Eric Heimburg, one of the premier MMO game design commentators and a blogger that I have a great deal of respect for, misses the mark by a wide margin in his latest effort.
In Deathtrap Design and the Invisible Gorilla Eric discusses the human ability to tune out irrelevant information when performing observational tasks, no matter how blatant that information might be. This was famously demonstrated in the “Invisible Gorilla” experiment; humans have evolved exquisite environmental filters that allow us to focus on important details without necessarily being cognizant of the entirety of our surroundings – it’s how we stay sane and survive in a chaotic world.
This experiment from 1999 was quite astonishing. Framed as a test, the video asks you to count the number of times some kids pass a basketball back and forth. Partway through, a person wearing a gorilla suit saunters into the video, mugs right in front of the camera, plain as day, and leaves. In the experiment, fully half the people who watched this video did not notice the gorilla. They were too busy counting basketball passes.
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If you didn’t see the gorilla in that video, you aren’t stupid. Even after many experiments, the researchers couldn’t find any way to predict the people who would notice the gorilla (or whatever other random thing they added, in any context). Regardless of the experiment or the person, some people notice the external details sometimes, and sometimes they don’t. But people always think they will notice all major details. Worse, when they see somebody not noticing an important detail, they assume those other people are idiots… even though it’s just dumb luck that they noticed it themselves.
Eric then takes this scientific nugget and attempts to apply it to modern MMO design.
It’s an MMO designer classic: stick some giant horrific monster into an area to keep players on their toes. If the players refuse to run away from said monster, they get killed. But they always have plenty of warning. “The earth shakes when the giant walks,” says the designer — “they can’t help but notice that! So it’s not unfair. It’s just something to keep them on their toes.” Or how about the old “random firetraps in the middle of a raid dungeon” trick? Spices things up without being unfair, right?
Unfortunately, half the time these sorts of encounters end in unavoidable death. The players are deeply engaged in playing the game — watching the little bars tick down and using the right skills at the right time — and half the time, they miss your deathtrap cues, no matter how obvious you think they are. When they die, they are understandably upset.
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But yet half the time, these “easily avoidable” deathtraps go unnoticed. There’s nothing the players could do to pay more attention. It’s not possible to focus on the gameplay and also notice 100% of the other stuff going on all the time.
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When you’re playing a video game, you shouldn’t be surprised about unfortunate outcomes. You shouldn’t go “How did I die?!” or “Where did that level-80 elite mob come from!?” Those questions indicate that the player is feeling abused. Moreover, they aren’t learning anything, either (except, perhaps, not to play your game): it is not possible to “learn to pay more attention”.
The above statements, couched in scientific studies, are seductive on the surface, however they ignore a glaring truth about video games, and MMOs specifically.
Fire? What fire?
When we sit down in front of our computers to play a game we are taking on the role of a functionally immortal character. Our on screen avatar may die a horrendous death one minute, however within seconds we are almost always back to normal, with some minor penalty attached to our failure. Even if we are killed by an invisible gorilla, we spring back to life almost immediately, practically unscathed. (In fact, there is a valid argument that death penalties in MMOs are too light at present.)
Modern MMOs are not like the MUDs of yesteryear: they do not contain deathtrap rooms that kill players for making a single misstep (often for having the simple crime of not to reading a wall of text) and then rub salt in their wounds by permanently destroying all of the gear that they were wearing. This is vitally important. Insta-kill scenarios may feel slightly unfair in a game like World of Warcraft, however they are not punishing – usually the only significant resource lost is time.
Further more, to claim that players cannot “learn to pay more attention” is as audacious as it is untrue. When The Burning Crusade was released for World of Warcraft I stumbled into Hellfire Peninsula for the first time, ignored the rumbling ground, and got summarily crushed by a Fel Reaver. I never made that mistake again. I learned to detect the screen shaking and listen for the audible rumbling whenever I was playing in an area containing Fel Reavers. Furthermore, when Wrath of the Lich King was released I immediately noticed rumbling of some other titan in one of the new areas that I had never visited, and avoided death instinctively. Simple put: I learned to watch out for a shaking screen after a single fatal experience. My human survival instinct learned to incorporate known fatal environmental cues into its internal filters.
Likewise, raids in MMOs are filled with unexpected events and environmental danger that can be quite fatal when ignored. A great example is the Al’ar fight in WoW’s Tempest Keep: new players will often fail to watch for the random patches of flame that appear throughout the fight, and will die because they are focused too much on their bars and keys. After a period of learning, most players become capable of watching for these fires in addition to their normal duties, and stop “randomly” dying.
Since video games are not random life events like invisible gorillas, immortal players are able to die, learn from the mistake that they made, and re-prioritize what they are unconsciously watching out for in a given moment to compensate for known game mechanics. While someone could certainly consider the death trap “unfair” or “unavoidable” the first few times it happened, after a handful of attempts that death will no longer be a case of bad luck or the human condition – rather it will be a personal failure of someone to accept the fact that in this fight/area they need to watch for fires/extra mobs/whatever more carefully.
Removing a game mechanic like death traps, which cause rare flashes of frustration and a perceived lack of fun in some players should not be taken lightly. The fact that you might die at any given moment if you are not careful adds an element of risk to a game. Sadly, MMOs appear to be trending more and more towards risk-free gaming, as even a small monetary penalty and a few minutes of “lost” time are too much for many players.
11 Responses to “Players can learn”
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You weren’t learning to pay more attention to unexpected noise. You learned to pay more attention to things that had already happened to you. I don’t think that’s at all the same thing. You can LEARN, certainly (although there are nicer ways to teach you something than killing you, especially in a game with harsh death penalties). But you can’t learn to notice unexpected cues while focusing on something else. Teaching by punishment is a poor design experience. There are better ways to teach.
Back in the day, all types of games did deathtraps often. Early text adventures and graphical adventures seemed to specialize in them. The logic was: “when they die, they just reload from a previous save, so it’s not a big deal. And then they learn not to do that again. This is just a frustration to keep them on their toes.” Similar arguments of increased verisimilitude were also put forth, but in the end, being punished unexpectedly isn’t fun. These concepts became less and less acceptable, just as they will for MMOs.
If you want your game to have occasional levels of frustration, that’s fine! I’m definitely not arguing that that’s a bad thing. But players need the perception of fairness. It’s fun to be frustrated in your attempt to kill a boss because he had one too many nasty surprises up his sleeve. We perceive that as being fair. But getting stomped flat while trying to read your mini-map is just not a useful kind of frustration. If you’re going to use unfair frustration, hell, why not make the login system frustrating? “Oh I can’t log in today, how frustrating! But it’s part of the game design…” frustration comes in many contexts, and those contexts matter.
And different levels of death penalty are all fine, too, as long as you know what that will do to your game design. (http://www.eldergame.com/2007/12/whats-in-a-death-penalty/) However, the higher the death penalty, the more horrific those frustrating deaths are.
“You weren’t learning to pay more attention to unexpected noise. You learned to pay more attention to things that had already happened to you.”
Close, but not quite: I was learning that certain environmental stimuli (i.e. rumbling and shaking) had a higher probability of leading to unexpected death. I could then apply this newfound knowledge and apply it outside the context that I learned it. (i.e. in Northrend as opposed to HFP) This is exactly the same as the manner in which all animals – humans included – learn survival traits. Many many many animal/human studies have proven this out.
So yeah, I’m not disputing that it is impossible to learn how to detect a previously unknown danger and avoid it 100% of the time, but what I am saying is that it is easy to learn general rules, and apply them to increase your odds of surviving in unknown locales.
Given the finite scope of MMOs, there are only so many death traps that can be devised – and given the functional immortality of a player, learning a good working set of cues is easy and – except for a short inconvenience – pain free.
“Back in the day, all types of games did deathtraps often. ”
I think that the old school death traps are a different thing entirely…. the pain inflicted by them was often so severe that real progress WAS lost – sometimes permanently. I remember dying in a death trap in a MUD and losing all of my gear which INCLUDED a unique piece of gear gifted by one of the game’s immortals (admins). That was gone forever. I also lost gear that was world-limited, and at least piece I could never recovered because someone else got the drop before me.
“If you want your game to have occasional levels of frustration, that’s fine! I’m definitely not arguing that that’s a bad thing. But players need the perception of fairness. ”
The MMO death traps of today are more than fair in my opinion… the is because the risk/reward equation n games is so skewed towards the “reward” side of the equation that dying simply does not matter.
(Aside: That’s one of the reasons I’ve fallen out of favor with MMOs – the risk just doesn’t feel high enough in any game that I want to play.)
“But getting stomped flat while trying to read your mini-map is just not a useful kind of frustration.”
Shouldn’t the lesson a player internalizes after having this happen be: “I ought to read my maps only when I’m in a zone that I know is safe” ? I know that’s the way I operate most of the time…. and if I need a map in a dangerous area, I flick it open, try to quickly ascertain what I need, and then close it and survey my immediate surroundings for threats. I may have to repeat this a few times if I’m not able to find what I’m looking for quickly, but doesn’t this closer simulate a real experience, and add some flavor to a game? (I hate how most single player titles pause when the map is open – it destroys the immersion IMO).
This post so should have been titled “Death By Invisible Gorilla”
I did not quite get what the lesson for game designers should be. Does it boil down to addon-style warnings a la Boss Mods “Warning: X to happen” with voice, flash, sounds and all that?
Not even the Fel Reaver surprising a player meant instant death. -> I wonder which modern MMO has instant death upon mistake design. I can’t even think of an example from any kind of contemporary game right now.
Also, perhaps more to your point — I still get killed by level 80 elites on roads in WoW. I know they path down roads… I just have other things to focus on. I do not find it fun to die while reading my mini-map, anymore than I find it fun to lose connection while fighting a monster. I can do without cheap frustrations: games have plenty of real, fun ones.
Also, people who say “I never miss visual cues in my environment and only morons would die to [the Fel Reaver | griffyns in EQ1 | fire traps | guards walking down the road | etc]” are, in fact, pointing out the exact point of the experiment: you are 100% positive you’d never miss those big visual cues, but it turns out that you WILL miss them, and often, ALL THE TIME. And then you will blame it on something other than your missing the cue. Lag, or “I had to use power X so I couldn’t have survived that, too,” or “it came up from behind me” or any number of other excuses that, if you were to watch a video of yourself, would turn out not to be true. Turns out we lie to ourselves about our ability to notice these things. That is the astonishing part.
Longasc: the point of the article is that game designers need to know this and work to counteract it. We can’t expect players to know and understand it… it’s too unintuitive to be believed at a glance. But when those players die and then make excuses for themselves, they are having less fun than if they hadn’t missed those cues in their environment. We need to find ways to make them notice their environment better. At the moment, klaxons and warnings don’t look like they would help much… you’ll tune them out. What would help better? I would like to know that, too.
Well…
* How will you make the Fel Reaver more “visible” to the player? I mean going back to the HUD/fighter pilot example, it would mean to put a big red MISSILE LOCK directly onto the HUD to make sure the pilot does not miss the beeps and the pulsing red missile lock.
But what do you do then? You would train them to be even less careful, they will rely on the warnings.
The solutions would be:
a.) remove instantly deadly threats -> we are there already. WoW guards and guards in other MMO don’t kill people right away anymore. You can get away even as lowbie.
b.) remove the threat completely, aka no Fel Reaver. -> I think we already have too easy games. Take a little precaution and read your minimap or map in a safe place?
I finally can point out a game where an unexpected threat aka lions and other predators attack without much cue or warning time: Red Dead Redemption.
So is getting killed by an invisible gorilla really that bad? Not if you can fight back. This simply means you are not instantly doomed or dead.
“Also, people who say “I never miss visual cues in my environment and only morons would die to [the Fel Reaver | griffyns in EQ1 | fire traps | guards walking down the road | etc]” are, in fact, pointing out the exact point of the experiment: you are 100% positive you’d never miss those big visual cues, but it turns out that you WILL miss them, and often, ALL THE TIME. And then you will blame it on something other than your missing the cue.”
You bet players will miss things – as I recounted, I certainly missed the fel reaver warnings my first time. But it doesn’t take many deaths to learn the danger spots, and key cues for the area you’re in (or the game in general) – so the frustration can be minimized to a relatively short learning period.
>> Also, people who say “I never miss visual cues in my environment and only morons would die to [the Fel Reaver | griffyns in EQ1 | fire traps | guards walking down the road | etc]” are, in fact, pointing out the exact point of the experiment: you are 100% positive you’d never miss those big visual cues, but it turns out that you WILL miss them, and often, ALL THE TIME.
That’s contradicted by Richard Wiseman’s experiments: some people are generally more perceptive than others, it’s not a pure dumb luck even distribution of visible/invisible gorilla events.
I think that it’s also worth noting that MMOs do an exquisite job at helping you learn what killed you when you die: your camera stays focused on your corpse, the cause of death is not far away, and any environmental cues that warned of your pending demise are in plain view.
Examples:
1. Fel Reaver continues to stomp around, and your screen shakes even in death.
2. Your corpse smolders in Al’ar’s fire, and you can watch as fires randomly appear beneath your living raidmates, and see what THEY do to evade them.
As a player with raiding experience myself, I find that most of my improvement comes not from learning to notice events, but from being good enough at my rotation that I don’t NEED to concentrate on my rotation.
Yes – that’s definitely a huge thing too. If you can internalize your rotation and turn it into something instinctive, then you have more time to notice your surroundings.