RE: [GD-Design] Speed kills

[Brian H. <ho...@py...>]

> What I'm not so sure about is the idea of just using a global time
> slider, because I think there are more fundamental reasons why the
> player's perception of of the game is affected by the game's speed
> than the speed itself, and I wonder if there are ways to exploit
> them to better effect. I'm not sure if I'll be able to articulate
> what I mean by this, but I'll give it a go. ;)

You could think of this as a balance of time vs. number of actions 
required to perform in that period of time.

If you have a cost function that returns the amount of time a player 
needs to successfully hand a situation S, cost(S) then:

if t < cost(S)
   player.overwhelmed =3D 1;

So you can balance this by reducing the cost function, which usually 
means lowering the complexity.

In the NFL, a rookie quarterback usually has the game plan simplified 
immensely so that he doesn't have to process as much information.  
Instead of trying to read 5 receivers, he's given two receivers.  As 
he becomes more comfortable (and the game slows down) he adds more 
receivers to his responsibilities.
 
> If you reduce the speed of the game enough, the novice's
> timeslicing should become nearly as effective as an expert's
> subconscious, simultaneous approach, making the gulf between the
> two much smaller. 

Right, that's the central point of my thesis.

> Of course, this assumes that the expert cannot
> also take advantage of the drop in speed to exploit higher-level
> tactics or whatever.

Sure, but that's a tangential thing.

> So, although reducing speed will help the novice greatly, so would
> reducing the amount of stuff he has to timeslice through.

Exactly, you're talking about reducing the cost function.  This ties 
into something I call the Law of Incremental Complexity, which I 
stumbled upon while playing yet another game with an incredibly bad 
tutorial/learning system.  

When teaching people something, there is a set pattern that makes them 
comfortable.  Language (human) researchers know this.  Ironically 
enough, I stumbled upon this in the 20th Anniversary Mythical 
Man-Month:

"We need research to appropriate for the software reuse problem the 
large body of knowledge as to how people acquire language.  Some of 
the lessons are immediately obvious:

* People learn in sentence contexts.

* People do not memorize anything but spelling.  They learn syntax and 
semantics incrementally, in context, by use

* People group word composition rules by syntactic classes not by 
compatible subsets of objects"

This also applies to learning software, math or anything else with a 
large vocabulary.  Games have a vocabulary as well, in terms of the 
things that can be done (such as input) and the various interactions 
with subsystems in the game.

Educating a user about this vocabulary is tricky, and nearly every 
single game today I've played gets it completely wrong.  They start 
with an out-of-context tutorial, at which point they expect the player 
to know all the subtleties and nuances of the game before they've 
started their first real mission.

The few games that have got this right are No One Lives Forever 2, 
Advance Wars (GBA) and Fire Emblem.  Games that have got this 
aggressively wrong are any with an explicit tutorial THEN the game.

Okay, come back from tangent, sorry =3D)

> I think we have seen a very simple example of this in action in
> racing games, where you can usually select an automatic gearbox,
> removing one thing the player has to think about: changing gears at
> the right time. 

Exactly.  But this is managing complexity, not managing difficulty.  I 
am all for incrementally increasing the complexity of a game to match 
the user's expected skill and experience.  That's fine, that's great.

I am fine with changing first-order features, such as the gearbox, to 
manage complexity and, by extension, difficulty.  

> You might argue at this point that this is no different to changing
> the number of hits it takes to kill a monster or similar game rule
> changes, but I think it is.

I agree, it is rather different and completely acceptable.  I agree 
it's a fine line, and quantifying the difference between an automatic 
gearbox and, say, more enemies is an interesting exercise.

Brian