Theory

[Molloy]

Many fighting games have moves that are difficult to execute reliably. In tournament matches players weigh up the odds based on how reliably they can 'get the move out' rather like a snooker player decides he has odds of potting a certain ball.

In StarCraft the elite players are well known for their capacity to do insane inputs per minute. It's an absolute prerequisite for performing at the top level.

Many of the older FPS games in particular have very complicated movement systems. You've got tens of different techniques for making you move more quickly, increase your momentum or make you harder to hit (e.g. bunny hopping). Many of these take a lot of practice to perform (if you can ever do them at all) and vary subtly from game to game. Although I'd say many of the skills are transferrable.

You could contrast these three with a shooter where you only have to move your ship and hit a couple of buttons. There's plenty of hand-eye coordination and timing involved but the actual input is simple.

I'm a little bit confused when it comes to videogames what defines meaningful complexity. Even the best player can only concentrate on so many things at once. He's just better at prioritising what he does than everybody else. At what point do you over-egg the pudding adding complications and render the whole thing meaningless?

[Worm]

I asked about this in the other thread:
http://forum.insomnia.ac/viewtopic.php? ... rt=25#7136

Making it more physically challenging to input commands doesn't affect the game's possibility space.

Oh but it does! You didn't pay very much attention to the "muscle memory" example. You see, the more physical you make a game, the more complex you make it. This is a universal law. And when you make commands more physically challenging to pull off, this is what you are doing -- injecting more, let us say, reality into the game, and reality is always immeasurably complex. All the muscles and joints in the hand, the nerves communicating to the brain, what we call reflexes -- by increasing the required precision for commands, you are bringing all of this vastly complex apparatus into play, even more so than before. The possibilities for error are increased a hundrefold or thousandfold, and form an added layer of complexity that the players are called upon to master...

I'm not sure what you're asking in your last sentence. If it's a rule that requires additional skill to master and provides an advantage once mastered, it adds meaningful complexity. Now, what I think you are getting at is that there is a limit to human reaction speed and precision that restricts the number or difficulty of the inputs a player can be expected to make. Maybe we can draw a hard limit someday with the help of computers, but of course that limit will be different from person to person, and they will have to prioritize their choices accordingly.

There's no way to know in advance what will be manageable; we have to rely on the best judgment of experienced players and designers, then wait for competition to reveal what might have been missed.

[milkycha]

With regards to fighting games, the input difficulty is just one more thing that separates better players from lesser skilled players (I'd hasten to argue it's the same for all genres). The difficulty of reliably executing moves with strict timing/complex input is also subjective -- once you become proficient, it ceases to be difficult.

In Tekken, the Mishima characters have an 'electric' verion of their Wind God Fist move. Making the God Fist electric renders it unpunishable on block, does slightly more damage, and executes much faster. To perform an 'electric', the player must simultaneously press the final joystick input and a button within two frames. Since the move is already awkward (forward, neutral, down, down/forward+punch), performing the electric version EVERY single time seemed nigh on impossible when I was first learning. Now -- after endless hours of practice -- I can execute it 90-95% of the time; it has ceased to be difficult.

What I'm saying is that the top Mishima players don't need to "weigh up the odds" of them being able to flawlessly execute their electrics; it has become part of their muscle memory.

Now, does the inclusion of the Electric Wind God Fist (among others -- the Electrics are hardly the most technical Tekken moves) add meaningful complexity to the game? Again, this is purely subjective -- what, if anything, is meaningful? Does it mean anything that I've put hundreds of hours into the game, learning things like this along the way?

To those who would argue that inclusions of inputs such as these are arbitrary -- a relic of a bygone Arcade attitude (keep pumping in credits until you can execute it in your sleep!) -- I ask you this:

Would it be any fun if you could do everything the game has to offer on your first play?

You can't see all of Disneyland in a single day, man.

[Molloy]

That's pretty much what I was wondering about. Thanks for the link Worm.

The reason you hear most people complain about physical complexity is that it's locking most of the playerbase out of the high level play. I'm not going to argue along those lines.

What I'm curious about is if you add complexity in one area, don't you have to reduce it somewhere else? You can't have infinite complexity in every aspect of the game because it'd be more than the human brain can parse at once, or it'd take 100 years with 10,000 people playing each other to make sense of it. You don't want to know how the entire game works in a day, but you want people to understand a lot of it without it taking forever.

The StarCraft guys spend a ton of time wrestling with the interface because it doesn't allow you to queue anything very efficiently and everything needs babysitting. It often feels like you have to click five times where the designer could just have easily made you click once. It's a very micromanagement focussed tactical game. If the interface wasn't so limiting and the units cannon fodder without personal attention they could have made the game complex in lots of other ways where it's now by necessity very simple.

I think the scope of fighting games and FPSes is narrow enough that you can have much more physical input hurdles. But I think there's still probably a point where complicated input can cloud the complexity of the mind games.

[milkycha]

I think there's still probably a point where complicated input can cloud the complexity of the mind games.

Not really. While complicated inputs require physical dexterity, they don't change the rules of the game. Using Tekken as an example again -- While the Wind God Fist gains bonuses (unpunishable etc.) for flawless execution, it is still classed as a 'high' attack. Simply crouch to avoid it. And, at high level play, one simply assumes all God Fists will be electric.

You can't have infinite complexity in every aspect of the game

If the complexity is a part of the game, its a part of the game. Fighting games are all about knowing what to do when your opponent knows you know that he knows what your next move is going to be; the infinite outcomes are what makes it endlessly fun to play.

[losganados]

I think that he is trying to ask if a game can be unnecessarily complex. They can be if a game requires less input for a better output.

Example: If it is easier (requires less input) to use the special moves in a fighting game than the normal moves, then the normal moves are unnecessarily complex and/or the special moves are too simple (the more powerful moves should require more input from the player).

[Molloy]

I'm shy of discussing fighting games because it isn't a genre I'm very proficient in. That wasn't quite what I was saying losganados. What I meant was if a player is spending more of his time and energy on input dexterity isn't he spending less time and energy on choosing what moves to make and reading/predicting his opponent? Doesn't one aspect hinder people's ability to do the other?

As you say it probably really comes down to taste and who the game is catering for. The ratio of different types of complication isn't going to please everyone. And there's a balance between the two because otherwise the game would be very one dimensional.

If you take StarCraft there is a greater emphasis on unit control than on other aspects. A game like Total Annihilation has a broader scope so you have to spend most of your time dealing with economy and production, and spend what time you have left on the detail of handling units. There's too much for any one player to pay attention to at once, and the skill comes from deciding where to invest your time. That's where the varying playstyles come from because everybody prioritises their time/attention differently.

[milkycha]

I was just using fighting games as an example, as it is the genre I'm most proficient in.

if a player is spending more of his time and energy on input dexterity isn't he spending less time and energy on choosing what moves to make and reading/predicting his opponent?

I was arguing that once one becomes highly skilled at the input dexterity aspect of the game, your point becomes a non-issue; the player isn't concentrating on physical dexterity as it has been ingrained in his muscle memory. However, I realise my argument doesn't work for all genres when you say

There's too much for any one player to pay attention to at once, and the skill comes from deciding where to invest your time.

Obviously, even the top player cant keep his eyes on everything that's happening in a game like TA; its physically impossible. But doesn't this tie in with what I said about endless possibilities? Every time one plays TA, won't they choose to manage their time at least a little differently? And because of the limits set by the game's interface itself (can't manage everything at the same time), players will constantly strive to improve their management skills; learning what's best to pay attention to, and what isn't so important. Every player is on a level playing field in this regard.

[Molloy]

Sorry if I'm not being very coherent here. I tend to stumble upon realisations through conversation rather than knowing what I'm trying to say from the start.

I assumed if players can't get a move out with 100% success rate he's still going to be investing a lot of his concentration on executing the move. Still if practice can get the success rate up anywhere close to that then you're right it isn't really a problem in that genre. I don't really think it's a problem in the FPS genre to any great extent either, although even after investing hundreds of hours in these games I've unfortunately never managed to nail the more advanced techniques. Once you've learned the technique it's going to be fairly effortless, or the punishment for messing a maneuver up a few times is inconsequential.

The reason TA is appealing (to me) is the interface is driven towards queuing everything up so you can forget about it and do something else. This lets the player concentrate on the what players like to call macromanagement, rather than micromanagement. You don't have to concern yourself with the detail, except when you have the time. Whereas in many other RTS games you absolutely have to concern yourself with the detail because if your units are on 'move' rather than 'move-attack' they'll get massacred. The scope of most of these real time tactical games is much more limited by necessity.

This whole idea of wrestling with the interface is only really unique to a few genres, and they're all relatively modern. FPS, RTS, music game and latter day Vs fighters. I can't think of any very complex examples before that. Input has classically been very direct.

edit/update: when I think about it what I'm talking about with RTS isn't right. I'm talking about interface rather than execution. Everything you execute in any of these games is as simple as a button press. It's just that some require huge amounts of button pressing. It's volume rather than complexity. I don't think anyone would argue that making the player click twice instead of ten times to do the same thing would be a bad thing.

[Worm]

Many people would argue exactly that. The game is in real time, so more clicks is not just annoying repetition; it's also a reflex test. Some players enjoy the frenetic clicking and find it be an exciting challenge.

What you're talking about is a genre issue, but not in the way you've described--it is the broader question of how many "action" or "strategy" elements a game has.

Returning to your idea of trading complexity: a turn-based strategy game is not constrained by human reaction speed, so its rules can be more complex than any RTS (see: Civilization). Similarly, the less strategy one has to think about, the more complicated and demanding the reflex tests can be, since the player doesn't have to spend time making tactical decisions.

It's just a question of how "actiony" you want your strategy games to be, and that is a matter of taste.

EDIT: "Trading complexity" is a misleading phrase, since you can take a very simple game and add complexity in one area without sacrificing it in another. Still, it seems impossible for one game to be both the most complex strategy game and the most complex action game in existence.

[ganheddo]

To those who would argue that inclusions of inputs such as these are arbitrary -- a relic of a bygone Arcade attitude (keep pumping in credits until you can execute it in your sleep!) -- I ask you this:

Would it be any fun if you could do everything the game has to offer on your first play?

You can't see all of Disneyland in a single day, man.

Even if you could execute all these "arbitrary" button combinations, you still wouldn't have seen the entire game, far from it. If this would be the case, you'd have a rhythm game, that wouldn't have anything to offer besides the challenge of precisely repeating given input sequences. As you mentioned, there's also a great deal of strategy involved in these fighting games, besides the pure reflex tests. But yes, without the "execution complexity", we'd be playing a turn-based game (e.g. look at R-Type Final and R-Type Tactics to see a possible "transformation" from real-time to turn-based).

Apart from that I couldn't have said it better than Worm in his last post, it's a matter of how much action or strategy you want in your videogame. If you don't want to test your dexterity, then play a turn-based (instead of real-time) strategy game. If you don't want to strategize, then play Pong or Beatmania.

[icycalm]

You could contrast these three with a shooter where you only have to move your ship and hit a couple of buttons. There's plenty of hand-eye coordination and timing involved but the actual input is simple.

That's because in a shooter the complexity IS in the hand-eye coordination, whereas in a submarine simulator with a billion buttons the complexity is in the billion buttons, and how their various functions affect the sub's position compared to that of its opponents.

I'm a little bit confused when it comes to videogames what defines meaningful complexity.

Complexity that's really complex, that increases the game's possibility space -- genuine complexity. Adding buttons that do nothing, for example, or that do things which other buttons already do, is meaningless complexity -- i.e. NOT COMPLEXITY. It only seems to be real complexity to the dense and the feebleminded.

Even the best player can only concentrate on so many things at once. He's just better at prioritising what he does than everybody else.

Good. He then wins and goes home happy and everyone's happy. Nothing wrong with that -- that's the whole point.

At what point do you over-egg the pudding adding complications and render the whole thing meaningless?

It is a symptom of stupidity when someone thinks that it is POSSIBLE to make a game that is overly complex. First off, how could "adding complications" make "the whole thing meaningless"? -- WE HAVE DEFINED MEANINGFULNESS IN THIS CONTEXT AS ADDITIONAL COMPLEXITY! If someone is too stupid to understand how a game works, or his brain gets overloaded by all the button inputs and explodes, how is that anyone else's problem? There is always Pong for the mentally retarded and screesavers or movies for the physically incapacitated.

So a game can NEVER be made "overly complex" in general. It can only be made overly complex for a specific being. When this being, however, attempts to take his standard of "excessive complexity" and apply it to EVERYONE ELSE IN THE UNIVERSE, then absurdity ensues.

So what may seem TO YOU overly complex, TO ME might seem stupidly simplistic, et cetera.

Now, what I think you are getting at is that there is a limit to human reaction speed and precision that restricts the number or difficulty of the inputs a player can be expected to make. Maybe we can draw a hard limit someday with the help of computers, but of course that limit will be different from person to person, and they will have to prioritize their choices accordingly.

And in any case it is a mistake to only think of humans. The lower animals can play videogames too, as can the higher humans. Not to mention that the higher humans really have no limits in their speed, precision and reaction times -- because they can augment themselves infinitely by designing machines to help them. The desire to set a limit of some sort (Molloy's desire) simply stems from weakness and stupidity -- a sort of fascistic impulse that says "If I can't enjoy this, then NO ONE should!"

The difficulty of reliably executing moves with strict timing/complex input is also subjective -- once you become proficient, it ceases to be difficult.

Nothing ever ceases to be difficult. Things become more or less difficult -- zero difficulty is a logical absurdity, just like zero temperature, zero beauty, zero strength, etc.

Now -- after endless hours of practice -- I can execute it 90-95% of the time; it has ceased to be difficult.

Wrong. It has become LESS difficult. This always applies:

Many fighting games have moves that are difficult to execute reliably. In tournament matches players weigh up the odds based on how reliably they can 'get the move out' rather like a snooker player decides he has odds of potting a certain ball.

...

What I'm saying is that the top Mishima players don't need to "weigh up the odds" of them being able to flawlessly execute their electrics

Wrong. They DO need to weigh up the odds -- and when they fail, even if they only fail to pull this move off once every 10 billion attempts, they pay the consequences. The "weighing up" of the odds always happens in games which require some sort of skill (i.e. in games which have not been rendered trivial, as for example something like tic-tac-toe).

Now, does the inclusion of the Electric Wind God Fist (among others -- the Electrics are hardly the most technical Tekken moves) add meaningful complexity to the game?

Yes.

Again, this is purely subjective -- what, if anything, is meaningful?

In this context, as defined in my related article, meaningful complexity is complexity that increases the game's possibility space.

Does it mean anything that I've put hundreds of hours into the game, learning things like this along the way?

Yes, it means that the game is more complex than it would have been without that move. You have just not understood the way we use the term 'meaningful' in this context.

You can't have infinite complexity in every aspect of the game because it'd be more than the human brain can parse at once, or it'd take 100 years with 10,000 people playing each other to make sense of it.

Yes, lol. Just like full contact kickboxing, for example. It is infinitely complex, which is why the human brain cannot parse it at once, and it takes 10,000 years of people playing each other to make sense of it. That's why no one plays that game, lol. Never mind what they show on Eurosport -- it's pure lies and propaganda -- no one has yet managed to kickbox on this planet.

The StarCraft guys spend a ton of time wrestling with the interface because it doesn't allow you to queue anything very efficiently and everything needs babysitting.

What you call "wrestling with the interface" the "StarCraft guys" call "playing". Changing the terminology doesn't get you anywhere -- it's better to just be honest and state clearly what you like and what you don't like.

It often feels like you have to click five times where the designer could just have easily made you click once.

By adding a "WIN" button for example.

It's a very micromanagement focussed tactical game. If the interface wasn't so limiting and the units cannon fodder without personal attention they could have made the game complex in lots of other ways where it's now by necessity very simple.

Yes, they could have turned StarCraft into Civilization. In fact all games could be turned into Civilization with the appropriate interface changes. Ever wonder why they aren't? I guess not.

I think the scope of fighting games and FPSes is narrow enough that you can have much more physical input hurdles. But I think there's still probably a point where complicated input can cloud the complexity of the mind games.

Yeah, like, for example, how the infinitely complicated input system of the universe clouded the complexity of the mind games in, say, medieval Japanese samurai duels. Never mind Bushido and Zen: all those guys' brains were really clouded.

While complicated inputs require physical dexterity, they don't change the rules of the game.

lol

Using Tekken as an example again -- While the Wind God Fist gains bonuses (unpunishable etc.) for flawless execution

What sort of bonuses? And what does "flawless" execution mean? You either execute it or fail to execute it, right? What? It is an analog move?

Fighting games are all about knowing what to do when your opponent knows you know that he knows what your next move is going to be; the infinite outcomes are what makes it endlessly fun to play.

I have news for you: fighting games are NOT "endlessly fun" to play. So keep these Kung-Fu-movie-inspired rubbish comments for lamefaqs, thanks!

As you say it probably really comes down to taste and who the game is catering for. The ratio of different types of complication isn't going to please everyone. And there's a balance between the two because otherwise the game would be very one dimensional.

You just have to love it when people invent terms without defining them ("one-dimensional games", for example), and then throw them about in order to make it seem as if they are ACTUALLY SAYING SOMETHING.

There's too much for any one player to pay attention to at once, and the skill comes from deciding where to invest your time.

This is true in all games -- you are just seeing things in a fragmentary fashion and thus fail to grasp the continuum.

I was arguing that once one becomes highly skilled at the input dexterity aspect of the game, your point becomes a non-issue; the player isn't concentrating on physical dexterity as it has been ingrained in his muscle memory.

The player is always concentrating on physical dexterity in a fighting game, and indeed in all action games. No one has 100% execution rate on anything -- even a straight punch can go wrong if your finger slips and fails to hit the button.

Obviously, even the top player cant keep his eyes on everything that's happening in a game like TA; its physically impossible. But doesn't this tie in with what I said about endless possibilities?

What you said about "endless" possibilities was stupid. I doubt if fighting games have "endless" possibilities. I am not even sure what "endless" means at this point. You are most likely trying to say "infinite" but infinity is a very difficult concept to handle, even for me at this point, so let's leave it out of this.

The reason TA is appealing (to me) is the interface is driven towards queuing everything up so you can forget about it and do something else. This lets the player concentrate on the what players like to call macromanagement, rather than micromanagement. You don't have to concern yourself with the detail, except when you have the time. Whereas in many other RTS games you absolutely have to concern yourself with the detail because if your units are on 'move' rather than 'move-attack' they'll get massacred. The scope of most of these real time tactical games is much more limited by necessity.

By DESIGN... not by necessity. Necessity is when your computer is not powerful enough to do the things you want it to do. Design is when it CAN do them, and you tell him to do them.

This whole idea of wrestling with the interface is

something stupid that you imagined.

This whole idea of wrestling with the interface is only really unique to a few genres, and they're all relatively modern.

Bah. Modern interfaces are mostly dumbed down, if anything. You are just not very well versed in the history of videogames. Mind you, for an intelligent person there was NEVER a case of "wrestling" with the interface -- only of playing with it. But I can see how many people would be so massively disadvantaged physically and intellectually that a stupid little videogame's controls would seem to them as a formidable challenge. In that case, they would employ terms like 'wrestling' to describe their interactions with them.

FPS, RTS, music game and latter day Vs fighters. I can't think of any very complex examples before that. Input has classically been very direct.

Exactly -- you "can't think". You got that right at least.

edit/update: when I think about it what I'm talking about with RTS isn't right. I'm talking about interface rather than execution. Everything you execute in any of these games is as simple as a button press. It's just that some require huge amounts of button pressing. It's volume rather than complexity.

Because of course as we all know volume has nothing to do with complexity.

I don't think anyone would argue that making the player click twice instead of ten times to do the same thing would be a bad thing.

No, of course not. And making him click once would be even better. With the aforementioned "WIN" button, for example. That would be best.

[milkycha]

What sort of bonuses? And what does "flawless" execution mean? You either execute it or fail to execute it, right? What? It is an analog move?

As I said, there are two versions of the same move: the Wind God Fist and the Electric Wind God Fist. The move becomes electric when the player presses the final joystick input and a punch button within 2 frames of each other. So when you fail to execute an Electric, you still get the normal version. I listed the bonuses already -- unpunishable on block, faster, more damaging.

Nothing ever ceases to be difficult. Things become more or less difficult...It has become LESS difficult.

Yes, that is what I meant. Apologies.

[icycalm]

Again, your careless phrasing makes your meaning difficult to understand. It's one thing to say that a move has two different versions (which is pretty much the same as saying that there are two different moves...), while it's a completely different thing to say that there is one move which can be executed with varying levels of perfection -- and ultimately "flawlessly". In the first case you have two discreet possibilities, while in the second you have many -- perhaps 100 perhaps 1000 or more, depending on how the move has been designed. So it makes no sense to say that you pulled off a move in a fighting game "flawlessly", while it DOES make sense to say that for a move in real life (although of course it would always be an exaggeration).