DDL on 4/11/2008 at 14:54
Oh my lord, that person is impressively stupid. Is that real?
Apparently he missed that bit of the tutorial that explains exactly what the crosshair colour does (and was also too stupid to figure out the fairly obvious conclusion that red=bad, green=good). And I love the fact that they actually put in a game mechanic for the tutorial level whereby you CANNOT DIE (no matter how stupid you are), and it's judged as a major flaw.
Also "There are some crates below the dock but I can't seem to do a thing with them."
Have they played...any first person game, like, ever?
EDIT: Actually, that thread is interesting purely to see how many myths are still being perpetuated ("some enemies have different tazer weak points"). Bless.
Ostriig on 4/11/2008 at 15:17
Quote Posted by DDL
Oh my lord, that person is impressively stupid. Is that real?
QFT. Just read that post and, unless the guy's trolling, he really is a phenomenal imbecile. A once-in-a-lifetime encounter. What a horrible way to waste even just a couple of kilobytes of hosting space.
The_Raven on 4/11/2008 at 18:40
The sad thing is that this is probably legit. We all did stupid shit on our first playthrough of Thief, Deus Ex, System Shock, Ultima Underworld, or whatever; however, when we started to encounter trouble, we realized that we were doing something wrong and proceeded to experiment and to pay more attention to the things we're told in the tutorial, menu descriptions, and by the NPCs. It's really sad to see people stumble a bit by making false assumptions, and to then watch them just throw their hands up proclaiming that the game is broken. Hell, Deus Ex may be the perfect example of a game with seemingly broken mechanics; but even then, there's a method to its madness. One of my favorite things onerepeated playthroughs of the demo missions was experimenting with the AI and just shaking my head at how they immediately knew my exact location even if I sniped someone from miles away with a perfectly silenced rifle.
Unfortunately, the only solution to this syndrome is to create a game that holds your hands so much, it can't even be called a game at all anymore. As most of us have proclaimed lately, this is really sucking the life out of our once beloved pastime.
Chade on 4/11/2008 at 21:34
I don't know if this is really the sort of solution we want, but I'll hold up Crysis as a game, where the "advanced use" of the augs were so in tune with the action blockbuster crap we all get innundated with, that I suspect most people just "got it" - and used quite elaborate strategies (within the context of crysis) - without much in the way of handholding.
Not sure how that helps a game like DX though ...
Papy on 5/11/2008 at 21:56
Quote Posted by DDL
Might depend on your inherent natural playing style too, though
I agree, but I like to believe my playing style is because of my taste, which is a consequence of my natural abilities, not because I was conditioned. I don't believe we can become conditioned after playing a few video games. To me, someone who didn't get what Thief was about after playing the tutorial, was simply someone who didn't want that kind of gameplay and who chose to somewhat ignore the tutorial (maybe on an unconscious level) because of his taste.
Quote Posted by Chade
Each "playstyle" of DX, taken strictly by itself, is poorly implemented compared to other games focussing on that playstyle alone. DX works as a hybrid game because giving the player a choice of playstyles, and being able to switch or mix playstyles on the fly, more then makes up for this.
Being able to mix "playstyles", or rather
having to mix playstyles was the playstyle. To take each playstyle by itself makes no sense. To me, Deus Ex' gameplay was not about shooting or sneaking, it was first and foremost about choosing what was the best solution to accomplish what I had to do. The gameplay of Deus Ex was : there is a problem, you can use several solutions, none is perfect, choose the best according to your current situation. If shooting and sneaking were well implemented with Deus Ex, it would simply have killed the core gameplay. With well implemented playstyles, instead of always asking myself what I should be doing to survive, I would have asked myself what I wanted to do.
Quote Posted by Chade
The difficulty, as I see it, is getting the mainstream gamer to appreciate what is cool about DX.
They never will. That's not a matter of education, that's a matter of taste. You can use options to change the gameplay, you can use hand-holding to remove the thinking gameplay (and make it an action only gameplay), you can use things like auto-targeting to remove the action gameplay but no tutorial will change the player's taste.
Quote Posted by The_Raven
It's really sad to see people stumble a bit by making false assumptions, and to then watch them just throw their hands up proclaiming that the game is broken.
It's funny... Yesterday I helped a guy to assemble a chair. He was having trouble because some bolts were not fitting properly. He was giving up thinking there was a problem with the chair. It turns out the problem was he didn't notice some bolts were 6mm in diameter and other 8mm.
Chade on 5/11/2008 at 23:11
Quote Posted by Papy
Being able to mix "playstyles", or rather
having to mix playstyles was the playstyle. To take each playstyle by itself makes no sense.
I agree ... not really sure what you are trying to get at here. Perhaps I didn't make that post very clear?
The point of that particular post was that
a) making a game mixing playstyles results in a poorer implementation of each playstyle,
b) that didn't matter in DX because the mix of playstyles was part of the appeal, and
c) mixing "hardcore" and "casual" (I hate those terms btw) playstyles doesn't make a game more appealing - so (a) would matter in this case.
Quote Posted by Papy
They never will. That's not a matter of education, that's a matter of taste.
I don't really agree with that. In my (limited) personal experience, people do enjoy playing games which make them think, and games which give them responsibility and control over their experience. In fact, my previous post was inspired by watching somebody play Crysis, and wishing he had realised that he could have played DX in that way. (EDIT: Just to be clear, I am not talking about a specific playstyle here, but rather playing the game with an inquiring and experimental state of mind).
People don't
really want to be handheld. It's just a better alternative to being confused and not knowing how to make progress. But I don't know a single person who doesn't get pissed of at me when I watch them play games: all because I can't keep my bloody mouth shut, and find it really hard to stop telling them all the cool things I think they could do. People want control of the "game experience", and ultimately that is the single most important aesthetic in DX.
I think that traditionally in games like DX, people are so busy trying to work out the details of how to proceed on a step by step basis, that they are not noticing the responsibility and control just sitting there waiting to be picked up and enjoyed.
The trouble is that people can't see the forest for the trees: because the trees are actually a dense thorny thicket of brambles. But the hardcore DX fans are pretty used to that thorny thicket, really enjoy bashing their way through it, and don't want to lose that.
Papy on 6/11/2008 at 03:22
Is Deus Ex a step too high for someone who never played video games before? Certainly. It's like someone who drives a car. Signaling, releasing the gas pedal, pressing the clutch, changing gears, checking mirrors and blind spots, turning on the intermittent whippers, all this at the same time is something natural for someone who's been driving for 20 years, it is done without thinking, but it requires a lot of effort to think about all this for a novice.
Having said that, if I take the stats from the ESA, the average gamer has been playing video game for 13 years. He is not a novice. I can't believe that after 13 years playing video games, he would still lack the experience to understand Deus Ex. I can't believe that after 13 years playing video games, he never tried to look for something with a bit more complexity and depth, or at least tried a different way of playing.
If I take my own experience, I begun with simple games. It was Pong, then simple arcade games, then console games (mainly Colecovision and Intellivision)... They were fun, but I got tired of simple video games. That's the reason I switch to computer gaming with a C128 and then an Amiga 1000. I was not interested with the NES not the Sega Master System. If there were no "more complex" video games, I would have stopped playing. Maybe I should not extrapolate my own experience for other people, but I simply fail to see how someone can still find simple video games fully interesting after 13 years playing them, unless... he really don't want anything more.
I agree that people love games that make them think, but there's a catch : thinking requires efforts and people don't like making too much effort. That's why most people play Monopoly and Risk, or even dumber games, instead of Puerto Rico and Advanced Squad Leader.
I will also tell you a big secret : people get pissed off with you telling them what to do because it's YOU who's telling them what to do. Humans are hierarchical animals and they don't like when someone else show a hint of superiority. Personally, I have no problem reading a manual to know how to assemble an Ikea thing, that's even the first thing I do, but if someone else tells me what to do, it will get on my nerves. I will tell him to either do it himself or to shut up.
One last thing, you said that people like to control the "game experience" and I perfectly agree with you. That's why Oblivion was so popular, because the player was always in control, it was the game which was adapting to the player. That's certainly not the case with Deus Ex. With Deus Ex, I had different solution to choose from, but I never felt I was in control, I never felt I could do whatever I wanted. Far from it, in fact.
Chade on 6/11/2008 at 04:17
Quote Posted by Papy
I will also tell you a big secret : people get pissed off with you telling them what to do because it's YOU who's telling them what to do.
Heh, I thought somebody would say that! But that's not really what I mean ... people aren't getting pissed of at me as such, but after a while (we are talking years here ... it took me a while :tsktsk:) I begun to realise that even though their own choices aren't as exciting as I think they could be, they are more exciting for
them, because they are choices that they own. So now I try my hardest to keep my mouth shut.
Regarding the whole effort argument, my opinion is that effort is not an insurmountable barrier if a game has good pacing and uses good theories of learning. Board games* have little room to manouver in this way, I suspect, because you generally need to understand all the rules up front to be able to start playing. So you are probably right as far as board and card games go.
But computer games can change dramatically over time, can give the player long periods of time to learn the game systems, and do a whole bunch of automation for a whole variety of purposes. I think this gives computer games a great ability to employ good theories of learning, and games that utilize these theories appropriately can get remarkable things out of players. If you look back over gaming histroy, a great deal of highly popular games (EDIT: games that got people to play with systems that were more complicated then the game systems those people had been playing up till then) have really good learning principles built into them (Half Life, The Sims, etc ...).
But again, for various reasons I don't think it's easy to apply those lessons to DX. That has less to do with "woah, hardcore" though, and more to do with DX being a different game. Less linear then HL, and less intuitive then Sims, etc ...
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
* And on that note I'd like to add that I really wish I knew some people who were interested in playing german-style board games. :(
van HellSing on 6/11/2008 at 14:40
Quote Posted by Papy
It's funny... Yesterday I helped a guy to assemble a chair. He was having trouble because some bolts were not fitting properly. He was giving up thinking there was a problem with the chair. It turns out the problem was he didn't notice some bolts were 6mm in diameter and other 8mm.
And that's why we need unified bolts. :D
Papy on 6/11/2008 at 20:22
Chade : I agree with everything you said (last post only, ;) ), but there is one thing I'd like you to answer : why do people play video games?
As for board games, Puerto Rico may be a bit too complex for a novice, but Settlers of Catan is great for an introduction. Begin with that and slowly increase complexity. Also board games have an enormous advantage over video games : YOU. You can teach how to play to someone a lot more efficiently than any video game tutorial or hand holding system. You also provide an example, feedback and motivation.
van HellSing : It was a computer chair, not a console couch. Unified bolts are a bad idea!
