Sunday 1 December 2013

Large Punishments For Failure Is A Design Choice

I was browsing Facebook and found that somebody said that in the new Kingdom Hearts HD edition there is a smaller punishment for death. He then went on to say that having large punishments for death is inherently a bad thing and "archaic"

I completely disagree, the size of the punishment for failure is not inherently a bad thing but rather a design choice that may be good or bad. It is not the equivalent of having a long load screen or glitchy graphics.

Now KH as an example I'm not sure, I couldn't say that KH is better off or worse off either way because I'd have to think about it. But the "lack of punishment for death" is absolutely an example of hand-holding (not necessarily easiness, but hand-holding). It does of course depend on the game and what you're doing in the game. If the individual events of the game are really hard then a large punishment for death only adds to that difficulty.

But let's talk about the large punishments in general: If you are sent back a long way for death then this results in the game rewarding certain types of skills that I (as a big RPG fan) find admirable. For example: planning ahead, knowing your limits, being careful. The first point I want to make is that by making checkpoints more sparse, you must therefore as a result approach the game in a completely different way that certain people (including myself) find very engaging.

Planning ahead and knowing your own limits is a big factor in this. It's about conceptualizing the situation and preparing yourself. If you see a bonus 3-hour dungeon with no save points or boss that takes 2 hours to kill, you better be damn well sure that you can do it. The game puts the whole process in your mind and makes you appreciate what your own skills and abilities are. When you finally say to yourself that you are ready, you feel really attached to who you are and what you're able to accomplish. You also get that "on-edge" feeling. I know those are extreme examples, but examples none-the-less

Large punishments by their nature also result in large rewards. If you conquered that 3-hour saveless dungeon, how badass do you feel? how epic was that victory? How proud are you? You managed to climb that mountain.

Small punishments also diminish the effects of decision making with uncertain results. For example, you find a chest, you know it will either contain a potion or it will be a poison trap. Ideally you want it to result in giving you a potion but given the possibility that it may be a poison trap, there is a reason to decide to not open it. Now if you had just passed a checkpoint, you could just open it and then reload back to the checkpoint if it turned out to be a poison. However if your checkpoint was a while back, you have to carefully consider whether or not opening the chest is worth doing given the parameters of its effects. In this scenario, the decision making process has value. It makes you appreciate the consequences of your decision and the decision making process that the game sends you through because the act of making that decision has more quantifiable results.

This doesn't just apply to decisions though, it also applies to skill. If you have far away checkpoints then the risk-reward loop is expanded. What I mean by this is that you need to consider your skill on parts larger parts of the game before you can dismiss it. For example, if you have a platform game that is an hour long with no saving, you need to consider the game as an entire over-arching system as opposed to a series of case-by-case scenarios. Without saving, you may be able to complete level 7 fine, but you can still improve yourself and benefit from improving if you manage to do it without losing lives (for example). But if the game saved between levels, you could complete level 7 once and then erase it from your mind. By removing these save-points, you need to consider and appreciate the game as a whole system. It means that even though you can complete level 5 without issue, it still matters to you because you might slip-up one time and that adds dynamism and value to your consistent abilities (more on dynamism later).

But with larger punishments, you end up having to repeat more gameplay you've already done right? wrong! What actually results in more repeating gameplay is difficulty. If a game has closer checkpoints together then it is fundamentally easier, and that easiness needs to be balanced by making the individual events more challenging. A more challenging game results in more deaths and being sent back more frequently. What has more repetition: a game where you have to play a 30-minute segment twice, or one where you have to play a 3-minute segment 20 times? I'd probably say the playing a 3-minute section 20 times depending on the dynamism. This is one reason I got so bored with Uncharted

About dynamism, just because you are repeating a segment of the game does not mean the game will be *exactly* the same. Different things you encounter can change the tide of how that segment will go. A shorter time-frame means there is less viability for dynamism to happen. If you think of a flow chart: the bigger the flow chart, the more possibility there is for the process to go into alternate routes. When you play Super Meat Boy, a jump over a pit is always exactly the same jump every time with next to no dynamism. Also, given the pure difficulty of Super Meat Boy, you could end up making that same jump 40 or 50 times. I'm not bashing Super Meat Boy by the way, I do like that game, it just works as an example how constant checkpoints don't facilitate for as much dynamism.

The message that I really want to push is that large punishments for failure is not a bad thing by it's very nature. I am sure Super Meat Boy wouldn't be as good if you had just 3 lives and no saving. Super Meat Boy was built for the sake of testing the player to overcome a challenge in an enclosed environment and infinite lives suits that particular game. I am also sure that even big games with big-punishment segments don't need them all the time, and I know that large punishments can hinder a game if the game isn't suited or built towards it. I am not saying all games need to have big punishments for failure, I'm just saying that to erase it as a design choice stifles the ranges of fun players can have and creativity from designers is limited. As I am seeing this "anti-punishment" attitude crop up more and more often from both players and designers, it makes me sad that creativity and the range of fun is being limited like this.

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