game girl advance: Dynamic Gameplay Adjustment

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November 23, 2004

Dynamic Gameplay Adjustment

I have a friend named Doox. Like a few of my other friends, he's got a copy of Half-Life 2. I asked him, what difficulty level are you playing on? "Easy," he said, "because I like to tour."

For the last few years, I've been playing my games mostly on hard. I used to want to tour, to explore the far corners of all the levels and characters. But recently I've wanted more of a challenge, where I have to struggle through the game and overcome foes. I feel it makes me a more skilled player and invests me more in the action.

Doox and I have two different approaches to enjoying the same games. This came up in a discussion in an Interactive Media class at USC Film School. Some students were asking each other whether specific games were fun. It got kinda useless - one person's fun is another persons headache. I brought up Marc LeBlanc's "Eight Kinds of Fun" - finding more specific language to describe what we enjoy in games. I read through his list of eight: sensation / fantasy / narrative / challenge / fellowship / discovery / expression / submission.

The teacher, Erik Loyer, listened to the list, and brought up a terrific point: games today offer difficulty levels for players. What if, Loyer proposed, game designers presented a few different modes for experiencing the game?

So next time you boot up that first-person adventure RPG shooter, instead of choosing between Easy, Medium or Hard, you could choose between Tour, Expression or Challenge. It would describe more of the emphasis in the gameplay - is the game going to slack off on enemies and ease up on some puzzles to let you wander through the landscapes and architectures (Tour, or Discovery as LeBlanc calls it)? Maybe the game is going to spend more polygons on character customization, allowing the player to leave a greater impact on the world (Expression). Or maybe the focus is on foes, waves of cunning enemies testing a players resolve and the discipline of ammunition conservation.

Writing this out, it seems a great solution - game designers could build more complex titles than the game hardware can support, and allow the players to emphasize the gameplay they crave. Then the game allocates processing power to AI, architecture, or physics. Modular play! Umm, that's not sounding so great any more. Too much complexity and overhead.

It's the same problem I have with most fantasy RPGs - when a game starts, how do I know whether I want to play a thief, a fighter, or a magic user? I haven't even tested their powers or seen what the landscape looks like. Same with tour, expression or challenge - I don't know the shape of the world; how I want to play depends on the game, not the menu beforehand. Moreover, my mood might shift and I might feel like a touring break one Sunday morning, or a crazy fight after a few beers. Choosing modes of gaming based on gameplay is less broken then choosing a difficulty level, but it still ain't optimal. It's enough to make me want to study Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment! Maybe there can be Dynamic Gameplay Adjustment? Building in the game's ability to accommodate touring, expressive, or challenging players, behind the scenes.

Posted by justin at November 23, 2004 03:35 PM | TrackBack

Comments

Silent Hill series have done something like this, allowing the player to adjust the difficulty levels of action and puzzles separately. Players can choose their challenges - I've enjoyed the possibility of being able to tone down the fighting, as that's not the fun part of the games.

Posted by: Mikko Saari

on November 24, 2004 03:21 AM

The original System Shock had four different settings: combat, puzzles, story, and cyberspace. Each setting had 4 values; combat 0 made enemies not fight or move, and die in one hit; combat 1-3 were normal difficulty levels. Reducing puzzles simplified the various "logic" puzzles used on some doors; puzzle 0 unlocked them. Story change the audio logs to shorten them (and maybe got rid of unimportant ones); story 0, if I recall correctly, unlocked all doors. Cyberspace was a combat difficulty setting for the cyberspace sequences; I believe cyberspace 0 also got rid of the "wind" that buffeted you and dragged you along through the corridors.

Posted by: nothings

on November 27, 2004 04:39 PM

Did you think that was successful?

Posted by: Justin Hall

on November 27, 2004 08:15 PM

That makes me want to try System Shock.

I find lately that what I enjoy most is story. I've been playing games on easy, because I just want to get through the game and see how well the vision of the designer has been expressed. I want to experience the full length of the experience, but perhaps not dive too deeply into any one particular part, lest I get hung up somewhere. If I'm entranced by this or that, I can always dally there, or perhaps up the difficulty some and come back. But primarily I want to experience the experience, not worry about whether I'm hitting the button fast enough.

Having easy/medium/hard is a convenient mechanism that lets me focus on story. System Shock's solution is intriguing, but I worry that it would make the game more challenging to balance properly into a coherent experience. One of the joys of playing through a game is being able to water-cooler with your friends about it afterward. If we all had different experiences, I worry that this would dry up - or would it just make me want to go through and play again to see what I'd missed? Hmmmmm... something to think about.

Posted by: madsax

on November 27, 2004 09:53 PM

Successful? I don't know. It gave us a lot more to test, at least. (64 combinations!)

The cyberspace difficulty setting went in because some people really hated cyberspace. The problem is you couldn't change it once the game was underway, and you wouldn't know you hated it until it was underway.

I know we had a few people who played it who wouldn't have otherwise--mostly girlfriends of team members, who played it on combat 0 and just enjoyed the story. I'm not sure why anyone would really want to play on story 0.

Posted by: nothings

on November 27, 2004 10:30 PM

NetHack offers "Explore Mode" which is identical to normal mode, except that your saved game isn't wiped if your character dies. The penalty for this is that your character will never register on the high score list.

Posted by: ClockworkGrue

on November 28, 2004 05:25 PM

Posted by: ClockworkGrue

on November 28, 2004 05:26 PM

I'm worried about the same thing madsax is, and a little more- i know part of the point of some games is their incredible difficulty, or something that happens in the midst of things we'd rather skip through.

While some kind of fast-forwarding function might be useful if you're playing a game just to get a feel for it, that is kinda like reading a book and skipping all the parts without dialogue, isn't it?

Posted by: jdiaz

on November 29, 2004 10:28 AM

Jenova Chen's Flow seems to implement this fairly well in the mechanics. Play With Fire, a game I worked on which will be released on Manifesto by the end of the month, did this in the content structure design. Theres a Fun, Puzzle and Challenge path, all with different sorts of content that would suit those play styles.

Posted by: Patrick Dugan

on July 13, 2006 11:01 AM