Please Stop Sticking Things To Animals

In this article, game designer Francisco Gonzalez implores adventure game designers to avoid puzzles with sticky animals so that players can have a better gameplay experience.

Allow me to go on a bit of a rant, if I may. Adventure games have become infamous for their puzzles. I say “infamous” because when you ask most people what feelings they associate with playing games of this genre, they often respond with “frustration,” “annoyance,” or “hate.” The reason for this is mostly because many early adventure games featured puzzles with logic so obtuse, players wouldn’t be able to proceed unless they called the company-run hint lines (at roughly 75 cents per minute) to get the answers they needed. In fact, the founders of Sierra Online have admitted that at one point, revenue from hint books and hint lines far surpassed that of sales of the actual games. Once the internet became popular, this all went away, since finding solutions was just a Google search away. What didn’t go away, however, was ridiculous puzzle design. What’s worse, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend in recent adventure games that have all adopted a common solution: sticking things to animals.

“What on earth are you talking about?” you may be wondering. Allow me to enlighten you, dear reader, on the

intricacies of this terrifying new trope. In what can only be described as “creative desperation,” there are several games which feature this type of puzzle. In the interest of integrity, I will refrain from naming them, but I will describe the puzzles in detail so as to warn you in case you ever encounter them in your gameplay experiences.

We’ll begin with a recent release, which features not one, but TWO instances of the stick things to animals puzzle. In the first case, our protagonist finds himself in a mountaintop cable car station. The villains have stopped the cars from running by sabotaging a fuse box. Our job, as the player, is to repair the broken fuse and get the system running again. If the player attempts to look in the fusebox, they can see that the broken fuse is located at the far end of the box, out of the player’s reach (he doesn’t want to stick his arms in for fear of being electrocuted.)

Now, there are a number of ways this could have been handled, but this is how the game designers chose to go about it in this particular case: in the player’s inventory is a matchbox containing a live cockroach which we have been carrying all game, along with a crumbled tea biscuit, a paper clip, and several other items which serve no current purpose. In the station are a pair of large gears, on top of which is a lunch box. Activating the large gears crushes the lunchbox, which causes a jar of jam inside to explode and leak around the area. The player must then use the paperclip on the jam to make it sticky, then paste it on the back of the cockroach, toss the biscuit inside the fusebox, which then lures the roach to the exact spot where the paperclip on its back makes contact with the ends of the fuse and restarts the mechanism.

Take a moment to recover from that. As long as you need. Now, let’s move on to the second instance.

The second to last puzzle in this game features an ancient temple being guarded by some armed thugs. In the vicinity is a goat. To scare the thugs away, the player must take a piece of old sausage, stick a fuse in it so it resembles dynamite, light it, then tie it around the goat’s neck and lure it over to the guard with some fruit, scaring them away.

One might think this sort of thing was specific to this one game, but another one released in the mid 2000s did something equally ridiculous. In this game, the player is required to spy on a conversation being held inside a house, to which they have no access. Hanging around outside is a cat, and through some exploration the player can notice that the cat’s water dish is inside the house. In order to spy on the people talking inside, the player must tape their cell phone to the back of the cat, then feed it some extra salty tuna so it becomes thirsty and runs inside to drink water from its dish. The player then listens in via another phone.

One more example of this is a rather famous puzzle from a well-known game where the player needs to retrieve a key from some subway tracks. The solution requires you to tie a rope and clamp to an inflatable duck flotation device. The deflating duck causes the clamp to slowly close and grab the key. While technically not a living animal, this should be included for its sheer ridiculousness.

The lesson to be learned here is that animals should not be included as viable solutions to adventure game puzzles. Forcing the player to think up these outlandish and ridiculous solutions only hurts the genre and causes nothing but frustration and anger.

 Francisco Gonzalez has been writing and designing point and click adventure games since 2001. His favorite aspect of designing narrative based games is the writing process, and being able to create worlds and make characters come to life. He currently works at Wadjet Eye Games as a designer.

Microtransactions and Theft: Here We Go Again

In this article, aspiring game designer Gabby Taylor proposes some solutions to the issue of virtual good theft in MMOs.

Disclaimer: The following post does not represent the views of the IGDA, IGDA Game Design SIG, or anyone else except Gabby. Just wanted to get that out of the way.
 
Some of you might remember my other post about microtransactions from way back in February. It was a bit heated, but it spells out how I feel about them pretty well:  I don’t like them. I think they hurt the industry despite bringing in large amounts of money. Most people do not agree with me on this and have brought up pretty valid points. I love it when that happens. Intellectual debate is great; that’s how minds are opened and horizons are expanded. Then something happens to people like Mike Weatherley and all I can do is less-than-professionally laugh.

For those of you who are unaware, good sir Mike Weatherley has the esteemed position of being chief adviser on intellectual property to David Cameron (yes, Prime Minister of the UK David Cameron). In his off-time, he is also a gamer. Recently, he has experienced something nearly all gamers experience: someone stole his sword in World of Warcraft, one he bought with real-world money. His reaction to it? The political version of whining to his parents. I’m not going to get into how this may or may not be the morally right way to leverage his position, but instead focus on the experience itself.

Usually, microtransactions are used as a way to enhance a game experience. For example, extra lives or power-ups can be purchased in order for someone to have more fun playing while they’re waiting for the bus, rather than miserably grinding away until these advantages are natively available. This works wonders for bringing in money for the publishers and developers, so much so that it’s quite often taken a bit further than it needs to be, or even should be. The downside to this is that theft is fairly universal, and few things sour an experience than spending $5USD on a cuirass, for example, and having it be swiped from your account (along with other items that may or may not have been purchased with real world money). This is compounded when it happens in a subscription-based game, as it’s easy to view the situation as having been doubly robbed. At this point, it’s perfectly reasonable to feel upset and some people even ‘rage quit’ over the larger instances. At this point, the game experience is completely ruined. Not because of gameplay, graphics, technical problems, or really anything to do with the game itself, but rather the greed and selfishness of a group of players and the open door to them that is microtransactions.

I believe that game experiences should be enjoyable for everyone and I bet there are many who would agree with me. In order for this to happen, though, we need to fix how things are done. Mike Weatherley is of the opinion that thefts of digital goods ought to be punished in the same way that thefts of real-world good are. I believe that a proactive solution would do gamers and developers alike a bit more good than knowing someone, somewhere received a fine of some sorts (assuming, of course, they were tracked down, which would require a lot more resources than it’s really worth). My initial idea is to just nix the microtransactions altogether, but I understand publishers and developers are businesses and still need/want to make more money than the game itself will get them. With that in mind, let’s come up with a few ideas:

• The ability to re-obtain stolen items without spending more money. In order to prevent abuse of this system, the game can keep server-side records of what the account bought, for how much, and by what means did it leave the account’s possession. I suppose this is still open to abuse, since most stolen items are stolen by someone cracking the account’s password and trading the item to the cracker’s actual account (or an alternative account).

• All microtransaction-obtained items are bound to character or account. This would prevent anyone from cracking in and trading it off, but it does not help if someone wants to buy a gift for someone in game (though maybe a redeem code could be purchased for a gift).

• Microtransactions can only apply to buying in-game currency, and currency is account-bound (but not character/soul bound). This way, there are no items at stake, and the player still has the flexibility to outfit any of their characters as they see fit. It’s possible this might also bring in extra money, since not everyone would necessarily be interested in an item, but everyone wants money. The downside is this opens up a whole world of ‘pay-to-win’ problems.

Mike Weatherley is not alone in his loss of an item purchased with real world money in an MMO. This is a very widespread problem that should be looked at quite hard by the developers, as it’s their years of hard work at stake here. Theft of items that require lots of time or real world currency can ruin the entire experience, so it should be addressed proactively, not retroactively by lawmakers using methods that just drain everyone of more resources. I’ve tried to come up with a few simple ways of solving the problem that make everyone happy, but I’d like to hear what you think. What ideas do you or your studio have? Do you think it’s worth it to get lawmakers involved? Why or why not?

Gabby Taylor is an aspiring game designer and head of GreyBox Studio. When not making design documents, she contemplates going outside, and sometimes even takes a few steps when feeling particularly frisky. 

February 2011: Cheats

What an odd day to be writing about Cheats!  Sorry.  Sorry for the delay and the unintended timing.

About a year ago, I prepared a presentation on the topic of Cheats for the NYU Game Theory Seminar Series.  It struck me that colloquially, cheats or codes, as we sometimes call them, are commonly accepted by players as part of the game.  Look up any game and the word 'cheats' on Google and there are sure to be a number of websites and videos on the topic.  There are even magazines solely devoted to game cheats.  What does it mean to cheat in a game?  How does that affect the ludic contract?

For certain, a lot of it is tied to marketing.  What used to be a shortcut is now collapsed into a code that gives you an item for buying a certain product.  You may get an in-game item that helps you or a way to skip through the roadblocks to get to an unlimited mode of play.

When I was working on Siege of Avalon, a single-player RPG, the designers did not care if the player chose to be unheroic and slay everyone in the castle instead of the orcs outside.  Clearly, that was unintended behavior, especially since every NPC you met hailed you as the mighty hero of the homeland.  We were also aware that players could jigger the numbers so that they were so powerful, so stealthy, so charismatic, etc that they could sneak up to mobs and slay them without any sort of effort but pressing the Attack button.  This was a single-player game, so such behavior did not affect anyone but the player.

In a multiplayer game, it certainly becomes more complicated and even more so when there are real money transactions for in-game currency.  There was a recent article about cheating on a Zynga game, so not even social games are exempt from this kind of behavior.  But even when there is no real money involved, just prestige and competition, players can have strong feelings about cheating.  In an article from last year, a player accused of cheating at Counterstrike was knifed through the head.  Clearly, there are levels of cheating that are considered acceptable by players and levels of cheating that are unacceptable.

So what are your thoughts?

• How does this affect the ludic contract?
• What is it about game culture that promotes the use of cheats?
• How does the use of cheats affect the game?
• What should be done about cheats?