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andrewduckerThere's a game called I Saw Her Standing which you can play by clicking here.
It's a game where a black blob tries to avoid the green blob so that he can manouver the pink blob into the end zone.
Or, it's a game where you try to get the love of your life, sadly turned into a zombie, back into their cage, while avoiding the other zombies.
The difference between those two descriptions is some nice scene-setting text, a lovely bit of cheerful background guitar, and the fact that whenever you die a little heart appears next to your girlfriend and then breaks.
It really doesn't take much to get people to empathise, and to care, and to turn what would be a ridiculously simple game worth maybe 2/5 into one that evokes sympathy, tells a story, and gets 4.75/5 from the 24.000 votes it's had so far.
It just takes someone to remember that there are a few drives that speak to people on a basic level, and a few simple methods for making people invest a bit of their empathy into what would otherwise be a black blob nd a pink blob.
To be honest, the basic game behind Portal is pretty basic - take a few bits of kit, assemble them in different combinations to give you puzzles to solve. What makes it an amazing game is the bits that aren't really a game at all - the background detail, the setting, the voice acting, the pacing, the dialogue. All of that stuff that gives you a reason to care about solving a particular puzzle (because you _really_ want that cake).
I've seen a lot of people complain that there are other games with more realistic physics than Angry Birds. Games where you have more control over the outcome, and aren't hoping that the semi-random angle you hit something at isn't just the one you need to topple things in the way you need to. But what makes Angry Birds horribly addictive isn't the gameplay (although I am loving the way the gravity fields interact in Angry Birds: Space), it's the way the bastard pigs laugh at you when you just quit kill them off and instead leave them with enough bruises to know you almost did it, but failed to pull it off. It's the feeling of joy when, on the seventeenth attempt you manage to pull off the shot you've been trying for and bring the whole damn thing down around their sniggering faces. That's the emotional resonance that brings people back, because they won't be beaten by a bunch of fucking pigs.
And the same is true of Mass Effect (no spoiler conversations in the comments please - I'm not playing ME3 until the new DLC is out). The actual shooting, collecting, etc. is fun, but fairly mediocre. What pulls people in is the sense of scope, the massively deep character options and choices(which mean that two people can play the first two games and then have vastly dissimilar experiences of the third one), and the characters that you can get attached to. You play the somewhat-fun shooting sections because you care that you protect the Galaxy from the [redacted], and more importantly, protect the people you care about.
People will, given half a chance, see faces in a random collection of blobs. Given a teeny bit more of a chance, they'll care about them. Why more games don't tap into this, I really don't know.
It's a game where a black blob tries to avoid the green blob so that he can manouver the pink blob into the end zone.
Or, it's a game where you try to get the love of your life, sadly turned into a zombie, back into their cage, while avoiding the other zombies.
The difference between those two descriptions is some nice scene-setting text, a lovely bit of cheerful background guitar, and the fact that whenever you die a little heart appears next to your girlfriend and then breaks.
It really doesn't take much to get people to empathise, and to care, and to turn what would be a ridiculously simple game worth maybe 2/5 into one that evokes sympathy, tells a story, and gets 4.75/5 from the 24.000 votes it's had so far.
It just takes someone to remember that there are a few drives that speak to people on a basic level, and a few simple methods for making people invest a bit of their empathy into what would otherwise be a black blob nd a pink blob.
To be honest, the basic game behind Portal is pretty basic - take a few bits of kit, assemble them in different combinations to give you puzzles to solve. What makes it an amazing game is the bits that aren't really a game at all - the background detail, the setting, the voice acting, the pacing, the dialogue. All of that stuff that gives you a reason to care about solving a particular puzzle (because you _really_ want that cake).
I've seen a lot of people complain that there are other games with more realistic physics than Angry Birds. Games where you have more control over the outcome, and aren't hoping that the semi-random angle you hit something at isn't just the one you need to topple things in the way you need to. But what makes Angry Birds horribly addictive isn't the gameplay (although I am loving the way the gravity fields interact in Angry Birds: Space), it's the way the bastard pigs laugh at you when you just quit kill them off and instead leave them with enough bruises to know you almost did it, but failed to pull it off. It's the feeling of joy when, on the seventeenth attempt you manage to pull off the shot you've been trying for and bring the whole damn thing down around their sniggering faces. That's the emotional resonance that brings people back, because they won't be beaten by a bunch of fucking pigs.
And the same is true of Mass Effect (no spoiler conversations in the comments please - I'm not playing ME3 until the new DLC is out). The actual shooting, collecting, etc. is fun, but fairly mediocre. What pulls people in is the sense of scope, the massively deep character options and choices(which mean that two people can play the first two games and then have vastly dissimilar experiences of the third one), and the characters that you can get attached to. You play the somewhat-fun shooting sections because you care that you protect the Galaxy from the [redacted], and more importantly, protect the people you care about.
People will, given half a chance, see faces in a random collection of blobs. Given a teeny bit more of a chance, they'll care about them. Why more games don't tap into this, I really don't know.
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Date: 2012-04-25 06:03 pm (UTC)(And like you, I'm waiting for the DLC to be available before playing it._
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Date: 2012-04-25 06:22 pm (UTC)On Angry Birds: the sniggering pigs are a major part of the reason I couldn't stand the game. You're struggling with an interface that's the artillery-sim equivalent of playing the piano while wearing oven gloves, and the little fuckers laugh at you? Fuck that. And normally I love artillery sims.
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Date: 2012-04-25 06:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-25 06:57 pm (UTC)People will, given half a chance, see faces in a random collection of blobs. Given a teeny bit more of a chance, they'll care about them. Why more games don't tap into this, I really don't know.
I'm not so sure I'm convinced by this thesis:
1) Lots of game designers do tap into this adding emotion with a simply music/textual addition to something moderately abstract. If you read "play this thing" regularly you'll come across this arty sort of game fairly often. Passage, every day the same dream, Today I die and I wish I could remember the one with the old lady alone in the house waiting for death or the other one with the guy who worked at the company which designed the thing which destroyed the world. They're cool but as a trick it does not work very long. There's a reason these games last 10 minutes not 10 hours though. People see through the trick really quickly.
2) Is that really the hook of Portal? For me the puzzles were the hook. The story was cool and song and the music was catchy but really that was the gameplay (for me). There's only about 10 minutes of story in the many hours it took me to go through first time.
3) Many games are super addictive without an emotional hook. I've seen "sokoban" cutsied up a million times and for me it adds nothing -- the original is addicting. The orginal plus a lovable dinosaur saving eggs, a 3d interface, a happy guitar tune... it makes me no more happy than an @ pushing # signs. Minesweeper, solitaire, peggle... they all fall into the "mindless time sink" category and will continue to occupy people (including me) without that need.
Incidentally, a friend working at the interface of psychology and computing had to do some surveys about how people saw situations. Very interesting (to me). He showed a simulation that had some blobs algorithmically interacting and moving about the screen and asked people what was happening (the algorithms obviously have no concept of "chasing" or "running away" they are simply statements about goals and distances). Some people had some Pepe-le-pew like story about love and pursuit. Others came up with the idea of one set creeping up on the other which was unaware.
no subject
Date: 2012-04-26 08:24 am (UTC)This! In reducing Portal to 'here are some components, now we build puzzles out of them', you oversimplify out the most important part, which is whether the puzzles are any good (and, underlyingly, whether the components are well suited to building interesting puzzles out of). What motivates you to continue solving a particular puzzle is the feeling that surely you must be overlooking something, that you'll kick yourself when you see it, that maybe with just one or two more tries it might become obvious...
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Date: 2012-04-26 10:49 am (UTC)1) People are different. Some people care more about story, some about puzzles, so clearly something Great works on both levels.
2) The story isn't just an emotional hook, it's a help manual. Faced with blobs, most people won't know what the right outcome is. Do I want to catch the blob? Avoid the blob? OK, there is a nice category of puzzle where the puzzle is working out what you need to do. But a good story / skin should hold your hand in understanding what the puzzle is. A ladder is a thing you climb up. A love interest is a thing you protect. A gun is a thing you shoot, a stick can hit things. If you replaced these with abstract symbols then you'd add a whole layer of obfuscation. It's not just that people care about the zombie girlfriend, it's that it's much quicker to understand 'protect your girlfriend' than 'the pink blob is important'
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Date: 2012-04-26 11:03 am (UTC)Heh, true. I once saw a review of my puzzle collection on the web, including a screenshot of a partly filled in Dominosa puzzle in which every single domino placed was in the red colour that warns you you've accidentally put down two the same. My best guess was that the user had been trying to infer the rules from the program's behaviour and hadn't yet worked out which of black and red was the colour they should be aiming for :-)
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Date: 2012-04-27 03:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-27 03:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-28 04:16 pm (UTC)I have a sort of related rant about plot twists in fiction, which is that too many people (readers/viewers, reviewers, and I suspect occasionally writers too) seem to focus on the question of whether the audience can or did guess the twist in advance, and not on whether it was a good twist. My feeling as a consumer of fiction is that an elegant, pleasingly counterintuitive and yet poetically just twist which I did manage to work out in advance is preferable to a twist which I would never have guessed because it was awful and most of the possibilities I did consider would have been better. It's true that if everybody guesses the twist in advance then it probably wasn't very imaginative (in particular, it's one thing if the audience can work out the twist with some thought, but quite another if they don't even need to because it's been done many times before), but then on the other hand if absolutely nobody gets it in advance that's probably a sign that it's outside the bounds of sensibleness.
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Date: 2012-04-26 09:37 am (UTC)Then again I love playing puzzle games that aren't even slightly dressed up. So maybe I'm weird.
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Date: 2012-04-27 10:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-27 10:23 am (UTC)