Why do games tend to limit their form?

• Changes within a game need to be slow and simple enough for players to play effectively while they take place, without misunderstandings. On the other hand books, and to a lesser extent film, can disorient the audience until the changes are accepted and/or understood.
• Games have a formal structure of rules, which cannot be ignored, while narrative media have much more elastic internal coherence standards. If an airplane pilot is shot down and rescued by locals, in a story it is a reasonable and realistic development of what happens of a character, while in a flight simulator game it's the end (at least until the pilot returns to service and the rules of the flight simulator game apply again).
• Games containing multiple "forms" need to embed the respective rules in a rules superstructure (for example, trading simulations and action games can be combined meaningfully by acquiring equipment for use in the action parts and by looting trade goods in the action parts). This is far more difficult than simply making things happen in a story.

1 hour ago, Wavinator said:

Why is it that games tend to rarely vary their form? You start with a set of activities-- running, jumping, shooting-- and while they may deepen and expand, they almost never change significantly through the entirety of the experience.

...

What is it about games that so limit their form? Is it the maturity of the medium?

Quite the opposite, I'd say. Games used to vary their form significantly from one stage to the next.

Here's Ghostbusters 2: the first level sees you controlling a character in a downward scrolling thing, the next level is a side-scroller shooter, and the 3rd level is an isometric tactics game.

An older - and worse - example is Beach Head 2, back in the mid 80s. First level is this thing about moving from cover to cover, the second level is to rescue prisoners by shooting the obstacles (if I remember correctly)

There were a bunch of other games like this in the 80s and 90s but the approach mostly died off.

1 hour ago, Wavinator said:

Or is it possible that one of the medium's greatest strengths-- interactivity and the process of engaging with it, which is basically learning-- is simultaneously a weakness of sorts?

It's a weakness if you accept that such a change is a strength.

There's a cost involved for the player in terms of learning a new interface at each stage. That might put people off. (The same is true of movies, which is probably why most of them do stay close to genre, with very predictable excursions.)

But the biggest issue is because it requires creating entirely new features and content that adds significant expense. I think this is where your analogy is perhaps flawed, because a film that changes from comedy to drama has arguably not changed its form, just the tone. You can shoot 30 minutes of comedy and 30 minutes of drama with exactly the same equipment and exactly the same people without incurring extra expense compared to 60 minutes of entirely comedy or entirely drama. That's not true in games. If you want to add mechanics, that's adding cost. In that sense, I don't think "genre" or "form" means the same thing across the media being compared.

The thing is, when you start playing a game, you probably like it because... it's that game. If you're playing a side-scrolling shooter, you don't really want to start playing a top-down strategy game instead. Unwelcome changes like this are a real turn-off.

I can think of examples I've personally experienced, even, and I'm not even that hardcore of a gamer:

• Power Rangers S.P.D. on the GBA was normally a side-scrolling beat-em-up/platforming sort of game, but every once in a while it had a crappy Missile Command-esque stage. I dreaded those stages at the time and there was one point where I almost quit because of one of them, IIRC.
• In Mario & Luigi Bowser's Inside Story, I was constantly annoyed by gameplay changes to the point where I just never completed it (I got stuck on one of these stupid mini-games it forces on you, turned the game off, and never turned it on again). It's like the developers couldn't decide on a gameplay experience and just shoved as much crap in there as possible.

Think of it this way: if I don't like the game enough to play it to the end, then I'm not your target audience. If I do like the game, I don't want the experience hijacked in the middle of it. So really, making drastic gameplay changes like this is just bad for everyone involved. Plus, as has already been mentioned, it's extra cost.

Well, when I'm sitting with a tea in one hand playing a turn based strategy I would really hate if there were parts of the game where I would be forced to jump, shoot and do other arcadish activities like that

There used to be games like that in 80s and early 90s but fortunatelly those extincted by now. And it makes me quite happy I would say

BTW, Sword of the Samurai is one of the few of that type that sounded quite reasonable http://www.homeoftheunderdogs.net/game.php?id=1112 (at the beginning you are samurai - arcade and then a daimyo - strategy).

I don't believe anybody has approached this from the development side: the added complexity of putting in what is essentially an entirely different game. That's a lot of extra development time and hassle to do it well, and if you DON'T do it well the "less limited" form of the game will be a hindrance and not a benefit. Players will look at your RTS sections as half-assed and unfun, thus pulling down the entire game if you don't pull them off.

Many games do attempt to play with genre within their particular rules. For instance, Starcraft has levels without basebuilding and with very limited resources, making them akin to some sort of dungeon crawl/adventure game. These are built to vary the games experiences without actually requiring the player to learn new skills.

What about the one "form" in a classically styled JRPG where you're walking around talking to people, going through their houses and stealing their stuff and then transition to the "form" where you're battling critters. Does that count?

How about in X-Com, the strategic global view part and then the part where you shoot down the UFO, and then the part where you send in a landing team. Does that count? Maybe the shooting down of the UFO is more of a mini-game, but I'd say the other two are sufficiently large "forms" of gameplay that are distinct from each other.

I also remember in the one Romance of the Three Kingdoms game I played that it had two distinct forms as well. One a sort of political spreadsheet thing where you issued orders and the other was strategic combat decided rule over a territory.

There's no shortage of games that do it very, very badly. But I'll pose the suggestion that when it's done right, you don't notice it.

That said, I am also of the mind set that when I'm in the mood to play something specific, that's pretty much all I want to play and I won't likely pick something off the "shelf" that doesn't fit what I want.

Shadow of mordor is a good example of why games don't normally do this. The whole game you spend learning how to be a great assassin then it ends the final boss battle with a quick time event. Worst final battle ever.

What I am saying is that games keep to one or few forms, so that the effort the player puts in isn't wasted. After all games unlike most other media requires effort from both the creator and the audience.

14 hours ago, Wavinator said:

Card games and board games seem to share this limit-- chess does not morph into poker, for instance, and it would be hard to see it do so (I wouldn't count playing both at the same time).

You might find chess boxing interesting.

Like people have said, the real reason is dev time. Extensibility generally wins out over variety. This might not be such a bad thing, though. If we look at it from a skill atom point of view, extensible systems allow us to build wider and more dense graphs of skill chains, as opposed to having a sparse graph of skill atoms.

Having said that, there are sometimes justifications for adding extra games within a game. The game I'm currently developing switches between text adventure and 2d action/adventure sections. The main reason for this is because different parts of the story require more or less authorial control. Though it disconnects the skill chain, it's important to the overall skill that I'm trying to teach the player, and I return to each section multiple times and allow the skill chains to continue to be built.

On 27/06/2017 at 4:34 AM, Wavinator said:

Games that have attempted this, like Spore (or the little known Gordon Alliance decades before it), often run afoul of the problem of sacrificing depth for breadth or suffering from mechanics that just don't cohere well together.

Evoland and Evoland 2 did this on a deeper level, I think. The base game is a top-down action/adventure (something like Zelda: Link To The Past), but there are many parts of different styles, mostly as little minigames in certain parts of the game. This was the core idea of the game, so at least they tried to make it work. Overall, it's a game I liked.

That said, they suffer exactly from de depth problem: almost no minigame has the depth of the depicted style (the turn based strategy and turn based RPG are examples of that). Another problem is the quality of these minigames: many suffer from poor execution (2D platforming is subpar, in my opinion), others have bad mechanics or control, like the fighting part (2 or 3 fights in a row, can't remember now), which is terrible. Others are good, despite little depth (like the shoot'em up).

As others mentioned, it is less common for good reason. It is jarring.

I recently played a small game where you played one puzzle after another, defeating level after level and getting points based on how quickly you resolved the puzzle. Then on every 10th level after beating the puzzle, a memory game popped up. (Flip a tile, flip another tile, both vanish if they match.) It was incredibly jarring, and was the only thing I hated about the game. I played it for the fun puzzle levels, not the randomly included thing.

I recall many games in the '80s and early '90s that jumped from play style to play style. Battletoads was one of the more annoying ones among the games I enjoyed. Side scroller fighter, rappelling, swimming, speed bikes, surfing, jet planes, unicycles, and more. Every level was different, and each required different skills. As a result, it is often called one of the hardest video games ever.

Side-games can be fun, especially if they are entirely optional. Final Fantasy 8 introduced a side-game called "Triple Triad" that they reused in a few other games in the series. it is a totally optional side-quest that has nothing to do with the main story, but was fun enough as a side element.

Final Fantasy X had Blitzball, which was mostly optional but sadly required in a few levels for story progression. I recall people who struggled and even hated the game because of the mandatory Blitzball tournament.

2 hours ago, frob said:

As others mentioned, it is less common for good reason. It is jarring.

I don't think that's always true. In Soccer for example, penalty kicks are a different game included within the broader game, but I would expect most players don't find them very jarring. A handful of pinball games also have upper playfields with different rules.

Are they only jarring if the added game requires different skills?

7 minutes ago, Archduke said:

I don't think that's always true. In Soccer for example, penalty kicks are a different game included within the broader game, but I would expect most players don't find them very jarring. A handful of pinball games also have upper playfields with different rules.

Are they only jarring if the added game requires different skills?

Hardly anything is always true. But what if in soccer you had to stop and win a chess match before you could play the next soccer match.

30 minutes ago, Tom Sloper said:

Hardly anything is always true. But what if in soccer you had to stop and win a chess match before you could play the next soccer match.

Didn't mean to sound confrontational, if I did. Just exploring the topic, maybe something actionable falls out of it.

That would be pretty jarring, and would be a totally different skill. Seems like that may be the answer, then. Adding games that practice unrelated skills is jarring, but adding games that use subsets of the broader game's practiced skills is less jarring. I wonder how different you can make the games before they start to feel disconnected.

There is a game call chessboxing, where two boxers alternate rounds of chess and boxing. Not super popular, as you can imagine.

Jade Empire had a weird side scrolling shooter portion in it's RPG, Mass Effect had it's vehicle portions. Space Rangers is all over the place with different mechanics. X-COM has base building and tactics portions -- it's arguably the most successful blend of genres.

But mostly it's better to spend as much time as possible honing your core game mechanic instead of throwing a bunch of things on the wall and seeing what sticks.

I think it's mostly jarring when it requires a completely different set of skills, and more so if it comes out of left field without warning. Games have been successfully blending macro and micro level strategy, real-time and turn based for a while now. Like Total War. Same with vehicular and non-vehicular sections, like GTA. Some games successfully mix stealth and action, or first and third person.

1 hour ago, Archduke said:

I don't think that's always true. In Soccer for example, penalty kicks are a different game included within the broader game, but I would expect most players don't find them very jarring. A handful of pinball games also have upper playfields with different rules.

Are they only jarring if the added game requires different skills?

Penalty kicks are not a different game, they are only a specialized form in which the ball is kicked into the goal unusually fast and intercepted by the goalkeeper with unusual difficulty: not only the same skills, but the same rules as normal play.

The same applies to second-playfield pinball games, where the player uses button-controlled flippers and plungers to avoid losing balls in both: what you call "different rules" in the two playfields are simply two branches of a single system of ways to score and places to hit with the ball. Even in extreme cases like the physically separate mini-pinball in Shrek multiple playfields are only a mild novelty, less jarring than gimmicks in which the regular ball does something strange.

A videogame example: Micro Machines offers multiple vehicle types with different handling, control systems and special features, but you use them all for full-contact racing, often on the same tracks; general skills (e.g. looking at, and memorizing, the tracks; bumping opponents; not crashing) and universal rules are much more important and "larger" than specialized ones (e.g. shooting with tanks) so the game as a whole feels varied but coherent.

14 minutes ago, LorenzoGatti said:

The same applies to second-playfield pinball games, where the player uses button-controlled flippers and plungers to avoid losing balls in both: what you call "different rules" in the two playfields are simply two branches of a single system of ways to score and places to hit with the ball.

You're arguing two things here: that having the same core mechanism (in the Burgunian sense) means having the same game, and that having the same systems means having the same game.

To the first, chess and checkers are both "physically moving tokens to capture enemy tokens and avoid losing your own", but they're different games.

To the second, we would be missing information if we distinguished games only by the systems that facilitate them. Speedruns take place within the same systems as standard play, but the rules and win condition are changed, making them different games.

There could be a chance that switching genres could add freshness to a game, and could perhaps rekindle the childlike wonder of not knowing what comes next. However,when switching genres in a video game may have the potential to lose it's identity. In my opinion, the best games are the ones that start with a simple core gameplay loop, and gradually build to a complex yet fun challenge. Constantly changing the genre would damage this flow, and instead of gradually building up your skills over time, it feels more like your turning off the game you're currently playing and starting a new one. It leaves less room for complexity, and in terms of marketing, instead of finding people that like the genre for your game, you would have to market to people who conveniently enjoy all the styles of game play that your title has, making it incredibly niche.

This is my stance on your proposal, but don't let it stop you from attempting to make a title such as the one you described.

10 hours ago, Archduke said:

You're arguing two things here: that having the same core mechanism (in the Burgunian sense) means having the same game, and that having the same systems means having the same game.

To the first, chess and checkers are both "physically moving tokens to capture enemy tokens and avoid losing your own", but they're different games.

To the second, we would be missing information if we distinguished games only by the systems that facilitate them. Speedruns take place within the same systems as standard play, but the rules and win condition are changed, making them different games.

No, I'm arguing about specific examples. You are arguing about different examples of different situations.

In the case of chess and checkers, you neglect that the "same core mechanism" is the same only if its important aspects are the same, not if two games fit in the same branch of an arbitrary classification. In pinball, there is only a game mechanic that matters, using flippers to keep the ball in play and hit stuff, and any rules layered on top of that merely provide superficial differences in how to score. Consider that if a pinball machine is damaged (e.g. a bumper becomes inert) the player can adjust to the new rules during the same game, whereas if a piece is moved arbitrarily in chess or checkers the game in progress loses all meaning.

Is every sport in which a ball is used to score points and the team without the ball defends against the scoring attempts of the team with the ball the same? No, they need at least the same ball, the same team size and a very similar playfield to have a chance of being compatible and comparable. Did anyone successfully combine chess and checkers in nontrivial ways? No, because games about "moving tokens to capture enemy tokens and avoid losing your own" are so strongly dependent on piece movement and placement rules that any change disrupts their "chore mechanism" producing an essentially different game, with different strategies and techniques, and chess and checkers are particularly different instances of the genre. There are cases in which less different games share some skills, for example familiarity with traditional Shogi pieces that are featured in many variants and in similar starting configuration, or similar positions in different sizes of checkers, but it is an exception to the general need to reason about each game position piece by piece and move by move.

In the case of speedruns (I'll limit the discussion to glitch exploitation and skillful play, excluding tool-assisted speedruns), you forget that the discussion in this thread is about the game designer, not about formally different or formally similar games.

The possibility of players attempting a speedrun is only relevant as a group among many of requirements involved in evaluating the opportunity to write a more or less composite game. For example:

• Are speedrun-rewarding and speedrun-enabling features (e.g. bosses with hard to hit weak spots) a good idea for all players? In all parts of the game?
• Are there parts that do not allow speedrunning (e.g. strategic orders between action battles)? Would they be harmless, or even a welcome lull, or disruptive and annoying for the speedrunning player?
• Do the different parts of the game share similar control schemes and general glitch types? Unlike a typical player with plenty of time to adjust, a speedrunner might find the game too diverse.