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As you can see they ran four games in a one day event. Obviously I was going there for the Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, although since I’d be there for the whole event anyway, and they weren’t supposed to clash on the times, I agonised with the decision to enter Super Street Fighter IV as well, just for a laugh. In the end I decided not to bother – since I was taking along an XBox 360 for HDR casuals as well, I knew I’d enjoy playing that more than SSFIV anyway, and also, I wanted to be  able to look after the XBox and joysticks if needed and not have my attention split unnecessarily.

After picking up Mike “Zero1″ on the way there from Chesterfield, it was off to Birmingham. As expected, we got lost in Brum, just like last time. Whilst this was a new venue, I did thankfully recognise a lot more of the roads around the city though, and we thought we’d navigated a new course to the actual venue… then bam – “Road Closed”. With things so stacked against us and Jason “DNA” texting me asking me where I was, I called for help and Lom was there to deliver as he did an amazing job of giving me turn by turn “voice nav” all the way from central Brum to the tournament, and I made it there just in time with a great feeling of relief. I can’t thank Lom enough for getting me out of another Birmingham road-based pickle, and I’m also seriously impressed with your ability to do that – I am not sure I’d even know any part Sheffield well enough to be able to direct someone so precisely.

As soon as I got to sign into the event though, I could see it seemed rather, oversubscribed. Because they’d allowed on-the-day signups, about 50 more people had turned up than they’d expected… and it looked like things were going to be understaffed and under-equipped… so when DNA asked me if I would help out running HDR I wasn’t completely surprised. However I knew exactly what it would entail and I really didn’t want to run the game I was playing in, but on the other hand, I really wanted to help out the great guys I know at Electronic Dojo… so I bit the bullet and said I’d help. I knew exactly what I was in for though, and of course, it happened – I really lost my focus on actually playing the game once I was submerged in the chaos of trying to run a 16 man double elimination (The tournament had 32 entrants but was split into two groups of 16 to go through to a final four). The reason for the amount of chaos was that, predictably, due to all the extra players the SSFIV tournament was over-running massively, and because many players were playing in multiple games, it was a nightmare to even get two players together to play a match. So even though I tried to run my HDR bracket as smoothly as possible, it took way longer than it should do. We also had a HUGE problem with very poor kit, and massive problems being brought about because we were supposed to be playing on Play-FUCKIN’-Station 3. Now, I’m going to admit here that my hatred for everything Playstation branded has been fading greatly in recent years… I’m already an old man by videogaming standards and perhaps it’s my youthful fervour fading, but in truth, even I can’t stay bitter forever, and the reasons why I got so pissed off with my PS1 and the PS2 so much really don’t exist any more. I’ve really thought seriously about getting a PS3 lately… but there is one area where I really still detest the PS3 – and that’s for fighting games. With system input lag, splitting the community, non-compatible sticks and consensus worse online play on PSN than XBox Live, I can’t see any reason for fighting games and fighting game tournaments to ever run anything on PS3 when there are better options. But for some reason, they were trying it here, and the PS3 was giving us huge problems. On one TV it wouldn’t output any sound, on another it insisted on outputting in widescreen (on a 4:3 CRT!). Despite numerous attempts to change game and system options, nothing was working. And yet through all this mess there’s Zero1′s 360 sitting there running HDR perfectly fine (albeit on an LCD that some claimed was lagging) with both our TE sticks hooked up & available…. So after the first few rounds of problems we ended up giving players the choice to either play on a decent 360 setup or the diabolically bad setup that was the PS3 – of course the majority went for the 360, but as it was announced as a PS3 tournament it had to be done that way if either player insisted on the PS3.

Anyway, despite all of this, I think I did an ok job running it as best as I could in the circumstances.  There was a lot I couldn’t do anything about, but as you read above, I didn’t even know I’d be running things until a few minutes before it started up. We even noticed a screw-up in the tournament bracket – where someone in losers would’ve been paired to play someone twice before a final match – and got it corrected before it occurred. However there is one mistake that I may have been partially to blame for that I do have to call myself out on: the losers final match between AlanDaMan vs Ashman NW. They did button checks ok, but one of them (I forget which) wanted to be sat on the same side as his character on the screen – as this was a reasonable request and one I would’ve made myself had I been sat on the wrong side – I told them to restart the game and just flip the profiles to retain their button settings. I’ve done this many times before myself at home, and also earlier in the tournament, and it had worked fine. However this time, somehow, Ashman NW’s button config got reset and unfortunately he didn’t notice it until mid-round in a fight (as his stick is very close to the defaults) so we couldn’t re-start the match, and he had to take a round forfeit and re-configure. Understandably he was quite upset about it, and I was too for my part in advising the players to do it like that – as it seemed to have caused the problem. Although Ashman was a real class gent about it and told me not to worry, this kind of thing really gets to me, so I’m still annoyed about it, especially as their match was incredibly close and down to the wire. All I can say is I’ve never seen that bug before and if I am running a tournament again I will do some tests to see if I can figure out what causes it. Ashman, as far as I am concerned I still owe you one mate.

As for my performance, well, as I say, I really lost focus at the start, and was a bit distracted throughout. No sour grapes as it always happens to me when I run a tournament, even online ones; I can never play my best. I lost my first match with one of the ‘Twin Dragons’ (sorry guys due to how my visual psychology works I am almost incapable of correctly identifying twins!) and I was so unaware of what was going on I honestly didn’t even realise I had lost and I wondered why my opponent was shaking hands with me for a few moments. Ok, so I clearly didn’t have much in the way of tournament nerves, but talk about playing on auto-pilot! Once things I’d got things running a bit better later on I did manage to concentrate more, and I ended up with more wins than losses on the day. I was knocked out by fellow DeeJay player and 4th place finisher AlanDaMan so I couldn’t ask for a better guy to lose to. He played really well against me in the mirror and read a bunch of my tendencies really well. GGs to the Dragons, Alan and everyone else

Here’s the final wrap up and results from Vs Fighting, and the forum thread for it.

Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix Results:
1. Orf (Ryu)
2. Prodigal Son (Ryu)
3. Kaos Flare (Guile)
4. Alan the Man (Deejay)

So it was all players who’ve finished highly at the last couple of years of SVB and Prodigal Son (Ryan Hart) also placing well at a big HDR tournament for the first time I’ve seen. Congrats to everyone, especially Orf – good to see an XBox Live player winning again! Unfortunately I didn’t get to watch the finals as I was off home to watch the Miami Dolphins win their season opener that night – I wish Street Fighter tournaments wouldn’t clash with the NFL season!

A bunch of HDR and BB players including Ravage C and The Original Don

I myself have to say a special thanks to Lom (again) and Justin Xavier and of course Jason (DNA) for all the effort they put into this. As is obvious though, and as Justin’s already put in his report linked above, they know they want to do better next year. From my perspective in terms of controllable stuff, bad planning on numbers and allowing on-the-day signups was the root of many of the problems. As I am also sure they are aware, they definitely need to get access to more and better kit, and also to do better testing and allocation of kit on the day, as there seemed to be numerous times when machines were running casuals when really they were desperately needed to help run tournaments. I’m looking forward to next year though, and assuming I can make it, I’ll volunteer to help out in future, but not at HDR please guys! I’d quite happily help run a SSFIV pool though (& maybe play in it too, since I wouldn’t expect to win any at that game anyway).

SVB follow up:

It was really great at this event to be able to chat to the Dragon twins – two of the main organisers from Neo Empire. I was pleased to note they’d read my article about this years SVB, and I was ready and expecting to take a bit of flak from writing it, but actually, they were really great about it – well, apart from perhaps wishing I’d written a TL;DR summary Whilst it’s clear I’ve gained some notoriety for being a bit vocal, they seemed to realise I was attempting constructive criticism and they weren’t happy with the way some things happened at this years SVB and they want to and know they can do better. So that’s an excellent response and all anyone can ask for a positive future. The immediate future of SF2 looks brighter than ever as far as I can see in the UK. HDR seems to be getting something of a ‘revival‘ as it’s clear there’s still a lot of interest in this game at the tournament level. Two 30+ man tournaments in a year with some of the top players in UK and Europe showing up is hardly a bad thing for the UK.

You can imagine my frustration with not being able to find any videos on demand! Nearly all of the websites for these tournaments are horrendously designed and good luck finding any information!

So, with this in mind and since I’m looking for them anyway, I’ve decided to start posting links to any vods that I manage to find for the big tournaments.

Here”s my first: the MLG Washington D.C. Vods :-

http://www.mlgpro.com/content/link/316783/MLG-Washington-D-C-Starcraft-2-Rebroadcast/

Here’s the winner’s bracket finals of Idra vs Huk:

It’s been a few months since the last one, but now the summer “real” tournaments are over, I wanted to get back to running some of these. This tournament is for Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix tournament is only open to European XBox Live players. If you’re in America and are interested in playing something like this, please check out the WWL instead!

When: This coming SUNDAY 2nd OCTOBER, 2pm UK-time (14:00 GMT) start. These tournaments usually take around 2.5 hours, but it could take longer, so please be committed to play all afternoon and into the evening if necessary due to numbers.

As with last time, if you are not online on XBL at the start time, I will consider you to have dropped from the tournament. It will usually take at least 10 minutes for me to randomise the first round bracket and message everyone with their matches, so PLEASE BE PATIENT at the start and don’t send me messages asking me if it’s on etc. It is It just takes a while to sort out the 1st round as it depends on who turns up. This is the same reason why everyone has to be on time, as once I’ve made the brackets I cannot easily drop or add people without spoiling the integrity of the tournament – apart from in rare circumstances where an extra person or two makes the bracket easier. But if you want to be sure you can enter, be online in time!

Location: XBox Live

Signups:

Signup by Saturday 2nd October by posting here or on the SRK forums to participate, or by messaging me over XBL. Please do not signup until you are sure you can play on the date/time above.

Some late signups on the day MAY be allowed, but I cannot guarantee it, as noted above, it will depend on number of entrants.

Format:

Standard Double Elimination format. The number of signups will decide the exact nature of the event. Assuming we get 16 players or less, there will be a 16 player double-elimination bracket with first round Byes assigned as necessary, with seeding being based on previous results in my XBL events.

I will send an XBL message each round to all players as to who they are to play next. Tournament rounds after the first will be arranged by XBL messaging. ie: You will receive an XBL message each tournament round as to who you are to play next.

Each match will be a single best 3 of 5 rounds game (ie: the standard HDR “Ranked Match” setting).
All settings must be on default.
Akuma (Gouki, Demon) is banned.
You can pick any character to play (ie: the standard HDR blind pick). You are free to change character between rounds if you wish.
‘Turbo’ functions on joysticks or controllers are banned.

I recommend using a private 2-player match room on XBL. I will attempt to add all participants to my my XBL Friends List (which is visible) and also to the SF2HDR EU account Friends List so you should be able to find each other and invite each other into games easily.

Reporting Results:

Once your match is completed, BOTH participants must report their results over XBL message to me. All results will collated and later be posted here. Sadly I have not found a good way I can possibly report in real-time whilst also keeping the rounds running smoothly.

As usual, I only need to know who won and who lost, but if you want to report game-round scores or characters used etc, go ahead. If I only get a single report I will consider it accurate (eg: only the winner reports).

In the event people do not play, or there are discrepancies and disagreement in the results reported (or not reported), or any other kind of complaint reported, I will attempt to manage that. In the worst case scenario I will have to void the whole event if players do not co-operate, but I’m glad to say we’ve not had any problems yet at all. Don’t forget this is only an online tournament, and as such it isn’t too serious a deal – you should of course try your best to win, as that’s the whole point, but also look upon it as a chance to meet fellow SF2 players and have some fun.

Each tournament round if possible certain matches may be highlighted to be videoed by any player with available video equipment – please let me know if you can take videos and if you can, please do so and upload them. If I ask you to record a match you are not playing in, we will create a private player room with extra slots for the observer(s) and invite the actual participants in. I will post all results and links to any videos later. If possible videos will be posted at the SF2 Europe youtube channel.

Good luck and good games!

RESULTS:

Due to numbers, there were four first round Byes. According to the rules these should have been seeded, however due to there being a lot of new players, this was not easy to calculate quickly, and so to make sure the 1st round could start in good time, I instead did pure random 1st round draws. I also made a mistake in hosting the final match and putting it on the wrong round count, and a few other players reported round/match settings being done incorrectly – so apologies for these minor hiccups, but I still think it went ok all round. Comments and criticism is very much welcomed though!

Super Vs Battle 2010 Report & Analysis

Yep there’s some big buts here (& I cannot lie). Read on later for why, but first, here’s my story…

From Sharrow to Harrow

Well it was a fairly late decision for me to go to SVB, and the main thing that swung it was the amount of friends & online guys that I knew would be going this year. My previous experiences of going along and only knowing a couple of people there was very different to this year. After a four hour drive down that was far longer than it should have been (nasty M1 traffic and 50 zones annoyances) somehow I managed not to get lost when driving to a new place – practically a first for me. Freakishly I drove right up to the hotel carpark without a hitch. I did get a bit worried when I’d come off the motorway and I seemed to be driving through woods for a while, but for once googlemaps directions were correct & I was on the right road to Harrow. As soon as I walked out of my hotel room I was greeted with a “Hey! Are you Remy?” – incredibly Tony “Herbalholic” was right outside my door and remembered me from last year, and then he introduced me to Mike “Zero1″ who was in the room opposite me. So yeah, the social situation was basically fantastic at SVB for me this time around. It was great up to meet up with (SM)Qarnage, Fulan, Ethan, Robin “PlanetRV”, Lion-O, Painindagame, Markyboy, Ashman NW, Obi “Bleeper”, Callum “RavageC”, Jish “ScarGfx”, Zach “AverseBliss”, Orf and put a few names to faces for AlanDaMan & justinxavier, and probably a load of other players I’ve unfortunately forgotten – I’m very sorry – please get in touch and remind me who you are if I met you at SVB! Also it was very cool that a large number of “big names” from the fighting game scene were there this time around – of course Daigo Umehara was there as was advertised, as well as Markman from Madcatz, and names I knew from EVO and other tournaments – Luffy, Ryan Hart and Kayane – but the real surprise for me was the industry presence as Katsuhiro Harada (Producer of Tekken), Yoshinori Ono (Producer of Street Fighter IV) and Seth Killian (Capcom USA) were there too. In fact the highlight of the whole event for me was getting a chance to talk a bit about videogames, fighting game design and the ‘scene’ with Seth for a while – he was really generous with his time and I came away being really impressed with him (despite the fact I’ve disputed some of his articles in the past! ). You can expect a few more articles on the coming months on some of the things we spoke about. One thing I was really disappointed about was Daigo wasn’t playing in HDR. The story I heard was that Madcatz was only sponsoring him for SSFIV and so that was all he was allowed to play. Perhaps there was some concern he’d walk away winning all Street Fighter games if he was allowed to enter? But I don’t really know.

Umeee! Showmeyourtits

Herbal and Zero1 get straight on the Remix!

Anyway, back to the event – I got some food with Zero and Herbal and then drove over to the venue halls and I was really glad I’d driven down so had been able to bring my XBox and kit along as I was able to immediately get an STHDR setup going. Zero1 told me there’d been nothing on for SF2 (bar Dreamcast stuff) until I’d gotten there and he’d been getting a bit bored, so it was awesome to finally get some casual games on right away – I only wish I’d managed to get there sooner really, but I hadn’t wanted to travel too early as I was planning for lots of late nights in London. I realised once I got there that SVB had improved their organisation at least a little from previous years, and had the players’ names for all the pools had been pre-prepared and were written up on the wall. I wasn’t sure if I should look or not, but someone told me he thought I had “an easy pool” and so curiosity got the better of me and I just had to check it out. Despite all the (all too) vocal haters out there HDR once again had a decent amount of signups (30+ I believe, a lot more than many of the other games on) and there were 8 Pools for HDR. Overall I found the level of play was higher in HDR this year than last – to me, whilst casual interest in SF2 may have worn off now HDR isn’t “new” it seems that the number of good competitive players at this game in the UK is growing. There were six players in my pool and I knew three of them immediately just from their nicknames – two of them beat me regularly beat me on XBox Live, and the other one beat me last time we’d played.. so right away, my confidence was really quite low. I didn’t think I’d have any chance to make it out of that pool, but I wasn’t too bothered, as I’d really come for the casuals and meeting up with people this time anyway, or so I thought… ( foreshadowing at it’s finest there! ). Just to add to it, my joystick broke in the hands of one of my pool competitors (Robocop II) later that night just as I was about to get some practice games in against him. So I was left without my favourite modded Seimitsu HRAP stick (crafted by my friend Marc “Id0ru” – wish you coulda come along Marc!) that I’d been loving and practicing on for the last few months. Gah! Although thankfully because I’d brought all my fighting gaming gear I had my old Madcatz TE to fall back on. One of the really cool guys at the front desk had soldering equipment and everything on hand and offered to try to fix it if I wanted him to, but said that he’d already promised a few repairs to other people so he didn’t know if he’d have time. Oh well, no use crying about it I thought. I settled down to get in as much practice as I could to try and get used to the different feel of the Sanwa TE again. We actually continued the HDR casuals back at the hotel later by bringing my XBox back to Zero1′s room (as it was much bigger than mine!) and we played tons of good games until about 4am, even mixing in a bit of HF for a laugh.

Too Cool to Pool

I got up pretty late again the next day and got down to the venue expecting to play a few games, play my pools, get knocked out of the tournament and then go out for a clubbing all-nighter in London (at Slimelight). Predictably, things were delayed and running late, so I got there in plenty of time… however HDR wasn’t too badly affected compared to some of the other games, and started only about 30 mins late. Sadly my potential stick-repair man was too busy, and so I had to play with the TE. Markyboy then hooked me up with a beer just before the pools started – but right as I started to have a drink we were told that alcohol wasn’t allowed in the venue – which was a surprise as no-one had seemed bothered the day before – I assume there was some miscommunication somewhere. However luckily I managed to chug a load before I played which really helped me – thanks Markyboy I owe you one! It turned out I actually knew everyone in my pool, as one of the names I hadn’t recognised from the board was actually painindagame who I knew off XBox Live, and the final guy I didn’t know didn’t turn up. So the 6 pool was cut down to only 5. Surprising myself completely I managed beer-assisted wins against everyone except Robocop II and his expert Blanka.. and I managed to play the match of my life and get really lucky to beat Ashman NW too. I somehow pulled off some absolute circus-act stuff to come back from a huge life disadvantage. I was really enjoying finally getting to play tournament matches offline though. As I’ve always found, everything is so much clearer to see without lag and it really helps my style of play and my not exactly brilliant reactions to not have to deal with missing frames etc. I was even hitting super-juggles I can almost never hit online, even though I was still struggling a bit with the Sanwa stick which I’m not fond of on the TE, and getting a few random moves out that were completely unintentional – but perhaps my unpredictability helped me a little. I also think I was really fortunate that RavageC chose to play T Hawk against me rather than mirror match me with his DeeJay… but when Ashman NW beat Robocop II I predicted what I thought would happen and it did – three way tie again – exactly what happened to me last year. So I discussed it with my Pool judge and thought we had things sorted. Robocop’s name was drawn out of a hat and myself and Ashman started to play a tiebreaker match. I won the first match and then I realised something was wrong. The pool judge had said the loser of our match was out. I realised if I beat Ashman again he was going to suffer the exact same unfair fate that happened to me last year, and Robocop had effectively just won the tiebreaker for free (just as CalmDownMonkey had last year). True to my word from last year, I kicked up a fuss on behalf of my online sparring friend Ashman, and the Pool judge and Robocop were both totally cool about it as they weren’t confident things were being done right either, as I explained what GoldenGunman had told me after the event last year. Anyway, one of the main TOs (I think it was Bulletproof but apologies if I’ve gotten mixed up ^_^) did come over and stated the correct rules to which I said “that’s exactly what I was saying” and things were then done right. So it turned out Robocop II had been unfortunate with the short straw here, and he had to re-play Ashman after I beat him in the tiebreaker. Again, the pool system was really unfair on Robocop here, as he’d only been beaten by a single player in the whole tournament but was out (more on the tournament system later), but at least it was fairer than settling a tiebreaker without playing another game. Completely shocking to me, I’d won my pool – and RavageC joked to me that “he didn’t believe in me either”.

HDR Pool matches at SVB 2010

Anyway, the first set of Pools (#1-4) were completed in about an hour and then I waited for the final 16 match which I assumed would happen that day, although no-one seemed able to tell me for sure. And I waited, and waited, and then waited some more. I don’t know what was happening, but Pools #5-8 took forever to run (more than double the time our pools took) and it was now getting really late into the evening. I was getting really impatient and had to phone my friends and warn them I might not make it out clubbing as we’d planned. Finally they got around to doing the top 16 and my opponent had left the venue – so I got a Bye into the Final 8! I was slightly deflated because I’d now missed my chance to go out in London to not even play a game, and I now needed to get some sleep too so I’d actually be able to hopefully play semi decent in the last 8. An all-nighter in gay olde London towne suddenly seemed like a bad idea (as much fun as it always is!)…. Even so I was super jazzed to know I’d be able to go on to play on the stage in the final 8. I was also really happy that my friend Robin “PRV” had made it through as well – even though he had to fly back to Germany in the morning and wouldn’t be able to actually play his matches. However, he was just happy to make it too, and we both knew that our XBL friends Fulan, Orf and Qarnage were through as well, and we didn’t exactly fancy our chances to beat them anyway! We were both just overjoyed we’d got through that far (even though in my case it was mainly through luck!) and had had such a good day of gaming. We stayed up having pizza and (many) more drinks and some more HDR matches at the hotel; once again Zero1 and I played until about 4am. Sadly the SSFIV money match between PRV and markyboy didn’t happen as PRV was half-asleep and markyboy was completely out of it by then! Crazy guys. (Naked).

Ultimato, Ultimato, Ultimato Fight! COME ON!

Sunday I again got up really late, long after everyone else I knew had got to SVB or had had to head home, so instead I chilled out in Harrow town centre for a bit. I found an great Italian coffee place (Anacona’s I think it’s name was, anyway its right in the centre with an “Illy” coffee sign up) that I highly recommend should anyone find themselves in Harrow centre… Oh crap! I realise I sound like Peter King & his random coffee reviews now… but seriously, their macchiatos were amazing and they were really friendly, good prices too, and of course I had to order a tuna sandwich to eat, as is now the SVB tradition. Eventually I made my way over to the tournament venue and by now all the previous delays had caught up with them and, as everyone had predicted, things were running massively late. The HDR finals were scheduled for a decent timeslot of 6.30pm, but they didn’t actually start until about 10pm – and a lot of the crowd had gone by that time. The announcer made some noise about defending HDR from being “unpopular” but as the signups showed, that wasn’t true at all, it was more likely due to the fact that it was now really late on a Sunday night and people had to catch trains or get home for work the next day! Luckily most of the foreigners, the long-distance travellers who were staying the night, and not to mention all the Tekken 6 crew (who were on after us) were still around, so there was a good group there still to make it feel quite special. However I was sad that almost all my friends had had to leave already as it had run far later than planned – the same thing happened to me at my first tournament I attended as a spectator, so these days I plan for it. I watched some of the SSFIV finals just before HDR and they were honestly quite fun to watch. Obviously I’ve written a lot about why I didn’t like SFIV that much, but SSFIV has impressed me in the way it improved on a lot of things from “vanilla” SFIV. I have to say still rate the “IV series” as decent competitive games for my taste, I find them an intriguing blend of being somewhere in between the type of fighting game I enjoy the most – zone, footsie, timing/reaction, positioning and mindgame heavy (ie: SFII series) and the kind of hit-confirm, combo & technical-execution based fighters that I don’t enjoy so much (at least competitively, casually it can sometimes be a different matter). The weird thing watching the SSFIV final though was Daigo losing to Ryan Hart. I thought that Ryan had picked Cammy as some kind of surprise character, and lost to Daigo’s Ryu.. and then Ryan had lost a Ryu v Ryu and so Daigo had won.. however at some point I realised the ‘home’ crowd was really going too wild for that to have been the case and I realised I’d got the players the wrong way around mirror and it was Daigo that had picked Cammy and had lost as her and as Ryu! Why on earth he did this is currently a mystery. He didn’t seem to be taking the match too seriously though, messing about doing Cammy repeated air cannon strikes in the first loss when he had a large life disadvantage and effectively just gave up… or maybe he wanted to show off his cannon strike skills (if I recall it’s pretty hard to do what he was doing) or was trying to build meter… either way, it was strange to watch. I’ll post the HDR results later, but if you are interested, you can get all the full results for SSFIV and all the games played here.

Jump into the sky! Fighting for your dream!

RemY Fighting!

Finally after all the waiting, HDR was on, and I was called up as the 2nd game to be played. I took a few swigs of my “special drink” for luck, and to be honest, it all happened so fast it was a bit of a blur to me. I was matched up against PR Balrog… a guy I’d never met before but I knew he was a bit of a big name and big reputation (I know he is from elsewhere in Europe than the UK, France I believe) – and I’d just watched him take rounds of Daigo in SSFIV so I knew he had to be a great player. I did my grinning DeeJay pose to the camera and it really wasn’t a fake smile. I just felt so much joy inside me – just to be there it was amazing. My main goal as I’d mulled it over the night before was to hopefully get at least a round off one of these top players – it’s normally the best I manage against the likes of Orf and Qarnage! I knew I had gotten great luck to even get this far, but to be fair, there were a number of players in the top 16 who I thought I could’ve beaten, so I couldn’t totally say I didn’t deserve it, but still.. I didn’t want to embarrass myself and I wanted to at least prove it wasn’t just a fluke of the format and that I belonged. Surprisingly, despite his nickname, PR Balrog picked Chun Li against me – that put my confidence up a notch as I like that matchup much more than Boxer v DeeJay. I was also glad to be playing someone I didn’t know (and who didn’t know me) as he wouldn’t know what to expect from me. So I ‘came flying out like a Batman villain’ with absolutely everything I had – and to my own surprise I took the first game 2-0… For Jamaica!!! I don’t know if I was just too happy to have won a match on the stage and subconsciously relaxed, or to be honest, what really happened the rest of the way, but I know I took him to match point twice, and I know I was playing very wild and loose, but he came back to win it in the final match, final round. But I don’t feel bad about it at all, in fact my hat (if I had one ) is off to PR Balrog – he adapted amazingly well and quickly to how I was playing, and played a really good defensive Chun. He certainly played better than me in the match and deserved to win it. I was fishing for an opportunity to use lots more tricks (some of which I’d caught Ashman’s Chun with just the day before) right down to the wire, but he played brilliantly and didn’t fall for any of them. We both had a chat afterwards about what a great game it had been and how I’d caught him by surprise with a lot of the things I used and how close it had been. I feel it was a bit of a coin flip in some ways (as it can be in SFII), I’m not sure what would happen if we played more against each other. I’m sure I’d win some, but I have a feeling he’s better all-round than me & would do better the more we played – his execution and reactions are certainly far better than mine as is evidenced by the fact he also got final 8 in SSFIV – a game I wouldn’t stand a chance at.

Here’s the full results for HDR – I was glad I got to talk to and congratulate all the players except Sprint.

Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix:
1: KaosFlare (Guile)
2: WA Qarnage (Boxer, Guile)
3: ORF (Ryu)
4: PR Balrog (Chun Li, Boxer)
5-8: Remy77077 (Dee Jay)
5-8: PRV (E. Honda)
5-8: Fulan (Blanka)
5-8: Sprint (Cammy, Zangief)

Sour Skittles

I don’t actually want to burn any bridges here as I think a lot of the guys there are individually really sound & as you’ll know if you’ve read my past reports, I’ve praised many of them in the past, however as a collective group, Neo Empire appears to have some real issues when it comes to running tournaments, that came to light even more during SVB 2010 and that left me feeling quite sour about a few things. I feel all of this has to be said, even if I’m the sole “voice of the little guy” or whatever, or they decide to ban me from further events or something, I will just have to deal with it, since my principles simply won’t allow me to not say this stuff. I would have said about this to NE staff in person once I’d found out about all of the things below.. however I didn’t want to risk spoiling my good mood before or after the HDR Final 8. As I said in the headline, for me, the tournament was pretty great.. but…

Big screens and big stage - this is the kinda thing Neo Empire get right

A number of my XBL friends had chatted with me in the preceding weeks about what my previous experiences with Neo Empire events were like, and the way I explained it was that they seem to get all the big difficult stuff sorted really well – as you can see with the flashy graphics and posters, the “big names” brought in, the promotion, all the kit and the venue etc – they do a great job. But then it’s such a shame they manage to fall over on a lot of the smaller details. Some of it is just general disorganisation and chaos that comes with the territory with these events… but some of these things can be avoided or at least not exacerbated as seems to happen at times. Scheduling for example: Since you had to sign-up prior to the event, they knew the exact maximum numbers of players for each game. Now, first time around things can be a bit of a mystery, but once you’ve run a few events (as for example I have with my online tournaments), and as they have with proper tournaments, you should know pretty well that X amount of players will take X amount of time. However here they made a decision to change every game (from what I’ve heard from friends that played in other games) to best 2 of 3 matches (not just rounds) and in some cases like Tekken they upped it to best 3 of 5 matches (also with 3 of 5 rounds per match!). So pretty obviously this was a contributing factor to blowing the schedule in a number of areas. It was a fantastic decision for a game like HDR where matches are decided in a couple of minutes at the most anyway, but for games that go on for a far longer time like Tekken, BlazBlue and in particular SSFIV with the large number of sign-ups it had, this seems to be a baffling decision as the schedule didn’t seem to have been planned with it in mind properly. One of the problems with this was that it meant that a number of games ended up being played simultaneously… which is just a problem you face, however, here’s where it starts to get worse fast. It was very noticeable that if you were a “Neo Empire Name” player, you would get your matches held up, or be allowed to play all your matches in a pool in a row, so you were able to compete in all of them at once. However if you were a new player… no such luck. I found out later one of my friends was DQ’d from a couple of games because he was playing other ones simultaneously. Now, I’m sure his name was being called and they did a 5 min wait or whatever.. but the problem was the event was split into two halls with events being run in both, and there was only PA in one of the halls.

The way individual pools were ran also left a bit to be desired… my own Pool was at first being judged by Robocop who was of course one of the players in the pool – however Robocop’s a stand-up guy so it wasn’t an issue for any of us, and another pool judge soon replaced him by the time it mattered and he played his games. Still we then had the palarva with the three-way tie, and again, everything got sorted out fine in the end.. but it took someone (ie: me) to take a stand and to know their own rules better than their own staff do. At least these have been written down now though. However one thing that was especially embarrassing for HDR was that Akuma/Gouki wasn’t actually officially banned anywhere in the rules at all! Luckily everyone seemed to know he was supposed to be banned.. however I’d have really pitied a new player if he’d turned up expecting to be able to pick Akuma – how would they have known otherwise?

In another pool a “Neo Empire Name” player didn’t pick a character and waited on the select screen. The player he was against then also wondered what was up, and did the same thing – they both waited for about 2 minutes. However eventually he got worried and picked his character.. and was promptly counter-picked and beaten by the “Name” player. Shouldn’t the Pool judge have stepped in and either force both players to forfeit (as the rules say) or resolved it with a proper blind pick. However I got the strong impression the reason nothing was done was because this was a Neo Empire Name player, and thus got away with this.

Back to my situation in the final 16 for HDR. The whole running of this top 16 was really bad. Many of the matches weren’t even observed by any staff or judges at all – again this was ok because most of the players were cool and honest (but given some of the other things that went on, I cannot be sure there were no shenanigans attempted). I have no idea why they took so long to get started (probably scheduling problems with other games again), but when it was apparent my alloted opponent was a no-show, I attempted to talk to the NE staff member who seemed to be running things, and I pointed out two players who could’ve easily gone through from pools who’d been unfairly knocked out for various reasons (discussed here) and tried to tell him that I would be more than happy to play my final 16 match against one of them as they were still in attendance (and as you’ll remember from earlier, I had actually planned to go out clubbing, so a part of me was actually wanting to get knocked out!), but this particular staff member just completely ignored me and wouldn’t even speak to me – which apart from anything else was excessively rude for an event you are paying for. I would’ve been perfectly happy if he’d just said “sorry, we can’t do that” which would’ve been right and I would’ve agreed with that, being fair to the rules, however at the time I felt it was worth a shot to claw back something for players who’d been wronged earlier. Even so, there was nothing I could do so I’d have to take my Bye. However the next day, the player I would’ve been up against, who’s a great player and also happens to be a “Neo Empire Name” approached me and told me “You have to play your final 16 match against me today”, and apparently he’d been told by someone on the staff this is what should be done… Now, nothing personal against anyone involved but I actually couldn’t believe what I was hearing – it was just appalling sportsmanship. Because of the whole situation with the final 16 matches running so late and how I’d had to stand-up my friends who were expecting to meet me out in London that night, I was having absolutely none of it – I flat out refused to play my game “in arrears”. But what sickens me is that had anyone else tried this – for example if I had swanned off and gone out clubbing and missed my final 16 match, do you think anyone at Neo Empire would’ve even entertained for one second the laughable idea that a “no-name player” like me would be allowed to even ask to do a next-day re-match? It appeared dangerously close to being one rule for Neo Empire Names, one rule for everyone else. That said, luckily, my refusal to play stood, and nothing further came of this, and, as you read in the above story, it all ended well.. but I really worry if this had happened to someone without my situation or level of determination to ensure fair play.

Back to the Daigo SSFIV final 8 games. There are rumours that the “blind pick” of Daigo playing Cammy (as a counterpick to Ryan’s Dhalsim or Sagat?) was actually leaked to Ryan before the match began by one of the admins. Now these rumours have already been denounced, and I would normally laugh at things like this too… however given other things I saw go on, I have to say I can’t completely discount them myself anymore. It’s disturbing.

However I’m sad to say I’ve saved the worst case till last. Neo Empire Name Player #1 was playing in a particular pool, and told the NE Pool judge that Neo Empire Name Player #2 should be in that Pool. The pool judge (perhaps foolishly) complied and let both players play in that pool. No-Name Player ‘A’ beat both Neo Empire Name players #1 and #2 during pool play, however due to losing in other matches, it came down to a multi-way tiebreaker (again). I don’t know if it was resolved correctly or not (it seems unlikely given my experiences the last two years!) however No Name Player A was matched against Neo Empire Player #1 again, and beat him a 2nd time, to qualify without dispute from his pool. Or rather it would have been, but it seems the Pool judge had not tallied all the results and had asked NE Name Player #1 what the results had been, and he stated he’d beaten No Name Player A… however luckily he also asked the No Name Player what the result was – and so this was disputed. Luckily a video of the matches been taken, and the correct results were reported. Later on I saw Neo Empire Name Player #1 talking with a lot of the other NE staff, at length, when I was wandering about and wondering what was causing the extreme delay for the final 16 matches. I assumed this was just him chatting with friends or something of the like though, so I didn’t think anything of it – until I remembered it much later. Just before the Final 16 was played, No-Name Player A was told by a staff member that he was no longer qualified, because Neo Empire Name Player #2 shouldn’t have been playing in his Pool at all because he hadn’t registered properly, and so if the results from Name players #2 matches were removed from that Pool (ie: his win against #2 was removed from A’s results), he’d have no longer have been in the tie-breaker and thus would not have qualified. But guess who did, yep, Neo Empire Name Player #1 – the player he had actually beaten twice & who had been the one to ask the Pool judge for player #2 to enter the pool. It also transpires that the actual Pool judge was not consulted on what had happened earlier. BULLSHIT doesn’t even begin to describe this whole sorry situation. I regret that I didn’t understand what had happened fully until later and so wasn’t able to stick up for this poor guy who was effectively browbeaten into accepting it. Win and you’re in? Not if you’re playing against Neo Empire Names it seems, who can bend ears, and the rules, in their favour. It really is extremely disappointing that this kind of thing is allowed to go on. The good news is that this player did complain more later, and did receive a refund and an apology.

I discussed with Seth Killian about my general feelings about this and asked him about how EVO runs things and he said the key thing that he’s proud about EVO is that it always tries to “put the player first” which I think is a fantastic one-line goal statement for an event like this. However one friend of mine also familiar with NE events put it bluntly to me on the first day about SVB – “Here, the players are treated like shit”, and given everything I witnessed above, I can’t honestly say that he’s wrong. Another sad quote I heard (admittedly 2nd-hand) purportedly from a NE staff member in response to a query was “if you don’t like it, go to EVO”. Not exactly a great attitude there guys…

So yeah. I’m calling Neo Empire out on all of this crap stuff that I saw or heard happening. Now, everyone makes mistakes and I’m a firm believer in giving anyone a 2nd chance – but the first step to fixing a problem is to admit that you have one… so really, Neo Empire, the ball’s in your court now. Collectively you do so many things right, don’t let stupid stuff like this and individual bad behaviour spoil your events. You can argue these are all minor things in the grand scheme – however the strength of things like this are determined by their weakest link. Again, the good news is that I’ve heard privately some NE Staff members have realised they need to take some steps to improve the professionalism of the way they run things. I really hope they can and do so, best of luck guys!

Elimination!

A double elimination bracket from one of my XBL Tournaments

Ok, just to end this article on a slightly happier note, here’s one simple tip that I really believe would resolve masses of the problems with running the NE events as they are – as long as they are demanding advance signups and so know the numbers beforehand – run it as a double elimination format.

Now, I’m well aware that every workable tournament format has it’s issues. None of them are ideal for one reason or another. It often comes down to the case of time vs fairness vs ‘drama’. However I’ve become convinced over the years of playing many different competitive games in many different tournament formats that double elimination is the best one for this size of tournament for fighting videogames. You’d have far less matches and speed things up immensely, and do away with all the problems of Pool seeding, tie-breakers etc. Players like Robocop II should not get eliminated early, only losing against a single player like that. I also saw one pool had to run a four-way tiebreaker to resolve itself, which is ridiculous & very time consuming. You’d also prevent people like me this year from getting an “easy ride” into the final 8 like I did. I got into the final 8 with a real-game record of 4-1, and finished 4-2… last year I went 5-2 (with both losses against the same player), so I arguably actually performed better last year, yet of course I advanced much further this year.

I also wonder what you really gain by doing the Pools into single elimination format. I can see that it’s certainly more appealing for a player to attempt to enter even if they aren’t expecting to be able to win very many games, as they will at least be able to play out 5 or 6 matches and perhaps win one. However I think it must be very rare for any player with 2 or more losses to ever advance out of any pool. I certainly don’t personally know of anyone that did – so in reality it’s a double elimination anyway, with only the ‘illusion’ of a chance if you lose two (this is the same problem with Swiss pairings as well unless there are large numbers of competitors & rounds). The other point is, are you really running a tournament for players that enter not expecting to be able to win a game? I really understand you want to appeal to as many people as possible, but somehow, the trade-off doesn’t seem worth it here. What can possibly be done would be to put all the players that go 0-2 into a special “losers losers” bracket where two (or maybe more) players get a chance to make it back into the “losers bracket” (enlarge one of the knockout portions there by the relevant amount)… of course then you are kinda putting the 1-2 record guys in a bind – and if you take this to the extreme you could run a triple elimination, but then you are getting back to the masses of games problem that you started with.

This is exactly the kind of thing I am talking about in Battlefield BFF2 (click the image to enlarge)

As soon as I see people selling pre-levelled up characters and gear, or selling in game gold and the ilk  then I know something has gone badly wrong with a game. If a portion of a game is so bad and boring that people are willing to buy their way into not playing it, that’s a red flag for me to stay away.

After Navan’s seminal videogame categorizations, it’s even clearer to explain how I generally play and judge videogame titles almost entirely as games and/or as puzzles – as these are the aspects of videogames that I enjoy the most. (Go and read that link now or you’ll miss the point of these definitions!).

Almost every “level up” system in videogames is detrimental to its game and puzzle aspects – they only add to the “mmorpg”/grindability of a game, and possibly to simulation. If some people are willing to buy their way out of doing this, then it’s pretty obvious it isn’t an interesting game mechanic and has instead become a “grind”. In-game persistence and permanence of many kinds can be fun, but a videogame that rewards player persistence & time over anything else, is actually damaging the actual game aspect. Think about the following examples -

Would you buy a higher handicap at golf? Would you play Monopoly against someone who started the game with 5 hotels? Would you be proud of your team’s achievement in a sport where you automatically won a medal every 100 matches you played? Would you give a headstart in a footrace to the person that had already run the most races? Should the chess player with a higher matches played count get given an extra number of queens at the start of every game? Would you enjoy a rubiks cube where it was unsolvable until you’d spent at least ten hours holding it, or that automatically solved itself once you twisted it 10,000 times?

So why do all these kinds of cases come about in videogames?  Probably the best take on this I’ve read is at The Game Prodigy with A Necessary Evil: Grinding in Games. You’ll notice that all the pros of grinding are there only for the developers, not players. It’s not there to add anything to the actual play experience, but purely to lengthen it. Of course some ‘level up’ systems don’t inherently mean a grind. There are clear exceptions – in games like Zelda, Castlevania Symphony of the Night or Super Metroid for example. Here, as you complete puzzles in these videogames, you get new abilities and unlock new skills – and these in turn open or more puzzles or more solutions for puzzles. I would call these systems “upgrade systems” rather than “level up” systems of the type I am discussing here though. Upgrade systems of this nature in a single player experience change the puzzles to be solved, the challenge levels or the skills tested. In a multiplayer competitive title this kind of concept also works fine, eg. weapon spawns on an FPS map, or gaining a super move during fighting game, when everyone has an equal chance at the start of the match to obtain these upgrades. This is akin to getting an opportunity to change a pawn to a queen due to good play in a chess match – this isn’t starting someone out with an extra queen.

Level up systems are also added to attempt to addict players with fake achievements (another interesting take on this is the possibility of becoming a “praise junkie“). They allow for advancement of a persistent entity as a replacement for any other kinds of ‘fun’ in the actual gameplay. It’s a guarantee that if you spend enough time, you will succeed… but as you can see, all of these things are the antithesis of actual games or genuine puzzles.

What’s especially frustrating and annoying for me is how these kinds of level up systems are starting to invade videogames that would otherwise be better games. The poster game for this these days being Call of Duty. As soon as you’ve got enough skill to move around a bit and at least get a few kills in a COD match, you’re now fully able to grind. The Long Term Incentive of the game (at least for most players) becomes not one of improving your skill, but one of grinding to “collect everything”. Over at Levelling Down I was asked in their comments section about MW2 to “think about how many players prestige (resetting their max level back to 1). if the advantages with the unlockables were so strong at the highest level, why would they give them all up?” in response to my problems with higher level players getting advantages over new players. Well I’d answer by positing that it’s because the game doesn’t offer enough as a pure competitive game for most people – so they search out the next grind – prestige levels, rather than basic levels, to try and continue on the Skinnerian treadmill. The very fact that people DO reset their rank to gain prestige levels proves it itself. This isn’t “Playing to Win“.

Luckily for me as a fighting game fan the attitude I see from the competitive fighting game community is generally exactly the opposite to this – fighting game fans generally despise grinding for unlockable characters as they are well aware this can unfairly imbalance games, and mainly because it forces everyone to do relatively boring tasks to unlock things. There’s especially a dislike of unlocking characters as they are rightly considered a core component of the game itself. In this way level up systems just become barriers to play in actual games a lot of the time. For example I’ve heard that some of the content in top level raids in WoW requires great knowledge, dexterity and teamwork skills to complete – essentially these portions of the game have become decent co-op computer puzzles in their own right. But the problem is all players are forced to grind away for hundreds of hours before they can even access this content, and what’s even worse is that there are usually even more grinds that are possible to reduce/remove the challenges of these puzzles anyway (do a quest to get better armour before tackling that raid). Only when grinding is impossible is the real game or puzzle unveiled, or alternatively you can see the real game or puzzle requiring a meaningless time contribution from the player to be able to play, in the case of a game, or solve, in the case of a puzzle. This is also very similar to the problems I had with the design of Bayonetta.

GRIND!! This is the good kind of grinder

The “right” way to use grindable systems in videogames that are actually intended to be games or puzzles is to gain the advantages of the ‘carrot’ they offer, but not to damage the game/puzzle aspects at the same time – make the grindable system separate from actual game mechanics. You can put a ridiculously high kill count Achievement like Gears of War or Left 4 Dead to incentivise players to play more and to work as a “high experience” indicator, but it doesn’t offer any in-game advantages to earning it. Halo 3 and Halo Reach beta also offer the ability to unlock ranks and various forms of armour and customisations, but all of these are purely cosmetic. You also get the permanence of stat tracking your entire Halo gaming history at bungie.net (the videogaming equivalent of all the stats tracking at nfl.com) – yet at the start of every match you are always equal with your opposition in character abilities, regardless of whether you’ve unlocked “Master Sergeant” rank in the game or have 80 Spartan Laser kills on your bungie.net profile. StarCraft II offers a wealth of grindable (as well as skill-based) Achievements and unlockables from ladder play – yet none of them will give you some more Zerglings at the start of a battle or make it any easier for you to get your actual skill ranking improved.

Using levelling systems to pace the learning of the game could potentially work, but generally it is much easier to use “upgrade” mechanics rather than pure levelling up stats  - the StarCraft II campaign does this in some limited ways by introducing units and mechanics piecemeal, whereas some of the upgrades are pure stat improvements. When it comes to games, this might even be a great way to introduce players to the multiplayer – although the problem would be maintaining a big enough ‘new player’ playerbase so that new players without all their in-game abilities could always find games against other equivalent new players. As I noted about COD, it could work pretty well if it actually had some level and skill-based matchmaking.

There’s a huge attitude difference between playing to raise your skill at a competitive game like StarCraft II, Street Fighter or Halo, than there is in the player playing to get to the next level on COD or WoW. It’s not to say that you can’t attempt to play most videogames in spite of their grindable level systems as actual games or puzzles; many gamers do. It’s just that it’s worth looking for other options out there that allow you to game without having these horrible systems blocking your path to what you find fun.

This video encapsulates so much of what us “gamers” are trying to fight against. For a report that is supposed to be showing us the flip-side of our perceptions of gaming she still manages to start the report with: “If your parents ever told you that computer games would rot your brains” and ending with: ”A career goal that might make parents around the world cringe but one that, ironically, makes his fellow Koreans very proud”. Both indicative of the prejudism against this sort of past-time and telling people what they want to hear or what they think they already know – showing the “the news” should really be renamed to “the olds”.

Another example of the mire of misinformation that we are fighting against are articles such as the one that shows that “Science” proves that 7-10 year olds and college students don’t concentrate in class. Consider that no recitation of the original material is given for us to verify the validity and that the article manages to lever-in a mention of cancer in the same breath and what does “linked to” actually mean? How many times is the word “could” used in this…ooo look, a pretty flower. Wait, was I talking about? Ah yes, how gaming reduces concentration.

To further our goals in removing the stigma of gaming we are coming to the point where a distinction in gaming needs to be made.  Would a football player say: “I play games” or “I’m a football player”? Would a Chess Grandmaster say “I’m a gamer” or “I’m a Chess player”? Yet it’s still not a good idea to admit you’re a gamer.

Nerd vs Gamer (can you spot the difference?)

Gaming was originally used for entertaining competition. The Olympic Games, gladiatorial contests, football games, chess games, card games, etc. With a very few exceptions, these were all competitive in nature, either against opponents or against yourself. Even a lot of the first computer “games” were designed with competition in mind (tic-tac-toe and pong spring to mind). But since then, we were limited to having all interactions happening on a single screen and PC gamers were limited to a single controller (the keyboard). This led to home computer (I’m excluding arcades here) games predominantly being single player experiences. Until the internet arrived and competitive online gaming started to become major aspects of a lot more games. However, we haven’t revisited the term of computer “game” now that we have this split between single player and multiplayer. With the danger of sounding elitist towards my own style of gaming, here’s how I would distinguish them (n.b. most electronic media will fit into one or many of these categories):

1. Interactive story (the likes of Fable, Mass Effect, Half-life, any other FPS single player):
   The interactive stories are the next generation on from film. The story evolves around the player and more often than not is directed by the game designers. On-rails gameplay triggering story events and encounters with very little risk-factor. The risk-factor is important here as there is very little to lose by failing except a small amount of time to go back to the last save/check point. There is no real way to fail the game unless the player decides to stop playing. We are hearing a lot from game designers these days such as the creators of Mass Effect saying they wanted it to be as entertaining playing it as it would be for somebody who watches it being played.
2. Computer puzzle (e.g. Portal, Braid, ‘Splosion Man, Apple Jack, Lemmings, any RTS single player)
   The computer puzzle is the electronic version of any physical puzzle with all it’s aspects. The key being that the fun comes from finding the solutions to the given puzzles. But once the challenge of solving it is done with, there’s not much to be gained by doing it again as the solutions are already known.  Of course people will in the same way that people will continously resolve the Rubiks cube despite knowing the solution. The computer equivalents are Portal, Braid, ‘Splosion Man, etc. You could argue that most single player experiences fall under this category as once the “trick” of beating the A.I. is found, the game is solved.
3. Computer Toy (e.g. Mahjong, Solitaire, Spore, Sims, Lego games)
   The computer toys are the ones where the game itself is to explore the mechanics given by the designer in exactly the same way as a real toy is used. The fun is twisting and pulling against the mechanics to see what the outcomes are. These mechanics could be as simple as playing with plasticine (Spore Creator) to a game like the Sims (doll playing and roleplay) which has a very large breadth of experience to play around with for the avatars. The Lego game franchises are in this catergory (as well as the puzzle category) as well due to their design philosophy of getting parents and children to play together (as in real-life games) where a lot of the interaction is not for the need to progress, but just to see what it does and how it works.
4. Computer Games (e.g. Street Fighter and other fighting games, real-time strategies (RTS) and first-person-shooters (FPS) Multiplayer, Left 4 Dead, Magic the Gathering, Age of Booty)
   The computer game would be the ones that test skill and have risk to one degree or another. These must be the equivalent of real-life games such as chess, football, bear wrestling. The test of skill could be mental in the case of devising strategies, multitasking, opponent mind-games, reading the field, decision making and team work. Or the skill could be physical in the case of dexterity, speed, accuracy, consistency and execution. There needs to be some risk in not doing these well (of course games would target 1 or all of these traits), which would result in losing. The type of loss is not so important as long as there is a tangible feeling of it. Without exception this category of computer media would be multiplayer by necessity as anything involving an A.I. becomes a matter of puzzle solving (at least until A.I. unpredictability and creativity can match that of humans).

   

   Tangible Loss

   The multiplayer doesn’t necessarily have to be in versus-type games as cooperative multiplayer can hold many of these aspects of a true “game”. Friendly competition with your team mates while also cooperating to achieve the same goals with the skill of reacting to your own teams strengths and weaknesses give the aspect of the true “game” in computer games.

   

   Competitive Teamwork

5. MMORPG (e.g. Eve Online, World of Warcraft, etc).
   MMORPGs are a special breed as they are essentially sand-boxes cynically designed solely to draw you in through your biological addiction to get at your wallet. Putting my own personal bias to one side for a moment, these games get their own category as the interactions inside the massively multiplayer world are so varied as to almost be impossible to categorise without just saying they fit into all of the above electronic media categories; If you are a PvPer (Player vs Player) then you are likely playing it as a “true” game, whereas somebody who enjoys levelling up is playing it as an electronic toy. A quester is interested in the interactive story telling…I could go on and on and on and on and on and on (which is exactly what the companies such as Blizzard and CCP want us to do!)

It is our responsibility as gamers to not bow-down to the social stigma attached to our hobby (or livelihood if you are lucky enough to be a progamer).

We want more progamers like this (and yes, this is a real Korean Starcraft progamer named TossGirl who earns more than you or me by playing "games")

The fight is worth it and can lead to some great things. But for now the war will continue.

doesn't the box art remind you of boomer bile?

I’ve written a lot about this before, yet I believe it still deserves more expansion because of how important I think it is. I would also like to broaden my examples, and note where some new games are getting better at this. However I won’t rest happy in this crusade until all online competitive games are getting this right! I thought that the result of the L4D2 poll “why do you rage quit?” was especially telling. The top two were “skill imbalance” and “team disharmony”. And yet this is a game that they designed that does absolutely nothing to fix either of these issues. They can only state weakly that you should “play with your friends” as an excuse. And whilst every new balance patch might be nice, none of this will matter to your average player. Valve, you need to patch in some skill and social matchmaking! Also don’t forget that people who quit individual matches for these reasons are also very likely to quit the game altogether.

Now whilst it’s true from a designer’s perspective that, in most cases, once players have bought the game you’ve “already got their money anyway”; I’m going to assume for now you are a developer wanting to build a long term competitive community around a game. (And of course, there are numerous alternative ways to make a lot of money out of doing this, above and beyond just selling lots of games).

So here’s the formula for success for online competitive multiplayer matching:

Skill grades: 1 to 5.

Win more than 60% (over last x games) and the player rises a skill grade, win less than 40% (over last x games) and the player drops a skill grade.

Quit = Loss.

Have an automatic matching system that matches players of the same skill grade rating, and other necessary stuff like good low-latency connections, depending on the nature of the game.

And really, THAT IS IT.

All these numbers can and should be tailored and varied though as required for a particular game, this is just an example to keep things simple.

Of course, as always, the devil is in the details, so here’s a lot more about how behind the scenes it should work:

How do you determine players starting skill grade?

One simple and effective system is to allow a player to grade him/herself. Alternatively you can start every player at the same point, probably the lowest grade, or a middle grade – so either 1 or 3 in the 5-grade scale used in the example. Both have advantages and disadvantages though; starting all players at 3 may mean new players are more likely to lose a lot at first which may discourage new players – however starting all players at 1 may mean players who really are level 1 players of a game tend to get too many matches against people who are actually too good for them ie: the “real” grade 1 people are forced to play too many “unknown grade” new people. A compromise would be to start everyone at the “below average” grade of 2. The way StarCraft II handles this is a bit of a mystery as it doesn’t display anything to the player until they have played five “placement matches”. I think it likely matches you up against a mid-level player (3) at first, and then immediately adjusts each game based on the result, and then estimates what it thinks your skill grade is based on the first five results only – of course it’s quite likely to get it ‘wrong’ on such a small sample, but it’s better than nothing. Perhaps the ideal would be to base a player’s starting skill grade on a well designed multiplayer ‘trial’ of some kind – which would need to test as many of the same skills as real multiplayer as possible. The trouble is no game’s ever been really successful at designing this kind of trial yet, and even if they were, some players may not like being forced to play such a trial before they get into their first real game. But it need not be that long or arduous – and could always be optional: “Choose your skill grade, or, if you don’t know – let us determine what we think it is based on this trial level” would be a best of both worlds solution.

Team up to defeat Ming

For team-based games, the main added complexity is in determining the ‘win or loss’ for an individual player. The best way to solve this is breaking it down into two components to make a combined “skill grade points score” (rather than just a pure win/loss record) calculated based on: A) did the overall team win or lose, and B) what was the player’s impact on the game. For example In a team FPS game, if a team wins but a player had a negative kill:death ratio, and actually didn’t contribute to the team winning, then they probably shouldn’t be gaining skill grades. There could be many other stats collected by the game to calculate a player’s impact and ability (eg. the medals in Halo Reach). In team games communication and teamwork can also be a big factor though, and it is almost impossible to get measurable ‘contribution’ statistics on this, other than the overall team’s result. The best solution is one SCII uses which is to rank each player-determined team individually. ie: Tom & Fred together have their own team skill grade, Tom & Chris together have a seperate team skill grade, and then Tom & a random person also has it’s own team skill grade. This works great for small team games (like StarCraft II 2v2) and would be fantastic for Halo Reach Arena (4 player teams), Left 4 Dead or most team sports games. For large team games the “medal” way of working out a players contribution maybe the best you could go on, although when you have small teams within a larger team eg: parties within a COD, MAG or Battlefield match, you could look at the impact of those smaller groupings as well as the full team. As most people tend to play with fairly regular teammates, you could still calculate a skill grading for those ‘mini teams’ based on the contribution they tend to make to their overall teams.

In a scored game, you may possibly like to take into account the score differential rather than the raw win/loss. ie: a very close win probably indicates the player is already at their correct skill grade, whereas a win by a large margin could be worth more than a close win towards their next skill grade. However you need to be very careful how this impacts the game. Quitters should always count as losing by the largest margin possible, but also ‘sandbagging’ and other forms of ‘smurfing’ need to be more carefully considered if you use this – even players ‘being nice and letting the other guy win a bit’ would affect this score. So in general it is probably best left alone as, like badly conceived online achievements, it can easily have a negative effect on how people play the game.

Another common type of competitive multiplayer game is the “free for all” such as Bomberman or Smash series, or many boardgames and their videogame style equivalents. Here of course only 1 player out of the 4+ or so “wins” – however again the ‘win or loss’ system should be broken into components for a scoring based on how well the players did in the game. Generally this is not too hard to do as these games tend to be across multiple rounds to win, so you get a final score of 5 -3 -1 -0 between 4 players for example, it’s pretty easy to meter out how much their skill grades should be affected by this result.

Auto-match

The Matchmaker is a powerful lady, a bit like an extreme sports calendar model

The automatic matching system can have far more bells & whistles added as well to improve it beyond pure skill & connection matching – like Halo Reach’s social settings. You will also probably want to allow an expansion of searches so that players can get matched grade:2 vs grade:3 for example, at times – you can always leave this in the hands of player options as to whether they want to take this option though; but with a smaller player pool, or long match times, it may be necessary. Once non-equal skill grade matches are allowed (or enforced) though, again, again you need some kind of ‘skill grade points’ system behind the pure “% wins” score so that wins vs higher graded opponents are worth more, and conversely wins vs lower graded opponents are worth less. Also ideally, as covered before, when the automatic matching system is working to find a match, you should allow the player to do something else within the game whilst waiting. This is especially important for any game with a potentially smaller community (ie: StarCraft II probably doesn’t need to worry about this thanks to it’s own existing audience of StarCraft: Brood War, Warcraft 3 and general Blizzard communities, but most games do) – as it will quickly become even smaller still, as players grow bored of waiting for a match. Ironically the only game around that I know of that does this part pretty well – SFIV – has a relatively large online community and doesn’t really need it – however I think this feature is still useful and should become more important as the game ages and as the playerbase shrinks. It’s already becoming a lot more useful in Super SFIV in fact.

At last we can reveal ourselves to the Jedi

With all these figures of skill grades, skill grade points, win/loss, points won/lost per match etc. you can either choose to show the figures to players, or hide it all, whatever is most appropriate for the title and the playerbase. For example SCII shows you some things, but not others, and I believe it is all done to help incentivise players to play more. It shows you your skill grade and it shows you a “mini leaderboard” of 100 random players within your grade, but this leaderboard is not actually ranked by your skill grade points behind the scenes; it is based on a modified kind of seasonally reset ‘total wins’ (although losses are taken into account a bit) – this incentivices some level of ‘grinding’ from players to play more games. So this leaderboard is essentially a bit ‘fake’ in terms of an actual skill measurement – the system could know you are one of the most skilled in your group, yet not highly ranked due to not having played enough games. Whilst the grinding ‘total wins’ bit may sound like a problem, because it doesn’t affect a players actual skill grade or provide any actual in-game benefits (just out of game benefits, such as Achievements and icons – unlike certain games like COD), and it keeps more players playing more games, and so it is actually beneficial to the overall game and even the health of the matching and skill grading systems. For matchmaking purposes more players is always better, so long as you don’t sacrifice the real skill matching system to get them playing. Other times you may want to explicitly show a player exactly what their skill grade points are; to encourage them to try to improve; although this has to done with care, as it could also cause discouragement whenever a player can see any score “going down” too much. Psychologically people just don’t tend to like that.

However showing some of the ‘real figures’ to players becomes a lot more relevant at the very top end of the skill grades. These players tend to really want a proper actual leaderboard style table to measure themselves against their other top level competition on; and these types of players are likely to be the most dedicated and skilled and less likely to be discouraged by seeing a score go down. In fact they are likely to be encouraged to play more to re-gain any ‘points’ they lose. You can see why this is necessary when StarCraft II, at least in it’s beta, offered no way for the top grade players (Platinum, but now called Diamond I believe) to distinguish themselves from the arbitrarily large amount of ‘top’ platinum grade players. It’s like saying “congratulations, you’ve qualified for the Premier league, but now we’re not going to tell you who won” – understandably there was an outcry in the SCII competitive community because of this. Additional ‘top player only’ tournaments may also be a solution SCII uses (there is talk of an even higher “Pro” skill grade) but the important thing is that these top end levels need to use the true skill grade points to determine things, and not go by any kind of the fake grinding-type of leaderboard, no matter how good that type of leaderboard is for the average player. Essentially you want to tailor the visible scoring available based on the skill of the player – allow weaker and newer players to win ‘little victories’ & avoid discouragement, whilst at the same time give top hardcore players valid goals to strive for. Note that as I’ve covered before though, a player’s skill grade points should always depreciate over time to prevent players who no longer actually play the game to clog up places on a leaderboard – it should be a current leaderboard not an innaccurate ‘historic’ one that most games seem to use.

X-Factor

The reason for the ‘x games’ in the formula above is because people learn, often very quickly at videogames; so someone who loses his first 100 matches shouldn’t have to win the next 150 games to “rank up”. As soon as they are winning a significant amount against people at their skill grade they have become good enough to move up. Note: this is general failing of the ELO system and most skill rankings on XBL – a standard ELO will still be weighting all those previous losses as much as any more recent game, as so it essentially assumes people are relatively static in their skill level & knowledge and only improve slowly over time – but this is not generally the case for video games. Also conversely, a player who hasn’t played a particular game in a long time might have actually lost a lot of their skill or even forgotten a lot of knowledge; and so they should also drop rank far more quickly than normal ELO would allow. Note that x should almost certainly be hidden from players and should vary, and so possibly should the win/loss % or grade points amounts where grade changes can occur. This is to prevent players from attempting to “game” the system… although if done right, no-one should really have any incentive to want to game this system anyway.

An asymmetrical exception

Good matchmaking doesn't have to make you feel your character select screen looks like this

One huge exception you need to look at is games where you have different pieces/characters/races/teams/etc needing somewhat different skill sets & knowledge to master (ie: asymmetrical design). Here you may want to split someone’s skill grade into character-specific grades. This might even be applicable to different maps in some other multiplayer games such as most shooters – especially as new maps are added to a game over time. All you need to then have is separate leaderboards or separate ‘fake mini-leaderboards’ as described earlier for different ‘characters’. A player’s best character should generally be used their ‘overall ranking’ though, although a “master of all” leaderboard might be interesting in some titles. What’s important is not to exclude people from experimenting and learning different ‘characters’ or maps etc by allowing them to be matchmade against fair competition for them with the particular character they are using or map they are on. Any player who’s ever got to a high placing in any leaderboard or ladder system with a particular race/character/team etc understands the dilemma they put themselves in; they will most likely lose a lot if they try something new, and thus lose ranking. And even if the player isn’t bothered about this, the trouble is that it will be detrimental to the skill matching itself, as the experimental player will probably be far weaker than their grade would show with their new characters, but if they change back, they will then inadvertently “smurf” by being too strong at their new lower grade with their better characters. Incidentally, this problem even afflicts StarCraft II to some extent, and is a huge problem in Super SFIV. SSFIV has added a reasonably functional skill & connection matching system which is fantastic, however it only works if you play your best character at all times. I understand this is the standard for Japanese tournaments and such, but it’s not something which a lot of players always want to do all the time.

Back to FPS games and different maps – there may be good alternative ways to handle this; as map knowledge tends to be based on experience. You would still count all of a players results regardless of map, as the skill you are attempting to measure & match on is usually somewhat map-independent anyway, but perhaps you would weight a player’s score lower if they are on a map that they, or their opponents are less familiar with (easily measured with an experience point count of games on a particular map).

Quitting is not the problem – the penalties are

Quits MUST equal a Loss for any system like this to work. I can’t stress this enough and it’s amazing that so many games still can’t handle this simple thing. I’m aware that server-less games such as those run on PSN don’t really have any way to calculate who has quit; but any game designed for the PC with dedicated servers or XBox Live (with arbitration & other game servers, even though individual players host sessions) should always have a way to do this. You simply cannot run competitive multiplayer matchmaking on a system like PSN that doesn’t have this without providing additional systems. In a 1v1 game a player should always be allowed to quit without any other penalty other than counting it as a loss, eg. StarCraft II or SF2:HDR (on 360). In certain long 1v1 games you may want to allow the remaining player to “play it out vs the CPU” if they really want to. This is appropriate for some sports games where players may just enjoy the act of ‘completing’ a match, regardless of how un-competitive it has become, to help it simulate a real sport. But the point is that online video game players are not professionals and are not there for the for entertainment by others, only themselves – and there’s nothing to stop them quitting if they want to. It’s commonplace, and actually sensible to do so in StarCraft II, Magic, or even chess – especially in any game with a slippery slope. All the problems arise when people can quit and ‘get away with it’.

A team-based game where someone quits out has far greater problems though. Whilst that player can be assigned the appropriate loss of skill grade or ranking (which may even be problematic as it could give them a way to game and smurf the system), really if you want players who are losing to stick around, you’ll need to create some incentives, or disincentives outside of the skill ranking system for them to do so. Show players’ “quit game” totals or % on the leaderboards for a team game. Allow players to avoid team games with people that have quit team games in the past via additional matchmaking settings. Put in some kind of points or achievements for even a losing team to grind away at – just don’t do it like COD and attempt to remove most of the reason to compete entirely. If necessary and possible, it’s best to ban quitters from playing team games altogether. The loss of those few players inclined to quit a team game may actually be beneficial to the overall player base. But the presence of a great skill matching system like the one I describe should naturally help to reduce quits anyway – since games should be close and competitive a lot of the time. Games like Left 4 Dead which allow CPU takeovers and other players to join mid-game is another option, but it quickly becomes very hard to calculate any kind of skill grade points whatsoever. It’s not impossible though, and could even be facilitated by a great matchmaking system – imagine if in Left 4 Dead if someone dropped it would pause for a while (in the next safe room?) to allow an equally skill-rated person to join in their place; or the team-based skill grading had different team grades for “playing with CPU teammates” to match people on too, or it could reduce spawn times or other adjustments to keep teams balanced despite people quitting. There’s a variety of ways to help alleviate team quitters; but no matter how effective at dealing with it a game could become – quitting is always going to be very bad for team-based games and needs as much discouragement as possible by design.

So much thought went into this image!

This little one has been doing the rounds again the last few months, so I thought I’d give my agoners take on it:

Art imitates Life.

Life is a Game.

Games > Art.

o) Incredibly inventive level designs that build from the simple moveset to set the player up with opportunities to perform amazing feats.

o) Responsive controls that feel ‘right’ although do take a bit of initial adjustment that “SPLODE” isn’t quite a jump button, even though it often acts as such. The game in particular demands you get the direction of your splodes correct a lot of the time, notably often requiring hitting straight left or right, rather than up/left or up/right. Yet it still plays well on the 360 analogue stick – thank goodness, since the d-pad is useless – because the game rarely demands a precisely timed diagonal plus button input which I find hard to hit accurately on analogue. (Try it on Bionic Commando Rearmed to see what I mean here).

o) Brilliant style throughout – I’d describe it as Portal mixed with Space Channel 5 mixed with The Maw.

o) Hilarious quirky humour. If the ending of the game doesn’t turn you into an actual ROFLcopter, then I feel sorry for you.

o) Stunning soundtrack.

o) The great level design not only challenges the player with new things constantly, but also allows the player at times to ’show-off’ the skills they’ve learnt and “feel skilled” rather than constantly ramping up difficulty.

o) Like all good multiplayer modes, it encourages you to get good at it by playing the single player too. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts here. You simply MUST play this game with at least one other person to see why it’s so good.

o) One of the most teamwork based games ever. You have to co-operate down to perfect jointly-timed jumps to make any progress at all, there’s no other option.

o) Great netcode. I played the multiplayer co-op mode from within the UK with Navan who’s in Greece – and whilst we definitely had significant latency and noticed a lot of rollback at times, the game was still always playable (and completable) due the way it handles latency like GGPO with no controller lag introduced to the individual players. If this game had input-lag inducing netcode (like most games’ poor netcode), it would have been unplayable under these conditions.

o) The CAKE! Not only is it amusing, defiantly not a lie, and most delicious, it’s an fantastic piece of game design too – because it’s really a secret built in additional difficulty level for those that want to do it. It also encourages exploration and thinking about the level as opposed to the ’taking shortcuts’ & rushing through – which in many platform games is the best method to progress, but I don’t enjoy it so much. Here the in-game goals (rather than ones I invent for myself) and my taste in fun align perfectly. Time trials and Hardcore mode are also there for others that enjoy other kinds of challenge. Plus the game will make you want to eat MEAT and CAKE.

o) The mixture of puzzle & platform elements is spot on. I enjoy the mixture of skill-based challenge with puzzles too over the more ‘pure’ find-a-solution puzzler. It works far better than Portal’s action-orientated puzzles for the reason that a 2D perspective simply works for platform based puzzles, unlike an irritating FPS view. I also find it more enjoyable than than Braid, a lot of which is due to the aforementioned co-op mode – a puzzle tackled by two is an enjoyment doubled – and also thanks to the lack of obfuscation. What I mean by this is that you know exactly what’s available to you in ‘Splosion Man, yet the triple splode, switches and wall bounces give a lot of leeway to “maybe, just maybe, I CAN make that jump” or “what if I stand here and you do this…?”.

If you want more reviewing, the best review I’ve found for ‘Splosion Man, is, naturally, not at any mainstream “review” site, but here at a personal blog.

Of course Agoners is not about reviews, but about a critique of games and their environments and systems, so, rather than simply gushing, I’m going to look at the bigger picture here. (Although if you really want to know how I currently rate various games, feel free to have a read over at my raptr page )

So what’s wrong with it?

o) Some minor niggles with the camera. The angle sweeps it does in the single player mode are fun (in a vertigo sense) and dramatic and usually add to the game even if they can be slightly disorienting, but the problem arises when sometimes it zooms out a touch to far for you to see exactly what’s going on – even on a large HD TV. However this is very minor as it’s only really a problem in one or two places in the whole game in single player, and the same for two player multiplayer as long as you are playing cooperatively (which as noted above, you’ll have to be anyway). It might become a bigger problem in three or four player multiplayer, but I’ve not been able to play enough of that to tell.

o) Whilst it was pitched at an absolutely perfect difficulty setting for me – always tricky but always attainable to put me into a great state of flow – it’s simply too hard for many people to enjoy. How do I know this? Because I’ve watched other people try to play it, and also tackled and finished Hardcore mode myself, and despite how much fun I had in the challenge in doing it (cos, well, I’m still an Agoner at heart), I definitely feel it’s actually a worse game in Hardcore mode. By playing it, I can see how frustrated with the difficulty other people might feel playing the Normal game by seeing how I felt on Hardcore. What’s even more of a shame is that to enjoy the multiplayer game both of you need to get equally good (and patient with each other) at the game to progress. There’s no way to “lend a helping hand” in co-op; it really just makes the game harder for both of you.

So the question is what makes is it too hard? Here’s a quote from a friend of mine that tried to play it, DeeGruenEnzige:

“I do potentially really like ’Splosion Man… but my beef with it is that the levels are too long for how challenging they are. I think there should be either more save points or shorter levels. I don’t mind trying over and over until we get it right but having to do it all over again because you’ve failed the next bit is a bit much. It spoils the fun.”

Ok, required reading time before I continue: “Test Skills, Not Patience: Challenge, Punishment, and Learning” over at Pixel Poppers. I’m going to be sticking with Doctor Professor’s definitions of challenge, punishment and difficulty for the rest of this article.

The comments section there is just as important as the article. The key point raised is by commenter “Steven A” where he disagrees and says that Challenge and Punishment are fundamentally linked. Doc Prof responded:

“Reducing punishment scope changes goals, not challenge. Suppose a level in a sidescroller has a sequence of three bottomless pits, and falling into any of them will send the player back to the beginning of the level. The player thusly (sic)  has the goal “Jump across pit A, then pit B, then pit C.” Give the player rewind powers, and now they will have three goals: “Jump across pit A,” “Jump across pit B,” and “Jump across pit C.” Each jump, however, is discrete and requires just as much skill either way. “

But what if the nature of the game is to use succession challenges to become challenging – but at the same time, therefore, it also becomes punishing. The example given by Steven A is Super Mario Bros, however ‘Splosion Man is also a perfect example. It has a lot of these “jump pit A, pit B, pit C” types of challenges. The thing is, that any single jump in the game (bar a few that require perfect splode timing and angle) is generally quite easy. But making ten jumps in a row until you get to the next checkpoint is where it requires far more skill – and becomes more challenging – and at the same time, inevitably more punishing, because if you fail you have to restart the whole sequence again. Doc Prof’s own definition of challenge actually includes “strictly-timed series of jumps” – and you can’t have a series without also implying some level of punishment too. So whilst in some ways they can be separated, I agree with everything Steven A has to say on those comments, that you cannot remove or reduce punishment without also changing the nature of challenges. No more series-based challenges for one thing.

But a lot of the challenge in ’Splosion Man (and many platform games) are exactly these series of challenges, or challenges of succession. So it would be very hard to keep the challenge without also keeping the punishment. If you added an infinite ‘rewind’ ability to ‘Splosion Man, it would become trivially easy except for the odd true puzzle section – suddenly it would become a pure (and very easy) puzzle game – and to many people like myself, it would make a very poor game. This is exactly the same problem when you add unlimited save-anywhere points to a game – and why I found games such as Half Life so dull – if you remove all punishment, you also, at times, remove all challenge as well. The argument that says “well, don’t save then” or “don’t use rewind then” is covered in that article with regards to HL, but this argument is more deeply flawed than that, because anyone can potentially change any game’s rules to make it more fun for them – but they are no longer playing the same game! What a game doesn’t allow you to do is as important as what it does – it’s the very essence of a game – the rules you play by. If I write some new house rules to Monopoly to make it a strategic masterpiece of a game, well that’s great, but I’m no longer playing Monopoly. An important aside to note here is that this disparity of viewpoints is because many people play (& review) videogames as toys, rather than games.

As discussed by Steven A in the comments of the article noted above, I also believe good challenges of succession are the ones where the challenge level stays fairly constant & consequently the punishment seems fair relative to the challenge. However this doesn’t necessarily mean a temporal equation (see the commentary on Megaman 9 later as to why). The analogy of the basketball free throw is perfect to examine this. If the challenge of succession is to:

1. Walk the length of the court without falling over (time consuming but trivially easy challenge)

2. Make a basket (quite a hard challenge)

Then that’s a bad challenge of succession, because although the challenge level is overall slightly greater, it’s mostly just increased punishment. A player will naturally question the need to do the first part every time. It’s exactly why Soren Johnson gets to the heart of this on his game design journal when he describes:

“If a player needs to repeat a lengthy but easy section (or, more shamefully, a non-skippable cut-scene) before getting to the difficult bit, the game is punishing the player instead of challenging him”.

But compare the difference to a good challenge of succession:

1-10. “Make 10 baskets in a row” (all equally challenging)

The game =does= warn you exactly what you're in for

You can examine this difference in videogames by playing  ’Splosion Man on Normal mode and Hardcore mode. In Hardcore mode the game is exactly the same game, testing exactly the same skills in exactly the same levels, the only differences are that all enemies kill you in a single hit (instead of only terrain killing you in a single hit on Normal), and there are no checkpoints at all, so every time you die you have to restart the whole level (and there’s no level skip available).

Now since you can only unlock this once you’ve completed it on Normal, and so assuming you didn’t ever use the level-skip option (I didn’t), you could argue that this is the exact same challenge level again, only this time, more punishing.

It turns out, it is a lot more punishing, but it also actually also becomes more challenging too. You don’t now have to get skilled enough at performing a jump until you can do it once, twice or three times in a row perfectly, now you have to make perhaps 50 perfect jumps in a row. To be able to do this you will probably now start to need to memorize a level layout rather than just reacting to what you see, and there’s obviously a lot more memory required to know the whole level than just checkpoint to checkpoint. You have to get so skilled that “you can’t get it wrong” not just skilled enough to “get it right once”. This is what makes Splosion Man “too hard” – both too challenging AND too punishing – for many people that even on Normal level, is that to progress you have to make those 10 baskets in a row, not just two or three.

However I would still say Hardcore mode is a ”worse” game overall than Normal mode. The reason for this is that the levels are clearly designed with the checkpoints in mind, and so removing them actually does introduce a lot of those nasty ”bad” challenges of succession for me. At my skill level (and I’d posit, the skill level of anyone nuts enough to even try the Hardcore mode) there would be lengthy relatively easy challenges (even a couple of unskippable cutscenes, albeit short ones). These additional punishments made some levels very frustrating and definitely tested my patience at times rather than my skills, and I did not always enjoy the additional punishment. *

Now remember those Cakes I praised earlier – they actually end up being a much better way to increase the challenge level without increasing the punishment very much. So I do agree with the Pixel Poppers article here, that there are generally ways to increase challenge without necessarily increasing punishment, but as is demonstrated clearly by playing with these two different options in ‘Splosion Man – this does change the inherent nature of the challenge too.

Easiness is not always easy

One question I thought of whilst playing ‘Splosion Man is how would I redesign it to make it more accessible to a player who is less interested in the type of challenge it offers, and how would you reduce punishment without also reducing the challenge? Unfortunately the only way ‘Splosion Man offers this is a level-skipping option, which isn’t a very satisfactory solution for anyone, and I wished the designers had come up with something better.

One way would be to redesign the levels themselves for different difficulty settings, ie: as DeeGruenEinzige asked in the quote above – add more checkpoints. In fact the multiplayer co-op levels have actually been designed differently depending on the amount of players playing, so there’s already a precedent for it within the game. Another option would be to change the abilities available to the character – for example giving ‘Splosion Man four splodes instead of three, essentially redesigns a lot of the levels for the player, by making a lot of the distance-jump type challenges a lot easier, however it doesn’t really remove the punishment, it just makes it less likely to happen.

Finally another option would be the one mentioned in Soren Johnson’s article that Prince of Persia: Sand of Time uses – allowing the player to have a finite number of rewinds. Whilst this doesn’t totally remove the possibility of punishment – when you die and run out of rewinds – but it also doesn’t irrevocably change the challenge either in the way that adding infinite rewinds does.

Final thought on toys and games, challenge and punishment

A part of the Soren Johnson article linked above I thought was especially revealing was this:

“Such a forgiving system is not for every game. Bioshock used a similar mechanic by respawning dead players for free in Vita-Chambers placed throughout the game. Furthermore, enemies health rates were not reset on a player respawn, which meant that the player could chip away at any enemy with any weapon, including the wrench, if she was willing to die and be reborn enough times. This feature felt like an exploit to enough players that Irrational eventually patched in an option to disable Vita-Chambers.

However, the problem may have been with the expectations of Bioshock’s intended audience instead of any fundamental flaw with the respawn mechanic. Lego Star Wars uses an identical mechanic, which is perfect for the target audience of a dad and a son playing together in a forgiving environment. For Bioshock, core gamers expected the game to force them to use advanced strategies to progress instead of an easy out.”

Again this shows just how much challenge and punishment are linked in many traditional videogames. I also believe that the difference between the two examples is that the Bioshock “core gamers” wanted a game, whereas Lego Star Wars was aiming at being a toy more than an actual game. I’m starting to think that challenge and in particular punishment is intrinsically linked to games, and the removal of them is what starts to turn games into playareas, toys, or perhaps movies.

* Except that actually, sometimes I did enjoy the punishment. The fiero payoff at the end is simply worth it for me, and the cost in time and patience can actually make the payoffs even higher. Here’s a great article about someone experiencing this with another, even harder “old school design” game – MegaMan 9.

Proof if proof be need be! I AM HARDCORE!