Game Development Reference
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making it a horribly dangerous situation. But the system is still not diffi-
cult, because who said you were even trying to stay alive? Because it's dif-
ficult to survive , however, you might make the mistake of thinking that
the system is indeed difficult The thing is, who said that survival is the
goal of Minecraft ? Further, survival is not a valid win condition unless
it's timed—otherwise, at what point can you say that you survived? An
hour? Three hours? Twenty-four hours? Here, survival is an inherently
unachievable goal in that it is logically incomplete. If there is literally no
way to win, then there also can be no way to lose, because there was no
contest to begin with.
Digital gamers everywhere have a tendency to assume that survival
is the goal in games. It comes, in part, from designers' collective decision
to make fantasy simulation the primary goal of video games. If you're
really there—if you're actually putting yourself into the shoes of what-
ever it is you're controlling—then it sure would seem natural that sur-
vival is what you're setting out to do. And if it's really a fantasy simulator,
then maybe survival is what you'll care about; but then again, maybe
not—what if you're playing the fantasy of a suicidal person? Games need
achievable goals to reach even the level of “contest� on the interactive
spectrum, though. Survival can be that goal if a score is attached to it,
but then getting a high score (which is achievable) becomes the goal in-
stead of survival.
Another wrecking ball to the part of the brain that could otherwise
understand difficulty is the assumption that completion is the goal of a
game. Modern video games are unlike games created before the 20th
century in that, like books and movies, the expectation for many is that
they will be completed and then (for the most part) abandoned. Conse-
quently, people tend to misunderstand the level of difficulty for games
that are not about completion. For instance, Gamespot.com gave Mys-
tery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer a 6/10 review (which is essentially a
bad rating for a very good game, since most reviewers use the same scale
as schools do: scores in the 70s mean average , and scores below 65 mean
fail ) mostly because the reviewer failed to understand the game. Editor
Austin Shau said in the review that, “All told, Mystery Dungeon: Shiren
the Wanderer is a largely frustrating experience because of its random-
ness and permanent deaths.�
The key term to look at here is permanent deaths , which illustrates
the reviewer's central failing in understanding this game. What Shiren
actually has is just a lose condition , something that RPG fans and many
other video gamers have sort of forgotten about. But in Shiren (or in any
other games from its genre of roguelikes ; see Chapter 4 ), death doesn't
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