Results tagged “analysis” from Softcore Gamer

I get the impression that not a lot of people have heard of - let alone played - Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble. That might not be the case for long, though. The WGA just announced their nominees for best video game writing, and DHSGIT took the dark horse spot. I haven't played, um, any of the competition, except a little bit of Fallout 3, but I'd love to see a well-written indie game like this one take the prize.

I certainly recommend that you give Dangerous High School Girls a look, although it isn't by any means a perfect game. In this interview with Rock, Paper, Shotgun, author Keith Nemitz stated that "the story is about the culture of small-minded people and how strong, truthfully educated women can improve it." The writing is charming, funny, and does an excellent job of telling that story.

My reservations about the game come from some of the design decisions. Mostly, it's structured like a standard RPG, with semi-random encounters, experience, and character leveling - although it distances itself from any of that terminology. This structure works really well, actually, except that it doesn't allow the player to do any grinding.

In most RPGs, the player progresses the story by exploring a space and completing encounters. Succeeding in an encounter gives the player's party experience, which eventually causes them to become more powerful. Failing in an encounter, typically, does not give the player experience or progress the story (because, typically, it results in a fail-state, forcing the player to restore a saved game). The player, therefore, gets more powerful as the story progresses; later parts of the story open up new areas where the encounters are more difficult, theoretically matching the player's advancement.

Sometimes, though, the player doesn't level up fast enough. That's where grinding comes in. If the encounters become too difficult, the player can take a step back and play through some additional encounters in an easier area, gaining enough experience to tackle the continuation of the story on better terms.

Dangerous High School Girls doesn't have a death-equivalent fail-state, which I like. At least, it looks good on paper, but in practice, it doesn't always work out well. Instead of having to restart when you fail an encounter, you suffer some form of negative reinforcement and then play continues. At best, this negative reinforcement takes the form of a missed opportunity - a chance to have gained experience or some other bonus, while the story continues to progress. Frequently, however, you actually lose a buff or one of the girls in your party. Which makes it easy to find yourself falling behind the difficulty curve, facing encounters that are way out of your league.

Grinding is supposed to provide a way out of this situation. But Dangerous High School Girls takes away lower-level encounters as it opens up new, more difficult areas - or at least, it obscures the lower-level opportunities by putting them in the same space and not distinguishing between encounters of different levels. Add to that the pressure of time continuing to progress with each encounter, whether successful or not, and... well, the bottom line is that I feel like I'm falling further and further behind the more I play, and that my subversive little cadre of girls is becoming more ineffectual rather than more empowered as the story progresses.

Anyway, this post was really just supposed to be a couple of links and a brief review of the game. To sum up, then: worth playing, not perfect, but great writing. You can get a demo from Manifesto, here.

Over at my IMD blog. Link.

I was skimming through Kotaku this weekend and this post on the top ten video game emotions jumped out at me. It's over at Only a Game, and it's based on a survey of around a thousand gamers. The results are interesting, plus I learned a couple great new words: fiero, the sense of triumph over adversity, and naches, the feeling of pride in the accomplishments of a student. A cursory analysis of the survey data seems to suggest that casual gaming is big; a feeling of triumph is great, but softer emotions like curiosity and amusement are even bigger.

I'm also pleased to have seen this because I was unfamiliar with Only a Game. But scanning through their archives, it seems they've worked on some very interesting things.

I'll give you the basic run-down here; for an actual analysis of these results, check out the original article.

10. Bliss
09. Relief
08. Naches
07. Surprise
06. Fiero
05. Curiosity
04. Excitement
03. Wonderment
02. Contentment
01. Amusement

And the emotions at the bottom of the list were

20. Sadness
21. Guilt
22. Embarrassment

I have a couple problems with this study, although I'm thrilled so see research being done in this area. My major concern is that the survey's scale seems to conflate two distinct ideas: the effectiveness of emotions in games and the desireability of emotions in games. There is no room on the scale to describe, for example, an emotion that I would like to feel, and which I actively seek out in games, but which is not effectively presented. I'd also like to see a better breakdown of what emotions players recognize as being present in the games they play, independent of their effectiveness. Do the respondents mean to say that they don't like feeling sad, or that games are bad at making them feel sad?

The author notes that this is only a preliminary study. There's an enormous amount of potential here; quite honestly, this article leaves me with more questions than answers. I'd love to see a follow-up that addresses trends within demographics and even within individuals - do the same people who seek out fiero also seek out curiosity, or do these emotions represent two different types of gamer, the acheiver and the explorer? How does a person's reaction to negative emotions in games relate to their reaction to similar emotions in other media - do people who enjoy tearjerker movies also seek out sadness in games? I'm also curious about how these players go about seeking out their emotions of choice, and where they find them. Which genres, and which games specifically, give them the emotional high they're looking for?

Very promising research. I'm hoping to see a lot more of this sort of thing in the future.

I've been having some serious trouble formulating a response to this post over at HardCasual. A couple days ago they called out me and the rest of the blogosphere for the way we've handled You Have to Burn the Rope. HardCasual's point is that YHTBTR is a "smart" game, like Passage, and that games journalists are making it out to be merely "clever," by which they seem to mean "good only for a cheap laugh." I've been reading HardCasual for a couple weeks now, and I like it a lot, but something about this rubbed me the wrong way. I do agree, though, that YHTBTR is worth a bit of deeper analysis.

Aside from being funny, what, exactly, is YHTBTR saying? It's an almost perfect example of a classic action-adventure puzzle of the sort you might find in a Zelda game. It's simple, but its simplicity shouldn't be overestimated. Under normal circumstances, a player would naturally spend a couple minutes jumping around bullets and throwing axes before he or she figured out how to beat the Grinning Colossus. The point, of course, is that these aren't normal circumstances, and the game takes every available opportunity to point out the solution to the puzzle ahead of time. Knowing the solution removes all - well, almost all; there's still some platforming that requires twitch-play - the challenge from the game.

What's interesting to me is what that leaves you with: this super-simple, ultra-short, minimally challenging game is a perfect test case for an experiment about the relationship between difficulty, accomplishment, and fun. I've played YHTBTR a dozen times now, despite the fact that there is very little reason to do so. One play-through is almost exactly like another; it's impossible to lose, and no significant way to win with style. There's no emotional build, and likewise no significant narrative arc. The credits song is catchy, but I've already got it as an MP3, so that isn't a great motivator. The only good incentive, as far as I can make it out, is an emotional burst associated with winning, even in the absence of a challenge.

Possibly I'm reading my own reaction all wrong. It's conceivable that the real attractor to this game is the relatively high production value. Certainly, YHTBTR is well polished. Its graphics are solid, its interface is very well designed, and its self-aware sense of irony is downright charming. But it seems to me that there is something about burning that rope; maybe not a feeling of accomplishment, exactly, but a sense of satisfaction, or at least completion, that provides some sort of positive reinforcement. Something which indicates that - or rather, reinforces my belief that - at least for some gamers, myself included, a game can impart a sense of joy that is unrelated to its difficulty.

Is this what Kian Bashiri was trying to way with his game? I don't know; maybe not. It's what I got out of the game. If you're interested in the author's intentions, there's an interview with him over at IndieGames that's worth checking out.

The problem I have with HardCasual on this issue, aside from the pretentious tone that they adopted and the fact that they seemed to spend more energy complaining about the blogosphere's reaction to the game than on their own analysis of it, is that the production of FAQ files and video walkthroughs is not counterproductive to the message of YHTBTR. In fact, from my perspective, it's an excellent demonstration of the game's lesson. Creating elaborate guides for this game simply reinforces the central point that the puzzle is not a significant challenge, and doing it with the evident joy expressed on blogs like Rock, Paper, Shotgun or my own supports the thesis that a game without a significant challenge can still be fun. I think the fact that these fan-creations were so quickly aggregated on the YHTBTR homepage is further evidence that, far from detracting from the game, these artifacts are very much in keeping with what the game is trying to accomplish.