Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
In single-player games, however, the only opponent is the system itself. Although there are
gradual punishments (losing some of your health points), we don't always want to reset the
entire game if the player reaches a final punishment. Even if the whole game does reset, we
want the player to have the choice to try again. In fact, if your goal is to provide the player with
an experience of flow, balancing frustration and boredom, you may want your system to help
the player out if she's making mistakes, which is precisely the purpose of the DDA techniques
that we discussed earlier.
Instead, single-player games often punish the player with repetition: die or make a significant
mistake, and you'll have to repeat a section that you already did, starting from the last check-
point. Repetition may seem like a boring kind of punishment, since it may involve the player
encountering familiar objects and scenes, even using verbs in the same ways that they already
did. On the other hand, repetition can be useful in a couple different ways. First, if the space of
the game is open enough that the player has a lot of different verbs at her disposal and choices
of how to use those verbs, or there are different areas of the game to explore, the player may
experience something very different the next time around. Second, even if the player does go
through the same motions again, repetition can serve as
practice
: what was challenging the first
time becomes slightly easier, and when the player reaches the point where she made a mistake,
she has the opportunity to practice overcoming that challenge again.
In these two ways, punishment in the form of repetition has a purpose beyond just saying, “Bad
player! No!” in our systematic conversation: it gives the player the opportunity to revisit earlier
moments, to push into the game in another way and create a different result. You can imagine
the same thing happening in a spoken conversation, if one participant doesn't understand
something that's said: we repeat and revisit ideas and probably try to communicate in a slightly
different way so that we can continue.
Anna's game
Mighty Jill Off
(2008) gives the player plenty of opportunities to practice because
of the way the game develops the “jump” verb, which Jill uses to climb toward the top of a tall
tower. The first half of the game consists of a number of sections, each designed to teach the
player about a particular way of jumping and color-coded to be easily identifiable. The green
section near the beginning involves simple jumps from platform to platform, but the follow-
ing blue section requires the player to use a more advanced kind of jumping. In
Mighty Jill Off
,
rapidly tapping the jump button allows Jill to slow her descent. Combined with moving left or
right, this allows her to float sideways to land on platforms. After the blue section, the orange
section teaches the player how to run off platforms and jump at the same time, and the lime-
green section introduces a new kind of hazard: spiders that chase the player.
Each of these sections starts off with a scene or two that introduces the new kind of jumping or
hazard in a straightforward way that's not too challenging or complex; the next part of the sec-
tion often involves combining what's just been learned with hazards or situations from earlier
