Rage quitting in games. This was supposed to be a Shovel Knight review
Is the music of Pantera better than the music of Sting? could anyone objectively say Every breath you take is better than Cowboys from hell? Of course not, that’s absolutely ridiculous- what? people actually argue about that? well, then people are idiots.
Anyway.
Music and art in general provide unique experiences and emotions. The music that will touch you depends on your personality and the moment you are living. Having said that, I never once in my entire life felt like “Jeez, today was such a nice day, I could really use a couple of hours of absolute anger, irritation and frustration. Maybe an aneurysm too. Yeah, that’d be nice”. I mean, if that was the intent of Shovel Knight, it’s an extremely effective piece of work.
This really started as a review on Shovel Knight but then I started asking myself, assuming this was not the intended response by game developers and assuming most players don’t really want to experience that, why is this experience so common in videogames? So I’ll write about that.
Accomplishment
There might be other factors but the one that stands out is that most games are trying to induce a sense of accomplishment, and the only way you can feel accomplished is by overcoming a non trivial obstacle. Here lies the problem. No two players are equal. So you, as a game designer of a platformer, fine tune your game using a small sample group of players until the challenge seems to be just right! the players are on the edge of their seat, sweating, maybe losing a couple of times and getting slightly angry, but not enough to shake their determination, then they win and feel amazing. Perfection. Videogame bliss. The players feel like they graduated, found a cure for cancer and saved the world. Then you ship the game and realize many players think the game is too easy and still there are others who think it’s too hard.
For a game like Shovel Knight there is really nothing the designers can do, apart from coding a difficulty level system that detects player performance and adjusts accordingly. It’s not a design that lends itself naturally to that goal of inducing accomplishment. Your skill at timing your jumps and attacks are outside the game’s reach. Some games, sandbox games in particular, have an inherently adaptive difficulty system. I never felt accomplishment like landing on a planet in Kerbal Space Program, and it managed to give me that experience without a single rage quit! Even after many years playing.
If it sounds like I’m suggesting Shovel Knight is poorly designed then I’m not expressing myself properly. It’s definitely not an elegant design, because it will only provide the accomplishment I assume it wants to provide to a fraction of its players. But it’s not bad. I would argue that ‘accomplishment’ is not the ideal goal for a traditional platformer in the first place. This is another one of those things in game design we just carry around because of tradition. “Videogames are supposed to be challenges so the player can feel accomplished” Says who? Videogame is a recent medium, and we still do things without knowing why. It’s like lives and continues (usually 3 for some reason) in 8 bit generation games; most were made like that because the designers were used to making arcade games designed to eat quarters. But that made no sense in most console games, they were there just because devs thought games needed that to be games.
That line of argument requires its own article, and this one is already completely out of focus. So…
Back to Shovel Knight
So no, I don’t think Shovel Knight is bad. In fact, the reason I started writing this “review” was because Shovel Knight recently got several DLCs for free; and when I heard that my first thought was “awesome! I love Shovel Knight! Let me just replay the main campaign before playing the new stuff” only to realize I never actually finished the main campaign. Which means that after rage quitting and never playing it again the memories I had were still positive. The first half of the game alone was worth every penny.
Since this was meant to be a review, let me address a problem specific to Shovel Knight. Instant kill.
I did replay the main campaign and I got to the last level this time. Farther than before. After trying countless times I realized something. I had a huge life bar that I achieved by buying and finding all the meal tickets. And during this last level not once I died because I depleted my life bar, all deaths were instant kills from spikes or pits.
Having instant kill in a game where you are encouraged to improve your life bar is not itself a problem. Imagine if you could buy upgrades for jumping on a Mario game, then there’s a level where you swim under water. Your upgrades are useless but it’s all right, it’s just a new element that requires a different approach and serves to change the pacing of the game a little. But the culmination of the game, the hardest challenge, to be a super hard water level? that’s no good.
So there you have it. My views on… whatever the hell this was.
