Culture Clash

(May 2007)

Brain Training

At one point during a game of STALKER (which I'm pleased to say turned out way better than I expected it to), I was instructed to escape the facility via the secret passage. But there was a really scary monster lurking near the passage in question; a monster so scary, in fact, that I preferred to just live in the facility forever rather than approach him.

If this happened to me in the real world, I'd just find another way out. A window or a fire exit or something. In reality it's easy to invent alternative solutions to straightforward problems like escape the facility. Even if you're supposed to do it via the secret passage it might be possible to trick the monster into prowling off somewhere else so you can slink by; but an alternative route would probably be best. To get into the facility, I'd climbed down an elevator shaft, dropping the last fifteen feet or so because the ladder ended; it's possible that maybe I could have stacked up some crates to reach the ladder and come back out the way I came in. But I didn't try.

Why didn't I try? Because of Raph Koster, that's why.

Well, sort of. It all comes down to the brain's process of cognition, which Raph elucidates in his indispensable A Theory of Fun for Game Design. See, the brain enjoys rolling things into logical groups, or “chunks” – thus a cupcake in our minds isn't sugar, sprinkles, flour and so forth but a collection of such notions that we comprehend as a cupcake. Chunking allows us to organize concepts, establish complex behaviors and otherwise keep things tidy in a way that unchunked information simply cannot be. Videogames are extraordinary at engaging the brain, so it follows that players have established “chunked” routines for things like accomplishing a specified objective. And a long-time player like me has an outdated chunk. It told me not to bother seeking some other way to escape the facility; my chunk said that at best the alternative wouldn't work and at worst I'd crash the game. It said to follow the rules. Now, as it happens, in this case in STALKER the chunk was right (I just tried it), but that's not the point.

The point is that until pretty recently, players simply couldn't devise their own creative solutions to game challenges, especially when the objective path was explicitly stated. That view was totally reliable, and people got used to it. It was borne out of limitations in the technology and stricter design philosophies meant to keep players from breaking the game or doing something the developer didn't want them to. But today's technology isn't so limited and design philosophies are much more tolerant, to such a degree that player-invented experiences are viewed as desirable, rather than potential breaks. Future games will go even farther to encourage, or at least allow, the player to invent novel solutions to game challenges. This is great for games, but it's rough on gamers – especially crotchety old set-in-their-ways gamers like me.

Because my “how to complete a game objective” chunk didn't just materialize one day. My brain assembled it from years of experience playing games, learning that unstated solutions rarely worked, and operating under constraints of what's possible in game worlds. Those constraints, while still present in plenty of today's games, are getting looser. So rules and play styles based upon them are losing validity fast. Veteran gamers need to decompile their chunks and accommodate the new information.

Newcomers, unshackled by antiquated views of what is and is not possible in games, should have little difficulty with the playability advances tomorrow's games will offer. Games are becoming more intuitive to play. Proof of this is everywhere; on a macro level you've got the Wiimote, while more granular concepts like emergence and open worlds support the claim directly. Games are increasingly complex, sure, but the complexity is offset by greater freedom. They are becoming more like reality, in that many of the old checks – like limited or nonexistent physics in game worlds – are beginning to vanish. So yeah, it's great for newbies. But oldbies are about to enter a period when games seem less accessible. If we don't de-chunk, the old guard might miss out on some great game content because it simply will not occur to us that it's available.

Undoubtedly, designers will want to help people through the process, and figuring out how to teach players new skills is an interesting challenge. You can't just include the content and hope players find it. That could work, but it's far from universal and doesn't encourage active, high-speed de-chunking. Showing players new concepts makes more sense: just have an NPC or something demonstrate, and simple copycatting should do the rest. The people at Valve have great skill with this technique, but again, it's possible for dense players to miss things. So maybe it's best to just tell people what they need to know. “In this game, you can laugh in the face of locked doors. Just blow up a wall to make your own entrance.” Admittedly, that's not the most elegant solution, but it's guaranteed to work.