Interaction & Frustration

This is a completly and unfortunatly normal thing in games. The door thing is annoying at best but the worst thing is invisible barriers. In some games the developer tries to make the game seem big and expansive but there are too many barriers stopping the player. Specificly the dynasty warrior series. If the developer is going ot make a vast and large terrien and battlefeild why block if off with lots of invisible barriers?

The latter games in the Tomb Raider series are worth looking at if you want to learn how to frustrate someone.

There's a few things, specifically, that bother me with games:

1. Walking into a room and being killed by some trap you had absolutely no chance of avoiding the first time. Players should be rewarded for playing skillfully, not frustrated by unavoidable deaths.

2. Items that are difficult to see, annoy me. I'm partially-sighted, so obviously finding items can be harder for someone in my position, but even my dad, who has perfect eyesight, couldn't see some of the items in some of the Tomb Raider games. One section, he had to swim in some icy water (which meant he'd die in about 10 seconds) to find a coin that he could barely see. It took him months to get past that part. That's ridiculous.

Just to elaborate on this point, it might be "realistic" to make some objects harder to see, but I think a lot of people lose sight of the fact that they're developing a game as opposed to a simulation. Simulations can be fun; games should be fun.

3. Not having a reasonable direction to follow. It's all well-and-good deciding you want a player to get lost in a maze for 30 minutes, but at least give the player something to interact with, too. Wandering through corridor after corridor, trying to find an exit or a key, can be pretty frustrating.

4. Being a bit let down by what a game promises. GTA: San Andreas boasts you can carry out burglaries. It was a nice idea, but I felt it was really poorly executed and I didn't actually use it that much at all in the end. Could've been really fun; it just didn't end up being what I hoped it would.

5. This should probably be top of the list, but my biggest gripe is with horrid controls that aren't intuitive or open to being changed. I remember the first version of Battlefield 1942, wouldn't even let you invert the y-axis of the mouse before it was patched!

6. Poor AI. Again, referring back to GTA: San Andreas, the AI of the gang members under your control, was pretty weak. They'd easily get lost, wander off and not really do what you'd want them to. I'm taking that from the PS2 version, so maybe that was addressed in the PC version. I found them to be pointless on the PS2.

There's probably a lot more that I find frustrating, but that's all I can think of off the top of my head. [smile]

You might be interested in checking out Ernest W. Adams' Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie! series of articles: Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7.

Random Probability with Replacement. Nothing is more frustrating than to have a 90% chance of success and fail 4 times in a row.

See, my expectation with a 90% chance of success that in any given 10 tries at something, I'd only fail once, and that on a subsequent 10 more tries, I would only see one more failure, and that the failures wouldn't be adjacent. Although the game says my chances are 90%, attempting 4 times and failing 4 times gives me the observation that my chances were 0. Succeeding on the 5th try would only boost that observation of chance of success up to 20%

I'm kind of wondering if there is a common thread to these objections and faults.

Obviously there are the technical ones, caused by a lack of ability or time or just laziness (e.g. poor controls, poor porting, poor AI, etc.). You might even be able to include the invisible barrier in that group.

Then there are the plain stupid ones. (Black & White's forcing you to play through the tutorial for every new game comes to mind.)

But there are others that I have a hard time understanding. They could have been easily solved, and yet are glaring flaws in not just the interface or flow but the core gameplay.

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Original post by John H Just to elaborate on this point, it might be "realistic" to make some objects harder to see, but I think a lot of people lose sight of the fact that they're developing a game as opposed to a simulation. Simulations can be fun; games should be fun.

The game should be all about fun. Players going into a simulation know what they are getting into -- and the developers know who their targets are. I guess the problem must be a developer not correctly recognizing where the fun is in his game, and failing to maximize it?

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Original post by Inmate2993 Random Probability with Replacement. Nothing is more frustrating than to have a 90% chance of success and fail 4 times in a row.

This seems important. It's annoying to me from the start because it feels like a cheap increase in difficulty. It's akin to downtime introduced between battles for warriors. But is it the failure of the action that annoys the player or the fact that randomness caused it and not a player's action? e.g.:

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Original post by John H Walking into a room and being killed by some trap you had absolutely no chance of avoiding the first time. Players should be rewarded for playing skillfully, not frustrated by unavoidable deaths.

I think the player needs to know that they initiated the action that caused the failure, and they failed to react -- even though they had a chance. They didn't duck when they felt the whoosh of air.

The random failures can be solved this way. Oblivion did this really well with lock picking. Other games have you attempt the action, it rolls a dice, and you fail. Fail. Fail. Smash keyboard. Oblivion gave you the option to manually pick the lock, where at least if you failed you knew it was your fault by reaction time. But, they still gave the auto-pick option to people that wanted it.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. See I have a problem with games like Diablo 2. I loved the game - absolutely loved it - but trying to get the really, really rare items was a joke. Some items in that game are so rare, you basically could play it 24/7 for 20 years and STILL not get the item.

I understand that rare items, which are wanted by all, should be hard to come by, but surely there must be a better, and less frustrating, way of getting those items into the playing realm without relying on percentage chance to drops.

Another example of annoyance in random drop occurances: I hate when you have to kill a creature to get an object, and the object is something that would have been on every creature, but you have to kill 15x of them to get one.

e.g., "bring me 10 zebra hoofs", but I only get one hoof for every 5 zebras I kill.

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Thinking more about adventure games...

I love adventure games. I love the stories they can tell, the humor, all of it. But I hate playing them. I get really frustrated and usually resort to using a guide so I can watch the game play out. I'd almost rather watch someone else play than play it myself.

It's not because I don't like puzzles. I LOVE puzzle games. I never find myself frustrated with them like I do with many adventure games. So I've been trying to figure out why they frustrate me so...

If I see a pipe lying on the ground, the first thing I might think is "me bash things." (Brute!) But the designer may think, "pipes are for water."

The problem is that adventure games rarely give you a way to know that your idea of how something is used is incorrect. This is avoided in action games because when the character uses the item, an action is almost always performed, even if it has no effect. The club is swung, the ammo-less gun clicks when they click fire.

I guess you could say the puzzles in adventure games are figuring out what the designer was thinking, but I don't think that's good... I think the player should always get a good sense of what his character can do and figure out how to use it.

Instead of just telling me "you can't do that" show the action actually failing... show the character trying to screw the pipe onto the eye of the fat grocer instead of making me wonder if he just didn't want to hit him over the head.

I don't think the fact that it's random is so bad. It's the fact that the odds are so bad _and_ there is no interaction that could make the odds better.

Good Odds == Good.
Bad Odds + Interactive Way to Improve Odds == Good.
Bad Odds + No way to improve odds == Bad.

About frustration, I would like to distinguish 3 main types of frustration.
The first one is difficulty-related one, the most widely-known I guess. Whenever a player is in the "challenging but not hard" zone, taken in a rewarding loop, they are happy and will be willing to go further. If the challenge is too low for their skills or mental, they'll just be taken in the boredom loop, so this is a kind of frustration.
If the challenge overwhelms their skills or mental in a way they feel they just can't learn or that failure or success no longer seem to rely on them player, they'll just give it up, frustated, feeling they are losers. Please note that there is a narrow area where this frustation can actually drive the player further, so this could be called "good" frustration.

The next type of frustration is the obscure goal boredom. The player has visited every obvious area (aka the critical path), often several times, but still fails to see what on earth blocks him (someone mentioned "invisible barriers" earlier, I'm just talking about the broader problem, not just the physical invisible wall). It is hard to avoid this specific design flaw alone (unless you are a Grand Master at theorizing other minds ;)), it is necessary to have focus testing on the way to make sure what you designed shows enough clues (but not too obvious ones :)). In my mind, Soul Reaver (I&II) was a big offender here. The player was often facing new puzzles, but had not previously received the necessary knowledge to even SEE them (mostly because of a "too" great variety in graphics). On the other hand, the Zelda series, especially nowadays, gives the player a "sample" of the ludemes he'll have to face later (for example the "shoot-me-with-your-clawshot" pads, providentially being the one and only obivous object in the rooom where you find the clawshot, AND the only way to get out). Next time you'll see this pad, you'll immediately get it's somehow involved in the barrier blocking you, even if you do not feel stuck yet ;)
Nothing is more boring than not seeing your goal. Even seeing it clearly but failing to overcome it is less frustrating.

The third type of frustration is the bogus destination or the seemingly reachable unreachable destination. It has been mentioned earlier on this topic, but I'll just give my version. In my opinion, it is related to the previous type. Where on one hand everything looks the same, here you have an unreachable, standing-out-like-a-sore-thumb super attractive thing. People here mentioned doors you can't open but yet look sooooo attractive, I'll just add there so many other things artists can find "nice" without even realizing it will be interpreted by the player as a ludeme and not a prop or décor. Subsequently, a player who thinks he can overcome a challenge and actually has no way to do so will get both furious and bored. Some (level) designers think they are being subtle and funny putting a wall that is just high enough to block the player without the double-jump ability — although the player doesn't even know he'll ever get it at this point — but low enough to get the player to try 100 times to jump over it. Let me get this straight; if you don't want your player to be frustrated here : make it obivous that he lacks something to solve the puzzle!

So in theory, I'll just summarize my thoughts about frustration and how to avoid it : if your player feels he's helpless before a challenge, he'll get frustrated (and problably won't be willing to play again), just like he will get frustrated if the challenge is unworthy. If he fails to even see the challenge (and thus can't even fight), he will get so bored he'll stop playing. If he spends time trying to either reach something that is not clearly unreachable or not reachable yet, he'll get furious and bored.

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Original post by Inmate2993 I don't think the fact that it's random is so bad. It's the fact that the odds are so bad _and_ there is no interaction that could make the odds better. Good Odds == Good. Bad Odds + Interactive Way to Improve Odds == Good. Bad Odds + No way to improve odds == Bad.

I can still remember the first game that really bothered me in this regard. Final Fantasy II. In the very last area, the Lunar Underground, there was this small room that contained a single chest and nothing else. However, if you ran into random enemies in that room, and only that room, there was a small chance (1/64 I believe) that you would encounter a Pink Puff, a rare and completely pointless monster in the game.

If you defeated the Pink Puff, which was very difficult by the way, then you had another 1/64 chance of getting an item called the Pink Tail, which you could bring to a tail collector to acquire the Adamantite Armor, which was the best armor in the game. I fought a few Pink Puffs, which I believe cost me 40+ hours of my life but after about the 7th or 8th one I decided that it was pointless and that I had a better chance of winning a couple thousand in the lottery. This really pissed me off though because at the time I was the type of player that liked to collect every single item and discover every last secret.

What F#%*ing retard thought it would be a good idea to leave one of the most valuable items in the game up to pure chance with no way to improve your odds. If you want to create a very rare and valuable item or secret in the game make it difficult to acquire, but based on a players problem solving abilities, skills, and intelligence, not their luck.

Yup, obviously the feeling of powerlessness seems to be the root of all frustrations, I guess. Whenever the player is constrained, he might feel frustrated, but he won't if he feels he can help it. If he fails to see the mere chance to change the odds, he'll get frustrated. I think it's pretty fair :)

Bugs!
The finest game design is worth sch... if you can´t play a game without those aggravating blue screens, frozen characters etc. etc.

Especially horrible are those fatal bugs that simply prevent you from playing any further until the next patch is released.

I am really tired of being abused as a beta tester by publishers.

Ha ! Ralph, I so much understand how you feel ;) I began my career as a tester for a publisher, and I can tell you that most of time, those problems come from an unpredictable hardware conflict (in the case of a PC of course). You should not see so many A-bugs (blocking ones : freezes, progression stoppers, major inconsistencies, etc.) in console games, for they go through a complex validation process in the manufacturer's hands (Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, etc.). No matter how hard they test the game, some bugs still go through the net. But on the PC, it's different : the publisher will scarcely bother to get rid of every single bug, first because he can patch the game later and make money in the meanwhile (it's better to release the game as soon as possible to begin make money, and I'm just not talking about retailers' pressure), second because no submission process can get in the way and stop the game from being put on the shelves whatsoever...

Well, anyway, it has little to do with game design, right ? ;)

Anyone who designs game interfaces (or designs games, and in doing so happens to include an interface) and who has not yet done so, should read Donald Norman's The Design of Everyday Things. It's a great book about how users decide what to expect of an interface, and how they react when results don't match their expectations. It's also a very fun read.

@ Tohwaku:

That reminds me of my first testing (years ago) and leads me to another point of frustration: Illogical (or stupid) plot twists.

I did test this game called "Shadows over Riva" (a literal translation; I have no idea if that thing ever made it into international markets outside of Germany).

You get a (nice) cut scene where you have to observe a real kick ass famous mage being bound and then having some worm inserted into his nose. Fishy, eh. Anyhow, eventually the player is allowed to approach said mage and gets a neat speach from the guy wich made me go ballistic: Hes to exhausted to do anything, but evil lurks within these walls and blah blah etc. pp. You get the idea. THEN this "exhausted" mage (who is, we remember, quite likely under the influence of some weird worm thingy)TELEPORTS into safety. Now this was a computer adaption of a pen & paper RPG and in this RPG teleporting costed an arm and a leg.
Is it just me, or is this the kind of plottwist that must´ve sprung from the brains of a 6 year old (apologies to all the 6 year olds out therre who are far to clever to come up with something like this).

In many games this would not make me even shrug. But RPGs are (well should be) heavy on plot and really should not consider players to be imbeciles. Frustrates me to no end.

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Original post by Ralph Hawk Especially horrible are those fatal bugs that simply prevent you from playing any further until the next patch is released.

The first game I saw that suffered from this, was Kingpin. I remember reading in a PC magazine about it and the reviewer was saying that not a single person in the office, on roughly 10-20 different PCs, could get past a certain point. Amazing how something like that could be missed. The first patch fixed that.

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Amazing how something like that could be missed. The first patch fixed that.

Yup, amazing indeed. And now that I'm a QA manager, I'm just even more amazed! My team and I will walk through the entire game (my company's making) at least once a day (the rest of time, we plan several hard debug task such as collision testing, progression logic consistency, yadda, yadda, yadda). And I just don't understand how on earth a game with a major flaw (called A-bug, along with B-bug — not blocking ones but nasty anyway, and C-bug, the small and subjective one, as some of you may know) can be validated by a QA team and sent as a master to production.

Actually I think it's just plain impossible: a QA won't miss a 100% reproductible A-bug on the critical pass (during a normal playthrough) while testing a gold master. It happened in the past that some producers of my former company send a gold master to production without waiting for QA validation. Big mistake to do, guys ;) Big mistake.

Why do people want a 1/100 drop chance to mean that by their 100'th run they've seen the item?
Where as with a 1% drop chance you could really see the item between 1-4 times with good odds.
And it averages out to 1 time per 100 runs.

I'd personally be borred out of my mind if something had even something as low as a 1/20 drop chance
that wasn't independantly random. Cauze then you'd run into the situation where you kill something once,
get the drop, and know for a fact the next 19 you kill aren't going to have anything.

Some things like the "every zebra has a hoof, why wont it drop?" kinda is bothersome.
But for the good weapons and such, in a MMO where a creature gets killed thousands of times a day,
or even per hour, or min, depending on the creature, you have to have crappy drop odds or everyone would
get the item very quickly. So some people never see the item drop, but others do. And again it would
really suck if you knew that once someone found the item that it would take everyone X weeks of
constant runs on that monster in order to get the item to drop again, and even then they'd have to be
in the right mob at the right run inorder to get it.

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Original post by KulSeran Why do people want a 1/100 drop chance to mean that by their 100'th run they've seen the item? Where as with a 1% drop chance you could really see the item between 1-4 times with good odds. And it averages out to 1 time per 100 runs. I'd personally be borred out of my mind if something had even something as low as a 1/20 drop chance that wasn't independantly random. Cauze then you'd run into the situation where you kill something once, get the drop, and know for a fact the next 19 you kill aren't going to have anything.

The problem is that most pseudo-random number generators are programmed to average out (or balance) over the course of it's entire run. If you look up the Mersenne Twister, its run is so long that the earth would die and the sun would supernova and then cool into a useless mass in the cold universe before the run would end. At the very least, it could take me until the end of my own life before I get that item the first time.

Granted, the extra 19 dead monsters and no second item is just as annoying as 20 monsters and no first item. Though, my second post did mention that improving the odds through some means is an acceptable solution. So, a 5% chance would be cool, if I could go into the cave and get the secret amulet that kicked the chances up to 50%.