Dark Souls

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

And then this happened.

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.
 

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'.

Barriers and Ceilings

I wrote the bulk of this post the day after creating this blog, but keep putting off publishing it because I've been pretty verbose here. I decided that it's not acceptable to delay publishing a post for a whole month in the hope that it'll rewrite itself, so here it is - Please forgive the wordiness.

I've been playing a lot of Tribes: Ascend lately, and before that I played Quake Live a whole bunch. Though I like to think I'm pretty good, there's always someone better. That's OK though - it's a great thrill to test my skills against great opponents, regardless of the outcome.

I'm going to write about rocket jumping later on, stay tuned.

The term 'eSports' is often used to describe the competitive side of videogaming, and high-level competitive play has been seen across many genres and gametypes, from high scores in Donkey Kong, a solo game in which gamers try to beat the reigning champion's high score, to the recent surge in top-level MOBA competitions in which teams compete in real time and in the same gamespace. It's a broad subject and one that I'm not broadly experienced with, so I'm going to talk about some particular design metrics that I feel sufficiently familiar with to discuss in detail, and why they're important for all games, but particularly in competitive ones.

Hello World

I play a lot of games, across many genres and platforms. I was playing games at a very young age, and it's been my main hobby for the majority of my life. I don't do a lot of writing (you can probably already tell), but I think I've got a pretty good understanding of videogames and the communities and media surrounding them. I made this blog so I can have a place to publish my musings on these things, and maybe help some to better understand what has very quickly become a massive culture across the connected world. This post will hopefully introduce you to my background and particular gaming interests.

I'm 25, and I live in Australia. I'm in my third year of a games-programming degree. I intend to make a career out of games development, though this career may ultimately take on many forms. When I'm supposed to be working on assignments or paying attention to lectures, I'm often playing games or thinking about them instead. I enjoy playing solo, with friends, or against rivals. I do pretty well in FPS games and am terrible at RTS games. I have a list of games to play next to my list of games to make. Most of them will never be made, but I look at them and say "maybe one day".

Why is this blog called Rocket Jumping? It's partly that I intend to write a lot of posts about interesting game mechanics, and rocket jumping is a very well-known one. As a game developer I try to examine games from a design perspective and understand how certain mechanics can make a game better or worse. My own personal discovery of rocket jumping marks the day I decided that I wanted to make games.

Screenshot taken using EGL