Mechanical Evaluation 1: Dark Souls Combat Part 5

This post is the fifth part of a series on the Dark Souls combat system. This series will cover why I personally am such a fan of the Dark Souls combat system, why it is objectively a well-made system, and how it compares to other action game combat systems. In the previous post, and the this post, I will go over the backstabbing system. 

Picture from Google Images

When you see that mask along with a rapier (lightweight, low-requirement weapon with thoroughly-insane back-stab damage bonus), you may as well assume that they plan on fighting you only with backstabbing. 
The problem with backstabbing in online combat against other players, is the all-too-common exploitation of latency (online lag) to get back-stabs that the recipient usually does not see coming, and has no chance of avoiding, except by anticipating their attempt. This practice is colloquially known as "lagstabbing" in the Dark Souls community, and is almost universally frowned-upon in public, despite its extreme prevalence in actual online play. 

As you can see from the video, backstabbing, originally intended as a punishment for sloppy play, is used as a powerful primary means of engagement via purposeful lagstabbing. 

This will frustrate the loser (trust me on this one), as they must attribute the failure to the the network for being slow enough to allow this (not to mention the oft-derided Dark Souls netcode, which seems to give "priority frames" to backstabs), and the other player for exploiting this technical issue, rather than their own failure to rise to the challenge. Plus, the perpetrator as well as victim is essentially robbed of what could have been a fun fight, by choosing to substitute the fast and frantic in-and-out, best-in-class combat for an instant, nigh-infallible kill.

Thus is the truly tragic part of this situation, from a game design perspective.  All of the masterfully balanced nuances of online combat are thrown out the window when someone decides to abuse lagstabbing. All of the mind games, anticipation, and finer points of a good duel are circumvented by a strategy that requires almost no skill, and was not intended to be possible. The winner is also cheated out of potential enjoyment from proper engagement of the challenge of online duels. For these players, the thrill of the win, fear of failure, desire to annoy other players, or a combination of the three, must over-power their desire to just have the fun, unpredictable, fights intended by the developers.

Now that I have  touched on the strengths and weaknesses of Dark Souls combat, I will continue further discussion with comparisons of it to more popular games.

Picture from Google Images

(Don't worry, I still play Elder Scrolls games every now and then, I'll be fair!)

Thanks for reading! Comments are as welcome as always!

-Kenny White

PSN: Fatalis_Veritas

Mechanical Evaluation 1: Dark Souls Combat Part 4

This post is the fourth part of a series on the Dark Souls combat system. This series will cover why I personally am such a fan of the Dark Souls combat system, why it is objectively a well-made system, and how it compares to other action game combat systems. In this post, and the next, I will go over the backstabbing system.

In the next two posts, I will discuss the backstabbing, and the problems with it that blemish quite possibly the best action video game combat system of all time. The complex series of checks and balances that go into making the combat as viable online as it is against AI, are dizzying in their ubiquity and complexity, but generally are extremely well thought-out. Nevertheless, there are some things that could stand to change (which seem to be at least partially mitigated in Dark Souls 2, from what little information we have from the beta).

Backstabbing is a keystone in balancing multi-player combat, Essentially implemented to punish other players for severe misjudgments such as:

• Healing. Generally, if you're opponent is trying to heal, they believe that they are out of options, dying. In this case, you need to be able to press your advantage to finish the fight, and prevent them from regaining all their health. While drinking Estus (regenerating healing item) or using humanity (consumable, relatively rare healing item), you are open to attack. Backstabbing deals a decent amount of damage to your opponent, and also knocks them on the ground, interrupting their actions regardless of their armor; which might have otherwise allowed them to heal as you hit them.

• Dumb moves: Many weapons have one or two attacks that have either significant warm-up (vulnerable time before the weapon is swung) or cool-down (opposite warm-up). Very large weapons sometimes have so much warm-up on certain attacks, that they just generally should not be used against other players, so punishing a lapse in judgment of this kind is another valid reason to have back-stabs in the game.

• Running: Oftentimes, other players will run when the situation seems hopeless. Sometimes they just want to find a terrain advantage, but a more common behavior is to attempt to get you to die from the terrain in pursuit of them. Cowardice in this context usually deserves a good backstabbing.

In my next post, I will discuss the abuse of backstabbing, which creates serious problems in player-versus-player combat.

Thanks, the next post will be up soon!

-Kenny White

PSN: Fatalis_Veritas

Mechanical Evaluation 1: Dark Souls Combat Part 3

This post is the third part of a series on the Dark Souls combat system. This series will cover why I personally am such a fan of the Dark Souls combat system, why it is objectively a well-made system, and how it compares to other action game combat systems.

Picture from Google Images

Every time I play through Dark Souls (I'm on my 15th character, currently) I am always astounded by the things that kill me. Enemies and situations I never thought of as being that bad a threat, put me down like a dog. How does this happen, you ask? Well, the #1 thing to remember, is that Dark Souls is fair, and punishes you when you make a mistake, and very rarely otherwise.

As my playing style evolves, I don't make the rookie mistakes that come with minor punishment anymore, because in my over-confidence, I essentially play all-or-nothing, accepting the risk of bigger mistakes in order to speed things up. I can fly through the first areas of the game with extreme ease, but I get sloppy in my rush.
For example, I know that I can just barely hit this undead dragon with 3 attacks from this weapon  before I need to maneuver to safety, so I take the chance of doing as much damage as possible. I die, because my timing on the attacks was a little off, and I am punished by a lethal attack that is obvious and relatively easy to avoid for newer players, who tend to keep their distance and take less risk. This is frustrating to me, but once again, attributing my failure to my poor risk-management, I learn from it and move on.

Picture found on Google Images

This game is balanced to where you will die very quickly, and justly if you allow yourself to get into a bad situation; and that's exactly what hubris does in Dark Souls. This lends itself to the developer's goals for a dynamic experience, naturally increasing the difficulty for players via self-imposed restrictions (usually time, by rushing themselves), without ever changing the enemies. This naturally creates more goals for advanced players to conquer, that can prove to be almost as interesting as when the goal earlier was simply to survive. Even better, is that these goals naturally occur from the game's difficulty curve as the result of the player's mastery of basic skills, meaning that there doesn't have to be a cheesy, incongruous challenge system to encourage my continuous self-development.

In summary, most other facets of a game's design fall into place if you can perfect the basic game play mechanics (in this case close combat, obviously) by ensuring they fairly test the skill that they are intended to, leading to fun, brain-engaging challenge.

Thanks again for reading! I really hope that this is helpful and interesting to you, so let me know what you think in the comments.
My next post will highlight the weaknesses of the Dark Souls combat system (yes, they do exist).

-Kenny White,
PSN: Fatalis_Veritas

Mechanical Evaluation 1: Dark Souls Combat Part 2

This post is the second part of a series on the Dark Souls combat system. This series will cover why I personally am such a fan of the Dark Souls combat system, why it is objectively a well-made system, and how it compares to other action game combat systems.

Picture from Google Images

Picture from Google Images

The key to the success of this entire system, in all its complexity, is the degree of control you have over your character. In single-combat, especially against another player, it feels more like a fighting game, such as SoulCalibur, with split-second decisions as to which move in your repertoire to use for the greatest effect. And as you can see from the image below, you have a fairly exhaustive repertoire to choose from at any given moment.

 With at least 6 unique ways to directly attack your enemy at any time, with any given weapon, as well as the ability to switch to a different weapon with another unique set of moves with the tap of a directional button, the fit and finish of fighting game combat is married with the complexity and and customization of an RPG (the perfect action-RPG, right?). This allows you to change your strengths and weaknesses dynamically with the flow of the battle. 

The best way to give you an idea of how this works is to show you a video of players who do it very well. This video to the right, is of player-versus-player combat, as the finest, most nuanced techniques are required to out-smart and out-fight other players.

Things to note in the video:

•  back-stabs - An animation that does high damage and freezes an opponent when you press the light attack button close enough to them while facing their back.
•  Ripostes - An animation triggered by successfully deflecting an enemy's attack with the parry technique, and then following up with a unique, very high damage attack. 
• Also make note of the variety of equipment and tactics.

Thanks for reading, comment if you want, and stay on the lookout for my next post. In this upcoming post, I will focus on balancing of single-player challenge in the combat.

-Kenny White,
PSN: Fatalis_Veritas

Mechanical Evaluation 1: Dark Souls Combat Part 1

I used to play shooters almost exclusively. In fact, my brother and I once noticed that out of our selection of 15 PS3 games, 3 or 4 did not have any firearms on the front cover.  This seems pretty typical of the times, with shooters making up 21.2% of all video games sold in the U.S. in 2012 . Shooters were only beat by action games, ahead by a margin of 1.1%.

Then, something wonderful happened. Spring 2012, a good friend of mine introduced me to a dark, disturbing, death-filled cesspool of suffering known as Dark Souls.Chris Urie of Arcade Sushi put it this way: "The design Lordran (the game's setting) is a work of sheer, dark, mind-bending brilliance. It is a painting with pixels. Intersecting circles. The world of Dark Souls is like a Venn diagram in three dimensions where character, philosophy, and design all intersect."

Retrieved from Arcadesushi.com

In my first experiences with Dark Souls, I only noticed sword, pain, and my face intersecting. But with more time to study its intricacy, how can one deny that video games have an important place in future storytelling?

Anyway, learning through death after brutal, bloody death was painful, I knew from the beginning that it was a fair game, and could feel that these deaths were warranted by the errors I was working on fixing. (Good attribution, right guys?) 

Additionally, this was exactly the right kind of challenge for me: I was always drawn to shooters because of their status as the quintessential test of skill, requiring an engaging blend of mental agility, hand-eye coordination, and a bit of strategy, for optimal results. Since I have always had such a penchant for testing this skill-set and combat readiness, (and a romantic's appreciation for knightly, stabby combat.) which it corresponds to, the move to Dark Souls, (which does all of this in a way that, to me, deeper and more interesting than a shooter,) was rapturous for me.

That covers my reason for picking up Dark Souls, so next post, I will begin to give more detail on the ways the combat system is so engrossing to me.

Thanks for reading! 
-Kenny White
PSN: Fatalis_Veritas

Attribution Case Study - Dark Souls

I said I would talk about Dark Souls, and being such a great example of a game that often causes attribution to person, the part of attribution theory discussed in my last post, this is a great place to introduce it! 

A large part of what turns many people away from this game, thinking that they just aren't capable of surviving Dark Souls, is that where many games are giving you a tutorial, showing you the ropes, Dark Souls is giving you death. How's that 'Asylum Demon' to the left look for a first boss? At about 2-15 minutes into the game, he really doesn't waste any time in conveying that in Dark Souls, death is your only reliable teacher. Still, many people are used to the status quo, and misconstrue this as meaning that they aren't good enough, when they really just need the patience and attention to find figure out what keeps killing them. 

It's really is a sorry thing, that so many are turned away due to their illusory inadequacy, but it is a good learning point nonetheless. Most gamers I talk about Dark Souls with, think that you have to be some kind of stuck-up, masochistic, "hardcore gamer" elitist/hipster to play this game as avidly as I do. It's just that intimidating.

Heck, even Takeshi Miyazoe, a producer for the upcoming Dark Souls 2 admitted that the first game was too intimidating when he said that the sequel would be "[more] accessible... it's not that the game is going to be any easier, but it will be the process of streamlining a lot of the 'fat' that hinders people from enjoying the true Dark Souls experience."

Mr. Miyazoe's differentiation between accessibility and difficulty serves our discussion perfectly:

• Here, accessibility refers to the ability to understand the challenge better, to the end of encouraging attribution to circumstance, rather than attribution to player.

• The level of difficulty will still ensure a good challenge, (Having played the beta of DS2, I can tell you that the difficulty isn't going anywhere!) but the accessibility they speak of should remove some ambiguity from the equation, perhaps by offering a more straight-forward approach to teaching game basics.

• By giving the players more knowledge on their failures, they will be able to more effectively lean from them. This should make the game much less daunting initially, without sacrificing any positive elements of its design. (Although an argument could be made that the depth of despair felt in the first game made triumph that much better.)

Thank you once again for reading! Stay tuned for a short series on combat in action games.

-Kenny White

PSN: Fatalis_Veritas

The Ingredients of Fun - Part 3 Continued: Attribution to Person

This post is part 3 of 3 on the subject of Attribution Theory, covering attribution to Person. See parts 1 and 2 to learn about what happens when game events are attributed to Circumstance and Entity, respectively.

As we learned from the last post, it is never fun to lose because of a glitch or because the game just doesn't allow much room for your skill to affect the outcome. Players often attribute their failure to the game or some part of it. However, that's not the only thing that can go wrong with attribution. Sometimes, players will attribute the outcome to themselves, or to person. To cite our pal Jesper Juul Ph.D once more, some players in the aforementioned 2006 Gamelab study mentioned, complained not that the game was too hard, but others insisted that they just weren't good at the type of game used for the test. 

More challenging games often have the problem of players wrongly attributing their failure to the entity (often saying simply that the game's difficulty is too high) or person (lose interest in the game, thinking that they will not be good enough to have any success).What is important to realize about games that suffer this, is that they are often entirely fair, but also some combination of the following:

• Give less warning before punishing the player.
• Have stiffer punishments for failure than other games.
• Ways to avoid being punished are less apparent.

All of these attributes tend to intimidate the player, and make them wonder if they are good enough to eventually win, and if such a difficult game is worth the effort.

This concludes our science overviews for now, and I will now move on to some case studies, beginning with the problem of attribution of failure to entity and to player in my favorite game, Dark Souls. The upcoming posts will discuss specific games and parts of them, analyzing them in light of  the knowledge outlined in these science posts.
Thank you for reading, and comment at will!

-Kenny White
PSN: Fatalis_Veritas

The Ingredients of Fun - Part 3 continued: Attribution to Entity

This post is part 2 of 3 on the subject of Attribution Theory, covering attribution to Entity. See parts 1 and 3 to learn about what happens when game events are attributed to Circumstance and Person, respectively.

In the last post, I gave an example of good game design at work: 

1. The (totally) hypothetical player made a very obviously bad decision, and executed it unskillfully.
2.  The game punished the player with 'life punishment', by killing the character for such an silly mistake.
3.  The player realized their mistake from the terminal punishment, and learned from it, facilitating smarter play with less failure from then on.

In this post, I will give an example of a lamentable situation that can arise from poor game design, or player low player aptitude or temperament: attribution to entity.
This term applies to games when someone attributes their failure to an entity. They may blame the challenge itself, claiming that it is too difficult, or some aspect of the game that doesn't work as it should. One example of the latter, would be unresponsive, unhelpful, or just plain broken AI  (sets of computer-controlled character behaviors, in video game context) in allies, which can lead to difficulty that was unintended by the developers, and therefore destructive to the balance of the game. More common, but potentially just as annoying, are issues with imprecise controls, or unclear feedback after failure. 

Time for another story:

Picture from Google Images

You've sat down to unwind to some Skyrim, and you're having a grand old time. As someone who gets a real kick out of exploring virtual worlds, you've been mountaineering about for quite some time, taking in the sights and sounds. Suddenly, everything goes awry as the inexplicable friction that has been keeping you stuck to 75 degree slopes for over 20 minutes is simply not to be found on the next rock you make your jump to. Too bad you haven't saved the whole time. 

Now you're angry again. But not at yourself for doing something dumb (well, you might be, for not saving), but at the game for having an unfair inconsistency that you could not have avoided, unless you had been spending enough time around town to have heard "The legend of that one mountain with that one rock that doesn't work right". You have just attributed your failure to the game, which is typically no fun, as it bypasses the entire process of learning from mistakes, improving, and thereby firing up the dopamine dispenser.

Picture from Google Images

So, although there are a few exceptions, like "hopeless bosses", whose resulting forced-death is typically a story point that you do not need to replay, or try to prevent,  it is best when games have you feel responsible for your mistakes (attribute failure to circumstance). That way, you can actually correct it, and engage the challenge as it was meant to be.

Next time, you'll hear about how games can elicit a reaction of attributing failure to the person, in this case, the player.

Thank you for reading! Comments are always welcome, so post away!

-Kenny White
PSN: Fatalis_Veritas

The Ingredients of Fun - Part 3: Attribution to Circumstance

This post is part 1 of 3 on the subject of Attribution Theory, covering attribution to circumstance. See parts 2 and 3 to learn about what happens when game events are attributed to Entity and Person, respectively.

This psychological concept of 'attribution' I concluded the previous post with, lies at the heart of fun in video games. If you attribute failure to yourself, then the failure will be bearable because you are more aware of the demands of the game, and the challenge will be satisfying. Seeing how this fits together? I'll try to explain this with a stream-of-consciousness example: 

You're playing a Grand Theft Auto 5 (you heathen, you) and you make a mortal mistake: while trying to escape a very angry private security company in your suped-up Banshee, you hit a guard rail and fly off a bridge. Oops, your character died. 

Picture from Google Images

You are rather angry with yourself, because you had a good 10 seconds where you were wrestling with yourself, trying to judge if jumping off the bridge would be a good way to escape. Reflecting on the events prior to your untimely end, you first realize that you were having doubts about the whole idea just before smashing through the rail and falling (albeit with style) to your death. You know a few things could have prevented this, like making the jump in a way that would have caused less damage, preventing your cherry-red ride from transforming into a death-yellow explosion. 

You just attributed the cause of failure to the circumstance, since you can see that you made an uncharacteristically careless decision that only could possibly have ended well with perfect execution. After thinking about various other options you had at the time, you file this experience under "things I won't do again", and in the next chase, live that much longer for it.
The end result is a satisfying experience overall, because after critically-thinking through the situation, you isolate the mistakes made, and by resolving to avoid them from then on, end up learning something that helps you succeed later on.

In my next post I will give an example of a less-than-ideal situation, in which you find the circumstances surrounding your failure to be unfair, and attribute the outcome to an entity, like a nonsensical rule in the game.  
And with that, thank you for reading, and by all-means, comment if anything didn't make sense to you!

-Kenny White
PSN: Fatalis_Veritas

The Ingredients of Fun - Part 2: Failure

These days, people seem to be all about avoiding failure. This makes sense, as no sane person enjoys putting sincere effort into making something happen, only to watch their plans come to ruin as the opposite occurs. Nevertheless, when we fail, (SPOILER: If you're a human, it's going to happen.) too strong an aversion to failure can keep us from gleaning valuable experience from analysis of our mistakes. You've probably heard something like this in the form of life advice, or whatever. But it is quite relevant to game design, as failure is a component of challenge. 

• The possibility of failing defines challenge. Is an activity at which you will succeed regardless of your efforts a challenge? Nope.  
• From our look at the study in the previous post, we know that players prefer to be challenged to the point that they succeed in a game with difficulty. 
• Therefore, they want to experience some failure in the games they play. 

Although failure is generally not a fun experience, it serves to as more than a contrast to triumph. The difficulty curves (gradual, often exponential, rate at which difficulty increases through a game) of the best video games often are designed to require the player to learn from failure in order to cope with the challenge. 

Picture from Google Images

For example: rather than reading in the instruction manual that Mario is capable of jumping X feet horizontally, the players of Mario platforming games feel out the limitations of his acrobatics by failing basic jumps many times. As the player progresses through the stages, Mario's jumping ability becomes second-nature, allowing for the completion of more complex obstacles that would be incredibly daunting without precision jumping skills.

Picture from Google Images

In this way, failure teaches you one mistake at a time, engaging your brain' s previously discussed systems for finding paths to reward. This is where the dopamine kicks in, and you are having fun identifying strategies that work, and those that need to be rethought or better executed. That is, as long as the game is providing the feedback necessary to glean possible methods of improvement, since trial-and-error is only interesting so long as you can avoid unnecessary trial by learning from the error. Otherwise, the game runs the risk of the player attributing their failure to game or its rules, rather than themselves. 

Next post, I will discuss how Attribution Theory explains this phenomenon of players blaming the game for mistakes, and how this frustrating situation can be avoided with good game design.  

Thanks for reading! Did I miss anything? It can be hard to choose what to cut when condensing so much information, so please let me know if anything doesn't make sense to you. 

The Ingredients of Fun - Part 1: Challenge and Success

A game, by one definition is “a contest with rules, the result being determined by skill, strength, or chance”(Collins). The game presents goals for a player to complete, and has rules to restrict the means by which you accomplish them.

• These rules create challenge, as the player must overcome the difficulty of the restrictions set in place by the rule set in order to complete the goals and win.
• While winning is satisfying, and failure can be frustrating, the bulk of the enjoyment from a game should not come from the rewards for winning:

1.  In research conducted by Gamelab, a creator of popular casual computer games, study participants reported enjoying a test game most when they are barely able to win. (Gamelab, 2006) Those that were challenged to the point of losing most, but not all of their lives had more fun than those who lost few/no lives, as well as those who could not win.
2. Participants were also asked how they know a game is too easy. Popular answers included: “No challenge, go through motions to complete it without any thought” “boring... doesn’t provide further challenges” 27% of answers fell into a category that could be summed  with "... did not have to rethink strategy.".

Thus, challenge, the essence of a game itself, is key to fun, and trumps the desire to win.

Image taken from www.jesperjuul.net

This seemingly-paradoxical truth of our enjoyment of games is explained by our inborn desire to test our skill in a controlled environment. It’s what makes you crave a challenge in activities you enjoy.  If you’ve ever owned dogs or cats, you have surely witnessed play-fighting antics between them. This behavior results from their hard-wired desire to compete, and their brains encourage this exploration of their skills in conflict resolution with a dopamine release in their brain.
 The dopamine system is engaged to encourage behavior that is beneficial to the organism (eating, mating, etc.) and subsequently provide impetus to find more ways of receiving similar rewards. Human brains experience dopamine release during game play (Gee, 2007), due to the apparent systems of reward for the overcoming of challenge, explaining the potentially addictive quality of games. In summary:

• Gamers want to complete the goals set by games, but also to be challenged by them.
• The challenge itself is a rewarding experience, and the reward (despite providing reason satisfaction and reason to continue playing) for completing the goal is relatively unimportant to the fun of playing a video game.
• The engagement of challenges in a game lead to dopamine release in the brain, which encourages a player to persevere until they find a way to overcome the challenge and receive the reward for doing so. This process is what makes a video game fun, and hard to stop playing.

Thanks to you for reading, and to my main source, Jesper Juul, for his wonderfully informative forays into this topic, which he has generously published on his site.
In my next post, I will discuss the critical role that failure and punishment hold in defining the challenge of a game. Until then, please post any questions or comments, and I will be happy to address them.  
-Kenny White
PSN: Fatalis_Veritas