The logical fallacy of "difficulty"

There is a mis-conception that a lot of designers and players have about difficulty in games. Here's the logical flaw in their thinking (and it is very common):

Something that is very difficult often takes a long time to do. It's very rare that hard things can be done quickly. Therefore, people equate hard with time-consuming, and make the following incorrect logical deduction:

1. All hard things take a long time to accomplish.
2. X takes a long time to accomplish
3. Therefore, X is hard.

That, of course, is not correct at all... because while almost all things hard to do take a long time, not everything that takes a long while, is hard. It takes an awful long time to sit there watching paint dry but I can't imagine most people would call that "difficult." In fact this logical fallacy would be similar to constructing one like this (just as obviously incorrect):

1. Anything made of wood is brown.
2. My hair is brown.
3. Therefore my hair is made of wood.

Again this is clearly not right. What we have done in both cases is incorrectly generalize from a more specific case. And sadly, many people make this mistake with regard to difficulty.

Specifically, what happens in game design, is that the designers think that by making something take a long time, they have made it hard. It takes an hour to walk from point A to point B? Then that journey is considered "harder" than the journey from B to C, which only takes half an hour. Now, if you consider that between A and B are no hostile enemies, but the B to C zone is full of hostile things with long-range aggro and lots of special nasty abilities, suddenly the journey from B to C sounds much harder (at least to me)... even though the physical trip takes half as long.

You might ask, "So why do people use time as their estimate of difficulty then?" Well the first reason is the false syllogism I listed above (that if something takes a long time it "must" be hard). But the second reason is that it's a seemingly-objective way to measure difficulty. A fight with a monster might be hard for me and easy for you because you're better at clicking buttons, but 10 minutes is 10 minutes, period. So if something takes 10 minutes instead of 5, I can use that to "guesstimate" that it's "twice as hard" and that's pretty handy. The problem is that it is also an incorrect deduction. There are lots of activities that take a long time but are not difficult in the sense of being "challenging." After all you probably sleep more hours than you play an MMORPG, but is sleeping "harder"? It takes longer, doesn't it? So doesn't that make it "harder?" Well, no... it' just takes longer.

The other reason people use time to approximate "difficulty" is because time is a "weed out" device. Say something requires you to put 20 hours of game play into the game a week for several months, and doing less than that would not lead to success. Well, that weeds out the huge portion of the player base that doesn't have 20 hours a week to devote to it. And so people with the item, flag, badge, skill, whatever, can use that as a badge of honor, "I was 'good' enough to get this." Which in MMORPGs usually means, "I have less life than you and thus had more time to kill on gaming than you do." And that's because "difficulty" again is equated with "time spent doing a thing."

I think the only true way to measure difficulty is not "how many people do a thing?" but rather, "how many people who try a thing succeed at it?" See when "time spent" is your only way to make something difficult, then, quite literally, even if only 10% of the player base has the time to devote to X, it's essentially guaranteed that anyone who has the time to devote to it, will attain X. The succes rate of obtaining X is going to be 99% or something. To me, that makes X easy -- everyone who attempts this dungeon and puts 3 hours into it succeeds and gets the loot does not make this a hard dungeon, just a long one. On the other hand, a dungeon that takes 20 minutes, but 3/4 of people attempting it can't even succeed -- that would be "hard".

The equating of time to difficulty in this sense has very strong implications for game design. Gamers have come to expect that if they "put enough time into" a thing that gives them the "right" to have it. "I spent 10 hours in this dungeon therefore I deserve the loot drop." This leads to, unfortunately, the design of, "If you can put the time into it you succeed." This makes the challenge being "finding the time to put into it" rather than actually a challenge within the game of, say, a maze or a puzzle or a riddle or a hard fight that is hard because you have to think your way through it not just stand there spamming the same key for 45 minutes.

In the end this makes MMORPGs of today more challenging to the ass (for the ability to sit in a chair), and the eye (for the ability to remain open into the wee hours of the morning), than challenging to the brain, reflexes, or knowledge of the player.

Click-aholics

You've seen it many times before. That new "massively mulitplayer online roleplaying game" (MMORPG) releases its ads and PR, and it tells you (like most of the ones that have come out for the last 3-4 years) that is combat will be "action packed" and "dynamic." Unfortunately for the person trying to decide whether to buy the game or not, these terms, which can mean practically anything unless you put specifics to them, are usually not defined. However, after having seen and tried a lot of these, there seems to be a pattern here: "action packed, dynamic" combat almost always means "clickaholism." Let's step back a minute, though, before I explain what I mean.

Roleplaying games, of course, originated with pencils and paper (PnP), played on your kitchen table or living room floor or wherever was convenient, with some dice and a small group of friends. Figures or counters were placed on a scaled map and you moved them around to keep track of the battle. Combat was very slow in these games, in terms of real time -- in Dungeons and Dragons it might take 45 minutes for the party to kill a few orcs. In Champions a battle between a half-dozen superheroes and a few villains could take upwards of an hour of real time (the time the players spent gaming it). That combat, in game time (the time the characters experienced) was only a few seconds or minutes in either game. Roleplaying games were, thus, originally tactical and strategic games, much like chess or checkers. You had a long period of time to think about what you wanted to do, and you could even stop and read up on the rules before making your move, assuming the GM allowed it.

When translated into computer games, this strategic level of game play was retained by the expedient (in solo games, which were all that existed at first) of "turn based" play. That is, the cursor would blink infinitely until you made your move, then you'd move and hit "enter". Then the computer controlled enemy would make his move, and then your cursor would blink again. This gave you, as with table top, as long as you wanted to think, plan, strategize, read help files, go get a bag of chips to munch on, etc. The gameplay, although faster by far than table-top because the complex calculations were now handled by the machine rather than your pencil and brain, remained fairly slow and ponderous. These games were not exciting, like an arcade game, but intellectually stimulating, again like a game of chess. People looking for visceral excitement would turn to a different game, such as Asteroids or Space Invaders -- just as someone looking for a fast-paced table-top game would play ping-pong rather than chess.

Once online games became a reality, and multiple players could play together, the utility of turn-based gaming pretty much vanished. If you have to wait for 8 different people to press "enter" before your turn comes up again, it could take hours and hours to play a simple battle, and heaven help you if someone goes "away from keyboard" (AFK) for any length of time.

To solve this, developers of even the early MMORPGs switched from turn-based play, to "real time" play. Thus, 1 second of real time equated to roughly 1 second of game time, and your character could swing his axe or cast his spells say once every 3 seconds... So you had to react now based on timing. The advantage of this game style is that battles are fast and more "exciting" because they happen quickly, and you can have any number of people in the fight, but it won't (measurably) slow down because time moves forward whether you click your "attack" button or not. The disadvantage is that the speed pretty much kills off any chance of planning out and executing a complex strategy. You don't have time to look up the consequences of casting "Fireball" -- by the time you do, the battle is over (and if you were looking up rules instead of clicking "attack," you're now dead).

To compensate for this, the early games such as Everquest included a couple of useful features. The first was "auto-attack" -- this was the basic attack with your equipped weapon or prepared spell, that would just fire every X seconds (whenever it's your turn to "go" in combat). This allowed you to just "attack" the target and then sit back and think about future commands or tactics a little bit (not for long, but a bit). The second feature to help deal with the speed increase was the "combat queue" -- this is a pre-defined list of commands your character will follow. One of the last games to have a queue that I know of was Star Wars Galaxies. In that game you could click any number of instructions, and they would all be listed in a small side window, and executed, in the order clicked, by the character. So you could (as a simple example) click, "punch, kick, legsweep, punch, punch, kick", and your character would do those, at a rate of about one every 1.5 seconds, until the queue ran out. Then it would revert to auto-attack until the target was dead or the user gave new instructions.

Although these two mechanisms helped very much to compensate for the lack of "thinking time" that real-time games had brought about, they ended up becoming maligned and criticized. One reason they were criticized was that players felt they were not "playing" their characters but only "watching." It was possible to just click "auto attack", sit back, and watch your character kill off an "even con" (equal strength) enemy (at least if your character was set up right, with proper equipment, skills, and so forth). It was also possible to make long, detailed lists of commands that could be funneled into the queue, and then you could go do something else and your character would happily go along killing things without you. The most extreme form of this was the "macro", which was basically a small script that the game executed on behalf of your character, running through a list of commands. Players figured out how to "loop" macros and could end up having the character play the game without them. They would set their character up in a place where enemies would "spawn" every so often, and have their looped macro target, attack, kill, and loot the enemy, and then fire itself to start the loop over in time for the next spawned creature. This led to a culture of "botting" the game (setting up a "bot" character who just played the scripts for you) -- allowing people to gain loot and levels without even being at the keys.

Players who did this, and games that allowed it, rightly earned the derision of folks who actually played the games. Additionally, as players became more used to the "real time" sorts of combat, clicking buttons and thinking a bit at the same time became easier, and it no longer was as much of a burden to do both at once. To combat this boring "I'm not really playing" feel, designers wanted to come up with a system that made you feel like you were really playing your character -- a system where you had to watch exactly what was going on, and respond, or your character would die. Such a system would be more "action packed and dynamic."

Although they may not have been the first to try it, the first game I am aware of to really implement this successfully was City of Heroes. They had no queue... when you clicked a button, it executed. If command #1 was executing when you tried to execute command #2, then #2 didn't happen, and you had to click it again. Each action had its own individual refresh rate so you had to watch carefully. Thunder Kick did good damage, for example, but took, say, 4 seconds to recharge. You couldn't just hit TK, TK, TK... You'd hit TK once, and it would go off and its button would fade. The button stayed faded and un-clickable for 4 seconds, slowly "animating" back to the "usable" version. Meantime, the enemies were swinging at you so you'd better do something else -- like, perhaps, clicking Crane Kick instead.

This changed game play dramatically. Bots were gone; auto attack was gone. You had to click each attack as you needed it. That was what they meant by more "action packed," and it worked somewhat. But it also turned the game into what I call a "click-fest." Instead of actually watching the battle -- which looked really cool with all those special effects and whatnot -- players found themselves watching their button refreshes. You stared at your toolbar, waiting for that button to light up so you could click it again. I've likened it to a user interface version of "whack a mole" (that game you find in arcades where moles pop out of random holes and you wait with a mallet to hit them as they pop out). This model was quite successful and was quickly followed by pretty much every game that has come out since, including WOW, Guild Wars, Vanguard, Everquest 2, the revamped versions of SWG... the list goes on and on.

Players in general seem to prefer this sort of gameplay, though to be honest I do not. I end up spending too much time thinking about button refresh rates and not nearly enough time watching the pretty combat animations. Now, I suppose in a game like Vanguard where the special effects are about as good as those of the old 1980s Commodore-64 and Apple II games, maybe that's not a big loss. But for most games, it is frustrating that I spend so much time looking at the UI, and so little time looking at the actual game.

What this has definitely done, though, is turn the world of MMORPG gamers into what I call "click-aholics." In short, if they're not clicking, they're bored. They have to click... and click again... and click again. As soon as the clicking stops, they become impatient. Designers seem to know this (either explicitly or maybe instinctively), so they keep designing "click-fest" games. Nobody is willing to try going back to the queue and maybe fixing it to work better (and most importantly not be bottable), because they figure the players will say they're bored.

The consequence of all this is that, at the fundamental gameplay level, every single MMORPG on the market today, and every one in development for release in the next 2 years at least, is exactly the same. Every one of them has a toolbar with animated buttons, skills that are used individually and have individual refresh rates, and no combat queue. Now, it's not that these things are bad, per se -- I wouldn't mind them just in, say, COH. But it gets old when you install yet another MMORPG, and realize that basically, you already know how to play it, because it plays like every other MMORPG out there.

What I'd really like to see is a little bit of innovation. Playing a non-MMO, but single player, RPG -- Jade Empire -- recently has made me feel this more strongly than ever. In Jade Empire, you have up to 10 "styles", but each style only has four moves - attack, power attack, block, and area attack. The four moves are entered by the mouse only -- left click, right click, center click, and left/right simultaneous click, respectively. Therefore, once you learn it there is nothing to really look at. Style switching might require glancing at your list of styles, but in a given fight you are usually using just one style at a time. Since there are no refresh rates, and no buttons to look at, you spend your whole time looking at the animations, the battle, the enemies, your character -- in other words, you look at the game, and never at the UI.

Now, I realize that as Jade Empire is a console game translation, and something you only play one type of character in (a martial artist) with only 20 or so hours of gameplay to it, this exact mechanism would certainly not work for an MMORPG. But the point isn't the exact mechanism, but the bottom line -- which is that Jade Empire is a game where I actually play the game, instead of playing the toolbar. And that's the real point -- I'm sick of "playing the toolbar." I'd like to go back to playing the game.

I'm not sure if the click-fest style of gaming is going to change any time soon though, at least for MMORPGs. Players are so hooked on clicking, because they are "click-aholics," that most of them would have to go through withdrawal if they played a game like Jade Empire, where they didn't have to stare at their toolbar the whole time. I'm going to keep holding out hope though, that someone, somewhere, will design a game that avoids click-fests... but though I'm holding out that hope, I certainly am not going to hold my breath...

The SOE is falling!

Last night, someone posted a rumor at Fires of Heaven, a popular fansite for the game Vanguard. The rumor basically stated that most of the employees of Sigil, the company that had been developing and running Vanguard for many years, had been called outside the building and fired on the spot around 4:30 PM yesterday. The rumor concludes by saying that Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) would be taking full control of Vanguard. For those not following this previously, Sigil had been partnering with Microsoft, but when Microsoft yanked its support, SOE stepped in as "publisher" of the game. Originally it was stated that SOE would not do anything more than run servers and distribute game boxes, but now it looks like SOE is going to run the entire game.

This announcement created a massive uproar in the community. Historically, many gamers do not trust (and some even hate with a vengeance) SOE as a company. The reasons for this are legion, but the basic problem is that SOE has a habit of taking games people like and making unpopular changes that cause people to quit the game. The most famous case was the case of the "Combat Upgrade" and "New Game Experience" changes (CU and NGE, repsectively) in Star Wars Galaxies. These changes were unpopular because of what they did to the game, but more so because of how they were implemented. In both cases, SOE sprang a major change on the player base with little warning, almost no testing, and without properly preparing the players for the changes. In both cases they lied to the players quite blatantly (or at the least, willfully mislead them).

For example, when the CU was being prepared for launch, players were told that item stats would be changing but that "the best gun before the CU would remain the best after." This was a lie -- many of the weapons and other items that had been "the best" before the CU were converted to useless garbage upon the application of the patch that "upgraded" the game. Some crafters who had been making "the best" stuff, ended up with crates upon crates of useless material. At the same time, entertainers, worrying over the fact that one of the two reasons for their existence in the game -- mind wounds, which only they could heal -- had been removed, were very concerned that the last one (battle fatigue, or BF) would also go. The lead developer actually took the unprecedented step (since generally the entertainer forum was completely ignored by SOE's developers) of posting to the entertainer boards saying in no uncertain terms that BF was not being removed from the game. Less than a month later, it was gone... without the slightest hint of embarrassment from SOE that they had (clearly) openly lied to the entertainers.

I could go on and on with a list of about a thousand more incidents like this, but the king of all SOE deceptions came after the CU, with the so-called New Game Experiences (NGE). This was a complete change to the game that started being designed in secret in approximately April of 2005, just days or weeks after the CU was implemented. All the while, SOE was saying things like "The CU is here to stay" and "we will never do another major change like this again so get used to the new CU system." They told people they were working on some of the professions that had been completely bugged up by the CU -- scouts, rangers, creature handlers, and bio-engineers to name a few. And then they announced a new expansion ("Trials of Obi-wan", or TOOW) that they said quite plainly in their advertisements would include a fantastic new pet for Creature Handlers. What they didn't tell people was that the NGE, which they were planning to release right after TOOW, was going to take Creature Handlers (as well as scouts, rangers, and some 24 other professions out of the 36 that had existed up to that point) out of the game. They encouraged people to pre-order the game, especially trying to lure those playing creature handlers. On November 1, 2005, they launched the expansion and charged everyone's credit cards (for those keeping score, SOE had up to that point always had an "absolutely no refunds for purchases of online games or expansions" policy). The very next day, after everyone's accounts had been billed, then and only then did they announce the NGE, and the fact that the Creature Handler and all those other professions would be vanishing.

The uproar was unbelievable. By the most conservative estimates SOE lost roughly 1/2 of the 200,000 remaining accounts from SWG over the next 2-3 weeks, and many guess the number was closer to 3/4. The players were, yes, upset over having lost professions, skills, and over the changes, but it was much more than that. They were upset over the deceitful, duplicitous, slimy, smarmy, immoral, unethical behavior exhibited so blatantly by SOE -- the attempt to trick everyone, especially players with Creature Handler characters, into buying the expansion before informing us that in just 12 days, the whole game was basically vanishing and being replaced by what could only be described as "SWG 1.5."

These repeated betrayals of player trust, the repeated lies and deception, the repeated insistence that they are "going to start listening" only to have their behavior remain entirely unchanged (if not get even worse), have caused tens of thousands of players of online games to be wary or distrustful of SOE, if not to downright hate them.

This brings us back to Vanguard. When, about a year ago, it was announced that Microsoft was out and SOE was in as publishers of Vanguard, there was a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth. People were afraid that, once SOE got their mitts on the game, it would become another exercise in lies, deception, and unethical business practices. They were afraid, in short, it would become "another SWG." The people at Sigil assured everyone not to worry -- SOE was just going to house the servers and take care of box distribution and billing. Sigil would retain full creative control and would run the game as they intended. Some people were mollified, but those of us who knew SOE well, just shook our heads at the naivete. I do not understand how, after the abundant record of SOE's lack of character as a company, anyone would ever find them easy to trust again.

But, trust the players did. And Sigil seemed to keep this promise at first, to keep control. But then, when Vanguard was pushed out the door an admitted 6 months early, people started to worry again. Had SOE forced them to push it out too soon, just like they had pushed SWG out too soon, and EQ II too soon? (SOE has a track record of premature launches and insufficient testing, you see -- another reason players don't like them.) But again everyone was assured, "SOE is just the publisher."

Then last night, this rumor surfaced, that half or more of Sigil had been fired and that SOE was going to take over the entire company and the entire game. And this afternoon, John Smedley, the president of SOE, confirmed that this had in fact happened -- SOE, like a giant internet Borg cube, is going to absorb Sigil and take complete control of Vanguard.

This has prompted many people to make "The Sky is Falling" (or should we say, "The SOE is falling"?) posts. They are understandably afraid that the doom that befell SWG, is going to befall Vanguard now. They are not unreasonable to worry about this. Brad McQuaid, the lead developer for Sigil until, well, today I suppose, has already talked about how they intend some time this fall or winter to "re-launch" Vanguard -- which sounds suspiciously like another "NGE", for Vanguard this time (people are already referring to it as the NVGE or VNGE... *snicker*). And there is the worry that with SOE at the helm, the track record of lies, deception, dissembling, refusal to listen, is all going to re-assert itself in Vanguard.

Now, as one can easily tell from what I have written, I have no love for SOE. I regard them as the worst sort of company -- one that does not care about its customers and only cares about its bottom line. I am sure it could be argued that "all companies" are like this, and to a degree they all must be (a company that doesn't worry about its bottom line is going to go bankrupt soon enough). But there are companies that care about the bottom line along with other things like customer satisfaction and quality service, and then there are companies that only care about their damn bottom line. And SOE is clearly in this latter category, which (rightly, in my opinion) earns them my deepest derision.

On the other hand, so far as I can tell, SOE hasn't really done anything to Vanguard yet. I am more than willing to blame them if the shoe fits, but I don't see how they can be blamed for the mess in which Vanguard finds itself. Most of the key decisions that have mired Vanguard in mediocrity as a game were made long ago, when Microsoft was still the publisher and SOE was a competitor, not the owner. For example, the decision to go with the Unreal 2 engine was probably a stupid one, given how badly that engine works on the most basic level in-game, but that was made 4 or 5 years ago, long before SOE came along. The decision to make travel take forever and make the game "hardcore" was in from the early design stages, and was never tweaked despite the much greater success of the "soft core" games like World of Warcraft. The lead designers at Sigil refused to see the handwriting on the wall for years -- that the type of game they were building was already out of fashion before it was launched, and that players were looking for a different sort of play style. Only after launching to mediocre sales and rapidly dropping subscriptions did Brad McQuaid finally start telling people they should not think of Vanguard as "hard core" and should think of it as "core" (not quite "soft core" either, but somewhere in between hard and soft). He says now that it is what they "always" intended but a cursory glance at the archived posts he made for years before the launch, shows he is lying.

Vanguard is in trouble, as a game -- I don't think anyone with any sense would see it otherwise. They didn't sell as many copies as they had hoped. The ones they did sell led to far too many canceled subscriptions for them to be comfortable. They were not able to recoup the massive $30 million cost of building the game. And so they ended up needing help from SOE, and finally SOE just absorbed them. I'm more than willing to be wary of SOE, and rest assured I will watch them like a hawk, and jump ship at the first sign of them lying to me yet again. However, to this point, I think whatever problems Vanguard has so far endured have been the fault of Brad and his Sigil cronies, and not the fault of SOE.

And so, I will be patient, and watchful. If SOE lies to me again, about even the smallest thing, I am done... I will not pay to be lied to. But so far I have not seen any lies from them -- the lies have come from Brad and company. So for now, instead of screaming that "the sky is falling" I am going to wait and see what happens.

A fresh start

Today, I begin a fresh start on this, a new blog here at blogspot.com. Now, I am not completely new to the internet, nor to blogging. I have spent many years playing online games and reading their forums, and making long, opinionated, blog-like posts at such places as the City of Heroes forums, the SWG forums, and so forth. I have also run a website dedicated to roleplaying games (RPGs) and that site has a "blog" section where I have written many rants, raves, etc.

However, every site of which I am a member has some sort of a "theme" to it -- roleplaying games in general, or some individual game in particular, or something along those lines. As a result, I haven't really had the freedom to blog about whatever I darn well please at any of those sites (doing so would violate the rules of the site). Even at the gaming site I run, the rules (which I wrote myself, and thus it would be hypocritical to violate) clearly state that the subject matter of all content must relate, at least indirectly, to roleplaying games.

And so, I decided it was time to get my own "blogging" site. There are a few of these around, but I decided to go with this one because it is affiliated with Google, and I like how Google does things (at least at this point). It's a free website, so if anyone reading this wants a blog, click the link to blogger on the side-bar to the right of this page (you may have to scroll down a bit, but it's there) and follow the step-by-step instructions. It's quite simple, and convenient.

Now that I have my own blog site, I am going to use it to continue commenting on the things of interest to me, but this time I can make the topic about whatever I choose. Today it might be an online roleplaying game; tomorrow it might be on an environmental issue.

One decision I had to make right away of course, was to come up with a name, so I will explain a little bit about that here. I wanted a name that would be unique, and would describe me in a few short letters. I am, by profession, a biologist, and by hobby, an RPG gamer. I thus combined elements of the two things (Biology + an RPG wizard, or mage) and came up with "BioMage." The picture is of Shogun Suzerain, a character I played for a while in City of Villains (he was a Ninja Mastermind). It's a fictional character and so, of course, looks absolutely nothing like me.

That's all I'm going to post for now... Later on today or in the days ahead, I will use this spot to post my thoughts on a wide variety of topics, including games of all sorts (both computer and non-computer, roleplaying and non-roleplaying), entertainment (movies, books, TV shows, etc), photography (another hobby of mine), science, the environment, politics, you name it.

I welcome comments and feedback about whatever my thoughts are. For now I will let just anyone post comments and I will not moderate. As long as comments remain civil, post away. However, I will moderate any comments that contain anything I consider offensive. Since this is my blog I won't bother to define it in detail. If there are any problems I will restrict comments in a more aggressive manner but I trust (and hope) that I won't have to do this.

And with that... welcome to my blog. Enjoy!