True Risk or the Illusion of Risk?

I don't think players are easily fooled by the illusion of risks. Especially not when it revolves around important game mechanics. And if they discover what's really going on, it's just going to cause a meltdown for immersion.

Exaggerating the difficulty of a challenge is perfectly fine, but I wouldn't exaggerate the consequences.

Death is a risk, and quickload makes it an illusion. Constant quickloading makes it a very poor illusion. I would say that's the most direct application of that quote to games, at least in their current form. Nintendo-hard-no-continue, of course, means it's not an illusion at all.

Hi, I am new to this forum, this is actually my first post. I thought I would put by two cents in here.

I would say that while creating the illusion of risk is an artform all to itself, the inherent problem with it is that you can only trick the same player once. If the player catches on that the "risks" involved are only illusions, they are likely to lose their sense of immersion and their desire to continue the game as a whole.

Think of the game who sits down to digest a game, get's a bit frusterated, a bit burned out and decided to start using cheat codes. After blowing through the content of the game, the player is left with nothing to do but run around with god powers in a virtual world. It's only amusing for a little while give or take a bit for maturity of the player.

I'd be interested to see more of your thoughts on the matter.

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Original post by Wavinator What do you think makes better gameplay, a game world which trends toward true, naked risk with the possibility of catastrophic failure, or risk which is really the illusion of a challenge but biased toward player victory.

I'd say somewhere in the middle. Make it too hard, and you end up serving a niche community putting off most everyone else. Make it too easy, and the game loses its game. The optimal difficulty level to implement in games, if your goal is to attract the largest amount of people to your game, would be in the middle of those two extremes.

You could also implement multiple difficulty levels that the players can choose from (if a single-player game/campaign).

I tend to think players want games to be fair, and will generally be happy to accept a genuine risk as long as they perceive the potential failure as being fair.

Taking your risky combat example, it wouldn't really be fair to the player to blow them out of the sky with stray gunfire as they're just starting, but most players will probably accept (but may still be annoyed by) being blown out of the sky by a clearly defined enemy who is on approximately level ground with the player.

I disagree with the original premsise that people are mostly risk averse. I think people have built within them risk taking straegies and actually seek risk out instintively.

From a biological standpoint the winners are the ones which actually take risks, ie hunting, mate competition and other risky behaviors can be found in the natural world.

It could very well be that game playing, engages those risk play strageieis and that is one reason why we play games (a form of pratice for the risk strategies).

-ddn

Games with the chance for devastating failure actually catch my interest far more than games that don't. Basically, nothing has any meaning if you are guaranteed to get it - value comes from what you have to give up (or go through) to get. Having setbacks and overcoming those setbacks adds a sense of value to one's efforts. And "winning" is only fun if you have a chance to loose. For instance, would you have fun racing a 2 year old in a marathon? Or would you have more fun winning against a track star, even though there was a huge chance for total failure?

But I should point out that this is just my opinion, and the general opinion of more hardcore audiences (this keeps coming up in my posts for some reason). Most gamers are casual, and are desperate to win at whatever they do; they really don't care about the quality of the win so long as they get it. You will have a much smaller audience for riskier play, but I personally think it's a much better game, and far less of a mindless click-fest of shiny, cookie, or pat-on-back hand-out of doom.

If real, true, tangible risk weren't exciting, Las Vegas would not exist...

I think challenges can be made to "feel" more interesting to challenge-seekers without increasing the risks or difficulty.

For one thing, most games and characters degrade and cheapen the reality of life threatening situations. I think this is really common in games, because as designers, we see the player as an immortal user instead of a human-like entity that's interacting with our world. As a result, the game characters treat everything too lightly, as if the player has no choice but to go all out, every moment of the game, for any trivial, selfless reason.

If missions that would seem insane in real life are regarded slightly more insane in the game, it would do a lot to build up the feeling of risk and suspense, as well as a sense of accomplishment.

I think it's the illusion of risk that is important. While there are niche players who thrive on real risk, the majority of gamers want the illusion, they won’t tell you that, but they do. The goal, however, is actually a very thin line between the two. If the illusion isn’t good enough, the player recognizes there’s no risk and can get bored. If there is no illusion than the player may take risk mitigation steps such as not exploring areas of the game they might have otherwise or simply stopping all together (I’ve seen people do this).

Beyond that, the ideal situation is that the player never finds out whether it is an illusion or a real risk. In the ideal game, it doesn’t matter which you choose because the player will never reach that state.

People want to feel good about themselves while playing the game. This means the game should keep the player on the on the edge of the chasm, always about to go falling in but always managing to stay on that line. The moment the game tosses them over the edge either the illusion is lost and they are saved or they lose (and if this happens too often, most people will quit). You need to keep them on that edge so when they come through, they feel like they’ve really struggled and accomplished something.

I think the quote is true. If you were playing a stealth game, there were few real risks in Deus Ex. It was much harder for the AI to see you than for you to see the AI, and, even if they did see you, it was just a (relatively short) matter of time before they completely forgot you were there. And yet, the game was immersive, and it felt like you were being sneaky. This was somewhat justified in the premise of the game (i.e. you're an engineered super-being), but that's just telling the player, "Things are balanced in your favor". I think the quote is just another way of expressing the idea that a game should be as hard as possible with the player still winning (an idea I've seen promoted a few times on this forum).

I think the problem with the "blown out of the sky" scenario is mostly that there's no recovery. You get blasted once, and you're done. It doesn't matter if you were seeing a steady gain, or even just a net gain over time, you're done now. Sure, it may be fair in the sense that you had just as much chance of doing that to your opponent, but that doesn't make it more fun.

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Original post by Way Walker I think the quote is true. If you were playing a stealth game, there were few real risks in Deus Ex. It was much harder for the AI to see you than for you to see the AI, and, even if they did see you, it was just a (relatively short) matter of time before they completely forgot you were there. And yet, the game was immersive, and it felt like you were being sneaky. This was somewhat justified in the premise of the game (i.e. you're an engineered super-being), but that's just telling the player, "Things are balanced in your favor". I think the quote is just another way of expressing the idea that a game should be as hard as possible with the player still winning (an idea I've seen promoted a few times on this forum).

That's really strange, because I was just playing that yesterday, the first time I've played in years, thinking about this exact thing. The stealth gameplay is made to be far more interactive than other games. It's made more interactive by having the characters take more than an instant to actually "see" you. You even get acknowledgment of their visibility, when they say things like "what was that??". You can literally test the stealthiness of a situation before you commit to it, without dying and reloading.

Having forgotten everything, I still made it all the way to the prison cell where the male cyborg is being held without being seen. Then I accidentally came face to face with a soldier, panicked, overestimated the range of the taser prod, got shot a few times, ran into another room, then taken out by a turret. Fun stuff.

But I don't think there's any illusion of risk here. It's simply some room to breathe, with a tolerance for tiny failures. You can still get kicked pretty hard for large failures, so the risk is real. Players are completely aware of how blind the AI is, but unless the situation really calls for it, they won't push their luck, and will try to remain as hidden as possible. Great game designers putting psychology to work.

However, I agree that making the AI blind and stoned didn't hurt the immersion as much as one might think it would. But the game did so many things right that I think it might be difficult for me to look at it objectively.

While Way Walker and Kest's discussion is interesting... Im not sure that its necessarily directly related to the question of risk. While you can say "the risk of an AI character seeing you is less than the risk of you seeing the AI character", it doesnt necessarily speak to the aggregate risk of the game as a whole.

Throughout the game, you encounter a large number of AI characters. So a more appropriate question might be "Is the risk of being spotted by the AI enough times over the course of an entire objective or level high enough that there is a real risk of eventually being killed?". Obviously that is a different question, and much harder to gauge.


I think the problem with the question is that "true" risk is very vague.
Does it mean "true to life" as the last few posts are beginning to skirt around the edges of? From my reading of the OP, I dont think so... Not to mention, true to life risk probabilities rule out many heroic scenarios that are common in games, except to the most skilled players. If not, then what? Truly even risk of failure versus success? Truly even risk to reward ratios? Perhaps risk to reward ratios that are not necessarily evenly balanced, but where the risk to reward ratio is accurately portrayed to the player.


I think with many of the above definitions, applying them is dependent on a lot of decisions specific to the game being created.
For example, how difficult is the game intended to be? The risk is often related to how difficult the game is, and variable difficulty levels could mean a lot of re-balancing.
How realistic is the game? Has effects on both the risk to reward ratios, and on possible knowledge and randomness of the risks.
Does the game have themes of deception, randomness, or information gathering? Obviously, is likely to effect the player's knowledge of risks and rewards.
And so forth...


So to answer the question directly: I think its a concept that should flow from the higher-level goals of the game, with their implementation guiding the answers to questions about risk. With the game's goals well defined, risk questions I think should be fairly obvious extensions.

I've been playing The Witcher recently and while its a good game one thing that annoys me is the dice game(dice in games generally annoy me anyway). I have lost over 20 games in a row in it(probably alot more). Is it random(of course it isnt), but is there some calculations going on in the background that I dont know about that says I cannot beat my oppenent. I have to ask what is the point of a random chance game in an RPG, its not fun.

I'd like to see something different that makes the player feel a hero. I remember Fallout had a perk which made the player extrememly unlucky I think, with weapons possibly exploding etc. Why cant I have the opposite, so that in games of chance I win perhaps not all the time, but more often than the odds dictate.

Half life 1 is more challenging than its sequel, they have tried to make half life 2 so that everyone can complete it and in doing so have made it a bit flat. They tried to make the player feel a hero but you dont do as many heroic things compared to the first game. Lots of other fps make you fight really hard to be a hero, most of the time you have to resort to quicksaves to get through. Sometimes it might be nice if the game helped you a bit. So instead of having to lower the risks they just raise certain helpers. They could do this a number of ways, dynamicly placed health and ammo, dynamic damage, npcs, events, all manner of things could be done to get players through the tricky bits.

Frankly thats what I thought games were about, Illusions, fantasies, unique experiences. Instead we have forced on rails, no variation in gameplay, to win you have to fight hard and it will be tedious. They are nothing at all like the movies, or the fantasies they try to emulate.

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Original post by Kest But I don't think there's any illusion of risk here. It's simply some room to breathe, with a tolerance for tiny failures. You can still get kicked pretty hard for large failures, so the risk is real. Players are completely aware of how blind the AI is, but unless the situation really calls for it, they won't push their luck, and will try to remain as hidden as possible. Great game designers putting psychology to work.

But, the question then is, "Why remain as hidden as possible?" I think the answer is that the illusion of risk was higher than the actual risk. It wasn't that the player didn't know the risk was small, but that the game gave them every opportunity to pretend the risk was large. It lets you play dress up. I had that first level down to a science, and yet I could still play it and feel like I was taking J.C. Denton level risks.


I agree, to some extent, as caffiene points out, the question doesn't make sense. The risk is whatever the game defines it to be and the players, in a sense, are aware of the risk set by the game. There is no illusion. There can be no illusion.

On the other hand, games can, and do, provide that action hero feeling of making it against all odds, even when the odds aren't really that bad. That's an illusion of risk. I think Deus Ex is a game that does this by, using Kest's words, "[treating] missions that would seem insane in real life [as] slightly more insane in the game".

I agree with jbadams, as long as everything seems fair I can accept the risk of getting shot to pieces. As long as I'm somewhat aware of there being a risk and either I have to do it (storyline for example) or it's by choice (huge reward).

When it comes to trade the player can choose to trade with legal stuff that's more of less guaranteed to give a small profit or go for stuff that yields a much larger profit but is more hazardous because of 1/ varying demand/price fluctuation 2/ pirates more likely to attack expensive cargo 3/ the merchandise is illegal.

In that way at least I wouldn't feel cheated on when I'm blown to bits by the police for trying to smuggle weapons, it was a risk I was willing to take.

So as long as it's all about some randomness but mostly up to choices made by the player I think a real risk is a more rewarding experience in the end.

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Original post by Wavinator What do you think makes better gameplay, a game world which trends toward true, naked risk with the possibility of catastrophic failure, or risk which is really the illusion of a challenge but biased toward player victory.

"risk" and "catastrophic failures" do not apply to games IMO.
The only thing a game designer can work on is time.
Player gets hit, loses HP, he needs to heal or find a medpack, what the player is spending is time.
Same for death, player died, he lost some level or whatnot, what the player has lost is time, so the only loss a player can ever suffer from is time.
That said having to restart at the beginning of a long game would be "catastrophic", and the player wouldn't likely continue on playing.

That leads me to a short and inaccurate definition of a game. A game is meant to be both fun (enjoy the interactions), and challenging (require active participation from the player).

I'd think that the main area of the game should be the one with failure implying to biggest loss in time, and not other parts.
If your game is all about trading, then, the biggest loss I could suffer should be related to that. If it's a game about violence, then it's when I suffer/exercise violence that I should have the potential worst loss. (of time)

IMO, it wouldn't make sense to have a player frustrated by loss he's suffering because of secondary aspect of the game. The player bought the game for a reason, it should be the main theme of the game, and so that theme should lead to the best rewards and worst losses.

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Original post by Ingenu The only thing a game designer can work on is time. Player gets hit, loses HP, he needs to heal or find a medpack, what the player is spending is time. Same for death, player died, he lost some level or whatnot, what the player has lost is time, so the only loss a player can ever suffer from is time.

By not doing something correctly, the player can lose rewards, or be inflicted with a penalty that can't be corrected with time. For example, they can miss out on an outfit, or a stealth pistol, or even a dialog encounter (the reward would take up time, missing it would save time). If they can't reload, or don't care about the loss enough to reload, they are penalized with something other than lost time.

Great replies everyone, thank you!

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Original post by Kest By not doing something correctly, the player can lose rewards, or be inflicted with a penalty that can't be corrected with time. For example, they can miss out on an outfit, or a stealth pistol, or even a dialog encounter (the reward would take up time, missing it would save time). If they can't reload, or don't care about the loss enough to reload, they are penalized with something other than lost time.

You're right here-- it's opportunity being lost.

Maybe it could be argued that was it lost is the player's quality time. If you skip dialog or miss out on something, you're losing out on potentially interesting gameplay, and that possibly reduces the experience as a whole.