Thoughts on games, work, and… well, mostly games

I consumed Torchlight on XBLA this weekend.  I had forgotten it was being released and was quick to buy it; I used to play Mythos with my wife and remembered that it had reincarnated as Torchlight on the PC.  But having satisfied myself with Mythos I never tried Torchlight.  Before that we played Dungeon Runners.  I suppose I had had my fill of randomly-generated dungeon crawlers.

Torchlight on XBLA is beautifully executed, though not very “deep”.  Aside from the story quests, which are all glorified beat-a-harder-boss quests, there are only repetitive fetch quests in which you find and deliver a single item from the dungeon.  When you complete that quest, the quest giver essentially repeats his original request with only the item name and dungeon level changed.

That surprised me.  You’d think a single player, randomly-generated dungeon crawling game would have, well, better randomly-generated quests.

When I finished Torchlight, I considered whether the game was worth playing anymore.  Completing the story unlocks an “infinite dungeon” accompanied by two of the aforementioned quest givers.  The dungeon simply generates random map after random map, presumably scaling the difficulty of the monsters to your level.  You can get progressively better loot, improve your character, and that seems to be about it.  I still have an itch to play it, but I’m not sure why.  It’s not very difficult and there isn’t really anything to accomplish except getting myself on the leaderboards, which strike me as a curiosity to anyone with a day job.

I’ve been reading Jane McGonigal’s Reality Is Broken, in which she proposes that video games have an untapped potential to improve our lives, as evidence by their apparently making us happier than reality does.  (See her TED Talk and her interviews on G4.  She was also recently interviewed on Xbox Live’s “Tech With Tina” segment.)  I’ve just started Chapter 3, where McGonigal discusses some of the research surrounding failure in games.  Failure, she says, keeps games’ fun going.  She cites another author, Raph Koster:

“Games don’t last forever,” says Raph Koster, a leading creative director of online games and virtual worlds. “I play something I’m good at, I get really far and do really well, then I get bored.” And that’s when he stops playing and moves on to the next game. Why? Because being really good at something is less fun than being not quite good enough–yet.

Koster has written a book much beloved in the game industry, A Theory of Fun for Game Design, in which he argues that games are “fun” only as long as we haven’t mastered them. He writes, “Fun from games arises out of mastery. It arises out of comprehension… With games, learning is the drug.” And that’s why fun in games lasts only as long as we’re not consistently successful.

This passage made me grin first, because Koster’s A Theory of Fun for Game Design has been on my Amazon wishlist for some time.  Then it made me think about Torchlight.

I played through Torchlight the first time on “Easy” difficulty.  I’ve gotten into the habit recently of playing games on the easiest available difficulty level. Why? Because I despise failing and having to restart, replay, or rewatch some part of a game. But I only recently started this bias toward ease when I reasoned that I simply don’t have enough time to play games, and therefore it makes very little sense to subject myself to having to repeat parts of them.

But playing through Torchlight on “Easy” was so easy that I sometimes found myself yawning.  So after I retired my first character and began another, I bumped it up a notch to see the difference. There isn’t much, so far. Now I find myself wanting to try the harder difficulties, and I have no idea why.

It’s strange to me because 1) I’ve arguably seen everything the game has to offer, and increasing the difficulty does nothing for me except increase the chance that I’ll die, which I don’t enjoy, and 2) despite the ease, and despite having finished the game, I still find myself wanting to play the game more.

This makes me wonder if what I’m really interested in are not Torchlight’s RPG mechanics, which are basic at best, but its underlying technology instead.  Its random level generator is the best I’ve played.  It features verticality (!), randomized switch puzzles, set pieces placed for purely decorative effect, well-placed traps, and even hidden rooms.  Killing monsters isn’t what kept me playing Torchlight.  That was easy.  I kept playing–keep playing–to see the procedural map system at work.  I wanted to see what it was capable of.  Looking at it, I find its fun to apply my own intermediate understanding of procedural level generators and imagine the code underneath–how it’s architected and executes.  This exercise causes me to consider things I hadn’t before.  Learning, like Koster says, is the drug.

This is important to me because it resonates with a desire I’ve had for a while: to build a game engine, or at least part of one.  My day job has me building complex systems and the tools you use to operate them, except that it’s set in the much less glamorous world of enterprise web applications.  But whatever the backdrop, it’s true that I like building codified clockwork.  And I wonder if I play games more in the spirit of research than for the fun that McGonigal and Koster describe.

All this reminds me that I’ve still got some code to write in my series of posts on procedurally-generated loot.  Does anyone out there have any question they’d like me to take a stab at answering?