Two Thousand and Fourteen

It's been a while since I updated this blog. I have a half-dozen posts in perpetual draft mode, so I may one day get back to them.

2014's nearly over and out of interest I decided to take a look at my Steam account history. This last year alone I've purchased more games on Steam than I had in the other 5 years since creating my current account. It's partly due to the fact that I have some more disposable income lately, and partly because I got my first debit card this year, allowing me to buy stuff online without having to borrow someone else's card.

One of my new years' resolutions for 2013 was to play a lot of interesting games, and I did a pretty good job - I'd make a facebook post every week or so with a brief description of the games I'd recently played - most weeks I had a couple of new games out of the backlog and under my belt. I didn't do so well this year, but I thought I might dust off the old blog and make a big roundup of all the great games I've played this year.

Dark Souls

I bought Dark Souls on Steam a while ago, and started writing this article.

And then this happened.

Old Games

This post is dedicated mostly to games I played many years ago and still enjoy today. Be warned that extreme subjectivity lies ahead.

Doom

From the Doom comic, courtesy Wikipedia.

Someone more talented has probably described at length the influence this game has had on the games industry, so I won't comment further on Doom's historical significance. What I will say is that despite being released almost nineteen years ago, people are still playing Doom. A subsection of the community is still making engine ports, modifications and level packs for it. I think the reason is that Doom managed to pack superb level design, aesthetics, great pacing and a surprisingly high skill ceiling into what appears by today's standards to be a fairly primitive game. During my course I spent many lectures blasting demons on a tiny netbook, and even today I loaded Doom up for a quick session. The fact that it is still great fun so many years after release is testament either to the game's quality, or the devotion of its fans.

Failure Tolerance in Games

In my last post, I tried to explain why I felt that accepting failure in games could produce more interesting experiences for players. Today I want to describe some methods that can be used to embrace the idea of failure, and make allowances for it both in game mechanics and story writing. I will focus on single-player or co-operative experiences - Competitive multiplayer games are very different beasts.

Videogames distinguish themselves from other media like film and literature in that they allow the audience to fail. More generally they allow the audience to take a highly active role in the outcome of a game's story.

To illustrate, you might look at the story of Mario trying to rescue Peach in Super Mario Bros. Some players may struggle through the game, using many lives, to finally overcome Bowser and rescue Peach. Other players may find all the warp zones and skip past most of the game, beating it with far less effort.

I have never beaten Super Mario Bros.

So different players have different experiences - This is also somewhat true for books and film, too (see previous post). It's pretty obvious when you watch someone play a game and they're far better at it than you. What's important here is that this is one of the fundamental elements of games, and in my opinion some more effort should be invested into diversifying player experience. How games deal with failure is a part of this, and I have some ideas on how to expand some games' tolerance of player failures.
 

Losing Is Fun

Let me start by saying that I believe that in all media, not just games, the audience plays an important part in their own experience of the story. In a similar way that the reader of a book might imagine characters' voices and appearances differently than the author, the player of a game will define part of their own experience by making different choices, slipping in and out of the designer's expected player flow. So as well as the written story of a game, film or book, there is a personal story that the player, viewer or reader writes in their mind as they go through the author's story. I hope the distinction is clear in the remainder of my post.

I've been occasionally replaying a game called Jagged Alliance 2 for over a decade now. It's a turn-based strategy game in which you hire a team of mercenaries (and can create your own mercenary persona) with the intent of overthrowing a corrupt dictator that is oppressing the people of Arulco, a small fictional country that has a number of small towns with vibrant characters. It's one of the earliest non-linear videogames I remember playing, allowing players to develop their own strategies for winning, ranging from different combat tactics to which towns need to be liberated first.

Image taken from Wikipedia

Your mercenary team can be made up from a number of characters, recruited from Arulco or from in-game websites accessed through the game's laptop. What's important to note here is that the player controls multiple characters, and that they can die without you losing the game. There are consequences (if your mission has cost many mercs their lives, other mercs might refuse the job) but the game goes on. You can even opt to have your mercs surrender and rescue them from captivity later.

Until a few years ago, I would abuse game saves in Jagged Alliance 2 in order to avoid losing mercs, or even taking too much damage in one turn. I used the save system like any other game mechanic and effectively gave myself infinite retries of any scenario, pursuing a 'perfect' round of combat. At some point I relaxed a bit, allowing mercs to be gravely wounded and - provided I could rescue them and give them first aid before they bled out - continued playing. Even more recently I started accepting any mercenary deaths as part of my playthrough's story. Interestingly, I started enjoying the game a lot more. Battles became more intense and strategies had to be careful, because the penalty for losing mercs in my game became more than simply playing through a few turns in a different way - I was allowing the game's risk and penalty systems to function as intended, and the game took on a new life just because of this change in my use of the save system.

The problem with reviews

I like to think I'm a savvy consumer. Being a student, I don't have a lot of disposable income, which I suppose makes me a little more cautious about what I buy. To this end, I've adopted a general rule that I won't buy a game over about $15 until I'm reasonably sure that I'll be getting my money's worth.

I normally like to play a game for a little while, to get a clear feel for how it plays, before I make a decision. I love that many games on Steam have a free demo that I can try out, but for some reason a lot of games still don't bother to release a demo. I'm sure it's a lot of work to produce a game demo, and I think the bean-counters at the large publishing companies have probably evaluated that it's not worth the investment and they'd rather not bother with hesitant buyers like me.

One might think I could rely on game reviews to help me decide - Magazines and websites publish textual and video reviews. Metacritic uses some mathematical wizardry, compiling multiple reviews to produce 'meta-scores', giving a general overview of a game's review scores. Yahtzee's Zero Punctuation videos home in on flaws that might otherwise go unnoticed by the generally-positive review websites. I don't consider game reviews to be a reliable, accurate or otherwise useful measure of a game's quality, and I hope this post can list the issues I see in them along with some ideas on how to improve things.

Rocket Jumping: A Bad Idea Gone Horribly Right

I figure I've laid down the necessary groundwork to discuss this blog's title mechanic. If you haven't already, check out my post on the Entry Barrier and Skill Ceiling metrics, because they're important for this discussion.

In this post, I'm going to have a go at breaking down and discussing why I love rocket jumping so much. For the poor sheltered souls who've never seen a rocket jump before, here's a video of someone performing Quake Live's rocket jump tutorial:

It took me much longer to beat this tutorial

So rocket jumping is about using an explosive to propel yourself some distance, and it's called rocket jumping because it's typically done with a rocket launcher. Simple, right? Not quite. This trick takes a while to master because it requires precision and lightning speed to pull off in the middle of a tense deathmatch, but you can punt yourself across the room with relative ease. Despite being easy to begin using, it takes practice to get the most bang out of your buck, which is the key reason why rocket jumping is so awesome - Its result is not just win or fail, which means it's not a 'boolean action'.