Gaming and mental "modes"

[filk]

I've been playing Guild Wars 2 a fair amount lately, and at first, I didn't like it at all. It does as much handholding as any other MMO, encouraging you to keep your map up and follow the waypoints. Then, a couple days ago, I consciously shifted the "mode" in which I was interpreting the game in an effort to fix this. Now, I'm playing it more like something like Skyrim. I go off in a direction and explore, and sometimes awesome shit happens (with other people!) While before the game felt like a pretty funnel, now it feels genuinely like the great wide world that I was hoping it would be.

What I've been wondering is, is it a sign of a bad game that it requires a conscious step back and reinterpretation of the game's goals by the player for it to really succeed?

I feel like this is something that is generally not forgiven. One example is Assassin's Creed, which was torn apart for the combat. What seems like the vast majority of players played the combat in a strictly counter-based mode, which made it long, boring and uninteresting. However (in my experience), if you shift your focus in Assassin's Creed to dispatching enemies as quickly as possible, the combat system becomes a very rhythmic, engrossing experience of risk and reward. I would argue that people would have enjoyed the first AC much more if they did this, but most reviewers (and players) tore it apart.

Personally, I wish games facilitated getting you in the right mode more. We always hear that games are being changed to support mass audiences, but many of those mass market titles can still provide compelling experiences if the player makes the effort to engage. I can't help but wonder how many games I've written off because I wasn't able to notice the need for this mode switch and respond.

Another recent example for me is FTL. I started playing without naming any of my crew or my ship. There's no indication really (especially if you've never really played any high-investment, death is death kind of game) that you should be investing time into the creation in order for you to get the most emotionally out of the experience. But once I started assigning names to my characters (and thinking of them by names instead of as anonymous dudes) the game became much more enjoyable and the emergent storyline much more powerful.

Anyways, I was wondering if anyone else has had these experiences or has some feeling on how games could do this better. I'm kind of new to the forum but Idle Thumbs podcast discussion is good so I suspect you forum people have cool opinions.

[toblix]

If I understand you correctly, and I'm known not to, you're sort of implying that all players have to switch to this specific other mode to play the game the «right» way, or enjoy it the most or whatever. With your Guild Wars 2 example, obviously they made this early, major decision to very explicitly move players around the world and through the game by way of empty checkboxes on the map and always showing you your completion stats in percent of the current area. If you're able to play it and enjoy it in this alternative renegade way, that's awesome, but I wouldn't describe that as the only case in which the game succeeds.

[Gormongous]

If I understand you correctly, and I'm known not to, you're sort of implying that all players have to switch to this specific other mode to play the game the «right» way, or enjoy it the most or whatever. With your Guild Wars 2 example, obviously they made this early, major decision to very explicitly move players around the world and through the game by way of empty checkboxes on the map and always showing you your completion stats in percent of the current area. If you're able to play it and enjoy it in this alternative renegade way, that's awesome, but I wouldn't describe that as the only case in which the game succeeds.

I don't think he's arguing that, exactly. I do agree that oftentimes I hate a game until I finally sync up with how the dev expected/wanted me to play it and then discover it anew. I think it's a big design problem that few devs account for truly different styles of play (Assassin's Creed sticks out to me immensely).

[Forbin]

I think LA Noire is a good example of a game that playing a certain way improves the experience a lot. I don't fault the player when a game is played "wrong", but sometimes I don't fault the game that much either. Some people are self destructive and some games are just designed poorly. But most of the time I think you can make more fun out of a game that you're struggling with if you take a step back and examine what's not working for you. It's like a lucid dream, the better you are at recognizing your behavior, the more you can alter it.

I find that MMOs are perfect illustrations. I've seen a lot of people burn themselves out from grinding away at MMOs on things that they either over value, or don't understand. Then later they sound like alcoholics saying that the game was such a waste of their time, and they spent so much effort getting something that became meaningless for them. The other phenomena I've seen is that people seem to only really get burned like that once, and the second time they get sucked into an MMO, they can recognize the good time sinks from the bad. Also, you get better at recognizing when you're not enjoying the experience for it's intrinsic value, and either shift your context or take a break.

[TurboPubx-16]

There are situations where I have augmented an already pleasurable experience by doing something differently. Examples of that would be reading all the text in games like Icewind Dale or Morrowind even though my instinct is to hastily click through it, or upping the difficulty in a game like Fallout 3 to better reinforce the atmosphere. But I can't think of an example of a game that I hated at first but grew to love after changing something on my side of the interaction. Why would I care to in the first place? The most common reason I will tend to dislike a game is precisely because it is too restrictive about what I am and am not allowed to do.

Situations like this are much more common for me: I enjoyed a certain game for the most part but lost interest after only a few hours. After discovering Idle Thumbs something had been injected in my brain and when I returned to that special game I enjoyed it a lot more. In that case I didn't actively make any changes other than choosing to play the game again, but the effect I think you are talking about was certainly achieved since I ended up playing the game differently and enjoying it a lot more.

With your Assassin's Creed example you seem to be referring to people who played through the entire game and came away with a negative experience; this concept of disliking a game and yet playing it to completion is totally alien to me and I humbly suggest that you ignore the lunatics who do stuff like that, game reviewers included .

I've finished something like 100 games; if I don't understand what you want me to do, and the Internet doesn't help me any, then I probably think your game sucks. Blaming the gamer is summed up in a phrase that is as ridiculous as it is common, directed at critics of any game someone happens to like: "you played it wrong."

[Ride Rise Roar]

I think there's something to be said for mental state, not relating to how you play the game but rather to how you experience it. Nostalgia and games that consciously evoke that are great examples, they assume that the player will affect a certain attitude in order to enjoy the games in the same light as the author. It gets even more interesting when the author and player assume different views, especially in games that allow for that to happen and where "narrative dissonance" can be even more interesting than the actual narrative.

[filk]

I've been thinking about this more in the context of some XCOM: Enemy Unknown conversation I had on NeoGAF.

One of the ways this state of mind thing becomes an issue all the time in games is cost-effectiveness. Probably one of the easiest ways in the world for developers to shoot themselves is to not make all options in the game cost-effective in at least a certain set of scenarios. In the context of XCOM, it seems some fans of the original series take issue with the tack the new game is taking by introducing an explicit cover mechanic. The argument goes: While the map looks like a 2+D navigable space, because the only cost-effective positions are behind cover, the interaction space the player actually engages in is quite smaller. If it only ever makes sense to move from cover to cover, then the game's map is really just a node graph with some fancy paint on top.

Now, in XCOM's case I think this is probably not the case, but Assassin's Creed is the perfect example. Literally, the game has many combat options at any time, switching between enemies and weapons. However, in practice, it is most cost-effective to sit still and counter, so for many players the combat is actually just a one-button timing game. It takes a conscious effort on the part of the player to put themselves in a mental place where they are willing to sacrifice optimality to experience the breadth of game design.

In general, I think most problems with many games are solved by putting yourself in a playful state of mind. If you're not exploring the mechanics and trying new things, you're essentially doing busy work. On the other hand, it seems kind of wasteful to devote so much clever, playful, creative energy to something as transient as a video game.