As the superintendant might say, pardon my dust! It has been too long since my last Crunch Time post, but with the relaunch of the blog onto WordPress 2.7 with the help of Caleb White, I can finally post without the boundaries that RapidWeaver had imposed. This week I plan to deconstruct reinforcement in games.

 

The Carrot

By definition, positive reinforcement is an increase in a behavior’s frequency due to the addition of a stimulus.  While many games feature portions of positive reinforcement, most are lacking when in comparison to their negative counterparts, and very few choose to equally balance the two.  The casual games market excels in this balance.  ThatGameCompany’s Fl0w was centered around the concept of progression.  As a 2D creature you eat to grow, and the bigger you get and the deeper you go the closer you are to evolution.  The carrot in this case is continued growth.  When an enemy creature stops your growth by removing your energy, the cycle is broken.  The key to the end of this cycle is that not only is your progression saved in a state where you can recollect your past levels of growth, but the fact that death in the video game sense does not occur.  The player’s deterrent is merely the stop of flow, rather than an action which forces a restart. 

 

“Gamer Masochism”

There is no other explanation for the amount of negative reinforcement found in games up to now than the perceived notion of “gamer masochism.”  The concept that the only thing that will keep gamers playing is the threat of failure isn’t a new one.  Since the days of the arcade, players have been conditioned to end gameplay with failure.  Before the advent of coherent story in games, mastery of an arcade game’s mechanics were all players had as a reward for their progress.  Players would advance to their level of play, and fail, having to restart and attempt to go farther.  Even in what became known as the kill screen, players met an inevitable death at the conclusion of an arcade classic.  As the years went on and the concept of a campaign was introduced, player death and the end of progression was carried over from generations past.  Whether it be a first person shooter or a real time strategy game, players have consistently faced the threat of failure.

 

External Reinforcement

Microsoft’s Achievements and Sony’s Trophies provide a new layer of reinforcement to games on their respective platforms.  They add a new meta level of interaction with a game by applying task completion and score as an overlay to existing titles.  From here you can branch off to how you view these “achievements” should reward players; should they be for completing the main quest, or to encourage action which may not otherwise have been attempted?  A balance is required to both insert additional positive reinforcement to existing game set pieces, while encouraging new exploration and game longevity.  Achievements and Trophies should never replace in game reinforcement, but rather supplement it, or we will find ourselves in a time where most games are not merely played on their own merits, but on the merits of a 3rd party add on.  

 

Adapting Negative Reinforcement and a Study of Prince of Persia

The adaptation of negative reinforcement can occur when a game attempts to forego a consistent gameplay frustration of its genre/series and inevitably lacks consequence, becoming easy.  There is no better recent example than the new re-imagined Prince of Persia from UbiSoft Montreal.  The gameplay mechanic of Elika and the removal of death made the game a straight shot.  Frustration really could only arise after abrupt placement on solid ground after making a misstep during a prolonged free running sequence, or in the ill conceived combat system.  No checkpoints were required, no extra lives, just patience.  

This mammoth shift in the idea of how action games or platformers could be made will be felt for years to come and have proponents on both sides of the fence.  On the one hand, the game became significantly less difficult than it could have been, removing a layer of negative reinforcement and opening it up to a larger audience.  On the other hand, the lower difficulty level, paired with design choices for combat, made for a very strange game experience that was not only easy, but shared the frustration that the game would have had without the use of Elika’s persistent saving throw, even if to a lesser extent.  What the team at UbiSoft had achieved was a casual game design ideology applied to an action platformer.  You can take direct examples from Fl0w and apply them to PoP.  Continuous movement rather than growth is your carrot.  When a misstep occurs, you don’t restart the entire level, you merely teleport back to your last time on solid ground to recover your progress.  Again, the player’s deterrent is merely the stop of flow, rather than an action which forces a restart.  

When it all boils down to brass tax, reinforcement dictates a game’s flow.  So…what is flow?  Flow is the pattern of give and take a game uses to keep you hooked.  Without consistent player reinforcement of both types, a game could suffer from periods of intense engagement, followed by boredom.  It’s this balance of give and take that game developers strive to perfect and apply to their concepts.  

 

Crunch Time: Reinforcement is in the can! Hope you liked it! There is so much more to elaborate on, so feel free to leave a comment by clicking on the article title to get to the permalink page, or follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/jeremybogdan and send me a message starting with @jeremybogdan and I’ll be sure to write back!