May

14

A recent revelation

May 14, 2007 | 1 Comment

As I was playing yet another hour (or two) of the fabulously addictive Desktop Tower Defense by Paul Preece on Challenge level (The 100) and while I was failing over and over to actually complete the challenge, I was struck with a sudden revelation. It hit me like a level 40 giant hitting a noobie wizard in a soiled cloth robe.

I am a masochistic gamer.

Of course, I should have realized this long ago. After all, when playing games of any kind, I routinely ratchet up the difficulty until it becomes impossible to win without me turning in a near-perfect performance. I don’t get put off by losing, penalties, being flung back to checkpoints or even complete restarts.

But now I understand that this may make me different from many other gamers. It is probably hard for many to imagine that there is anything “fun” about playing games on maximum difficulty when they could be played and beaten on “normal.” Some people probably think that losing over and over could not possibly be as much fun as winning. But for some reason, that doesn’t seem to be true for me.

For example, I realize that playing Civ IV on emperor level against 17 opponents is a no win scenario for me, but despite losing game after game where my cutting edge longbowmen are overrun by my opponents’ infantry and modern armor, you won’t find me lowering the difficulty settings any.

When I play Europa Universalis 3, do I take Spain, England, or even Sweden? No, I prefer to play nations like Iroquois, Kongo, or Dai Viet, which have no chance of ever becoming serious world players.

In Everquest each time a new server would come up, I would quit whatever character I was playing and jump to the new server and try to finish all the available content as quickly as possible, staying ahead of the majority and tackling the content with gear I had earned myself or with guild-mates, rather than bought from a high-level player merchant.

Recently, I have been playing Guild Wars and I have been singularly focused on obtaining the “Survivor” title for my character. In order to achieve it, I need to get to level 20 without dying. However, I am unwilling to change my aggressive play-style of soloing without henchmen . After 8 re-rolls of this character, the highest deathless level I have achieved is 11. But that’s okay. For me, that’s what makes it fun.

After all, I also played Pitfall on the Atari for years.

I have friends who are content to grab a game and play through it at a lower difficulty setting. They have fun “beating” the game. Getting to the end is what matters for them.
But for me, I like “playing” the game. Getting to the end means the game is over; that there is no challenge left.

Back in the day, it seemed like most games were designed to be pretty darn difficult to beat. It took me forever to beat games like Adventure (Atari), Zork (C-64), Ultima and X-Com (PC). Those were games I played and worked at for long periods of time and the possibility of having to start all over from the beginning was around every corner. There was no hand-holding and no sympathy treatment. Screw up and you go home.

But lately, I have been getting the feeling that game designers are designing games so that nobody loses. Anyone who simply puts enough time in (and saves frequently enough) will eventually get through the game. It’s sort of like that feel-good style of little league they were pushing some years back. No one loses, we’re all winners. Yay!

I think that philosophy sucks.

I think this is what disappoints me most about MMOs now. There is no barrier for completion, there is no minimum standard for competency of players. There is nothing which stops anyone who creates an account from achieving nigh god-like status in the world. Permanent death, grievous injury, character age and obsolescence, gear destruction, and systems by which players have to pass difficult trials unaided to advance are all mechanisms which the current crop of MMOs ignore in the pursuit of the “casual” gamer, the “goal-oriented” gamer, or the “social” gamer.

So instead, I find myself on single player games mashing the difficulty setting all the way to “Insane” or “Oh my God. you’ve got to be kidding” level, or imposing artificial challenges on myself within the framework of online games, just to make it tougher and see what kind of teeth each game really has. And I don’t want to see the end of the game, unless I’ve had to bleed for it.

Which reminds me of one more thing I really dislike, which is game designers who try to force “replayability” into their games by only letting you unlock higher levels of difficulty if you complete the game. Seriously, who (without severe OCD) wants to replay some linear style game just to see what it would have been like if it was actually tougher to play? Certainly not me (my OCD notwithstanding).

Now after all that rambling, I want to qualify what I am saying. Although I do not mind losing or negative game reinforcement for poor play, that doesn’t mean I am willing to tolerate poor game design and ill-conceived mechanics which make it painful to play – perfectly or not. For example, I find nothing redeeming about Lineage 2 which certainly is torturous to play, but only by virtue of being totally devoid of anything resembling fun and requiring a monumental time commitment to the tedium to be able to advance to even more mind-numbingly boring time sinks.

No, I simply want games to be fun, and challenging nearly to the point of impossibility and then I want to win in spite of it. Is that really too much to ask?

I’ll leave you to ponder that while I go put my perfect Pogo Free Cell record on the line…

Undefeated in Pogo Free-Cell


 

 

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1 Comment so far

  1. noob on May 14, 2007 3:30 am

    Since I originally posted this, like, 20 minutes ago, I have had to go back and edit it 6 times for various mistakes and omissions.

    For some reason, I don’t seem to notice the errors until they have jumped from the editing realm to “published” status. Then they seem to un-stealth like little gnome rogues, stabbing away at my suddenly compromised ideas.

    Naturally, I will assume that I am the only one who has ever run into this sort of difficulty, in order to make myself feel unique and special.

    (And I have had to edit this comment 1 time so far, also)

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