Cargo Interactive

I just happened to pass this game the other day. Prince of Persia Classic for the PS3 and Xbox 360 is a remake what is in my opinion one of the best games ever made. Jordan Mechner brought a completely new expirience to puzzle game design, inspiring a new sub-genre of platform games (to name a couple: Abe’s Oddysee, and the cinematic Another World by Eric Chahi).

I had heard that Mechner video taped his brother as a visual aide when designing his character animations. This was the key to creating fluid jumping, falling, and climbing sequences, and brought the game to life. This would be a precursor to motion capture. Here is some of that footage.

Prince of Persia Animation Reference 1985 from jordan mechner on Vimeo

Here’s a video I saw a while back, but felt it particularly inspiring. It’s a discussion among some of today’s most recognized independent game designers.  Pioneers, showing that small teams can make truly enjoyable and innovative games.

For a long time people have been very critical over the use of “lives” in video games. In fact, using them seems to be a relic left over from the arcades which is slowly becoming extinct. It used to be that a quarter would buy you with a number of fatal mistakes, metaphorically called “lives”. Often you would loose a life when your character died: rolled over by a barrel; crashed into a mountain; shot by a laser, etc. Lives work in the opposite direction of points, while you perform well in the game you are rewarded with points, meanwhile if you perform poorly you will be punished by losing lives.

Now this has worked extremely well for a long time. In fact, it was a staple in home consoles for well over a decade. It worked on the premise that once you reached a point where the gameplay became too difficult, and you would run out of lives. This means it starts slow, and builds your skill over time. As you learn to deal with the challenges of the game, tension increases as the enemies move faster, or become more aggressive. The near misses become closer and more frequent, and you know that a wrong move will mean its all over.

And that’s where the problem comes in. Often, a game that has finite lives is going to have to end before you want it to, and chances are you are going to be frustrated by that. Especially if you have to start the ball rolling again. Like Sisyphus, you start at the bottom once more and work your way up toward the peak. To combat this, game developers began to make quick ways to get back to where you died, curbing frustration. Warp pipes, level selects, or infinite continues. Unfortunately this can dampen the thrill of an encounter: If you know you can just try again without any severe punishment, you will not be nearly as frustrated, because you won’t feel like anything is at stake.

I think, however, that this frustration comes from failing to achieve a goal. You just nearly reached the summit, only slip and have to start all over. But this is not as much a problem if you really enjoy the task you’re involved in. If the game provides you with pleasure from moment to moment, and your goals are simply something to focus your attention on, failure will be much less frustrating. Starting over can still be pleasurable, especially if the game still presents a challenge to you where you start.

I think lives can be a very valuable currency which allows the player to push themselves to their limits, allowing them a few missteps along the way, if however, losing your lives means being plunged into agonizingly slow and unchallenging gameplay, they can be of very little help at all.

Jenova Chen is one of the first to pioneer Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow constraints into a game. He released flOw as a flash game, which went on to become the very successful PS3 title of the same name.

I think he’s really run with the formula with this next title Active Quiz for Math.

Something that really stuck with me when I read Jenova’s thesis was the notion of controlling difficulty through the core mechanics of a game.

“[...]the game needs to offer a pool with a wide spectrum of activities and difficulties for different types of players to swim inside. Based on players’ tastes, each individual will choose different choices and work at a different pace to navigate through the game.”*

You can see this in Active Quiz for Math. As the quiz progresses, you can quickly scan your choices for the math problems you think you could most quickly solve. I think this model could work extremely well with tasks which require snap judgments, especially where a time constraint is involved. The faster you can quickly determine the path of least resistance, without consciously thinking it through, the more quickly you can move from one task to the next. Ultimately, in flow, this is what you want to achieve: a merging of action and awareness, where you no longer think to choose, but simply act.

The presentation in this game is remarkable. The interface applies the mouse in a completely unique way and the graphics are unparalleled in today’s flash games. Add to that an amazing soundtrack by Tin Hat Trio. Keep an eye out for more work from these designers.

Florian Himsl
Edmund McMillen (who, by the way, created Gish) .

This is one of those games you play, wishing you came up with the idea yourself. Yoshio Ishii has a truly innovative game here. Cursor* 10 cleverly uses a mechanism which records your interactions, then echoes it back to you. Your task is to collaborate with those echoes to solve puzzles. I think there is a lot that could be done with this premise.