Unangband Competition update

With two days to go in the Unangband competition, cjeep1962 is winning overall having killed Denethor, Steward of Gondor - a level 57 unique - with Aspir. Big Al is only one level behind, with an adjusted deepest kill of 56 with Mirest. It's down to the wire to see who the winner is...

There's a circle of hell for game designers like me

How long before I could redesign an already well-designed game? Less than 24 hours I hear you say...

I don't think Solium Infernum needs a redesign - it feels robust, every turn has significant choices and Vic will patch out most high level exploits (Puzzle Cube + excommunication for instance).

But everyone complains about the fact you have to have Charisma in order to play the game. So I've played one 0 Charisma game to see what a low Charisma player feels like. It's not impossible, but you need to get extremely lucky, both with keeping your initial legion alive, and events. Events are important because you want to spend as long as possible restricting other people from gaining or spending their tribute.

There are a number of possible approaches that I can see to starting this way. All of them include taking the Obscure perk and starting out as a Lord, as you're already getting too few tribute for this to really matter:

Martial Prowess 4, Master of the Sword: You'll be spending what little tribute you generate on combat cards. What is important with this build is the Prestige Bonus for Victories (1.5). Capture your first place of power, and at the same time start picking on a nearby player. Don't stop until you've killed them.
Intelligence 4, Unnatural Prescience: This approach involves manipulating the events available as much as possible to your advantage. The downside with this, is you are entirely dependent on this and most useful events cost tribute. I don't see this being a viable build at all. You're much better going Prophecy 3 and using Charisma to boost yourself up to Prophecy 4 early.
Wickedness 4, Sorcery: A similar approach to Martial Prowess. The advantage is you get an extra turn. The disadvantage is you already have too many turns with the Martial Prowess to use them all to maximum effect, and this build doesn't let you create dummy event cards to waste time with.

In all of these instances,you'll be extremely vulnerable to a Destruction build, or any event that lowers your attributes by one. If you lose your starting legion or 4 points stat, you may as well rage quit straight away.

The biggest problem with all of the above strategies though is that you can just take the Lust or Gluttony public objectives, and instantly give yourself 1 Charisma. Which is why so many people take either Lust or Gluttony. Gluttony is far easier to achieve in the end game, but you're deliberately running a low tribute game, so Lust may be more appropriate here.

A number of people have complained about public objectives affecting your starting build. I don't necessarily agree, but the fact that Lust + 1 Charisma is a no brainer choice which supersedes the above does suggest we may need to redesign it.

So howabout the following descent into hell of redesigning public objectives:

Your public objective gives you one random tribute card at the start of the following turn any time you qualify for the bonus, as stated below. The random tribute cards you gain are just a base tribute roll, unmodified by your Charisma, perks or any Artifact, Relic or other bonus or Event. Each of the objectives does not modify the number of points available to the Avatar.

Gluttony: You demand tribute on all your available orders for the turn.
Greed: You consolidate four or more cards as tribute in a single turn and do not spend any tribute.
Lust: You control The Garden of Infernal Delights or The Temple of Lust the whole turn.
Sloth: You have an order slot which is not filled at the end of the turn.
Wrath: You destroy at least one Legion or banish or vanquish in single combat one Praetor during your turn.
Envy: You initiate two or more Diplomatic actions in a single turn.
Pride: You have the most prestige at the start and end of the turn.

Comments, thoughts, suggesting while I burn?

Solium Infernum

I cracked after replaying the demo most of the afternoon and bought the full version of Solium Infernum. First full single player game I played a Sorceror, Infernal Cardinal Charisma 2, Wickedness 2 build - ranked at Marquis - and ended up winning in the last turn by gaining about 120 prestige off the previous leader with Charisma and Wickedness maxed out.

Then I played a Martial Prowess 4, Obscure, Master of the Sword - only at Lord rank - and won again. That's right: a 0 charisma build with Obscure which penalizes your tribute draw even more. I only ever got enough tribute to buy a second unit once - but fortunately played the first event at the start of the game and closed off the hell mouth for 6 turns. Even then, despite pressing my advantage and staying well ahead of the AI in prestige (including eliminating another player) it was still touch and go. The AI may have stuffed up once by not attacking my undefended (except combat cards) stronghold, but I kept scrapping up enough tribute for more combat cards - didn't get a chance to increase my Charisma to 1 until turn 60 or so.

Looking forward to some real human opponents now.

For those of you worrying about the early problems with the AI being passive, it has significantly improved in release 1.05a. It's still not ideal, but at least is a worthy opponent.

All of my demons so far have been named after Angband variant maintainers.

Very occasionally

I write science fiction...

Review: Bioshock

The last ten years have been eventful for Team Soho, but probably not in the way they expected or wanted. The Getaway was delayed eighteen months from the original release date intended to coincide with the release of the Playstation 2 launch, and the technology originally envisaged for the sequel ended being co-opted and released as Playstation Station Home. And then there's Bioshock, caught between the two like a fly in amber.

Widely lauded as the game of 2007, Bioshock is a fluid puzzle game where you have to expose pipe sections then switch them around to redirect an slowing streaming flow of liquid to the exit. It is important to say I've only played the first few levels of this game and I'm looking forward to more sophisticated variations featuring multiple coloured fluids, and criss crossing sections of pipe. The reason I've only been able to get to a few levels is the same reason that few people take advantage of the Playstation Home interface: navigating the game lobby is inconvenient and would be much better replaced by a simple menu system.

That's not to denigrate the design or tech behind these lobbies: you can see why Sony saw fit to make this system the centre piece of this generation of console technology. Much like The Getaway modeled the city of London, here the ambition has been scaled upwards to feature a whole country - reading between the lines it is clearly New Zealand. The opening area, called Rapture, is inspired by the city of Napier-Hastings, which following an earthquake and fire in 1931 was rebuilt in an Art Deco style.

At some point though, the Unreal engine suffers a little as it is re purposed for a multi-user lobby system. The draw distances suffer, with little effort going on the landscape outside the windows except for a watery looking distance fog, and the continuous game world of the Getaway replaced by separately loading areas.

Inevitably human nature is the biggest flaw in this game: all of the areas I've been to so far have been filled with griefers. You hear them lolcatzing before you see them, and they are dressed like the masked and bondaged rejects of Second Life: which with the dayglo neon sheen of the environments gives the whole place the tawdry feel of a sex club. Worse still, the remnants of the Getaway's unsatisfactory first person shooter code still exist in the lobby system - hampered by the poor walking speed of your avatar and the fact the environment design restricts the combat distance between you and your opponents to approximately ten feet. Since ammunition for the two weapons I've managed to find is so limited, I've had to resort to hitting them repeatedly in the head with an over sized nipple clamp that I appear to have picked up at some point. There's no strategy to this as you cannot block with this weapon, so you're forced to merely watch the increasingly blood spattered fantasy gimp outfit of what in reality must be some overweight thirty something American trying to click the mouse button faster than you.

I'm convinced some of the devs must have been moonlighting to make the lobbies more interactive, but it is so frustratingly incomplete. Picking up one of the tape recorded messages would start to play recorded dialog explaining the history of the place in every other first person shooter in existence, but not here. And there's some kind of magic system that helps you against the griefers, but you have to stare at their feet to figure out whether they're standing oil or water to decide which ability to use, instead of going for the head shot which you'd intuitively choose. Ideally there'd be well balanced integration between the main game - which you access by going up to one of the elabourate arcade cabinets and pressing v - and the lobby meta-game: see Paradroid for a beautiful example of how to implement this.

I hope the developers respond to some of the criticism they must have inevitably received in the follow up Bioshock 2. I'm convinced your avatar's slow walking speed - my personal peeve - will be addressed as the second game features a protagonist called Big Daddy; his impressive height must justify an increase in pace.

TF2 bug filed with Valve

The Scottish Resistance is too boring a weapon on many maps - placing the stickies and sitting around waiting is unnecessarily dull, especially when compared to the Eyelander.

The stickes should nag the Demoman in a wee high pitched voice - as if they were married to him, and Irish.

A kinder, gentler Unangband

The final release of Unangband 0.6.4 will be a much kinder game. This is due to the generous contribution of bigalphillips, fixing a bug that caused spell damage to be grossly over the intended amounts.

I was referencing the wrong field in the monster_race structure when computing the actual spell damage inflicted.

As Al puts it:

Apprentice mages used to use a power of 9 instead of the spell_power of 1 for their spells, causing the major damage.

This makes many dungeon guardians much easier eg. The Dunlending Agent has a power of 28 but a spell_power of only 8, so he'll do about ~third less damage now. :(

I also want to thank Big Al for picking up and fixing so many bugs this week...

[Edit: For those concerned, damage from breath weapons is unaffected].

245 open bugs

What happens at this point in the Unangband release cycle, is I force myself to stop adding new features and start working on the bugs list. At some point while working my way through this list, I will be crying tears of blood, swearing never again to work on the game and then I will release 0.6.4 final and take some time off.

Adding new features results in writing hundreds of lines of code, juggling complex and interesting ideas in your head and coding in an enjoyable fashion. Whereas bug fixing requires that you desparately try to remember old and crufty code you haven't looked at in a while, juggle even more of the code base in your head, and wander through the procedural landscape until you find the exact circumstance the bug occurs under, and then get killed off by a passing monster while you're trying to replicate the fault over and over. And the fix is frequently a one-line or even one character change so you don't feel like you're doing much work.

The irony is that I probably fix bugs at the same rate when I'm adding new features* as when I'm bugfixing. But I can't guarantee which bugs I'll fix when adding new features. Whereas every bug raised by someone is an issue that I need to address to keep the players happy. So I have to go through this process.

To get a feeling of progress, I use the bug tracker in Berlios to mark bugs as fixed in SVN by lowering the priority to one and adding a comment to that effect in the bug. This results in page one of the bug database slowing changing from light red to grey. And consequently, bugs get fixed in batches of 50 or so, because switching to page 2 and seeing the wall of grey I'm building turn to red undermines all the progress that I've made.

(* The difference is I'm creating new bugs at about the same rate as well).

The Unday Papers

Undays* are for kicking back, getting out the bug spray and fixing the hole in the screen windows in the bedroom while avoiding scratching the mosquito bites on your toes.

Let's try and avoid adding more insect monsters to Midgewater Marshes and have a look at what's happened on the SVN server over the last fortnight (I guess this is a biweekly column now):

• We've gone from rev 2792 to 2890 - that's a total of 98 commits, slightly up on the 45 commits per week I achieved the previous week I reported on. A lot of those commits are smaller - and seem to feature statements like 'fix the obvious compilation bug left in the previous revision' - it looks like my overall coding quality is dipping a little as development fatigue sets in. But a lot of tidying up and bug fixing at the same time - we're heading in the right direction for release.
  
• Quite a bit of work followed on directly from the competition: fixes for monster allies, balancing and revising druid spells based on player feedback, bug fixes for targeting spells.
  
• I've added a 'h'andle command ('%' in roguelike keyset) which allows you to choose an item, then specify which command you use with that item. This command has been some time coming, with most of the required framework in the code. There is a larger game plan afoot with this, that should benefit players using graphics more than ASCII...
• I've completed the third attempt for allowing running next to unusual terrain - this time successfully. There's still some work to be done allowing the player to run along the walls of wide corridors, but I'm happy with running in Unangband now.
• Angband released version 3.1.2 and as usual, the most important thing is to steal are any user interface improvements. I borrow the command to center the screen on the player (^L) and there's a few other improvements I'd like to use but the code base has diverged enough that'll I have to do the heavy lifting myself.
• I've spent considerable time improving the description of spells: both those that create regions and shape change spells, as well as the regions themselves. Players won't use an ability if they don't understand it, and one of the more successful Unangband players in the competition has avoided the Druid specialty of region spells in favour of summoning...
• SaThaRiel conveniently pops up after every release and let's me know about the compilation warnings he sees. I appreciate the effort to keep me honest.
• The pre3 release trips one of the more classic release bugs. Bumping the version number does little except cause every data file to fail to load - and I managed to compile and release the game in this state. D'oh!
• Pav, the generous maintainer of angband.oook.cz, is forced to update the code to parse the competition character dumps twice, because of formatting errors on my part in producing some game statistics in the character dump. But you can now see which monsters you are killing the most of. Unsurprisingly it is fruit bats.
• I've bumped up the power of familiars considerably - all of my testing featured familiars that had blows, and without blows they were a lot less useful. My wife finds it mildly amusing that I'm teaching my character's pet monkey to fetch things. Especially since we visited the Monkey Forest in Ubud, Bali late last year and the monkeys were much keener on stealing than fetching for you.
• Please ignore the mention of dungeon towns for the moment, and imagine you're reading the next Unday papers - when I'll be ready to discuss them in detail.
• Add birth_gollum option which starts you deep in the dungeon, but with the snivelling, wretched ability to make any offer sound good to a hostile monster who would listen to you. It sounds intriguing, even to me. I hope it's playable.
• Long standing bugs fixed: I think, just quietly, I may have fixed the mysterious 'body parts getting created in walls bug.' I'm not marking this fixed at the moment, but am hopeful I'll be able to.
• New spells this fortnight: Briarpatch. Razorwood. Hoar Frost. New items this week: None. New monsters this fortnight: Wooden golem. Wooden figurine. Got to give druids something to warp...
  

Bug spray? Hmm... I don't think I have any midges in the Midgewater Marshes. That has to be fixed...

The Unday papers is a somewhat stylistically derivative summary of SVN commits for the week and other development issues.

RIP Explorington

It's with a heavy heart that I've read the final Angband - Tales of the Pit. Congratulations on running the series so long and so reliably. I've enjoyed the strip and the wry take on genre.

Why are games difficult?

You may want to start this series with part one, two, three, four or five.

Demon's Souls was lauded as one of the best and most challenging games of 2009, for the difficulty of both the game play and the placement the apostrophe in the title. It is this difficulty that was seen as a breath of fresh air by many jaded critics and game players, who had supposedly grown fat and weak on the Facebook Farmvilles and amusement park ride MMOs, with their watered down game mechanics designed to hook in and succor what Gevlon refers to as morons and socials.

Demon's Souls was criticised as one of the most harsh and unforgiving games of 2009, for the difficulty of both the game play and the placement of the apostrophe in the title. It is this unnecessarily hostile environment that continued the tradition of poor design catering only to hard core critics and game players, who have the obsessive compulsive disorders necessary and basement bedrooms at their parents' place necessary for the multi-hundred hour play times required by treadmill MMOs, with their grindtastic game mechanics designed to hook in and succor those Tobold parodies in the Rise of the Leet King.

Difficulty in game design is something I hold dear to my heart - mostly because I have written a game which is too difficult for me, or many others to ever contemplate completing. Witness the crushed and torn bodies of the many Shadow Fairies that litter the latest Angband competition ladder and the self-evident pride of the masochists posting that they've made level 5 (out of 50 - and level 50 is much, much more challenging again). As Konijn puts it:

Anyway, I think at this point, I give up. You cannot win with this character, there's instakill from a number of sources even while playing very carefully. I number my savegame tries, this is number 22, so you cant say I didnt try ;)

and then keeps playing...

The current shining exemplar of the roguelike genre, Dwarf Fortress, has a motto 'failing is fun', but roguelikes have always been notoriously difficult...

Let's start at the beginning. Tobold poses the question succinctly in a follow up post to the Leet King letter:

When you say World of Warcraft is too easy, how exactly should a good, hard game differ from that?

(An aside: the only literary technique more misplaced than writing a humorous opening to a serious question on the Internet - the mistake Tobold admits to - is posing a rhetorical question. It works in the context of the original post, but as soon as you're quoted elsewhere, people just assume you're stupid and answer the question, rather than following the link and finding out you've already got some answers. So only an idiot someone trying to be difficult would title an article with a rhetorical question. So if you're going to link to this, please call it 'The Seventeen Ways Games can be Difficult' - or something like that).

He misses a trick: the question shouldn't be how can we make games harder? It should be why are games difficult at all? And it's this, more fundamental question, that I'll be attempting to answer here.

Why are games difficult? We have conquered the world as a species, we are better off than every previous generation, we are - you especially - inherently bad-ass. As Neal Stephenson points out, provided you accept evolution as a theory, you are currently expressing more badassedness than any creature that has ever lived and died ever, by definition. And yet we can be challenged and beaten by something as a simple as a game - some lines on a ground, and some differing coloured pebbles.

We can be beaten because of random factors. As soon as you introduce the possibility of randomness in a game, there exists the possibility of events outside of your direct control. Something as simple as a dice, or a spinner, or something less biased like entropic heat exchange, can be used to simulate externalities: the environment around you, other competitors - either because you don't have the players available to represent them directly, or to represent conflicts for which it would be inconvenient or dangerous to play out in reality - the want of a nail for the shoe of a horse. Reality is more outrageous and unbelievable than the most fantastical fiction, and randomness is a fair arbiter of unlikely consequences.

Even when you are able to directly resolve events without a random number generator, stochastic forces ensure that the outcome is not pre-determined. In fact, many games require that. You may immediately think of games of chance, gambling, horse racing, boxing, but the continuum of indeterminacy extends to all sporting events. If the outcome of any sprint is that Usain Bolt is the winner, then no one will sprint against him - unless there is sufficient incentive to change the race to be 'by how much is Usain Bolt the winner' or 'by what amount will the world record held by Usain Bolt be reduced by this week'. Even pursuits as sedentary as chess can be influenced by illness, distraction, the mindset and level of preparation of the competitors.

Other players are the next reason games can be difficult. Multi-player suddenly increases the variability of the challenge enormously, both in directly competitive games, and cooperative games (PvE). Should I choose the optimal strategy, which requires that my opponent or my partner is also playing to this optimal strategy? If there are suboptimal strategies with reduced risk of loss, which one of these is predictable, which one less so? The skill set required to directly read the mind of the opponent, or yomi, and the complexities and strategies of game theory can be expressed in games as simple as rock, paper, scissors, or as complex as the stock market.

Implicit with competition is the notion of different outcomes. Games can be difficult because we don't necessarily have a binary notion of risk vs. reward in all games. And even games which are differentiated by simple winning and losing, the consequences of the strategy employed can vary widely depending on whether we anticipate repeat play with the same opponent, or if we carry resources (star players, information about the opponent's preferred strategy or risk aversion, preponderance of particularly strategies in the environment of possible players) from one game to the next. Whether you should be a hawk or a dove depends on who you flock with, in the prisoner's dilemma, your choice matters more on whether you'll meet your potential betrayer as a cellmate.

Reward or risk over time is another important factor. Unlike the perfect world of game theory, we are finite beings with immediate wants and needs, and long term goals. Over a sufficiently long term, everyone is a loser - dead, as well. There is evidence to suggest a negative correlation between time spent (computer) gaming, and income - does the time you devote to winning this hundred hour RPG meaning you're losing out on the bigger game of life? Even in the game, if there is a strategy that earns you 50G per hour, why are you employing a tactic that only earns you 25G in the same time.

But that's unfair - I hear you say, complaining on the forums and asking Blizzard to reach for the nerf bat. What I want to do in the game should be just as rewarding as the actions those people who bothered to go out and do the research are doing? Strategy X is clearly cheating, because I can't or won't do it, or don't enjoy doing it. Welcome to the world, scrub. You're not playing the game if you're not playing to win. You're playing some weird made up in your own head game that no one else on the server is actually playing. Feel free to keep doing it, but get out of the way of the real players.

But sometimes you just don't have the abilities needed to play at the highest level. Or the twitch reflexes. Or the Internet connection. Or the money. Or clean water and parasite free food and a source of income able to keep you above the poverty line with a diet rich in enough protein and other essential nutrients to avoid crippling chronic disease. It should be self-evident that life is unfair, from the moment of conception, and it is only the badass inheritance of your genes that keeps you floating atop the cesspool of the real world, fighting over the last scrap of food at the table.

And that's before you sit at the table. When you do, are you playing black or white? Do you move first or second? Are you Protoss against Zerg, or Terran against Terran? Did you spawn in the jungle, next to elephants, or in the hills next to copper? Does your starting planet have enough iron, Quinns? The rules of the game may start out asymmetrical, with a playing field tilted towards or against you.

There is one asymmetry that everyone starts out with when they first play a game - they don't know the rules of play. The process of learning a game can be simple or challenging, but it is clear that we can derive significant enjoyment simply from exploring the possible space set up by starting with simple rules and gradually introducing game play elements with greater complexity. Critically lauded puzzle games like Braid and World of Goo as well as block busters like Half Life 2 rely on this technique to propel narrative and game play forward, and games like Civilisation, Diablo and most MMORPGs dangle the carrot of newer and shinier toys to play with at almost every opportunity. The recent after adventure report of a Solium Infernum game starts out with games journalist Kieron Gillen tripping up on straight forward failing to read the fine manual, through staying awake at night writing angry letters in his head to the designer when an ambiguity in the rules interpretation puts him at a disadvantage, through to him rules lawyering with the best of them via email to try to bring down the front runner in the end game.

And even when you know what rules drive the game forward, and what ones to drive around, you may still not know what is happening in the game. Fog of war, hard to implement in board games, far easier in computer games, will shroud the map, letting you know a little of what is going on, but not enough. Incomplete information is an art lost these days to the single player game and almost entirely the province of multi-player, thanks to the rise of gamefaqs.com and game assistance tools in MMORPGs. Roguelikes are fighting a rear guard battle here, with randomly generated dungeons, permadeath and identify systems, but even some of the staunchest Angband players now advocate the elimination of identify, and full 'monster spoilers' available to all players. Which is a shame, because as poker and Demon's Souls, with its in game tip sharing, both demonstrate, incomplete information is a powerful and addictive game mechanic when done right.

Related to incomplete information, but important enough that it warrants separate discussion, is incorrect information - exemplified by the difficulty spike. Jeff Vogel argues strongly that you should never bushwhack your players; that is design a section of the game which they cannot complete at the point they reach it. I class this as incorrect information, because players will blithely waltz pasts the signs saying 'certain death here, do not enter!', the skulls, wet with fresh blood, the wall of helpful townsfolk blocking the entrance with prophecies of doom, with a notion in their head based on the difficulty of what the last challenge required, not what the next one will. The continued expenditure of millions on protecting us from the last terrorist threat, not the next one, shows us humans incapable of predicting terribly well, but very good at remembering what just happened. From a game theory point of view, we play using an optimisation strategy based on what we know, and when the strategy ends up depleting resources we had planned to keep for later, we find it difficult to continue.

Incorrect information is the most harmful when inappropriately in the user interface to the game. At some level, almost all computer games are about a user interface strategy. If we can design an AI to play the game perfectly, and simplify the UI to a single button press to start that AI, I would argue we still have a game, but the user interface to that game has been solved. At the other extreme, the complex button sequences and twitch reflexes of FPS or fighting games are a user interface hurdle that proves to be insurmountable for some potential players.

Moving beyond a discussion of simple user interface design, there are more subtle interface disparities between play at an intermediate level and advanced level, or between single player and multiplayer. I've argued elsewhere that Civilisation IV fails as a game on one level, because the elements of the game that it emphasizes in the user interface - a broad spread of technologies, boom or turtle strategies, building lots of interesting units - completely mismatch the strategies required at high level play - forest chopping, rushing strategies, the stack of death. If the optimal strategy is to have horse units built by turn 10, as you lower the difficulty level, you should be getting rushed by the AI with horse units at turn 11, then 12, and so on. Similarly, your single player game should usually be designed to make you better at multi-player, because the high level, interesting play typically only develops in multi-player some months after release. The newly introduced Dungeon Finder in World of Warcraft appears to be revolutionising the game, because it makes the tactics needed for the end game: the trinity of tank, healer, DPS - the easiest and most effective strategy for advancement at prior levels.

But what allows these differing levels of play in the first place? What makes for increasing levels of strategy, plays and counter plays? Even games with perfect information, minimised asymmetry and easily learned rules like Chess and Go, have almost unlimited scope for interesting play, because the rule set allows for a combinatorial explosion of possible game play spaces. These different from tic-tac-toe because there are too many possible combinations of moves for any one player to know the perfect strategy for any situation. Chess and Go differ from Starcraft and Streetfighter because the possible moves that have to been examined for exploits goes beyond the rock, paper, scissor choices of rush, turtle, boom or strike, block, throw.

Closely related to complexity is emergence, where behaviour that could not be predicted by the game designers, but can be discovered by the players appears in the game. This differs from complexity in the way that chess pieces don't change colour or float in the air when the board reaches a particular configuration, but it is possible to scale a building in Deus Ex or Half-Life using some well placed limpet mines. It is the provinces of speed runs and ROM programmers.

Whereas play is the province of mod designers and role players. We can always make a game more difficult, by choosing to make it more difficult, limiting ourselves artificially to a different set of standards, or changing the rules of the game and exploring the results. I'll be the nurse, you be the doctor this time - scrub as strength instead of weakness. Even for a seasoned play to winner like David Sirlin, play provides the opportunity for some well-needed research and development time. If I play as Blanka, can I find some bug or exploit against Guile, my favourite character, that an opponent in an upcoming tournament may try to use against me? What about if I blank on the day? Who should I choose instead if I don't make my crouch low punches reliably?

And finally, we can choose to extend play in the moment, for pleasure's sake. The day is dawning over Africa in Far Cry 2, so I'm going to walk to the next assassination, admiring the god rays filtering through the trees, the mist, the sniper lining up a bead on me... I know I should move on from Aeris, but I'm going to try to rescue her one last time. Yorda and I will sit here a moment, and watch the birds flock, even if it brings the darkness one step closer to taking her from me...

To summarise, games can be difficult because of:

1. Random number generators
2. Indeterminacy of outcomes due to unpredictable external forces
3. Other players
4. Complex risk vs. reward trade offs
5. Finite playing time
6. Self-limiting performance
7. Inequality
8. Asymmetry
9. Learning the rules
10. Incomplete information
11. Incorrect information
12. User interface
13. Disparity between beginning, mid and high level play
14. Complexity
15. Emergence
16. Play
17. Pleasure

So to ask how do we make a game harder, is to ask how we can vary these factors in an interesting way.

There's a whole lot here to take in, and I have skimmed over topic areas that warrant an article in themselves. This has been a diversion from the path we were taking, but an important one, and for part seven, I'll be getting back on track, and making a second attempt to talk about failure.

The Quest for Quests: Part Five (Failure)

You may want to start this series with part one, two, three or four.

Normally I write these article series in situ in the browser, using the java based text editing tool. But the article I was planning to write on failure felt like a more substantial topic, so I ended up creating an .rtf document in Text Edit and starting jotting down notes and thoughts about failure. It has been this document that has sat on my desktop for over two months, terrifyingly incomplete and unformed, since I finished part four of this series. A single word staring at me every time I started my computer.

Failure.

Think of the fifth part of this article series as an ellipsis, rather than an admission of defeat. Travel forward, a little wiser, a little tender, to part six, where I'll be talking about a topic closely related to failure, and a little dearer to my heart: difficulty.

(Fret not, I intend to return to this at a later date).