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