[HN Gopher] Inside Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator's delib...
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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.
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