Arcade Berg aka. "Learning Game Design with Arcade Berg"

Punish or Help the Weak?

I'm a bit busy now and during this weekend, so I'll use my old trick of doing a repost of a post I wrote for AboutGameDesign.com when the topic was:

Reward and Punishment

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To get the really cool power ups in games, I usually have to be quite skilled to get them. If I'm skilled enough to get them, it's likely that I'm skilled enough to beat the game without them. If I'm not skilled enough to get them, it's likely that I'm not skilled enough to beat the game without them.

I want to discuss a common problem I see in games, to which I don't have a great solution; We often make the weak even weaker and the strong even stronger.

Shouldn't we encourage the weak to keep trying and give him some help? But then, if I get rewards for playing badly, why should I try to excel?

If I'm playing a game I'm good at, I feel that it's nothing short of damn right that I get to have the good stuff in the game. I've earned them. While playing Gradius and managing to keep level up my weapons, I'm on top of the world when I'm maxed up. But when I die, I lose my powers and the game gets a lot harder.

Now, in games like those Shoot 'em Ups it might be taken to the extreme, but the effect is most often there in games. If I'm a really good shot, I don't need as many bullets to kill my enemies, resulting in me having more bullets left to spend. If I'm a bad shot, I spend more bullets, making me have fewer left while I would need way more.

It's a natural way of things. Of course we want to create incentive for the player to play as well as he can and try and not to screw up. But some people just can't help themself from screwing up and what are we going to then? We could just say "Well, then you're not the right kind of person for this game." or we could give him a bigger gun and say "Okay, try again.".

I'm both pro and against the use of auto adjustment of the difficulty level. It's a great thing since, assuming it works, all players gets the "right" difficulty, but in a way, increased difficulty can be considered a punishment.

RPG's and other games where you can level up have a way of fixing this: Grinding. If you're beat, then just stay where you are in the game untill you're stronger and then continue. People complain about "grinding" but that's a topic on its own. Either way, it works.

But really, both the difficulty adjustments and the grinding aren't solutions for the problems with rewards and punishment, only whether or not the player can beat the game.

Some games, like Ninja Gaiden Sigma starts helping you out if you die too much (which I did...) where they basically say "Wow, you really suck. Do you want to admit your failure and play on the n00b-difficulty? We'll give you some health potions.", whereas I chose to accept.

So, in a way you get rewarded for not making it, but the reward isn't worth much. But at least it's something positive.

I'm not a fan of punishing the player as long as he's trying to play the game (cheaters, etc. deserve it). I think it's better to "not reward"

As I said, I don't have a great solution, but I think it's important to look at the situation and think long and hard about it. If the game is already hard enough, it shouldn't get even harder if you're a bad player.