Playing the Game Wrong

I did some work over in Los Angeles – a story unto itself – and was in close contact with a fairly important guy who was the client for the company I worked for at the time. Once or twice a week he would drive me across town to Venice Beach. Sometimes this was during rush hour and it meant that we would end up spending up to an hour or two in the car. He was a very down to earth guy with a passion for games, so that was generally the topic of our conversations (that and the life-threatening smog that permeated the whole of the city). Bioshock was new at the time and on one of these drives he expressed his disgust with the hype being thrown at the game:

“The fact is, there is no challenge. Every encounter just involves going up to the enemies, hitting them with whatever you’ve got then dying, respawning and, because they don’t regenerate health, you can just rinse/repeat. Also it just isn’t a good shooter. It’s boring.”

I sat there a little uncomfortably. I liked the guy and in some respects he was right. If you play Bioshock in that fashion then it is dull; the mechanics aren’t engaging enough and the essential flaw is that health packs and ammo are pointless when you can just mindlessly rush at enemies until you or they die. Played like that, moving from room to room with scant regard for your surroundings, the game is going to get very dull, very quickly.

It pained me at the time – and pains me more now – but I still had to venture that maybe he was playing the game wrong. He, rightly so, was offended by this statement. The counter-argument being that if the developer put it in there then why shouldn’t he play it like that, seeing as it was an obvious exploit to get through the game?

I tried to argue that those elements were there deliberately to allow for a lower entry-level of player and that the shooting mechanics were not what the game was about, rather the exploration of the world that was Rapture.  At the time I didn’t know about the sly digs the game made about the systems it put in place and I wished I had as I might have made a more convincing argument. Still, the idea of playing a game in the wrong fashion irritates me. If you have to play a game a certain way for it to be enjoyed then it is not you that is wrong but the game – surely?

A year later I was on the receiving end of the same derisive comment. A co-worker suggested I was playing Ninja Gaiden wrong because I wasn’t using the block button. Aside from the blatant dig at my ability to play games, a very successful attempt at getting a rise out me, the comment sort of makes sense. It wasn’t as simple as using the block button: people who play Ninja Gaiden want to be punished. The enjoyment comes from trying and failing at the game and then getting better, refining yourself and improving your reactions. I would argue that Ninja Gaiden is unfair and not fun. In the same breath I would argue with anyone who thought Dark Souls was too hard and not fun, and defend it along the same lines as fans of Ninja Gaiden would. In both games levelling up your character is less important than levelling up your own skills. You have to learn to deal with the mobs efficiently and understand the underlying systems; learning to exploit them is not just par for the course, it is sometimes integral to success. Utilising these flaws is not boring: in fact it is part of learning how to play the game.

Playing the game wrong is to expect the game to communicate anything past the basics, to be fairly checkpointed, to not have one hit kill bosses and not be threatening.

I played Ninja Gaiden wrong, or perhaps I never appreciated what it was doing, whereas Dark Souls’ approach made so much sense to me that I would have rated it one of the best games (if not the best) of last year.

The previous examples I gave of playing a game wrong involved not appreciating the game’s mechanics for what they were, either by exploiting them or failing to do so. I feel that there are other examples where it is not the game’s mechanics but its narrative design that can lead to playing the game wrong.

In a cultural exchange that instigated my 12 Games Before Christmas challenge I made a friend play Way of the Samurai 3 while he made me play Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. I’ll never know what he did to get the achievement for having played the game for ten hours but not completed a story line (it should have taken him a maximum of five hours to get one of the twenty-one endings) but I am going to fantasise that it was narrative ambiguity. WotS3 has no real direction: there are so many choices which can be made that it is easy to try and do everything, for which the will game brutally slap your hand in a way that can be dispiriting. The narrative is so flexible that it can lead to you feeling lost. You will find yourself identifying with one person even though you have to kill them and similarly every outcome can seem unsatisfying. To not embrace that there is no perfect run (although actually there is and it sucks) is to play WOTS3 wrong.

Inversely, Modern Warfare 2 is sniper-scope focused in terms of its narrative. My rather derisive review of the game picked it apart for what I deemed to be its flawed design. In hindsight I can see that what I was doing was playing the game wrong, which I think I even mentioned in the comments. The narrative requires you to keep it going through suspension of disbelief and to not deviate from its set path. You are only lost when you don’t let the game guide you through its tight corridors. Similarly, Uncharted 2 is a phenomenal experience so long as you are willing to play along with what it is trying to do. Both games are visual rollercoasters where you must pretend to believe that the danger is real and that failure is somehow tangible. Looking in from the outside all you will see is a bunch of people locked into a linear experience with no divergent path, whereas if you strap in and let go you are going to be thrilled (unless you are as emotionally dead as I am) and have an amazing time.

These experiences require that you are a willing participant. Regardless of other qualms you might have, by not playing along you are only ruining it for yourself. Where Way of the Samurai is demanding and therefore can feel utterly opaque in its intent, Modern Warfare and Uncharted want to please you and it is down to you to not play along. Think of it as if you were on a murder mystery tour (or a Live Action Role Playing retreat) and then spend the entire time out of character.  Why are you there and why are you actively trying to make your time worse? Gratification comes from living within that setting’s limitations rather than pushing its boundaries.

Bizarrely there are games that almost succeed in spite of themselves. Playing them in a manner contrary to what was the creator’s intent actually means they rise above what they aimed for. Like a bad film or two, sometimes a game just has to be subverted to derive elite status. (Editor’s note: neither of these games are in any way shit.)

The first is an obvious candidate: Deadly Premonition is a game so bad that it is actually awesome. Playing the game as it was intended can be extremely entertaining but when played badly and clumsily with little regard for its limitations it transcends from an interesting game to a phenomenal game. In this case, to play the game wrong is to try and keep a straight face and play along with the preposterousness, some of which was clearly not intended by the creators. They have now come to embrace the game’s moderate success and its open silliness as a by-product.

The second is the Smash Brothers series explored in the recent Fighterpedia. The episode is a compelling argument for why Smash Brothers should be embraced as a fighter but one of the points made I found especially interesting. The game’s creators don’t want you to play it like a fighter and have done all they can to not make the game a legitimate one. This has got them nowhere as players have played the game wrong/right and adapted it to their needs. This leads to some confusion as to when playing the game wrong is incorrect.

So what is the future of the misunderstood? Many of the examples I have used were games that found their market, some of them proving insanely popular for better or for worse. For every hardcore player deriding Bioshock to no effect there are others mocking Lost Planet 2 or completely missing the drift button in Ridge Racer: Unbounded.

This leads to further questions. Is playing the game the correct way a disservice to the audience that might encounter the game through your writing? Playing a game so straight that you avoid game breakers and progression blockers which common users would encounter is a case of playing the game too right, but at the same time playing L.A. Noire with the intent of screwing up every question could be viewed as going too far in the other direction.

At this point we start getting into the debate of what constitutes normal player action. Ocarina of Time is considered a flawless gem by many but I got stuck for almost two hours trying to find a sword. When you are playing something for the first time, either with no external influences or perhaps many, when are you playing the game wrong or right?

I guess I would like to say that, as a gamer, you should trust yourself and your instincts. If viewing the X360’s top-selling list this week is any indication of gamers trusting their instincts that might not be such a bad idea.

Also, play Mindjack.

Comments

11 responses to “Playing the Game Wrong”

  1. Michael Zupecki Avatar

    I think a huge part of the problem with linear games is that they require heavy use of internal language – visual cues, level design and the like – in order to be successful.

    Playing games for our entire lives, we take for granted our ability to read the 'language of video games' and guarantee that if you put someone into Call of Duty MW2, someone who hasn't played games much, or at all, they would definitely try to walk down a street they aren't supposed to, or try to open every door assuming there is laborious data for every nook and cranny they might decide to wander through. They don't 'get' it – but put them in something like Skyrim, or an MMO, and they will have an extremely hard time breaking the game because they are often okay to act on a whim and do whatever they please; just as we do in real life.

    I think that poses a massive problem for linear games because there are always parts that fall down in terms of visually communicating what you can and cannot do.

    The other issue is that linear games are now trying to be films – but they fail at doing so because the flow of the narrative, and thus the pacing, is ruined by the 'gamey' parts… respawing, failing etc. I recently played Max Payne 3 on Hard and the damage feedback to your avatar is almost non-existent and I found myself dying at a moments notice… and there are two difficulties above that!

    I found it really hard to care about the carefully woven climax at the end, merely because I had to attempt it 15 times and I don't remember watching Denzel Washington die in Man on Fire 15 times in one scene before the film moved along… and yes, the correlation to MP3 and Man on Fire is definitely intentional.

    Anyway… not sure what my point is, just felt like a rant more than anything!

    Nice article though, I enjoyed it and, once again, cannot tell you actually like or despise these sorts of games. I think a good game presents options and communicates, almost intuitively, what you can and cannot do and they allow you to do enough so you don't ever desire to try and break them.

    I find myself trying to break a game when I start thinking "Damn, they should have let me do this… I'll try anyway" Haha.

    Anyway, happy gaming!

    1. badgercommander Avatar
      badgercommander

      Hey Zupecki! You were a witness to the Ninja Gaiden incident, so you know I wasn't anyway near as level headed about it at the time. As for learning internal languages, I very much agree. There is that great video of a girlfriend playing Bioshock and her pointing out flaws in game logic that I never would have considered. I would disagree about having no problem Skyrim though, I've seen people wilt at the idea of having no direction. That might be down to personality though.

      As for my stance on linear games… I was presenting a devil's advocate stance on them. I still hate those corridor shooters unless the mechanics they present are compelling (Bioshock, FEAR). Thanks for posting the rant as well it is always good to read stuff like that. After spending so much time playing games I try not to break them now, especially as I know how frail they can be.

      As for Max Payne 3, all the talk that has been going on about it has continually had me thinking of Man on Fire.

      PS: The Witcher 2 is absolutely top-notch, something special is going to have to come along this year to knock it off my favourites of this year

  2. guillaumeodinduval Avatar

    YES. You mentioned Mindjack. Sorry, I did pay attention to every word in the article (and the points you made) but I'll start by saying it was firstly because I was eager to see if you'd mention the game.

    (edited 10 minutes later)
    P.S.: Speaking of which, I couldn't help but notice you forgot to add Mindjack in the tags for the article. Just saying.

    Now, on with the actual comment:

    I'd like to head towards the L.A. Noir example you gave, as a base to show the ''misleading'' designs of a game which can get the player to THINK they are still playing the game right, but are actually ''doing it wrong''. I would say you are playing the game wrong if you're going outside what the game gives you and try to succeed or fail. If you make it, great! You find a way to entertain yourself. You found something the game managed to still do right despite having attempted to break it. If you don't, well, ''can't say you didn't know you were going out of bound there, can ya?''

    The problem with L.A. Noir, and other games (but I'll get back to them after this ''short rant'') is… if you DO try to fail using what the game gives you, you still… won't fail. So to experiment something that would be the equivalent of, for a gunfight scenario, go out guns blazing, try to pull the same stunt in a conversation where options are given to you making you THINK you are taking a rather adventurous path, or giving you the HOPES you will have such a path open because… I mean why the hell bother with choices at that point, should have gone with just ''press B to keep the chatter going until the talking is done and the case moves on''… the game won't grant you the flamboyant exit. Or ''extra difficulty'' you'd expect to add to your case.

    Playing L.A. Noir wrong would be raving at the lack of choices in conversations every time, but playing the game right and being wronged by it is just limiting yourself to what you have and not get what SHOULD happen given the paths you selected – paths the game handed to you.

    I read somewhere that one of a senior dev for the game stated that you could fail in a gun-fight, but the ''conversation'' aspect was too new to ''implement the ability to fail through it''. Almost if it wouldn't be FAIR if players could fail at it.

    Let's look back at First Person Shooters… were the first ones about powerful entities with unlimited health and ammo roaming the world and obliterating everything ''because the concept of having the view of the character as he shoots was rather new at the time, so we had to make sure people wouldn't suck at it''?

    Besides, I remember that back on the Dreamcast, while not having the same presentation, one could say that the concept of approaching conversation FAILURES had already been in some games. Ok, I can only think of two. Shenmue and Shenmue 2. The amount of times you can fail (in some cases, quite brutally) conversations to keep the story going because you selected the wrong ''button prompt'' is astonishing, then again, even if we call that off since ''it's not quite the same approach altogether, those ''events'' were planned and were the ONLY way the linear story were going'', you can still go back and say ''O and that was one of the first time we had a game that had button prompts''.

    And guess what? I think in all games I've played, if there had got to be ONE game where the button prompts are unforgiving it must be Shenmue. Yet it's one of the first to use that as a core mechanic. And it had scripted FAILURES for almost every one of them which required you to start over. I still don't get the dev's mentality of ''having to limit yourself to add the feature in god-mode because it's new''. How is that going to help a game ''being played right''?

    1. badgercommander Avatar
      badgercommander

      Hey, I deliberately left Mindjack out of the tags so as to have that come as a surprise.

      I agree that LA Noire is the worst for that as you are expecting something hilarious to pay off and it really doesn't happen there are no guffaws just an extremely stale story. Dull as ditchwater basically and the comparison with a gun fight going wrong (Splinter Cell Conviction has this in spades) and then pulling back from the brink is what makes some games truly brilliant. Shenmue I and II are good but I woudl say that Ultima and Fallout both beat them to that with the outcome getting to points where it will break your game. As for QTEs Shemue got them right (oh look dodge a football!) in that failing would result in divergent paths (actually some failed QTEs in Sword of the Beserk and Farenheit also did this) whereas now they are just there as a way for the developers to show off flashy cutscenes while the user is 'engaged'.

  3. guillaumeodinduval Avatar

    O yeah, and I guess now that the ''short rant'' is done (sorry, had to split the comment, apparently it was too long), I gotta go back to those other games. Well, given the concept of linear FPS being ''ruined'' by people ''ruining it to themselves'' trying to explore left and right when they should ''stick to the road''. Nothing wrong with that. I've played the Call of Duty series since the first game BACK IN THE DAYS, and it's only through the ''modern'' (read: recent, I include World at War in there too) that I've had issues with the presentation of the linearity of it all. I bought World at War. It's a Call of Duty game. I know I am expecting a roller coaster and am down for it. Problem is, I didn't go out and try to bust through every door, go outside every paths and sneak ''out of world through a pile of rubble that didn't let me climb it when it sorta looked like it should let me''.

    I just met many – many – invisible walls through what I thought was a path (or the path) to get the job done and finish the mission. I swear, I kept gunning down Japs on and on and ON during the FIRST mission of World at War, at first distracted into thinking ''I had to clear the area to move on'', since I MAY have not payed attention to whoever was the token actor/storyteller soldier hinting me on the objectives at the time as I was too busy being in awe with well, everything going on.

    One hell of a ride really.

    So as a result, I stand there, taking cover, shooting with salvaged Japanese weapons I risked my hide to get every time only to realize the spawning seems endless. So now I tell myself ''maybe I gotta go somewhere''. And I tried to go wherever that somewhere was only to meet invisible walls where nothing would normally lead me to think I shouldn't go there. It made me realize ''wow, this has got to be the ugliest most blatant invisible collision I've ever seen. And that in the first mission too! What is this?'' And well, aside from those weird encounters, the game remained an entertaining roller coaster. I was just surprised at the amount I'd bump into compared to the ''older games''.

    Not that the older games didn't have their boundaries, they just seemed convincing enough I guess since instead of being an invisible wall, it was a ruined building or a bush that was blocking me I dunno. It's like we design game with the misleading sense of freedom attached to what is meant to be a roller coaster. In that effect, it can only LEAD people to ''play the game wrong'' in the end.

  4. Minh T Avatar
    Minh T

    The way I see it is… it all depends on each individual on whether they have fun or not. The goal of all games is to have fun. That said, if you're playing the game in a different way than the intention of the developer and you're having fun with it, then you're playing the game right (like the forementioned Smash bros example).

    Personally, a lot of times I intentionally play the games "wrong", especially in MMO. I like to go against the intent of the game, it's how I have fun playing the game in a different way than other people.

    1. badgercommander Avatar
      badgercommander

      Yeah, but there are stumbling blocks, sometimes there really is a right way to play a game that you simply don't get. My go to would be Mindjack, a terrible single player game but when played in the multiplayer environment going against some of the intent of the single player structure and openly griefing other players turns this game into a beautiful experience.

      That seems to have been the intent of the developers, but I will be damned if that was communicated properly nor that anyone will ever really find that layer underneath some of the drudgery.

  5. Harbour Master Avatar

    This is one of those thorny issues where it's not clear whose "fault" it is. Is it the developer for not signposting enough? Is it the player for not getting it? Sometimes players and games are not right for each other, a first date that ends up a last date. And, as pointed out here, sometimes doing things your own way can deliver something more personalised. It reminds me of GTA III whose missions were more sandboxy than GTA:SA which – despite going all open-world – went to some lengths to make sure you couldn't do missions any other way. That's practically a developer misunderstanding why they were so successful.

    Mrs. HM played Max Payne sniping round corners – because that's how she played all shooters, austere with ammunition and cautious – which makes it substantially less fun. I was pulling my hair out as I failed to convince her she was playing it all wrong. The game is about running to a parade of bullets and doing the action hero thing. The sequel made this easier to pull off (bullet time would increase as you took out enemies) and she got it then. I think she lived in bullet time for the rest of the game.

    So – was it Mrs. HM's shortcoming for not grokking what Max Payne was about? Or was it the Remedy's for not making bullet time more fun?

    I have no answers today. Thank you.

    1. badgercommander Avatar
      badgercommander

      It is a bit like Stranglehold not getting what made the game fun and when you get onto the hardest difficulties you just stop using the slow motion and play it like a broken Gears of War game. That is a clear case of the developers not understanding what the game was about.

      I did not enjoy any of the missions in the 3-D GTA series as they are ropey at best. The sandbox was alright for about a week and then got dull. Was I playing the game wrong? Probably, there is a good chance I don't have the imagination to enjoy them.

      Love that story about Max Payne, mainly because it is like Rockstar tapped into your missus's brain. What with Max Payne 3 making you focus on cover shooting.

  6. Sid Menon Avatar
    Sid Menon

    It's funny that you mentioned Ninja Gaiden not being fun alongside you not using the block button. I had the halfway problem in that I tried to block attacks but would get thrown or otherwise grappled by enemies- that's how they punished blocking for too long. I only looked up what the deal was with not dying in the game because I liked the potential of the combat system. It turns out you're supposed to roll around a crapton, which still involves the block button. The experience improved MASSIVELY for me after that. Oddly, the third game is easier as everyone says, but way more confusing to get into, what with all the crazy QTEs and instant kill abilities thrown in atop the regular combat.

    I figured out Devil May Cry on my own, but its pace is way less frenetic (at first, on lower difficulties), making it a better teacher through experience. A lot of people decried the enemies that gradually just get more abilities and recolors, but it was important in signalling when you would have to watch for new attacks. The basic enemies in Ninja Gaiden (and even the first Devil May Cry) have a wide array of abilities, which can throw you off if you don't end up triggering certain ones through your normal playstyle.

    It's interesting that playing Deadly Premonition wrong for you seems to be "hating that it's stupid". I mean, I agree on that when it comes to any b-game, but I don't know how you'd communicate that to somebody if they were playing it wrong.

    1. badgercommander Avatar
      badgercommander

      I think GiantBomb did a great job of communicating how to play Deadly Premonition the right way.

      As for Ninja Gaiden it is a bitter point in my gaming history as I absolutely hate that game with a passion and yet people who I genuinely respect adore the thing. The thing is I can play the game and got really far in it but then I just got bored of the ever respawning enemies the poor checkpointing and the irritating bosses. It simply wasn't for me.