Lab Rat Gaming
A friend of mine who is an avid and opinionated gamer made reference to game designer Wyatt Cheng's five second rule, five seconds of perfect pleasure in a game that ensures you'll want to do it for hours and days to come, like the five seconds when you complete a row in Tetris and the blocks disappear and you hear that distinctive sound, or the five seconds in Street Fighter 2 where you deliver a controlled and well-timed dragon punch and inflict proportionally more effective and visually interesting damage. My friend wrote that the immensely popular game Worlds of Warcraft was missing this key factor and that it was one of the reasons he found his interest in the game waning.
Even as someone who's been around the culture of video and computer games since its inception and even at one time attempted to develop games in a professional capacity, I've always felt uncomfortable referring to myself as a gamer, because I'm not. However, I've owned several consoles since I was a kid and my initial computer purchase was driven not because I wanted to do anything particular productive with that box of metal, glass and electricity, but merely because I wanted to play games. I still try out new games regularly, and keep up with various innovative or particularly interesting games -- I made a concerted effort to try out Shadow of the Colossus recently (fantastic) and for some reason am fascinated by the concept of Katamari Damacy even though I've never actually played it. I own an Xbox, got it modded (a process intended to allow an owner to play games and software on the console in a much less restricted fashion), but ended up using it mostly as a media centre to watch videos and, unlike a hardcore gamer, left it in Toronto to gather dust temporarily while I moved to Vancouver for work.
So... I don't know where I fall on the spectrum exactly. I suppose most people would call me a casual gamer, but I suspect I'm not even that. But to get back to this "five second rule" -- to me, this insight initially seemed interesting but the longer I think about it, the less convinced I am of its bell-ringing universal truth, and the more I believe that he's conflated excellent game mechanics with the visual and auditory elements that embellish them.
Katamari springs to mind as something that is essentially a single idea, repeated indefinitely, but rolling a ball of trash around to pick up larger and larger pieces isn't the central reward, it's the basic structure of the game. In a similar fashion, the Tetris example used by Cheng seems particularly wrong-headed. Making rows disappear is the fundamental game mechanic of Tetris; if you don't, you will lose much faster. I don't think anyone but the most addicted of gamers played the game for the particular delights of seeing a row disappear.
It's as if Cheng is saying that the sheer delight of a gong sounding and a fireworks display when your pawn captures a queen is what would keep people playing chess, rather than a well-tested game mechanic with deep implications. His "five second rule" points up a certain philosophy of gaming that I find kind of depressing. It's the devotion to a system of tangible rewards, a weirdly Pavlovian style of gaming that is completely at odds with the way I played games as a kid, and the games which I enjoyed. You see it in the grim, statistic quests of many MMOGs (massively multiplayer online games, games which allow many people to play together and interact -- a kind of socializing for the 21st century nerd) and in the insistent way some gamers feel they need to finish a game, even if they don't like it all that much.
Like the promise of continuous pleasure in the videotape described in David Foster Wallace's magnum opus Infinite Jest, the majority of vocal gamers nowadays seem intent on creating even more efficiently time-absorbing leisure. Playing games has become a lifestyle in itself, a centralized devotion to something that by design, is just entertainment, diversion. It's diverting, all right. (What results from games? Really, only more games.) Is this just the modern way of doing things? Is this some endpoint of copious leisure time? How ironic it is that people have lost their jobs and families to the addictive pleasures of modern games!
Five seconds, multiplied, sure adds up.
posted by Nelson @ 7:45 a.m.
5 comments
5 Comments:
My understanding of Cheng's five second rule is a little subtler than Cheng's. It's not the payoff that's five seconds long, it's the few seconds of anticipation prior to that payoff--in Tetris, when you've been building up a solid tower with a single narrow corridor down one side so that a straight four-piece slides right down it, taking out four rows at once; the five second rule covers seeing that straight block, guiding it into place, and watching four rows flash and disappear. That continual drip, drip, drip of anticipated reward is the addictive quality that keeps you sitting their for hours.
Where Cheng overstates it is limiting it to the narrowest five second case, because it's not really five seconds long. Civilization is famous for its turns being just short enough that you keep wanting to play for one more turn (a TV ad for Civ 4 featured a support group chanting "no more turns... no more turns"). In fact, Civ 4 reduced the number of cities in your empire just because turns were taking too long. But the idea is the same--making the basic unit of pleasure small enough to keep exciting the player without sating them, and making the next hit available in the very near future.
I agree that this doesn't capture the entirety of (good) games, though a game like Katamari is all about this sort of reward. But I wouldn't describe it as a split in game design, where some other guiding principle leads you in a different direction. It's more like the five second rule is a necessary but not sufficient component of a good game (with the five second rule being interpretted liberally in actual duration). I can't think of any games that are successful without some kind of continual stream of low level payoff. Chess has positioning in the opening and middle game, and capturing various pieces; Monopoly has passing go and collecting rent; football has plays and touchdowns; FPS' have killing enemies; Civ has one more turn; Sim City has a growing budget and continual city fluctuations.
Cheng's wrong insofar as that five second rule content is all that's required. But it's absence is usually a glaring omission.
On reflection, a bit of clarification is in order.
What your friend and I are talking about with the five second rule is somewhat different from what Cheng is highlighting. The way I described it is one thing; Cheng is talking about longer term payoffs. The continual feeding of small payoffs to the customer is what keeps them playing long enough to see Cheng's payoff of some beautiful, big, artistic moment. Cheng's is the second order payoff, while mine and Craig's is the first order. The first order happens every few minutes; Cheng's happens a couple times an hour.
Where games like WoW crap out at the end is that the fourth or fifth order payoff (having the epic 2 elite uber shoulderpads that takes weeks to get) is too far removed for most to get anticipatory about it.
Justin, there's no doubt that consistent low level payoffs is what makes games appealing and addictive. I just think it points up a certain philosophy of game design that reminds me a lot of the method that goes into thrill-ride blockbusters in Hollywood, which are great while you're playing but end up leaving not much of an impression after the ride is over.
What you're talking about is short term goals (most obvious in the chess example, where it's tactics versus strategy) and, as you noted, less about the food dispenser-like "wow cool" reward system that Cheng is referring to, and are pretty different things.
My friend wrote that the immensely popular game Worlds of Warcraft was missing this key factor and that it was one of the reasons he found his interest in the game waning.
When combat is the point of the game, and does not produce any measurable amount of pleasure or "small reward", then yes, it must be doing other things to retain my interest. And when you read the other reasons, you'll see that these other things didn't measure up either. If its the point of the game, then make it perfect. The way that you make it perfect is to use the 5-second rule as a guide. I was just pointing it out for the benefit of those who may not know what it is; not to point to some universal law and say "I declare this....inferiorrr!". :-)
the less convinced I am of its bell-ringing universal truth, and the more I believe that he's conflated excellent game mechanics with the visual and auditory elements that embellish them.
Nope. I don't recall calling it a universal truth - its presence (or lack of) must fit the style of the game its in. Its neither game mechanic nor feature, yet a helpful rule of thumb to keep in mind when weighing your game's objectives against the means to achieve them; and how the positive rewards manifest themselves for the player.
You say that Tetris did not pay attention to reward immediacy, yet I would suggest that you try some really bad versions of Tetris. You'll see how they differ from the original (or better) versions and you will see very subtle differences in the reward sound/visuals when you clear a line, or when you get a Tetris. The difference is huge, and worth paying a lot of attention to when making games.
Although I sort of agree with Justin's assessment of Cheng's post, I'd point out that Wyatt refers to X-Wing as a great example of the 5-second rule in action. And in that, he's not referring to a 2nd order payoff at all - he's referring to a measured response within the context of a specific game objective.
Yeah, I can get with the concept of the five-second rule as shorthand for "pay attention to the details (the important details)", but I suppose I was using it as an indicator of the stress put on "addictiveness" in game design over other qualities that might be prized in a game, like the depth of certain board games and the infinite inspiration of a good book. I think this emphasis in games is why some people tend to look upon the current crop of games as a second-rate medium, although most hardcore gamers tend to disagree vehemently.
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