Do Games Need to Be Painful? | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
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- Опубликовано: 8 фев 2016
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Pain has long been a fundamental element of video games. It is used to inform the player how to act, and punish them for choosing incorrectly. When underutilized, a game becomes boring and overly simple. And yet, taken to the extreme, it can begin to feel unnecessary and… somewhat disturbing. Let us know some of your favorite games that hit the sweet spot of pain, and some that don’t get it quite right, in the comments below!
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0:13 Charlie Chaplin Quote
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0:24 Road Sodas - Visiting Arcade Xtreme @ The Peppermill Reno
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0:44 B. F. Skinner
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0:50 Operant Conditioning - Skinner box experiment - VCE Psychology
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0:55 An example of a Skinner Box
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1:08 How to Train a Brain - Crash Course Psychology #11
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1:11 3 minutes Painstation at 28c3
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2:31 The Ethics of Computer Games
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2:33 Invited Speakers
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2:36 Michel Foucault
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3:31 STAR WARS: THE OLD REPUBLIC - KNIGHTS OF THE FALLEN EMPIRE REVIEW
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4:32 Arkham City's Too-Forgiving Combat System
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Hosted by Jamin Warren (@jaminwar)
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You seem to switch your definition of pain half way through the video. in the first half it sounds like your using it as a metaphor for failure states and accessibility of game mechanics tied to progression. the other half you're talking about pain as it pertains to graphic depictions of violence. Looking through the comments it seems you have confused a lot of your audience.
+Jeb Galicia Valid point. We will address it next week. -jj
Watched this video from a reddit thread and was about to make the same comment. Video is so scattered I wonder what the point is.
What you mean by ''pain'' is poorly, defined.
when you're talking about games that aren't painful enough, you're talking about how easy the combat is, as in playing with a specific tactic in mind vs button mashing, having no real impact to the outcome of a conflict, and you mention TOR and batman.
but when you're talking about games that are too painful, you're talking about morbid representations, and you mention cut scenes and killcams, things that aren't really all that effected by player input.
so I really have no clue if you're talking about difficulty in gameplay or controversial cutscenes, cause you seem to have lost the thread at the end.
+Ebon Hawk Ya. Does he mean gory, or does he mean violent? Because there are plenty of FPS games that aren't really gory - the Borderlands or halo comes to mind: You just pop a bad guy and they magically evaporate after a little bit. That's violent, but not gory.
That said... the intial vibe I got was more of a "A lot of modern games 'punish' me if I do something wrong - so I have to start over. Can't an NPC or tutorial just hold my hand while I play so I can't lose?"
The souls games especially: You're supposed to learn from trial and error, starting over again and again.
Then he starts blathering on that pain has something to do with engagement and player retention for MMOs. Fucking hell - this video is a mess.
It's a pain
+Ebon Hawk I had this exact thought pass my mind.
+Ebon Hawk I think what he was talking about was a spectrum of how pain is used in games.
There is pain as a tool used to teach mechanics in a Pavlovian manner which can be too forgiving or be extremely demanding.
Then he shifted to pain in and of itself, how the player feels (a cringe factor if you will) when auditory or graphical depictions of painful things happen, which again can be negligible or too extreme but can be used to get the player more engaged in say the narrative for example.
Both of these will get the player to rea... respond but by different forms of pain and for different purposes. I don't think there was a loss of focus but a shift in perspective on the subject. The transitions could have been a little better i suppose.
+shane foster shift in perspective? But none of those types of 'pain' are the same. People respond differently to them, and they 'hurt' in different ways - so lumping them all together like that... it sends a hell of a mixed message
+webkilla I don't think he was trying to address one type of pain. Rather, the video was an attempt to answer the rather overly broad question of the video's title. It is coherent when keeping in mind that question, though, a little less impactful had he chosen a more defined and narrow question (or answer).
Side note, I don't think he properly answered the question either and why the focus on video games? Do board games need to be painful as well? What about children's games like tag?
I do agree that message is rather mixed and i don't see what point he was trying to make. Instead this feels more like a cursory glance at the subject...
Sweet Foucault reference
My exact thoughts!
It's interesting that you mention Skinner and operant conditioning via pain. Skinner actually found that punishments (like pain) are some of the least effective ways to teach a behavior. The problem is that pain teaches people what not to do, but doesn't give them any clue about what they should do. Rewards like high scores, bonus levels, and extra equipment/lives can serve to motivate players to play better. My guess is that games become frustrating when players are punished, but it isn't apparent that they could have done anything to prevent that punishment. Players will then call the game cheap, or suspect it is cheating. Players will eventually learn that there is nothing they can do to prevent failing, so they stop trying to succeed, which is a learned helplessness effect.
This is why I love games like Skyrim and Fallout, where you find enemies you can't fight and places you can't go until a higher level, because you get instakilled if you try early in the game. The "pain" of getting instakilled adds to the sense of accomplishment when you are finally high enough level to win the battle. It also creates a sense of geography in an open-world game, almost like a "topography" of where you can and can't go - a map as opposed to a set of rules. Dawnbreaker in Skyrim or The Forged in Fallout are examples of the kinds of quests I'm talking about.
Great video! The problem of games being "without pain" or too easy is an interesting one. I remember when the game Styx, a 3rd person stealth game, was announced and part of the trailer content for the game was a super-cut of the player being horrible killed upon being discovered. This basically glorified a negative experience to advertise that the game was certainly not "without pain". Although many players were dissuaded by how punishing the combat was, another group of players really appreciated how it wasn't like Assassin's Creed and actually motivated stealth gameplay - basically, the brutal player deaths and unforgiving combat pushed the player into the playstyle the designers intended. I find it interesting that a game's challenge is now becoming more and more of a selling point (another example is Bloodborne), and who doesn't like a challenge?
I get where you're coming from that pain can be an important part of the mechanics, but I don't think it's necessary. Right now I'm playing a game called Stacking which is kind of a puzzle game, so you can do things to make other characters uncomfortable, but there isn't any kind of combat or punishment for doing things wrong, only rewards if you get it right.
+Freakazette That's a good point! The Witness is also like this. -jj
I remember seeing some setup in Europe I think where you could play COD and anytime you got hit an actual paintball would be shot at you.
+InMaTeofDeath There is also the game PainStation. Must be a German thing! -jj
I feel pain also adds realism, in the way you described how the game teaches you it's rules.
How the game teaches you about death changes your play style. Games like Battlefield treat death as part of the gig, whereas, narrative based games like most RPGs tend to discourage death, making you restart at a previous saved point, causing the player to not take risky moves when dealing with enemies.
The first Mario party on the 64 taught you the real meaning of pain.
I think comparing the role of rewards and punishment in a game like Dark Souls to Skinner's work sells games a bit short. Skinner's work was designed around fostering extrinsic motivation, particularly in making animals do things to avoid pain and/or feel pleasure. While games rely on this to some extent, a major purpose of the "pain" in Dark Souls is to allow us to see our growth and progression as we find our way back to where we died, reclaim our souls, and push forward into new territory. This is significant, as rewards that allow us to visualize and understand our growth tend to bolster our intrinsic motivation (enjoyment), while rewards that don't reveal our growth tend to make us feel manipulated and decrease our intrinsic motivation. Edward Deci and Arlen Moller (to name a few folks) did a lot of research on this phenomenon when studying the roles of autonomy and competence in self-determination theory.
It's not really the same genre of games, but I remember being a little excited when I first started playing the original Monkey Island in that it was a game where it was almost impossible to die. The developers specified that, unlikely the standard adventure games at the time - they wanted the player to feel relaxed about experimenting and have fun rather than fear having to go back to their last save.
Though Life is Strange is an adventure game centers on intense emotional pain, and though it gives you a mechanic where you can wind back time - the pain is inevitable because there is no perfect path - Max simply can't save everyone and can't avoid all the pain. Pain is necessary to progress, you can't just keep winding back time and avoiding difficult decisions.
For action orientated games, I particularly liked the original Operation Flashpoint in that it was a game with no health bar, no med kits, etc. Whether you played the green soldier or the hardened special forces operative, you were a fragile human being who could easily be crippled or killed by a single bullet. You very quickly learned the value of cover, squad mates, snipers, avoiding conflict and the power of armored vehicles and tanks. It was particularly powerful due to the game also showing you a quote on death every time you were killed.
I wonder, Undertake ( and other games ) have created a game where you can be merciful or violent to the characters you interact with. will there be a game where you can choose to cause pain or avoid pain for your character/avatar? I guess that's every game, depending on the way you play it but what about a game where this choice will effect the game play & the story. so if you play with pain your character is physically and emotional effected by this.
*continues playing Xcom 2*
They don't *need* to be this damn hard, but it can provide an amazing amount of fun for some people. It's not for everyone :)
The brutal pain of game play, in my opinion, helps drive the different choices I would make in game. An example for this would be games like Counter Strike and Insurgency. With so many things happening everywhere around your character, the choice to clutch or cover defines the player skills at that moment.
When it comes to pain in games, I feel it really depends on the game and the player. While I love extremely hard vehicle oriented games, like Ace Combat and Stuntman, when I play an FPS a prefer to play against bots set to easy and see how many I can kill in a round. At the same time, some of my friends can dominate against real people in a CoD match, but have trouble flying in Ace Combat, and can't even beat the first level in Stuntman!
The trick is to make a game's learning curve gradual. If it becomes hard too fast, only the most expert of expert players will play it for more then a few levels. But if it remains too easy throughout the whole game, not only will you beat the game very quickly, but it isn't going to offer up enough challenge to be satisfying. Adjustable difficulties are really helpful in this regard, but they still need to be gradual enough that a game doesn't go from too easy on one setting to impossible on the next.
Games don't necessarily have to do this so long as they plan on just being niche title, but if they want to appeal to the masses, a well paced learning curve is essential. Stuntman may be fun for someone who is already a master at driving games, but the difficulty is already so high from the start, new players just get frustrated. Burnout 3 on the other hand starts off with slower cars on simple tracks and easy going IA, slowly building up to the final few races were if you even blink, you will crash and fall so far behind you can never catch up.
What's the connection between narrative choice and personality quizzes? (referencing the IdeaChannel episode about personality quizzes) Gameplay choices and narrative trees seem a lot like personality quizzes, where the choices provided may say more about the test/game creators than the test taker/player. That seems obvious for games, which we expect to be constructed (despite open worlds and such, it all had to be made by a person) but we somehow forget that conscious design by another person is involved in personality quizzes.
I think one thing to consider when discussing pain and difficulty in games are the games that are intentionally made/designed to enrage the players and make them have a bad time. A strong example of this right now is Super Mario Maker. A lot of level creators are making levels that are extremely difficult to get through that involve precise timing, long periods with no power ups (or no power ups in the level at all), and placement of items and enemies that require a lot of skill or luck to get through. People can see the clear rate to different levels, so they can make a semi-informed decision on the difficulty of the level.
Some people do play games that are intentionally difficult and painful for either the satisfaction of winning it, or as a test of skill and determination. Some people may not go into it with the will to complete it, but rather just to see how far they can get before their patience runs out.
There is a lot of intentional pain out there, or intentional avoidance of pain in other games. It really depends on the player when it comes to how they feel about a game and how necessary the pain is in games.
I've been playing quite a bit of xenoblade chronicles x recently, and one of the things that I enjoy about it is that it seems to encourage me to fail in the game now and then. At first, I didn't know whether I could take on some enemies that would be slightly higher leveled than my party. However, encounters with enemies that would result in failure taught me which enemies I should fight and which ones I should wait until later to fight. There's a manual to explain how things work in the game, but I found myself learning more about the game world itself by playing in it and failing in it. I really enjoyed this, since I thought it suited the overall premise of the game. It's about humans having their planet destroyed and having to move to a new one, with new rules. You won't learn as much without experiencing pain or failure. I thought that this game did that really well.
I have pretty bad arthritis, and certain games really take a toll and cause incredible pain, my hands to lock up, or both. Juist seeing the torture scene in Metal Gear Solid for those 5 seconds made my hands hurt.
I'd love to hear your take on representation of pain in VR. I can't reference exactly where I heard it, but I read that even hardcore players that were used to violent games felt that playing Skyrim in VR felt too violent for depicting how the enemies die.
There are few games, if any, more needlessly rage inducing than Hearthstone.
I am not sure I would automatically connect 'challenge' with 'pain'. Having a challenging game that keeps our interest, is very different from having pain to mold peoples reactions.
superhot can sometimes become very painful especially since we die with 1 bullet or a truck or a car or some punch
Well, for the pain inflicted to the player, we can talk about rage games.
The new Doom looks really painful, but I'm worried that it could get very old, very quick.
One very interesting aspect about the "pain" of Dark Souls is that it's actually integral not only to the gameplay loop but also to the setting and story. The challenge reflects the fact that the world is dark, harsh, broken and unforgiving. Your character is not really the chosen one empowered to defy all odds but is instead just another hollow who happened to be lucky enough to escape the Asylum. If you remove the pain of the play experience, the whole concept of the game falls apart (which is something that those wanting menu based difficulty options in Souls games don't seem to understand).
With games being so violent I think this idea of 'pain' or feedback is an interesting lens. I think fidelity can really influence our take. Like the Mortal Kombat's of the arcade vs what's on screens today. It was always controversal but there's no doubt that something changed and it went from cartoonish to just plain gory.
I also am taken back to the first time I played MGS2. The second 'boss' you fight is a series of soilders in a hallway. It doesn't look so shocking now but at the time it was one of the most gory scenes I'd played through. I put the controller down and thought those were just men probably with families and people waiting for them and it gave me pause. Later this idea was echoed in Revengence when pretty much all of your agency is stripped from you.
It's all a scale. 'Easy' games suck for some, but not for all. Really, really hard and really, really painful games suck for some, but not for all. However, it's just the personality of the person. Some people find the investment of perfecting a one-mistake-you-die strategy the most fun experience in the world. There is also people who honestly have fun playing games that hardly pose a challenge. The real question I think reflects more on the game industry as a whole is: *Where are most of us?* It'd be really cool to see how many of us would play Minecraft-on-Creative-Mode vs. Dark Souls.
+Lumberjackminer That would be a really interesting test. I know I for one would rather play Minecraft on creative, but I'm not really a fan of Dark Souls. Though if we bring Stuntman into the mix, I'd chose that for sure, it is kind of the driving game equivalent to Dark Souls. None of my friends have even beaten the first level in Stuntman, lol!
what a great episode! It only needs some Marquis de Sade, lulz ;)
I "survived" through gore in games like Blood or Carmageddon. Max Payne's bullet time was enjoyable in its own way, and violent deaths or dismemberment in Soldier of Fortune felt kind of unsettling at that time, but also curious. Torture scenes directed by player in Spycraft: The Great Game or GTA V made me raise eyebrows, but kept me play along.
But there is one game that made me stand up and take a short walk. Far Cry 3, scene (spolier) where you pretend to torture your own brother. It was ... unsettling. There is the thing, that the whole game could be understood as one big parody. If the purpose of this scene was to ask main character (as a representation of player) "How far are you willing to go?" and "Did you enjoy it?" at this meta level - while making player feel really bad - then GG Ubisoft, you succeeded. What made me furious was that there really way no other choice. I was not able to determine if this made me disconnect from main character, or empathize with him even more.
As graphics gradually improved, so did depiction of pain and gore. But it was always kind of ... cartoonish? Definitely exaggerated. And it stays like that in modern games, for a good reason, to distinguish it from real life. But the real impact on player has much less to do with graphics.
I'm going to go with "pain" as "negative reinforcement" and include its opposite, "reward" or "positive reinforcement".
A game that, despite its critically-lackluster reviews, did handled positive and negative reinforcement very well: *Lords of the Fallen*
LotF took its basic inspiration and attitude from Demon's/Dark Souls, but upped the ante. The multiplier system which accrued your character potentially increased XP as he survived longer and defeated more foes without saving and cashing in was excellently done. In theory, you can play for very long periods of time in order to gain XP and level up extremely quickly. In practice, when you take the risk of going on a long streak and mess up, you are punished in Souls-style fashion by the necessity to recover your corpse.
On top of this, you are given a sort of deadline to get there -- a percentage of your accrued XP will decay as time goes on. The developers did a bang-up job dangling a very large carrot in front of the player, while also holding a nasty stick with which to punish mistakes and over-extension of one's capabilities.
While the game isn't as enjoyable, for me at least, as Dark Souls, I think they really nailed the death/recovery system.
You can't leave us hanging on the social studies bit! The ultimate tease.
How did that influence you in what you do at the moment? I can understand somewhat, I am in architecture - that of which the US seems to find elitist (which it's not, since we try to democratize space all the time) and not willing to pay for design despite both fields being an integral part to society, esp when given an inherent value by the community at large.
ATM BF4 is my favorite game. While playing it I'm always angry by whatever way I die, and it's very easy to die in conquest mode, there's threat everywhere. I even say sometimes that I play BF only to get mad. Of course that's not really the case, but that shows that risk and pain do increase the reward effect of a game.
In a game where the player is likely to die often and quickly like Super Meat Boy, I assume it is important that the pain be lessened, that the player can start over almost immediately. While I also think of something like Etrian Odyssey where death might mean starting back at quite a distance away and much slower, there is some importance placed on the player's own ability to find shortcuts themselves as the player is responsible for creating their game map as they go, and some missteps of not playing correctly could lead to dying easily. The game trains players more at not taking risks.
They don't need to be painful
Example : animal crossing
+A Hormonal Llama But there is pain involved. Whenever you shake a tree and there's a beehive in it, you get stung.
+A Hormonal Llama in so many ways that's the most painful game. Real world stress, debt, everyone hates you.
+Wednesday's Serial Exactly. Most of the pain is psychological.
True there is the pain of crippling debt haha
But most days I play I don't shake trees and don't truly worry about my debt, I just run around making my town look nice.
+A Hormonal Llama Don't forget when the neighbors guilt-trip you for not playing the game enough.
Most modern day FPS games (CoD, BF, etc) don't really represent pain or injury very well. Even though taking cover in these games is important there really isn't a whole lot that encourages this since if a player gets hit they can regen health easily. If they die they just respawn. IRL taking cover is reinforced largely with a strong desire and/or instinct to survive and this is further reinforced by pain or the threat of experiencing pain.
Instead of players being bullet sponges being able to just take x amount of damage before they "die", wait a few seconds and respawn their characters in game should experience significant degradation in performance. They should be slowed down, vision darkened or blurred, their aim should be hampered. This not only makes it challenging to avoid injury/death but also makes it challenging to manage injury/death. The decrease in performance would be something players would want to avoid. I also think for most games death should be a bit more than just a very temporary setback. Some of these games have you respawning literally seconds after you die and this means you have a fresh, fully loaded character at full health (with the exception of games like Counterstrike where you have one life per match). I think these kinds of games should have their death timers significantly increased.
for me it isn't necessarily "pain" but difficulty. games that lack custom mapping features (especially shooters or things with a stylus) often end up harder for me from the get go since I'm left handed. I also have joint problems so super fast button combos just aren't something I can do for long. I play for the story and the characterization a lot of the time. I flat out can't play Dark Souls or oblivion. I will die and not progress at all. It really bummed me out that FFXIII Lightning Returns ramped up the difficulty so drastically from the two other games I don't even bother with it. I want to play a game and face challenges I can actually overcome. Not be reminded of my own limitations.
I feel like this is why difficulty levels are important. yes, forcing a player to 'be better' works, but not for everyone, and acessability is important (it's one of the reasons let's play is so big) no not every game should have an 'easy' or 'accessability' mode, but when say, VVVVVV has a menu option that turns off spike damage so the mentally disordered can freely explore the game world, it hurts no one.
I may sound like a bit of a wuss but I honestly felt a little bit bad when playing throught the torture section of GTA5 and I had to stop playing in the game once i was done because I needed to focus onside something else because it made me feel sick; that has never happened to me with another game before or since.
+No7Bruce
I don't think that is wussy, it has come up at times that people have gotten upset about it. Maybe it was intentionally crossing the line, making the player think about what they're doing. I have heard a theory that Trevor is essentially a personification of the kind of GTA player that goes on ranpages and kills people just to see what happens, so the torture scene might have tried to make an impact on those people as well. But, I have not played much GTAV so I am not saying I know much about this. I just thought it was interesting.
it all depend on the game for like darksouls yes full heartedly cause it needs it to feel great after all you done without it feel hollow and no joke and like if you add pain to kirby itll be like oh gkd
I had to download a mod that removed blood from Fallout 4 not because I'm squeamish (I'm not) but because watching my character spurt out buckets of blood in every fight completely broke immersion for me. Granted, pain and blood loss are not one in the same, but not even characters in Tarantino movies are allowed to sustain that level of injury and still walk out alive.
XCOM Long War is TRUE PAIN, and we love it
This definitely makes me second guess my choice of difficulty mode...
Games aren't always about enforcing adherence to mechanics, puzzlers rarely have much pain since they work on the basis that you start with an unsolved problem, time and execution don't matter, you just need to solve them. spacechem is a good example, it's about finding an answer, and there's no wrong way to do it, so there's no pain.
whenever I think pain in a video game my brain instantly goes to 3 Vikings and ninja gaiden.
so unforgiving.
I've heard the idea of games as Skinner Boxes before, and it's an idea that really makes me uncomfortable. I think it's an accurate description, but I wish it were less true. I often wonder if there are any games which break this mold (I can't think of any, but I haven't looked terribly hard). It isn't too hard, though, to find games that manipulate it - free-to-play games for example.
I have to wonder how games like Minecraft fit into this idea of pain being an essential component to games, since Minecraft is a game people play that is largely removed from any conventional notion of challenges or obstacles. Sure there are monsters to defeat, but many players forgo the presence of monsters entirely and just focus on building and creating in the sandbox world Minecraft presents. Where then does pain come into the equation with a game where there are no obstacles to overcome and the sole purpose is creating or exploring?
Then there are puzzle games and point and click adventure games. While it's possible to lose at such games, and that might be considered a form of pain, there are some adventure games that don't have game over screens and the only challenge is in being patient enough to solve the next segment of the game. How does pain fit into these types of games?
Why is it that pain and punishment has to be used as a way of navigating our way through games, and where has this concept of setting out rules of engagement come from? Video games can only draw upon what has or is occurring in life so by going along with setting the rules based on pain and suffering what is being maintained in the real world? Real life often doesn't have so many 'life or death' situations but the amount of pressures we face everyday that say 'if you don't play by these rules failure and pain will be your rewards'. It feels like it's supporting a very negative way to address life in a way that has been dressed up to be 'fun' in the form of a video game.
Tomb Raider 3 for PSX is not only painfull; it's cruel! The hardest game I've ever played!
Imo a great game that used pain greatly was Bioshock 1.
Asking you to kill Paarthurnax is grossing the line.
Bayonetta is a great game in terms of pain in perfecting those levels to a key. This pain I guess you might call it the perfectionist pain.
I see that there's some confusion about what Jamin means by 'pain' here, but the way I see it is that there's pain inflicted BY you and by pain inflicted ON you.
What I got was that violence/pain inflicted on you affects the game's difficulty and therefore your experience of it, making the game more challenging and therefore potentially more enjoyable. I also think pain inflicted on you affects your immersion in the world and the empathy you have with your character and therefore the character and the world's believability.
Violence/pain that you inflict on other players or NPCs affects how you see yourself and others in the game world as well as your perspective on the concept of violence itself.
That said, as a player of primarily story driven RPGs and action adventure games, I do think pain is very necessary for believability's sake. After all, most stories are built around the protagonist's struggle and that does include physical or psychological pain, which affects the difficulty of the protagonist's journey, and in the game world the difficulty of the game for you as the player.
If we're talking about something like Legend of Zelda, which has a protagonist who's supposed to be a blank slate so you can impress your own ideas of what a hero or a protagonist is on him, it helps my immersion a lot to add little details that show pain affecting Link in a somewhat realistic way, for example: his stand still animation look tired when his health is low. The same thing is in Final Fantasy, the lower your health during battle, the closer your character seems to collapsing. I think little details like that are important for putting you in your characters' shoes, and would be glaringly obvious if they were left out of that type of game. I also appreciate games that gradually make your character look more scuffed/hurt as you go along or makes them move slower, etc.
There's a lot to be said about the excess of violence in games (or even tv shows or movies) and why to some extent we enjoy watching pain or inflicting/receiving it in a virtual/fictional setting, and i think it has to do with characters being our avatars and it's probably a messy mix of schadenfreude and empathy pain and sadomasochism. I'm sure somewhere out there someone a lot smarter than I am has thought and written about this in a lot more detail.
The best games make you fail, tell you the reason you failed but always let you figure out how to not fail. You need to fail enough to strive to get better, but not fail so much that you feel "ahh whats the point". You need to feel the progress of overcoming the failure and feel like you have a long way to go, but never feel like getting there is going to be a slog. This is why i love dark souls so much. You go "oh man i'll never win that fight.... unless.... maybe i'll try....."
Of course not. There is a lot of non punitive game, like that Prince of Persia game where you get res as soon as you die, Phoenix Mode in Fire Emblem Fates, infinite lifes in Yoshi's Wooly World and so on.
Pain in game like Dark Soul, Darkest Dungeon and so on is just a way to make more challenge, often with unfair stats. It might be a psychological/sociological reason behind it like "life is unfair, winning against an unfair game makes it more bearable to live and unfair life" or something like that and eventhought, it's not really useful. Some like their game painful and punitive, other likes their game like their TV Show and Ant-Man movie (mostly brainless), and some will love other thinks that you can find in both punitive and non punitive games.
are the non prescription glasses there to make you look more nerdy?
Is it just me or does Skinner look a bit like Dwight from the Office?
I hate the Lego games because death doesn't matter. You just loose your pointless Points and immediately regain them. I had to suffer trough them because of my nephew. To Show him that challenge and punishment in games is fun I bought him Xcom and set it on Ironman-Mode. And he loved it!
What about player-inflicted pain/challenges like Pokemon Nuzlocks?
+DragonKazooie89 It hurts so good! -jj
1:30How the hell is that any different from every game ever that has health in it before it?
see back in my day swtor had lots of pain because it took forever to get a goddamn healer companion.and this is from a a consular and inquisitor player i think knights only got their healer on belsalvis in the late game.
The cost of pain is time.
I thought you meant actual pain. Wear some sort of gloves that drive spikes under your fingernails whenever you get hit in the game. That would be great! Really make us play well.
But yeh, games are meant to be hard. Who says otherwise?
I'm currently designing a religion based game where the player wonders around a religious place and needs to do kind actions in a classic rpg-like environment to collect points and advance to the next level. Until we develop our first prototype it's hard to tell whether the lack of traditional gaming pain (dying, losing life, having to wait, losing progress, etc) will put off players.
What do you people think?
ideas:
no saving, have to rely on checkpoints
I think the term "pain" is a bit click-baity for this video. I think in the context of games, the driving force for most games is "avoiding failure." In MMOs and FPSes), the failure condition is generally when health reaches 0. In puzzle games, you fail when the time runs out, use up your turns, or aren't able to solve the puzzle because of some other condition.Tetris doesn't have pain, but it does have failure. The only reason you keep playing is to keep from hitting the inevitable failure condition (as mentioned in a previous video).
I prefer my single player games to be rather easy, if I am looking for a challenge, then I like that coming from other players in PvP kind of games.
+Drudenfusz Funny enough I am actually the opposite, I want a challenge in single player, but then prefer more laid back multiplayer like with PVE modes.
Commenters have a point on the definition of pain. But I must add, comparing learning dark souls system through failure states with a Skinner Box is highly inaccurate, and unfair to the game. Operant conditioning is a lot more akin to gambling, or Farmville. For a better explanation of Skinner Boxes in games check out Extra Credits video on the subject. Frankly, this video is all over the place. You have to be a lot more rigorous with the usage of your concepts.
I might get a lot of hate for this, but for me Dark Souls crossed that line. When a single boss forces you to reload, walk for 90 seconds and die within 5 seconds 20 times in a row, my fun is gone. Yes, later on I did pick the game up again and beat that boss but to say it was all worth it, like many others claim? Not for me.
interesting debate
did that thing on his lip bother anyone else?
TMNT, battle toads punishing to the point of rage quit... Too hard. Too soft. Too short
You seem to be talking about two different senses of "pain" throughout. Pain to the player through failure (lack of progress) and pain as experienced by the player -character- or npcs. These are very different concepts, and I don't think we can compare excessive violence to Lara Croft to the brutal difficulty of, say, Super Meat Boy.
+Taylor Bennett I am going to disagree with you. Yes, these are different types of pain; however, they are comparable. Both of these forms of pain affect player engagement. One does so by keeping the player engaged in a challenging endeavor. The other does so by keeping the player engaged in the narrative perspective. Both are forms of pain used to maintain engagement... or fail to do so.
+shane foster Good point! -jj
no ninja gaiden mention?
definitely not, games are becoming waaaay to easy now days. remember the days as a kid being stuck on a level for weeks on end only to just pass it by the skin of your teeth one day? yeah i havent had an experience like that in years. infact its rare for a game considered HUUUUUGE to even take longer than 40 or so hours which i can easily bash out in under a week everyone says "oh just play dark souls" it sucks that the selling point of that franchise is that it hasnt forgotten what games used to be. with the odd exceptions id prefer games to go back to their roots. when beating a game was a challenge, it was almost an honorary title to be able to beat a game. whereas the hand holding is so prevalent in games nowdays. and when you talk about physical pain, again no way, while violence for the sake of violence can come across as fake or being a bit try hard. ultra gore fests is what gaming is based on its the staple of video games and in my opinion needs to be upped even more, push the boundaries. worst case, it offends people which starts controversy which only provides media attention and essentially free publicity which pushes the sales of your game
Strong curl game!!!
seeing how even with the last peach of the game KOTR, that made it ezer, and I am stall dead form time to time, other I most not be a hard core gamer, or you can fall below 90% in that game
Brilliant Piece. I think your examples of too painful games are inaccurate. You are looking at game aesthetics and not experience. A better example might be the oft overused form of pain in RNGs. Which are used to inflate play time (and often revenue) without adding content. A perfect example is the loot cave in Destiny. (Where in order to avoid the pain of the RNG, some players sought the path of least resistance)
If I understand you correctly, are you saying that negative experiences should strictly serve to teach gameplay? I don't think this makes any kind of sense if you are.
Pain is a necessary part of human experience that is the root of much of humanity. Sympathy, empathy even comedy are positive shared experiences born out of pain and our ability to help each other though it. ( see pixar's "inside out)
All traditional non-interactive media uses talk about pain is some way, shape or form as it is relevant to us as people.
Games tell stories about pain, the gameplay reflects this theme.
as far as your 2nd bit about media that is too painful to enjoy. That can only be a personal thing.
Games that depict lots of violence and are hard to watch, like have more in common with the Saw movies. The narrative, and aesthetics are the entire point of those things. There is no gameplay in a movie it's the narrative, and the aesthetics that are painful for the audience. viewers of those movies might not feel sympathy or empathy, but that doesn't make the media objectively bad. , (disturbing, though.)
It is what it is and if some media is to painful for you too watch them rage quit, and read a book.
"no pain no game"
dark souls 2011-present
What the hell is at the back of his head?
you talked about negative reinforcement/punishment as pain, which seemed to be the point of the episode and made sense. then you started talking about gore and related things as pain which it just doesnt honestly make sense to me to talk about these two concepts as though they are interchangeable. and then when you were talking about pain going too far you were talking exclusively about gore. i think a better example of negative reinforcement at its extreme would be flappy bird, where you have to be practically perfect and it punishes you by sending you back to the start anytime you are not perfect.
as for whether gore can go too far: yes, but i hate gore in small amounts so i am not the best judge.
as for whether negative reinforcement/punishment can go to far, i would say: yes, whenever it is so much that it seems nothing you can do will avoid the negative response then you kind of give up and that is when we throw the controller. when we fail and then see a way to succeed (that we reasonably think we can do) then it has not gone too far, but we need to see that correct option within only a few failures or we will probably ragequit.
you didn't leave the link to the idea channel undertale video
+Kalernor viola ruclips.net/video/qvSd_opycoI/видео.html -jj
+PBS Game/Show Thnanks I'd already searched it, I was just pointing it out coz you said you'd leave a link in the description and I thought you'd forgotten :D
Okay, so I more or less agree with your whole video and this is kind of weird tangent, but why would it be an insult to Trevor Noah that you mention the name of the former host of the same show of which he is the current host? That really just ate my brain when you said that. Like, what?
take out blood your everytime you take damage
where does flappy bird fit in? what about goat simulater?
Flappy Bird: Either you fail early and say "Hey! I can do better than that!" or you try to get a high score to brag to your friends about, same with Crossy Road, etc.
Goat Simulator: Not a challenge. It's just fun to watch a goat flop around.
Michael Spheal but Game/Show has given praise to Crossy Road, while calling flappy bird the worst game ever.
+Michael Spheal Goat Simulator has some challenge, in that the "reward" is getting achievements so figuring out the most insane thing or ridiculous thing you can to to maybe earn an achievement is the challenge. But Goat Simulator in a rarity among games in that there is no punishment, there is no fail state.
Try Dota, your pain may vary from game to game.
That's why i play airsoft
sniper elite
and what about tetris?
last
+tactical gaming lol
Dark Souls Lets players off the hook FAR too easily.
the second guy to comment
As others have pointed out, you lost me at the end when you started bringing gruesome cutscenes into the mix, which has little to do with classic game design.
I think the line to where a game is too difficult is muddled with the "git gud" mindset that's more prevalent now than ever, almost like it's a right of passage. With me, puzzle/strategy games like Fire Emblem are so brutal because so much thought and time needs to be applied first, and a few deaths are likely to put me off for a while.
This video straight up confuses me.
You're confusing representations of physical pain with punishment. Punishment and rewards are used to teach players the rules of the game and it doesn't have to have anything to do with physical pain, for instance scoring an own-goal in rocket league would count as punishment but has nothing to do with physical pain. Balancing punishment and reward are key to an enjoyable experience. Skinner actually studied this and the rule of thumb is a 80% success rate is the most effective for keeping people/animals engaged in any given activity, if the success rate is more than 80% you get the "too easy" phenomenon where players get bored because they don't have to try anything different to win, lower than 80% and you get a game that is frustrating and not fun to play either. This is why games have multiple difficulty settings so that for a wide range of player ability/skill the player can find a setting where they are close to the 80% success rate. In Bloodborne & Dark Souls the ability to retrieve dropped echoes/souls acts as a reward and plays the same role. Since echoes/souls get dropped where-ever the player made it too the last run they act as an ability-scaled reward, the worse you are at the game the easier/quicker it is to retrieve you echoes/souls which to some extent makes up for the lack of difficulty settings.
Representations of physical pain can be used as either a reward or a punishment, eg. slow-mo/replay of kill-shots is used as a reward - the game is saying "you were so awesome let's see that again", or when it is used as a health-meter for the player it is used as punishment. A third use of depictions physical pain is a cheap/lazy way to "add emotional depth/deeper meaning" or make the game "edgy" by just going for gross/disturbing imagery or forcing the player to be a despicable person (this is neither reward nor punishment because the player has no choice thus no learning involved).
Asking you to kill Paarthurnax is grossing the line.