Game Theory Discussion - Today's topic: skill ceiling

[Ablu2]

Also I just wanted to say that there is a big gap between "unfair" and "legitimate challenge." An enemy can be difficult without being unfair, and an unfair challenge should be the fail state of any game development.

Well an unfair fight is only really bad if your forced to fight fairly too. As long as there's some clever way a skilled player can best the boss, an unfair fight can be a fun experience, as long as you keep your mind open.

Or you could interpret "unfair" to mean that you can't win unless you get lucky or do everything perfectly, which yeah I would agree with you.

Also Ycobb I got that you were talking about singleplayer, I just wanted to mention it's place in multiplayer.

[wordNumber]

If the player is expected to find some way to bend the rules to counter the enemy bending the rules that isn't unfair it's a puzzle. Unfair, to me, is when an enemy moves bodaciously to fast to dodge, or attacks without a tell, or the hit box on the insta-death attack are wider then you'd expect. If the player is outnumbered, that isn't unfair because the challenge then becomes "deal with being outnumbered," and the enemies don't necessarily act outside of established gameplay systems. Unfair difficulty is fake difficulty and fake difficulty is bad.

Granted, my own definitions of fake difficulty are rather personalized. For example, to me, a timed mission is fair but a mission where you are constantly losing life and there is nothing you can do about it is not. You can also interpret "unfair" a few ways in the original context of YCobb's post, so I might be arguing the wrong point.

[Galaxy Man]

Fake difficulty is whenever trial and error is introduced. That's the qualifier.

Once a scenario becomes almost impossible to complete without dying once, you've hit fake difficulty. The game itself isn't difficult, but it's killing you repeatedly and hampering your efforts to create the idea of difficulty. A good example would be the mach speed segments in Sonic '06. They're not difficult stages, it's the struggle with the badly designed controls and speed that cause you to die often.

Actual, legitimate difficulty can sometimes be easily confused with it. Dark Souls never stoops to fake difficulty. There are parts that are brutal, and sometimes just plain evil, but it never punishes you with death unless it's clearly your fault. It presents the obstacles you will face through environmental hints, or though simply allowing you to see what is coming. When people fail to interpret the clues they are given, it seems like trial and error, but getting through the whole game without much trouble the first try is entirely possible. Skill in Dark Souls comes from being able to understand the clues the game constantly throws at you and using your twitch reflexes to get by.

[Shining Charizard]

Extra Credits recently made a really good episode dealing with difficulty in games.

The basic premise is that trial-and-error is not hard, it's just frustrating. Because we often can get frustrated while playing a legitimately challenging game, some people have come to think that "frustration = challenge." This isn't really the case.

The video actually uses Dark Souls as an example. Enemies are hard, but every enemy you ever find in the game world follows the same rules. It can be interacted with, sniped from miles away, pushed off a cliff, whatever. There isn't some enemy that has weird immunities to all that just to make it hard. Once you figure out how to correctly approach the enemies, they can be killed.

I think this is what some of the others here are trying to say. An unfair enemy is one who breaks the rules of the game world in a manner the player cannot surmount or reproduce using his own techniques. A challenging enemy may be faster or tougher than usual, but if swords still hurt him then all that's left is acquiring the skill necessary to land the right attacks.

[Operation Awesome]

Enemies are hard, but every enemy you ever find in the game world follows the same rules. It can be interacted with, sniped from miles away, pushed off a cliff, whatever. There isn't some enemy that has weird immunities to all that just to make it hard. Once you figure out how to correctly approach the enemies, they can be killed.
An unfair enemy is one who breaks the rules of the game world in a manner the player cannot surmount or reproduce using his own techniques.

Fucking Lizalfos in Skyward Sword.

If I am too far away to have aggroed you then there is no reason you should be able to block my arrows.

[Shining Charizard]

An unfair enemy is one who breaks the rules of the game world in a manner the player cannot surmount or reproduce using his own techniques.

You can still kill Lizalfos using other methods, such as the sword, bombs, whatever. And the player is allowed to block things with their shield, so it's within the game's logic that a shield-carrying enemy can do the same.

They're still challenging, yes, but they're fair.

[D-vid]

I think what OA means is that he is so far away, they don't notice him yet, but still somehow manage to block an attack.

[Syobon]

What is you guys' opinion on making a fair CPU opponent that's a substitute for a human opponent? Like in strategy, fighting and FPS games. How can the challenge be increased without being unfair? I'm talking about things like inhumanely perfect parries, aim, map hacks and extra resources. Obviously the best way to do it is have the AI get smarter with increasing difficulty levels, but there's a limit on how good you can make an AI with limited dev time.

[YCobb]

I think making an AI that seems human would just require a lot of research tailored to that specific game. It's all about knowing how a human would think while playing the game, so it would get better the more time they spent watching really close while people played the game in question. What this is saying is that I agree it depends on dev time.

On the other side, though, I can't help but wonder how much it matters. In Section 8: Prejudice on PC, it took me ages to realize half my matches were populated almost entirely by bots, and I only did so by looking at their names on the scoreboard. In TF2, I think it would be pretty simple to implement a system for bots to use the chat. They can already use the game's various indication commands, right?

I think an important question is how good a substitute you want, and which games you want it in. Do you want it to play exactly like a human for the sake of honing fighting game skills, or do you just want it to be a convincing facsimile?

An unfair enemy is one who breaks the rules of the game world in a manner the player cannot surmount or reproduce using his own techniques.

You can still kill Lizalfos using other methods, such as the sword, bombs, whatever. And the player is allowed to block things with their shield, so it's within the game's logic that a shield-carrying enemy can do the same.

They're still challenging, yes, but they're fair.

Also, that was a pretty obvious decision by the developers to force you to fight the enemy. The fight itself is entirely possible to succeed at, you're just trying to break the game. I don't think it's unfair for the developers to put their feet down and make an enemy that's tough because it forces you into combat. They broke the "rules" of the game in a way, yes, but only because they didn't want to let you cheat your way through relatively major fights. I think that's completely justified.

Fake difficulty is whenever trial and error is introduced. That's the qualifier.

No it's not? There are more qualifiers. A better definition is anything that makes the game harder that can't be surpassed through skill. An example of this that doesn't involve trial and error is Astro Man's stage in Megaman and Bass. It contains several areas which spawn random enemies at random times, sometimes right on top of the player.
Coming from the other direction, trial and error isn't necessarily bad, so long as the player isn't punished too heavily for it. An example of this in the same games is the robot masters' weaknesses. Unless you cheat and look it up, you have to find out the order by finding out.... except that if you want, you can simply fight the bosses with only the mega buster. You're not forced to figure it out, but doing so is deinitely dependent on trial and error.

[wordNumber]

What is you guys' opinion on making a fair CPU opponent that's a substitute for a human opponent? Like in strategy, fighting and FPS games. How can the challenge be increased without being unfair? I'm talking about things like inhumanely perfect parries, aim, map hacks and extra resources. Obviously the best way to do it is have the AI get smarter with increasing difficulty levels, but there's a limit on how good you can make an AI with limited dev time.

I think a big thing is the CPU has to ignore information that comes directly from player input unless it logically could have witnessed it within the game world. The CPU would have to react to sight and sound and respond with realistic tactics but without just reading the player's inputs. Also perfect play AI's can be good for a specific challenge fight, but otherwise the AL should have the ability to make mistakes, even if they have to be baked-in to the program, rather then naturally-occuring.

Also GM I want to point out that Trial and Error is technically a large part of Dark Souls. Like, you can still win the first time if you're good, but you'll probably die and learn. "Death is fun," "Prepare to Die" and all that. I know you mean a situation where the only logical way to learn is to fail, but in Dark Souls death-and-learn is the most likely scenario and is an advertised part of the game.

[Galaxy Man]

Also GM I want to point out that Trial and Error is technically a large part of Dark Souls. Like, you can still win the first time if you're good, but you'll probably die and learn. "Death is fun," "Prepare to Die" and all that. I know you mean a situation where the only logical way to learn is to fail, but in Dark Souls death-and-learn is the most likely scenario and is an advertised part of the game.

There's really a very major difference. I can't remember a point in my first run of Dark Souls where I died because I was unprepared for what was ahead. I have always, always died because I stopped paying attention to what I needed to for just long enough and lost focus. Dying in Dark Souls isn't a scenario brought about by being unsure of what is there and reacting poorly, dying in Dark Souls is a scenario brought about by ignoring what the game is telling you.

Technically, yes, a lot of people will die doing stupid things. They will learn that the thing is stupid, and thus account for it later. It is not, however, trial and error. Trial and Error comes about when you are entirely unable to tell what is ahead, when you are forced to die in order to learn. Dark Souls never forces you to die, it never gives you a scenario where you will not be able to react properly the first time around. That's what trial and error is.

You can't just apply the term to anything where death teaches you a lesson because that is basically every game to ever exist. You fall down a pit in Mario, you have technically learned what not to do next time. It's not trial and error to learn a lesson from a mistake, it's trial and error to be forced into a mistake due to the game itself putting you in that position.

[YCobb]

That's a uselessly limited definition. Like it or not, if you try something and then find out it doesn't work? that is, by literal, objective definition, trial and error.

What you're talking about is better referred to as just bad game design.

[Galaxy Man]

What I'm saying is the term means something entirely different when referring to video games. "Technically", every game is trial and error. The term isn't used that way when talking about video games because clearly it's useless like that.

[YCobb]

No, it means something different when you use it in reference to video games. You'd do much better to just use standard language like everyone else. Trial and error can be bad, but its definition is not the definition you gave.

[Galaxy Man]

From Merriam Webster:

a finding out of the best way to reach a desired result or a correct solution by trying out one or more ways or means and by noting and eliminating errors or causes of failure; also : the trying of one thing or another until something succeeds

Trial and Error is defined by being almost unable to achieve success without repeated attempts.
Applying this to video games is a different hat because it starts relying on the individual more. True trial and error does indeed mean that multiple attempts are necessary to learn, but it also means the multiple attempts are necessary.

In video games, one person may breeze through a task while another fails constantly. Now, does the person who failed constantly show that the game uses trial and error? Not really, because on the other side of the coin, the other person passed flawlessly. We can still call this trial and error, but then that definition can suddenly be applied to bodaciously every video game where someone had trouble, so now it's a useless term and why use it.

So you have to go down past the individual, who may have anything from better skill to better luck, and examine the game itself. If the game itself does not require trial and the subsequent error, then we can put failure down onto the individual, and not the game.

This is usually what people mean when they talk about trial and error in video games. Being unable to pass a certain spot due to no sign of what is coming, forcing memorization in order to succeed. I don't know where you're hearing the term being used so often in an entirely different way, but it's sure as hell not where I have.