To make the War worth fighting for, the reset has to go, And This Is Why.

Jabo Zerstorer

Jabo Zerstorer

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Disemboweled Ego

D
deleteduser said:
Press [Trigger] = Weapon fires.

Why would this game mechanic have to allude to anything else to make sense? What else could it allude to that would make sense?

e.g. - "I've bound this key to the 'trigger' and when I pull the trigger, the weapon fires." - What is nonsensical about this?
e.g. - "If I shoot at [victim] several times, [victim] should explode, gaining me a score +1. I do shoot, [Victim] does explode, score does +1" - Where is the disconnect here?
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It's often a crude representation of a weapon, its function and effects that only works because it's crystal clear what it alludes to.

There's games that use something else, mostly as a joke - you're crying tears, blowing hearts of love, playing music or taking a leak instead of shooting at enemies. It gets called shooting by the players anyway, but if miraculously you didn't know what weapons or shooting were it might still make sense comparing it to something else like using a camera to line up a picture or pointing a fire extinguisher at a fire.

If you press the fire button and sometimes your character shoots and sometimes they just stand there doing nothing for a while and then shoot it helps to understand that they're reloading the gun - something that would cause a disconnect if it used something other than a gun without another explanation - lasers can't fire forever and overheat, magic needs mana to cast etc. Mass Effect 1 is probably a good example of a game that got it kinda wrong for many people and fixed it in the sequel.

Another common disconnect from older games here is only having one bullet on screen at once due to technical/hardware limitations. It only makes sense if you're using a boomerang or thrown weapons that need to be recovered before they can be used again. Plenty of games with guns had that too and it was annoying beyond just having an inconsistent rate of fire.

There's just something inherently, if only slightly more satisfying when a game is well designed and all comes together without stumbling on explaining things that would maybe be intuitive if they used different words for things.
 

Disemboweled Ego

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deleteduser said:
These are all their own separate mechanics.
No allusions are needed. No metaphors are present.
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That's the point, you can have the exact same game play mechanic for different things, but reloading a laser using bullets or putting bullets in your spellbook to cast spells is nonsensical (but cool if you're going for an over the top absurdist vibe, something Enter the Gungeon probably did). Players wouldn't expect these things unless they were called something like power/energy cells or reagents/ingredients by the game and it would affect how they interact with the game mechanic naturally (without an upfront tutorial explaining it), this to me means that there's at least a very strong connection between the labels on things and the game mechanics involving them.
 

babelfisch

babelfisch
Andrew Gaspurr said:
Obsidian Ant nailed it pretty well in his recent video: No matter the challenge and the desired difficulty, you don't eliminate players' progress. You just don't. It's game design 101.
And I agree.
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Ned Flandalorian said:
"Game design 101" except for the long list of games that have periodic wipes of everyone's progress (Escape from Tarkov, Star Citizen, etc).
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TFB Daerist said:
Irony being, back in the day (1980s), games wiped your progress: 3 lives then high score; start again. Elite changed that - no 3 lives/high score; you explode your progress isn't wiped. So not sure any "rule" of game design" can really be discerned, unless its a "currently some/most games do X and this does Y".
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Weps said:
This whole 101 thing keeps getting taken out of context.

Of course it doesn't apply to roguelikes... And of course you can't compare it with gaming done almost half a century ago...

It's like saying that safety belts in cars are not a basic safety feature. Because bycles don't have them. Or because 300 years ago people would ride horses and do just fine, as long as they didn't fall and hit their head on a rock.
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deleteduser said:
Nope. Nothing like "safety belts" etc... same as Gankers are nothing like irl psychos, and 'grind' is nothing like physically abusing a child to toughen them up... a recently read example from somewhere in this forum, quelle surprise

Entirely different topics in entirely different contexts muh dude.

Game mechanics = Game mechanics... and literally nothing else.
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Disemboweled Ego said:
Game mechanics are metaphors which are literally something else.
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deleteduser said:
a game mechanic is not a metaphor... it's an ingame inter/action/reaction loop. Its an actual thing.
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Disemboweled Ego said:
Stripping it all away to pure abstraction isn't really possible, even if you try, a triangle becomes a spaceship and the missing slice on a circle becomes an open mouth on a head. Without direction it might not be the same things that emerge for everyone, but those things are inseparable from play. For every game mechanic a corresponding metaphor has to arise in your head along with all the messy stuff with comes with that.

This is why discussing game design is fun. Trying to figure out and explain what bar and the reset represent because it has to make sense on that level or there's something similar to cognitive dissonance going on.
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deleteduser said:
image... not methaphor, image. And these have all been handily drawn for us by the good arty folks at FDev.

... and this is only necessary for mechanics requiring visual representations, such as the progress bar that shows our progress in this phase of the battle, weapons fire or exploding ships...

Not all mechanics require an image; some need sounds, e.g the honk of the Scanner, the click of a button or the crackling of the ice on your canopy as your temperature drops.... also all provided by FDev.

Other mechanics require other representations... such as commodity prices & availability, the system scan results in your System map or the FSS screen... none of them though require metaphors... unless you want to get abstract and talk around a subject instead of about the subject.... or have a properly shady dev team that wants you to imagine the game mechanics instead of having them code the game mechanics.

... all of wich is entirely beside the point I made. Game Mechanics are not comparable to vehicle safety belt technology, violent criminality.... or indeed, anything else.
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Disemboweled Ego said:
I maintain that game mechanics have to allude to something else to make sense and connect, having imagery or icons to go along with things helps you get there. They don't always compare directly in a strictly logical sense, but making that stuff up and trying to make it work is an important part of play too. It's what brains do, look for patterns and try to apply them to reduce cognitive load, there's no escape from it.

You can play blind tetris without seeing the board because you intuitively understand how the geometry and filling space works and can memorize all the pieces on the board (and it's an actual challenge mode in some variants), but tetris in 4 dimensions is not something you can as easily pick up because the metaphor for something in the real world isn't there and you have to fall back on your previous knowledge of other tetris mechanics that remain to try to feel it out and make sense of it. It's hard to find examples of (non puzzle) games that do something so completely out there and disconnected from what we can understand intuitively like that.
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deleteduser said:
Press [Trigger] = Weapon fires.

Why would this game mechanic have to allude to anything else to make sense? What else could it allude to that would make sense?

e.g. - "I've bound this key to the 'trigger' and when I pull the trigger, the weapon fires." - What is nonsensical about this?
e.g. - "If I shoot at [victim] several times, [victim] should explode, gaining me a score +1. I do shoot, [Victim] does explode, score does +1" - Where is the disconnect here?
Click to expand...

Sometimes I play a little game and read an argument "backwards". If, after a few posts, it becomes clear how it started and what it's about, I lose. But if I need to click through dozens of posts and don't have the slightest idea what you are actually talking about I win. And then I quote random parts of the discussion and turn them into poetry.

Where is the disconnect here?
What else could it allude to
that would make sense?

Not something you can as easily pick up.
Game mechanics are not comparable,
to vehicle safety belt technology.

A triangle becomes a spaceship.
Its an actual thing,
game mechanics are metaphors.
And literally nothing else.

As long as they didn't fall
and hit their head on a rock,
games do X and this does Y,
have periodic wipes.

And I agree.
 
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