Kojima made a GBA game about a vampire hunter who was stronger in the daylight. The cartridge featured a light sensor that could detect if you were playing it out in the sun.
This is a questionable mechanic - I'd even say a useless gimmick that adds nothing substantial to the gameplay.
Dean Hall, the creator of the viral survival sandbox mod DayZ, was obsessed with realism-based immersion, and also tried something similar in his game in 2012. One of the updates tied the in-game time to the real time at the location of the server you were connected to. It also made the moonless and/or cloudy nights impenetrably dark, even GPU gamma correction wasn't able to help you see anything. Considering that the majority of players played the game in the evening, that the game was set in the fictional Balkan country (they only had an hour or so of twilight at best), and that the night vision device was a top-tier item hard to obtain in a survival sandbox, the majority of players just played on servers in distant timezones, preferring huge latencies to playing in the dark.
The update was reverted shortly after that, as it was obvious that it degraded the gameplay quality immensely.
You've made quite the generalization based on one example of a real time MMO. I still acknowledge the artistry behind it in the case of DayZ, and it's even more interesting within the context of Kojima's career.
If the game was designed for it, I could see the advantage of having a synchronous day/night cycle in game for a few reasons.
For instance, an RPG where your time of day combined with in game locations could change what enemies spawn, or characters that get sleepy and less capable after so long, but it should also be able to cause unique time events to happen, and not just spooky Halloween season or Xmas spectacular, either.
Hah, I remember that Day Z sheer darkness. Used it to my advantage once when stuck in an area bristling with well-armed people, navigating solely by structures and trees silhouetted against the stars, stopping in cover to listen, making sure I didn't silhouette _myself_ as I moved. It was fun, and exhausting.
Moving on a night with a full moon was even more terrifying - trying to build up the courage to cross a moonlit field that someone might be watching.
I read Demiurge right after I played the original Deus Ex for that reason. It was a masterpiece.
Haven't had the chance to read anything by Chris Todd yet (the writer/curator of all the snippets you come across within the game, as opposed to the plot itself), but I remember enjoying his in-game style a lot too at the time.
That's double silly as Warren Spector was only marginally involved with Thief for a short time; certainly not the "creator". In his own words: "[I] worked briefly on Thief: The Dark Project (though my impact on that title was, at best, minimal)".
It's not ideal, but it's better than crediting the game entirely to the publisher. Talking about studios can be useful, but then you have to include a year or something since the make up a studio can change radically over time. There are definitely people in the industry that have an outsized influence or a particular style/flavor to their output.
I would argue that it isn't better than crediting the game to the studio. People can look into the game's credits to see who actually worked on it. However when everyone keeps going "Bob made this game", nobody bothers looking into who else. They just become a deity of creation.
I wouldn't say it's just a cult of personality though. Game directors control exactly what makes it into a game, what is made for the game, and ultimately how it turns out. No other individual has anywhere near that level of impact, nor responsibility. You can generally see this quite clearly when those big names leave studios, of which there are countless examples.
Kojima's final game at Konami was Metal Gear Solid V. After he left, Konami shrugged and made Metal Gear Survive. Suffice to say, the non-Kojima metal gear was a flop. Itagaki is another example. He's the creator of Ninja Gaiden, and also ended up leaving Team Ninja after a dispute. His final game was Ninja Gaiden 2, their first game was Ninja Gaiden 3. And again, the reception went from positive, to flop.
And to be clear it's not like these series waxed and waned. Every single Metal Gear game with Kojima received exceptional praise. Similarly for every single Ninja Gaiden game, to a lesser degree. Then they leave, and the series collapse. Obviously far more people work on these games than just the singular name, but if most of these people were replaced with somebody of a similar skillset, the final product would be largely unchanged.
You appear to be calculating something like Wins Above Replacement by saying the only thing that changed between these releases is the director being replaced. But you don't know that for sure. For example, Kojima would have known the most impactful, most critical staff at Konami. When he started his own thing he might have encouraged them to move. If this had happened Konami would have had to complete the new game with a gutted team, which would explain the poor quality.
Of course you can say "well if this is true it only shows that Kojima can attract the best talent to work for him" and sure, that's probably true. But then we can't claim it's all completely Kojima doing the work.
Sure, I think that's a perfectly reasonable point. You'll find quite a lot of name overlap on Death Stranding (Kojima's first independent game) and Metal Gear Solid 5. But rather than appeal to Kojima attracting the best talent, I'd appeal to something else. Kojima has been creating Metal Gear games for nearly 40 years. And while there's naturally going to be some overlap between iterations, it's all liminal.
Go back to the original 1987 Metal Gear on the NES and you'll find 0 overlap except for Kojima. Kojima was a new hire at the time and thrust onto a completely new team on a project already in development. He dramatically shifted the direction of what was being built, and what was born was Metal Gear. And, as would become a recurring pattern for every single title he's been involved in, it was met with phenomenal reception.
I think the truth is somewhere in between. Kojima benefits from relying on a highly skilled team that deserves more credit than they get. At the same time he probably doesn't get enough credit for attracting that talent and creating an environment they can flourish in. If that were easy then anyone would do it.
Hidetaka Miyazaki,for example, is one such “auteur game designer” and it’s very clear when he has had his influence on a game.
Just compare Dark Souls 1 or 3 (which he worked on) to Dark Souls 2 (which he didn’t work on) and Bloodborne (which was created by Miyazaki in parallel with DS2) and you’ll see that his influence on games that he has a direct hand in is massive.
Or for something more relevant, the first and only Metal Gear game released after Kojima was fired by Konami - Meta Gear: Survive - was an unmitigated disaster. Metal Gear Solid 5 was unfinished and flawed, but there’s no denying that it had Kojima’s flourish on it.
That's just author theory applied to video games. Everyone know that games like movies are collective endeavour. The question is: is the final product the manifestation of someone vision?
Sure you'd be stronger, but for those playing without a backlight you'd also be nearly blind. The GBA SP would spare you from struggling to make out anything on the GBA screen under direct sunlight, but the cartage also went in at the bottom facing you and the floor, not at the top facing the outside world which might have made the sensor less effective.
The original wide GBA, as well as the first run of the SP had a reflective screen, and would look wonderful in direct sunlight. It’s only the second gen of the SP which had a backlight (rather than a front light) and could not perform in the sun.
Oh my. I had a GBA that me and my dad modded to be backlit. Boktai was so good on that system. I didn't think about how lucky I was that I could play the game pretty easily.
Much more tame, but when the switch was released one of the first games was 1-2 switch, which was basically a tech demo.
One of the coolest games is 'ball count'. All you do is tilt the controller. The force feedback is so accurate it feels like metal balls are moving inside of it, and you win if you guess how many balls are in the controller.
Never seen anything like it, and it changed how I think about the relationship of sound and what causes a specific sound. I'm trying to remember a TV show that joked about this, about some engineers making a device and a superior asking for the machine to make a different sound. The joke was that the sound any machine makes directly correlates to it's function, but this never made 100% sense to me until I played this switch game.
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Another game that comes to mind (although it might also be a stretch) is F-Zero GX, a Gamecube race game I got into well after the Wii was already released. To unlock every track you had had to take the GC memory card, find a F-Zero AX arcade machine, insert it there and win every race.
This was in 2008, decades after the arcade heyday. I was super lucky I lived in a big city that had an arcade (now closed) that also happened to have this machine. According to my research there were only a few in North America. So I found myself freezing in Toronto winter in my 20's throwing quarters in an arcade machine several nights. This added a lot to the F-Zero experience. (later on I found out I could have unlocked everything at home, but I'm glad I never found out until later). The era of Arcade gaming always spoke to my imagination so I was grateful to have this (belated) experience.
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I can go on. I think all my examples are by Nintendo. Pokewalker comes to mind and also Streetpass. All these ideas really speak to me. The common thread is probably that they all create some connection to the real world.
> To unlock every track you had had to take the GC memory card, find a F-Zero AX arcade machine, insert it there
I don't know in America but least in the EU version, winning the first 4 cups in Master difficulty was enough to unlock the AX cup; no need to go to an arcade.
I was in university when Snake Eater came out and I got to play it when I went home during the Christmas break. I got to The End fight and had to go back. When I came back during March break I didn't have to win the fight because he died.
I hated that one, cause it wasn't game box but disk case, and in game I'd just picked up a disk and spent forever trying to figure out how to look at the case before looking up the answer.
You know the PlayStation Classic mini-console that came out a few years back? They incorporated that puzzle into the console's packaging: the back of the PSClassic's box includes thumbnails for the 20 or so games that come installed, and MGS's thumbnail is just a picture of Meryl's codec convo screen. It cracked me up when I first saw it.
4th wall breaking stuff is cool. A few other big games that break the fourth wall in boss fights: Arkham Asylum (Scarecrow), Undertale (Flowey), Pony Island (Asmodeus.exe). Nier does something similar.
I know I am in an (extreme) minority with lots of people considering it a classic, but honestly while it is creative I always thought that was total bullshit and an example of extremely gimicky game design. It literally made me never play another Kojima game after that.
IIRC, if you take long enough to figure it out, you can call your "support team" in-game and they'll give you hints about trying the second controller port.
(Also I love that this and the comment chain immediately above it are both Kojima games. Can't wait to see what kind of mechanics he throws at us in DS2.)
One of my favorite sites to browse when I'm looking for inspiration is this site of 300 game mechanics: http://www.squidi.net/three/ . Even if I don't copy something verbatim, reading through them starts my brain juices flowing, and I'll remix them with some of my own ideas or combine a couple together to get me unstuck on a problem I'm having with one of my designs.
Is there a similar list of more generic or common mechanics? I've always been curious if a list that contained things like "tiles-based", "roguelike", "rhythm game" would yield interesting results if combined randomly.
There was an attempt to create a taxonomy, basically, of board game mechanics. It was collected into the book "Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design: An Encyclopedia of Mechanisms".
The book "Characteristics of Games" exists as well, that might have a good list in it. It's for all types of games, though, including sports. Richard Garfield (creator of Magic The Gathering) is one of the authors of that book.
There's also Unpub: The Unpublished Card Game, which is a deck of cards that each has a theme, a core mechanism, and game component listed on each card, and you combine cards to pitch a board game design based on it. It's not still in print but you can get a copy cheap (I think I have one somewhere).
Dice Tower did a live show on Youtube where they made a tournament bracket of 64 board game mechanisms and let the audience vote in real time for each match-up. So you can see what the most popular game mechanics are for board gamers from that:
To complete cableshaft's great answer, there is Chris Crawford "on Game Design" that also has a lot of game ideas and particular game mechanics, a very interesting read.
Eternal Darkness for the gamecube had a sanity meter. A bit reduced sanity and you'd literally start seeing things. Even lower and things got weirder... including faking a gamecube reset, faking lowering the volume on your tv (with faked on-screen volume bar), etc. The list of examples [1] is beautiful.
A similar, but dramatically more light-hearted use of such mechanics was Resetti in the original Animal Crossing for the Gamecube. If you shut off your game without saving (either because you were save scumming, or just on accident), then on your next boot a hard-hat wearing mole would hop out of the ground, introduce himself as Mr. Resetti, and scold you. Repeated infractions would make Mr. Resetti become increasingly irate, including some sort of punishment, such as forcing you to type out (using the incredibly tedious joystick-character select) messages of either repentance or praise of Mr. Resetti, or a fake system shutdown.
Each time your opponent scores a hit in pong against you, you get an electric shock. The person first letting to of the metal handle delivering the shocks loses.
Also heat and get your hand whipped.. and the hand whipping is actually the most painful and leaves a permanent mark for few days (so you can keep mocking your visiting friends/colleagues for the rest of their trip :D).
> Dave continues, discussing a P.K. Dick story in which the characters take turns holding their fingers in a cigarette lighter. In the story, they're not burned, because Dick, but you could imagine playing this as a brutal game in our non-Dick universe. In fact I thought I might have heard of people playing exactly this game, but I'm not sure.
Given the amount of influence the book Seven Pillars of Wisdom pretty clearly had on Dune, I wouldn't be a bit surprised if that's a case of the film Lawrence of Arabia (1962) influencing Dune (1965)—that little exchange could plausibly be the seed of inspiration that became the Gom Jabbar scene.
When I was a kid, I remember seeing an arcade cabinet which was decorated with tacky paintings of Uncle Fester, but instead of having a screen with controls it only had metal rod that was like a joystick that you had to hold. It would give you electric shocks of ever increasing power until you gave up, and that was your final score. I always wondered if it ever killed anybody...
I remember Disneyland having pain machines in the 90's. Sounds weird to say, but, yeah, they had these grips that would start to shock you until you let go. I remember them being near other things that took quarters like the fortune teller machine.
Talking about pain tolerance using "Episode 13 of Survivor: Borneo" is (accidentally?) a great example, because underneath the game of pain was an incredible tactical decision by Richard which ultimately won him the game.
(The short version is there were three players left: Richard, Rudy, and Kelly. Rudy was popular, Kelly was a hard competitor, and Richard was sly. If Rudy made the final two, he would win against either of them. Richard and Rudy had long standing deal to help each other, and if Richard broke that then Rudy would vote against him from the final jury, and Richard had burned enough bridges that he needed every vote he could get. By Richard deciding to step down, he made the bet that Kelly would win the challenge and the immunity, and would vote off Rudy, because she would know she couldn't win against him. So Richard made the final two, against Kelly, without burning his friendship with Rudy. And he won.)
As a fan of both drinking contests and chess, I was more interested in the Chess-but-you-can-make-your-opponent-undo-a-move-by-taking-a-shot.
A short term benefit traded for a longer term cognitive disadvantage in a mental game. Unfortunately, I could see it inevitably devolving into a straight-up drinking contest, with the actual chess gameplay only benefitting you by 1 drink (and maybe a longer clock).
That is you make a move, opponent makes a move, you undo your opponent move. Now whose turn is it? is it your turn? where you have effectively moved twice, your opponents turn? but we can't can just let them make the same move, that goes against the spirit of the thing. So perhaps their turn but they can make any move except for the one you undid.
I believe the idea is that you undo their move and they have to play a different move instead. A lot of fantastic chess moments are about one player finding the only move that’s good, and high level chess is largely about creating these incredibly tense board positions where there are a lot of possible moves but only a few are safe. For example, Sesse’s analysis of the last championship game http://analysis.sesse.net/ (can’t link to a specific move, use the bar chart or the Previous/Next hyperlinks to go to “analysis after 58… a3”). This is 50+ moves into a fast paced game and according to supercomputer analysis it is a perfectly tied position. There are two possible moves that keep the game tied or close to tied, and one more possible move that only give up a very slight advantage (0.5 points is roughly “half a pawn’s value” and is close to the limit of what a human player can confidently detect, this moves gives four tenths of a pawn). Every other move gives up 3 points or more (roughly a full piece, like a bishop) - not always immediately, maybe five or ten moves down the track.
Nepo, playing white, makes one of those “bad” moves, theoretically losing the equivalent of almost four whole pawns, a terrible blunder in the eyes of the all-seeing computer. But use the Next link to look at the position in “analysis after 59 Qc7”. There is one move, black Queen to g6, that takes advantage of the “blunder”. There is a second move, black Bishop to f8, that completely cedes the blunder and returns to a mostly-tied position. The third best possible move loses 32 points (going from -4 to +28, which is the equivalent of losing both knights, both bishops, both rooks, and your Queen in a single move - the computer equivalent of saying “you lose the game, it just takes 20 or more turns”). Then there’s two dozen more possible moves, all of which literally lose the game on the spot.
So to recap: one move gets your opponent ahead, one move keeps him tied, and twenty-four moves loses him the entire game. Being able to cut off your finger to undo and prevent that one good move would change the entire dynamic from “a terrible blunder” to “a bold stroke of pure brilliance”.
Of course! It doesn’t have to be verbatim or credit me in any way - if you like the idea, run with it, rephrase it, etc. If you’re familiar with the WTFPL, that’s the spirit of my comments.
Was there a game something like that in “Consider Phlebas”? I thought about mentioning it in the article but decided it wasn't worth the time it would take.
There were body bets in Player of Games. In consider Phlebas they had the game Damage where players bet/lost lives either extra people you 'owned' or your own life depending on the size of the game.
Another perception game is Dive (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/304324/dive), which has a stack of translucent plastic sheets. Some of these sheets have silhouettes of sea creatures on them (fish, sharks, even a whale) and you need to estimate how many sheets down that shark is.
It's not quite pain tolerance, but puts the competitor in duress and wastes their time:
In the winter sport of biathlon (skiing and shooting), if a target is missed, there are penalty laps around a small loop before they can continue. It's partly a time penalty, but also just uses up more of their reserve.
Then there is the steeplechase which is basically running around the track with the misery of running in wet shoes.
Or maybe all of running, really. I was in a running club years ago. Professional coach, and athletes from high schoolers to hobbyists to the world record holder in the 5k. We were at breakfast and one of the hobbyists asked when it stopped hurting so much. The pros laughed and said, "It never stops hurting. It's about making them hurt more."
Now that I think of it, my kids have seen great success in wrestling from the same approach of just being more willing to be miserable than their opponents. It's not simply a matter of being more fit, either. People just give up due to pain at different points.
> It's not simply a matter of being more fit, either. People just give up due to pain at different points.
What’s interesting though is that you don’t know how much pain everyone is experiencing for a given level of fitness. I ran D1 track and cross-country but was not the fastest on the team. So I would often wonder: did I get beat because my teammate was able to withstand more pain than me or because they could run faster with less pain than me? Then on one of our strength training days, we decided to have a planking competition, and I ended up winning. What surprised me though was that there was no correlation between the order of the fastest runners and the order of who lasted the longest planking. Maybe I just had some genetic advantage with ab strength that made it easier for me?
It would be cool if there was some sort of competition where you could measure the perceived pain each person’s brain is experiencing, normalize the pain to be the same for each person, and then see who lasts the longest (this gets into the problem of qualia though, so not likely to happen).
You have to drag to move.
Sounds painful, and it is.
That's really weird and you have to re-learn how to move your character, which can be frustrating and show how used we are to standard movements.
After a few minutes you get used to it and it becomes fun.
I made it when I researched how to "physically" play differently.
Definitely had friends play the "See who can hold your hand in a candle flame the longest"
Also, drywall bingo: there's a wall of drywall that is about to be demolished. Pick a spot near the middle of the wall and headbutt it. If you hit a stud, you lose.
Seaman for dreamcast utilized a microphone in which you would talk to your fish (that also would develop to grow a human head). It relied on voice commands. You could praise it, scold it, order it to clean its tank. In response it would insult you or ask you trivia facts.
The game also used the dreamcast clock to age the fish even when the game was not running. It had an anti-cheat mechanism where it would detect if you altered the clock and would punish the cheater accordingly.
All of them are regularly used in board games and video games, so I have to assume the author is not a huge gamer.
In Lords of Xidit, you have to remember each time a player puts something in the central bank to time when it's worth getting it.
In the just freshly out zelda, you can cross ceilings, but since you are often in caves, you have to approximate the volume of the above structure to figure out where you exit.
In the exceptionally good "Inscryption", you win/lose by tilting a balance 5 ticks in the other direction. There is a bonus item, pliers, that will let you pull one of your teeth out, and put it in the balance to add one tick. The animation and noise are sick.
And it's the mark of great games to have great gameplay, so you can be sure game creators are trying them all. We are not in the 80' anymore, games are crazy.
Give a try to Ark Nova, Great Western Trail or Mind Bug and you will see how vast and diverse the possibilities of gameplay are. That's on board games, so you can image what happens with a computer where you have very little limits. The indie scene is fantastic, I haven't had that much fun since the 90'.
>> Will we ever hear about why the aliens might already know how to play Go?
Which I found a bit more interesting (as an avid board game player).
>> “There is a mathematics game,” said the alien.… “The game involves a screee—" Some word that the autopilot couldn't translate. The alien raised a three-clawed hand, holding a lens-shaped object. The alien's mutually opposed fingers turned it so that Louis could see the different markings on each side. "This is a screee. You and I will throw it upward six times each. I will choose one of the symbols, you will choose the other. If my symbol falls looking upward more often than yours, the artifact is mine. The risks are even."
>> "Agreed," said Louis. He was a bit disappointed in the simplicity of the game.
One mechanic that people tend to hate but I really loved at the time was Word Tendency in Demons Souls.
If you died repeatedly in body form the game got harder as tendency tended to black (dying is frequent in souls games and if you are in body form you have more HP, dying in body form put you at 50% Max Hp and uou had to use a consumable item or kill a boss or invade another player and kill them to get your body back). Killing bosses moved it toward white.
Tougher enemies would appear in black tendencies, but you’d get more experience points. The game was slightly easier in white tendency. Different paths would close or open depending on your tendency.
Trying to figure this stuff out in 2009 before the ubiquity of internet wikis was something else, as this mechanic was not explained very well (souls games are obtuse in general, really by design).
There was also a separate “character tendency” mechanic that affected quest lines and other things.
It made completionist runs annoying and it was just a pain to manipulate it in certain ways to get the outcome you wanted - would have loved a rework in the later souls games but they just abandoned it.
Demons Souls is probably still my favourite Souls title for just all of the weird, quirky, unpolished/jank things about it it made it quite a unique experience.
On the topic of pain-based games, I once witnessed a group of teenagers engage in what seemed to a 10 y.o me an extremely brutal example. The contest consisted of two players, sitting across from each other over relatively long, smooth table. After coinflip to decide the first player, each would take turns flicking the coin across the table, with the goal of making the coin over the opposite edge. The defending player would attempt to block this using their knuckles, which were required to be pressed down against the table with their fingers curled back towards them for the duration of the opponents turn.
The winning strategy seemed to revolve around being able to launch a coin fast enough to significantly bloody your opponents knuckles, and then take advantage of their flinch response to rack up points, all while grin-and-bearing the opponents attempts to do the same. By the end of the evening, the table was smeared with blood on both edges, and the nickel they were using was so caked with the same that it was difficult to differentiate between heads and tails.
You can Freeze Time to do things like turn water into a walkable surface, go through electricity, throw a bunch of bolts at once (this one also exists in Dishonored).
Reverse Time is more rare (I recall only Braid having something similar ?) and is even used in one of my favorite speedrun tricks ever: shoot at something to make it explode (such as a motorcycle), reverse time to bring the exploding fragments back into their original object's shape, jump on one of the fragments (such as a tire) and let time play again, catching a ride on the explosion. You can even influence where the fragment is going by shooting at it in Slow Time before reversing, it's not precalculated physics.
My partners family plays a version of Canasta where you start dealing by picking up all the cards you think you’ll need to deal and if you picked it perfectly you get another 100 points.
It’s a great addition to the game and makes it a positive to be the dealer.
Tell that to Fortnite and other battle-royale games.
> And there's that game where two players take turns hitting each other in the face until one gives up or is too battered to continue — I don't know what it's called.
Short-term memory seems super common. Simon is an example similar to the one given, and of course there's the popular matching flipped cards mechanic you see in a lot of games.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boktai:_The_Sun_Is_in_Your_Han...