Feeding the perfectionist's hunger

Whether you're collecting coins in hope of extra lives, searching for pieces of a broken key or shooting targets to get all the bottlecaps, there's no denying that collecting items has always been one of the most common challenges in video games.

I've heard someone compare the collecting in video games to hoarding, a type of obsessive-compulsive disorder, but I believe those two have one significant difference; the goal. Hoarding or just basic collecting rarely has a clear ending point, whereas video games can't help but have their limits and so the player is always capable of "catching em all". Collectors are more like perfectionists, looking for that absolute completion that real life can't offer.

That is why designers should always award the player for getting that glorius 100%. Even if you can't offer actual rewards, like an extra map or infinite ammo, simply acknowledging the player's hard work with a golden star or a few words is plenty enough.
I received Super Paper Mario for Wii this Christmas, and after 60 hours of playing I was finally done with all the cards and recipes and treasure maps. And the game said nothing. Of course the completion was still satisfying, but the anti-climatic ending left a part of me disappointed and feeling like I wasn't truly done yet.

Being able to see how far you have gotten also motivates and engages the player like nothing else, be it the amount of collectible items or a percentage of your overall process. I've found myself playing games I'm not too fond of for countless hours simply because 68.7% just doesn't feel like a good place to stop at.
That is also why role-playing games are the most addictive of them all - seeing your characters grow and get stroner little by little makes us all resort to the "just one more level" excuse more than once.

- TM

Favorite best game ever?

Okay, I'm cheating a bit here - this post isn't really about game designing. But bear with me, I just want to point out something interesting I've noticed about gamers' opinions.

When you're discussing video games with someone, sooner or later comes the time when they ask about your favorite game, or "the best game ever". I personally don't like the situation at all, mostly because I can never decide on a single favorite - just choosing ten of them is hard enough!

However, people often seem to think that your favorite game and the game you think is the best one made are always the same thing. It can of course simply be a difference in wording and not in context, but there are still plenty of people who think that just because something is my favorite I also believe it should be awarded with "The Game of The Year" and 10 points.

Final Fantasy VII

A favorite is so much more than just something you feel is well made. Nostalgia is one of the biggest factors; if you played a certain game a lot when you were young, there's a big chance that you are gonna call it one of your favorites, simply because of the memories it holds. We also tend to remember our "first times"; Final Fantasy VII might not be the best game in the series, let alone the whole genre, but for many of us it was our first step into the world of Japanese role-playing games.
We also tend to relate to certain games. If a game's story, character or setting reminds you of your own life, it can become dear to you, regardless of how many flaws it actually has - and this applies to other mediums, like books and movies, as well.

There will obviously never be such thing as "the best game ever made", and it's better that way. But if I really had to try to name one, I would turn my head towards aggregate game review scores - the more ratings, the better. They are not perfectly accurate, they still have their own biases, but I feel it's the closest we'll ever get to finding some of the best and the worst.

For example, I have Clock Tower, a game I actually mentioned in the second post of this blog, on my list of my favorite games. Would I suggest it deserves the title of one of the best games made? Not at all.

- TM

Sneaking some depth into adventure game characters

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It's no secret that adventure games, such as Grim Fandango and The Longest Journey, have a special place in my heart. Without them, I most likely wouldn't have gotten interested in game designing in the first place.

I just recently finished Another Code: Two Memories (known as Trace Memory in North America), the developer Cing's first graphic adventure for the Nintendo DS. I had already played their masterpiece Hotel Dusk: Room 215 earlier this year and since I had heard that the two games are rather similar, my expectations were high. In the end, Another Code wasn't quite what I was hoping for, but I'm not disappointed - after all, Cing is doing wonders to the genre. Along with a few other developers, they're keeping adventure games alive and well and bringing out new elements to the table besides the usual inventory and item puzzles. I'm definitely looking forward to what other ideas they've got up their sleeve.

There is one certain design, or lack thereof, in Another Code that I want to discuss. I've thought about the importance of this particular feature before and now that I've seen it done badly, I simply cannot stop myself from writing a rant. I'm talking about the comments the game's main character makes when the player examines different objects and environments - moreover, comments that also reflect the character's personality.

As we all know, the genre focuses heavily on story telling. Aside from the smart puzzles, the story is the main reason why most players pick up an adventure game in the first place, and they expect it to make them cry, laugh or sigh in amazement. And what is the heart of any good story? The characters, of course.
In adventure games, the main character's personality is usually shown little by little through conversations with non-playable characters, but in many games the NPCs are scarce and the designers can't rely on them alone to make their character believable.
That's where the comments come in - there's no better way to get to know a person than to learn about the way they view the world, after all. An old desk is never the same object for different people; one person cannot understand why it hasn't been thrown away yet, other would love to have it in her room, and someone is reminded of the summers he used to spend with his uncle.

This is where Another Code went badly wrong. Examining objects always lead to the same, boring comments: "It's a red lamp." "It's a chair". The player does not do anything with such info - not when he can tell what it is by simply looking at it. Either teach us something new about the environment, a current puzzle or the main character, or don't bother at all. As Ernest Adams would say: "Bad game designer, no Twinkie!"

There are games that have nailed this design exceptionally well, and The Longest Journey for the PC is one of them. The main character is April Ryan, a witty 18-year old student, but we probably wouldn't have gotten to know half of her personality if examining even the simplest of objects hadn't resulted in her sarcastic insights. And The Longest Journey went even further than that, also letting the player read a regularly updated diary which retold the game's past events in a manner that made it feel like it was truly written by April herself.
It's no wonder that April is often said to be one of the most memorable video game characters.

The Longest Journey

I'll mention one more example, Syberia. While the game otherwise was wonderfully designed, I never quite got a hang of what kind of person Kate Walker, the main character, really was. Even though it's a point-and-click game, which makes exploration very easy, there was no way to examine anything else than active objects. Luckily, the game had plenty of colorful characters and chances to have conversations with them so it didn't bother us too much.

I can't stress this feature enough. It might seem unsignificant, but if done right, it can give the characters much more depth.

- TM

Silent Hill and true terror

I can't claim to be an expert on the brilliant survival horror franchise known as Silent Hill (and often referred to as "holy shit, what was that noise?"), as I have only played the third game and a little bit of the second. But as my interest towards the series grows, one certain thought keeps lingering on my mind: the game should try giving up the weapons entirely.

Let's face it: the action, while not that bad, has never been the franchise's strongest point. And when its biggest competition Resident Evil introduced the new, action-centered gameplay and smoother control in RE4, it made Silent Hill's combat seem awkward and slow in comparison.
However, what makes Silent Hill truly stand out is the way it manages to scare you. It's hard to shake away that disturbing feeling when you're walking down a corridor with the flashlight as your only guide, watching blood stains on the walls and wondering if that noise you're hearing is merely a sound effect or an approaching monster. Not to mention all the rooms and events which have a single purpose; to get your heart pounding.

But no matter how you view it, everything is just a tad less scary when you have a shotgun in your hand. Having to run away defenseless, on the other hand, can make you panic no matter what the situation, as Clock Tower for PS1 taught us. Although most of the game took place in broad daylight and the visuals were nothing like what you see these days, running away from a slow-moving man with scissors managed to freak us out badly.
I believe that kind of fleeing would fit the world of Silent Hill perfectly, and make it more realistic, too - what are the chances that you would find firearms and ammo lying around in a hellhole like that? And even if you did, a lot of people wouldn't know how to use them and most likely all of us would be too afraid to do anything else than run.

Taking away the weapons wouldn't take away all the action, of course. It would just be replaced with another form of defense; dodging and running. Dodging the attacks of the enemies could especially be made fun by the right kind of controls. And it could change boss battles, where most people use their collection of bullets anyway, into puzzles of a kind. Instead of killing them straight-forwardly, the player would have to trick the enemy into hurting itself or make it fall of a cliff, for example.

I'm not saying the whole series should take a weaponless direction, but it would be interesting to see at least one installment based around the idea.

- TM

About the blog

Often, when I'm in the midst of playing a video game, I notice a design that's exceptionally creative, that has a lot of potential but didn't quite get to shine or one that's so poorly-designed that even I feel like hanging my head in shame.
And since game designer is something that I strive to be (it's a whole nother story if I can ever reach that goal), I decided it's finally time to write all those thoughts down. Although I'm mostly doing this to learn something through other designers' mistakes and triumphs, I'd love it if a person or two gave their opinions or challenged my thoughts. And what better way to do that than to start a weblog and throw myself in the middle of all those other 112 million blogs?

That's about what "Small Observations, Big Designs" (or SOBD for us lazy people) is. I first thought about writing game reviews, but I realized that there are already over nine thousand websites doing them better I ever could and decided to fully focus on praising and scolding game designs.

- TM