Depending on the genre, I think the sweet spot is opt-in on-the-fly dynamic difficulty adjustments along with more traditional sliders. I hold the Forza games as one of the high points of gaming accessibility (insofar as the actual racing - the tiny fonts and cluttered menus could definitely do with visual accessibility options). But even with their incredible sliders and the rewind function, a godsend to someone like me who is legally blind, Forza Horizon 4 still makes some glaring difficulty errors. THis is particularly egregious with their Showcase events, which make heavy use of rubber banding to create (in theory) a more stimulating race. The reality is, though, with the difficulty sliders set to baby me, I'm often coming out of corners too slow at the last to theoretically win. It's still doable, but the precision needed to eke out a split-second victory is far sharper than if I actually had the difficulty set to not assist me with braking - which isn't viable for me since I can't see the corners. There are also events involving stunt racing that require you not to hit cars even once or else you have to start the whole thing over - and you're timed, so there's no lollygagging. It's maddening.
So then I propose this. More sliders, yes. Give us all the options to tinker with the difficulty on our own terms. Give us the "normal" and "hard" modes for those people who will invariably complain about the creative vision of the game (though how difficulty adjustment affects them I've yet to see a single good argument). But also implement dynamic difficulty with the option to opt out of it. And of course, playtest with people of as many backgrounds as you can. Get the dad gamer in there, the guy who doesn't have the time to master a game's complex combat systems and just wants to worship the sun. Get the hotheaded teenager who isn't happy with a game unless the difficulty is flaying the metaphorical skin from their bones. Get a sampling of people with disabilities, preferably with the realization that one person isn't going to define the spectrum of challenges the disabilities might entail (my blindness isn't your blindness, etc.). It's going to be a long process, to be sure, but thankfully games have been making huge leaps in this regard lately. The accessibility discussion (difficulty or physically) is working and someday we'll have these options down as pat as we do the current basic control schemes. We just have to go through the process of refinement.
I recognise the need you're talking about to approach any difficult "solution" with disabilities and diversity in mind. Especially, realising that range of disabilities. My current understanding is that most studios that are tackling accessibility tend to think of it with a very "call and response" attitude. E.g. The answer to blindness is a screen magnifier, the answer to deafness is to replicate audio input in the visual UI, when it's a lot more complicated than that. From what I gather, it's customisable systems, maybe a bit like Forza's approach to mechanics, that aid disabled players better than broad, one-size-fits-all solutions, but then I don't have a disability that affects how I interact with games. As always, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts, Sparky.
@sparky_buzzsaw: Yeah in my experience most driving games are bad at difficulty adjustments, at least for beginners. The reason why I do badly in racing games is because I fumble corners or crash into things, not because I can't accelerate fast enough. But more often than not, the only thing lowering difficulty does for AI drivers is lower their max speed. Unless they're capable of making the same kind of mistakes that human beginners make, they're playing a totally different game.
A game I noticed recently that does difficulty very badly is Spider-Man (2018). I was stuck at one of the optional missions, so lowered the difficulty and realized that it did jack squat. I got curious so I spent a couple hours experimenting, doing various missions and switching difficulty back and forth... The only difference I could tell was the amount of damage player inflicts/receives and that's it! There are so many different ways it could've done it, just off the top of my head: make stealth more forgiving, widen dodge/parry timing windows, reduce cooldowns, allow equipping multiple suit powers, make enemies slower (for chase missions), etc... but noooo, they just did the bare-minimum damage multiplier adjustments and called it a day. I doubt they even had people of different skill levels in QA.
Sometimes the low difficulty drives the car for you. For me, I want the challenge of driving more than the challenge of racing. So a lower AI setting but with assists off does me nicely.
And one thing I would've liked Pro Evolution Soccer to do was use sliders to tweak AI preferences. I play on Top Player but I've done all I can on that difficulty. Stepping up to Superstar feels like it's too tight. One goal normally wins matches and I really can't create that much.
I love both these comments. I think they really reflect the thing I'm trying to talk about with this essay where key elements of difficulty aren't modified by difficulty settings and where a more modular approach could help us find our difficulty sweet spot.
Love the write up! I actually just played it a few weeks ago and had very similar impressions. If the controls didn't suck ass I would have really liked it, but it feel so mediocre because of them. I really like the format (aside from polyerkitty) tho.
Thank you. I liked the chance to head back through the hotel performing different tasks, but I can see someone getting frustrated at Polterkitty grabbing their reward away from them at the last minute or making them repeat areas they've already beaten.
nitpick: for whatever reason it's called "Lara Croft GO" not "Tomb Raider GO" (AFAIK same name in all regions). For a second there I thought you were talking about a new entry in the series
Great article! It strikes up a lot of economical resonance, what with a heavier personal background in MMOs. Starts connecting up with other thoughts that are deeper subjects than the more overview coverage you've put forth. Also saw that there is a 2nd currency related post you've put up and about to dig in.
Thank you. There's definitely so much more to say about currencies in games than I've written here, but I hope this gives an accessible primer to some of the basic ideas behind monetary systems in games. If you want to read more on currencies in MMOs, this is one of my favourite pieces on it by Simon Ludgate, an ex-EA and Gameloft guy.
Thanks for writing this. I only managed about 45 minutes of The Division's demo before quitting in disgust. I felt it was crass, insensitive, gratuitous and shallow. This is a much better explanation for the source of those feelings than I could write for myself.
I didn't have the same feelings about The Division 2 though. I wonder why that is. EDIT: Except for the cutscenes, which were staggeringly, gratuitously unpleasant.
Thank you. Still not played The Division 2 yet, but I remember a fair bit of the controversy around it when it came out. I'm looking forward to see if it fares better than this one.
Great read, as much as I enjoy the gameplay of both Division games I was never able to stick with them because of all the underlying themes of the stories
Never forget that open carry was legal in that most liberal of states, California, until the Black Panther Party did it. The same people who love the right to bear arms get real scared when certain people exercise that right. See also: that picture of the Black man in Dallas who exercised his right to open carry and was immediately turned into a suspect on social media when police started getting shot. Yet, white folks who open carry are usually said to be "exercising their rights."
Tom Clancy is the sort of brand that single-tour Navy dads love. You know the type. Did their four years in peacetime, 30+ years ago, and never shut the fuck up about it. Have opinions about women in combat, simultaneously distrust "the government" while never actually criticizing the use of state violence.
Iraq, 2007: We did knock-and-searches on random houses. If there was no reason to suspect the people in a house, and no answer, we wouldn't force entry. We'd just move on to the next. I remember, after one such search where--as usual--we found nothing, I overheard a squad leader saying that we'd made an enemy that day. This guy wasn't a bleeding heart liberal. He just recognized that our actions made our job harder. Did we make an enemy of the man in that house? I don't know. But I bet he would've been less likely to volunteer information that might've helped us after that.
We had strict ROE. Do you know how fucking illegal it is to shoot a fleeing person in the back? It is literally a war crime. American police commit what would be considered war crimes if it occurred overseas. Now I see the weapons we used to occupy a foreign country turned to use against the people at home. You can't win hearts and minds through fear. We should've learned this lesson by now.
I absolutely agree on the double standards for rights. When white people have the capacity for violence, they call it liberty and self-protection. When black people have the capacity for violence, they call them thugs. What the police in the US get away with makes me shudder, but I don't think they're out to win hearts and minds. I think that was the PR rhetoric used to justify the wars of the 21st century and a liberal approach to modern policing, but the real goal isn't diplomacy, it's domination.
Not being from the US a lot themes in the Division go straight over my head.
Tom Clancy's stories are bonkers conspiracy theories started from a plausible base which is probably what makes them work for folks, but the Division is so outlandish I simply can't take it seriously. I know for some, the real world setting is hard to look past but its no different than Destiny for me.
Having played a lot of both games the setting is very much politically charged however its all pretty much window dressing, you'll spend most your time turning switches shooting waves of genric bad guys.
The main protagonist from the first game is one of you and in the second all the gangs have abilities from your tool kit and the main group is a private military company.
If anything New York is just a really cool setting with christmas at night the vast empty streets seeing and hearing the cleaners off in the distance, its probably is a highlight of last gen even though the setup is questionable.
I do really love the setting of The Division, but I think it would be wrong to read the politics as window dressing. The game's narrative and the design of the enemies frames what hunting down the enemies means in a political sense. The original Division does have this antagonist splinter faction, but it doesn't use that as a criticism of the Division as an agency or the practice of giving police military equipment and no regulations. It basically just boils down into there being a good military police and a bad military police; the difference being that the bad military police are explicit extortionists and the "good" military police are returning "order" largely by shooting enough rioters and ex-prisoners.
Amazing write-up. I've never played any of the Clancy games myself (mostly out of an indifference towards Ubisoft's catalogue), but I've still heard more than a few questionable things about them. Whether it was the recent mobile game clearly hearkening to black rights movements as the basis for it's shadowy, world-dominating riot-terrorist group, or talk of one of the Division games supposedly directly referencing Black Lives Matter with certain in-game targets, I can't say I'm shocked to hear that attitude is baked in as a core theme of the games' universe.
Extremely good write up, well researched to make your points. On some particulars, I didn't see things exactly as you did. But you put this together well.
What I will say is that in the main (and it is something I ought to think about) I have always avoided Tom Clancy games. I did play Rainbow 6, which involved basically shooting people of Mexican heritage. That experience soured on me, especially since it had been already also a tenet in my video game life to resist playing Military shooters. But that was a rule I broke several times, in terms of Tom Clancy. The other was playing the Division 2
In the Division 2, I cast myself as a citizen trying to preserve the established government. It helped that I thought I remembered some complaints that the Division 2, in it's trailers so to speak, hinted (obtusely) of being a defense against what could be rightest and dictatorial/authoritarian elements. But you can bend personal fantasy as what one suits. Especially if the game is fun to play.
Again, well done.
Thank you. I appreciate it. I still haven't played The Division 2, but I get the sense that a lot of the creative higher-ups at Ubisoft would like their games to function as a sort of political blank canvas that you bring your own beliefs and interpretations to. The problem is, I don't think there's such a thing as a neutral political choice in a game, and that when you believe there is, you just become blind to the ideological messages your games might be delivering. I did actually find The Division very fun to play, but I think the most generous political assessment you can make of it is that the studio didn't think about the implications of what it was developing.
@allthedinos: Thanks. It's been a while since I watched Insidious, but I do agree that overexplaining has been a negative trend in a lot of horror. Not to say you can't create a dark world with an elaborate fiction, but that's rarely the most disturbing world, and there's an abundance of explanation which undercuts the general tone of horror. It's often a side effect of sequelisation and trying to open up the genre to wider audiences. It's something you see a lot with Blumhouse's films.
I will say my interpretation of what happens at the end of Observation isn't based on anything explicit in the game, but the whole thing in framed in such an aesthetically dire tone, nothing about it feels positive. Very much appreciated your comment.
@earlessshrimp: That's a cool idea. Do you know what they were doing on the technical end to make those heatmaps? I remember back when Halo 3 was the latest Halo, Bungie publicly posted heatmaps so you could easily tell where you were more likely to encounter opponents, and that stuff was always fun to look at. It felt like you were getting an edge. This is more of a reaction to other player behaviour than a way to control randomisation though. RNG manipulation is always targeted and predicting behaviour of the software rather than the behaviour of people.
@rorie: Thanks Rorie. I didn't know that about Dino. I have a soft spot for the old Gamespot graphics. I believe he's working on visual design in film now.
@jdeano: Thanks. I think there are probably more ways you could adapt the diegetic UI of Dead Space than ways you could adapt the Nemesis system, but it's a specific niche.
@junkerman: Thanks. I think horror is generally a bit of a niche in media and the way it usually hits the mainstream is with some more middle of the road genre tropes thrown in. That's definitely the way it went for Dead Space which was an action game as much as a horror game and used third-person shooter mechanics particularly popular at the time. It was basically the last big new horror series before horror games hit an era more about evasion than action with titles like Amnesia and Outlast.
If I liked the monotony of churning out trite works of art and found it enjoyable to role-play as a high-art postmodernist trying to bill every scribble as an otherworldly escape to enlightenment to the masses, am I a bad person?
No. Most of the reasons you're a bad person have to do with anime.
"I have a lot of ... ideas where they come into my head so fully-formed that I can't imagine spending several months on it and keeping the excitement up."
Brilliantly worded. I am glad I am not the only one.
Totally. One thing I really like about the game is that it facilitates working on ideas in a way that can't spiral out into a huge project. The tools are simple enough that you'll ever be able to spend a lot of time working up a really detailed image, and once a task is done it's done. You can't go back to it.
gamer_152's comments