A Stranger Gravity

Difficulty vs. Accessibility

A Stranger Gravity - Team — Wed, 21 May 2014 04:15:29 GMT

A few months ago I wrote up a post on keeping in mind the assumed knowledge you have as both a designer and experienced player. It sparked a lot of great discussion, and I wanted to expand on a point raised. More than a few times it was suggested that if we try to make games for everyone, then our games will become easier.

However there is a big difference between accessibility and easiness. Making your game accessible could make your game easier, but accessibility does not preclude difficulty in the slightest. This is best explained by example.

Super Hexagon

Super Hexagon has two controls: move left and move right. It is clearly an accessible game — a new player could easily pick up the game and play it without any confusion.

However, it has just about one of the steepest difficulty curves of any recent game, especially on mobile. Lasting even a few seconds is extremely difficult until you get the hang of the controls and timing. Once you get into the flow and play for a while, you still get that brilliant feeling of mastery.

Super Hexagon is a great example of a game that is accessible, but difficult. The only needed skills to play are a fast reaction time and a bit of spatial orientation. Because of this, Super Hexagon is also a great example of a game with minimal assumed knowledge.

The Incredible Machine (Series)

For those unfamiliar, The Incredible Machine is a game where the player builds or completes Rube Goldberg Machines ranging from simple few-step processes to large, complex machines.

Even with the complexity in the mechanics and level design, the game is very accessible to even a novice game player. Firstly, the mechanics are naturally intuitive (skeuomorphism): everything moves just as you would expect in real life. Bowling balls fall, mice run to cheese, and seesaws ... saw(?). These are naturally relatable mechanics that don't take more than a few seconds to 'get'.

Additionally, the controls make use of simple drag and drop — something that vast majority of users are already comfortable with.

Yet at the same time, this accessibility doesn’t sacrifice any of the depth or complexity that the series is known for. This is one of my favorite games and a great example because it shows how we don’t have to water down our gameplay or mechanics in order to make our games accessible.

For a slightly more modern take on this style of game, see the game The Fantastic Contraption.

Intriguingly, it is often the games we see as complex that are the most accessible. This is one of the reasons The Sims and Farmville became so huge— the only requirements to play are basic familiarity with a computer interface. Compare this to even a simple game such as Mario which requires learning initially unintuitive skills (which keys to press, jumping, side-perspective physics, correctly timing button presses, etc). More specifically, there is a distinct difference between the playable complexity and the underlying mechanical complexity in a game. Simulation games such as Sim City might be a complex knot of systems and mechanics, but the complexity of actually playing the game is quite low. While high playable complexity isn't always a huge barrier, it is useful as a game designer to be aware of these concepts. Otherwise you may find your intended audience has a tricky time adjusting to your "simple" mechanics.

This isn't to say that there isn't a reason to build complex, inaccessible games. However, as game designers, we should always have accessibility at the back of our minds, helping to mold design to adapt to ever-broadening numbers of players.

The last few years has seen a huge growth in the number of people picking up games for the first time. It's worth your time to take a moment to impress them.

Make Games for Everyone

John Rogers Oliver — Mon, 17 Mar 2014 01:29:43 GMT

There is a significant amount of assumed knowledge in most popular games.

I once tried to introduce a non-gamer friends to the wonderful world of independent games. Being the quintessential indie-game, Braid seemed like the best way to give them a taste of the medium and its potential.

The game opened, many complements were made about the beautiful graphics and sound, and she arrived at one of the opening puzzles. The solution requires the player to jump on the heads of both monstars, propelling yourself to a height higher than can normally be reached.

And my friend couldn't do it. It wasn't that she didn't understand the puzzle; her muscle memory and coordination simply wasn't yet built. To complete the challenge she needed to

Understand the movement patterns of enemies.
Time the first jump to land on top of a monstar.
Have the fine motor skills to control the character in the air to land on the second moving monstar.
Manipulate the character to the puzzle piece at the center.

The act of jumping on two moving objects in series requires a great deal of timing and coordination that doesn't necessarily come natural.

Watching my friend struggle was frustrating. How can we expect games to become a widespread medium when so many games exclude non-gamers?

Imagine you're watching a movie in a foreign language (without subtitles). You'll be able to understand the plot and some of the dialogue, but your experience would be one of comprehension, not one of immersion. Similarly, it's hard to imagine my friend being able to get the full experience of Braid, much less a game like Portal or even Journey.

I'm not saying we should do away with games of skill. Any game accessible or not can have components of skill. All I suggest is that as we design our games, we consider a wider audience. Ask yourself questions like "Is it fundamentally necessary to add platforming challenges to my game?" and "Who might these challenges exclude?".

We should strive to make games that don't rely on this assumed knowledge of the medium to engage audiences. If games are to succeed as a serious medium on the public stage, we need a large selection of games that can engage without requiring the implicit skills of jumping on goombas or manipulating FPS control.

See my follow-up post.

Exposition

A Stranger Gravity - Team — Sat, 15 Mar 2014 20:45:32 GMT

A Stranger Gravity is a small group of friends making games in upstate NY. We chose our name for a few reasons.

One of the main goals of our work is to question, prod, and otherwise subvert the established norms that we observe in games. Criticality is paramount. This is not out of any wish to antagonize players or creators of games. We love games. We want to see the medium grow and to achieve that we believe it is important to question, to make things strange. Strangeness allows us to see things clearly and not just see familiar patterns. Even something as fundamental as gravity we would make a little stranger for the purpose of better understanding it.

Another goal of ours is to realize the potential of games as mediators of positive personal interaction. Though games are by no means the only interactive art medium (what medium isn't, really?) they are the one most explicitly oriented towards facilitating interaction. We believe games hold amazing potential for creating bonds among people, a sort of gravity among strangers.

With introductions out of the way now, welcome! Here you'll find our thoughts about games, art, software development, and anything else we can shape into coherent thoughts.