faetal on 10/11/2015 at 09:19
Perhaps it's just similar to sugar / fat in food? Sure people eat all kinds, but the e.g. sugary / fatty / salty foods deliver a big hit of reward pathway stimulation and thus will always out-sell other foods in a mass sense. There are plenty of games without killing, but in terms of finding the sharpest risk/reward pay-off for players, kill-or-be-killed just gives the biggest shot of brain excitement, so rather than make a game which does kind of OK, games just ramp up the excitement to the optimal system which generates the most popularity.
TannisRoot on 10/11/2015 at 12:24
What I remember about adventure games was pixel and key hunts *shudders* :eww:
Chade on 11/11/2015 at 01:37
Quote Posted by Sulphur
That doesn't quite explain the dearth of intellectual complexity in current-day multiplayer games, or the lack thereof of games that leverage the opponents' personalities.
Quote Posted by Starker
I don't really know if I'd put stealth at the same level of popularity with sports and violence.
Damn you both, now I have to try and decide what my point was.
Umm ... so, I think my point is not related to intellectual depth. Gaming's intellectual depth seems no different to a night at the movies. Well, I'm pretty far out of the loop now, but that's what it felt like when I was still playing newish games a few years ago (not playing at all at the moment, maybe that will change in a few years).
But it's true that gaming severely over-represents violence compared to other mediums. I think my argument is that the current state of affairs is best explained by the sort of games that we know how to make. We know how to do physical interaction, we don't know how to do anything else. Not in any depth. And I think that's sufficient to explain the amount of violence in games (compared to other mediums), I don't think any additional cultural factor is required (beyond the obvious fact that people are pretty used to the status quo).
The lack of stealth compared to violence is just due to relative intellectual depth and slow playoff of stealth games, not any sort of unusual obsession with violence. Sports ... I don't know, how popular are sports games compared to violent games? Any discrepancy there is probably more due to lack of dramatic storytelling in sports games than anything else.
If anything, it's kinda amazing how much dialogue we do have in games, given that we don't know how to implement it properly! Can you imagine how much violence we'd have in games if it was implemented the way we do dialogue?
(EDIT: didn't mean to say that stealth was as popular as sports and violence, Starker, just that it's reasonably popular. Your average person is likely to enjoy a bit of stealth here and there, even if they might not have the patience for an entire game of skulking in the shadows. A lot of games still have stealth options available, don't they?)
Nameless Voice on 11/11/2015 at 17:38
Quote Posted by nicked
Yep - this! It's the only Tomb Raider I really, really enjoyed, because the majority of the game was about (shock!) raiding tombs. They had a pretty much perfect formula, but every other game since has been about gunning down goons.
One thing that's interesting about the 2006-2008 Crystal Dynamics series is that Legend was first, Anniversary was second, and Underworld third - but I played them in the order Anniversary, Legend, Underworld. To me, that makes sense because Anniversary was awesome, Legend was rather bad, and then Underworld tried to take the best of both (but still didn't live up to Anniversary). I could imagine them making Legend as a more action-packed sequel to Anniversary, then realising that they'd done bad and going back to make Underworld with much more focus on exploring and less silly action - but that's not what happened, it's the opposite. They made Legend first, then tried to go back and remake the original, with awesome results ... and then people must have complained it didn't have enough mindless murder in it and so they went back more towards the Legend formula by putting in more mooks to gun down and focusing less on lonesome exploration. That's sad to me.
Quote Posted by nicked
That said, it's hard. Falling back on killing happens because it is the absolute easiest way to add challenge to a game, by a strong margin. I discovered this first-hand when trying to design Wheelbound (see my (
https://nickdablin.wordpress.com/) website for more info). Designing levels and challenges for a character who can't fight back, only avoid, is 100 times harder to do. If you give the character a gun, then you can fill your level with enemies, and you've got maybe 10-20 minutes of gameplay out of each level.
If you remove the combat, then by default you've reduced your gameplay down to just 1 minute, or however long it takes to reach the level exit. To build that level of gameplay back up you need to implement things like puzzles, maze-like level design that encourages exploration, environmental barriers and hazards, all of which are situation-specific and inherently take longer to make than if you could just place some enemies in the way. So I'm not at all surprised that killing, or at least dealing with enemies, is the go-to challenge.
I tried Wheelbound a few months ago, and I must admit that I got bored of it because the levels felt rather large and empty, without much to do in them (also, I think I got stuck). I guess the fact that it's a platform game designed specifically around having awkward controls made it even stranger (which you talked about at the time when you posted it - that the wheelchair and the platforming don't really work together.)
Anyway, you're not wrong about how much easier it is to drop enemies into a place. Once you have the enemy AI coded in, you can just drop one or a few into a room and you have added a lot of extra time and gameplay experience to the level. Otherwise, you need to spend much more time thinking and designing to get an equivalent amount of gaming time out of that space, unless you have some other kind of "drop in gameplay" artefact that you can use instead (such as Pipe Mania machines
*shudder*.)
Another thing is that you generally need to let players know how to play your game - they need to understand the controls and how to make things happen.
If you have a game with a realistic amount of combat (e.g. halfway through the game, someone tries to kill you and you have to deal with him, but that's the only combat in the entire game), then you run the risk of the player not knowing what to do in this situation, because they've had no chance to practice it before - not to mention that it involves coding an entire combat system and then only using it once, which feels like bad value for your programming time.
In that way, games in general tend to use their systems as much as possible to try to get the most playing time out of their development.
Quote Posted by Starker
I'd say it was defined pretty well (at least they spent a big chunk of the game on her character development), but sure, they might yet do a complete overhaul of the character and make her a nervous wreck or whatever they like.
I was referring to your comment that she was a pulpy action hero who had killed lots of people, dinosaurs, etc.. My point was that since it was a reboot, they were free to make her a different character - and that's exactly what they tried to do in the story, yet the gameplay still makes her a psychopath. I wasn't saying her behaviour wasn't consistent for her between games, but rather that it isn't consistent between the "Story Lara" and the "gameplay Lara", which is worse.
Nameless Voice on 13/11/2015 at 02:56
Another thing: doing too much of one thing at a time can get repetitive, so it can be good to have some different experience with a change of pace to keep things interesting. Combat and killing can work well as an action sequence to spice up a more slower-paced game, though it certainly isn't the only way.
As an example, when playing an RPG with a big city full of NPCs with tons of dialogue and quests, I sometimes get bored of talking to them all in a row, and want to go out and do something interactive after standing there and listening for half an hour. Going out to kill something works for that.
Pyrian on 13/11/2015 at 15:11
Quote Posted by Abysmal
Who actually goes to a town in real life and talks to every single person?
How many real life towns have only 3-7 people in them? :p
Quote Posted by Abysmal
Is it down to psychology, or are games really designed to encourage players to maximize their game time through this pointless stuff?
As far back as Ultima III, you basically
had to go around and talk to everyone, since some of them offered vital information. Even now, when most games allow some sort of "just get on with it" option, you're going to miss a lot of side quests and quest modifiers if you don't talk to everyone.
Quote Posted by Abysmal
I think there is an ongoing battle between realism and gamification, and the latter is probably going to always win out, no matter how ridiculous it seems in context. It's the medium.
Realism always takes a back seat to the demands of the medium. It's true in novels, TV, and film, too. For all but a handful of games, the primary driver is going to be gameplay. Narrative considerations (a la novels/TV/film) will then come after, but still before realism.
