EPTAn article about difficulty in games, human attention and design.
I kept it unfinished for a long time, but there is no better moment to complete and publish it. I hope you’ll enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed composing this.
I don’t know how many of you are familiar with this completely dedgeam "Grey Goo". This was one of the highly anticipated RTS games a year ago, and I was one of the people riding the hype train at full speed.
The developers were advertising this game as more of a “casual” RTS with interesting approaches and mechanics and whatnot. And they were not lying. The game has a rather slower pace, quite cool the Goo race design, simcity has its pluses, the macro is done for you for the most part - meaning no more hassle with worker building, and you can build battle units automatically - just lock this “Build continuously this unit” switch and you are good to go. Unit balance had this familiar and understandable “rock-paper-scissors” dynamic, and it was easy to get into. Also units have no active abilities, so you can have easier time battling your opponent.
What a surprise, the game ended up as completely pointless. It has some “wow that’s interesting” moments, but this is not what keeps people playing. There was literally nothing that was worth playing for, since the game was unbelievable bland and shallow and I honestly felt sorry for the developers who managed to assemble such a cool project but failed to hire a game designer.
So, I was lurking at /r/greygoo at the time to read all the stuff about the game.
There was this post that I saved:
“Been lurking this game a little bit, showing moderate interest. Two RTS games that I've played and gotten into for a decent amount of time are StarCraft 2 and Planetary Annihilation. It looks more similar to SC2, but how similar is it really? Is it a click-fest competition? I get the impression that, in SC2, having good wits is meaningless if you actions/minute is a bit slower than your opponent. Is that anything like Grey Goo?”
and another one
“I never understood the point of the needless button hitting to keep your apm high. It's meaningless actions and I only perform actions necessary”
This sort of opinions are reasonably popular. However, let’s think about it for a bit.
What is an RTS game? A game that is being played in Real Time, obviously is not a Turn-Based game.
That means you perform actions simultaneously with your opponent. There are no specific game rules regarding how many things you can perform within “a turn”, because there is no such thing as a turn: every second is a turn that last for one second.
Game understanding is important for both types of games - be it a Turn-based or a Real-time game: the word “Strategy” in “RTS” flat-out implies that. However, Turn-based gameplay doesn't have this stressful component of continuous and non-stop action. This is simply nature of a turn - you have the time. You have the time to act precisely as you want: there is no mechanical / dexterity / attention split restrictions that you have to overcome.
I have a lot of friends who dislike playing Starcraft multiplayer: it is frustrating, difficult, demanding and they “can’t keep up with the speed”. If you constantly can’t keep up, you just feel like you're playing sub-optimally.
The game has a lot of different things that you have to perform, while you just physically can’t handle everything at once. It’s impossible to be 100% efficient: it is a constant struggle, be you are from bronze or a top grandmaster player. Why doesn’t it keep getting easier instead?
It’s not about the game. It’s about you and your opponent. The game gives you options and tools to do stuff with, and you, as a player, act and respond accordingly to the stuff your opponent does to you, be it a Real-Time or a Turn Based game. Think about it: is chess a hard game to play?
Anyhow, the reason you cannot avoid “APM spam” in a REAL-TIME Strategy game is because even if you physically can't play the game as fast as the other guy, or if you don't have ridiculously attuned attention like a top-notch World of Warcraft raider has, there is no other way, but you will inevitable end up in disadvantage against a better player because of that. You don't compete with the game, you compete with other people.
The game always feels difficult, because you play against real people who make you struggle. For a Platinum league player a Bronze opponent is just a walk in the park, whilst a Platinum is not even a challenge for a Masters. Both you and your opponent COMPETE with each other trying to outperform both the enemy and their previous self.
Therefore the terms - “competitiveness” and “competitive game”.
After I collected some responses on this, I've seen a decent argument: why would you need "mechanical burden" for a game?
Think about regular sports. Aside from their strategic depth, they also require stamina, strength, finesse and overall years of physical training just to be on par with other players. Just to play the game.
Let's "improve" basketball, by getting rid of some of these useless complication that don't contribute to its tactical depth. Remove Dribbling, ain't got time for this burden. The basket size x2, for easier scoring - people love scoring. Forbid running as well, because after a hard day I just want to relax and play the damn game.
Is the game now easier to play? Definitely. But it is also less interesting to play, since there is less room for human error as well as for player improvement. Perfect is boring.
Coming back to video games.
By having a lot of different tasks that you have to control as a player, the game forces you to split your attention. Under these circumstances, attention becomes a finite, player-based resource that everyone has to manage on their own in order to improve as a player and to ultimately face better opponents.
The best advice for a bronze player? “Probes and Pylons”. It is a starting point - like a vector from zero to something, it gives a clear direction towards improvement.
By not forgetting these basic and simple tasks a player is able to progress significantly. After consciously doing this over and over again, it gets progressively less attention demanding and therefore frees up the brain capacity to focus on other tasks, such as not forgetting adding production facilities on time for example. To keep spreading creep. To check and maintain proper rally-points. To pay attention to the minimap. To micro a scouting probe and be distracting. To attack 3 places at once, fortify your 4th base with different structures and transfer SCVs while doing so.
I cannot emphasize this enough:
The continuous process of converting thoughts into memory gradually frees the brain capacity to think about something else, until your play turns into a pure performance. Similar to driving or playing an instrument you have to map out your decision making process for it to become mindless execution before you can properly operate it and do something else at the same time.
There are a lot of games that utilize this, for example, another Blizzard’s game World of Warcraft. I played PvE and let me tell you if you can’t keep a decent attention split of your own, you will die in some random fire while not being able to maintain a decent DPS rotation whatsoever. This is what the lack of attention split skills does to you. It is the attention split ability that differentiates not only good players from the bad ones, but every player from any other random player.
Don't get me wrong, it is not like stepping out of fire or queuing probes is THAT difficult, in fact, it is a compete no-brainer. But the problems arise when you're supposed to do that while trying to keep your focus on other 5 different things as well. Once the field gets more dynamic and strategic, players crumble under these circumstances.
In other words: a bunch of simple, but simultaneous tasks construct this type of gameplay where managing them with your attention becomes a skill on its own. Playing a game now requires careful planning and dynamic prioritization to maximize your efficiency.
You can’t have an outstandingly deep and sophisticated gameplay if it takes no time nor effort to learn. Including the attention split. Once you map out the entire decision making process that you also can flawlessly perform, the game loses its previous appealing.
Brood War had terrible UI and AI, meaning you had to dedicate a lot of your attention towards it. SC2 fixed these problems with a drastically better game engine: to play more efficiently and strategically got much easier. Then they added additional mechanics, including the macro ones.
HOWEVER,
Player vs Player games do not require any additional gameplay facilitations. At least, this is not necessary, because you compete against real people within the exact same system. If you think I want to add "APM Spam", attention sinks and severe execution taxes let me tell you that Player vs Player games do not require any additional gameplay complications, because you compete against real people as well.
What I’m trying to say is that there should be a fine balance between “Mechanical insanity” and “Point-and-click supremacy” to keep players in the flow: to give them a clear and huge room for improvements, whilst hooking them with this fascinating challenge. Before reaching this threshold the game might end up as insipid, however overshooting might repulse players early on.
The pros look forward towards improvement and competition - being the best. Regular players look forward to see the pros performing, admiring their mechanical prowess and superior game knowledge. If there is nothing to strive for, there is nothing to admire. This is especially important for a competitive 1v1 RTS eSports game.
If you’ve ever played Nexus Wars you should understand what I’m talking about.
But how about Dark Souls's Ornstein & Smough or Throne Watcher & Defender fights? Simply because there are 2 enemies you have to keep track of, the encounter feels much more difficult even though separately on their own, the bosses are dumber, slower and easier all around than a regular non-boss creature. I have this old videoclip of me killing TW&TD SL1, but I want you as a viewer to pay attention exclusively to the Defender guy and what he actually does in the fight.
Your attention is divided between:
- stamina management,
- 1st boss positioning,
- 2nd boss positioning,
- evading in time and towards proper directions,
- recognizing attack patterns to define the timings,
- avoiding the cliff behind you which you can totally fall off from,
- tracking their health bars, since they resurrect each other (meaning you have to distribute your damage somewhat evenly refocusing your attention on whom to attack),
- you can actually miss your attack because of the insufficient weapon reach and poor positioning,
- you can connect your attack, but hit the shield (which staggers and exposes you to a counter-attack)
- and on top of that your field of view is limited.
The mixture of these is what makes it difficult.
In Legacy of the Void Beta Blizzard did remove a small portion of macro: Mules, Injects and Chronoboosts. This decision of theirs sprung an enormous amount of discussions throughout all the possible boards, which has been a lot of fun to investigate people's opinions. Blizzard ended up putting them back, but in their tweaked autocast form.
Doing that in Heart of the Swarm would've been a mistake, however for Legacy it is an entire different story.
In LotV there are also a bunch of new gameplay amplifications such as
“Place more bases and then get faster production because of it”
or
“These new units have additional buttons and require more of your control and attention in order to make them efficient. And by the way counterplaying these units is also a huge deal.”
This results in a much faster pace of the game compared with Heart of the Swarm. They (Blizzard) are removing one “attention split drain APM sinks” mechanics and add different ones instead, just sideways: they redirect a player's attention towards unit control and micromanagement.
Does it improve the gameplay though? This is what the beta test is for.
My personal opinion on this: for Terran and Protoss it is a mild improvement, however Zerg gameplay is desolated.
Zerg units are too "swarmy" by design to control them individually. Drops, Warp-prism, blink control, force fields, disruptors, siege tanks, widow mines, marine splitting, liberators etc etc require conscious control and dedicated attention.
Zerg has much less individual unit control and their gameplay comes down to setting up a perfect engagement with the perfect army composition (due to larva mechanic, unlike linear Terran production), superior map control (Overlords, lings, creep, mutas) and continuous proper economy management. Their attention is divided more thinly and equally in between these tasks throughout the game.
The fights themselves are not micro intensive because they can't be. This is the root of "A-Move" complaints. By removing Zerg's main economy management sink, that also serves the purpose of their entire unit production, players might find themselves staring at their swarmy units and creep tumors, which is just not engaging on its own. It is only fun when you don't have enough time for it.
Recommended material to watch: "Baseballs vs Frisbees" by Day[9].
Summary #1: for a game to be competitively challenging, designers have to play on the insufficient human brain capabilities such as attention and capacity. This can be achieved by forcing players to solve or keep track of problems regardless of their variety and complexity. By tuning these factors you can set up engaging gameplay where players always have a clear room for improvement in both short-term and long-term perspectives.
Summary #2: since players compete against real people, developers can make their game as complex or as simple as their hearts desire. "WCS Champion" and "Silver League player" are positions that are relative to other competitors - relativistic thresholds. Players come and go, but top 0.1% has always been and will always be 0.1%. You don't compete against the game, you compete against other people - the game is just a medium. The players make you feel overwhelmed, not the game.
cheers
/etofok
edits: clarity, better wording and formatting. Rewrited the article completely (03.09.15). Several additions (06.09.15).
