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Chapter 9. Commonly used challenges. Conflict Challenge. R equires the direct opposition of forces, some of which are under the player’s control. Does not necessarily involve combat or violence.
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Chapter 9 Commonly used challenges
Conflict Challenge • Requires the direct opposition of forces, some of which are under the player’s control. • Does not necessarily involve combat or violence. • Classic activities to overcome conflict challenges include taking away another player’s resources and impeding another player’s ability to act.
Conflict Challenges Versus Conflict of Interest • The terms have different meanings. • Any game in which players are rivals for victory contains a conflict of interest. • Games such as Monopoly or Darts contain a conflict of interest but no conflict challenges. • Conflict challenges must include direct opposition of forces, such as in Checkers.
Conflict Factors • The scale of the action • The speed of the conflict • The complexity of winning conditions • Conflict challenges can be broken down into strategy, tactics, logistics, and other components.
Strategy Planning: • Taking advantage of your situation and resources. • Anticipating your opponents moves. • Knowing and minimizing your weaknesses.
Strategy • A strategic challenge requires the player the carefully consider the game. • This is achieved by considering all possible actions, and possible outcomes. • This is known as situational analysis. • In a game of perfect information, (no element of chance of hidden information) players use pure strategy to make their moves, such as in a game of chess.
Strategy • A game of pure strategy, or challenges involving pure strategy are often avoided by game developers. • Relatively few people possess the systematic reasoning talent required to succeed in a game of pure strategy. • Instead, many hide information and include elements of chance, calling for the use of applied strategy. • Real-time strategy games often require applied strategy, making them more accessible to players with less logically inclined.
Tactics • Tactics involve executing a plan to achieve a specific goal. • Tactics also include responding to unexpected events or conditions, new information, or bad luck. • For example, a poker player uses tactics to best decide how to play a specific hand.
Tactics versus Strategy • Tactics do not necessarily include strategy. • Strategy largely involves predicting the outcome of several different scenarios. • A game in which you control troops entering unknown territory does not allow for the player to plan, as the player doesn’t know where to go or what is coming. • However, keeping soldiers covered, taking advantage of particular skills, and so on, would be considered tactics.
Logistics • Logistical challenges are often not included in gameplay, players tend to find them boring. • Logistical challenges include such things as sending in fresh troops in a battle, bringing them food and supplies, or bringing them fuel. • Players would find themselves less concerned with logistical challenges and more entertained by combat challenges.
Logistics • However, some logistics are still implemented by games. • Weapon production challenges are one such implementation. Modern RTS games require the player the produce weapons and research new weapons, using raw material. • Another implementation would be limited inventory space in role-playing games, forcing players to choose which items to keep.
Survival and Reduction of Enemy Forces • Any game based on conflict includes the fundamental challenge of survival. • A player may not win without preserving health, units, or possibly time. • In some games, such as tower defense games, the entire premise is survival. • In other games, victory conditions are not so simple, and the player must reduce enemy forces.
Survival and Reductionof Enemy Forces • To create the challenges of reducing enemy forces, some conditions must be met. • Rules must be created that determine how enemy units are removed or damaged. • Chess uses capture by replacement, checkers uses capture by jumping. • War games use different models to determine how much damage a unit has received, or if the unit must be destroyed due to it’s health reaching zero.
Defending VulnerableItems or Units • Some challenges require the player to defend a specific unit or item, especially such things cannot control or defend themselves. • Chess involves all the player’s units effectively defending their king piece. • To successfully defend units, a player must know the capabilities and vulnerabilities of all their other units, as well as those of the entity they are trying to protect.
Stealth • Some games occasionally call for a challenge including stealth. • This involves the ability to move undetected to complete a challenge. • The game Thief: The Dark Knight was designed around this challenge, by having players complete missions by stealth and avoid being discovered.
Stealth Issues • From a programming standpoint, stealth poses a considerable problem in the design of artificial intelligence. • With no stealth, opponents have full knowledge of the working environment, and react appropriately. • To include stealth means including factors in opponents such as general knowledge or intelligence, attention spans and more.
Economic Challenges • Economy in a game involves including a system in which resources move either physically or conceptually from one owner to another owner. • This includes much more than money, anything that can be created, moved, stored, earned, exchanged, or destroyed could be considered such a resource. • Such resources could even include health points and ammunition.
Accumulating Resources • Accumulating resources is a basic challenge of many games, and the end-goal or winning condition of many other games. • Monopoly is such a game, where the top-level challenge is to collect as much money as possible. • These type of challenges encourage the players to understand the mechanisms of wealth creation and to use them to their advantage.
Achieving Balance • Achieving balance in an economy is slightly more difficult and more interesting than simply accumulating resources. • Games such as those in The Settlers series involve collecting resources in a specific manner : wheat goes to the mill to become flour, which goes to the bakery to become bread, which feeds miners who dig coal and iron ore, which is used to make iron ores by the smelter, which produces weapons, etc.
Caring for Living Things • The Sims and Spore describe the specific economic challenge of caring for living things. • Individuals, or groups of individuals,require the players attention, and have specific needs. • These needs are measured via numeric terms, and are considered resources, thus qualifying them as economic challenges.
Conceptual Reasoning and Lateral Thinking Puzzles • Both of these types of challenges require extrinsic knowledge. • This means having knowledge from outside the domain of the challenge itself.
Conceptual Reasoning • To complete a conceptual reasoning puzzle, players generally need to use their reasoning power and extrinsic knowledge of the subject matter to come up with a solution. • Simple games such as trivial pursuit or cranium involve testing the players knowledge and conceptual reasoning. • Mystery and detective games, such as Law & Order, are completed by solving clues and ignoring red herrings while using external knowledge of evidence.
Lateral Thinking • In lateral thinking puzzles, the player is made aware of the fact that the obvious solution is not possible. • The player is forced to think of alternatives to come up with a solution. • A simple example is a challenge involving getting an item down from a high place without using a ladder. • Without the obvious solution, the player is forced to consider alternatives such as stacking a chair on a table and climbing on top of that chair.
Lateral Thinking • Lateral thinking puzzles can also include using extrinsic knowledge gained in real life in unexpected ways. • However, game developers must ensure not to make solutions too obscure. • Average players will know that wood can float on water, however they should not be expected to know that cork comes from the bark of a certain species of Mediterranean oak tree.
Actions • User interfaces are the links that connect actions to the game world. Actions, therefore, refer to events in the game world that are directly caused by the user interface interpreting input. • Actions are the verbs of the game: • I jump • I run • I punch • I buy • I build
No Hierarchy of Actions • There is a “hierarchy of challenges”, because in the game world, it makes sense to group the challenges together as a group of goals the player attempts to achieve • For example, the challenge of “defeating the boss monster”, cannot be associated to the action “defeat the boss monster”. It’s not that simple. • Instead, actions are defined in low-level terms, such as “attack using kick”, “attack using punch”, “jump”, etc. It is up to the player to use the actions in the proper order and timing to successfully complete the challenge.
Actions for Gameplay • Most actions available to a player are given as necessary actions to complete a challenge. • In a combat game, fire weapon is an obvious choice for an action. • In a game where you control an avatar, actions are all avatar-based, thus to control the game world, the player must do so through the avatar.
Actions for Gameplay • There will never be a one-to-one mapping of challenges to actions. • Most games include a large amount of challenges compared to the relatively small amount of actions. • The Rubik’s Cube, for example, contains one action: rotate a side of the cube. • Games cannot contain too many actions, it would result in a cluttered user interface, as well as too many animations, which is expensive for developers.
Defining Your Actions • When creating a game, developers need to be careful on choosing what the player’s actions will be. • Ben Cousins has argued that game designers should spend most of their effort defining the refining the way that actions overcome atomic challenges because the player spends most of his time performing those actions.
Defining Your Actions • The Fundamental of Game Design textbook encourages developers to write down every action associated with atomic challenges. • Each of these atomic challenges should be successfully completed through one or a few actions in successive order. • Then, begin considering higher-level challenges, as well as actions unrelated to gameplay. • Once all possible actions have been determined, the developer may begin working on the user interface.
Actions that Serve Other Functions • Unstructured play: involves actions that may be considered fun, but do not solve or complete any specific challenge, such as “sightseeing”. In a car game, honking a horn accomplishes nothing, however is a necessary addition to the game.
Actions that Serve Other Functions • Actions for creation and self-expression: involves actions that allow players to create or customize things, such as their avatars. Many actions in construction and management games involve creative play actions, rather than gameplay, however these games often include economic challenges.
Actions that Serve Other Functions • Actions for socialization: involves actions used to reach out to a social community, such as chatting, forming groups, comparing high scores, or taking part in community activities.
