What is "consolisation" and why does it exist? Or Simulated Skill v Player Skill - by SubJeff
Sulphur on 6/2/2011 at 08:59
Quote Posted by Subjective Effect
An "I win" button is one that you press to carry out a Simulated Skill rather than needing to do a number of things in order to carry out the same action. Using a rope arrow in Thief 1 vs using the grappling hook in Batman Arkham Asylum for example. One requires considerable Player Skill, the other requires almost none.
How different is Batman: AA's grapple from almost every other video game grapple ever made, PC or console? You can't hook onto anything with a grapple that doesn't have a designated hook point. (Surely you can't be talking about the fact that you don't need to 'aim' it.) The only exception I can think of is Just Cause 2, and it's a multiplatform console game that is arguably all about skill.
Thief's rope arrows allowed you to fire them into any wooden surface, but is there another 3D game that lets you do such a thing?
Koki on 6/2/2011 at 11:16
Technically, "any wooden surface" is a designated grappling hook point.
Neb on 6/2/2011 at 13:00
Just like how air is designated jumping space.
Chade on 6/2/2011 at 21:27
Quote Posted by Wormrat
... most games, even supposedly "braindead" shooters, involve a mix of action and strategy, I don't see why the idea is controversial. Useful strategies are shaped by the actions available; changing one affects the other ... the opposite of "precision" is randomness, from the player's perspective. And random success is certainly the opposite of intelligent victory.
Well, I find it controversial because I don't agree! (Although of course it all depends on the game in question.)
You are right to say that a game may well offer intelligent strategies that require fast and accurate input. A game will offer many different approaches: intelligent reflexive strategies, dumb reflexive strategies, intelligent methodical strategies, and dumb methodical strategies.
Now, if the game is going to encourage reflexive strategies over methodical strategies, then it should only make the game more intelligent on average if the proportion of smart reflexive strategies compared to dumb reflexive strategies is higher then the proportion of smart methodical strategies compared to dumb methodical strategies.
In general, I have found the opposite to be true. I probably enjoyed gaming a bit more when I sucked at it, because I had to make up for my lack of skill by planning ahead and and using my imagination.
SubJeff on 6/2/2011 at 22:42
Quote Posted by Papy
That "trend" is only a personal perception based on your own evolution. The more you experience video games, the more depth and complexity you need to get the same feeling as you had before.
Nonsense. I can enjoy the simplest of games.
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Because of inflation, $50 from 10 years ago is now around 65$. So the question is : would you buy _today_ a game with the same graphics as System Shock 2 for $65? I know I wouldn't.
What has graphics got to do with it?
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Considering games offer now a lot more actions to do than before, what is important is the overall difficulty of the game, not how difficult it is to accomplish one action.
If only that were always true. It is sometimes, no doubt, but only sometimes.
Quote Posted by Sulphur
How different is Batman: AA's grapple from almost every other video game grapple ever made, PC or console? You can't hook onto anything with a grapple that doesn't have a designated hook point. (Surely you can't be talking about the fact that you don't need to 'aim' it.)
Why does it matter what other games have done, irrespective of platform? To clarify - I really enjoyed Batman: AA.
But yes, you didn't have to aim it. Imagine how different the game would have been if you had to. I'm not saying that I wish the game was like that but having a feature like that would alter the quality of the game a great deal wouldn't it?
And that is the difference between a Simulated and a Player Skill. Sometimes it's appropriate to simplify things, sometimes it isn't. And oftentimes cross-platform games will have inappropriate simplification.
Koki on 7/2/2011 at 06:46
Quote Posted by Neb
Just like how air is designated jumping space.
Uh, sure, most buildings and locations in Thief were 90% wood. Guess I remembered wrong.
Sulphur on 7/2/2011 at 07:20
Quote Posted by Subjective Effect
Why does it matter what other games have done, irrespective of platform? To clarify - I really enjoyed Batman: AA.
Well, if we're quoting examples of consolitis vs. more intelligent design on the PC, it's only fair to compare a general example on one platform with a general example on the other, no?
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But yes, you didn't have to aim it. Imagine how different the game would have been if you had to. I'm not saying that I wish the game was like that but having a feature like that would alter the quality of the game a great deal wouldn't it?
And that is the difference between a Simulated and a Player Skill. Sometimes it's appropriate to simplify things, sometimes it isn't. And oftentimes cross-platform games will have inappropriate simplification.
It wouldn't have made much of a difference if you had to aim it. Like I said, there are only designated hook points that the grapple can attach to. Manually aiming at them doesn't make the design any more intelligent. We're heading back to the argument that ZB had over aiming/more precise aiming making things more intelligent -- well, it doesn't. Taking the grapple hook into this context, there would be no actual skill involved in aiming at a hook point, because they're rather large and trivial to aim at anyway.
The actual issue with Batman: AA is that hook points, like all interactive parts of the gameworld, glow to let you know there's something you need to do with them. If the game weren't so overt in letting you know what needs to be done now/where to go next, players would have to be far more reliant on their brains.
SubJeff on 7/2/2011 at 11:10
Errr, no hook points mate. I'm talking about aiming it like Batman would in real life iyswim. You'd have to aim at points that the hook would work on and sometimes it wouldn't hook on just like sometimes you waste rope arrows in Thief by missing/hitting something they can't stick into.
You don't need a platform specific game to compare these concepts, just examples of the concepts alone. After all it's entirely possible to have a PC game that suffers from Simulated Skill bias or a console game that has Player Skill bias.
Briareos H on 7/2/2011 at 12:05
Quote Posted by Sulphur
@Briareos: Here's the thing: a TV in your bedroom connected to a console is just as asocial as a PC. If you were playing RDR without your friends around and you had no other pressing activities, would you still have turned it off to go chug a beer with someone because the console somehow forced social contact on you?
Well, you wouldn't have been playing it anyway because you don't have a console. So yes, your opinion is skewed towards one platform because by your own admission you've had an extremely stilted and limited experience with them in comparison to PCs.
Apart from that, I'd buy the 'console gaming isn't as deeply engaging as PC gaming' (not your words but what you seem to be implying) thing if console games were a completely different and more casual beast than PC games, but they share far too many games, game types, and experiences in common for that to be true.
Sorry to bring that back but this had gone under my radar - You shouldn't put words in my mouth. "By my own admission", I was raised on computer gaming. However, the sheer amount of console games I played at friends' places or on my Gamecube does not make for an "extremely" (OMG so extreme) stilted or limited experience. I played games from start to finish on most platforms since the Megadrive - I know the games, the consoles and their limitations. My experience with PC gaming is broader, and has been consistently more immersive for the perceived reasons I cited.
I still think it all boils down to two things: the targeted audience and the interface. I want to highlight that there are multiple examples of 'recent' console games which generally contradict my argument about being targeted at more social audience - for the best - and as many examples of PC-only games which do the opposite. That's where I think the line has blurred along with the general tendency to socialise gaming (rather than consolise) on all platforms.
Still, the interface is everything but a non-issue because it impacts how the same information is provided to a player which can both be sitting 3 metres from the TV with a gamepad or 50cm from the screen with keyboard & mouse.
Consolisation is
not an excuse however for the trend of making everything explicit (and more generally tailoring the experience and contents to an 'ideal' player response rather than making a knowingly flawed game based solely on your vision and expecting the player to bend it somehow). Maturity in the videogaming economy is more to blame here.
