it's been branded as "hard".

I see room for both styles of gaming, but in the end Kirby does not offer a skill challenge. The only challenge it offers is whether or not you are willing to take the time to play through the whole game for the sake of it. Demon's Souls, on the other hand, offers a skill challenge that, apparently, a lot of players are unprepared to understand or deal with.

 

[2fish]

I can see this trend in games and I am still seen as slightly crazy among my friends for beating Ninja Gaiden black on master ninja mode. I worked until the combos we a part of me and bosses patterns were well known. I was working on master ninja in all the challenge modes when my xbox killed itself...

While I will not say all games need to be a challenge it is nice to find a game that is fun and kicks my ass. That way when I win it feels a hell of a lot better than winning an easy game. That and I get bored in easy games unless they can offer some other form of fun like Starwars Battlefront II.


One of these days I will go unlock all the difficulties and beat master ninja mode again. I may be slight hesitant since last time I unlocked master ninja mode my 360 killed itself.

 

[Domehammer]

Example of this? I haven't really noticed games giving players more praise tbh.

Starcraft 2. People apparently couldn't stand losing so much that most stopped playing competetive ladder games. Blizzard's solution: don't display losses. At all. Now everyone's essentially a winner.

Which is a load of bollocks. People should not be encouraging this sort of pitiful behaviour while directly driving the industry backwards.

Reason I stopped laddering in Starcraft 2 was because the losses weren't displayed. Motivation to play for me was keeping wins ahead of losses. Once losses were removed after about twenty games I just stopped playing as it dawned on me what is the point if winning means nothing.

 

[tehroc]

I find it very disturbing that these new games are conditioning our children to just give up when things become challenging. This lack of effort leads us into Idiocracy.

 

[flagship]

Back in the day games where designed to be hard to drain your pockets of quarters at the arcade and then ported over to the Nintendo/Atari for additional profit. Games designed specifically for the home system back then had to be difficult because that's what people expected. The problem with this however was in an arcade you could constantly pump in quarters whereas home systems gave you lives and continues which meant if you where good enough you'd never finish, so things got easier and easier.

 

[ShannonG]

Back in mah day we had to play our games with coins! In the snow! Uphill! Both ways!

Yeah, yeah. Standard grognard whining.

You really think it's easy games that cause people to give up in the face of challenge? I'm afraid you're putting the cart before the horse, there. Games are being made less frustrating today as a response to the fact that a majority of players became frustrated, lost interest, and never finished those older games.

At least some of the motivation for making a game easier comes from the game developers themselves, who are spending more effort than ever on dialogue, cutscenes, and pretty graphics - effort which is completely and totally wasted if 50% of players never see most of it, because they didn't bother to finish playing.

That's actually pretty close to an average number, by the way. 50% of people who start a modern game are going to finish it. Think that sounds bad? If you look back to first-generation games, the number of people who 'beat' the game is close to 0% - the games are literally unbeatable, and the number of people who've made it to a kill screen can probably be counted in the single digits. It's the same with the later games that get held up as paragons of hardcore difficulty - maybe 5-10% of players actually finished them, and those are the people who are talking breathlessly about having a 'great sense of achievement'. The other 90%? Those people went and did something that was actually fun, rather than endlessly frustrating.

That is, in my opinion, a fundamental problem with the established 'arcade' model of gameplay - the game throws up a wall of difficulty wherein the player dies over and over until one of two things happen - either they succeed and are allowed to progress, or they give up in frustration. It really is a much better paradigm to allow the player to progress even if they fail, while keeping track of their successes and failures and allowing them to go back and try over. The person who's dedicated enough to play the same level 100 times in order to succeed is also a person who's dedicated enough to play the game 100 times in order to get a perfect score. Meanwhile, the person who's going to give up in frustration because they don't have the time or the inclination to play the level 100 times is still allowed to continue playing and enjoy themselves.

Articles like this simply make it clear how over-represented those 10% of hardcore challenge-gamers are in gaming commentary. People whine and complain that a majority of games aren't being made to cater to the 10%, and act as if the 10% is the default that everything should be based around, rather than the 90% that actually makes up the majority of people's experiences with gaming.