[HN Gopher] Inside Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator's delib... ___________________________________________________________________ Inside Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator's deliberately designed friction Author : bpierre Score : 69 points Date : 2022-02-07 17:45 UTC (5 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.gamedeveloper.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.gamedeveloper.com) | the_af wrote: | Some thoughts; note it's not my intention if some sound mildly | antagonistic: | | What other examples of "friction" are there in this game besides | that some organs in your inventory may eat other organs? That's | just a single example but I don't see anything else mentioned. | | What's the difference between "friction" and just challenges in a | game (or good old plain "difficulty"). I understand many casual | click-and-wait games in the last decade essentially autoplay, and | there's no way to lose: you just click, and wait (or expedite the | wait by making a micropayment), and that's all there is to them. | Has this become so much the norm that the concept of a game that | can be difficult, or requires skill, or where you can lose, is | surprising? | | Are UI limitations themselves a sort of friction? That's a | concept I can get behind: one of my absolute favorite games is | "Papers, Please!", which effectively deploys cumbersome UI as a | gameplay element. You are bureaucrat and most of your game area | is your desktop, which is tiny, and you must shuffle papers and | overlapping game elements in that limited space under stress and | with a time limit -- and the experience is _great_ , if | frustrating. So if friction is this -- a conscious way to limit | the player's interaction with the game, in ways that enhance and | add challenge to the gameplay experience -- then I'm ok with the | term! | andy_andy_ wrote: | Here's a twitter thread from Xalavier Nelson Jr. about this in | more detail: | https://twitter.com/WritNelson/status/1470118973580664834?s=... | the_af wrote: | Thanks, it indeed adds more detail! | | I'm not convinced every bit of frustrating UI is good | "friction". The author mentions many old games, but to be | honest, even as a retrogamer I find going back to some clunky | UI decisions of old games so frustrating it impedes my | enjoyment of those games. | | I think some "friction" is indeed useful, and that the | convenience of a modern UI is sometimes detrimental to the | gameplay experience. To name another example, also from Lukas | Pope (hey, fanboy here!) in "Return of the Obra Dinn", the | player is an insurance inspector unravelling the mystery of a | merchant ship that returned without crew. There is no way of | teleporting between spots in the ship, even if it would be a | modern and convenient UI: the author has said he wanted to | recreate the feeling of walking inside a medium size ship, | and teleporting would have destroyed that feeling. | | However, the extreme of "sometimes the UI makes you misclick | or doesn't respond accurately" would be frustrating for no | good gameplay role. It seems the issue described in that | twitter thread, of clicking on an item but it got sold so it | got swapped with another one at the last second, and you end | up buying the wrong one, is borderline frustrating for no | good reason. | | A player _could_ accuse the author of being lazy, e.g. "you | just didn't think this through and now you want to claim bugs | are features", whereas the limited UI in a game like "Papers, | Please!" -- like it or hate it -- is evidently intentional, | and there's no mistaking that. | bulek wrote: | Interestingly, the article is not about Star Sector. | austinl wrote: | When I read the title, I thought the article would be about | Rimworld (perhaps the most efficient way to make money in that | game) | | https://www.reddit.com/r/RimWorld/search/?q=organ%20harvesti... | vanderZwan wrote: | By the way, this game made the rounds recently for actually | having Kinect 2.0 support[0]. And of course within a month | someone actually recently beat the game this way[1]. Much to the | surprise of the developers who did not at all design the game | around it and basically hacked the support together in the span | of five hours. | | [0] | https://steamcommunity.com/app/1507780/discussions/0/3192486... | | [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTZOLbW6XNU | hoseja wrote: | I thought this was gonna be about Rimworld. | Arrath wrote: | You are not alone. | cpjreynolds wrote: | I'm so glad it wasn't just me. | unfocussed_mike wrote: | Is this headline one of those "trip up a Turing Test contestant" | things? | | Because if it is I'm a confused app. | tasha0663 wrote: | The italics in the title were lost | MauranKilom wrote: | In this case, the capitalization of the words is very helpful | in determining that there is a title in the middle of that | title. | unfocussed_mike wrote: | I was making a funny but yes ;-) | harblcat wrote: | The game's name is "Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator" | kurthr wrote: | I read other postings as well, and maybe it's just quirky | phrasing (of an admittedly odd topic) or ESOL, but there is a | GPT ring to it. | unfocussed_mike wrote: | Yep! | sidibe wrote: | The way he describes friction reminds of the book Anathem by Neal | Stephenson. Good book with a giant obstacle of tons of made up | vocabulary. I read that a long time ago, and now I'm not sure how | much I enjoyed the story/characters and how much of it was just a | different level of immersion and satisfaction from getting | through the friction. | giraffe_lady wrote: | I've never really heard it talked about explicitly so I don't | have vocabulary for it but I think playing with this is a | fairly common device in fiction. It also fills a similar role | as throwing a bunch of languages/writing systems or fiction | formats does at you does. I'm thinking of 'always coming home' | and 'the last samurai.' Each kind of disorients you at first | and obscures parts of the books, but then is rewarding as you | learn them and reveal those elements. | | Definitely notable when it's tweaked up really high like | stephenson likes to do, but I think that's a knob a lot of | authors twist to varying degrees. | austinl wrote: | If you liked Anathem, I'd recommend reading Gene Wolfe's | series, The Book of the New Sun [1]. I didn't quite like it the | first time, but decided to reread the series because I kept | thinking about it a year later. The world is deep, and Wolfe | does a great job of revealing parts of it, bit by bit. | | The use of vocabulary in the series is so unique that someone | produced a companion dictionary called the Lexicon Urthus [2]. | There's also a great podcast called Alzabo Soup, that covers | the series in depth, chapter by chapter. | | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_the_New_Sun [2] | https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/5970607-lexicon-urthu... | [3] https://www.alzabosoup.com | pickettd wrote: | As an additional data point - I've read Anathem multiple | times and have loved it every time but I read The Book of the | New Sun series and really disliked it (though to be fair, I | only read TBotNS series once). But I know that TBotNS gets | great reviews. So as always with books, your mileage may | vary. | gameswithgo wrote: | It took me about 3 years of off and on attempts to get past | page 20 or so, but it was worth it when I finally did. | Eventually the lingo clicks. | schnevets wrote: | I haven't played this game, but I'll definitely add it to my | watchlist from this insightful conversation. | | I had an interesting experience with friction playing the Retro | Bowl (football) and Retro Goal (soccer) games on my iPhone. I | don't usually play sports titles, but they build an interesting | feeling where you just can't win 'em all. If you are building a | franchise, some matches will be impossible to win, so you just | need to try your damndest to lose less. While action games will | warp you to a checkpoint when you die and roguelikes will bring | you back to the beginning, these games give you a penalty and let | you proceed. It's a fun procedural narrative when you have an | abyssal record, pissed off investors/fans, and a team with great | potential, but low morale. | | Unfortunately, these games are single player but F2P, so there is | a tempting micro-transaction of spending $2/$5/$10+ to get a | morale boost or funds _. I appreciate the design decisions, but | it does make me think the game traps you into failure until you | spend some cash. | | _ I had to admit that I spent real money in Retro Goal. I | actually justified it by pretending I had to take Qatari funding | to keep my Premier League team afloat. | DylanSp wrote: | I'm guessing they're a step up in complexity, but the Football | Manager series might be up your alley. Especially starting in | the lower leagues, there's going to be a similar dynamic, where | your semi-pro team just isn't going to be able to win | everything out of the gates. | schnevets wrote: | I have had some fun with Football Manager, and it does have a | similar vibe of "letting the story play out". However, the | Retro games allow you to actively control players in the | match itself, instead of only being the manager like in FM. | | That's the cool thing: an extremely skillful player may | thrash an opponent and earn a big reward, but in a different | situation may only be able to "avoid disaster". I feel like | this is similar to real-life, but isn't really applied in a | lot of games. | LightG wrote: | Last line, hilarious. | duxup wrote: | Maybe I've had good luck but I've run across more f2p games | that have all the trappings of dark patterns and having to pay | just to win and ... they're actually good games and skill wins | over pay to win. | | I wish there was a good way to classify a "f2p... but | reasonably balanced " game. | schnevets wrote: | You are absolutely correct that the genre is maturing more | than many gamers realize. Many gaming pundits that I follow | seem to get caught in a particular game, and it changes their | perspective of the format as a whole. For example, I have | been hearing a lot of praise for Final Fantasy: First Soldier | lately. | | I actually think something similar to the Gartner hype cycle | applies [1]. Any shovelware became profitable during the | Zynga/King heydays, but quality declined and the ecosystem | become more competitive. We are now hitting a point where | some quality is needed to distinguish ones self. | | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle | the_af wrote: | Do you have examples of good F2P games? I'd like to take a | look. | | To me, a bad pattern -- usually done by F2P games, but I | don't think it's mandatory for them to use it -- is both the | mindless grind ("am I having fun with this, or just clicking | stuff?") and the pay-to-skip aspect. To me the latter is the | worst, an admission by the game developers that their game is | boring and the only way to get to the "good parts" is to | spend money to fast-forward them. Usually there aren't even | any good parts, it's all skippable. | schnevets wrote: | I have had a lot of fun with Brawl Stars. Supercell got a | bad wrap because Clash of Clans was so frequently mimicked, | but they clearly have some passionate designers. | MWil wrote: | I had a similar urge in Retro Bowl but it wasn't based on my | impression that I was being "trapped" into failure unless I | spent cash so much as that's what legitimately happens when | there's a finite game clock. The Green Bay Packers for example, | can absolutely take up the last 9-10 minutes of the game in | real life leaving you with 30 seconds for a hail mary strategy. | That's a real life pressure that I felt in that game where the | CPU has the ball and the lead. | rhn_mk1 wrote: | > and roguelikes will bring you back to the beginning | | I think the best roguelikes are the ones who let you fail and | then proceed limping. Or maybe the best games in general, since | I'm not sure if Rimworld counts as a roguelike. Either way, to | start from the beginning in a good roguelike means to have made | a chain of bad decisions. | brimble wrote: | That's more a quality of the "rogue lite" subgenre, no? Which | I do personally prefer to the traditional kind. Though "fail | but keep going" can go very wrong, in the case of something | like FTL, where you can easily have "lost" by the end of the | first or second area due to a bad roll, but still manage to | limp all the way to the end (with no hope whatsoever of | winning). An early "game over" would be preferable there to | keep new players from wasting their time on doomed-in-the- | first-15-minutes attempts that won't even be good for | learning purposes (the way you have to play when you're | already dead but don't know it yet and are just trying to | maintain forward movement, is very different from what you do | when you're on anything resembling the path to victory, in | that game). | bentcorner wrote: | Reminds me of the intentional friction in Red Dead Redemption 2. | When you go through a house to take things, you have to literally | see your character pick things up before it can be placed in your | inventory. There is no auto-collection in this game. | | The result is a slower-paced game where you really feel like some | guy in the outdoors cooking skinned rabbits on a stove and | picking your way through an abandoned cottage in the countryside. | | R* could have easily not designed this friction into the game but | it adds to the ambiance. To contrast this would feel very out of | place in GTA, which thrives on a frenetic, chaotic experience. | meristohm wrote: | Since I care about memorable stories that emerge through play, | convenience is not king. It's a difficulty balance to strike, as | we all have different frustration tolerance and different reasons | for playing games in the first place. I've always been an | explorer in games, and I used to care more about being powerful. | Now what little free time I spend in games is less about the | (illusion of the) end goal and more about the escape into a | low/no-stakes arena where the journey matters most and I don't | much care if this moment is the last I'll ever spend in this | game. I'm trading time and some light decision-making practice | for memories, both solo and with friends. | TMWNN wrote: | >Since I care about memorable stories that emerge through play, | convenience is not king. | | As an example, I think the biggest mistake Blizzard made with | _World of Warcraft_ is a) adding flight, and b) making flying | so easy. | | a) devalues the hard work developers and artists put into | gorgeous scenery, because those flying high overhead will miss | much of it. b) destroys much of the gameplay when outdoors | (where most flying occurs), because it's far too easy to (say) | hover straight down near some item that needs collecting, grab | it, then take off again VTOL-style. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-02-07 23:00 UTC)