Uncertainty in Games by Greg Costikyan

Author:Greg Costikyan [Costikyan, Greg]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9780262313599
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 2013-04-13T16:00:00+00:00

5 Sources of Uncertainty

We’re now equipped to examine the sources of uncertainty in games more closely.

Performative Uncertainty

I’ve restricted the term “performative uncertainty” to mean the uncertainty of physical performance. In today’s conventional videogame market, games of performative uncertainty rule: first-person shooters, action/adventure games, driving games, and the like. Indeed, many videogamers view challenges of hand-eye coordination as inseparable from the very idea of “the videogame,” though of course there are in fact many digital games for which this is not true: turn-based strategy games, adventure games, and so on.

One school of thought holds that games of performative uncertainty, or player-skill games, are inherently superior to character-skill games, or to games of analytic complexity, which are often derided as “animated spreadsheets.” The notion is that “real gamers” should develop l33t skillz, and anything else is an inferior experience.

The problem with depending on player skill, however, is that, by nature, players are not evenly matched. A new FPS player, signing onto a multiplayer server, will die over and over, at the hands of more experienced players—not a positive player experience. It’s no fun to feel as if you have no chance; any uncertainty departs.

Of course, there are ways of redressing this problem—having a scheme to match players by experience, for example. But designing any such system is tricky, and none is perfect.

Equally tricky is the problem of tuning performative challenge in a soloplay game. Almost whatever you do, some players will find the game too easy, and others too hard; those who find it too hard will abandon it, and feel that the money they paid for the game was not well spent, while those who find it too easy will be similarly dissatisfied. Moreover, developers tend to listen to their most ardent fans, who are by nature hard-core and more skilled than the general audience, and therefore tend to develop games that satisfy the hard core, at the potential expense of reaching a wider audience; indeed, over time, particular genres become harder and less newbie friendly, the phenomenon of grognard capture. Anyone could play Doom; only someone who grew up playing FPSs can master more recent titles, particularly at the highest difficulty setting.

Developers try to deal with this problem using variable difficulty settings, or dynamically adjusted difficulty, but even the “easy” setting in many games is beyond the capabilities of some players. For my part, there are bosses in, say, the Zelda games I cannot beat, my strategy typically being to hand the controller to a teenage daughter and tell her “five bucks to beat this boss.”

While it is possible to construct a player-skill game that is fairly casual in nature—Tetris (Pajitnov, 1984) and Snood (Dobson, 1996) are examples—games of physical challenge tend to be “lean forward” rather than “lean backward” in nature. That is, they typically require continuous attention from the player and excellent timing for success; they are tense, not relaxing. Lean backward games, by contrast, are less tense, do

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