by Slade » May 7th, 2015, 10:44 pm
I can't remember the source, but I watched a video where someone was explaining that games are more exciting when you're naive about them. It's an idea that I've thought about a lot. As a kid playing side-scrolling action/adventure games for the first time, anything could happen. Any cave opening or door could lead to unfathomable secrets. Your brain is firing nonstop. After a while, you begin to understand that most of those possibilities are actually just flat, decorative pixels. There are invisible walls separating you from the truly unknown. You come around to the idea that it's not unknown, it's actually unprogrammed nothing. Or repetitive filler.
Then you play around in your first 3D environments, and the world is full of possibilities again. It's not as magical as before because you have some idea of the limitations of programming in general, but there is a whole new axis to explore and you can actually look up and see the sky from the character's perspective for the first time. After a while, you understand that the sky is usually a flat image that moves slightly, or one that is static and just appears to move as you travel around. Instead of complex environments, you begin to see blurry skins up close. The new trick worked at first, but soon your brain unravels the fantasy just as it did the fake doors in the old games. Newer versions of 3D games require more processing power and use more resources to cover up unsightly, unrealistic edges with smoke and mirrors. Shadows and reflections make everything seem alive and real. Sound effects are recorded from Actual Things and implemented in the game with great skill. How long do those illusions last? Your brain is really good at figuring out the slight improvements, answering "how did they do that?" before the sentence is out of your mouth. Sometimes your sight distance is shorter, and you see complex polygons loading at the edge of your vision. If you move really fast, you can get there before the people in the game are complete and you can see right through them.
So many patterns are repeated across games. You can read an NPC's movement and immediately tell if they are pacing, sneaking, or acting aggressively. After encountering so many hundreds of NPCs nothing surprises you. Eventually they're using complex tactics to outsmart you. They can even sneak up behind you and attack. Your screen flashes at the same time you hear a loud sound and it makes you jump. Wow.
Rewards in the earliest games I played were usually treasure related. Coins, jewels, and other valued items. Maybe it's a secret area full of jewels, which is like a double reward. Later it's rewarding to do violent acts, like shoot someone directly in the face with a rocket launcher. Sometimes the bullets just feel good. Make it more complex and use a mine detonated by proximity to an enemy that is also near a pile of explosive material. You're not even there, but you can see and hear the explosion from far away. You can use a heavy weapon up close that slashes through torsos like meat. Bloodshed tends to increase, until it goes beyond reason into pure fetishistic violence. Eventually you've watched so many characters die in so many ways that it doesn't feel like much of anything to watch 50 or 100 die within minutes. You get the Really Big Gun that is skinned to look the most badass and kill 1000 and then eat something.
The reward can be keeping someone alive. It can be someone your character cares about, or someone you actually feel like saving because they have emotional value. Maybe someone else in the game saves your character. Your character can be saved and then betrayed, which is the worst way to be kept alive. Fast-forward through a few dozen games and you've run through so many combinations of killing, saving, and betraying that none of those things are new or different anymore. Things that are meant to be surprising are obvious. Any agenda that the game has seems so simple because in all the games you played most of the possibilities never happened, and every new experience feels like a conglomeration of old ones. Games live in a box. The caves were never endless.
Lately the games I play are based around a system that is fairly balanced, but challenging. X-COM: something something Inside comes to mind. Adventuring, running around and shooting, and exploring rarely feel good. But solving tricky puzzles still gives me a burst of dopamine, and I hope that will continue!
Last edited by
Slade on May 7th, 2015, 11:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.