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Failure, fairness and friends: development and video games
If you play video games, you may be aware of the Dark Souls series, or the genre of ‘Soulslike’ games. These games have common characteristics: they are third person action adventure games, usually (but not always) set in a fantasy world, where you fight an implacably hostile environment and enemies, including bosses who often tower above you. They have complex, obscure stories that you discover piece by piece, you level up by gathering resources (souls, or runes or something else) from the enemies you kill, and you lose those resources when you get killed - but you can regain them if you fight your way back to the place you died without getting killed. And they’re hard. Very hard.
i enjoy these games (with a few exceptions - ahem Sekiro ahem). Even though they are intense and frustrating, they are very rewarding when you manage to overcome challenges and get to the end. Moreover, they feel fair: when you die to a boss for the fifteenth time, you know that it was because you made a mistake: you dodged slightly too late, or you waited slightly too long to heal, or you pushed your luck a bit too far.
Now you’re thinking with . . .
Christmas is a time for play, so let’s talk about a game. If you haven’t played the video game Portal, then I suggest that you stop reading this article and go and play it.
Welcome back. Did you play Portal 2 as well? If not, go and play that one as well: it’s even better.
If you didn’t take my advice, then you’ve missed out on a great experience. (Maybe you should go and try it - we’ll wait.) I believe that the Portal games are examples of just how good video gaming can be: intriguing, playful, thoughtful and challenging, with a sparse but engaging story.
In the games, you are a subject in a lab, and you have one tool to pass a series of strange and dangerous tests: a portal gun. When fired, this gun creates a hole on a surface, and when fired again, it creates a hole on another surface. If you jump through one hole, you come out of the other - it’s a portal! The games are an exercise in creativity on top of this simple premise, by both the developers and the players.
What can technologists learn from board games?
Have you played a board game recently?
If not, you might find that they are very different from the games of Monopoly, Risk and Scrabble that you are familiar with. Many of today’s board games seem bewilderingly complex, packed with counters, cards and other components, described by intimidating rulebooks, and based on unlikely themes: cross-Atlantic trading in the 17th century, subsistence farming in the Middle Ages, and the construction of stained glass windows (these are all real games).
However, like any hobby, I think that they are worth paying attention to (and I have to admit that I have spent plenty of my own time playing these games). It’s a useful rule of thumb that, even if an activity seems uninteresting or difficult to appreciate at first sight, when a lot of people invest a lot of time in it, then it is good to be curious about it. Even if it’s not for you, you will learn something new.
Do you wish to proceed? y/n
If you play video games, particularly adventures that take many hours to complete, you may be familiar with an experience you sometimes get just before the end. The list of sidequests is dwindling and you have run all the errands for your party members. You suspect that you are nearing the conclusion of the story, when an option pops up, something like this:
Do you want to proceed? (You will not be able to return past this point.)
If you’re anything like me, when you see this option for the first time, you say no, you save your game, you check your inventory, you upgrade everything that you can upgrade, and you save your game again for good measure. And then you say yes.
If you don’t play video games, you can get the same feeling by administering a computer, even if it’s just your own laptop. Sooner or later you will get prompted to apply an upgrade, accompanied by a message something like this:
Do you wish to proceed? y/n