Today’s video games rely so heavily on graphics, sound, and fan-service, that they lose sight of what matters most in gaming: the gameplay. Over twenty years ago, technology was still new, and there was very little space and memory to work with. Thousands of games from that era could all fit on the dinosaur floppy disk, and still have room left over. These constraints meant that one would have to balance graphics, sound, and gameplay with the five to six kilobytes of space they could store on a chip which was protected by a box known as a cartridge. Those cartridges were similar to the jump-drives often used today, and were bulky compared to the six or seven kilobytes they could store. Despite those limitations, many great and addictive games came from that era.

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The second psychological need termed by the PENS model is autonomy. When I first read about this, I thought I knew exactly what it was talking about. Autonomy is described as the quality of the game which controls freedom in choices and influence on forthcoming experiences. However, Immersyve named simulation games, particularly Sim City 4, as “the pinnacle of open-ended gameplay and the degrees of freedom that can maximally satisfy the player’s need for autonomy.” After reading that, I’m thinking maybe we had two different ideas…

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While I was looking around randomly on the internet a website by the name of “Art of Manliness” caught my eye.  Recently they asked a question about whether video games are manly.  Call me crazy, but doesn’t this sound like asking if movies are manly?  Are there not movies that cater to particular types of individuals?  Why, yes there are.  The same (as has been explored in previous posts) is true for games.  Some gamers like a challenge, others want to lose themselves in an adventure.

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According to the PENS model, one of three psychological needs satisfied by games is competence. The desire to feel capable is present in any challenge, so games are probably the purest arena for this need. For many people, a lack of skill is a lack of fun. It’s understandable that if you exert more effort for a game, you expect to see better results.

The most important requirement of the PENS model is that all of this be measurable, predictable. Talking about this stuff in theory may spark ideas, but if it can’t measure completed games or game features, there’s no practical use. So, here’s where it gets interesting…

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About a year ago, I read about a self-described think-tank called Immersyve. This company described a game-assessment model that was meant to help in “predicting outcomes such as enjoyment, sustained play, and value,” called the Player Experience of Need Satisfaction (PENS). Their work is sold to game development companies for building better games and brands. For some reason their website hasn’t been updated since this time last summer.

Immersyve’s research concluded that every game, regardless of platform and genre, contains three inherent psychological needs that contribute to a player’s experience with a game. The needs are coined as competence (mastery and success), autonomy (freedom and ingenuity), and relatedness (social cooperation).

As games become more sophisticated in their abilities, educated players expect newer types of feedback from the experiences. Over the next few posts I’m going to take a closer look at these psychological needs and their presence in games.

While this all leads to a great notion – more understanding = games which are more fun — there’s an obvious flaw (and isn’t there always?). What about manipulation? We’re all guilty of playing games beyond the fresh-new-fun stage: hanging on for the threadbare reward of finally beating a game, for unlocking more achievements or the “100%” mark, for building a better character that had no further use. But what if a game were engineered from the beginning to keep players returning at any cost? This may be more of a moral dilemma, a matter of intentions. 

Would you feel betrayed if you discovered you had spent a ton of your time playing certain features of a game that were only added to put a deeper branding of the game into your awareness and recommendations to friends? And how many games have you played that have already done this?

Links
Immersyve

A few months back, Gamasutra did an interview with Peter Molyneux where he expressed a pretty upset opinion about the whole video game industry:

“Now that’s a huge failure. That’s our failure. For not being really, truly as big as movies. Because we’re not. Because we only sell — what do we sell? Eight million?”

Talk about blunt. But as big as movies?

I do believe that games will eventually be as much a part of daily life as movies, but I don’t think it will happen in the timespan of one generation; I think it will come about only as more, younger kids are raised to play them.

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John Carmack, graphics-programming pioneer and programming lead of id Software, does things with video cards that other people only theorize. He understands the zeitgeist of gaming, and that is a movement toward console games. It’s a little confusing, then, why he would announce a browser-based game for the competitive gaming community, a community that appears to be stuck in its infancy.

Last year, when Carmack announced Quake Zero (later renamed Quake Live) he explained that the choice for a browser-based delivery of the game was natural because competitive players forsake graphical quality in favor of faster input response. The game itself, which will run on a revitalized Quake 3 Arena engine, certainly has no aspirations to be the biggest, the best, or the prettiest anything.

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Hey everyone, this is DoomRater, the sponsor of Weapons and Tactics Research.  I’m glad to announce that our deal with We The Players is complete and we will be going live very soon.  As some of you are already aware, Weapons and Tactics Research has been rather liptight about recent projects.  However, with our grand opening we intend to bring to light some of our latest analytical research concerning the epic project “Shotgun Frenzy”.  This project, developed by Wad’a'holic, blends RTS elements almost seamlessly into wave based ZDoom combat.  With our info, you should be well equipped to tackle the beta 1.2 version single-handedly, at the defiance of the developer!

Weapons and Tactics Research also informs me that work has been started on refining some older weapons, and intends to overhaul the old Greaser collection.  Now handling those grenades shouldn’t be as much of a problem with them also on the knife weapon, making it easier to deal with enemies that have gotten too close for safe use of the grenade.  The new chaingun design also has some new balancing features I believe will be much appreciated by fans and critics alike.  No new info on the sniper rifles, however.