Why Sonic the Hedgehog is 'incorrect' game design | Hacker News Reader

Why Sonic the Hedgehog is 'incorrect' game design

theguardian.com

52 pointsklez58 comments

IMHO the article is right that Sonic is a terrible platformer, because it's not a platformer. It's a speedrun game. It's all about memorizing the map and being able to make twitchy inputs to get the biggest rewards. It's a fundamentally different kind of game than Super Mario Brothers, even though they look superficially similar.

I definitely agree with your point, though I'd recast it slightly away from "twitchy"/"speedrun"/map memorization and towards the thrill of things being fast and disorienting. [1] Sonic involved lots of bright lights, fast animation, and noises. It was fun because everything ran out of control sometimes, or at least seemed to, and I think this, aside from considerations of wanting to optimize for efficiency of solution, was a large part of its joy. (I say "seemed to" because I remember elements of levels that blasted you through loops and walls at dizzying speed, but in practice served as just a rail that took you from point A to B.)

I didn't realize before I read this article that the design of Sonic (even excluding Sonic Spinball) was driven by pinball, though it makes tons of sense in retrospect. Pinball's got the same thrills; you're constantly in an unstable state, not really learning a puzzle so much as trying to manage a high-degree of chaos before you inevitably get thrown off the horse. It's a different brand of fun than the article's "correct" game design, less/more appealing to different people and less/more appealing when you're in the wrong/right mood.

[1] "Ilinx" in the taxonomy of Roger Callois's "Man, Play, and Games," though a personal caveat that I didn't really enjoy that book.

Oh yeah, that line about it being influenced by Pinball gave me one of those "of course it was" moments where something has been obvious forever but you never noticed it.

Bumpers, spinners, bouncers, Sonic himself when he gets going... It's semi-linear pinball.

> Sonic Spinball

Which, ironically, is possibly the slowest and most plodding Sonic game. It should have just been endless variations on Casino Night Zone.

I can still hear the Casino Night Zone and Mystic Cave Zone music in my head. My sister and I would try to play through all of Sonic 2 on our genesis in her room waiting for Christmas day. It made us so happy to beat it. Sometimes we'd take a break because the genesis would heat up and start to make sonic run in slow motion. Thanks Sega.

But Sonic fails as a speedrun game too. There's always some slow moving platform you need to time jumps around that breaks a thrilling run through a level. Not to mention that finding the chaos emeralds is almost impossible if you just plough through each level.

Chaos emeralds are just achievements they don't impact game play.

Yes they do, collecting them enables you to turn into Super Sonic (in Sonic 2+)

Article is in reference to the original game where they just change the ending.

Isn't one of the thrills of speedrunning figuring out how to time some action 5 screens ago so the platform is in exactly the right place when you get to it?

And that's one of the things they actually improved in the Sonic Adventure series: they placed Homing Attack targets in just the right places throughout the level so if you've gotten good at the game, you'll be able to hit them in succession without ever touching the ground/falling out.

I'd agree with you on the most recent 3D outings, however, the 2D Sonic games from the MegaDrive/Genesis era had a lot of solid skilled platforming with speedy parts interspersed throughout the level as a reward, not as the core gameplay mechanic.

It's a hybrid really. It's a speed runner with platform elements (or vice versa, really).

But yes, fundamentally quite different in goal and style.

Or perhaps people get quickly tired of the same formulaic garbage. Endless superhero movies in every scene that go exposition, cgi action, witty one liner. Repeat.

That nearly every 3 minute pop track follows the same formula as the scenes in every James Bond movie.

Some things are just popular. Snakes and ladders technically isn't a game. You have ZERO agency in the outcome of events but it's based upon a game that's been played at least since the Indus Valley Civilisation 3000 BC. It's when committees and statisticians get involved that the fun goes away. Hence the endless reboots and sequels of exponentially more funding yet almost always fall short of the originals.

>"Snakes and ladders technically isn't a game. You have ZERO agency in the outcome of events but it's based upon a game that's been played at least since the Indus Valley Civilisation 3000 BC."

I have to wonder if that was true back then. Did they have "fair" dice, or was there room for influencing the results or otherwise benefiting from knowledge of the imbalance? This could be either by choosing between dice for each roll, betting on the outcomes midgame, or getting the desired roll more often than usual.

A lot of strategy games and RPGs suffer from the same.

Starcraft II for instance was a lot more fun IMO when it was new and the strategies hadn't been refined. I remember wasting a ton of time/resources turtling, building a giant mass of carriers and then steam-rolling the map, just because I could and thought the visual of a dozen carriers sweeping the map would be awesome (it was). Good luck doing that now in a public server.

Too many games have obsessive fans that are hell-bent on discovering the mathematically perfect way to play a game, and once the one or half-dozen working formulae are discovered, that's it. No one else can play any other way and hope to win, and that really takes the creativity and fun out of it. I'm not sure where these people come from, I got into video games as a distraction from math homework, not an extension of it. :P

Yeah, I remember when StarCraft 1 was newer and playing online was always weird experiment. There was an odd satisfaction to being beaten by something you'd never seen before after a hard fought 2 hours on a map draining all the minerals. Never has a 'GG' been so genuine.

This is typically what keeps me from playing/enjoying multiplayer games. This isn't meant to be a "final judgment" on all MP games, but in general, the tendency seems to be toward min/maxing which leaves a lot less room for the experimentation and occasional accidental lucky breaks you catch where everything just falls into place.

I don't mean to suggest that for a lot of people, discovering and testing these min/max strategies isn't fun and satisfying (like solving a puzzle with the "perfect" solution) but it's not really for me.

See also: diablo 3. There are only a handful of combinations of gear that enable actually being able to kill stuff in a reasonable amount of time + survive on the highest torment difficulty. Most of those end-game builds with high enough damage + survivability don't even use the unique play styles of the characters -- necromancer and witch doctor don't use pets.

I guess climbing a top100 ladder (or even top 1000) is, for some, also a game, and maybe just one I don't particularly enjoy. I see this in Overwatch too -- there are particular team compositions which work well in certain scenarios (mostly informed by the pros), and deviating from one of those cookie-cutter strategies will get you a tongue lashing on voice chat. The fixed 6v6 teams and smallish chokepoint-centric maps make it possible for one good player on one team to "carry" that team to victory and subsequently make the game pretty unfun for the other team. If your team comp is poorly-chosen (let's say you're attacking and two players want to play snipers), you likely will not win and your team will be frustrated the whole time. Conversely, the opposing team will have an absolute field day pounding you into a fine mist. The game is way too fun to win lopsided matches in. The teams are too small and inflexible to tolerate average players. The matchmaking, despite having a very large pool of active players, is frequently very wrong at making even matches. There are no mods supported, and a server browser (to browse only official servers, mind) is a recent addition, as others also tired of the small choice of variety in game modes (previously just public "screw around, rage quit, throw a match because someone is revealed to be female" or competitive "ultra salty tryhardathon").

I go back to TF2 and have fun for hours not caring about my win:loss ratio. I also previously had tons of fun and a great community in a Quake 3 mod for class-based, red vs blue CTF with large teams (16vs16). I die laughing messing around in Blackwake. I even grind for hours with friends in Diablo. Nothing makes me rage like Overwatch. I usually just get frustrated and stop playing.

Yeah I stopped playing competition-mode overwatch for exactly that reason. I quite enjoy a lot of the Arcade modes (particularly Random Heroes) and occasionally quick-play however. I found that once you hit level 100 the matchmaking seems to only match you with other level 100+ players, which makes it a whole new game even in quick play.

At the same time, I've seen almost no PvP games based on randomness that really end up working. Hearthstone has a huge RNG element - which deck you're up against, what cards you get etc. People minmax their decks from rank 20 and below (out of 25), and while there is some difference in decision making it really doesn't fulfill the dream of having many different viable strategies and the ability to use them - usually 3-5 "meta" decks that everyone knows about are more powerful than most.

Thats why I think co-op games end up being far more satisfying, since they don't have to balance out a player vs player arms race.

For a physical example of one that does, I found I quite enjoy Magic The Gathering draft games (everyone's given 20 mana of their choice then forced to assemble a deck on the spot from a bunch of sealed, random booster packs that get opened and passed around in an orderly fashion).

In most cases you can still make a viable deck, but everyone will have to deal with largely mediocre cards they wouldn't have picked given the chance. Granted the system isn't perfect, but it seems to effectively level the playing field and encourage creative deck-building. Not sure if Hearthstone has an equivalent mode.

They do, and its called arena - It costs $1.50 to do a round and you're out after 3 losses. Its entirely luck based since the only people winning (its a tournament format) are those that get a lot of really good cards.

This really just highlights to me that what it means for a game to "end up working" or for a game to be satisfying can be as subjective as what it means for it to be designed "correctly".

It's also interesting to me that the "meta" in Hearthstone not only can, but does change regularly, when people discover deck archetypes that beat the currently dominant ones. Especially when deck types that fell out of favor at some point show up again later because the decks that countered them too hard also fell out of favor (I think variants of Freeze Mage has done this twice?).

This kind of evolution of the meta happens in lots of games, but of course notably in the ones where players themselves refer explicitly to a meta amongst themselves and keep track of it.

The notion that a work of art could be "incorrect" is absurd on its face. Just because a game (in this case) does not remain confined to accepted norms does not make it "incorrect". The use of this word is pretentious as all hell, as if the author is the be-all-end-all of art criticism.

If one does not like a game, we have a word for that: "bad". There are plenty of bad games to analyze. Why the author picked Sonic the Hedgehog is beyond me.

As he said: it works. Therefore, to twist the word "incorrect" to its breaking point as he does is ridiculous.

The fact that he put the 'incorrect' in quotes indicates that he likely agreed with you on the use of the word and the you probably missed the intent of his use of it.

Unlike 'bad', a subjective word indicating opinion, 'incorrect' is objective: anything can be incorrect according to a certain set of parameters, and the author is selecting a particularly traditional set here from the book in order to frame the discussion.

He's not implying that Sonic is bad. He calls it a masterpiece!

It's quite likely he's also a Lorde fan.

that's literally the point of the article.

In both the cases of the game and the song though, they aren't pure works of art, but also entertainment.

With pop songs and games, there are formulae that, if you just follow them correctly, you are basically guaranteed to make something that is at least mediocre. Breaking the rules is more interesting, but also more risky. For every sonic and every Green Light, there are hundreds or thousands of crappy games and songs that thought the rules didn't apply to them.

Analyzing successful "incorrect" games is interesting because it tries to pin-down the je ne sais quoi that gives them their appeal.

I can find several other examples of games that are "incorrect" in much the same way, and I don't just mean Sonic knockoffs. Doom is pretty much a seminal moment in game design, and it looks nothing like the "ideal" design of Mario. I think the game design principles that are being tossed around here are very, very far from being universal.

It's not even clear that they're correct for the one example they go by. It's difficult to argue that "teaching" is essential to good design; to me it's just important for on-boarding (that the "tutorial" stages aren't canned info-dumps and dreadfully slow, interruptive, and staged events that treat the player as incomprehensibly incompetent).

I'm more inclined to the idea that good design is found in the ability to explore a ruleset, and the ruleset being interesting enough to justify exploring it. The art, music, themes and such all supplement the exploration of that ruleset (or even help define it). Good "levels" push you to explore the ruleset in ideally unintuitive ways, and lays the foundation for further exploration in future levels.

Ideally, the game shouldn't "teach" you how to play. It should simply exist as a world, and its rules, and you'll figure out the rest. Incentivized to explore particular areas of the world/rules, but thats about it.

Bad design comes from limiting your ability to explore. Rules that appear general (applies to all NPCS), but it turns out you can't punch the kids, because. You can normally jump around as much as you want...but this particular area you have to sit down and walk because its movie-time. You can run around as much as you wish, but here there's an invisible wall because you're not at the designated level for it.

Or the lack of things to explore. Poorly designed procedural generation games like No Man's Sky and Borderlands come to mind. The generation rules constantly produce different/new things... with little difference to your actual ability to interact with the world. It gets boring, fast, because it's not affecting the ruleset to any interesting degree. But a proper roguelike on the other-hand has you forced to explore corner cases of the ruleset every time you find a new enemy with some special combination of [dangerous] skills. The roguelike ruleset is potentially interesting (and expansive), and the procedural generation pushes you to explore all its corners. No Man's Sky has a much more limited ruleset, and the generation leads you to explore all its corners... very, very quickly.

And then ofc you have other aspects like compositional rules and feedback loops that allow the player a much freer exploration, of the world, to the point that you have genres defined around it (eg simulations, grand strategies, etc).

Other than the guns where is the procedural generation in Borderlands?

The guns is the only procedural generation, but also where the meat of the marketing and gameplay was meant to revolve around.

ofc, the guns were entirely uninteresting three hours in, and so what you're left with is the relatively weak level design, coop mechanics and mechanically simple enemy design. These would have all probably been fine, maybe even good, if the guns actually offered what they meant to: constantly changing gameplay (and so you'd see interesting combination of native mechanics + the new gun's mechanics).

Instead you just have a weak coop shooter.

I kinda disagree. The first level of DooM starts you off in an open area that's safe to play around in and you have to "choose" to start the first confrontation. The only thing you need to learn in DooM is to shoot and open doors and you learn how to do both things within the first moments of the first level.

Doom also has keys and switches. The map is arguably rather critical as is weapon selection.

Keys and switches work exactly the same way as standard doors, though, so there's nothing really to learn. The only education needed is the notification, which is shown in level 2, that you need a red keycard to open a specific door. The mechanic isn't sufficiently different, though.

I remember doom to this day having some of my favorite multiplayer map levels. Not enough to play one of the modern variants online, not enough people when I've tried. I also remember the original Team Fortress (Quake 1 mod), the first experience with that was a full weekend without any sleep.

Doom used game design principles though. At least Romero hints e.g. in [1] that was the case. ("Golden rule of level design: finish the first level last", classic horseshoe.) In [2] he lists other "core principles" (although it's a bit unclear to me if these were only explicitly formulated later.)

[3] is an in-depth writeup of the classic Super Mario World design principles. [4] argues the recent new Donkey Kong games has gone "beyond" these principles, and invented a new multi-mechanic approach. I don't really agree that this is "better", but it's fairly convincing in that the principles are indeed there.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rV6HlBa88js

[2] https://github.com/anttiviljami/romero-programming-principle...

[3] http://thegamedesignforum.com/features/RD_SMW_1.html

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqHcE6B4OP4

But Doom isn't a platformer...

All great art violates some existing genre conventions — if it doesn't, then by definition it's generic art.

One must first learn all the rules so that one may break them properly.

Sometimes knowing the rules traps you as well, and it would have been better to just seek the pureness of the muse.

In my experience this is critical to advancing the state of the art. Knowing the rules tends to lock one into a 'faster horse' mindset. If you want to invent a car, you're best off being ignorant of horse rules and conventions.

While that may be true for most people, I think that knowing everything about horse rules & conventions would give a car designer an upper hand _if_ that car designer was also the type of person to easily let go of his own presuppositions about things. What I'm trying to say is that there are people who are not held back by knowing what the rules of the game are, because they are not afraid to throw them away, even if learning those rules took a great mental investment.

What conventions did Michaelangelo's David violate?

Probably proportion. David's right hand holding the stone is massive in comparison to his body. It draws attention to the impending conflict.

Wasn't that done intentionally for perspective's sake, to make him look normally proportioned from certain, expected angles?

Using the grandparent's understanding of "generic", art could be generic, yet still exceptionally good/well executed.

To do a common thing uncommonly well brings success.

- Henry J. Heinz

I was reading a comment on a jazz album and it essentially said "expertly done but doesn't move the genre forward so meh."

I think people forget that sometimes you just want a good, standard jazz album.

I loved Sonic on Master System, Game Gear and Mega Drive/Genesis and was completely thrown off guard when I played Sonic Generations on the 360 decades later ("whoa how can anyone keep up with that pace?").

Once you embrace that pacing (which has been there all the time) you'll be able to appreciate that special kind of game/level design. It seems that Team Sonic was able to apply that principle to Quote a good number of titles with the IP.

Back in the days the controller would have been soaked in several people's sweat ofc and there were no persisted save points. If you want to improve on persistence, priorities and quick decision making: Go play these games on their original hardware (or at least don't use the emulator's snapshot abilities).

Another retrospective look at Sonic's design (2014):

http://redlettermedia.com/pre-rec-sonic-the-most-overrated-g...

That was a really good analysis of Sonic.

> Sonic is incorrect game design

Roguelike also require repetition to learn and master, in conjunction with skillful assessment. Games are the exploration of a fixed environment to discover and exploit linear optimizations for abstract goals.

Historically, this has been a training tool for children and students, to prepare for life challenges. e.g. Wargames are for those who are students of war. There's nothing inherently wrong about the game design of Sonic, which is why the conclusion does not fit the stated premise.

I would also like to point out that one of the greatest parts of the Sonic games IMO was the ability to enable the in-game debug mode, allowing edits to the level with various sprites. A definite source of childhood curiosity with gaming/code/design.

http://sonic.wikia.com/wiki/Debug_Mode

For anyone here who wants a very well-made nostalgic dive into the art / feel of Sonic the Hedgehog, namely Sonic & Knuckles, I recommend this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdxQmgC2Bhw

By this logic, all on-rails shooters are 'incorrect' game design.

Green Light is just a bad song.

Or, "Why The Guardian does not understand Sonic games."

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