Awesome By Proxy: Addicted to Fake Achievement | Hacker News Reader

Awesome By Proxy: Addicted to Fake Achievement

pixelpoppers.com

After 6 months of playing WOW, I finally got bored. I looked back at that time and thought, "What could I have accomplished with 6 months of free time?" Learned an instrument? Written an application? Dragged my fat carcass to the gym and lost some weight?

That was early 2005, and I haven't played a video game since (other than some GNUbg and a few hours of Street Fighter IV). I'm not entirely sure I've used my free time as wisely as I could have, but I know I didn't waste it killing boars.

This is what I need to tell people when I try to explain my love for racing games (and motorsports in general). To me, it really is the epitome of a mastery-based genre, especially when dealing with time attacks. Multiple failures with incremental improvements is absolutely required - "I need to do that lap in 1:30 and I did it in 1:36; if I brake later on the second turn, maybe I can bring it down to 1:34.4". Check results, adjust strategy, and repeat.

For a real-life example check Top Gear's visit to the Bonneville Salt Flats: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrKPPdTuk8I. "To reach our targets we'll have to get the wheelspin off the line exactly right. Every gear change, exactly right. We'd have to get our line in the salt, exactly right. Every bit of the run would have to be perfect."

I have a friend who is working on breaking a motorcycle land-speed-record (http://bonnevilleproject.wordpress.com/) who was the first person to explain this to me. It's easy to dismiss drag racing as "build a big engine and step on it" but as he demonstrated (through examples like you have provided) any one thing can be broken down into millions of variables, and to compete you have to be willing and able to tweak at this level to rise above the obvious improvements (which quickly become commodity).

A related (but from a developer point of view) blog post by Jeff Vogel: http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2009/11/make-your-game-easy-t...

It is really interesting to see these posts come out just days apart - I wonder if there is any cross pollination there.

topgear always bugs the hell out of me. To see a real racing film:

http://www.hulu.com/watch/79438/on-any-sunday

I don't believe my enjoyment of CRPGs with slim-to-nil skill requirement comes from any sort of achievement-orientation; instead, it's just a simple variable-schedule addiction mechanism—I pull the lever long enough, lights flash. I don't enjoy the kind of lights slot machines have, but lights that tell a story I enjoy quite a bit. In its effect it's quite like a parent telling their child they'll have to wait for the next night to hear the end of their bedtime story.

When I was young I would invite my friends over, and they would play the games—I would simply watch them, and offer strategic advice when I could (which I gleaned from reading the included instruction manuals that they usually ignored.) Thinking back, I got just as much out of this experience as actually playing them[1] myself, if not more, due to the pair-programming-like social interaction of pilot and navigator. The variable enforcement schedule was still there, as there would be times that they were stuck, and, by empathy, I would feel stuck too. I was two levels removed from the game-world, only able to direct my friend to direct the character, but it was still just as fun.

I still play these games, already knowing their plots, just because I can immerse myself in the game-world's atmosphere by deviating in any direction from the "move the plot forward" one. It's a bit like taking a guided tour through a sandbox game; when someone points out a lion, you can stop the bus and ride it, then get back on toward the next stop. Even then, though, I know it's really just a movie, and none of the "scenes" I'm creating for myself would make it past editing.

If you find a lot of yourself in that description, by the way, I'd recommend checking out the Let's Play Archive[2] from SomethingAwful. Basically just people being your buddy and playing games with you, sometimes doing MST3K-like additions to the narrative to make the presented stories even more compelling.

[1] "Them" as in CRPGs. I would not compare for a moment the fun of watching someone play a skill-based game to actually playing it; the feelings are orthogonal.

[2] http://lparchive.org/LetsPlay/

Here is an article from a few years back that addresses this: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20060222/sirlin_01.shtml

It's main points are is games like WoW teach the wrong lessons, like "investing a lot of time in something is worth more than actual skill". This addresses MMOs more specifically, but relates to the larger point raised by the pixelpoppers article.

It's main points are is games like WoW teach the wrong lessons, like "investing a lot of time in something is worth more than actual skill".

For the vast majority of our fellow humans, this is exactly the lesson they should learn to prepare for whatever they are likely to do for the rest of their lives. It's a vanishingly small proportion of the population that cares about cultivating a skill beyond "good enough", and that includes a greater majority than you'd probably expect of programmers, academics, and people in other "thinking" professions as well. Plenty of people need little more than a stable income and a few loved ones around them to be happy.

And it's not necessarily a bad thing: shoot for mastery if that's what you feel compelled to do, but if you don't feel you have what it takes, carve out a comfortable niche and try to be happy in other ways. Everyone evaluates their success against a different metric, and we should never be so arrogant to assume that our personal metrics are valid when we measure others.

my grades tended to be either A's or F's, as I either understood things right away (such as, say, calculus) or gave up on them completely (trigonometry)

Me too. I used to think it was cool to make no effort at all but still come first - although, away from school, I put a lot of effort into coding, and was really proud of seeing deeper, solving difficult problems and getting results.

In changing this, one concept I've used is: value inputs, not outputs.

Side note: if one places RPG's in the same category as books and movies (in which the reader identifies with the protagonist), they can be seen as having a mastery orientation...

Josh Waitzkin (the kid from Searching for Bobby Fischer) wrote a book called the Art of Learning and he talks a lot about the difference between these two modes of learning. He calls it Entity versus Incremental intelligence. (Really good cliff's notes on the book by Derek Siver are here: http://sivers.org/book/ArtOfLearning). He's even harsher on entity knowledge-ists -- they crumble under the pressure. It's a good theory to explain why some of the brightest kids I knew in high school have done nothing with their lives since: they are afraid to mess up their 'undefeated' academic records.

As a side note, I found this article really interesting in the context of the recently released Demon's Souls. Despite being a fringe title with essentially zero marketing, it's expected to sell 250,000 copies by the end of the year. Why is it so successful? It breaks the conventions set by most console RPGs in that leveling up only helps you a little bit, and you really need to gain skill to advance.

So it's much, much more difficult than just about any modern console game I've played, and yet it's hugely successful. This really seems to suggest that there's a hole in the market for games catering to mastery-oriented gamers.

"Hugely Successful" -- compared to CoD MW2 at 13 million units, Demon's Souls is a drop in the bucket. I do agree that there is a niche for mastery-oriented gamers. MW2 allows a faux "leveling" that unlocks trivially different weapons, but the ranking in the individual play sessions is based on skill.

Isn't the entire multiplayer FPS market based on player skill? Maybe there's a hole in the RPG market, but not the overall game market.

Multiplayer FPS is based on social interaction, and skill is a close second for that.

Edit: Also, RTS is extremely skill-based

A good article, but I'm wary of the idea that you can solve the problem by spending just as much time, only on a different kind of solo computer game.

Solo computer games are fun for recreation* but until the AI in them starts approaching humans levels they will never challenge you the way real people can. Learning a martial art, studying math/computer science or playing a team sport (even if it's a LAN strategy game) seems to me a much better way to build muscles (physical, mental, social).

*but playing them too much is probably a sign of akrasia... http://lesswrong.com/lw/15w/experiential_pica/

However games which train actual working memory (e.g. Dual N-Back) may be an exception.

I'm not sure how well genre maps to his argument, though I'd agree 'difficulty' as a distinct axis fits fairly well.

Yes, the Gygax/Arneson-style advancement system, when applied in CRPGs often becomes a dynamic difficulty-scaling mechanism. But one needn't look any further than this year's Most Important Game Ever (Call of Duty... 6?) to see similar systems in the most sacred of 'skill based' genres: online, multiplayer, first-person shooter. Put in the time, get power-ups.

Yep, playing your best in COD and leveling up fast in COD are basically incompatible. To play well, you have to be fresh and sharp. To level up fast, you have to keep playing long past the point where you get groggy and start slowing down. More than a few times I forced myself to keep playing until 3am even when I was logging 5 kill / 15 death games, because I knew it would bring me closer to weapons like the PTRS sniper rifle.

I think many action-oriented games are just as guilty of this. Instead of leveling up your character, the skilling-up mechanism is memorizing the hazards in the levels; with enough patience the player memorizes the pattern and repeats back the appropriate response and wins. While this may teach a "pocket-simon" memory skill, it still rewards patience over strategy or reflexes or whatever else might be developed.

Case in point: Touhou.

Some types of RPGs do have another attraction, that appeals to the "Master" style: they give you a single system, and steadily tack options onto it. While your character does improve as a result of this, if the game is well-designed, the difficulty remains roughly constant or increases over the course of the game. This gives you the opportunity to master aspects of the system in more manageable chunks. That is, it takes a complex system that would normally require a tutorial, and spreads the tutorial out over the whole game.

FPS/RPG hybrids often have this, the most notable I can think of being Deus Ex (Bioshock is a passable example, but nowhere near as complex in the endgame). Action and strategy RPGs have this if played in a certain way, though most of them are just really easy to begin with. Roguelikes have this in spades. The combat in pen-and-paper dungeons and dragons can have this.

Console-style RPGs like the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest series usually don't have this. MMORPGs usually don't have this as such; rather, they usually have two almost independent games (beginning-game and endgame).

There are also other options. I've come to enjoy playing RPGs with the deliberate goal of underleveling. Where a performance-oriented player's idea of an ultimate fight is walking up to the end boss and smacking them down in one hit with damage to spare, my ideal battle is every member of my party down but the mage, every expendable expended, with the only option left for the mage to attack with their staff... and that 1HP hit finishes the boss off.

I've never quite experienced this exact ideal, but I've come close. And I've also been beaten, which makes the next time even sweeter when my adjusted strategies carry the day.

This turns the game into a bit of a puzzle. Despite your mentioning them, Final Fantasies have typically been very good at this, if you take the minimal/"easy" game path. Which does mean not doing all the extras, but as FF games get bigger and bigger via copy&paste questing I'm finding this is less of an issue than it used to be. (You can still do the "postgame" stuff if you're that into it.)

The Persona series also involve some skill and some luck; sometimes I find it hard to believe how one error can be the difference between wiping my party out without me touching the enemy and my wiping out the enemy without them touching me. It doesn't seem like it should work that way, but it has happened to me numerous times, where even a well-leveled party for where they are gets themselves wiped out because I had a momentary brain fart and hit the wrong command in the first round. It's a very mathematically unstable system, vs. FF's very stable/predictable one, but great fun.

Indeed, the (early) Final Fantasy series actually becomes quite tactically complex if you limit yourself such that you'll never take an unneeded step except to move toward the plot, use various amenities (inn/shop/etc) or take treasure. Doing so also means you don't end up with a glut of money, disabling you from getting better equipment at every opportunity (but usually often enough that it never becomes a serious problem in-and-of-itself.) Most bosses can be "brute-forced", but they usually also have a strategic weakness that most players might have never even discovered due to their higher-than-required level upon reaching them.

I liked the highly motivational ending, if you lose, in Death Duel for the Sega Genesis:

Your defeat has brought chaos to the Federation. Your cowardice and betrayal shall be known throughout the stars. Your decaying corpse will be an object for ridicule and scorn. Disgrace will follow your family for centuries.

Once adorned and worshipped by all. Your rotting flesh will serve as a reminder of the price of failure.

Oh, the horrible pain of defeat....

Game Over

What an excellent way to explain this!

http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/ (2007) has the best account of this effect that I've seen.

one page version: http://www.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&...

I play tabletop RPGs which could be considered fake achievement. The types I play however reward creativity and problem solving so I think they have merit.

Quake has taught me more about how to confront pressure and competition than my entire academic career.

Quake gave me a sense of direction when I was a teenager. Before that I had either walked very short distances or been driven everywhere. My sense of direction meant I could figure out that this street was parallel to that street etc. but it was not based on cardinal directions. When I started using a map during college was when my sense of north aligned with north.

In silicon valley it's interesting because people sometimes define north/south as parallel to the freeway north/south 101. It actually runs ~east/west where I am.

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