...looting every garbage pail and back alley in search of a tiny little bit of collectible thingy? That's a little...odd, isn't it?

I'd almost think you're one of TotalBiscuit's handles right now lol. I was watching his "WTF is... Tomb Raider" video on Youtube, where he addressed the exact same thing as you do now. I have to agree, it looks really odd when you're called upon to do a bunch of completely unrelated tasks that will do nothing but reward you with a completely useless item.

At least they could have the decency to make the items useful in some sense or another. I remember back in GTA San Andreas, there were essentially 4 different collectibles you could get. If you managed to get them all, some in-game permanent bonus would occur. The collectibles included spraying turf tags, collecting horseshoes and oysters, and taking photos of Photo Ops. The tags and photo ops made sense with regards to the plot of Los Santos and the city style of San Fierro, respectively. As for the oysters and horseshoes, they didn't make the same sense but, in order to collect them, the player needed to be smart and take advantage of various game mechanics such as the Jetpack flying and other things.

There's been a couple misconceptions I'de like to clear up. Procedural rhetoric refers to the procedures that a player performs within the game, and the things that the developer conveys with them about how reality operates or should operate.

Such as learning that stealing everything that isn't nailed down is a customary and normal behavior in most RPGs. Or going from place to place killing anything that moves. Or that your boss will betray you and turn out to be a villain.

The other misconception is about what is being designed. Several arguments have been put forth that living a purely reactionary life, merely responding to the immediate environment, is a personal choice or preference. The perception that this behavior is chosen or preferred is entirely because of experience. And guess where that experience comes from? It comes from games designed to promote that behavior. Game design is at it's core about designing human behavior and interactions.

I've been asked to give more specific examples, so let's look at the 4x space game genre. Most of them will let you design a ship, but none of them will let you choose a sane destination. For example, Endless Space only gives you a limited set of destinations, and your research on what type of planet to colonize will be started before arriving, without knowing what to choose. Some suggestion as to star color is given, but the probabilities don't reflect enough knowledge to make it actionable.

Or let's look at the FPS genre. Stumbling across supplies just randomly scattered about. Don't fret, you'll get all you need for free when you need it, with no significant effort on your part. Rather a strange behavior to ingrain into people, wouldn't you agree? Or how about the business of turning players into scavengers, looting every garbage pail and back alley in search of a tiny little bit of supplies and collectible shiny,. That's a little...odd, isn't it?

Or let's look at the RPG genre. A is generically better than B is better than C. It lacks the very basics of what constitutes a 2-player game: Taking into account the disposition of the opponant.

It's probably just me, but this seems radically different than your initial post and doesn't address preparation so much as game design and technological limitations.

In your RPG example, stealing everything that isn't nailed down is preparation. You don't know what you'll need, and so you allocate your money to the things you're pretty sure you will need. Stealing everything is how you hedge against an incorrect prediction, and also how you get some special items. Whether you choose to engage in constant larceny is up to you, but it's never a "prank" played on the player.

Your other clarification seems to me to be a complaint about limitations on game design, which also strikes me as an interesting topic to discuss. I disagree that game design is at its core about human interactions. Although the types of games I prefer do try to simulate this, Tetris is still a game. And one which amply rewards preparation and foresightedness while brutally punishing failure to do so.

Games aren't deep enough to model complex systems completely enough to fool the average player into thinking that game mechanics are not, at their base, the Blue Door requires the Blue Key to unlock. How would I take into account the disposition of my opponent when I know that there are data representations of my goal and my tools, and that the possible components of those representations are finite?

I would agree that games in general have settled into a groups of connected behavior patterns (I really enjoyed this article on the subject) and that players become good at genres more than games. This reinforces design approaches which favor serving things up (the ammo restock right before a boss fight, for example) regardless of other game mechanics. This definitely reduces variety, but it isn't any less realistic than using dice to decide which army wins in Risk. Games aren't reality simulators. If you expect a game to faithfully teach you behaviors that are appropriate and effective in the real world I think you're looking at the wrong hobby. When I want to do something realistic and responsible, I'll do my taxes. When I want to be a demigod who vaporizes all challengers I'll play a video game, even if it requires simulated picking through simulated dumpsters.

Your examples don't match (my interpretation of) your point, which, as above, is probably a failure on my part. In a 4x game (I haven't played Endless Space, but am a huge fan of the genre) I can't imagine sending a colony ship to a planet without scouting the sector first. I prepare by first knowing what information matters (what makes one planet better than another?) and then investing my resources so that I can collect that information (build a scout, send it out). If I have to research new technology to make a planet desireable then it would be good preparation to wait until I know what planets are around before doing any such research. If the particular design of ES inherently prevents you from gaining information before committing your resources, then that's really bad design. But that would be the only example I know of in the 4x space which has such a badly designed system.

In an FPS, I agree with you. The design approach for the entire genre has de-emphasized preparation down to virtually nothing in favor of allowing players to respond "in the moment", with previous successes or failures making little difference.

It would not surprise me if I'm still not addressing your point. But it seems to me that your concern is about games relying on arbitrary conventions and being too easy if you already know the tropes and indecipherable if you don't.

If you are complaining of unrealistic games, well, a game where the character is a dragon or a single soldier is the decisive factor in winning World War II (or any conflict) is inherently unrealistic whether there are health packs and reams of bullets around or not.

Just a quick note to those disgruntled by my use of the terms Free Will and Freedom of Choice: Consider this: If a movie makes you laugh or cry, does it offend you that someone else made you feel that way? If you play a game of hop-scotch, is it a problem that someone else invented the rules?

I'm a scientist; and my outlook on those matters is eloquently detailed by Sam Harris in this video

If disasters happen, I'm accountable for the damages caused, and so it's in my best interest to minimize those damages by invest my fat stacks of insurance premiums into countermeasures, so that the event won't break the bank. It would encourage me, as a player, to build safeguards into my design.

Exactly, and a well designed behavior!

...looting every garbage pail and back alley in search of a tiny little bit of collectible thingy? That's a little...odd, isn't it?

I was watching [totalBiscuit's] "WTF is... Tomb Raider" video on Youtube, where he addressed the exact same thing as you do now.

And it goes even deeper than at first it might seem. I've seen walkthrough videos where the player is fully aware of the proper and best course to take, and automatically chooses to select every possible incorrect path first, "just in case." It can come across like some variant of gambler's disease.

In my previous post, I gave several examples of systems of interaction that discourage planning. 4x games imposing a gamble mechanic on the destination of ships. FPS games hand-holding the player with free supplies that might as well not be in the game at all. RPGs presenting systems of itemization that can be characterized as bigger is better, with no specific opponent in mind.

I've seen walkthrough videos where the player is fully aware of the proper and best course to take, and automatically chooses to select every possible incorrect path first, "just in case." It can come across like some variant of gambler's disease.

Haha, boy can I recognize myself in that. It's not gambler's disease, it's just the feeling of completion that a lot of people have. The consequence of wanting to complete an overall objective can result in excessive gaming and, potentially, gambler's addiction. That's why I feel that developers need to take responsibility for their games and maybe have some laws rammed down their throats, because they're sometimes creating addicts that didn't already exist by exploiting human nature and psychology. Similar to how McDonalds exploit our instinctual desire for sugars and fat.

In their defence, however, I think they're just trying to promote the sense of exploration. Somewhat ignorantly and I agree that it doesn't feel right. I think one reason is that you can't go back once you've moved on. Like on Dead Space 3, I've missed a lot of the progression because of this. If I wanna correct that, I'll need to restart the game (afaik). Now I'm not going to, but others might and I know I would a year ago.

I think you're onto something, but I'm not sure if I'd do things exactly the same way. But that's alright, we do things our own way and hopefully it'll pan out.

Haha, boy can I recognize myself in that. It's not gambler's disease, it's just the feeling of completion that a lot of people have.

My roommate plays like that - he will backtrack down every path, to break every vase in the entire game world. Whether or not there is any actual reward to doing so.

As a person who games solely for the story/progression, I find it incredibly painful to watch.

In their defence, however, I think they're just trying to promote the sense of exploration. Somewhat ignorantly and I agree that it doesn't feel right. I think one reason is that you can't go back once you've moved on. Like on Dead Space 3, I've missed a lot of the progression because of this. If I wanna correct that, I'll need to restart the game (afaik). Now I'm not going to, but others might and I know I would a year ago.

Another possible reason that such systems continue to exist in games today might relate to the artists who do the work of level design. They spend a bunch of time and energy crafting every nook and cranny of a game world, and there could be an impulse to give the player reason to visit their work.

King's Field (possibly my absolutely favorite game), rewards you for sliding along walls and interacting with every segment of the wall, hoping there was a hidden panel with an item in it. I didn't particularly like that (it was somewhat tedious), but they did reward you with good items frequently enough to make you keep doing it. I would rather secret areas be hidden behind paintings or bookcases or activated by secret switches, rather than randomly clicking on walls.

The addictive gambling element might come from the history of video games as coin operated arcades, where the main goal was to get the player to continue inserting coins. So research into behavior and gambling resulted in the discovery that people are more likely to continue pressing the button if they feel there is a chance of reward with each press. Whereas if they are rewarded at specific intervals, such as the way most level-up progressions work, players are much less likely to continue pressing the button after being rewarded, because they know the next reward is much farther down the line. Another way to put it is that it's not as much fun to continue playing immediately after receiving a major level-up.

The online browser rpg Tynon handles this by providing the player with a myriad of different ways to level up your avatar, so that there's almost always something to shoot for that's just a few minutes down the road.

Many games have no place for deliberate preparedness efforts because disasters simply don't happen: it is an essential feature, not a moral choice.

For example, Street Fighter II characters are not attacked by monkeys or snakes in the Blanka jungle stage, they don't slip on wet tiles in the E. Honda public bath stage, they aren't hit by beer bottles in the Zangief ring stage, they don't need to avoid hurting a pedestrian or dodge a car in the Las Vegas street stage; yet the game doesn't appear unrealistic, because the player simply assumes the extreme safety of the environment as a necessary premise for fairness and simplicity, letting fighting moves and positioning be the only focus of the game.

Adding random hazards to a fighting game like Street Fighter II would make it worse, reducing planning because of the increase of randomness and (much worse) making the game unfair (the fighter who suffers less random accidents wins).
On the other hand, adding fair and predictable hazards (like falling from the edge of the ring or stepping on a spike) might be an interesting variation of the game's strategy (or an annoying complication) but it would be a very superficial change that doesn't introduce any sort of "preparedness", only some new types of mistakes to avoid and opportunities to exploit.

The same problems with the bad randomness of disasters making games shallow and/or unfair are shared by most genres; foresight to prepare for the worst is very hard to reward as an attitude or a strategy without turning it into a difficult task like any other. Consider a FEMA simulator in which you have a few years to prepare New Orleans for hurricane Katrina, then you run the actual emergency. Without a randomly generated disaster and/or a randomly generated city each time the player would learn an optimal walkthrough, not the principles of simulated hurricane preparation. Without resource constraints, there would be no meaningful challenge in planning. At this point we aren't far from a war game.

Adding random hazards to a ... game...

I remember Dustin Browder (Lead Developer, Starcraft 2) was talking about this in an interview once. Initially, he wanted to see Protoss Carriers and other units just fly apart as they got destroyed and there was even some talk about environmental effects to "add to the experience". Eventually, they decided that too much of this random stuff just wouldn't work, especially since an RTS is a game about calculated risk-reward and deep strategies that you expect to work. So while you can see environments and NPCs popping out here and there for the Single-player campaigns, there very little randomness in multiplayer.

I think this is one of those cases where an expectable core gameplay must be the thing that everything else revolves around and is dictated by. Random events are just annoying moreso than interesting.