How Games Challenge Us - Empathy and Intuition in Puzzle Design - Extra Credits
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- Опубликовано: 1 окт 2024
- How can we use empathy, intuition, and other types of design vectors to create interesting gameplay besides the most popular mechanics--which are based in reflex and logic challenges?
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The next few decades of game design will be about expanding our toolbelt and finding all the interesting things we can do if we don’t make every encounter, puzzle or test about reflexes or logic.
Extra Credits great vid keep it up
Imagine a game about trying to convince people to join a cult about using the right word choice and ideas and try to manipulate people into joining your cult
I would argue god horror games already do this to some extent. Fear is a great example of something you can design either for or around.
Id also like to point out that technically it would probably be wise to break 'logical tests' into two categories, 'logical', and 'knowledgeable'. One requires either pre-assumed knowledge or investigative knowledge, the other is the ability to problem solve. (though yes, investigative knowledge could require problem solving to obtain).
I'm not exactly sure where this might go, but a endurance or fortitude test might be interesting. Sort of like emotional, but fundamentally not technical or reactionary.
Now can we put a rest on block pushing puzzles and key/switches for a bit
Did you just...sponsor yourself?
Is that legal?
I can only imagine a world where the sentence "this has been Jake Paul, and use the code "Jake Paul" to get a discount on your next Jake Paul purchase!" makes ANY sense.
Self-five!
Hello there
@@lucascox7122
General Kenobi!
You are a bold one!
On one hand, I don't think I'd be very good at empathy challenges. (I'm on the autism spectrum.) On the other hand...I can't help but wonder if a well-crafted game built around them could help me with that.
I had the same thought, empathy based video games that taught how to read facial expressions and such would have been very helpful for me as a kid
I think an empathy puzzle would be good from an educational stance. With what graphics and facial animations we see in games these days, there are certainly possibilities.
Well, I think it would.
I also think I’m having an idea of how to do it...
Have you considered that a life of playing videogames instead of hanging out at the bar with friends may have, itself, contributed to you being on the autism spectrum?
InversePie Autism is a genetic disorder??? Your actions in life don’t contribute to whether or not you develop it???
A possible problem with the empathy test is if you are having a conversation with someone and they might seem a bit depressed and when it is your turn to talk using a mass effect like dialog system and one of the options is “are you okay?” that might raise some flags if it is not a common option, this could then undermine the whole puzzle
I would say a control question might lead to this direct question
I think there might be a way around it. In the games "oh sir the insult simulator" and "Event[0]" you can type or construct sentences and the I will respond you like a human would(I am referring to the AI in Event[0]). I believe a game solely depending on this mechanic could challenge the player in an emphatic way without falling for a mass effect dialogue system.
In the example that you provided. When it is the players turn they can either type or construct their respond and the decision will be up to them.
If the aim is to make an emphatic game, or a game where emphatic responses are a solution then giving the player the option to ask certain things as actions 'how you doing?' 'are you okay?' etc. then it'll get around the strangeness of it as it's simply a mechanic in the game.
@@swiftsword4444 how are you is also a greeting, what happens if it is not a greeting to the one you greet but rather a question?
There are many ways someone are triggered. Most of them you stumble upon
Issue with having those questions as standard actions to perform is that it would move it from testing empathy to testing logic. When you know the premise of the game is to discover the "empathy cues", you might start with trying to really empathize, but after a while you start to notice the patterns, the way the game thinks someone in a rough place would behave. What really would be needed is a natural language interface, like event[0] mentioned above, and a game NOT focused on this mechanic. The idea of spotting people in a rough place would need to be baked into a larger system of mechanics, and not be the core mechanic. Be something the player discovers by themselves while playing in the world, with another goal set.
Think of it this way: You don't go out in the morning looking for people who are in a rough place. You go out in the morning to go to work/school/whatever. Then, when you get to work, you notice your coworker being a bit down, in a way you can't put your finger on, it just triggers an alarm in the back of your mind that something is "off", so you ask them if everything is ok, and they laugh it off and say "Well, mostly, my mom needs to have her appendix removed, we'll work it out, but we ran into some trouble with the insurance company".
You didn't go to work to check on your coworker, but you did, because you noticed something was off. If your goal by going out that day was to find people who might have it rough, you've reduced the concept to a logic puzzle. "Who's having trouble today that I can help to win the game?" and you actively look for those clues. That's the issue with capturing this in a game, it needs to be unexpected, you shouldn't be on the lookout, you should be doing something, and then get interrupted by this feeling that something is "off", and break off into, what we could classify as a side-quest.
The moment anything in a game becomes an explicit core mechanic, it turns into a logic puzzle trying to figure out how that mechanic works for the player. In order for this concept to work, it needs to be a "throwaway" mechanic, something the player doesn't feel inclined to master, but rather act on when they get the "feeling" for it. Balancing that will be one hell of a difficult task, since the reward for spotting the "empathy cue" needs to be big enough for the player to do it again next time they encounter it, but not substantial enough they feel inclined to "master the mechanic", turning it into a logic puzzle they consciously look for with every encounter.
Keep talking and nobody explodes tests communication skills
Yes, but that is mostly a logic test paired to a reflex test - Can the guider understand what the defuser is seeing and correctly instruct them what to do? (Logic) and can the defuser carry out the task (reflex)
Yeah but the test will fail if either of them can't describe to the other one what he/she is seeing or concluding. I think it's a great example of a communication skill game because over the days you can really see how good the two players have known each other in the results
But I think you can call it also empathy because you need to read your teammate to find out how and which informations he/she needs at the moment
ironically a game called overcooked is a communication-skill game as well.
there are several others too, such as "we were here too" i think it was called? but keep talking does something else, it adds a level of stress handling, and... (mental exploration?) its really hard to explain, if you've played it it will probably make a little more sense.
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tfw you scope with a shotgun.
Maximum accuracy lol
Sometimes we do things because they can be done, without questioning should they.
HuhJuhWuh clearly you haven’t played borderlands
There are real shotguns out there with scopes... (Remembers the CAWS)
+HuhJuhWuh, It works in XCOM.
Creativity? People spends hour on Minecraft not for logic nor for reflexes...
Can we use creativity as a skill to TEST and build a game about it?
But that's not a test, it's more an activity.
I don’t know how they missed this. Other examples I can think of are Mario Paint, creating levels in Mario Maker, or making beatmaps in a rhythm game. There are even artistic interpretation challenges in diving into an analysis of “What Remains of Edith Finch” or the lore of Dark Souls.
Creativity isn't exactly a challenge, unless there's a goal in mind, then it becomes a logic challenge. Some people do play games not looking for a challenge though.
The problem is design a TEST about creativity. Making level is fun, also painting in Photoshop is fun, but a game must have a goal and rules and victory and failure. Or it isn't a game.
There this multiplay flash game where they ask you to draw League of Legends Champions and other player have to understand and guess the Champion. That is a challenge based on drawing skill and guessing. And a game
IamMe It is called Passpartout.
I admit, I'm not sure I'm convinced that empathy and intuition are much more than soft types of logic. You're trying to establish what action to take or conclusion to draw based on the evidence, it's just that the available evidence is either incomplete or uncertain. These are potentially limiting design ideas in the sense that they're largely dependent on an individual player's personal experiences (while reflex challenges can gate off people with neurological conditions, I don't think they can be called "experience dependent").
That said, there's something to the rough idea of making a game that *builds up* the necessary experience to intuit or empathize meaningfully by making sure that all of the cues you're expected to experience are self-contained within the game. I haven't seen the film but I'm told that The Godfather establishes a symbolic association between orange/oranges and death, which if true strikes me as impressive since those two concepts don't have any broader cultural connection to each other as far as I know.
Have you guys heard of the OODA Loop? Observe-Orient-Decide-Act, it was developed by a military pilot. There are some pretty interesting implications on designing a system that keeps that conceptual loop in mind.
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It's pretty interesting!
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Do you think that those two (Logic and reflex) are the only types of challenge that could exist? I agree that both represent the key aspect of the human perception (Today), the mind and the physical, but people has changed the way it look at the world and themselves in the past. So I think that's its possible to adapt those two and make something new with different fields of study and, of course, philosophy.
I think I agree with this, it's hard to come up with anything that doesn't fit the category of 'do you know what to do and how to do it' or 'can you do it'
Another type of challenge that game designers are starting to explore is moral challenges. Sure a lot of times it is reductive, clunky, and ham-handed, but I really think there is a lot of space to explore designing really interesting moral challenges.
And the difference of choice between consequence, duty and virtue in an ethical dilemma
I would love to see moral choices develop more than the simplistic duality good and evil setup we have now. Imagine a moral based game with as many endings as the 'shadow the hedgehog' video game. 4 or more factions all with different and overlapping ideologies.
This game shouldn't even tell you which faction you've gained points with until you meet them afterwards and they say something like 'You have been off much help to our cause, we would like to thank you with this spell or item'
You would need to give the player the opportunity to define their morals first in order to increase the impact of the challenge and consequences later on (basically what black and white did back then quite rudimentary)
Morality choices are often too obvious to the point of there not really being a choice because you know what you'll choose based on whether you're going for a good or evil playthrough.
But another problem is when what counts as morally good or bad is dictated by the opinions held within the game. I see this more in games that have several factions, which encourage the player to join one that best aligns with their own views, while one faction is considered evil by the game. Imagine making choices based on what you personally think is right, but at the end the game basically says you're evil.
An example of this would be in some post-apocalyptic setting where everyone is struggling to survive, but there's a faction that basically provides security and stability to settlements at the cost of personal freedom. 9 times out of 10 that faction would be considered evil by its game, but I'd personally be more likely to support it given the circumstances. Things get even stickier when it comes to narrative games that have smaller stakes and are based more on personal issues where what is considered right and wrong can vary greatly from person to person.
@@sanfransiscon How about making an open ending to let the player decide for themselves? I think leaving the ending to especially a narrative based game obscure and with an moral question in the ending could leave a game morally challenging on a meta sort of level.
Papers, please is a GREAT empathy test game
See, that's not quite empathy. Most of the people you get tell you they're in a bad place, or that they have a problem. Instead, I'd actually rank it as an ethics test, where it tests to see if you feel compelled to give something up for other people, which is also a really good idea. You may also want to check out Gods Will Be Watching, because it supposedly has a similar kind of idea to it.
Though there is some empathy in it, you kind of have to intuit whether a person is lying or not based off of their phrasing in order to make the correct ethical decision.
No it isn't. Your success depends only on your ability to process paperwork, and even the "best" endings don't require ypu to be empathetic, just kind
Regardless, I think it still challenges you beyond just logic; emotion will probably play a part in your decisions, depending on how you play, that is.
@@lucaballarati9694 I will argue against that since you sometimes you have the option of let someone through but at the cost of your money or not
Self-control mabye? I am thinking of a game that tempts players to make poor decisions or to make decisions before they really should. A possible example of this at a basic level would be the Little Sisters in Bioshock.
Ohhh! That could be cool! Perhaps a resource managing element, where in the over consumption of resources can give the playing a huge power boost in the short term, making frustrating challenges much easier, but if they indulge too much they run the risk of completely whipping out that resource. Perhaps extincting an animal, or killing all of a certain type of herb, thereby making the rest of the game nearly impossible unless they dig themselves even deeper.
Vampyr does this with how you gain exp pretty slowly to the point where you'd be underleveled unless you grind a whole lot, or feed on friendly NPCs who give you tons of exp. The NPCs even become worth more exp when you learn more about them or heal them of sicknesses.
Actually, Frostpunk is a pretty good example of this. It sells itself as a gritty, survival resource-management game where you need to force your people to make sacrifices to survive, but if you do that too much they revolt and everything goes to shit. Generally, doing the moral thing that makes things harder in the short-term, actually makes it easier to survive in the long-term.
A lot of self-evaluating tests are hugely underexplored.
The issue is that saving the Little Sisters was way *too* obviously the right choice. Not only do you get praised and thanked for doing it, but you *also* are rewarded with more Adam than you would get if you killed them. When you kill them, you lose out on Adam *and* you get guilt tripped(deservedly so). Can you call it a moral decision when the answer is obvious?
Is "patience" a logical step ? Not sure, but it feels like especially stealth games have the whole "if you wait, everything will be better... but the player doesn't really want to wait"
In farcry 4 you can get the good ending by waiting during the intro scene when the (not yet) main villain asks you to stay put while he takes care of something. Not sure if it applies but just tought ill mention it
That could still be considered a physical challenge. Maybe logical and physical are too broad though, because patience is definitely different than logic or button-pressing skills.
Nils Munch idle games abuse patience in the same way rpg's abuse an exp curve
I'd argue stealth is what this video calls a "reflex"challenge. You know what you need to do (or not to do), you just need not to mess up on how long you walk, the timing of shooting your silenced gun, etc. If you take the flavor away, it's actually a lot like a game where you're dodging multiple opponents or a platformer that makes you wait for the spikes to go away before jumping.
Earthbound had the player literally wait a few minutes iirc in order to progress the story
An Empathy puzzle would be a good fit in a Life is Strange-like high school game. Let's say a kid is being harassed and is slowly beginning to crack as a result. The player, should they see the signs, would then have the option of intervening and helping said student. You could even make the puzzle more realistic and make it harder to solve (stop the harassment and help the student) the longer it takes the player to notice what's going on.
Actually don't the first two episodes of LIS 1 actually convey this in a compressed scale? Through thorough inspection of Kate's room, Max's thoughts would hint at Kate becoming increasingly bleak in her art, mannerisms, etc. So make a game where not only would you actually experience pre-bullying Kate, but also have lots of different Kates with different problems?
Funnily enough, I tried "Depression Quest" exactly because I wanted to find out how well Quinn had done at delivering the feeling of what depression is like, and the reason I couldn't really get into it is because it's ham-handed.
What I mean to say is that it's likely a good idea, what you are suggesting here, but it would require quite a bit of care put into it.
To be fair... you just described the reverse of a gameplay element in Yandere Simulator...
adiksaff lis did handle the whole Kate situation more like a logic puzzle though, it was pretty clear something was up. They weren't subtle about it and all you had to do was pay attention to her life and remember things and you could save her life by repeating the information back. Lis is a good start but they could hav went wayyyyyyy further I feel.
@@machina4200 how do you know that any of the people in your life are real besides yourself? Im just a piece of your own mind speaking to you. Wake up.
There is a 2016 korean mobile game called "Mystic Messenger", it's a dating sim with 5-6 romance options, and you talk to all of them simultaneously trough a chat-room, the characters tells you about their days and what they are going to do and how well their days went, the interesting part of the game is that you have to play a route trough 11 real-time days, because the game has a slightly distinctive approach to the waiting games and their "energy bar" systems, the conversation doesn't progress until the fictional characters do what they told you were going to do (practice their singing, go to the gym, do a rehearsal), and you have a limited amount of time to answer the chatroom, and ocasionally phone calls, or the history would progress without your feedback between the different npc, fun game, cute boys, zen is the best.
Finishing this game, was a CHALLENGE, because i had to interrupt real life conversations and situations to answer to my cute digital boyfriend, slightly reducing my real-life social interactions, but giving me a really good topic discussion with my girl friends that were playing the game simultaneously with me, there was an occasion, when one of the characters called me while i was in the perimeter of a forest fire, i don't know how to call the challenge that was this game, but wasn't a reflex challenge because you have several minutes to answer the phone call and hours to the chatrooms, and neither a logical challenge because the questions had completely obvious answers, or were completely unpredictable.
you all should try it
I'd love to play a game that forces you to read other NPC's like players. Imagine a high stakes Diplomacy game where noticing small details and behaviours is how you construct your arguments. It's not logic that wins the day, but winning over the opponent. Now THAT would be awesome!
Playing Europa Universalis online feels something like this. :) That's real diplomacy with consequences if you mess it up.
Problem like that is how you're going to actually deliver said argument. I have long thought that a debate game would be fun, where you actually have to craft your *own* argument to counter the problem the in-game character gave you.
But how do you actually pull that off in a game? If you only put in a range of say, 5 selectable options, then you're not really coming up with your own arguments, you're just picking from a range of premade choices.
If you allow the players to type in their own argument, well then how are you supposed to grade if that argument passes? No AI is currently advanced enough to grade such open-ended problem, where the line between right and wrong can be so blurry and subtle.
But if you need to notice small details and connect them to certain behaviours, it won't really be intuitive. It's still mostly a logical challenge.
@@toboterxp8155 yes and no. Yes logical in that you need to use those puzzle pieces to figure out what to do. But you need your empathy skills to figure out what those puzzle pieces are! :)
@@oboretaiwritingch.2077 well guess that's a challenge for designers of the future. :) Let's use the new processing power for deeper design
I was talking to my friends about this and we came up with some other examples of a "third type of mechanic" which games can test:
*Visual reflex*. Some games make you look multiple places back and forth with planned timing, and are not necessarily fast-paced. Games like Screencheat, Warioware's Gamer, Hidden in Plain Sight, and tons of DS games. Keeping your attention on what's important and trying to focus without forgetting other things are happening is really a different type of reflex all together from fast thumbs and quick reaction times.
*Creativity*, where the test of skill is just subjective judgement by your peers. Games like Minecraft creative mode, Mario Maker, and pretty much anything with a level editor.
*Memory*. Seems straightforward, but old flash games with cards that flip over aren't the only type of memory. Remember what moves a character in League has during the match will partially decide how successful you are against them, and in roguelike games like Binding of Isaac it helps to know what every item is immediately before using them, and to know where they can be found and how they interact.
*Persistence*, or maybe "dedication" or "ambition" would be a better way to say it. Games like WoW, Pokemon, but also simple clicker games. The underlying mechanics can change but there are type of gameplay that determine a player's success sometimes directly by time spent in-game, for better or worse.
*Teamwork*. I bet you can think of hundreds of games that reward communication, the combination of listening, informing, and even predicting each other's behaviors, but my favorite example for this was Spaceteam for mobile, a game which has instructions appear on your phone while h correspond to randomly generated controls on your teammates' screens.
I'm sure other people in the comments can think of a few others, and it makes you think that there are probably loads of game ideas using these types of challenges but intentionally avoid as much reflex or logic as possible.
On the topic of the thumbnail
Yo, this new season of jojo’s looks weird.
*deep breath*
*_B O I ! ! !_*
One might say, it's bizarre
iS tHiS a JoJo’S rEfErEnCe?
The newer jojo parts doesn't use hyper masculine men artstyle anymore.
When did Jojo ever look normal?
This was actually something that I explored for my bachelor's project. I was tasked with making a mobile application to teach children basic skills. But I expanded it so that it would revolve around beating games that require a certain kind of skill to beat, and I used the Theory of Multiple Intelligences as a refference. I think that could be a great place to start.
How was that project effected by the fact that said theory is more or less totally wrong, at least as it relates to intelligence? Did you simply use the ideas as a baseline for which faculties to challenge?
One of the more untouched faculties for game challenges is stress management. Games like "alien isolation" and "welcome to the game" have dabbled in this. Players perform complex interactions under the background of fear, however there may be other ways of accomplishing this. Where this panders out is that they still use logic and reflex challenges. With repetition, each task gets easier, and your need for "keeping it cool", is lessened over your playtime. Though this is an interesting concept, the idea of a game that never lets it's finger off your brain's stress receptors is both fascinating and horrifying.
A while back I've read about some games that used heart rate monitoring to scale the difficulty level, making the game harder the more stressed you are, and forcing you to be calm to be able to progress. I believe it was even used in some kind of therapy. This is a fascinating concept, I've been excited ever since for something like that to be incorporated in a big game.
I like that concept a lot. I wonder if there are other ways to track stress via biometrics. Eye tracking maybe?
This would have been so useful before the Extra Credits Jam
Yeah, but you can’t be perfectly prepared, for anything, you know! Game Jams are partially about being unprepared.
This would make a great topic for a game jam
One strange aspect of designing for empathy is that empathy cannot be extrinsically motivated and still be meaningful. If a game forces you to empathize with another character in order to progress or in order to gain a critical resource, players would dive right past the feeling empathy for another and instead treat the entities they are intended to empathize with as just a means to progress. So, to have empathy be a meaningful part of the experience, I believe it cannot be forced. Like the IM example, the player has to choose to engage with and attempt to understand/feel what another feels in order for empathy to become part of the experience at all. No one texts a friend in order to level up.
However designing content that is optional and that doesn't clearly offer progress or feedback to the player from the game system leads to a problem on how to motivate the player to seek out and engage with other entities. I and a team of other students designed a game for an empathy focused game jam and ran into this problem. We couldn't find a good solution other than just trapping the player character in the same play space as the other entities and calling it a day. I can't claim to know how to answer the problems that are posed by trying to design for empathy, but I do believe that designing games for empathy offers interesting and unexplored avenues of engagement that players rarely experience today.
Think about why humans in reality are empathetic and that should give you your answer. How you can feasibly transfer that into a game in which the player can choose to stop playing is difficult, though, since a big driver for empathetic behavior irl is that you can't quit playing.
The first thing that comes to mind is the friendship system in Fire Emblem games, where characters gain bonuses for working together because they're assumed to have built a repoire by working together for an extended period of time. What if those bonuses were gained through empathy challenges rather than simply occupying space near each other? If your interpretation of empathy is that it's optional to begin with, why not structure the challenges just that way?
I think a good way to utilize empathy as a mechanic/challenge is to take advantage of some player’s desire to see good character development. It doesn’t necessarily have to be about standard rewards or gameplay bonuses in the traditional sense; just getting more unique dialogue and a deeper understanding of a character can be enough. As an example, recognizing when one of your allies is bothered or distressed and then reassuring/comforting them may get them to open up more and present more of their unique personality, which (with good writing) could be fun in and of itself.
On the other hand, traditional gameplay rewards could be worked in just as well. Maybe if you’re talking to a companion and end up being very good friends with them, they’ll be more effective at combat or prioritize healing you more than going off on their own- the options are limitless. I’m talking about Fallout-4-type likes and dislikes here, except a lot more based on subtlety and less on picking locks a hundred times.
Of course for any challenge, there’s got to be a way to fail. For empathy, maybe it’s choosing to comfort when you needed to give space, or saying something offensive accidentally when the NPC is trying to open up to the player and is thus vulnerable.
Either way, the key to empathy would definitely be subtlety and good character writing; make a tell too obvious and it’s just a cheesy logic puzzle, make a character bland and they’re just another obstacle to get around.
So instead of being designed for empathy, a poor design might end up being designed for Sociopathy or Narcissism?
Emily is Away is the best game I know of that uses the empathy puzzle system. It's not perfect, but it's pretty unique in what it is
Is there any puzzle in Emily is Away ?
The puzzle is deciding how to respond in order to get a response you may desire. The goal is to create an empathic connection to your choices and make you feel something. In empathy, there is no 'right' answer.
In that way it's not a challenge, however it is a jumping off point for this kind of empathetic challenge design
The sequel did it even better.
@@filiaaut check out @JohnathanMasons answer. I couldn't have phrased it better.
ARTILLERY ONLY
Ah yes, the Morality Test...
Care to explain?
Everyone must fear the Artillery only challenge
Oh yes artillery only.
The Sanity Challenge.
I feel like Visual Novels are a good genre of games to focus on the Empathy challenges. There are certainly a lot of them that have shallow writing and focus on fanservice, but there are also well-written games like DDLC where you can sense that something is "wrong" well before the game actually explicitly tells you.
There are a lot of virtual novels that aren't specifically dating simulators - or ones where there are serious consequences for ignoring one character over another. For that intuitive feeling, and also actually making it so that if your character hasn't been taking care of themselves, you cannot choose the best option - I recommend Fading Hearts.
How about diplomacy?
Not diplomacy with AI, but with other humans. Some of my best lan party memories were about making alliances and plots to win a Civ 5. Sadly that works only on a basic level in civ, and when you get better in the game, you know what is the best for you and for your opponent, so the game becomes about logic again.
Oh! Town of Salem does this decently.
a text based MMORPG where you hash out diplomacy as various leaders of different places would be fun!!
Diplomacy board game does that pretty awesome. The mechanics are designed in a way that makes alliances necessary and at the same time makes it hard to trust anyone. As you master the game, the logic part grows, because less options seem plausible or available but it is still a great negotiation game.
there is also eRepublik that i used to play a long time ago. Player is a citizen that, as most real-life citizens has a job and (like few real-life citizens) fights in wars while developing his skills. Those are basic activities. If you stop at doing only this, you will quickly get bored. There are lots of optional things to do: newspapers, political parties, elections, governments, international and domestic affairs, all run by players (!). The big flaw of the game is the mechanics that almost encourage you to make multiple accounts :(
I reccomend playing Diplomacy with your friends and at least reading about eRepublik if you are interested in this kind of challenges.
I think this would be a good aspect to build in systems with fixed limited resources. However, it would take some effort to keep players from looting and pillaging.
Things such as attention span, interest in the game's narrative, exploration, etc could in theory be tested outside of the logical environment. Think something like Dark Souls' story as breadcrumps and expand on it as an actual mechanic. The "puzzles" are less having the players figure out what they should do and more about having them making estimations of how much or how little they do know
Yes please. I need a game where you play as a therapist, and the puzzles are people you have to understand and help. Doctors and therapists balance logic and intuition all of the time, that would be so much fun to play.
This is a great idea. I would love to play something like that
Surgeon simulator, but for therapy.
See the horror game Nevermind for an example of this premise.
An empathic challenge would be interesting, but also very difficuld to execute. Cultural differences would have to be incorprated. Localization have to go down to body language level for this. A lot of effort.
And it have to be very on point. Otherweise it easily would enter the uncanny valley.
Also you might have to spend quite some time on exposition & getting to know the characters. Some people just seem perpetually grumpy, some people will fart rainbows even when unhappy. Some people will talk more when nervous, some less, some don't show nervousness through speech at all. Especially relevant if you want to reduce things to just one element of human interaction, like messages, for lack of high fidelity graphics.
... Although, that bit makes me think if the game is focused on empathy that much, maybe video footage could be used, like Her Story?
I just remember Elder Scrolls Oblivion. This gaining personal reputation minigame.
The game mechanic killed it to a degree. But this is the only "challenge" that goes - more or less vaguely - in the empathic direction.
A pure empathic challenge has to work on so many levels, it would be a huge approach.
But it could be supported by other game elements like music.
Haven't played Oblivion, but I guess in a way empathy plays into a lot of logic puzzles, when it comes to who to trust for example. Sure, you'll use hard facts and figure out whether it shows someone is lying to you, but you'll also be influenced by how they act, if they seem sincere or trustworthy. I think there's a couple situations choosing between two parties in Skyrim for example where there's no definitive right or wrong offered by the game in terms of pure logic.
So maybe empathy can be an element of logic puzzles... or maybe empathy is in itself just a logic puzzle?
Having more layers to it like music is definitely a good idea!
Makes me think, what about interpreting situations? Most locations in video games try to evoke a certain feel/expectations. Be it a big room screaming 'something important', or the design/soundtrack of an area making it seem happy or sad or something. It's not really empathy, is it, since it's not about understanding other people. But it's also not necessarily hard logic.
This would work well for a game with companions like Mass Effect. With all its dialogues.
It would be a challenge if you have to press a specific button if you notice somethig odd. So it's not a mere dialogue option.
I don't think empathy is a logic puzzle. It's subconscious. And it don't show a clear way, because it mirrors the emotions of the other one.
Ohhh, the 'press a button if you notice something' has been done by the Hotel Dusk/Last Window games, it would work quite well indeed I think :) Although there it was mainly logic things (contradictions etc) and the ! button only showed up sometimes... and you basically always had to press it lol.
But maybe you're doing subconscious logic? Like you've learned what certain emotions are supposed to look like, or remember how certain people have reacted in certain situations before. Or how you would act. And then your mind kinda plays spot the difference?
Point and click / text adventure games are usually all about that kind of stuff, and they also include the perception challenge of figuring out what you can interact with and second guessing the designer to figure out what THEY thought of (in a way, that's an empathy in itself). An extension of that is something like the moons in Oddyssey or the Korok seeds in Breath of the Wild. There is no logical reason to assume that lining up apples will give you any kind of reward besides the hints you get that the game wants you to tool around.
True! Korrok seeds play off our natural ability to intuit that something's off, something's different, and it peaks our curiosity. It still COULD be logical, but you usually recognize something's up before you even start to think it through.
what about a game that tests humor? or one that tests morals?(in a way that isn't as obtuse as a dialogue tree) these tests wouldn't be pass/fail nor would they have a correct or "best" answer. also percption is another skill that is often tested in video games, and I don't think that it falls under logic or reflexes, so things like being able to tell where the ball in rocket league is going to land or extrapolated what enemy is where based off of the attacks that come towards you from off screen in a game like enter the gungeon or binding of isaac.
For testing humor, Cards Against Humanity or Quiplash are an option.
For an intuitive challenge, check out the board game Mysterium.
The role of the spirit in the game is to give "visions" to the mediums. You can only do this with pre-determined cards that contain a jumble of imagery, so the only way to get this across is to "Suggest" certain elements of the people/places/things you're trying to communicate.
Now, I'm not certain this is still entirely distinct from a logical challenge even if Mysterium is the closest I've seem to pure-intuition. Adventure games have tried to make puzzles you solve by intuition, but the problem is that when an "intuitive" puzzle has a fixed answer, it FEELS like a poorly-constructed logic puzzle. "How was I supposed to know that?!" etc
Mysterium gets around this only by putting the puzzle-making process in the hands of the spirit and greatly restricting what they can do. Even then there's still several rounds of "how was I supposed to figure that out?!" but it's more understandable because all the players can get a sense for how the restrictions bind puzzle-building.
Yup, Mysterium fits well as an intuitive game, and is a great example of how such games can be constructed to avoid the disconnect you'll normally get with players coming from logic games.
I had the same thought and I highly recommend Mysterium not just to check out a game centered around intuitive challenge but also because the game is just so rad.
Oh my god when playing as the ghost - it can be the most frustrating thing, you have so many decisions to make, about how to try to inform the other players. I honestly had no clue what the red herrings even were, I was trying to pay attention to when they got the right answer, how to pair colors, how to figure each persons intution based on their voice...
The most annoying part - WHEN THEY USE THEIR PHONES WHILE I AM TRYING TO GIVE CLUES!
Why not use the player themselves? Use "random" things (such as glitchy/buggy sprites, or other things that "break" the game) and according to how the player handles them in the game, the game changes.
Hmmm... there is a couple of problems with that, though. Make it too obvious that the 'glitches' are intentional, and the game just turns into a logic puzzle of 'getting to my (the player's) desired outcome'. On the other hand, not making it obvious that the glitches are intentional will most often end up with 'huh. that was a bit strange. guess i'll just ignore it'. Of course, there's another issue that once people realize that the game changes based on how they handle the 'glitches', you'll get people picking apart the game's code to see what they can do with it... but i s'pose that too might be a 'valid' end result, as a way of 'handling the glitches'. I remember there was a pokemon april fools fan game released a couple years ago that had you use glitches and cheats to solve puzzles. The only way to get a perfect score, though, was to essentially take apart the game's code and figure out the password generation system, and create a valid 'perfect score' that the site they had the leaderboard on would accept. There was no other way to get a perfect score... and that was completely intentional.
if it's advanced enough that it can be partially procedurally generated plotwise, you could present the player with various "bugs" and see which one they click on first, then proceed to generate from there.
Play Corrypt or Game Title: The Lost Levels (both free) to see player created glitch puzzles in action. They're both pretty great.
I don't like moral dilemmas in most games because my reasoning as a person is typically more nuanced and well thought out than the design of the situation will ever recognize or react to in how things play out. It's not really matter of fidelity in graphics as it things not being as well thought out and fleshed out as they could have been.
In example I recall the quest "That Lucky Old Sun" from Fallout: New Vegas. One option that quest presents is to utilize the HELIOS station to re-route power to the whole of the wasteland (instead of supplying a supported faction only).
It was a clear greater good choice. But I opted to not do so (the first time around) even though I was playing a decidedly good character. My reasoning was that having traveled the wasteland, I'd seen how many crippled towers and downed power lines there were. Suddenly surging power through a battered and broken infrastructure seemed like it would do a lot more harm than good.
But no NPC runs up at any point and commends my character on their sound and rational decision making. Nor does supplying power to the wasteland create all the issues that it reasonably would (like opening up new side quests to fix infrastructure or rescue people from falling live wires or fires started by contact with high voltage).
The one game I've played which I felt did moral dilemmas right was Life is Strange. With that game it wasn't just the my decisions had a massive impact and changed the course of events. It was even that my indecision had consequences. Seemingly side things like not turning in the contest entry photo or helping that one teacher with her petition because I prioritized other things had a real effect that I couldn't have anticipated.
.. Some games do get it right with more than just logical or reflexive challenges. But only when they make it a real focus and not an afterthought.
Surprise design making
Decisons based on fear, the oppisite of logic
Ooh, interesting! Make it so you just don't have time to think it through, you just have to go for it
Exactly
how about a game that challenges our kindness? forgiving people, helping people out in bad situations. or: just being kind in an unkind world.
That just wouldn't work as a major game mechanic. Because A) The player doesn't have any cost associated to kindness and will just do it, without challenge and gets bored or B) The player actually suffers for being kind (say by losing real time or in game items), which has worked in some games (for example keeping your family alive in papers please), but would be excrutiating if it was the sole focus of the game. Bottom line: I don't think it can be done, but I'd love to be proven wrong
hmm, i see your point. But i think a part of the challenge would be, that you were willing to lose items and time in order to help others? or something like that. Or maybe you lose your items, and it seems bad for a while, but you end up gaining something else?
The Dog island is a game about helping other dogs with their problems but you do get a reward for it, so I don't know if it counts towards what your saying.
Undertale is another game where you could forgive monsters and help people who may have tried to hurt you in the past. You don't get any sort of actual currency like in the dog island but it does help you in the game. It is also all optional whether you help of hurt.
There might be more games but those were the two that popped into my head
Most games that incorporate even basic moral choices are heavy handed in how they directly reward the player for them. In Skyrim you get an immediate stat buff from donating to a beggar. Bioshock gives you tremendously better rewards for good choices to the extent it's silly to be evil. Metal Gear ties pacifism to score, but it's only slightly harder to avoid killing.
A decent game in this regard might be Majora's Mask. I'm just now playing it for the first time, but it's full of sidequests that have little to no bearing on your abilities and main quest. Helping people factors into your 100% completion of the game, but you get basically nothing from it. You spend enough time with the people (via a Groundhog day loop) that you really do care to help them, however whimsical their problems are.
+Felix Windisch Lisa: The Painful proved you wrong four years ago.
Just played Passpartout: The Starving Artist for the first time today. That seems like a good example of a non-reflex non-logic game, though to be honest I'm not sure what it's testing. Perhaps it's a logic game in disguise and I just haven't realized it yet.
A combination of intuitive and reflex gaming would be a shooter, where you are an officer and you have to make decisions within seconds under pressure.
Shots and dying men around you, the artillery sounds like thunder, every second a bomb could be dropped, you and your platoon in the middle. Suddenly something in the situation changes, the enemy aritllery gets destroyed or an enemy tank breaks through the wall next to you. You have now less than 2 seconds to decide what the best for you, your platoon and/or your country is.
The difficulty is, that those decisions should not be presented like an A, B or C test, they have to feel real. Therefore, the game has to give you extreme freedom and at the same time a defined narrative.
This War Of Mine touches on this. The implementation is purely via the regular mechanics, but the choices you make using those mechanics can drastically change the game world itself, and how you perceive it. Do you steal from the old couple, to feed the 6 people you have at home? How about shooting the looter that's doing exactly the same thing to you? Do you feel as bad pulling the trigger and ending a soldiers life as you do that poor guy you ran into in the squat that you had to murder for a box of band-aids? If you play it with the empathy the title deserves, your choices become... exceedingly difficult and you do not feel good about them.
Artillery only!!!
quite a number of games have offered ethical challenges. most of the worst ham fisting in any media has shown up here. I wonder how it would play out if you never give points but have the quality of outcomes based on how consistent the player is and not the content of the choice? this would require a branching story sort of game and ... how to deal with some of the characters learning a lesson in the middle of the plot or any other form of growth?
Most of these have avoided any sense of moral/ethical ambiguity and stayed in the Kill your grandmother vs. pick apples for her moral decision.
I guess the first step is to make a game with ethical choices to be made where, of the options presented there is no perfect option, there are really bad options and also a few goodish options. some games have kind of done this but again this is the worst of the hamfisted so far. I think the keys may be to have the good ethics cost the player something and have the bad choices cost the character dearly. ... no that is not quite it ... this needs more thought.
Well there's always also the luck challenge game.
You know, the ones where a chimpanzee has as much chance of winning as you.
a game that I think could use the empathy puzzle system is Va-11 Hall-A: a cyberpunk bartender action. You serve multiple drinks to people and learn their story. Also, in a part of the game, one of your regular clients ask for another drink that the usual one and if you give her her old drink something good will happen since she knows that someone saw that something was wrong with her
One great example of moral/empathetic challenge can be seen in Virtue's Last Reward in the AB games. During the games you must choose whether to ally or betray your opponent. If both players choose to ally they both get two points while if they both choose to betray neither gets any. However what's most interesting is if one player chooses ally and the other chooses betray the allying player loses two points while the betraying player gains three. The game adds consequences to the points and therefore each choice through the story and character interaction and sometimes the most logical choice isn't always the best one. My favourite example of this is a point in the story where you have no reason not to pick betray against a known enemy and everyone agrees that you should do so but if you trust your judgement of your opponent and choose ally you get rewarded with a better ending.
Virtue's Last Reward was also not exactly a good example though, because the fact is, you're more or less expected to choose both options to continue to progress in the game. There isn't really a "better ending" as up until the final one, all of them are just stopping points before you reach the "real" end, and you need to go through most of those endings to get the real one, too. Heck, you can't even trust reading "the signs", because sometimes the characters arbitrarily change their decisions even though there's no way for your decision to affect that, so you ALWAYS choose wrong.
I really like challenging games as they test my brain. Especially HOI4 regarding strategies. One time I was Argentina and saw that the Axis was defeating the UK and its allies so I joined the Axis and used the invasion to my advantage by invading the Falklands successfully.
I just started that and I am so terrible. Well guess I'd better keep practicing.
Yup, keep practicing. The more you practice, the more you'll get better at it and succeed! If you have Millennium Dawn, I highly recommend choosing Tuvalu or Nauru as the South Pacific nations surrounding it are pretty easy to invade. Especially Vanuatu.
Wait, you played as Argentina?
Trying to figure out CK2 at the moment. I know it's one of the "easier" PDX games, but it's still a far cry from EU4 which I'm quite good at.
Dam, this man has the patience of a Buddhist monk
I would disagree with you on the alternative puzzle ideas you have mentioned, mostly for one simple reason: You can't see where you are wrong. If I fail a reflexive challenge, I know I need to get faster. If I fail a logical challenge, I need to think more thoroughly. But what should I do when I fail an intuitive challenge (or an empathic one - empathy is just a kind of intuition)? I can't consciously change my intuition, that's the point about intuition, else it would be logic again. That is why I doubt that intuition will be a very good design paradigm.
You can definitely get better at intuition. Like what intuition is, is a kind of quick logic that your brain does without you thinking about it, it is the mastery of understanding a certain area. So, if you learn to take in addition cues or behaviours from the environment. Possible by breaking down the identify of what you're meant to spot into it's components, changes in behaviour, writing style, word choice, facial expressions. Then you certainly can teach these skills in your game and get better at them during the game as more of the gestalt is added to make a choice, now the difficult is in the way you test because logic puzzles give you time to make a choice so the importance here is to make that choice without giving you the time to think about it. If you're curious about how to teach it then look up stuff on emotional literacy.
@@swiftsword4444 That may be, but the problem is that , as you pointed out, Intuition is a type of logic, but faster, meaning essentially an intuition puzzle is just an unfair logic puzzle. That holds multiple dangers: first, they might be confused with logic puzzles, leading to unnecessary frustration. Second, intuition isn't player controllable, you can't intuate harder, meaning you either get it or screw up, leading to more frustration. Third, Intuition is something that relies on a lot of very continous training, meaning that such a game would be per definition really hard and not casual-friendly. As long as the intuition does carry over between challenges (contrary to for example Dark Souls, where the bosses require loads of training, but after you finish them you never fight them again) such a game wouldn't be user friendly at all.
The thing is I disagree with the premise that empathy is not a form of logic. The easiest way to empathize with someone after all is to put yourself in their shoes, which is really just a logical thought experiment. Same goes for the other tests he mentioned that supposedly weren't logic or "reflexes."
To me, most of what you are designing appears to merely be a very fast paced logic test. In this form, there's plenty of in games; such as the example in the video playing a first person shooter. What they seem to be really after is some sort of free association version of intuition; and I think there probably shouldn't be "wrong" choices for that; simply branch offs where different things happen.
I think this is where various fail-states come into play. It doesn't have to be a pass/game over thing. Maybe it alters the relationship in the future based on what you intuit. Maybe a good result means the game positively feeds back to you later on, while a bad result means you find out second hand.
I think it is less a problem with intuitive gameplay that you're raising, as it is a problem with intuitive game design. It isn't like skill/reflex can't be poorly designed either.
Wait, all games (sports, puzzle, board and card games) are about Logic or reflexes!
Is a videogame (without logic or reflexes test) still a game?
A video game is just software that you play with. Not all play involves games. It's just a misnomer.
@Daniele Mazzali There are plenty of games that don't require either. A great example would be Minecraft. It's more about creativity rather then logic or reflexes (Think about creative mode). Telltale games are also a good example, as most of the questions are moral one rather then physical/logical. Papers Please, a game about intuition where you must find out if someone is lying to you or not. What about luck based games like Mario Party (To an extent here, as the mini games would fall under logic/reflex.) These are just a few examples.
Creativity Is a huge one too. In its pure form in games like Minecraft. It mixes well with logic in games like breath of the wild, and it looks like it mixes pretty well with reaction in games like fortnight.
I feel some telltale games and life is strange somewhat do this
I really feel like this is a bit of reductionsit attitude to these challenges. Reflex and logic aren't the only types of problems we're faced with when you present them that way. Figuring out the "how" or "what" to do is often more complicated and isn't just "do I move my unit 3 steps up, or 2 up 1 over." There are problems that are a bit more complicated that include much larger steps than this. I'm all for more kinds of puzzles but ultimately it still comes down to the two steps in your shooter example. What do I need to do and am I good enough at doing it to succeed. Framing it differently could be a huge change to the way it feels and in the cultist simulator example leads to a lot of unclear goals. Not saying that's a bad thing but do want to point out that in that game the objective is still "can I figure out how to do it" followed by "can I actually do it."
Artillery only
Maybe combine logic and art, there are songs that can sound completely horrible if 1 note is half a step off, so maybe a mechanics where you have to fix a song, you could go step by step, discovering it, and the progression of the song could match advances in the story. Or maybe scene composition, where you have a bunch of layers of objects and people, and you have to arrange them in a visually pleasing manner
The Heck Snek returns!
Or the Hecknomancer
I was about to say that. Like, did no one see it in around 24h or just didn't comment?
ARTILLERY ONLY!!
**Looks at the thumbnail**
That man has special eyes.
what about diplomacy skill?
There are strategic games when there are more than 2 player, take Risk! for example, it doesn' t really matter how lucky you are and how good is your strategy, if the other players decide to team up against you, you are probably gonna die.
But if you can make an ally or 2 during the game, you have more chance of victory.
Challenge Accepted!
Unless I've missed the point of this video, it sounds like good empathetic challenges have been made in the past with Undertale and maybe Oneshot. In Undertale with how for example you have to continuosly try to spare Toriel to reach the end of the ruins a pacifist, despite the fact the game is implying it won't work. I say maybe to Oneshot because I'm not sure whether you could consider going against the implication that the game cannot be replayed to go for a better ending an empathetic challenge. In some sense it's logical because in calling the game Oneshot it's almost like it challenges you to find a way to try again, but in another sense, it's empathetic because you would only try based on your guilt for abandoning either Niko or the rest of the world depending on your choice in the first run.
I might be a bit sociopathic for saying this but I think an empathy challenge based game wouldn't be engaging for me.
Tbh a lot of people play games to escape from emotion and real world consequences, so it's not that weird, but there would definitely be a market for it
Me too, for me it's just logic puzzles, no different from the usual ones (if not easier)
@@andrewmirror4611 a truly empathetic challenge based game wouldn't actually be logically solved that's kind of the point they were making.
@@urahara64360 But is there a way to make this? What if it is just a logic puzzle? In Real Life? And in computers one must make logic for smth to work, because computers are just big counting machines, and human brain is just a counting machine, but much bigger (in some instances), that's what I meant. There's probably no way to implement thing that people think doesn't have logic, make it with logic, and make it allogical, if it is
I disagree slightly with the logic-dexterity split on DDR. Sure, it's mostly about reflexes, but for more technical songs there can be a significant challenge in deciding the best way to step a particular pattern. For example, if the pattern is left-down-right-up, then alternating feet forces you to turn away from the machine, which affects how you can handle the next steps, so you may want to step left-right-right-left instead. Or a pattern left-down-down-right might be best stepped left-right-left-right (switching feet on the two down steps), depending on the patterns around it. The choice could even depend on secondary goals, like "I want to show off by doing crazy spins" or "I want to conserve energy so I can power through the really hard part coming up".
So maybe the split is closer to 80% dexterity and 20% logic, at least on those charts.
Intuition is either random or based on some pattern that is not obvious to our rational self, so an 'intuitive puzzle' must be either random or logical. If it is random and has no 'right' solution then it also has no wrong solution and is in fact not a challenge at all. If we'd have AIs that could fool us into making emotional decisions - well, games would be our least concern because we'd be fighting Skynet or be trapped in the Matrix.
I disagree. A logical choice is a choice done based on known premises and known rules. In some cases, logic can also include some of the unknown information in it.
An intuitive choice is something where all the premises and all the rules aren't known, but a choice has to be made. There are multiple dictionary definitions for intuition, but I mean the one that goes "not deductible, not evident". So it's a guess, based on some unknowable factors and some uncalculable probabilities. Guessing which strategy your opponent(s) chose in a multiplayer match before the game starts can be an untuitive choice, or a logical choice (if you e.g. know that 90% of players go with a specific strategy or opening).
Complex games with lots of hidden information typically rely more on intuition, while games with more straightforward interactions and less hidden information can typically rely more on logic. Both intuition and logic can be present, of course. The challenge is that, as any game system becomes more and more understood, there's less space for intuition, and the previously unknown becomes known.
Hearthstone is a totally different game for someone who knows the top 10 most commonly played decks down to each card and the percentages they're played and their statistical win rates against each other. As hidden information (whether it's in-game or meta) becomes known information, there's less space for intuition. But it's much more complex than "totally random" and "totally logical" - there's a huge fuzzy area between the two.
Some ideas (in depth explanations further down).
* artistic / creative / humor tests
* character understanding / human nature tests
* "wisdom" tests
* communication / acting tests
* physical aptitude tests
* knowledge / memory / quick learning tests (self explanatory)
* ability to stay calm, or remove biases (self explanatory)
(disclaimer, these ideas may not all be good to implement, but they may be interesting to think about)
- AI is not currently smart enough to evaluate what's the most creative / artistic / humorous. However, if you have every player make a piece of art / content, force other players to give a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" to 10 other pieces of untested art / content, and force your character to get more than 5 thumbs ups to proceed, you could theoretically test players' artistic / creative / humor abilities.
- adding on to the Empathy idea, you could also have challenges that test understanding of characters / human nature, if you asked your players to evaluate "what would this other character do in this situation?", and punish them if they get it wrong. You could even have adjustable difficulty if you have to infer a character's motivations and personality with more, or less clues / exposition / backstory. Dating Sims already test this, but more games could play up these tests.
- choose your own adventure style games tend to often have their choices either Boil down to obvious logical choices, or choosing between two equally valid paths. But games could not present the player with enough information to make a choice obvious, and require then to use their personal experience / "wisdom", in order to know what is the correct option in the long term. Games like the walking dead, life is strange, and Detroit become human already do this kinda, but more games could serve to have this kind of challenge. And games like the ones I mentioned could incur more "game over" states instead of alternate story paths if they want to amp up the role of choices as a "test" instead of a choose your own adventure.
- multiplayer games could be more intentionally structured around your ability to communicate or act. Non video games like charades and mafia already test this, and a few multiplayer party games like spy party test this. But other games could test how quickly can you convince others to help you out, join your party, be convinced by your side, understand your explanation to a puzzle when you have limited means to communicate, etc
- With more advents of games using augmented reality technology, like pokemon go, and more virtual reality aids, such as treadmills and bullet impact vests, wii fit balance boards, more games could test physical aptitude for things like "accurately throw a virtual object using a vive controller", run to a destination fast, speed read some material, apply enough pressure to a sensor by gripping it, etc.
I think what you describe as an empathy challenge can be more broadly defined as a type of observational challenge, i.e. a challenge of finding or noticing specific details within a clutter of other information, which is actually something that shows up in a lot of games. Most obviously, hidden object games use this as their primary challenge, but I'd argue that any game that has you trying to figure out and react to the behavior of other players - or AI, for that matter - also falls into this category to some degree. That said, there's still a lot of room to explore this concept.
I mean games like stably parable do not really meet the standard guidelines premised in your video as the way their game play works is very unique and all about subtle things being noticed.
Tsp is more of an interactive experience than a game though.
You could challenge creativity, but it would be very hard to evaluate in a game, because players would find unexpected solutions by definition.
I love me some quick time events
I think one other type of challenge that has been very well developed in the industry is the entire horror genre. Not so much "what's the right action" or "are you able to perform the action" but "can you actually bring yourself to do the thing that you have decided to do"
A lot of games test your dexterity too, and it might not always be timing-base. I don't feel like "reflex challenges" is a good name...
I'm over a year late to say this, but I'd say intuition challenges are in a lot more than just cultist simulator, for instance almost all multiplayer games from strategies to shooters are in no small part about intuiting what the opposing player might do.
Games can reward you for exploring like they can make the goal to find something that can only be found if you are curious enough.
Games can test you on your abillity to resist to stress, fear, attention and even self doubt. It's rarely the only thing tested, but these kind of hurdles are everywhere.
an empathy test, eh? While walking along in desert sand, you suddenly look down and see a tortoise crawling toward you...
When doing a multiplayer game with voice comms that kind of challenges communitcation skills
the part about intuition games reminded me of the game "where they fall" in the gmtk2022 game jam
Would papers please be a decent example of the empathy test? Its might a stretch but that’s the closest I could come up with as an example.
Doom II is my favorite game because it has the right balance of logic and reflex changes. It also has low hardware requirements and its visuals make good use of its graphics. Thank you EC, I haven't been able to explain this feeling till now.
emphatic challenges? don't you mean society?
1:30 Sazed from Mistborn
Using Sonic as an example is a very good idea, because there have been at least two major instances, perhaps three, of a very much disliked segment in a Sonic game, in which you're asked to puzzle out a task. Sonic is not really about solving puzzles, but that's exactly what they ask of you in Sonic 3's Carnival Night Act 2's Barrel of Doom, Sonic 4 Episode 1's Lost Labyrinth torch puzzle, and Sonic Lost World's Silent Forest stealth segments. All of them involve looking at the situation and figuring out how to proceed, which runs completely counter to the fast-paced gamplay the rest of these games encourage of you.
I can't speak for everyone, but to me both empathy and intuition are simply extensions or variations of logic. They're both some kind of mental problem-solving.
Intuition being to make split-second decisions without enough facts to make a decisive conclusion. In typical logic puzzles you can tell with 100% certainty what the answer is, and you can prove it given the available information. In intuition puzzles you can only say that something is probably the answer, never with certainty, because not enough information is disclosed. It often comes in the form of identifying patterns, "given that I know X, Y is probably true". What makes intuition puzzles different from other logical puzzles is that they typically involve split-second decisions, so there is no time for time-consuming reasoning, and perhaps more crucially to filter out things like emotions, instincts, and preconceptions. Action games typically include a great deal of intuition puzzles as you have to react quickly to visual and audio cues, such as to determine whether the person who just fired their gun behind you in Fortnite is an enemy or your teammate.
Empathy is similarly also a form of reasoning with hidden information, but this time that hidden information is another person's way of thinking. You could for example have two people watch a kitten drown, and ask three important questions: "Does this make me sad?", "Does this make most people sad?", and "Does this make the person next to me sad?". These questions test (in order) your emotional response, logical reasoning/knowledge, and empathy. The first considers your own mindset, the second considers what you know about people's mindsets in general, and the third considers the specific mindset of a single other person. It is however still a logic puzzle since determining how someone else thinks or feels is a question that can be answered through logic, by recalling their past responses and by analyzing their expressions. Detective games for example often involve getting to know a character, and then being able to tell when they are lying based on the type of person they are.
What I'm getting to is that it's a bit weird to lump together all forms of logical puzzles as one and the same, because they test widely different skills. Being great at mathematics doesn't mean that you are also great at drawing an object from different angles, or playing Hearthstone. Similarly if you are great at aiming in an FPS, that doesn't translate into being able to execute perfect ability combos in a MOBA, or play Guitar Hero flawlessly. Logic and reflexes are more like overarching categories, but what you actually develop while playing a game is a subset of those groups.
When you started talking about Empathy and Intuition as types of challenge in a game, the title that sprang to mind immediately was Night In The Woods. There's a few dexterity and logic challenges in there to mix things up (Demontower, the band minigame, the pickpocketing minigame, etc.), and you don't make a lot of decisions, but most of the time, I felt like the way you navigated the story was by intuition and empathy with the characters.
I don't know if you've checked out Legend of Dragoon, but the bosses, especially one in particular, Shirley, can play off of empathy and intuition, as well as subvert your expectations.
See, Shirley engages you in combat and starts a boss fight. If you try fighting her, she will kick your ass handily. Instead, you need to spam Defend every turn, and Shirley will ask the party some incredibly difficult moral questions that you need to answer in character for the party member she is asking. It's a flawed approach, as you can just guess until you get it right, but if you've been paying attention to the story that boss fight packs some major emotional punch.
I played this game a lot as a child, but I couldn't reach very far without knowing English. It was my first step to learning in the language, as I played with a dictionary in hand. But sadly I didn't complete it, and don't know if I ever will have the time for it (heck, the game was 4 CDs!)
Sadly, the game was overshadowed by FF 7 at the time and never gained much traction beyond being a cult classic. Despite that it is still a masterpiece of gaming and most certainly the best RPG of the generation by faaaaaaar.
I would love it if AI gets good enough to carry out a completely normal conversation. Throw that into a game, and you could really open the floodgates on the possibilities for empathy-detecting gameplay.
Anybody else catch that Whomp! reference?
Jackbox and Mafia/Ware-wolf are two of my favorite games to play with friends! Would you say those are different types of challenges?
100% agree! In something like quip lash you are challenged by your skill of humor and knowing what humor is most successful within your own friends. Mafia is perhaps a blend of logic and social intuition.
it probably counts as more of a "Reflext test" then anything, but i do what i might call a "Patience test" game on my phone called "Rolling sky"
It's an automatic-runner game where you need to maneuver a ball through a long series of obstacles to get to the finish line collecting gems along the way. And while it is very much a reflex test in that regard, it's also a game where you need to be patient and willing to repeat the same sequence of events again and again. It's almost impossible to complete any one level perfectly without committing every section to muscle-memory, you can't just rush in and force your way through everything, you need to wait until you have at least 75% of the map committed to memory to the point where you can work around obstacles without even thinking about them.
The game does offer checkpoints if you want to complete the level faster, but the cost for that is it won't count Gems that spawn in the world behind you, you'd need to complete the entire map in one go, collecting every gem along the way to get a 100% perfect score. It's actually really fun!
I'm fascinated by the idea. It'll take quite a few rounds of Game You Might Not Have Tried to really get to one that hit's mainstream though.
It feels like I'm Bubba naming types of shrimp here but:
Optimization challenges exist in games today too
Customization challenges, and the ability to overcome boredom from farming.
Also the challenge of patience at not purchasing premium content and waiting for it to be attainable through freemium methods. (Meta challenge)
And some games don't need to have challenges to be good, they are experiences.
There are memory challenges.
Challenges of self control (example, sacrificing power and ease in the early game for a boost in the endgame)
Challenges of awareness and paying attention to your surroundings.
Reading comprehension challenges (Divinity Original Sin)
Auctioneer challenges in MMOs
Social Challenges in Guids/Parties of other players
Tactical Strategy/Coordination challenges to pull off a proper heist in Payday or Military tactic in Battlefield (beyond personal skill or problem solving it needs group coordination)
I'll think of more and add them later if I care to.
What about a game like Monkey Island? It's more based on lateral thinking / puns / comedy than logic. What about LA Noire? It's deductive logic and detecting lies from facial expressions. And is there a difference between logic and tactics? Like Divekick, which has been talked about on this channel before, where you skip all combo learning and just jump straight to tactics? Does endgame Min-Maxing count as a logic challenge? And what about creative games like Minecraft, where building is the point, and you could argue the challenge is being a good architect? And where do walking simulators fit in?
For some reason I always considered visual novels and dating sims as empathy tests, even though the results I expected to get were counter intuitive in the end. But that made me think about how different people can be and how differently everyone processes ideas, conversations.
That as well as making me wish the game was better crafted
But now that I think about it, don't games do that already? Like RPG games, for example chrono trigger, where you are pressed with the moral choice of taking something you find on a bench which has consequences at the judgement stage?
Or even Dragon Age Origins, when you flirt with an NPC and they make facial expressions and you weigh if they approved of what you just said, building conversations, not just increasing or decreasing your relationship bar.
I feel like we already have a lot of empathy and intuition choices in games, but at the moment it really depends on our ability to be immersed in it and not freak out when the mechanics disrupt that immersion
Easy question proposed: Other types of tests besides Dexterity and Intellect are:
Strength
Perception
Charisma
Willpower
Constitution
and Spirit
One common other type of challenge in games is an "endurance" challenge/test, something requiring you to endure the test to achieve the goal. I don't usually like them, but they can also be part reflex and logic if they're endurance of something that may take a lot of tries to complete, but can technically be done with good reflexes after having planned everything out by playing it so many times.
[paused at 2:05] Out of the contents of this video alone, I can already see a third type of challenge that ALREADY EXISTS: Memory challenges.
In guitar hero, playing a song is NOT JUST reflexes. On first try, sure it is, but as you play the same song again and again, you memorize it, and it becomes less reflexes and more memory + coordination (+ ability to follow the beat)
So the premise at the beginning of the video "there are only two kinds of challenges" is already flawed, even before we get to theorizing about additional ones.
Resuming now.
I could think of 5 other kinds of challenges you didn't recognize, just in the time it took me to watch the video:
- Strategy challenges, obviously the focus of strategy games.
- Memory challenges, which are usually used together with logic ones, but can also be a whole new thing, like remembering the path you took in a maze-like level.
- Management challenges, that tests your organization with a lot of simultaneous problems and how to spend the limited resources. The most classic example is SimCity.
- Social challenges, like convincing people to do what you want. This may be together with what you called empathy challenges, both very hard to design with current technology, but I've seen good examples like Life Is Strange.
- Patience challenges, which reward the player for persistence in doing some task, or even just waiting for something to happen. A lot of times this is seen as bad design, like grinding at an RPG, but if done well it can be interesting.
This video felt too generalizing, considering only a small subset of games that only contain either logic or reflex challenges, while the actual variety is much larger.
Doesn't 'Emily is Away' play with the idea of Empathy as a mechanic? And could building a deck in Hearthstone be considered Intuition?
That "empathetic" and "intuitive" tests seem to me like subtypes of the "logic" test, even if they're optimally formed, and thus NOT new archetypes. Doesn't mean they're BAD ideas, but if the goal is to subvert the "logic/reflex" scale, they don't quite do the job.
hmm. If you equate these challenges to ability scores in D&D then logic would be Intelligence and reflex would be Dexterity.
That leaves Wisdom, Strength, Charisma and Constitution.
The skills you suggested (intuition and empathy) would be covered by Wisdom score.
The Wii fit tested core strength when it judged your form while doing yoga poses and fairs (carnivals) have games that let you smash things with a hammer, punch a punching bag or arm-wrestle a robot.
Your charisma could be tested in dating sims or RPGs where you need to recruit more people to your cause. Or any multiplayer online game where you need to put together a good raid group to beat certain challenges or a team for PvP.
Constitution is tested in button bashing contests in party games like Mario Party or the original Mortal Kombat. Clicker games also challenge you to click or tap as rapidly as possible for as long as possible.
Thank you for the video. Empathy and intuition? There is intuition in games for multi-player games already. Like you know whether the enemy team players used a heal or repair based on your game play experience.
About empathy, I could care less about the other game characters, unless they are needed for my game goals. The question is how much game developers want to feel good about themselves by setting a morale compass in games? Do game developers really honestly believe that players want to do good and care all the time for humanity's sake? Freedom of choice. Games are mission oriented and not about giving hugs.
For example in a 12 v 12 MMO match, I do care how the team plays in the match. We are the "Army of one" going for our goal to win. Do your best. If you do these things, then no one can say you didn't try.
However there have been times of less teammate participation I wished I had a "Commissar" consumable to adjust my friendly teammate's attitude either by TK or convert the player's unit to more cooperative game bot, bouncing the player from the match. Granted that's harsh, however it gets the point across. Yes, I know its a game, but why make things more complicated in the fog of war in wasting my game time? It's not fair to my teammates.
At least in the short term, these kinds of challenges shouldn't be forced on players (unless that's the whole point of the game), because as the video said, both players and designers aren't used to them. If you want to include one of these challenges in a game then by all means go ahead, but make it an optional side mission, and accept that many players will never see it.
I think empathy, intuition and so, are just logic abilities on the inside (using information you get to make a decision).
However, the same way there's different types of intelligences, there are different types of logic that can be tested, too.
As an example, "We Were Here" not only has logic puzzles, there's the added challenge of coming up with the better way of informing your partner (communication) of any hints you should find.
Also, I believe these kind of interpersonal skills are most prevalent on AR games, where people can cooperate and share information in order to solve a given challenge.
Oh, I have a lot of ideas for other gameplay mechanics... Here's three big ones.
1. Perception. There are so many amazing perceptual shortcomings we humans have, and it is entirely possible to train our brains to see the things that we normally filter out. In particular, I think a game centered around training the mind to overcome "room blindness" (the tendency we have to discount certain parts of a given space simply because we don't expect anything to be there) could be amazing.
2. Judgment. Not logical, intuitive, empathetic, or reflexive, mind, but much more complex. I would like to see more games give us scenarios where there is no obviously "right" or "ideal" solution. The player must, using their own faculties as they see fit, come to a decision on how to proceed when facing a scenario to get the result they want (and not what the game wants). Thinking like an entrepreneur, basically, and seeing opportunities that aren't spelled out for you. A lot of game challenges out there arise from this kind of thinking, so a game engineered explicitly with the intention of inspiring this kind of thought would be something on a whole other level.
3. Counter-intuition. That may sound a bit odd, but if you want to see a game that really embraces this, check out Antichamber. Games that force you to rethink how you're even percieving the problem because standard rules of logic do not apply are some of the most intriguing ones out there.