Cheating part XVII January 7th, 2008 (Visited 2236 times) Tags:

I intend to make this my last post on this topic for a while. Possibly a couple decades.

At this point, the debate has spread far and wide. Some notable entries that caught my eye include:

•  Tim Burke wrestling with how meaning and game fiction and quests interrelate, over at TerraNova.
• A multiblogger podcast debate on the topic over at Shut Up We’re Talking
• And finally, Moroagh’s highly entertaining and incisive Boy Scout parable (also posted in the comments here).

It’s this last one that prompts a few thoughts…

As many long-time blog readers know, my son is in the Cub Scouts (in fact, his advancement ceremony to Webelos is tomorrow). So this happens to be a world that I know pretty well.

In that world, core premises are “we are teaching the boys a lot of valuable skills, and they are having fun along the way.” The idea that the journey is the reward is fundamental to the whole operation.

Because of this, needless to say, there are few cases of million-dollar prizes waiting at the top of mountains. Even in the most competitive activities (like, say, pine car derby racing), everyone “wins.”

A Scout doesn’t get to advance if they haven’t learned the knotmaking along the way. Would the boys have more fun if they didn’t have to earn badges on Leave No Trace, recycling, and doing laundry? Of course. But the system does not let them level up unless they do — not without it being considered “cheating,” of course.

The game design of Scouting is in some ways the exact reverse of what we have been discussing. The badges, the levels, etc, are just the feedback, not the point. The point is the things you have to do along the way. The level is the reward, not the motive.

It seems to me like a lot of what we have been discussing is the desire to “play only the way you want to.” And the Scout parable cuts both ways — because the boys in that parable will never make Eagle Scout, and will have undermined the very point of Scouting. Will they have had fun along the way? Sure. Was it a good tradeoff?

Well, that’s up to you to decide. I think that in the end, it may have been a decent one for the Scouts in the parable, in the short term. In the long term, probably not. And certainly the Scout parents in the parable are split. I don’t think most parents in the real world would be. But for sure, the people who run Scouting will cry foul, and the people who design games can cry foul.

Players and designers wil certainly end up with different definitions of cheating. And once you release a game, it’s out there, in the hands of players to do with as they will. But at least the designer gets to write the rules that others ignore, and therefore set the first standard for what cheating is.

So when I read the parable, I sympathize strongly with the Scout leader. He’s made some very bad design choices — sticking a million dollars at the top of the hill,  for example — but his heart is in the right place. And the wife in the story is missing the point. She doesn’t want her kids in Scouting. She wants them in a playgroup. And that’s fine, if that’s her choice. But she shouldn’t be trying to change Scouting into what she wants.

I am sure that’s the opposite of what Moroagh wanted us to all take away from the parable.

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66 Responses to “Cheating part XVII”

1. VR Community Forums : :: View topic - Incentives wrote on January 7th, 2008 at 5:58 pm:

   [...] There have been a bunch of posts lately on Raph Koster’s blog about cheating. Some interesting discussions ensued, including this insightful comment: [...]

2. Time to put the blogosphere on hold « Thoughts on Moroagh - MMORPGs and other distractions wrote on January 8th, 2008 at 4:34 am:

   [...] an interesting sequence at the tail end of the cheating debate that evolved like this:  [...]

3. Rocket Elf! « The Ancient Gaming Noob wrote on January 8th, 2008 at 5:39 pm:

   [...] Anderson on Webkinz Holiday Slam!Wilhelm2451 on No Gold! Well, Maybe…Raph’s Website » Cheating part XVII on Shut Up We’re Talking #17elizabeth harper on No Gold! Well, Maybe…Bildo on [...]

4. Game devs learning from gamers (yes, I know it’s hard), part I « Thoughts on Moroagh - MMORPGs and other distractions wrote on January 10th, 2008 at 12:38 pm:

   [...] is also interesting because Raph actually gave his personal interpretation of the parable and he closes with “I am sure that’s the opposite of what Moroagh wanted us to all take away [...]

5. Cub scouting ceremonies wrote on January 20th, 2008 at 11:53 am:

   Original post:Cheating part XVIIby at Google Blog Search: cub scouting ceremonies Blog tag: Cub scouting ceremonies Technorati tag: Cub scouting ceremonies

1. Kerri Knight said on January 7th, 2008 at 1:00 pm:

   Is running an automated macro cheating?

   Is it if you’re still actually at the keys, just wanting to keep your fingers free for chatting?

   Is it if you’re not engaged in the game, but watching TV while at the computer desk?

   Is it if you’re alt+tabbed out and surfing the net?

   Is it if you’re downstairs making cookies?

   Is it if you’re not even in the house?

2. TheAmazin said on January 7th, 2008 at 1:05 pm:

   Man… aren’t games art?
   And as art, can’t they be interpreted in different ways?
   So wouldn’t cheating just be one interpretation of how the game is supposed to be played?
   Does a tour guide in a museum giving one interpretation of a painting ruin it for the other people not in the tour?

   We make all these pushes for “games as art”, and then we tell people there’s only one way to look at it. :-/

3. Alex Fedotov said on January 7th, 2008 at 1:23 pm:

   Raph, I guess you’ve hit THE NAIL on the head with this ’scouting’ example.
   THAT’S WHY many things are considered ‘cheating’ in the US (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scouting see the numbers in ‘Membership’ section and estimate the ‘penetration’ ratio) while being completely ‘OK’ elsewhere.
   Thank you very much for the MOST important observation on this topic I’ve heard so far.

   Regards.

4. Kerri Knight said on January 7th, 2008 at 1:40 pm:

   I think its less telling people there’s only one way to look at it and more that the artist didn’t intend for you to look at it with a spectrum microscope, or scrape samples of the paint off and clip out a section of canvas to be sent off for analysis of its basic atomic structure. They almost certainly didn’t expect you to read up on the results of such research before you even saw their work.

   He/she meant it for your eyes is exactly the point.

   My first post above was a very often debated subject in SW:G, especially among the entertainer professions. Our gameplay was 100% AFK-able not only to mastership, but thereafter as well. “Buff-bots” could serve dozens of people at a time with a simple straightforward process that was so precise and routine (benefit of automated logic) that most players frequented them over the entertainers live at the keys. Their high service rates got them plenty of cash….to purchase all the buffing skill mod attachments that live ents couldn’t afford. They skipped all the gameplay and got all the rewards. Of course unattended play permeated all levels of gameplay, a symptom of a larger problem in itself.

   Gameplay needs to stop putting the rewards at the end, at least as a meaningful advancement. Completing a challenge indicates you have the skills necessary to add to your understanding necessary for what is coming next (or at the next level of challenges, prefering a playfield rather than a single line of tasks). It should not give you that ‘level shaped like a vambrace’ which gives you just enough stat mod gains to move along in a predetermined series of encounters and activities.

   Why focus on making the avatar better, when you can make the player better?

5. Mike Rozak said on January 7th, 2008 at 2:14 pm:

   The “Boy Scout Parable” reminds me of something I just wrote up in http://www.mxac.com.au/drt/NutritionalGameDesign.htm :

   Here’s an anecdote: I created a hobbit character in Lord of the Rings Online. The Shire had oodles of fed-ex quests. Some of them were sub-games, involving time limits and NPCs that would “catch you” and abscond with the sweets you were carrying. They came with rewards, which was good, because I wouldn’t have played the moderately-fun sub-games without the offer. However, most fed-ex quests had no sub-game component, but they still included rewards. I found myself crisscrossing the shire dozens of time delivering messages and packages, something that I found quite boring. But, I was rewarded for it, so I did it. And I was rewarded for killing rats (or whatever they were called), so I didn’t kill any rats along the roadside until I was given a quest to kill them. In fact, I didn’t do anything unless I had a quest for it because there was always a quest for everything, and quests always provided better rewards. Ultimately, I found myself being led around “by the nose”, feeling like I didn’t have any choice in the matter. The world conceptually changed from a beautiful landscape populated by (boring) NPCs and monsters into a task list.

   If people know you’re sticking a million dollars on top of hills, they will only climb those hills with a million dollars on top, and they will only care about getting to the top.

6. Michael W. said on January 7th, 2008 at 2:19 pm:

   Man… aren’t games art?
   And as art, can’t they be interpreted in different ways?

   That is like saying that reading the spark notes for Hamlet is an acceptable method of interpretation.

7. Tychus said on January 7th, 2008 at 2:23 pm:

   Something that’s always puzzled me - why is cheating so often free?

   One of the strengths of MMOs is supposed to be “emergent gameplay.” Information trading seems like a potential market that can be gamed. I would think some of the people who first crack some puzzles (whether it’s flax growing strategies in A Tale in the Desert, or raid strategies in WoW) would try to capitalize on their comparative advantage while they have it. Maybe the ego boost of showing others is more valuable to an early achiever. Maybe the transaction costs are too high.

   When information can be commoditized (blue prints in Eve, for example) markets to develop.

8. Peter S. said on January 7th, 2008 at 2:34 pm:

   You know, it occurs to me just now that if the level-shaped-like-a-vambrace appropriately repositioned you along the XP curve, it wouldn’t be half the issue it is. It’s widely understood that a Lv. 13 character killing Lv. 10 goons won’t (shouldn’t) make as much relative progress as a Lv. 10 character would; of course people cry foul when this very deeply built-in rule of the game is violated (waaay too strong of a word, but I’d rather not camp the Thesauri for a Synonym drop).

   Sure, you’d still have issues of thresholds and advancement (must be this tall to enter), but gear as an alternate to levelling may simply be an additional gameplay option if the strange synergy between the two advancement numbers (cash vs. exp) was stripped.

9. Tim said on January 7th, 2008 at 2:54 pm:

   Malcolm Gladwell’s TED talk titled “What we can learn from spaghetti sauce” is pretty interesting, and I think it applies to cheating, RMT, quest design and all these other conversations. The responses of the different Scouts in Boy Scout Parable fit right into his talk.

   http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/20

10. moo said on January 7th, 2008 at 2:56 pm:

    I agree with Mike Rozak about the rewards. One designer who has influenced my thinking about this a lot is Jonathan Blow. He points out that current video games use addictive, perhaps even unethical, methods of rewarding the player. In MMOs for example, the randomized drops have a skinner-box type effect on players. The nutritional metaphor is accurate: would the gameplay still be any fun if we stripped out the empty rewards? In all the MMOs I’ve ever seen, most of the time the answer is no. Current game designs range between candy and hard drugs, probably because no one understands how to design “nutritious-but-delicious” games.

11. JuJutsu said on January 7th, 2008 at 3:06 pm:

    Why focus on making the avatar better, when you can make the player better?

    I’m happy when a game focuses on making my avatar better. There are a plethora of things to make ME better; some of them games many of them not. Maybe I should engage with more of them. I’m sure my wife wishes so…;)

    Nonetheless one of the things that has made me happy over the years is pretending to be someone else. Mostly someone heroic [I'm not] and sometimes someone villainous [I'm not]. Almost always humanoid; I’ve learned that pretending to be a spaceship just doesn’t cut it.

    I’ve spent a number of years playing LARPs and although they are great fun I’m always painfully aware that in a LARP I’m no smarter, stronger, faster or nimble than I am otherwise. One reason I enjoy RPGs is that they help get around that by focusing on the avatar rather than the player.

12. Moroagh said on January 7th, 2008 at 3:41 pm:

    In a sense I’m pleased I picked the scouts. Because they hold the principles that Raph discusses. They hold some more principles as well but it doesn’t really matter. One could replace scouts with Simpsons-characters no problem.

    I enjoy Raph’s reading. It’s meant to be able to be read in many ways. Of course I have my own readings of it (there are a few).

    The parable is actually designed to display what we don’t see and to show that we see things that aren’t actually in it.

    For example I’m glad that folks picked up that the parable is about game design and that a design blunders happened (if that wasn’t the sledgehammer method to make it obvious).

    But there is more in there and I’d like to hint at them so maybe folks can find a second or third reading of the parable:

    *) Notice how one boy scout is not rat-racing. This actually makes at least three points. I’ll leave it to the reader to try to unearth them. A hint for the most important point is: Did you see that on your first reading and did you give that any weight at all in the assessment of what is going on here?

    *) What is the scout leader’s focus? Raph’s noticed that the leader made design mistakes but did the scout leader notice that? More specifically is his assessment of the situation accurate and contains all observable information? Why is he missing some of the information that is available to him? Is his assessment level-headed? Is he able to take perspective of other participants in the setup? He blames, is the blame well placed?

    *) There are actually two game designs in the parable. One is broken and we all know that. One I consider rather sensible and not obviously broken. This gives a litmus test as to what doesn’t really change between a broken and a non-broken design. What are the results of that test?

    *) What is the wife’s attitude towards learning as it can be deduced from the piece? Or can it be deduced?

    *) The wife very specifically reacts to her husbands upset, what is her intent? Does the leader understand her intent?

    *) Is the wife a teacher? If yes what does she teach about game design? And what does she teach about learning? Does she teach other things as well?

    *) The leader gets the last word. What possible responses could the wife have?

    Finally one last to think about:

    *) Who all in this parable can be seen as spoiler if you put yourself in any of the characters’ perspectives?

    Finally let me give away one of my readings reading of the parable:

    The beauty of this reading is that I already know how it will find a second reading that is contrary to what I actually mean. The reason is simply it appears in not just one but three contexts (maybe you find more) in the piece involving all characters in shifting roles. But the most obvious reading of the piece is the least interesting setup.

    But if you answered some of the questions above you’ll see there are more readings in there for sure.

13. Moroagh said on January 7th, 2008 at 3:57 pm:

    Tim, thanks for the lead to Malcolm Gladwell’s TED talk. Loving it. “I want extra chunky.” TED talks have a tendency to be very good but I hadn’t hit that one yet.

14. Kerri Knight said on January 7th, 2008 at 4:04 pm:

    Well, there I went being lazy by just putting ‘better’ out there instead of more nuanced terminology. What I’m getting at here is that ‘progression’ has come to mean ‘getting more skill mods’. There are dozens if not hundreds of alternative ways to facilitate your character ‘improving’. In LARPS you most certainly can get stonger, smarter, and faster. The advantage of games is that you don’t have to practice sword techniques and lift weights to become a better swordfighter. You can improve your understanding of which situations call for what decisions, which in turn makes your avatar ‘faster, stronger, or more nimble’.

    The problem with gear based character stat mixes is it just becomes a cycle of getting gear to be in a position to get more gear. You’ve gone through a pre-ordained series of moves and been given a reward in the form of stat mods. You could just as well present a challenge that requires demonstration of some keen strategy and/or teamwork to be displayed that will become a common level of challenge in future gameplay. The reward is intrinsic, it comes in the form of confidence in moving on to more ‘prestigous’ or even mechanically ‘influental’ gameplay. You can put a badge system in as a personal achievement record, but there’s no reason to attach power gains to everything as incentive.

15. TheAmazin said on January 7th, 2008 at 4:07 pm:

    If you read Hamlet, and you don’t really “get” the language, and wouldn’t otherwise finish the play, wouldn’t the Spark notes be better than not reading at all? Pretty much every English teacher I’ve ever had seems to think so.

16. Adrian Lopez said on January 7th, 2008 at 4:10 pm:

    Instead of blaming the player for “cheating”, I prefer to look at this in terms of lousy design:

    If a game requires a strategy guide or walkthrough to complete, it’s broken. If the game may be completed without one but nevertheless provokes a not insignificant number of players to consult one, it’s just as broken as before.

    Completing a game should require no external clues. A player’s failure to figure out a particular puzzle is actually the designer’s failure to provide sufficient clues within the game. The game world is missing essential information; the game is broken.

17. Morgan Ramsay said on January 7th, 2008 at 4:58 pm:

    Cheating is a form of emergent play, and neither necessarily good or bad.

    TheAmazin wrote:

    We make all these pushes for “games as art”, and then we tell people there’s only one way to look at it.

    Some people push that concept. I doubt there is consensus agreement that games are art, if only because my opinion counts as a dissenting voice. Games are games. They go beyond art, and are superior to art as, at least, tools for simulating and experimenting with models.

    Pretty much every English teacher I’ve ever had seems to think so.

    That’s the same sort of academic laziness that leads people to dismiss evolution as “just a theory” because they read a few bullet points without understanding the science.

18. Morgan Ramsay said on January 7th, 2008 at 5:08 pm:

    Mike Rozak wrote:

    If people know you’re sticking a million dollars on top of hills, they will only climb those hills with a million dollars on top, and they will only care about getting to the top.

    Business provides a great deal of insight into the problems with financial incentivization. For example, if your incentive program focuses on rewarding employees with higher salaries and bonuses, there’s a good chance you are effectively molding them into workforce mercenaries who would have no qualms with leaving you at a critical point in your operations for another employer who’s simply paying more than you.

    You don’t foster loyalty with carrots on a string. That’s how you buy time.

19. Mike Rozak said on January 7th, 2008 at 6:13 pm:

    Morgan Ramsay wrote:

    Business provides a great deal of insight into the problems with financial incentivization. For example, if your incentive program focuses on rewarding employees with higher salaries and bonuses, there’s a good chance you are effectively molding them into workforce mercenaries who would have no qualms with leaving you at a critical point in your operations for another employer who’s simply paying more than you.

    On a somewhat related note, if your compensation package to new hires is only about money, you end up attracting people who like money.

    The game design selects the player base, and the player base impacts future designs of the game, ad infinitum. And as Raph Koster has noted, this eventually leads to an obscure game genre that only a few die-hards play.

    Everyone knows that contemporary MMORPGs are about (a) 500-hour games, with (b) endless grinding, so a lot of players that might be interested in MMOs, but who aren’t intersting in 500-hours and grinding, leave and never return. A large percentage of these people are the ones that like to tie knots or solve puzzles.

20. Raph said on January 7th, 2008 at 7:44 pm:

    If a game requires a strategy guide or walkthrough to complete, it’s broken. If the game may be completed without one but nevertheless provokes a not insignificant number of players to consult one, it’s just as broken as before.

    Completing a game should require no external clues. A player’s failure to figure out a particular puzzle is actually the designer’s failure to provide sufficient clues within the game. The game world is missing essential information; the game is broken.

    I think this makes the crucial mistake of ignoring the audience to which the game is aimed. A game which is aimed at physics majors can feel free to have tough physics-based stuff in it. That doesn’t mean it’s poorly designed when a majority of users cheat in it. It might just mean they aren’t physics majors. There may have been a superabundance of clues in the game — just the audience wasn’t equipped to even see them.

    This happens all the time in games, and it’s impossible to aim a game at “everyone” because everyone comes to the table with different skills and knowledge.

21. Adrian Lopez said on January 7th, 2008 at 10:10 pm:

    If a game mechanic explicitly involves the application of external information, the rule I’ve presented does not apply. You could argue all games involve the application of outside experience (as do all cognitive acts), but I think that’s missing the point.

    Although I’ve failed to say so, my post concerns those games which involve mechanics that aren’t supposed to require any outside knowledge beyond the basic information necessary to understand what’s going on and — where appropriate — what the characters are saying. Basic cultural, linguistic and cognitive skills aside, I think the vast majority of games can reasonably be called self-contained.

    In my admittedly limited experience, strategy guides and walkthroughs serve mostly as cures against insufficient information within a game.

22. Raph said on January 7th, 2008 at 10:34 pm:

    Well, let’s take the infamous echo puzzle in Zork. You have to pick up a precious item (a bar of platinum?) from a chamber where everything you try to do results in echoes.

    If you explore, you find a dam full of water, and there’s a puzzle to open the dam. Removing the water that is surrounding the room removes the echo, and then you can get the bar.

    This puzzle was HARD in its day. It is perfectly logical. There’s ample hints there, in fact. I was just stupid.

    This is very different from the joke puzzles that existed in Colossal Cave. There’s one there where you face a huge dragon. An earlier snake, you defeated by throwing a bird at it. It made no sense. This time, you try every item in the game. Nothing works. You keep trying to kill the dragon, and every time you do, you get this:

    > KILL DRAGON
    With what, your bare hands?

    Finally, in desperation, you type YES. And you miraculously slay the dragon with your bare hands.

    The second puzzle is a joke. Spoilering it, well, frankly, no loss. I think I may have had someone tell me the answer, at an Osborne 1 User Group meeting. The Zork one, though — sorry, I was just being stupid. Everything I needed WAS there.

    Many many people probably never solved the dam and the echo chamber. It doesn’t mean it was a bad puzzle or poor game design. Even the nonsensical dragon one surrendered to player frustration.

23. Adrian Lopez said on January 7th, 2008 at 10:54 pm:

    Consider it a statistical argument. The fact that some players are unable to figure out a particular puzzle isn’t enough to make it a bad puzzle, but a significant number of frustrated players strongly suggests there’s something very wrong with it.

    So, assuming the statistical argument is correct, how many players annoyed is too many players annoyed? I don’t know the answer, but I think it’s the designer’s job to minimize player frustration while simultaneously presenting interesting challenges. Someday, perhaps, I’ll figure out how to do that.

    I think a designer’s job involves promoting player progress more than it involves blocking it.

24. Raph said on January 7th, 2008 at 11:02 pm:

    Here’s another way to look at it: must a given game be both a freshman course and also a graduate seminar? Can’t you have games that are only graduate seminars?

    Shooting for everyone being able to progress, or even most people, kind of precludes the graduate seminar.

25. Adrian Lopez said on January 7th, 2008 at 11:25 pm:

    Yes, you can have games that are only “graduate seminars”, and well designed ones to boot.

    You declare your assumptions about your target audience, make sure those assumptions hold, and only then do you determine what constitutes outside information by defining it in terms of what’s missing from both your game and your target audience’s head.

    Also, consider that if your graduate seminar is attended mostly by freshmen, there’s either something wrong with your market research, or with your screening mechanism.

26. Morgan Ramsay said on January 8th, 2008 at 1:46 am:

    Adrian Lopez wrote:

    …but a significant number of frustrated players strongly suggests there’s something very wrong with it.

    No offense, Adrian, but that’s a crock! Guitar Hero 3, Expert difficulty, “Through the Fire and Flames” by DragonForce. There’s nothing wrong with challenge.

    You, the player, are responsible for being ready to overcome that challenge. If everything could be done by anyone, everyone would be anything they dreamed of being. I’d be a billionaire, take over a small island, and establish my own civilization because the only effort I’d exert would be interacting with the one-click ordering button.

    Challenge creates difference. Without difference, there are no individuals, no concept of identity, and we are simply nameless, faceless drones in a world without wonder.

    Raph wrote:

    Shooting for everyone being able to progress, or even most people, kind of precludes the graduate seminar.

    I don’t understand why some people can’t grok this truth, Raph. Perhaps we can blame for-the-children governance and the spoiled-brat culture?

    Some people abhor change, always fearing the unexpected and always overprotective of their expectations. They never want to see gray skies. When they wake up from sunny days to the reality of change, they grumpily roll out of bed, stomp their feet, and grimly travel to work wishing the day away.

    These people avoid obstacles, opting for the longer and less eventful road. When confronted with a maze, they look for a map. When they have a map, they want their hand held before proceeding down dimly lit corridors.

    Silver spoons, golden bowls, and power-player rolodexes—these people want to be gifted privileges, rights, and rewards. Easy and effortless are their bread and butter. What a shallow life to live. Challenge is not a bug. Challenge is what makes life worth living.

27. chris said on January 8th, 2008 at 3:07 am:

    after reading all the posts and the article itself isnt it easy to say people are different and therefor need different things in life to complete their simplistic way of living. even the college professor can not continue to write hypothetical equatics and prove them right day after day after day without rest or simplisity. some can go on for days dreaming and think complexity while others lay in their simplistic life thinking of things to make it more and more easy. cheating could mearly be a definition created by oneself. example: i feel that in order to get somewhere you must walk. if you take your bike or car or any other form of travel can i say your cheating. your trying to explain why the earth spins at such an such a speed and all you can say is just because couldnt you say thats cheating. people want things to be given to them the way they want it, whether its considered cheating by another individual has no signifigance. it is merly the fact that people are not satisfied with what they have or once they achieve that satisfaction how long will it last until it is replaced with a need for change or something new to be installed. once that comes how can anyone guess what that single person wants to be added compared to the mass majority. life is simply what you make it to be and if you dont understand or cannot complete such and such puzzle or problem you either keep trying till you get it by brain power or sheer dumb luck, or you give up and complain, or mumble on about how i couldnt get it or i didnt like it. simply put you shouldnt judge how others do things and merly pass it by when something to your liking is not met. history shows fights battles and even wars to begin by the sheer fact people cannot compromise and work together to achieve the happy ending to a dreaded problem. when it comes to games how am i a producer suppose to know what to make for everyone so everyone can be happy. if i were to make a game everyone would like then it be a game so vast it would be exactly as life even though we cannot go out and chop things in half with swords we can pretend and make those games to those specific people, whether they like it or not is up to them and whether they cheat or not is them deciding they wont lose and will win by any tactics necessary. why cant people just give up and admit their defeat? or even why cant they quit a game if they do not like it and leave it alone for others to enjoy. is the society today so focused on themselfs they cannot respect the other people in the world who enjoy what they do and what they play?

28. Moroagh said on January 8th, 2008 at 4:15 am:

    What a shallow life to live.

    Yes, because wasting away ones life tiatribing a gamer blog is deep and profound. And certainly beating GH3 on hard is… just unspeakably good use of a person’s time.

    Think I have pretty much decided you’re beyond hope. Some things are just completely out of whack here if someone believes that the depth of a life is defined by achievement in computer games.

    To think that making people spend more effort in an escapist world instead of going out and actually doing something useful for society is about as meaningful as a priviliged slacker denegrading others as priviliged slackers to feel good about himself.

    Complete lack of perspective, seriously. And an arrogant anti-social outlook on top. Lovely. And no I don’t see any need to respond to opinionated one-liners anymore, it’s clearly pointless. I mean this in all honesty and friendliness: Get help or at least wake up. And I’m gonna heed my own advice and spend no more time on here… there are may more important things to learn (and teach) than are being taught here.

    Thanks, that was actually a valuable lesson to learn.

29. Sir Digby Chicken Caesar said on January 8th, 2008 at 5:22 am:

    Moroagh wrote:

    Yes, because wasting away ones life tiatribing a gamer blog is deep and profound. And certainly beating GH3 on hard is… just unspeakably good use of a person’s time.

    Now there’s a well-built strawman if I ever saw one.

30. Adrian Lopez said on January 8th, 2008 at 6:09 am:

    “Guitar Hero 3, Expert difficulty, ‘Through the Fire and Flames’ by DragonForce. There’s nothing wrong with challenge.”

    Walkthroughs won’t help you with Guitar Hero, so it’s not particularly relevant in the context of this discussion. Having said that, I don’t think having an “expert mode” is indicative of bad design. Only when expert skills are necessary in a game that’s aimed at a more general audience would I say it’s indicative of bad design.

31. Raph said on January 8th, 2008 at 7:39 am:

    Only when expert skills are necessary in a game that’s aimed at a more general audience would I say it’s indicative of bad design.

    Like, say, Ninja Gaiden? (A game I couldn’t get past the first level of!). Or most shmups these days? It was generally agreed that is was a “hard game” but nobody thought it was bad for that reason.

    I agree with your earlier point, though — yes, it is about the targeted audience, and who it is marketed to.

    Though I don’t think it is the game’s fault or the designer’s fault if it is aimed at one crowd, and a second crowd picks it up — yes, it’s a market research problem, or maybe you discovered a new segment altogether. But not an issue with what you made.

32. Adrian Lopez said on January 8th, 2008 at 8:38 am:

    I don’t think the designer is to blame if the game is picked up by the wrong crowd (the game itself hasn’t changed, after all), but if the game designer thinks he’s designing a game for a particular crowd and that crowd finds the game frustrating, the designer has failed to design a game that’s fit for that crowd. I say such a game is badly designed.

33. Todd Ogrin said on January 8th, 2008 at 9:34 am:

    Gabe at Penny Arcade posted this on 12/3/07:

    [....] I was getting frustrated because some of the boss battles were really giving me a hard time. I realised I don’t play games for the challenge. I don’t need or want to be punished by a game for making mistakes. I play games for what Ron Gilbert calls “new art”. I play to see the next level or cool animation. I don’t play games to beat them I play games to see them.

    I feel much the same way. I wouldn’t think twice about consulting a walkthrough if I got stuck. That doesn’t mean I’m a cheater or the game is broken. It means there’s an amount of effort I’m willing to expend to unlock the next chapter; beyond that and the cost-benefit ratio doesn’t pay out in my favor. I want to be satisfied to have solved a puzzle, not relieved. Designers need to accept (and be grateful) that some players play games for tourism and don’t want to beat their heads against a wall just to get to the next point of interest.

34. Kerri Knight said on January 8th, 2008 at 11:01 am:

    Todd, I completely agree there is a viable market segment that want a thrill rides and attractions type of experience. I hope you’d agree that form of gameplay preference is not the exclusive interest or probably even a majority. There certainly seems to be a lot of development time going that way, lately. From my point of view, jumping through a repititous series of hoops I feel just as much like I’m beating my head against a wall until I unlock the next chapter.

    I want puzzles to be adaptive, dynamic, and varied enough in their offerings and outcomes that range beyond pass/fail. ‘Losing’ can still offer constructive benefits to the participants. Even ‘winning’ can be an opportunity to attempt even more exacting precision on a desired outcome. Less ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’, more tabletop freeform, please :9.

35. Morgan Ramsay said on January 8th, 2008 at 2:39 pm:

    Moroagh wrote:

    And certainly beating GH3 on hard is… just unspeakably good use of a person’s time.

    Here in Las Vegas, I attended Bill Gates’ keynote on Sunday. Robbie Bach, Microsoft’s Entertainment & Devices division president, brought on stage a girl who is the reigning Guitar Hero 3 champion. (Whatever that means.)

    She stood beside one of the richest men in the world, played a song on Expert difficulty, perfectly, in front of an audience of thousands of consumer electronics professionals, executives, and press. Gates followed up by bringing out Slash who played the same song on an actual guitar. She’s set for life.

    http://www.microsoft.com/ces/

    Some things are just completely out of whack here if someone believes that the depth of a life is defined by achievement in computer games.

    Life is shaped by challenge, period. Does virtual adversity play a role in shaping life? Yes. To a revolutionary degree? Generally, probably not.

    To think that making people spend more effort in an escapist world …

    Escapism isn’t a game environment. Escapism is reason to interact.

    … instead of going out and actually doing something useful for society is about as meaningful as …

    Ever heard of serious games? How about wargames? How about the Virtual Reality Medical Center? Games are meaningful and useful to society, from serving as luxury goods for the citizenry to training warfighters at the front lines of combat.

36. David CHATEL said on January 8th, 2008 at 3:00 pm:

    Things could be said about balancing the amount of difficulty to match player’s profiles, but as Raph said, something difficult for someone may be easy for another person… So maybe we should talk about the “kind of difficulty” ? And if it’s possible to change the gameplay to match player’s profiles ?

    It’s probably not possible to change the gameplay of a raid in World of Warcraft, for example, to match the players’ profiles of the raid members, but i think that “kind of difficulty” have already been achieved in SWG (pre-CU).

    Having more options than only combat was really a great thing : it allowed players to decide “who” their characters will be. Only providing combat-gameplay in a mmorpg is more like saying to all your players “you will only kill/destroy stuff”, and if you’d like that you can go away. It also give you, as a designer, serious headaches when your players start complaining about pvp or pve imbalances.

    So…

    Instead of blaming the player for “cheating”, I prefer to look at this in terms of lousy design:

    I tend to agree with this, but for other reasons.

    If someone cheated in Ninja Gaiden, he did only because he got more entertainment from playing this game in a cheated state, not particulary because it was “too difficult”. I recall modifications of Doom 1 (basically cheats) which were making the game more difficult.

    So, “lousy design” because the game (a mmorpg, since we’re mainly talking about this ?) do not offer what it could (should ?). Grinding endlessly is not a challenge, or more exactly, the challenge is all about making a huge and painful effort to overcome the boredom of this kind of gameplay. Not exactly what you’d call “fun”.

    While i think about it… There are some games, in some occasions, that simply do not have cheating in it, right ? In which occasions cheating do not occurs ? I’m wondering because, we’re all talking about “why cheating occurs” and “how can you combat cheating, RMT, etc…” but i havent seen the questions “when cheating do not occurs ?” and “what are the ingredients that will make ‘cheating’ less fun, even for the player who’s cheating ?”.

    I’m saying something stupid or… ? You cheat because the result of cheating makes the game more fun for you, right ? So, if cheating makes the game less fun, or if the game is fun enough, in itself ?… What happens ?

37. JuJutsu said on January 8th, 2008 at 3:23 pm:

    She stood beside one of the richest men in the world, played a song on Expert difficulty, perfectly, in front of an audience of thousands of consumer electronics professionals, executives, and press. Gates followed up by bringing out Slash who played the same song on an actual guitar. She’s set for life.

    I’d be more impressed if she showed up here, but that’s just me.

    http://www.everydayhero.com.au/

38. Len Bullard said on January 9th, 2008 at 6:43 am:

    @Morgan:

    Some games are useful just as some combinations of chemicals are useful. It is a results-oriented analysis. The Guitar Hero may be set for life in some community that respects her skill at that game, but she can’t take the place of even the lowliest rhythm guitar player in a real garage band. This is not to disrespect her achievement but to note that in a results-oriented analysis, there are classes of results and it is the class that value is assigned to, not the result.

    The whole topic of cheating has been a fascinating read. I’m not a gamer. The comparison that comes to mind is that games at this time are analogous to 19th century medicines. Any medical treatment has a results-oriented goal: to make the patient better. How that is measured determines the class. If the patient is better because a condition is cured or mitigated, that is one class of result. If the patient is better because they feel better, that is another class of result possibly. This can be the difference between a class of antibiotic and a class of patent medicine (Mom’s Home Draft of Herbs and Morphine).

    So it seems that some of the game designers in this topic are in the business of creating games where the play of the game results in a smarter and more intellectually nimble player. Others are designing games that provide pleasure from domination by any means or gratification from having something new, trendy, customized, self-absorbed. The first class of results has positive long lasting results. The second class is patent medicine in 19th century terms. The results may be obtained but only by consuming a poison.

    Caveat emptor.

39. Morgan Ramsay said on January 9th, 2008 at 11:08 am:

    Len Bullard wrote:

    The Guitar Hero may be set for life in some community that respects her skill at that game, but she can’t take the place of even the lowliest rhythm guitar player in a real garage band.

    Look, some names in business open doors. I’d say that if you can cite Bill Gates or Slash as personal references when, for example, launching a business or applying for a job, that’s pretty much as good as it gets. The next best thing is being able to cite the President of the United States, as a few entertainers have done in the past.

    In addition, the girl who performed on stage with one of the richest men in the world also performed in front of thousands of consumer electronics professionals, executives, and press. She can, in all likelihood, obtain all the connections she needs to have a long, fulfilling career in whatever she desires. She has the key to the city, so to speak.

    Let me emphasize that she performed on Guitar Hero 3. This is different from simply playing Guitar Hero 3 in your living room. There is extrinsic value to playing video games, if you have the chops to play competitively to the top of the ladder. Granted, few will achieve this status, but if this were easy, everyone would be a pop-culture phenomenon and therefore the concept of a pop-culture phenomenon would be rendered obsolete.

    You said “she can’t take the place of even the lowliest rhythm guitar player in a real garage band.” Assuming that she doesn’t possess skills on an actual guitar, I’d still say that she can perform in a band—just not in the same way that you’re thinking. Let’s say this band wanted to do something different with their cover songs. Perhaps she could perform songs on Guitar Hero 3, muted on a big HDTV, while the rest of the band accompanies her?

    If you’re only looking for the needle in a haystack, you probably won’t see the box of needles on the blanket to your right. Look beyond the results of analysis. Avoid confirmation bias. Basically, using your example, don’t ignore the side effects of medical treatments. They can prevail over the intended remedy.

40. Zomboe said on January 9th, 2008 at 1:29 pm:

    Like, say, Ninja Gaiden? (A game I couldn’t get past the first level of!). Or most shmups these days?

    Speaking of shooters, they often used to require you hit the shooting button very rapidly. Using a rapid fire controller instead could be called cheating, but most players would enjoy it far more. But what happens if the player physically can’t hit the button fast enough? Would he be better off abandoning the game entirely rather than cheating?

    The developers of ATITD allow attended macroing, though some players still consider it unfair. Many of those who do macro do so in order to avoid (or cope with) RSI. A lot of activities in ATITD do require an obscene number of clicks. Should that physical clicking element be considered a part of the game’s challenge?

    To push the point even more, is using a 3rd party controller for a console game cheating? Suppose the analog sticks on the controller are 5% better (by whatever metric), surely that counts as an unfair advantage? Or perhaps the controller just fits the player’s hands better.

    I guess my question is, where do you draw the line?

41. Zomboe said on January 9th, 2008 at 2:11 pm:

    The second puzzle is a joke. Spoilering it, well, frankly, no loss. I think I may have had someone tell me the answer, at an Osborne 1 User Group meeting. The Zork one, though — sorry, I was just being stupid. Everything I needed WAS there.

    Sorry to double post, but this is an excellent example of drawing that line. Raph, I take it you mean that looking up the solution to the second puzzle wouldn’t be cheating? Or that it would be cheating, but it’s not a big deal?

    I personally don’t agree with your reasoning for the cheating exemption, but regardless of that, in what capacity are you drawing that line?

    The most obvious place to turn for definitions of cheating would be the developers, but I’m guessing you didn’t develop Colossal Cave. Have the developers explicitly said it’s ok to spoil that puzzle?

    Should we accept your judgment because you’re an expert on game design? That then brings up the issue of who is qualified to determine what counts as cheating. Since I’m probably not, would it be ok if I just consulted you every time I was potentially cheating? You might even be able to make some money that way. . .

    It seems to me you are most likely just drawing the line as a player. In that case, though, everyone’s claims have equal weight. I could just as easily say that sharing or looking up the dragon solution is terrible cheating, and be pissed off that you spoiled it for me ;). That seems to be the most reasonable option to me, that players are free to decide what they personally consider cheating (and whether or not they care).

42. yunk said on January 9th, 2008 at 2:15 pm:

    I think a better example from scouting would be to use a real world competition that exists in scouting: orienteering. In orienteering you are given a starting position, then many steps of direction and distance. You are only allowed a pencil, compass and map.

    Now there’s two ways to solve this. One way is to follow each step pacing out the distances. You’ve already paced yourself and believe if you take 100 steps it’s exactly z distance. So you divide the distance you are suppose to walk and figure out how many steps to take. At the beginning you adjust your compass for your latitude. Then for each vector you’re given you use your compass to gauge direction, then walk the paces you’ve calculated. Repeat this for each vector, then there is a numbered stake or something to say where you finished up. Whoever knows the correct numbered stake wins.

    A smart kid might use trigonometry to calculate only one vector to walk instead of all those steps, thereby he might get closer to the finish point because he has to pace out the vector only once, instead of many of them which could compound any pacing or direction errors.

    Is the second kid cheating? Some scout leaders would say yes. Some might say no. The reward is for arriving at a final destination, which he did, and if he only used a pencil, the compass and map then he used everything given. However, in real life you probably can’t walk a straight line, but if you are given directions will have to take many steps, so completing it the “right” way proves you can do this and helps you gauge how good you are.

    So maybe even if he didn’t cheat, he still missed a learning opportunity, though perhaps created he his own learning opportunity.

    So maybe the point of that would be, reward them not for hitting the final one, but also recording where they landed for each step, and whoever has the most right wins. Then the purpose of the exercise would be obvious and the way to determine cheating or not would also be obvious.

    That is why I don’t feel anything for the scout leader, he completely misses the point by 1. offering a reward like that and 2. not rewarding scouts for learning scouting skills, but the scouting skills are merely tangential. To me the parable is that the skills you want to reward have to actually be performed and have some relation to what you’re trying to teach.

    That kind of makes me realize that scouting does actually reward the journey, because for each promotion you get, you must prove you learned x,y and z skills. You can’t just give the right answers at the end. These skills are also useful scouting skills, not just “any” skills. Untying a bizarre knot or solving puzzles wouldn’t be, but tying knots and untying proper knots would be considered useful. (Solving puzzles is good for your brain but wouldn’t be a true scouting skill, well then there is that “mentally awake” part… hmm…).

    So one thing that reminds me of, it seems like in all games there are officials / referees / monitors. Like the Warden. Maybe that is just part of what is needed for any kind of competition. That introduces error on the part of the officials too. But maybe that is just life, part of life is sometimes you get a bad call and you have to learn to deal with it.

43. Len Bullard said on January 9th, 2008 at 4:00 pm:

    I’m not deprecating what she accomplished, Morgan, and I said so. I’m saying a results oriented analysis depends on the class of results. Take that guitar and make a loop-based synth interface out of it and she can perform with a live band that uses loops (many do).

    As to famous personalities, I’ve met lots of them. I’ve partied with the Eagles, played accompaniment for Nichelle Nichols, spent a week with Allen Ginsburg jamming and chatting, met with Chet Atkins and more. In a performer’s life, you can literally meet LOTs of famous people and guess what, the more famous they are, generally the nicer they are. But the key is do you have a talent or commoditity they need to do a project. This is where business starts and stops. And then, can you carry it out? Bo Bice is the guy who lost to Carrie Underwood. Bo is a local player here. This is someone I’ve watched from literally two feet away. When he was on American Idol, one of my co-workers was going nuts and I had to explain to her, “big opportunity and it will evaporate in a year because he isn’t prepared”. And so it went.

    You can always hope. There is lots of that. Whole campaigns are built on that but a business deal doesn’t always come down to who you know but what you can do for who wants what you can do now. So ask yourself if trading on Guitar Hero skills or WoW skills is the road to lifelong success, or merely a very short very bright exposure. This doesn’t deprecate the experience. It validates it for what it is relative to your own goals.

    Would you rather be the first person to have a WoW level 70 or Raph Koster? Seriously. Who has more opportunities? What are the ‘extrinsic values’? What I learned from the ‘famous people’ was my talent was valid, appreciated, and we had fun together. That’s it. And that is really the value of those very bright moments. But to tell you the truth, the brightest moment of all was standing the back of the room watching my seven year old son demonstrate the first virtual reality epic (yes, In VRML) to Neil Armstrong and the Deputy Prime Minister of Ireland in front of the world press. It was HIS moment and I made that possible with a team of very dedicated people. That’s success IMHO. Our skill and creativity made that possible. This is the point: no one could cheat their way to that. They could only earn it. Guitar Hero is not a cheat but it is not a skilled guitar performance. That doesn’t deprecate it. It is a class of results but the class determines the value. The results determine if the class is merited. The *stars* of her performance wrote the GH code and recorded those loops she is keying. If Bill Gates is going to make a deal, it will be with them.

    At the end of the day, I decided I liked my hometown, wanted to stay married to the same woman, raise kids and shelties, and still own my music and do with my art what I wanted to do, not what a market validated, then fight the good fight because I have enough stuff. So I am a VP in a software company and when I want to, I can play at the Bluebird in Nashville, or work on commissions for virtual worlds that want music, or write for my church choir, or write songs for JOI (that was fun!). The main thing is that I am neither impressed by wealth and power nor awed by the size of the crowd. Neither will bring me happiness nor make it possible for me to grow. Only I can do that.

    Now if playing Guitar Hero can get me a date with Heather Graham or a night on the town in New York’s finest spots with Samantha Brown, then we’ll talk ‘extrinsic values’.

44. Morgan Ramsay said on January 9th, 2008 at 6:05 pm:

    Len Bullard wrote:

    What I learned from the ‘famous people’ was my talent was valid, appreciated, and we had fun together. That’s it.

    I had prepared a lengthy response, but after discussing your thoughts [and my frustration] with a few executives in my immediate vicinity at the moment, the bottom line is that you are, apparently, regularly unaware of opportunities presented to you. Because you are unaware of these opportunities, you don’t understand their value and thus don’t follow up on them. (For example, if that’s all you learned, you missed out on a lot.)

    By the way, I said nothing of “impressiveness.” I believe your argument is based on a clear misinterpretation of what I’ve previously written. That said, your reasoning behind many of the statements you’ve made is incomplete. This is either the truth of your situation or an illustration of the tremendous differences in our definitions.

45. Kerri Knight said on January 9th, 2008 at 8:59 pm:

    At the end of the day, I decided I liked my hometown, wanted to stay married to the same woman, raise kids and shelties, and still own my music and do with my art what I wanted to do, not what a market validated, then fight the good fight because I have enough stuff. So I am a VP in a software company and when I want to, I can play at the Bluebird in Nashville, or work on commissions for virtual worlds that want music, or write for my church choir, or write songs for JOI (that was fun!). The main thing is that I am neither impressed by wealth and power nor awed by the size of the crowd. Neither will bring me happiness nor make it possible for me to grow. Only I can do that.

    Dear Reality Devs, please clone this design and use it frequently.

    Morgan, just because someone doesn’t salivate to the possibilities of pursuing more money/power/prestige/influence doesn’t mean they’re unaware, or mistake the potential value. They have chosen, for themselves, that something else offers greater value to them. You and your executive friends can enjoy your value system, but not everyone is going to use the same one.

46. Rik said on January 10th, 2008 at 2:09 am:

    The developers of ATITD allow attended macroing, though some players still consider it unfair.

    Something doesn’t need to be a violation of the terms of service to be “cheating”. In this case the fact that many people had macros was a “work around” that allowed bad game design to go unfixed. Players should refuse to do unfun activities, even ones with strong in-game rewards, and demand new and enjoyable content. (oh, and “Greetings, Citizen Zomboe “. )

47. JuJutsu said on January 10th, 2008 at 7:04 am:

    after discussing your thoughts [and my frustration] with a few executives in my immediate vicinity at the moment, the bottom line is that you are, apparently, regularly unaware of opportunities presented to you. Because you are unaware of these opportunities, you don’t understand their value and thus don’t follow up on them.

    Morgan, have you considered the alternative…that you and the aforementioned executives are arrogant and presumptuous in telling Len or anyone else what they should value and what opportunities they should pursue? I’d comment further but I’m afraid Raph would ban me from his blog.

48. Len Bullard said on January 10th, 2008 at 7:07 am:

    Kerri said it, Morgan. It is a tremendous difference in our values. Also, it is a difference in time of life. I was 21 when chatting with Chet Atkins or partying with Glen Fry and I absolutely did not understand the music business in 1975. Nichelle treated me like a son, gave me good life advice, and got three different people to pay me for the same bill. She was the classiest woman I’d ever met and one of the kindest.

    True. Mr. Atkins did give me good advice. He told me to come to Nashville as a songwriter. To quote, “You’re a good player but I have thousands of them. You are also a good lyricist and that is hard to find.” Was that an offer? Possibly. But in college, with a band, and a very different economic of the day, it wasn’t something I was stout enough to take advantage of. With Frye, he was simply clearing out his room of groupies etc., but told the bodyguard to let me stay. Then he had a chat with me about the business. A wiseguy publicly, privately he was like a good older brother to a kid who knew nothing. Was it an offer? Absolutely not. It was manners inside the tribe.

    I suspect in your business you take advantage of every contact and push it hard. I don’t. It is somewhat part of the Southern culture to consider such people pushy, rude, not to be trusted. At 54 I do look back on the salad days and ask did I not pursue it for economic advantage to the degree possible. Yes, I didn’t. Why? Mostly because of all the good things in my life that I can control, freedom of expression and freedom of movement, are high on that list. I’d seen what the money did to my friends. It wasn’t good for their art and it wasn’t good for their lives. I’ve buried some of them and it was sad. Didn’t it strike you as it did others when John Lennon was assasinated that the price was just too high?

    What I want is less of that. What I fear is the game community makes more of that. I do understand fast feedback systems and games as in current practice do make kids more violent and less able to cope. All the RMT provides is the example that if you are going to steal, steal a lot. Not really a great legacy, but consider that history may look back and put John Carmack in the same league as John Stith Pemberton. Just my opinion.

    What I did do was become an early member of the hypermedia community, before the web, before games, before desktops. The vision was intriguing. We could finally be free of the musicBusiness (little m Big B), free of the mob types who own the venues, free of the recording executives forcing out mindless repetitive drivel copies of someone else’s last hit. It worked. Unfortunately, with iTunes the old model comes back and with the theft of music by the web, we lost our revenues for writing and touring is NOT where it’s at. Well, heck. So it goes. On the other hand, shared midis are raising the level of players. That Flash app Raph mentions raises the level of players. Guitar Hero doesn’t. It is sugar on cornflakes. There is nothing wrong with the taste but there is no nutrition either. Peaches are better.

    With VRML, we had a shot at inventing a new art form, and those only come once a millienium. As I said, I’m not a gamer, but a 3D sound engine with scripting and events both controlled and audio give us this new form to create and that edge is where I want to be: hypersequencing. I’ll keep fighting for those people not because they have better technology. The technology is adequate but more importantly, they have a better dream and they keep to their goals. Even if slowly, eventually better goals prevail.

    In Silly Valley, Hollywood, Nashville, or SanFran, so many are like Cortez or Balboa. They want to loot the gold or claim to be the discoverer when they aren’t. I’m not. I want soft shiny metal because I can make wonderful art for pleasure and worship, and to walk a beach with the natives who did find it first before mavens of mad publicity tromp over it guns a blazing ripping through the silence, fogging the morning air with smoke, and covering the soft light rising sun with flashes of gunpowder. I’ve no killer instinct, and yes, that cuts me out of the executives you mention and the money.

    I’ve all I need and accomplished what I set out to accomplish. I hope when you are my age, you are as satisfied. You will die. Try to do it happy.

    As for Heather and Samantha, if all you can offer me is illusion, mine are sweet and pretty and don’t shoot lightning.

    With that, done with this thread. I learned what I was interested in.

49. Raph said on January 10th, 2008 at 11:19 am:

    What on earth has this thread become about? And why is it resulting in people (2 now!) choosing to drop out of the conversation?

    FWIW, my values line up a lot more with Len’s here, I think.

    That said, I also don’t think Guitar hero is all empty calories. One of the things that I think it does — and actually, Rock Band does this even better — is teach active listening, which is actually quite hard to learn for many people.

50. Zomboe said on January 10th, 2008 at 11:34 am:

    Something doesn’t need to be a violation of the terms of service to be “cheating”. In this case the fact that many people had macros was a “work around” that allowed bad game design to go unfixed.

    But who gets to decide what counts as cheating vs. bad game design? It sounds like you don’t think it should be the developers. Should it just be the majority player opinion? I have no problem with that, but it seems like Raph would disagree. If enough players of a game embrace RMT I suppose it would no longer be cheating.

    Players should refuse to do unfun activities, even ones with strong in-game rewards, and demand new and enjoyable content. (oh, and “Greetings, Citizen Zomboe “. )

    Actually, it is Peasant Zomboe now :). I definitely refuse to do unfun activities (like growing flax). Unfortunately, with the level system that is most of ATITD for me. If I hate grinding for levels, would it be cheating if I bypassed them somehow? Does it change if most players hate leveling? Over the course of the game, various tests have been “gamed” to various degrees, and the player community seems to have no problem defining cheating, but does a particular individual have any great obligation to honor that?

51. Morgan Ramsay said on January 10th, 2008 at 1:17 pm:

    Kerri Knight wrote:

    Morgan, just because someone doesn’t salivate to the possibilities of pursuing more money/power/prestige/influence doesn’t mean they’re unaware, or mistake the potential value. They have chosen, for themselves, that something else offers greater value to them.

    I respect that, Kerri. I don’t “salivate to the possibilities of pursuing more money, power, prestige, and influence.” I seize opportunities that lead to more adventure, more experiences with plenty of educational value. As I’ve written before, when you fail to learn, you fail. Life’s all about learning. If you’re continually succeeding at the same thing, try something different. That’s my philosophy anyway.

    However, I didn’t read Len as saying “to each our own.” I read Len as saying that the value of any activity is only and absolutely valuable in specific circumstances, that there is no extrinsic value to derive. If that were true, advertising, branding, marketing, public relations, etc., all would not be possible.

    Len Bullard wrote:

    Was that an offer? Possibly.

    First of all, Len, I hope you didn’t take offense to what I wrote. I certainly didn’t mean to write what I did in that way. I was being more sarcastic, if anything, simply interpreting your example that I quoted. Sorry about that.

    Now, to your reply, I wasn’t talking about offers. I was talking about opportunities to learn. You had to have learned more about, say, human behavior, yourself in a world context, and the attitudes of people who “went before you” with great success. But when you say that all you learned was that your talent was valid and appreciated…

    I suspect in your business you take advantage of every contact and push it hard. I don’t.

    This says to me that you are indeed seeing my use of the word “opportunity” in a business context. No, Len, I value relationships above all else… as a means to learn. I’ve given the advice “make connections, not contacts” countless times. On my music website, I had written the following quotes. “We are defined by our decisions and bound to the people we affect.” “To succeed, strive; to empower, inspire; to live, entertain.” These embody my principles.

    I’d seen what the money did to my friends.

    Money is often blamed for wrongdoing; yet, the burden of blame actually rests with those who do wrong. People must be held accountable for their actions, wherever possible.

    Didn’t it strike you as it did others when John Lennon was assasinated that the price was just too high?

    Some people value breathing more than what they love, and that’s fine. You won’t find them fighting wars or taking great risks to life and limb, but they’ll contribute in their own way somehow. That said, celebrities are people, too. The same fatality statistics that apply to us apply to them. If you want to do something you love to do, you can’t “let the bozos get you down”, as Guy Kawasaki would say.

    I do understand fast feedback systems and games as in current practice do make kids more violent and less able to cope.

    I’ve read at least twenty research papers on media violence. The research is not conclusive.

    All the RMT provides is the example that if you are going to steal, steal a lot.

    I don’t see how commercial transactions can be alluded to theft.

    Guitar Hero doesn’t. It is sugar on cornflakes. There is nothing wrong with the taste but there is no nutrition either. Peaches are better.

    You won’t catch me dead agreeing with you there. Where the value of games are concerned, I’m completely in Raph’s corner. I suggest you read his book A Theory of Fun for Game Design again, if necessary.

    Raph wrote:

    What on earth has this thread become about?

    Ultimately, we’re still talking about whether using walkthroughs is cheating, only we’re talking about that subject on a much deeper, real-world level than game rules and such. I’m talking about how circumventing challenge actually circumvents opportunities to learn. Len later chimed in claiming that the challenges games present are not meaningful outside play. Moroagh misinterpreted my comment about challenge being a life-driving force as being strictly applied to the challenge that games present, and then he left… the blogosphere, apparently.

52. Len Bullard said on January 10th, 2008 at 1:52 pm:

    I only mean to drop the personal topics. They really don’t touch what this thread is about and my values are not of concern here. I got carried away. In the end, I just didn’t give a rats behind about being famous because I got what I wanted without the bother and had already found out it is hollow. Just my take on it…

    The active listening part is right. The problem is the hand to eye coordination patterns are wrong. IOW, bad habits. That said, there are certainly guitar controllers that can teach good habits and midi displays for it, but these are training systems. Actually, even lowly Guitare Pro has a fretboard animation for that. The trouble is the fingerings are usually wrong. Nothing I’ve run across replaces a living teacher and lots and lots and lots of practice. Guitar particularly is about touch and it is as the guy said in the Eddie and The Cruisers sequel, “as individual as a finger print”.

    I think that as games GH and RH are great. I can conceive of bands using devices like that with stored loops and such, and really except for the length of the sequence, is that much different from what synthesists do now live? I try to remember that harpsichord players once decried that evil pianoforte invention and claimed it would dumb down the art too. IMO, the two things coming out of comp-sci that did the most for musicians were in order a) CHEAP digital tuners (boy, did that save time and stress) and B) Cheap digital recording for songwriters. Getting off the meter system is the only thing that actually makes it possible to be an indie when one has to give the songs away.

53. Len Bullard said on January 10th, 2008 at 2:35 pm:

    I learned from all of them, Morgan. Ginsburg was very pushy about that. He actually grabbed my fingers and forced me to play the blues lick he wanted while he improvised. I was blowing classical and he wanted boogie. I got the point too. Simple. Simple. Simple.

    Money? Money changes everything. Choose.

    I get the part about games and fun. If I ever play Bach where they came to Boogie, that lesson will be hammered into my head with broken bottles. OTOH,there is a wonderful outtake from an early MTV Awards show where someone mistakenly put Chrissie Hynde and Bo Diddley at the same table and she asked him what he thought. If you can find that, it’s a hoot.

    IMO, if someone puts a GH savant on a stage and represents them as a virtuoso, it deserves the South Park episode but if you find that entertaining, do have fun. As much as having a cup of coffee with Gates and yakking markets would be fun, I don’t think he would be much good as a funky bass player (i might be wrong) and if not, who needs him in the act? Sarah Michelle Gellar? I’ll sit up all night teaching her the fingering to Louie Louie. There is no way the act isn’t better with her playing bass even if the beat is a little off.

    One must have standards.

54. Morgan Ramsay said on January 10th, 2008 at 2:57 pm:

    Len Bullard wrote:

    In the end, I just didn’t give a rats behind about being famous because I got what I wanted without the bother and had already found out it is hollow. Just my take on it…

    But, see, that’s where you’re misunderstanding my example of the girl who performed on Guitar Hero 3 at the 2008 International CES. I’m not talking about fame, impressiveness, etc. I’m talking about access, or [educational] opportunities. That’s what I meant by “she’s set for life.” Think of what I wrote this way: she’s standing in a circular room in which the walls are doors to anywhere she can and can’t yet imagine.

    The challenges of games are not limited to entertainment. They can be a means to improve mental health, simulate business environments, and train warfare skills. They can even be used, as per my example, to provide people with opportunities they would not have otherwise had.

    Nothing I’ve run across replaces a living teacher and lots and lots and lots of practice.

    As a Celtic guitarist, which is clearly more of a road to obscurity than fame, wealth, or power, I’d say that living teachers can be replaced by a great deal of inspiration, creativity, persistence, and lots of practice. I’ve never had a guitar teacher and never wanted one. I also don’t play music written by other people—an approach that I believe forces me to always be original.

    IMO, the two things coming out of comp-sci that did the most for musicians were …

    C) Digital distribution. There are good articles in a recent edition of Wired that talk about Radiohead’s marketing of “In Rainbows”. Radiohead is also interviewed, and they talk about their experience as an indie artist again as well as the problems they encountered in the business.

55. Kerri Knight said on January 10th, 2008 at 4:38 pm:

    I know this is a bit of a tangent, but I can’t really connect the game with whatever future opportunities her performance in Vegas may bring. That is the result of a promotional opportunity, and in all likelyhood once ‘Guitar Hero 4′ comes out she’ll find those doors slammed shut in her face. Those doors aren’t open because she’s reached some level where they stay that way, they’re open (for a limited time) because her skills can be put on display to promote someone else’s success (the development team and distributor of the game). Maybe there will be some exceptions and I wish her luck in finding a few genuine personal connections, but my experience with the world ‘up there’ is that you’re seen only in terms of how much money can be squeezed out of you.

    I appologize for a trigger happy, somewhat defensive and judgemental review of your comment previous to mine, Morgan. Yay for text communications and crotchety old opinionated stalwarts mixed together. But I think cooler heads tend to prevail here and another day starts we’re all aware of imperfections in both what is said and what is heard. Maturity, even among dissenting adults, is why I enjoy reading here….and adding imperfection of my own :9.

    As far as cheating goes, I think where I’ve settled on this for now was covered a few entire topics back. Markets are created from demand, if you want to stop the cheating, get rid of the demand. If you want people to stop looking up information, don’t design a puzzle made up of blank cardboard pieces. Give me some edge pieces, some color groups, some transitions. I need to identify pieces and their functions, their place in the whole. If you sit me in front of a chess board without giving me instructions, I’m probably going to do a lot of things that an educated player would call ‘cheating’.

    I don’t necessarily blame design only as ‘unfun’. What are we really saying there? Its a design that hasn’t taught me anything. Combat play, for example. If combat play gave more feedback and guidance, a player could spend their ‘grinding time’ feeling like they are honing a skill, rather than gathering xp for a skill-up. See, in that case having your character power-leveled could potentially go very badly. You hop on after a couple of days, your character is max level…..and you have no concept of controlling it. Under that system, you missed all the fun (learning, instead of tedium) and have restricted your chances to have fun going forward (taking the final exam without taking the course).

56. Morgan Ramsay said on January 10th, 2008 at 6:09 pm:

    Kerri Knight wrote:

    That is the result of a promotional opportunity, and in all likelyhood once ‘Guitar Hero 4′ comes out she’ll find those doors slammed shut in her face.

    That’s similar to saying that meeting people as a result of a monthly networking social can’t lead to future opportunities. Or that your boss can’t give you a great recommendation. Or anyone you meet at a friend’s birthday party can’t possibly open any doors for you. We’re all just people in our places, and our places have little bearing on who we are. If you approach people as who they are instead of under the guise of commerce, you’ll find that people can be a lot more reasonable than how they represent their businesses.

    If she took advantage of her position, her proximity to an industry leader and other influentials, then there are a lot of opportunities, career and otherwise, that she could have seized. Nevertheless, playing a significant role in the promotion of a Microsoft product alongside Bill Gates, Robbie Bach, and Slash in front of thousands of industry professionals and press at Gates’ last keynote for the largest consumer electronics show in the world is definitely an item of interest one can promote, from which a great deal of value can be derived, and that can be associated with the promise of challenge in games.

    The point I was making was that if everything were easy, there would be nothing worth doing. People who rise to the top of a ladder should get special privileges. There should be inequality. Challenge is how we differentiate those who succeed from everyone else.

    I apologize for a trigger happy, somewhat defensive and judgemental review of your comment previous to mine, Morgan.

    Don’t worry about it. I failed to properly communicate my drift to Len and ended up with an unintended comment that sounds really awful on a second read.

57. Kerri Knight said on January 10th, 2008 at 10:10 pm:

    The point I was making was that if everything were easy, there would be nothing worth doing. People who rise to the top of a ladder should get special privileges. There should be inequality. Challenge is how we differentiate those who succeed from everyone else.

    Okay, I can start following you here a bit. After all, what seperates me from 800 unqualified monkeys who think the answer to ‘could it sound better?’ is always ‘yes, if I turn the main sends up some more’ running sound boards across the country?

    Back to games, here’s my issue: why always just one or two ladders?

    What you end up with is a few people who get there naturally, like they were born for it. Then, a whole pack of lobsters in a pail…many of which probably don’t belong in the environment at all. Later, the naturals actually have left, and the top is replaced by cheaters, exploiters, and those with incredible amounts of time….they get in front of the ‘not quite as naturally adept’ group (unsupported opinion). I don’t know if its actually improbability or flat out lack of vision that keeps the industry from establishing a platform that focuses on more than 2-3 things. If you define success in too narrow a way, a lot of folks outside the margins are pressured to ‘bend the rules a little’. Give them someplace more natural to expend their desire for accomplishment and they’ll probably do that instead of working some half-baked plan together.

    We’ve talked a lot in the past about established and emerging web design concepts and their possible applications in game structures. What couldn’t badges of accomplishments read like a list of book purchases in an Amazon.com profile. A way to glance over a persons interests, playstyle preferences, and competence in those fields. A large part of what drives interest in this level of identity goes beyond the desire to eliminate (or mitigate, at least) the anonyimity factor of the internet. You can identify a reader of similar habits, read their reveiw of a book that you are considering, and know with some better than random certainty that you can find similarity in your expectations. How many more opportunities for interpersonal connections does that open up than having a very slim minority at the top and a mass of ‘others’.

    The only movement available on a ladder? Up or down, relative to your peers. I don’t play sports games solo or competitively, I never got into fighter games. I was playing anything and everything that involved other people cooperatively or even at least let me direct a cooperative group (Bard’s Tale!) I want to go sideways, forwards (maybe backwards, sometimes :9), whats over that hill? Who’s coming with me!

    Unless its the intent of the designers to emulate life-like class warfare, why restrict your designs by implementing the same kind of innefficient distractions at all? I’m not saying don’t respect success, I’m saying people express success in lots of incredible ways. If someone can’t express success in their own terms where they are, they probably ought to move along to a venue better suited to them. But thats assuming that one is available, and their friends are all okay with suddenly uprooting to join them, or willingness to part ways. Those are some stiff opportunity costs, from my perspective.

    Why ignore the strength of Virtual Worlds where dozens of playstyles and challenge levels exist in the same overall environment? Which is where I, again, as an outsider don’t know if it is simply not feasible to address so many interests on budget or if clueless suits see fast bucks to make and wreck a great thing needlessly. Then comes the problem of convincing future investment in a similar pursuit that it would have worked if patience and diligence had prevailed.

58. Rik said on January 10th, 2008 at 10:59 pm:

    But who gets to decide what counts as cheating vs. bad game design? It sounds like you don’t think it should be the developers.

    Well, my off-the-cuff answer is that I can tell the difference when I see it. But anytime players as a group skip “intended content” it means there is a problem with the content or the mind set of the players. If it’s player mind set they probably got that idea either from another game or from earlier content in your game. As a game designer you can attempt to influence that mind set. (I’d refer you here to the designer notes in Portal for examples.)

    Work-arounds are bad policy. Picture an office setting. One printer breaks down. Instead of getting it fixed or replaced, people just start using the other printer. The broken printer takes up space, the working printer gets twice as much work which leads to longer wait times for your documents. Then finally weeks later it breaks and no one can get any printing done until the repair man comes. It’s the same in virtual worlds. If the only way to compete a seemingly-basic * quest is to go online and read where to kill the thing that drops the other thing lives, then someone should call the repair man.

    * The phrase “seemingly-basic” is meant to indicate that it is possible to intensionally have very hard quests that need groups of people to resolve, they just should look like they are that kind of quest. “Bruce the undead is hard to find, you might need to ask your friends to help out.”

59. Kerri Knight said on January 10th, 2008 at 11:14 pm:

    Cheap digital recording for songwriters.

    …and engineers, and producers, and labels :9.

    Digital distribution.

    Both great advances. More access means more choices. When there are barriers to access, the consumer trying to find the 10% they want is faced with frustration. Should we call it Sturgeon’s Dilemna? Actually I wrote an essay on this for my college admission last year. I think I concluded something along the lines of the only ones threatened by this influx of content is anyone unwilling to define themselves as something.

    So there I am again at pushing for recognition of individual talents or groups known for retaining talent rather than monolithic entities pumping out mediocrity to reach a ‘broad market’.

    So, what we need is to facilitate an influx of content and talent…*grins*

    To quote Worm, your Honor, “Tear down the wall!”

60. Len Bullard said on January 11th, 2008 at 6:56 am:

    @kerri:

    There is an article at CNet.com today which is an interview with Saul Williams. Contrast what he has to say about his options and choices in this production with Trent Reznor and what Reznor has to say. I found the comment about the ‘freedom from race’ pointed. There was another black artist, Charlie Pride, who faced the same dilemmas. Even earlier, Buddy Holly and the Crickets faced this. I’ve faced it myself living in the land of the chord police and the bluegrassNazis.

    So we choose and accept it. That’s all. What we get from the web is more opportunities, not more choices in the local shape. It is