Random, useless thought

While I was doing some other thing I started to think about traps and traps.

For example there could be a trap at the entrance of a dungeon. The trap may or not kill you but it probably should be set to trigger during a combat or it wouldn’t make much of a difference. It would just add another downtime while you are sitting to recover some health points (or run back, if it was a deadly trap).

And then there’s another type of trap. Like in EverQuest, you target a random NPC to hail but instead you “fumble” and press “A”, starting an attack and getting killed in no time.

While I was thinking all this I also started to think about “skill” in games. Right now I think the new combat of SWG really requires skill with its clumsy hotkey+right click interface. Even more skill requires the use of the powerful secondary effects on DAoC’s artifacts. Since, as I often ranted, you have to exit combat, right click on item, left click on macro and reenter combat. See? Skill. It requires a good amount of skill to go as quickly as possible through that sequence in the heat of a battle while you are also trying to coordinate with your group and use all your skills at best.

The rule seems to be: the more you fight with the interface and controls and the more the game requires “skill”. After all you are fighting with the interface even when in a FPS you try to aim at a running and jumping player. Or not?

So what ties together the reasoning about “traps” and the one about skill in games? Well, I was just trying to discover the difference between the two types of traps. What’s the essential gameplay value of a trap (like the one in first example)? It should be the fact that, once you fall in the trap, you learn how to avoid it. An unexperienced player would risk its life on the first run, while he should be able to avoid the trap or at least try to counter and minimize its effect on a second run. This can be fun because it adds an interesting element in the gameplay. Essentially we are back at the basic concept of Raph’s “fun” (and mine): we are having fun when we learn something. Then we can practice and reiterate what we learnt. The trap is the ideal example, something that can kill you if you are unaware of it but that it’s easy to bypass once you learnt the proper pattern. The “design masterpiece” under the name of “God of War” is completely designed following that simple rule. All the encounters are almost impossible till you figure out the proper tactics to beat them. Once you have mastered them, the game becomes rather simple even at the highest level of difficulty. The game is never frustrating because it encourages you to master the (wonderful) controls and discover the proper patterns through a continued, varied exploration of your possibilities (types of combos, use of the environment, timing, positioning etc.. You have many, leaving space for a lot of “creativity” in how you decide to face a situation. Another fundamental trait of that game, in fact).

And what’s instead the basic trait of the second type of trap? I guess it’s obvious. The difference is that in the second example you are facing an “UI trap”. To begin with this trap is “OOC”. It’s about the player, not the character. So it breaks the “fourth wall” and the whole purpose of a game (simulate stuff). Then the other fundamental trait is that you aren’t really learning anything. You may actually know that “A” is used to attack but that doesn’t prevent you to fumble and keep pressing it by mistake. I fumble nearly always on every game, in fact in WoW I set meticulously my hotbars so that they are “fumble friendly”, plancing the buttons so that they usually activate when those surrounding are off (my keyboard is also a nightmare, since it has almost no space between a key and the other). So the difference is that in this second case you may be totally aware of the trap, but still this doesn’t prevent you to fall in it. There isn’t a lesson to learn, and, even if you do, you are still not put in the condition to use what you learnt as an advantage. In fact this trap is not fun and rather annoying.

The main point is: you have no control over the second type of trap. In the same way (here’s the tie) you may have no control over your actions while you are “fighting against the interface”. Maybe you know exactly what to do, maybe you know that to make a successful jump in a platform game you have to run till the very limit of a platform and then jump. But the controls may lag and your character drift too much and fail even if you know exactly what you are supposed to do. This is damn frustrating and, while tremendously successful games (from Super Mario to Wonderboy, those games really required “skill”) have been built completely around this concept, I believe it’s a thing of the past and cannot be used anymore today.

We aren’t playing anymore Pac-Man. We play past it. We play in a story and a context. We like to be heroes or demons. We want things to happen as we plan them. We don’t want to see an interface between us and the simulated world and we get even more angry if this interface gets in the way and goes against our will, forcing us to fumble and fight with clumsy, overly complicated controls. We want to think and act because what interests us is the action itself and its consequence, not the skill of the fingers to press multiple keys with a right timing. We don’t want to play anymore the controls. We only want to play the shared myth. The “symbolic shared system”.

And if we like a FPS it’s *after* we have master the type of controls, not before. It’s when we are finally simulating the aiming of the marine (and not ours) and when we are running and jumping like in a second skin. *Only then* the fun begins. And not when you are still fighting with your mouse and WASD, trying to learn how the hell these games work.

What I wanted to say with all this? Nothing at all, just a totally random, useless thought.

I have many of these…

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