Game Psychology
An article on game design, may be of interest to some here.
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3085/behavioral_game_design.php?page=1
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3085/behavioral_game_design.php?page=1
Post edited by Zoffy on
General Malthadius Zoff
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I wonder if the "Achievement" culture that's appearing these days on Xbox and Playstation was influenced by any of this...It certainly keeps me playing games longer!
i think players create their own rewards, like personal challenges.
not like a time trial or anything, for instance getting 100% completion, but one that doesn't give you anything at the end of it.
but i must say i loved fallout 3 and stopped playing at my last achievement and my level cap.
which means i wont be playing for ever and i have free time to buy their new product. :-P
Also I saw a few text/ adventures which gave the hint of real survival tactics and other usefull stuff... And cool jokes)
* speed-running (this is where they try to complete the game in record-breaking time, and is very popular on the 'net, with sites such as http://speeddemosarchive.com/ often hosting videos to prove the staggeringly fast times that some people claim),
*"breaking" the game (using in game glitches to complete objectives before they should be possible game-time wise, or doing other "impossible" things in the game, etc), or
*completing the game in extra-hard ways, such as ghosting in the Thief games (this means completing the game not only without killing or stunning an enemy, but actually not letting even one enemy even suspect that you are around), or Dark License to Kill mode in Goldeneye or Perfect Dark (when you complete either of these two on their hardest skill level you unlock the ability to set several variables, such as enemy reaction speed, enemy starting health, and enemy damage, and in DLtK mode you set them all to max, which makes the game much harder (like it wasn't already!), and there are even DLtK Enemy Rocket attempts, where the cheat to give all enemies hand held rocket launchers instead of guns is used too!), and
People who are successful with these self imposed challenges often post their results (and often their methods) on sites such as Gamefaqs.com or even dedicated sites like http://mg.thengamer.com/pdltk/ and http://come.thengamer.com/DarkLTK/index.html (two sites I'll never appear on! :-(), and I'd imagine that being named among the fastest in the world at your favourite game is much more satisfactory than some arbitrary achievement points could ever be.
its impossible to complete it on that difficulty, one shot and your toast.
You'd be surprised, most of the levels on both games have been completed with enemy rockets and DLtK, and with videos available to prove it.
It's staggering how good some players are, even considering that these people probably spend hours every day playing through the same levels for months on end.
One thing that austounded me was the video of Half-Life (PC) being done in just under half an hour ( http://speeddemosarchive.com/HalfLife.html ). Some of the things done here are amazing, and the authors knowledge of the game engines idiosynchrosies as well as game playing skill are amazing. I've seen a fair few speed run videos. and this is still maybe the most surprising.
yeah i can see some of the levels being done but not the entire game, imposssible.
some speed runs are pretty good, but never keen on when they break the game and exploit bugs.
for instance it was great reading how people would do fallout 3, but then someone found a bug in the code and you just jumped to the end (sort of) so the rest of the speed running ideas were redundant.
It's hard to imagine the methods employed in on-line games now being used a few years ago - then it made economic sense to have the player complete the game quickly so they would go out and buy another one. Now, you spend hours doing some repetitive task like chipping away at a piece of rock to get some iron which you then have to learn ironmongery so you can make it into a dagger.... would have made Atic Atac a bit of a drag..... ;)
I guess Elite was the first game to employ this sort of reward structure: you have to do a few food runs to safe worlds to earn the cash to buy better weapons before embarking on the more lucrative drug smuggling. Only when you've fully equipped the ship can you take on the Thargoids and fill the hold with Alien Items. It does all this without any artificial 'levelling' or 'unlocking' - theoretically you could take on the Thargoids with the starting ship, you just wouldn't get very far.
In the meantime all those kills were increasing the player rating which led to the ultimate reward.
Were there any games before Elite which used this kind of reward structure?
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