  The Power of Powers and Purpose | 
Posted - 6/24/2009 11:46:26 PM | A number of AAA open-world games were released in the last month and, coincidentally, two of these games are based around the concept of the player's character possessing superhero-like powers amidst a major metropolis. It's the video game industry's own Armageddon/Deep Impact, A Bug's Life/Antz, The Prestige/The Illusionist, etc.. The first of the super-hero games to be released was Infamous (inFAMOUS, technically) and it's a game by Sly Cooper developer Sucker Punch and it puts players in the electrified body of Cole McGrath in the fictional Empire City. Radical Entertainment's Prototype casts players as Alex Mercer, a biological experiment gone wrong whose sole goal is determine what happened to him while unraveling a "government conspiracy." The release of these two games within such a close time frame (mere weeks apart) almost naturally makes for a number of comparisons between the two titles. The two elements I'm interested in are how each title attempts to have its game mechanics and atmosphere inform a player's sense of purpose and how the two games treat their protagonist's powers/abilities.
Infamous' protagonist, Cole McGrath, is boosted to superhero status when an in-game event bestows a host of electricity-based abilities to him. The concept of electricity isn't just a random power that was assigned to the player, though; smartly, Sucker Punch chose to have electricity inform every aspect of the game. Movement through the city is eased by metal electric lines and the rails that define the elevated train track. Metal objects can be electrified to harm enemies who are overly-reliant on metallic cover (and apparently give no regard to the fact that all of their opponent's powers revolve around electricity). Any electric object throughout the city can be used by the player to harvest energy and this concept creates a very reliable cause-and-consequence relationship between what a player thinks would conduct or react to electricity and what would not. Even the feeling that an open-world game will eventually rely on cars or guns is discarded in an opening scene between Cole and his best friend as they discuss why Cole can't drive cars or use guns. What Cole can do, though, is fire controlled bolts of electricity (or a long-range, very precise bolt), "sticky bombs" of electric energy, an electric cannon ball projectile, arc lightning, summon a huge roving thunder bolt capable of destroying everything in its path, and a couple other abilities along those lines. Sucker Punch clearly thought very carefully about their super hero and what he could and could not do and the result is a game that so thoroughly engrosses itself in its premise that, if nothing else, the result is truly impressive.
  
When a player opens Infamous' ability sheet for the first time, there is a horizontal list of all abilities along the top of the screen (though most are a mystery, as they get unlocked with progression through the story). There are, maybe, a dozen high-level abilities available to the player throughout the game. About three-fourths of these abilities can "level-up" to become more damaging, be more grandiose to execute, or offer new side-effects entirely. Each ability, though, has an entire section of gameplay designed around it when the player first unlocks it. The ability-unlocked section is a bit formulaic taken within the scope of the entire game (as it is executed in roughly the same fashion a handful of times throughout the game), but the purpose of each segment is to both familiarize the player with the basic operations of the new power along with some "advanced uses" before throwing the player into the game proper with it. This section also, though, allows the player to truly integrate the power into his existing play-style; this quickly breeds both familiarity and character.
Prototype doesn't have quite the same focus of intent. Alex Mercer is a character that appears to be the result of a biological experiment gone wrong and has the following abilities:- The ability to run and jump up buildings as if they're a typical ground plane.
- Automatically-executing parkour when sprinting.
- A gliding ability, charged high jumps, and a limited number of air-dashes.
- An ability to consume people and take their knowledge/skills.
- The ability to take the form of any person that he consumes.
- The ability to transform his arms into claws, whips, huge muscular arms, wrecking ball arms, or a giant blade.
- Access to devastator abilities which, essentially, create a block-wide genocide via sharp thorns.
- A host of melee moves and throws.
- A host of air moves like karate kicks (which can take down helicopters) and elbow drops (which can take out tanks).
- An ability to generate a shield or transform his body into a layer of armor.
- Special vision modes to determining body heat.
- The ability to pilot APCs, tanks, and helicopters.
- The ability to karate kick a pedestrian and use their dying body as a "surf board" for approximately two seconds.
- He can use any weapon -- be it an assault rifle, machine gun, grenade launcher, or rocket launcher -- that the military uses.
Alex Mercer has just a few abilities. The arsenal of powers and moves gets absurd to the point of the game assigning certain abilities to a simultaneous press of the left and right face buttons at the same time. This is, as far as I can think of, one of the most uncomfortable and error-prone button combinations imaginable for the Xbox 360 controller and, yet, it's just one of a few dozen combinations that are meant to be employed in the incredibly fast-paced combat environment that Prototype promotes. A combat encounter with a human enemy lasts anywhere from an instantaneous explosion of gore to about one second (the execution of one ability).
  
Prototype's problem isn't simply a case of "too much." It's a case of too much, too unnecessary, and too unfocused. This is a game about what is, essentially, a super hero. Why should a player that can karate-kick a helicopter ever need to actually pilot a helicopter? Every move being a charge-able attack is nice for consistency, but almost always unnecessary and flow-breaking. The need for melee combat is minimal after the first half-hour of the game and, consequently, the introduction of a handful of melee abilities alongside abilities which enhance the player's new, devastating arm-blade is confusing. This all results in an enormous libraries of special abilities which seem to want to flesh out individual combat scenarios like Bungie's "30 Seconds of Fun" but, instead, are too scattered and quick to provide players with any real opportunity for the kind of experimentation such an array of abilities and encounters necessitates.
As would be expected, each game handles its approach to civilians/cityscape and a player's interaction with each game's primary narrative differently. Prototype's story is, essentially, about a man who woke up with strange powers one day and is hell-bent on figuring out who was involved, why whatever happened had to happen to him, and what he could do to stop those involved. The story progresses through Alex Mercer's "consumption" of key figures in the conspiracy -- mapped to an interface element called the "Web of Intrigue" -- and getting that person's interpretation or perspective on relevant current events. The player has no agency in the progression of Prototype's narrative and, on top of that, Radical Entertainment focuses pretty heavily throughout the game on this story. The first hour of the game is constantly interrupted by a series of three-five minute cut scenes which jump back-and-forth between disparate events in the game's time line. This is all compounded by what seems to be the most angry, humorless, impatient, and generally unlikable protagonist that I've seen in a video game in years (but he's right at home in Prototype's equally melodramatic, humorless, and angry universe).
The primary theme that runs through Infamous is how the introduction of super-powers into the life of a normal guy, Cole McGrath, affects his outlook on the city and the goals of his future actions. The game is constantly throwing ethical choices at the player that shape the progression of the entire game's atmosphere and high-and-low level narrative. The ethical choices are often silly in their extreme polarity ("do I make dozens of people suffer or have a bit of tar splash in my face"), but the changes in both atmosphere and game mechanics are fantastic. A good Cole will run through the streets and have people snapping pictures of him with their cell phones and talking on their phones to friends saying how crazy it is to see Cole just walking through the streets. A bad Cole will inspire people to run away, throw rocks at him, and so forth. Players can inform their morality progression by blowing innocent civilians up, using civilians as a source for health/energy, healing the sick that adorn the streets, or other various actions throughout the game. There is no real point to ever going good sometimes and bad other times as the game rewards players who go pure evil or pure good, and each path has a surprisingly different play style as players customize their powers. An evil Cole will have far more explosive, bombastic interpretations of the same powers (save one pair of alignment-exclusive powers) as a Good Cole's more subtle, stasis-based versions of those powers.
  
There are never penalties or anything for harming massive amounts of civilians in either Prototype or Infamous (though all actions have a morality impact in Infamous), but Infamous does one thing that Prototype does not: infuse civilians with personality. In my Good Cole play-through of Infamous, I actually started feeling somewhat bad whenever I accidentally killed/hurt a civilian. For reasons I can't explain, I actually found myself doing penance by running up-and-down streets healing sick people whenever I accidentally killed a group of people with my highly-volatile powers. This is largely due to the effort the game goes through to frame the after-math of the disaster that occurs in the introduction along with the random interactions with civilians that play-out while exploring the city.
In Prototype, there is a mission where you have to drive through the city in a tank. While a player is in this tank, it's impossible to do anything but run over hundreds (yes, hundreds) of innocent civilians and at no point does the game indicate to players that they may be doing something terrible. And, for the most part, the game rarely makes any effort to frame the struggles of a civilian amidst major government and military intervention into a city where an infected group of monsters are tearing through the streets. A civilian in Prototype is nothing more than a tool for the player to consume for a 2-5% boost in health. Due to Prototype's focus on narrative over Infamous, the resulting game for me was playing as an angry, unlikable protagonist fighting for himself with little-to-no care for those around him against an enemy whose portrayal seems to want to invoke both the Nazis and Blackwater at once.
Where Prototype missteps, it feels like Infamous succeeds. Infamous is a much more enjoyable than I would have ever imagined going in. It starts off as an exploration-focused open-world game where players are encouraged to experiment and as it gets further along its narrative progression and the player's ability library expands and his mastery with his powers improves, it smartly becomes more of an action game centered around large encounters. It's a testament to Sucker Punch that each of the game's abilities was unique and useful without ever muddying up the game's central control scheme; every button has a definite and consistent use. Infamous' greatest quality is the focus of its application of the game's central premise, an electrically-charged super hero, to every aspect of the gameplay and game world. It's a pretty stark comparison to the jack-of-all-trades approach that Prototype took, and Infamous is a better game for it.
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| Opportunity | 
Posted - 6/4/2009 10:09:19 PM | When I was finishing up what ended up being my second-to-last semester at the University of Michigan, I knew I was going to be a High School English teacher. That was my goal. The forthcoming summer was the first summer since my freshman year that I didn't have to take two terms of summer classes. Since I was already pretty massively in student loan debt, I figured I'd a get job for the summer. The summer after my freshman year, I was scheduled to take an internship as a game developer at Stardock Entertainment but could not accept the job due to a lack of a car of my own (and no money to get one). I ended up working as a game journalist while also doing programming for the University of Michigan's Space Research department. Luckily, though, I was still in contact with friends at Stardock and we ended up organizing an internship for that summer after my senior year.
Now, two years and a few months later, I'm leaving Stardock Entertainment and following a superb opportunity to work as a Game Designer with LightBox Interactive. LightBox is composed of a large portion of members of Incognito Entertainment who, most recently, released the superb Warhawk. And Warhawk is a game that, to a large extent, was the reason I bought a Playstation 3 in the first place. Every single person I've met and talked to at LightBox has been incredibly friendly and amazingly knowledgeable in regards to their work. To say I'm excited about starting there is a bit of an understatement.
One of the unique aspects about taking this job is the opportunity to live in Salt Lake City, where LightBox is currently located, for the next two and a half months and then move to Austin with the rest of the studio to settle down. I have lived in Michigan all my life, so while the move may be sort a sort of logistical nightmare, I'm eagerly anticipating the fact that I get to check out Salt Lake City -- which is gorgeous from what I saw when I was flown out for my inteview -- and then head to Austin just a couple months later. And I'm sure my ferocious tiger cat will enjoy the road trips to each place. I've lived in the Ann Arbor/Detroit area since I came to the University of Michigan six-ish years ago (and have lived all around Michigan before that), so the geographic change alone seems like it will be pretty amazing.
Most importantly for me, I'm incredibly excited to start working in the capacity of a Game Designer as it's a change I've been wanting to make some time. Game design has always been one of my primary interests in the game industry and after working for the last couple of years in a programming-focused position, I'm pretty psyched to get to work in a more creative capacity that more directly impacts the gameplay experience that players engage in. And one of the things that stood out to me about LightBox was the breadth of knowledge and clear passion for games and game design that LightBox's Lead Game Designer, Josh Sutphin, conveyed in my phone interview with him. Which is a good thing because, as anyone who has read this site is aware, I like video games and game design a little bit.
I have had a pretty great time these last couple of years at Stardock. Since I've been here I've worked on The Political Machine 2008, contributed some work to Galactic Civilizations 2: Twilight of the Arnor and Demigod, and put a lot of time, work, and love into Elemental: War of Magic. I have met some truly great people and worked alongside some crazy intelligent developers in the process, and I'm extremely thankful for the opportunity to work here. Had Stardock's Vice President not suggested that I take an internship here way back in January 2007, I would probably be an English teacher right now.
So, I have about three and a half work days left at Stardock. And as I go through my final week in Michigan for the foreseeable future, it's really strange to be making such a major change. I'm packing a small amount of absolute necessities for the temporary stay in Salt Lake City (so, you know, clothes, consoles, computer, cat) and "looking forward to" what is probably a twenty-four hour drive spread over three days across one giant freeway through the middle of the country.
And, yeah: crazy excited.
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| Magnetic Butterfly Progress | |
Posted - 5/21/2009 8:34:59 PM | After I finished up with the second gameplay section of my Call of Duty 4 level, I decided that Magnetic Butterfly would probably only take a few more weeks of work to get to a decent place. I don't intend to finish it during this development sprint, but my goal is to work on most of its gameplay mechanics and systems and get the game, as a whole, to a relatively feature-complete state where most of the rest of the work will lie in making some new assets -- since most of the game is place-holder right now -- and tweaking various object properties and physics.
As it stands right now I have the proper game flow in the game and working (main menu to game to game over back to main menu), the player can die when the life bar runs out, enemies will damage the player, point spheres will damage the player, and there is a pretty basic score-keeping and combo/multiplier system in place. At this point, the work on the game is a matter of finishing various systems, polishing others, and fixing various physics bugs that are cropping up after a player dies or a new game is started. I'm currently focusing on two primary features right now, one of which is the feedback that the player experiences when he/she is hit and when he/she uses the wrecking ball on any one of the game entities. There is the purely kinetic feedback that the player can see whenever a collision occurs, but that's not really enough. Despite it kind of doing against the more minimalist style that I've been aiming for thus far, I'm currently just tossing in some particle sprays that will emit from the point of a collision and then collide with the world geometry over the course of five-to-ten seconds. I really am digging the the look of these particle sprays as they collide with the arena plane and persist for a few seconds. When I was brainstorming some of the visual styles for Magnetic Butterfly, I really was aspiring to have something akin to the flow and tranquility that Flower presents through the game's beautiful grassland; the combination of flowing grass blades and simplistic particle sprites was gorgeous. It just wasn't something that fit in with the scope of this game's development, but the feedback particles that will persist for about ten seconds really remind me of that early goal.
  
As of right now, one of each type of enemy is being spawned into the game arena when a new game starts, but no more will be spawned in. The other focus right now is getting in the enemy spawning and gameplay segment "rating." There are four enemies: anger, envy, sadness, and sloth. Anger is a fast-moving enemy that is focused on attacking the player. Envy attempts to knock the point spheres out of the arena on its own. Sadness slowly moves around with no real goal in mind. Sloth just... Well, it sits still.
A session of Magnetic Butterfly is designed to last for a finite amount of time (this is not in yet either as I'm waiting on my friend to do the musical track for it), so in that mindset I'm splitting the gameplay into discrete sections. The player is rated on their performance for each section and the number and type of enemies that spawn are entirely dependent on that player performance. If a player does a great job for a given section, then anger and envy enemies will be prevalent. If a player does poorly, the sloth will spawn. If a player falls off the edge a lot, sadness will spawn. This may be an unnecessary design, but it's one I grew kind of attached to during the early phases of the game and am looking forward to getting into the game to see how it plays out. The player's performance will be displayed as a histogram in the "Game Over" screen (or, maybe, somewhere in the main game UI but I'm doubting that).
One of the aspects of the game that I'm constantly tweaking and rewriting are the core player movement mechanics. The concept of the game is a butterfly attached to a giant wrecking ball, so some degree of unwieldiness is to be expected, but I don't want the game to suffer as a result of this mechanic. My best estimate as to how to do this is to make the manipulation of the butterfly itself pretty simple and responsive and to lay the burden of difficulties on getting the ball rolling (so to speak); once the ball is moving along with a decent force, the magnetism should be able to ease the player input significantly. The biggest problem with this whole situation right now is the tail that connects the butterfly to the ball; it's either too stiff and inhibits player movement or its too loose and stretches like a weak rubber-band.
Anyway, I'm constantly updating the publicly-available build of the game, so feel free to try it by clicking the link below. Any feedback is appreciated. There should actually be a proper site for Magnetic Butterfly going up at some point in the next few weeks too, so that's rad.
Play Magnetic Butterfly!
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| Early "Escape" | |
Posted - 5/5/2009 12:29:42 PM | Over the course of the last month I've been juggling a few projects, one of which is Magnetic Butterfly which I have already discussed a bit (and isn't my primary project for the time being). I have also been working as a designer and consultant on an as-of-yet unannounced iPhone game that, hopefully, I can talk more about a bit later.
My primary project lately has been the design and implementation of a mission for Call of Duty 4. The mission is called "Escape" and it places the player in the position of waking up in a holding cell within an enemy-controlled building. The door to the cell has been left open and a silenced USP pistol has been left on the dresser. From there on out, the player simply has to escape the city as a war wages around him. Once I got comfortable with the development tools and realized what kind of scope I wanted to shoot for, I drew up a basic level sketch in SketchUp:
 
When I started working on the mission, I knew I wanted the first gameplay segment to be a sort of "stealth" segment; the player is unexpectedly let loose in an enemy-held building, so it made sense to allow him the element of surprise. Once the player passed through the two stories of this building into the streets of the city, then the mission would get more intense pretty quickly (especially as a siren will ring out once the player makes it out into the open or makes too much noise escaping the building). At this point, the player's progression through the city uses a large communications tower as a visual anchor amidst the cityscape. The assumption for getting to the communications tower, in this case, is that the player was part of squad of soldiers tasked with taking the communications building and that getting there was his best course of action.
Coming off of a bunch of level work with Unreal Tournament 3 (I released an alpha of DM-Artifact a couple weeks ago), I was looking forward to getting used to a game toolset that was geared towards single-player design. I loved Call of Duty 4 something fierce, so when I first found out that Infinity Ward released the game SDK (allowing for map-making with CoD4Radiant and scripting) I was kind of confused as to why I haven't heard anything about people utilizing it for single-player mission and levels and such. I figured there wasn't much of an interest in making custom single-player content for PC games outside of Epic's crazy mod community. And, while that may be a great deal of it, the main problem with the Call of Duty 4/5 toolset -- coming from a crazy amount of resources with Unreal Editor 3 and its amazing community -- is the lack of much documentation or a community presence. The Infinity Ward Wiki was a good resource for about an hour's worth of introductory material (with no screen shots, which were pretty heavily relied on by the text), its scripting resources as far as single-player AI, enemy spawning, and so on are non-existent. A few days later I found Treyarch's Wiki for creating content and missions for Call of Duty: World at War which, thankfully, shared a lot of the same principles and ideas as Call of Duty 4. Unfortunately, though, while important topics such as color groups are covered, the reinforcing of color groups is left with an incredibly mean tease.
And to compare scripting in UnrealEd versus scripting with Call of Duty 4 (granted, one makes a light bulb flicker and the other is guiding the entire flow of a level, but let's not split hairs here):
 
Despite all that, though, I really enjoy working with the Call of Duty 4 toolset once I'm able to put some facts and processes together on my own. And I manged to get some surprisingly decent work done on the first two legs of gameplay in "Escape." The Call of Duty 4 desktop screen shot on the right (above) actually shows the level as it exists in the editor now, and here are some stills. As a note, I am focusing on general design and shelling of the level right now so while there are objects in these rooms, they are all objects relating to gameplay. I won't make a proper detailing pass of the level until I have the whole thing "finished" as far as its gameplay is concerned. This is a verbose way of saying that things are kind of ugly right now.
   
And here's a bit of gameplay footage from the first few minutes of "Escape" (which I couldn't seem to embed into this entry): CoD4 Escape - First Two Gameplay Segments.
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| Challenge in Games: Everyone Hates Nathan | |
Posted - 4/13/2009 1:50:18 PM | Resistance 2 is a first-person shooter which doesn't seem to understand what era it was released in. There are moments in the game where a player, in the role of Nathan Hale, is walking through a forest, the screen will shake and some loud footsteps will occur for about a second, and then an enemy will break out of his camouflaged state and deal one brutal swipe to the player, killing him instantly. There are platforming segments where falling in the water (water that can be swam in) will result in instant death due to an invincible alien dolphin that eats players. Worse than all of this, though, are the numerous combat encounters where the game will attempt to constantly "raise the stakes" by throwing more and more varied enemies at the player at once in a large set-piece battle. One big, bad, challenging spider robot was done an act earlier, so now the player will be tasked with killing three big, bad, challenging spider robots all whilst killing the various grunt enemies that litter the battlefield. Once spider robots one and two are down and the rocket ammunition is gone, then the final spider robot must be killed while swatting off drones that hover around the "safe area" that seem to do more damage than most of the other enemies in the game. There may or may not also be aliens using a weapon that can shoot through walls, making any cover from the spider robots and the dozen drones useless.
There has always been a fine balance in gaming and game design between challenge and frustration. As game designers, we want our players to constantly feel like their personal level of expertise within the confines of a given game or genre is always put to the test without allowing the player to fail that test (or at least to fail it often). If a player is playing a game as intended and isn't missing some fundamental gameplay principle or mechanic, we don't want to frustrate that player for playing the game as intended. The ideal scenario is that we want to challenge gamers, not frustrate them.
Challenge is a term that the gaming and game development collective all use and practice, but is theoretically relegated to some nebulous understanding. Challenge is the intentional introduction of gameplay forces that work against player progress as a means of encouraging skill growth or adding meaning to player achievement. If challenge is thought of as a force that impedes player progress for purposes that are beneficial to the player, then a primary reason would be enforcing a certain skill requirement that forces players to either learn new mechanics or think of new strategies of play. Designers don't want players to necessarily feel like they're better or smarter than the game at all times, or else we're ruining a player's sense of interest or accomplishment by constantly diminishing the meaning of their actions. And since challenge is the intentional introduction of frictional forces between play and progress, frustration can be a byproduct of the unintentional or undesired application of challenge elements into a game.
In Resistance 2, the player's progress through the game is marked by increasingly more "epic" set-piece battles where the game attempts to out-do its earlier efforts. This boils down to there being more and more varied enemies in a given battle that generally takes place in an increasingly large arena of battle. This is not in and of itself a problem for the player; in fact, it's generally an accepted method of progression to task the player with increasingly more dangerous and difficult scenarios as he makes his way through the game. The main issue with Resistance 2 that makes these set-piece battles is that enemy awareness for the player's presence completely defies expectations in its sensitivity and focus. When a player enters a major battlefield passively or peacefully in an attempt to get to cover before taking major action then his perceivable consequence would be one where all battlefield actors continue what they were doing when the player entered the arena -- if an enemy was attempting to kill one specific allied unit, that enemy would continue to engage in this activity. When a large quantity of enemies actively appear (because appearance is what matters, if a player does not and cannot know the reasoning for an action then it is irrelevant) to break off their current activities in order to target the player, the game instantly becomes an consequence-defying experience.
Theoretically, the distinction between challenge and frustration is pretty clear: challenge is good, frustration is bad. Practically, the difference between the two concepts is anything but pronounced and can either be a result of poor balancing and design or simply a player who has an unexpected style of play that the game is unable to course-correct. In the case of Resistance 2, the frustration comes out of a game which relies on cheap enemy tactics to unnecessarily supplement the intrinsic difficulty of the scenarios that the game supplies.
Do games still need need to be difficult? A great deal of the up and coming game developers and designers, myself included, are of the mindset that the games we all grew up playing are more intentionally challenging than a majority of current games. This is kind of a straw man in and of itself solely due to the fact that anyone who was around to play the games ten or twenty years ago has undoubtedly increased their gaming skills over ten to twenty years of playing games. Though, with that said, there is a still a truth the claim: older games were harder, but not necessarily because they were more challenging. Take the beginning of Super Mario Bros., the NES original, as an example. The very first few seconds of the game charge the player with bypassing a goomba enemy. Within the scope of the game, this event requires the most trivial of actions by the player, but if, for whatever reason, a given player was having a hard time bypassing this enemy and died three times, then the game was over. If the player died twice and had one left, then that player's progress through the rest of the game is going to be more difficult than a player who progresses past that first goomba with all three lives. Should the game be challenging because one player didn't know the necessary gameplay mechanics and lost one of his starting three lives in learning that he has to jump over or stomp on the goomba to pass a certain area?
The concept of giving a player a finite number of "lives" with which to progress through a game has gone by the wayside for genres of games that don't intend to thrive on a sense of retro gaming or nostalgia as part of their appeal. In general, this is for the best. Arbitrarily limiting a player's attempts at gameplay progression (a concept born out of coin-operated arcade machines) is a design ideology that is no longer required to challenge players and, instead, simply frustrates players. Games that requires players to manage lives, eventually, caused players to continually abandon their progress through a game because they could get past a leg of gameplay without losing one of those finite lives that would come in handy later in the game. If we're making a game that aims to challenge players, this is not behavior that we want to have challenged. We want to challenge a player's skill at the game, not their ability to perfect an early leg in the game so that they had more attempts at later levels or bosses.
A lot of games are attempting redefine the way in which players are challenged. Far Cry 2 encourages player experimentation amidst challenging scenarios by offering the player an in-game buffer through a mechanic that allows a player's "buddy" to rescue him/her when on the brink of death (thus eliminating the player's need to reload or restart from a checkpoint). The recent Prince of Persia game eliminates death entirely and the challenge in the game comes from performing a series of gameplay elements more fluidly. Fable 2 allows players to die but instantly resurrects them, creating, as Jonathan Blow coined it, faux-challenge. Flower makes a player's actions important and meaningful purely through the way the player reacts to the game world and the sense of flow that is earned through skillful gathering of flower petals; the game does not even provide the player with a failure state.
Challenge is not a bad quality of games, but it's given the success that the aforementioned recent games have had at changing player perception of challenge it is not a quality that all must possess. The worst way to foster player creativity and experimentation in games is to actively work to punish them when they go off-script. There is no reason that games should attempt to limit a player's ability to progress simply because that's how designers and players are trained to think of games. By rethinking the way that games challenge gamer skill, new attempts at making a player's interactions with their games meaningful can arise.
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The entries in this journal have all been posted, along with many more, at mittens' personal site at www.polycat.net.
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