Behind the scenes with the neuroscience of game design | Hacker News Reader

Behind the scenes with the neuroscience of game design

polygon.com

68 pointsjsnell10 comments

> Mechanics that straight-up give you the illusion of their existence are some of my very favorites because they reveal, more than anything else, how much we want to be fooled, and how little it matters what is real and what simply feels real.

There is a quite different take on the same subject matter:

> Zizek suggests [...] that we neither believe nor disbelieve, but rather, that we conditionally believe and allow ourselves to be emotionally affected in the meantime. Far from mere escapism, this is in fact a highly utilitarian method of self-realization. “We need the truth of a fiction,” Zizek concludes, “to enact that which we really are.”

The problem I see with this is that if the illusion is ever shattered (because you make a jump you know you shouldn’t have or vice versa), then not only is the effect lost, but likely the player will distrust the game and the satisfaction of accomplishment in the game is gone forever.

I like some games (eg Dark Souls) because I know that I can overcome challenges through my own perseverence and skill. If I ever feel that it wasn’t my doing, then the game suddenly becomes completely worthless to me. The first time I battled the final boss in Dark Souls 3 DLC 2, I was playing on NG+2 and it took about a week of after work play to finally take him down. It was exillerating because I knew that I was a better player (at that fight, at least) at the end of the week than I was at the beginning. For example, I was able to dodge attacks with ease that at first I felt like they were un-dodgeable. What do you think will happen if I ever found out that the game became subtly easier over time and let me win, instead of my own skill improving? I’d feel cheated...

I will say that the Doom example -- where the last bit of health is counted as more as the rest of your health bar combined -- doesn't come as a surprise for me as I did feel that I could get away with just charging into the fray and dancing around all the enemies and my health bar would drop super quick but then somehow I was able to not lose that last bit of health as I'm charging through everything or running away from everything to find some brief cover before coming back in.

The game really wants you to charge and meleeing the weakened enemies to death (as a melee kill is the only way you will get health or ammo back, as it springs out of them), so they pretty much have to do something to help you make that otherwise suicidal charge.

Even knowing this, I don't care, I still think it gives you an awesome feeling. In fact now that I know this for a fact, I will probably get even more reckless in the game.

I'm so happy not all games are like this, I abhor hidden or unfair mechanics. Even if you sometimes get one-shotted "out of the blue" in, say, Path of Exile, you can be sure game didn't "help" you, there is a crystal clear explanation of every mechanic in Wiki and your 90 lvl hardcore char IS your and your skill achievement.

Every game mist do this, of course. Hitboxes are not (and can't be, and shouldn't be) perfectly accurate reflections of the target. Firing arcs are compressed down to the resolution of the game. Random chances aren't really random. Etc. what game designers realized long ago is that tuning these necessary approximations makes for a better game if 'more fun' is a stronger criteria than 'more accurate simulation of a usually-imaginary situation'. My usual example of this is critical hits in multiplayer games (I usually use WoW and D&D as examples, because they're well known). In D&D there is a chance that each attack is a critical success - an extra good hit. In the simplest versions, this is the 20 result on the 20-sided die, which means that roughly 5% of the time, on average, you get a critical. In WoW, crits do the same thing, but the rule is 'every so often', rather than '1 in 20 chance each try'. The designers of WoW understand that humans like these things to be "unpredictable but fair", so they have effectively a timer for crits; if you don't get a critical hit in a certain elapsed time, your chance goes up, until eventually it reaches certainty. This makes critical hits regular but. It predictable.

If the game has dynamic difficulty mechanics but applies them fairly to everyone playing, isn't your relative success or failure compared to other players still a matter of skill?

Just adding the word "neruoscience" does not make an article about neuroscience. This is deceptive use of the term.

One could almost say that it is a form of bait, that is trying to get someone to click on it.

You can exploit this in for example poker games that is rigged so that first time players will win.

Yes though I'd probably recommend exploiting this in games that are slightly less regulated if you enjoy being free from prison...

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