I was lucky enough to attend the Austin Game Developers' Conference in 2007 (before it was inexplicably renamed "GDC Online" - what's up with that?), where I attended Mike Morhaime's keynote address. Near the end of his talk he mentioned how important it was to eliminate "cheese" from the game.
"If there’s a most efficient way to play the game that will get you accomplishments faster, that’s what people will do, even if it’s boring and tedious. They’ll do it and think your game is boring and tedious and not fun –- try to eliminate those."
I've run
into a couple of instances of people talking about "cheese" that
they've experienced recently. On one of my favorite podcasts, the Giant
Bombcast, during their 2009 Game of the Year deliberations,
Jeff Gerstmann complained long and hard about the gargoyles in Batman:
Arkham Asylum. His complaint boiled down to this: he could beat all of
the stealth areas by jumping onto a gargoyle, waiting for one of the
enemies to walk under it, then hanging down and tying that enemy up. He
would then move to another gargoyle and do that again until he had
taken out all of the enemies and beaten the area without ever taking a
hit from any of the enemies. (Of course he had to wait minutes at a
time sometimes for the enemies to pass under him, so it could be
extremely boring to play this way; but that didn't seem to deter him from
this strategy, since it had guaranteed success and zero risk.)
On another podcast, Idle Thumbs
(in episode #7 I believe), Jake Rodkin of Telltale Games told of a time
when he and his friends had just failed repeatedly to beat a Left 4
Dead Expert-mode campaign. They were commisserating about how hard the
game was when a programmer walked in on the conversation and said "Left
4 Dead? Man that's a great game but it's so EASY, even on Expert!"
Turns out this guy had realized that no matter how many zombies were
around, if you just backed into a corner and used the right-click melee
knock-back ability with the perfect timing, you could always knock back
zombies before they did damage to you, while still shooting (between
each push) to do damage to them. "Man, that game would be fun - I hope
they patch that out," he said, "because otherwise the game's just too
easy!"
Like Rats in a Maze
So what
is cheese? Well, think of both of these games as a possibility space -
which is fundamentally what a game is, and what any game can be
understood as. In the Batman example, the possibility space I'm talking
about is driven by decisions like "Am I going to hide up on a gargoyle?
Am I going to drop down and kick that thug in the face? Or am I going
to wait until his friend isn't quite so close to him?" In the L4D
example I'm talking about a possibility space driven by decisions like
"am I going to stand out here in the open, or back into the corner? Am
I going to fire right now? Or do a push-back? Or start reloading my
weapon?"
So both of these are - or should be - very interesting
possibility spaces... meaning that the decisions on how we navigate
through them should be interesting, meaning that (by Sid Meier's
possibly-misquoted but probably-true-anyway definition), we have
achieved Good Gameplay! And the reason it's good gameplay is because
the player is going to jump into this possibility space, try various
decisions at various times in various orders - in order to get to the
"I win" node of the possibility space... which is always the player's
goal. The player is constantly defining and honing their strategy for
what decisions to make when, trying to figure out the best way to
navigate the possibility space.
Now, in any such possibility
space, the player IS eventually going to find the "optimal path"
through your possibility space: the perfect strategy of what to do in
any given situation, which will always eventually lead them to the "I
win" state. When this happens, the player has mastered your game; and
although you can extend your game's lifespan with various tricks,
sooner or later the player is going to get burned out, get bored with
your game, and move on. They have solved the puzzle you created for
them, and it's only fun to play with a system that you've fully
mastered for a while. Though some games like Tetris and chess have a
profoundly rich and complex possibility space which are extremely
difficult to master (and perhaps there is such a thing as a game that
can never be fully mastered, at least not in one human lifetime), I
think that it should generally be regarded as an inevitable part of
your game's "life cycle" that the player will eventually master it and
get bored.
The problem occurs when the player finds a
"degenerate strategy." The book Half-Real defines this as "a way of
playing a game that takes advantage of a weakness in the game design,
so that the play strategy guarantees success." Personally I believe
that there will always be at least one strategy that "guarantees
success"; degenerate strategies are specifically ones that are simply
much, much simpler than what the designer intended, and/or so simple as
to make the game much less interesting to play than it should be.
Who's to Blame?
From
one point of view, there's an extremely ridiculous element to all this:
we want to grab that L4D-exploiting programmer and tell him "stop
complaing about the game not being fun!!! You just said the game would
be more fun if they patched out that trick - why don't you just stop
using that trick and you'll have more fun!"
But as Morhaime
pointed out: when the player finds this boring and tedious way to win
the game, they will do it, period... and if it is a boring way to play
the game, they will complain about your game being boring. As a game
designer, of course, this feels unfair - you didn't intend for the game
to be boring, you didn't intend for them to play it that way, and if
they'd just stop playing it that way, it wouldn't be boring! It's not
fair for them to blame you, it's their own fault, right?
Wrong.
The player is doing their job: playing in your possibility space and
trying to find the optimal strategy through it. It's your job to make
that search challenging and interesting; and if an optimal strategy
exists that is neither challenging nor interesting, then you have
failed in your job, just as much as a programmer who had a bug in his
code or a boat-maker who built a hull with a big crack in it.
How to Get Rid of that Limburger Smell
So
how do you fix this problem? Sometimes the fix is pretty simple: in
L4D2, you can only do the push-back move a few times before it becomes
limited by a cool-down timer, making that action temporarily much less
effective and forcing you to try something else. But how should Batman
be fixed so that not every level can be solved by hiding on gargoyles
and waiting to string a man up?
One direction would be to let
the player keep this pet strategy, but begin to add exceptions that it
can't be used against. For instance, they could have eventually
introduced a new type of thug enemy that somehow can't be "strung up"
at all, and mixed these in among the regular thug enemies. (This is the
"Tower Defense" method of balancing.) Or they could have simply made
using the gargoyles come with an associated risk, thereby breaking the
dominance of this strategy in being zero-risk. In fact the team
attempted this solution, by introducing a few gargoyles that turned out
to be trapped with explosives. However Jeff Gerstmann found this to be
a lame solution, because the rigged gargoyles were few and far
between... and when they were introduced, the same one was trapped
every time, so that he could simply avoid those specific gargoyles
without actually modifying the rest of his strategy. Perhaps if
gargoyle traps were randomized, their use would have been discouraged
appropriately. However this kind of random element can introduce
frustration to the player: when they're damaged by a randomly trapped
gargoyle, they experience frustration because there was no way for them
to know that THAT gargoyle was trapped - it's a failure with nothing
the player can learn (i.e. nothing they could have done differently to
prevent it), and that's a formula for player frustration.
Perhaps
the best solution would have been to make the gargoyles begin to
crumble after being used repeatedly, and/or after Batman sits still on
them for an extended amount of time. This idea actually just occurred
to me, but it seems like a good one as I can see several benefits it
has:
- It's thematically appropriate since the stone gargoyles already represent dilapidated architectural elements.
- This mechanic could also interact with the stealth system of the game, as the sound of stone crumbling, or of a piece of stone falling to the floor, could alert the enemy to the player's position... negating the stealth that was the primary benefit of hiding on the gargoyles.
- It would specifically negate the boring strategy of waiting around on gargoyles for a long time; but the gargoyles could still be used in any other (non-boring) strategies as they were before.
- Finally, when the player used the gargoyles wrong and caused this "crumbling" failure, this failure wouldn't be frustrating; partially because it made sense in the world, but also because it's a failure they CAN learn from, and take into account in their strategies.
Again this seems like a good solution, and one that would force the player to go find another, more fun strategy. But who can say? It might have somehow created a different degenerate strategy, or exposed some other degenerate strategy that no one had noticed because they were too busy hanging out on gargoyles! In the end the only way to know whether something is fun is to play with it.
So to sum up: cheese is bad, and don't let your players abuse the gargoyles. Words of wisdom we could all stand to remember.