Cruel and Unusual
I picked up Lego Indy last week, and spent some time this weekend playing it. It’s essentially Lego Star Wars reskinned as Indiana Jones. There are a lot more environmental interactions, some of which are entertaining but most of which are irritating. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to activate a mechanism and instead swapping back and forth between my held item and an item on the ground. But really, it’s the same game. That’s not a bad thing, though, as I really liked the previous games.
One of the things I like best about them is the penalty for failure — or rather, the total lack of any penalty for failure. If you die, some money falls out of you and lands on the ground around you. If you’re quick you can recover most of it. That’s it. There is no other penalty for failure.
What this means is that a first play-through of Story Mode is trivially easy. You basically cannot lose. It’s just a matter of persistence and patience; even the boss fights can ultimately be solved by dying a lot until you finally figure out the trick. Most deaths are entertaining — you do something you know is stupid as hell, like firing a bazooka at a flower at point-blank range just to see what will happen — and the recovery time from them is instantaneous. It’s more of an elaborate toy than a challenge.
The game’s only real difficulty is in the secrets and unlocks. Once you get past the action elements — which, given what I described above, isn’t exactly hard to do — the Lego games are mostly about puzzles. There are obvious puzzles, like walls that can only be destroyed with explosives, or buried objects that must be dug up with a shovel. But there are much more complex puzzles, as well, including secret rooms that contain other secret rooms, puzzles that require you to coordinate two characters at once, puzzles that require you to complete tasks in tight time limits, and puzzles that can only be solved in a specific order. There are difficult jumping puzzles where the penalty is that you have to start the whole jumping sequence over from the beginning, and environmental puzzles that require you to explore every crevice of the environment and understand how various pieces will be put together before you start working on the solution.
The Lego games are all reward and no risk; I don’t think it’s possible to get a ‘game over’ screen. This means there are only two exit points in the game. The first is when you finish Story Mode for all three Indy movies; you’ve now seen (almost) all the available content. That’s about as far into the game as with most modern games — I probably played as long to finish Story Mode as I played COD4. The second exit point is when you get 100% completion.
Reward saturation allows them to smooth over the first exit point. In every level in Story Mode, you’re constantly being shown areas that you can’t access with your current characters. Before you meet Short Round, you see a lot of doorways that only a ’small’ character can enter. Before you unlock the Thuggee Cultist characters, you see a lot of statues of Kali you can’t interact with. Before you have a Nazi with grenades or a bazooka, you see lots of walls that you can’t break. At every step, you’re being told that the levels are much bigger than the small section you’re exposed to in Story Mode.
As well, at the end of each of the three movies, you’re told your percentage completion — and, because you’re in Story Mode, it’s pretty low. You know that, after finishing Raiders, you should be at about 30% completion. But you’re not; you’re probably only half that. The game shows you in as many places as possible just what, exactly, you have left to do on each level. Did you get ‘True Adventurer’ status? Did you unlock the cheat mode available for that level? Did you get all 10 treasure boxes to build the artifact?
This kind of completionist gameplay could be ultimately empty and unsatisfying, given that the only real reward for completion in most games is ‘more achievements and more gamer score’. In Lego Indy, they’ve identified that as a problem, and solved it with the best possible reward in a game with no risk: more content to explore. Completion unlocks three new secret levels with even more things to collect — but more importantly, new environments to wander around in.
It’s very easy to buy into the game design idea that ‘without risk, rewards are meaningless’. It sounds clever and theoretical and academic and makes game design seem like some kind of art form. It also allows us to justify abusing our players, and allows players to sort themselves into various strata of ’serious’ and ‘casual’ and ‘hardcore’ and ‘carebear’. It lets us create zero-sum games, and we’re good at creating zero-sum games, because we know that competition for fixed reward sets allows players to create gameplay for each other.
It’s important to keep in mind that there are only two ways a player can be challenged in any game, and thus only two ways to create risk. Players can either fail because they lack skill, or they can fail because they lack time. (MMOs have a third axis that I think is a mix of both failure modes: failure because you lack friends). While it’s plausible that given enough time, a player can acquire skill, the truth is that we all have some cap on just how skilled we’re ever going to get. I enjoy first person shooters but I don’t play them on Hard. My mom likes Animal Crossing but she’s never going to play a Mario game. To the degree that you can acquire skill, skill is a time problem; beyond that point, it’s a hard limit on your ability to avoid failure in a game.
The problem is that failing because you’re nearing your maximum skill is not a fun experience. It’s very close to the most negative experience a player can have in a game, and is an exit point that’s almost impossible to overcome with any reward. If a player feels like he can’t go any further in your game because he just sucks too much, he has no reason to keep playing at all. As long as he believes that more time invested will earn him more rewards, he’s likely to keep spending that time. As soon as he believes that more time invested will not benefit him, he will quit.
There are a couple of interesting tangents here; the first is that if you follow the FF:T and Oblivion model of making your enemies scale up in power as the player scales up in power, you immediately convince the player that their time invested is actually reducing their chance to ultimately succeed. That’s Bad. A second tangent: Even if you have multiple ways a player can succeed, being balked in any one of them is an exit point, even if there are others available. The sense that there’s some portion of the game’s content the player will never, ever see is disheartening and will cause a player to give up on the paths to success he can follow.
I believe that including a maximum-skill failure point is a bad idea. I think it’s a bad idea in all games, but specifically it’s a terrible idea in MMOs. We’re trying to sell players the idea that, with enough time and patience, they too can be as awesome as the level 70 on the epic mount with the enormous glowing shoulderpads and the giant sparkly swords. Those people act as a lure, pulling the players along the path of time investment (and, of course, time investment in a subscription game equals money investment). But if the player ever has the sense that, because he’s simply not good enough at the game, he cannot reach an achievement, he’s potentially at an exit point — and if he isn’t, it’s because he redefines what he considers ’success’ to mean in the game.
I have another tangential rant here about WoW’s Arena system, which I will save for another post.
The lesson of Lego Indy is that games can be all-reward and no-risk and still be fun; they can reward every player to the degree that the player wants to pursue the reward. It’s possible to do away with the maximum skill failure case, ensuring that every player who invests enough time in your game will achieve every possible reward, regardless of their personal skill.
In Super Smash Bros. for the GC, difficult-to-unlock characters will eventually auto-unlock just simply because you’ve played the game a lot, even if you never complete their unlock challenges. That’s the concept in a very nearly pure form: keep playing our game and you will be rewarded. No failure is a complete failure, and every challenge can eventually be overcome. In Lego Indy, I have no doubt I’ll eventually reach 100% completion — and it’s that assurance, more than anything else, that keeps me playing it.