Elder Game

Here’s another example of where our brains trick us into enjoying things in spite of ourselves.

I was reading a book of folk tales and I got to the story of The Snow Queen. It is about two innocent children who have adventures and then grow up. It ends this way:

Gerta and Kay went home hand in hand. There they found the grandmother and everything just as it had been, but when they went through the doorway they found they were grown-up.

There were roses on the leads; it was summer, warm, glorious summer.

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I’ve read a lot of really great posts as a result of my hornets-nest stirring post about how classes are better than unclassed games. Some rebuttals have been pretty smart and have changed my mind about a number of things. For instance, it seems obvious in retrospect that EVE has classes — for my definition of that word — because the ship you’re in tightly constrains the role you can perform.

Other rebuttals have been frustrating, either because they misunderstood my point or because I had already specifically talked about their counter-argument already and they ignored it.

But mostly, I think problems arose from my use of the word “class”, which was not defined well enough. I’ve defined it before on the blog, but I didn’t define it in the last post. (And I attempted to tackle a bunch of small side-topics which made things murkier.) Let me focus just on the core point for a second.

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A few years ago, I was interviewing for a systems designer gig. The design interviewer had been at Turbine many years prior, so we vaguely knew each other from there, but she needed to know how much I’d grown as a game designer since then.

She asked:

• “When you came to Turbine, how did you feel about classless systems like Asheron’s Call 1 has?” My answer: “I loved them and wanted to make all games that way.”

• “Do you still feel that way?” My answer: “No, I wouldn’t inflict that upon a game that I wanted to see succeed in the long run.”

This was the correct answer, if you’re keeping track at home, and I got the job.

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We’ve all grouped with great healers. It’s not really very hard to be a great healer: just keep track of all the little health meters and make sure nobody dies. But have you ever been in a group where the healer is just amazing? Your group is doing content way out of your league, but somehow, amazingly, you survive. The healer knows just the right moment to use his 30-minute emergency heal, when to stop healing in order to recover his juice, when to chain-heal the DPS and let the tank drop to critical levels. And just once — the one time in a million when this is the right thing to do — he gets out his friggin’ axe and starts doing damage instead of healing. And it works. How does he know what to do? Expert’s Intuition.

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One hard lesson that new developers have to learn is that not all game difficulty is equally fun. Some types of difficulty are perceived as fair, but other types are perceived as unfair… or worse, buggy.

The classics can teach us a lot about this. Many of the classic arcade games have survived for over 30 years and are still thriving in modern gaming. Robotron has been re-imagined as everything from Smash TV to Geometry Wars. Space Invaders is the grandfather of a million shoot-em-ups. Pac-Man never spawned derivative games, but the new versions of Pac-Man on the Xbox 360 are great, popular, accessible games.

But there are plenty of other arcade games which never managed a popular sequel, and whose game mechanics have died completely. Take, for instance, Asteroids and Joust. What’s wrong with these classics? Why can’t they be reborn?

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