Jinn

Man I'm a gamer at heart and anything that improves the industry is definitely in my best interests. This guy sure has a lot of BAD arguments, though.

It really doesn't sound like this guy has tried to program AI or even studied game theory very much. There's entire research fields devoted to the study of games and their overall "funativity". One of the more important discussions is precisely this. It's actually EASIER to develop ungodly AI than stupid AI. Give the NPC's knowledge of everything.. every entity, it's viewport, its movement, its size, etc. They'll never miss, because they have 100% perfect aim. Anyone who has played against expert Counter-Strike bots has seen this.. they know where you are long before you even know they exist, and they one shot-kill every time. As soon as you start to do REALISTIC AI, you have to start calculating what it should know when, how accurate it should be, etc.. etc.. Furthermore, you ALWAYS want AI to be "challenging, but beatable." Otherwise, no one would play. Remember, people play games to have fun, and part of having fun is winning at least SOME of the time. Introduce other game design concepts like convexities, and you can interest the gamer even more.

EXACTLY. I think this is a very important point, and I think it defeats his whole argument. I'd MUCH rather have game developers focus on MULTIPLAYER than Artificial Intelligence design. Why? Becuase humans are fare more confusing, diverse, and challenging than any computer-generated human can ever be. I rarely play single-player games anymore, because no matter how intelligent the AI is, it doesn't compare to a well-trained and practiced human.

This one is just entirely silly.. there are clearly defined sets of genres, and there are games for all of them. The fact that they're not available on the new consoles is a twofold nonpoint: these games are still under development, as not every game releases with the console. Furthermore, popular games are determined by the MARKET. I don't think I'd be that interested in playing the "spy game" he's talking about. And I tell you what -- the hundreds of marketing and game-interests surveys that major producers do every year tell a different story about what people in general think is a good game. If these small genres he described were popular, there would be more games developed for them. Look at Katamari Damacy, for example.

WTF? I'll take my car-stealing, cop killing, prostitute smashing gang member game over that ANY day.

And I call BULLSHIT on this statistic. I've seen tons of demographic studies in my Game Design classes, and none of them even come near his overzealous approximation. Without a source, this is like saying that 3/4 of all statistics are made up.

This point is spot on, and I'll leave it. However, he shot himself in the foot later with..

He's obviously never studied advertising or marketing. People don't want teeny little pictures of what's going on in the game. That's what the BACK of the box is for. The front has to catch your eye and trigger a name-response. "Hey, I recognize that eye.. that's PERFECT DARK!" *flips box over*.. "Oh whoa, it looks neat.." My own personal first law of advertising is that you have got to grab their attention immediately, and game-scenes cropped to a 5 x 6 or smaller size to fit the front of a DVD/CD box isn't going to cut it.

This argument doesn't even follow. Having strict game rating systems does not prevent any type of game from being created. It only ensures a game is correctly labelled based on its' content. It doesn't *PREVENT* anything above PG-13 from being made, it just makes it less likely to be produced. Just like movies, there is LESS of a market for hardcore adult games, and so market forces drive this, not game design companies or ratings administrations. The "emotional plea" at the end to make you feel this is worthless, because having an AO rating has nothing to do with banning movies above PG-13.

Solid point. Nothing to say here.

This argument, again, reeks of no education into true game design. This is part of a "convexity" of difficulty. "Save-anywhere" savegames make the game MUCH easier than it could be otherwise. Imagine, if you will, that you can save at any given microsecond of the game. You know that a hard boss is coming up, so you save every second into the battle until you make a bad move. You just restore the save from a second ago, and try again until you get it right. This defeats the entire challenge of the boss, as you can break it down into scripted "one button combos" instead of the seven-move combo toss that you were supposed to be able to use. The further apart you make the saves, the more challenging you can make a game. This, coming from the guy who wanted more challenge in his games. Obviously, this has to be tempered with realism (two saves throughout the entire game), but making MORE savepoints just dices an otherwise enthralling, challenging game into "who can restore saves more quickly.."

This is absolutely garbage, and reeks to me AGAIN of an uneducated bafoon. Show me ANY modern hardware that can dynamically create and store game entities without any preloading, and I'll be amazed. When you're dealing with hundreds of megs of sprites, meshes, animations, AI every second, you need to have some of it in quickaccess RAM, not stored on some slow-accessing CD-ROM. His "solution" would be to make video games like a buffering WMV. Ever tried to buffer an WMV over the internet on 56k? It doesn't really preload anything, and tries to load as it plays. What this results in is a bandwidth chokepoint.. you watch about 6 seconds of the movie and then it stutters and tries to buffer some more. If you let the movie buffer BEFORE you watch it, it's decidely smooth and uninterrupted. I'd much rather wait 30 seconds for a load screen than have to watch my game stutter for 5 seconds everytime it needs to reload some entities.

Does he want speed or quality? This man just can't decide. Especially if you somehow expect the game to not load ANYTHING, you're not going to get quality sound assets. The more of these "different" sound clip assets that you add to a game like Madden, the bigger the game and the more you need to preload to ensure continuity. The re-used soundclips are annoying, sure.. but programming dynamic ones? ENORMOUS in complexity and resources. Until we master real-time sound generation from text (with something other than a robotic voice) this is a pipe dream. We have to stick with pre-generated audio, just as we stick with pre-animated graphics.

Emotional appeal, nothing to see here. He knows its as false as it can get, but he's got to garner your support for the next one.

I hate running into invisible walls as much as the next guy, but this is what we call an infinite decision tree. Unless you limit the choices the players have, your decisions become infinite, and so too does your gaming budget.

To illustrate.

Player can go either A or B

........A
P
.........B

From A or B, player can go to C or D / E or F.

............C
............D
........A
P
.........B
............E
............F

It keeps going and diverging until you have 50 seperate paths to follow. To quote our author, "How in the name of Islamic Fonzie" do you expect that to be programmed? You have to converge those decision trees back into smaller amounts of choices if you ever want the game to be finished. That's why you have to have artificial barriers, son.

I can follow this argument in RPGs. You really don't need to know the name of the enemy, although I think that it adds to the immersion level, personally. "Ohh I got killed by a Rock Golem.." not "Ohh I just got killed by that rock thing with the big arm.."

However, taking away "superimposed shit" in a FPS? No HUD? No Player names? I think that would make for one of the most confusing games you could play.

This is a very solid argument -- could have been taken directly out of a Game Studies textbook. Cause and effect is a VERY important concept in game design, and any time that the world doesn't appear to act in the way a player believes it realistically should, its going to be frustrating. Having a person not be where they say they're going to be is frustrating in real life, we don't need it in our games.

This is realism. How many people do you know that can carry around an ak47 and 900 rounds for it? I'm sorry if you find ammo limits restricting, but it makes AIMING more important than SPRAY N PRAY. Good thing? Yes.

ABSOLUTE contradiction of his point earlier. Remove all artificial boundaries? I think not, you'd be lost in the metaphorical hotel. You have to limit the player's movement, or you end up in situations like this. If you limit the player's movement, you have to do it with artifical boundaries. One or the other.

This, again, is realism. If you felt like you could trip an alarm and still live, what's the point of avoiding the alarm? If I were truly a super-secret international spy in a building loaded with alarms, I wouldn't want to set one off, no matter how many bad guys game forth. Odds are, however, that they'd easily outnumber me because they're armed to the teeth and know where I am. Perhaps infinitely many enemies is not the solution, but you must certainly make the reward for NOT tripping the alarm far better than the reward for tripping the alarm.

This sounds like he wants cookie cutter games that he can beat in 5 minutes. Sure, it was frustrating trying to figure out the Up down left right left right A B A A B move, but wasn't it rewarding when you figured it out? I'll deign that the argument about having to watch a cut scene repeatedly is obnoxious, but certainly lowering the difficulty of a game so that you can beat it without being challenged is NOT a good thing in the face of good game design.

If you're so concerned that you're not getting the Ferrari, save your money for a real damn one. For the rest of us GAMERS, EARNING the Ferrari gives us a sense of accomplishment, and driving it is that much more orgasmic after driving the shitty car with the slow transmission and horrid steering. If you've ever cheated and gotten the awesome car from the beginning of the game, it's FAR less satisifying.

No disagreements here, as a self-proclaimed internet revolutionary, copyright and patent law are the truest spawn of satan.

Excellent point. We saw this with the release of Battlefield 2 -- it was far less tested than it should have been before release, and they've realized that now. Being able to test the game AFTER you release it is no excuse for having poor QA test cycles.

Quality.

Man -- you just bemoaned the inability to jump over the stuff in your rant about artificial barriers. Make up your mind. I personally don't like jumping puzzles, but if you give the player the ability to jump, why not use it?

Waa waa waa.. one final gripe for an uneducated baffoon who managed to pull 5 or so solid arguments out of 20 "gripes" in his so-called manifesto. This man is certainly not the new headstone of game improvement. Let someone with a real education do that, please.

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"I'm typing on a computer of science, which is being sent by science wires to a little science server where you can access it. I'm not typing on a computer of philosophy or religion or whatever other thing you think can be used to understand the universe because they're a poor substitute in the role of understanding the universe which exists independent from ourselves." - Willravel