In this thread:
The video is great. A shame that it’s getting downvoted.
In fiction there’s the concept of suspension of disbelief. Wikipedia describes it better than I could, but to keep it short - when you’re reading/watching/etc. a fictional story, you avoid applying your critical thinking and logic reasoning to certain story elements, in order to enjoy it.
I feel like a similar but not identical principle operates with game mechanics. I’ll call it here suspension of scepticism. That suspension of scepticism makes you willing to trust that the information provided or implied by the game about itself is factual, accurate, and relevant.
For example, if it shows you a six-sided die, you treat it as a fair die, and you treat your odds of getting a 1 the same as getting a 6, a 5, or any other number. You won’t save the game, throw the die a hundred times, and see if it’s actually fair or not.
Those “design lies” use that suspension of scepticism to deliver a better experience. And it works - for the reason mentioned in the video, it makes playing more enjoyable.
However just like the suspension of disbelief can be broken, so does the suspension of scepticism. It’s OK if the game designer is a liar, but he must be a good liar; if you lie too often or too obviously, the player will smell the lie from afar, and the suspension of scepticism is broken. And with it, the enjoyment of the game goes down the drain.
I watched 3 minutes and he advocates multiple absolutely game breaking terrible ideas.
“We don’t want players to die” is cancer. “Silently changing difficulty” when people die is cancer.
Dying is a good thing. Players learning to get past difficult segments is a good thing. A game that doesn’t respect that is broken.
It’s extremely common. You’ve probably played and loved dozens of games that do it without you knowing. Resident Evil 4 is the famous example, but to its detriment, I could see it working in the Resident Evil 2 remake as well.
Have you ever gotten through an encounter by the skin of your teeth, with just barely enough ammo and health? It’s probably because you had more health than the game told you, or that the last bullet in your magazine does more damage than the rest of them.
I know it’s common. It completely fucking destroys games singlehandedly. There is no acceptable way to do it.
Rubber banding replaces actual progress with illusory progress.
But often times, that’s desirable. Not everyone sits down with a game to be thoroughly challenged, and even with the difficulty dynamically adjusting to you, there are often other ways to further tune it up. They don’t make failure impossible, but they try to find that sweet spot for a flow state, which is going to be incredibly difficult to find with unchanging difficulty modes. If you didn’t notice, games used to have astonishingly low completion rates back when they did have unchanging difficulty modes.
It’s not desirable. Building a game that enables people to continually make actual progress is desirable. Allowing people to modularly adjust difficulty if they feel a game is too difficult is desirable.
Removing feedback to make it significantly harder to get better at a game is not desirable. You cannot get better if a game is constantly lying to you about what is good and what is bad. Rubber banding isn’t just “fake progress to get by an encounter”. It actively prevents you from being able to learn because it gives you unreliable mixed signals. It’s fundamentally broken and being forced to rely on it means your actual game design is fundamentally broken.
I think you’re overstating the importance of games as a platform for skill development as opposed to a platform for, you know, having fun. The fact is that the vast majority of players play any game on one of its lowest difficulty settings.
Rubber banding is made for the core of the game’s audience and challenge-seekers are just not large enough to be that core. Some of those rubber banding mechanics can and are disabled at higher difficulty settings. Others are needed at higher difficulty because the AI can’t compete and the investment in dev time to improve the AI just isn’t worth it because, again, very few people actually play the game at those difficulties.
It’s not possible for a game to be fun without development of skill over time.
That’s the core concept of what a game is: forcing you to make ambiguous decisions in an uncertain environment.
Funny that this releases so soon after Frost’s video about Nick’s lies.
Holy crap Frost left? His stuff and yahtzee are the only reason I’m subbed to second wind at all. The rest of the content on the channel just seems like cringe click bait clutter like this and all the other God awful design delve videos.
After watching this video about what Frost is saying about Nick Calandra, it really makes sense why the Second Wind channel is the way it is.
EDIT: Holy Jesus. Giving this a second listen to make sure I didn’t mishear anything. This Nick Calandra guy running Second Wind is a Grade-A twat. Fuck him and any thing he touches. Anyone supporting Second Wind needs to watch this.
