Video Game Musing: Why we get stuck. · 9:25pm Jan 6th, 2014
I hope everyone's enjoyed the holidays. I know I did. I spent the last couple weeks working hard at doing as little as possible. For example, I achieved writing absolutely nothing in any of my stories. Because of this, I really don't have any update to give. So, instead, I've decided to write a short blog on something I've noticed in a lot of the games I've played recently.
The topic is "getting stuck". If you've played any kind of lengthy RPG, FPS, side-scroller, platformer, or the like, then there's almost certainly been a time when you've found yourself scratching your head and wandering around in circles. Most of the time, this is by design: the developers wanted to throw a random puzzle at you because they thought you might be getting bored at shooting things. Or, perhaps the game itself is a puzzle, like Portal. Either way, these are likely to pause the game-play for a bit while you figure it all out.
Now, when these are done well, they can be extremely entertaining. You always have new avenues to explore, new approaches to try, and everything starts to make sense after a while. You collect all the information you need to know (e.g. what items are scattered around the room to work with, what paths you can to take, etc...) and then deduce how you can use them to get where you need to be. Portal did this extremely well. It marked what button went to where, made your end-goal clear, and left you with everything you needed to stare at to figure out what to do. Portal 2 did even better by squeezing each test chamber into a single room, making the end goal visible from the moment you stepped off the elevator.
However, as fun as this can be when it's done well, there are just as many (or even more) instances of doing this poorly. These will invariable leave gamers left in the dark and scratching their heads, wondering what they should do. In fact, there's an entire article on this on tvtropes.
Now, I'm going to narrow the scope at this point, as the list of complete game flaws that lead to looking things up is waaaay too big to discuss (or even list) here. Yes, there are outright flaws that can get you stuck: for example, there was a room in Quake 4 I walked into that required you to kill an enemy before you could proceed. However, the scripted sequence failed to fire when I walked in, and the enemy got locked behind the very door that wouldn't open until the enemy was killed. Since this was the first time I had played the game, I didn't know about that enemy and had to look it up. I'm not talking about this, though. (I've actually happened across this problem many times, where the player gets permanently stuck. Not all these instances involved an outright failure.)
Another guide-dang-it instance is where the game literally fails to give you a piece of vital information that it assumes you already know. For example, the instruction manual may have neglected to give you the button combination for a certain move. Again, I am not going to talk about these.
I'm talking about instances where the game gives you all the information it intends to give you, everything works as the designer wants it to, and the player *still* has to look up the answer. Heck, the designer might even look at the puzzle's flawed design as a sign of being simply challenging. And yes, sometimes this is the case (when you look up the answer and immediately wish you hadn't due to how simple the part was that you missed). However, if you look up the answer and find yourself just staring at your screen with a "what the **@^#$*" look on your face, you know the designer screwed up.
There's a difference between a clever puzzle that requires a lot of patience and logic to figure out, and a part that just plain doesn't make any sense, even in retrospect.
I'll use a hypothetical Half-Life puzzle as an example, since that's likely to be a game you all are familiar with. Suppose there was a puzzle that involved a maze, and a headcrab. The correct solution to the puzzle is to follow the headcrab as it traverses the maze. The designer is thinking "the player will have to think outside the box to solve the maze". They may even be proud of such a convoluted solution to the puzzle, and if implemented in just the right way, it may even be somewhat clever.
However, there's a glaring flaw with throwing the player into this situation: as soon as they step foot into the room, they're going to shoot the headcrab to death, thus destroying the very means of finding the way through the maze. Even if you put a continuous respawn of headcrabs, the player will only find this irritating each time they walk into the room.
Why?
Because everything prior to this moment has clearly established that headcrabs are bad, and that they are always better dead than they are alive. The player has been trained by the game itself that headcrabs only cause problems with left alive.
Now, there are games where enemies *are* used to solve puzzles. For example, Braid makes extensive use of enemies as jumping platforms. However, the difference between the headcrab and the Braid monsters is that Braid clearly establishes the monsters as jumping platforms from the very beginning. The player is expecting to use them to their advantage, and has been trained to see them as more than just cannon (jumping?) fodder.
Now, one thing Half-Life could do, if it really wanted to implement the head-crab puzzle, is to have voice-overs informing the player that something is different about the enemies in this room. Valve did something similar in Episode One when they presented the player with a ditch, a car, and an unending supply of ant-lions. Portal 2 also did this in a certain turret-section with Wheatly. Both of these sections would have been very tricky due to how different they are from standard game-play. However, having Alyx and Wheatly there to inform the player to think differently about these situations goes a long way. It lets them know not to treat the situation like they would any other part of the game.
So many puzzle games (particularly online flash puzzle games) don't understand this consistency issue. For example, there were a number of point-and-click games that I got completely stuck on because I couldn't interact with an item unless I was viewing it at a particular angle. In particular, there was one point-and-click game where clicking on a cave would make the entrance take up the entire screen. However, in order to light it with the torch item I had picked up earlier, I needed to drag the torch onto the cave wile I was zoomed out. That is to say, when I clicked on the cave entrance so it took up the entire screen and *then* dragged the torch over it, it wouldn't do anything.
One of the most praised games of all time, The Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past (one of my personal favorites, by the way) has this problem in many areas. However, the most glaring part is the movable (pushable?) tiles. Why are some tiles movable when others are not? Why will a tile move when pushed from one side but not the other? Why can a tile be pushed to the left, but not pushed back to the right again, even though it was just there a minute ago? The rules are completely arbitrary. There's no way to deduce which tiles can be pushed in what direction without going from tile to tile, pushing from each and every direction until one of them moves. There's no other way to put it: this is bad design, plain and simple. An easy way to fix this would be to add a subtle clue as to which tiles are movable. For example, lighter-shade tiles could weigh less, enabling the hero to push them easier than dark-shaded tiles. The Illusion of Gaia did something similar with statues: the ones that looked slightly different could come to life while the others remained in the background.
I guess the point I'm making with all of this is that it all comes down to consistency and clarity. Good game design clearly establishes the rules of the game and then continues to play by them until the bitter end. If the rules change, then good game design will make this clear to the player, one way or the other.
As a side note to end this with, many adventure games are notorious for going completely left field. If you haven't read it already, check out these six completely absurd puzzles.
Ah, yes. Those where the days.
Back then, before I even got to play the games, I had the strategy guides. I essentially went in already knowing all the solutions so I breezed through the puzzles and struggled with the combat.
Nowadays, I do my best to stay in the dark and go into a new game blind. The experience is totally different when you are forced to take thing in as they come at you.
Still, gamefaqs.com is just a click away if I ever get stuck...
Ah, yes. Matter of fact, i can think of one right off the top of my head: Myst. Now, most of Myst was pretty well balanced; the puzzles were tricky, but they were a nice challenge, with one exception.
The gorram Selenic age.
Just entering it required knowledge of musical theory, which is something that not a lot of people would know. I recall personally being abysmally bad at that whole section.
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Personally, I love Myst, but it's definitely not without its flaws.
Entering Selenitic requires memorizing (or writing down) notes on a keyboard and then playing them back on the organ in the rocket. It doesn't require any theory, but it *does* require a good ear. You need to be able to hear a note, and remember the pitch (I just hum the pitch out loud after I play it, and keep humming until I match it using the slider.) Most people struggle with this because they have trouble matching the pitch. I remember the forums being full of enraged tone-deaf people, and for good reason.
The Selenitic age has a bigger gameplay flaw, though. The maze runner requires knowledge that can only be gained in the Mechanical Age. Since each Age requires you to complete it before you can return to the island, there's no way to go back to Mechanical to get the information once you enter Selenitic. This is one of the most blatant gameplay flaws and should have been caught during play testing. It's resulted in numerous frustrated entries on the forums.
With that said, looking back over Myst as a whole, it's relatively well-structured, especially for being made by a team of two. Most everything is logical, in contrast to many other adventure games. The puzzles just weren't as rewarding as they could have been (a problem that was addressed in the sequels, particularly those made under different companies).