The Designer's Notebook: Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie! V

It's time once again for The Designer's Notebook's annual compendium of goofs, screw-ups, and errors of judgment or taste—those elements that make a videogame less than what it should be. These Twinkie Denial Conditions (TDCs) aren't restricted to bad games only; sometimes they're just one blemish on an otherwise good game.

Almost all of these have been sent to me by readers (and if you have some choice remarks about designers who don't deserve their Twinkies, I'd like to hear from you too, at [email protected]). Unfortunately, I'm not rich enough to afford a PS2, an Xbox, a GameCube, a Dreamcast, a GBA, and a top-end PC, all at the same time, so I haven't been able to verify for myself all the examples mentioned. But even if a detail or two is wrong, it's the principle that matters.

Wrecking a Game's Balance for the Sake of A "Cool Feature"

Bryan Buschmann writes:

I think Bryan has summed it up pretty well. A lot of designers succumb to this temptation. Their desire to incorporate, like, totally awesome weapons overrides their desire to, like, balance the game properly.

Personally, I don't know what giant walking tanks are doing in a game about World War II anyway; it's been 60 years since D-Day and we still don't have giant walking tanks—I doubt if we ever will, since they're totally impractical. Science fiction, OK—historical simulation, not OK.

Dead Opponents Resurrected While You Sleep…

Or when you save the game. Anita Ray (and several other people as well) wrote to complain about this one. As she puts it,

Ah, if only it could be attributed to the programmers! Sorry, Anita, this one belongs squarely at the door of us game designers. The whole issue of spawning and resurrection is a complicated one that I'll deal with in a future column, but I do know one thing: when a boss is dead, it ought to stay dead unless you reload the game at a point before you met the boss. I'm not wild about bosses anyway, but I recognize that they're a standard convention, so we need rules for implementing them. A boss shouldn't be resurrected unless there's some clear reason why it's possible (and some way to prevent it). And a boss should certainly never re-spawn the way a normal grunt does.

Un-configurable Controls

Someone who signs off as "Deathbliss" rants:

I couldn't agree more. This is worse than a Twinkie Denial Condition; any big commercial game that doesn't let the player reconfigure the input devices merits withholding all snack food. This is especially true if it's a twitch game requiring high dexterity, where a tenth of a second counts. Configurable controls are trivial to implement, cost next to nothing in RAM and storage space, and make your game far more accessible. When are game designers going to realize that human factors engineering is not just something for fighter planes and nuclear power plants?

It needs to be done properly, though. R. Alan Monroe writes to complain about…

Bad Configuration Mechanisms

Mr. Monroe says:

Once again, getting this right is just as easy as getting it wrong and costs nothing, so why not do it right?

Out-Of-Sequence Checkpoints

This one's a little bit difficult to describe in generic terms, so I'm going to let Jason Seip put it in his own words with a specific example. He says it happened in Splinter Cell for the GameCube and was just "a bad moment in a good game."

The moral, he says, is: "Don't let the player reach checkpoint B if he or she hasn't satisfied the requirements of checkpoint A." Checkpoint B should have been in some area that was completely inaccessible to the player until the bomb was defused.

Jason actually ran across one of the fundamental conundrums of linear interactive narratives: the Problem of Narrative Flow. How do you make sure that the player has done everything he needs to do by the time he arrives at the dramatic climax of your story, when you don't control his actions? There are various solutions, one of the simplest being: unlock the doors to the dramatic climax one at a time, so the player can't get there until he or she is ready. Jason actually got ahead of the story by skipping a step, so the story took a wrong turn and came to a dead end.

Yet More Fantasy-Killing Elements

In my very first No Twinkie episode, I mentioned fantasy-killing elements: elements of the game that are so stupid or inappropriate that they destroy your sense of immersion. As you can imagine, this covers a wide range of blunders. Gregg Tavares rings in with a few:

Music that doesn't fit the game. In many games an emotional connection to the game is important. Music helps create this emotion when done correctly (scored like a movie, for instance) and detracts when not (generic peppy "game" music, licensed music, user-selectable music, and so on). [I would add that the popular practice of licensing completely inappropriate bands to do music for a game is just as aesthetically bankrupt as that of doing it for movies. M.C. Hammer for The Addams Family? Excuse me? That’s marketing gone mad. —Ernest]

In-game dialog that refers to real-world things. In Metal Gear Solid, Commander calls Snake on the walkie-talkie and says something like "Snake, to open the hatch press A on the control pad." Huh? In real life no one would refer to a control pad, because it's outside of the game’s world. Grand Theft Auto 3 has a better implementation. In GTA3 game characters stay in character 100 percent of the time, and gameplay-related explanations are printed on the screen, detached from any of the characters.

Extremely ridiculous situations. This of course happens in lots of Hollywood movies too. For example, you've got 18 hours to stop an atomic bomb going off. Oh, I know, let's spend lots of precious minutes flirting with an in-game character (Metal Gear Solid). The world ends tomorrow, so let's go to an amusement park (Final Fantasy 7). I'm around the corner from a guard about three feet away, so let's have a conversation on the communicator with the commander (MGS again).

Uninterruptible Movies

Jerry Strand and "loganb" both wrote to complain about movies that you couldn’t interrupt. Sometimes they're incredibly long intros that you have to sit through every time you start the game; sometimes they're cut-scenes that play right after a save point. If you keep getting killed and have to reload from that save point, you have to see the movie again. I'll add some more: the uninterruptible 15-second spell-effect movies in Final Fantasy 8. (I haven't played the others in this series, so I don't know if they're all guilty of this or not.) They're impressive the first time, interesting the next three or four, and exceedingly tiresome from then on. It discourages you from casting the spell or even playing the game after a while.

Now, I actually like cinematics in games (Dogma 2001 notwithstanding), so long as they're well executed, short and sweet, visually compatible with the rest of the game, and actually add something to the plot. Unfortunately, a harmonic convergence of all these qualities only occurs in about 25 percent of the cases. The rest of the time, they're corny, irrelevant, or both, and I want to button through them and get on with playing the game. Once again, the fix for this is trivial—so do it!

Conclusion

That's it for this edition of Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie! Thanks to all those who wrote in and apologies to those whose suggestions I didn't have room for. But keep those cards and letters coming to [email protected], because all of you can play far more games in a year—and spot far more Twinkie Denial Conditions—than I can.