Posted 08/27/10 05:27:00 am Angry birdI am an angry bird. I am angry, because through playing this otherwise excellent game (Angry Birds, then) for the iPhone, I have come to hate the randomness found in the gameplay. What does that mean? It means that even if I am knowing the exact strategy for a level, and executing the manipulations seemingly perfectly, I still may fail the level. The success or failure of a level always seems to depend on someone throwing a dice and giving me a random result, disconnected from how well I achieved my strategy and moves.
The goal of the game is to kill static green pigs, protected by elaborate structures that can be destroyed or damaged using birds thrown by a sling. The player can control the way the birds are projected by the sling, choosing angle and strength, but once the bird is released, apart from an extra step which allows players to timely trigger special powers like explosion, acceleration, bomb dropping or others, there is nothing to be done anymore. The bird follows a parabolic trajectory, hits the structure or pigs and triggers a chain reaction of physical impulses that hopefully results in maximal destruction.
The point is that if you aim at a very precise point, anticipate the trajectory, see your bird hit the structure at seemingly exactly the same place as the previous attempt... the structure can collapse in a very different way than the way you expect it to collapse. As a result, you can as well reset the level before using the remaining birds, because you know that you can't succeed anymore at that stage. You are left with a feeling of waste, and have to try again and again with growing feelings of frustration, until when you hit the identified weak spot, it finally destroys or damages the structure the way you intended it, based on what you experienced before.
In a way it's a bit like Peggle: In Peggle, once you shoot your ball, the trajectory it will follow until it hits the bottom, and may hopefully be falling into the moving bucket, is unpredictable, and doesn't have anything to do with the player's skills. Once you've made your best move, randomness kicks in and you just can watch whether the dice will roll for you or against you.
This is the kind of situation that frustrates me to the core, and this frustration makes me want to rant. Actually, this article is meant to be something between a rant and a question: why do we put randomness in games? And why may it matter?
What kind of randomness are we talking about?For starters, I think that randomness can be found in 2 different ways within video games:
- Randomness that happens when the game shuffles gameplay elements for a player to deal with. I would call it pre-randomness. That's the randomness that you find in card games, where the cards are shuffled before being dealt, or in Age of Kings, when you start with a randomly generated map.
- Randomness that happens in the expected results for a player's actions, delivering an outcome based on chance rather than skill. I would call it post-randomness. That is the randomness I described in Angry Birds, or in Peggle.
The goal of the game is to kill static green pigs, protected by elaborate structures that can be destroyed or damaged using birds thrown by a sling. The player can control the way the birds are projected by the sling, choosing angle and strength, but once the bird is released, apart from an extra step which allows players to timely trigger special powers like explosion, acceleration, bomb dropping or others, there is nothing to be done anymore. The bird follows a parabolic trajectory, hits the structure or pigs and triggers a chain reaction of physical impulses that hopefully results in maximal destruction.
The point is that if you aim at a very precise point, anticipate the trajectory, see your bird hit the structure at seemingly exactly the same place as the previous attempt... the structure can collapse in a very different way than the way you expect it to collapse. As a result, you can as well reset the level before using the remaining birds, because you know that you can't succeed anymore at that stage. You are left with a feeling of waste, and have to try again and again with growing feelings of frustration, until when you hit the identified weak spot, it finally destroys or damages the structure the way you intended it, based on what you experienced before.
In a way it's a bit like Peggle: In Peggle, once you shoot your ball, the trajectory it will follow until it hits the bottom, and may hopefully be falling into the moving bucket, is unpredictable, and doesn't have anything to do with the player's skills. Once you've made your best move, randomness kicks in and you just can watch whether the dice will roll for you or against you.
This is the kind of situation that frustrates me to the core, and this frustration makes me want to rant. Actually, this article is meant to be something between a rant and a question: why do we put randomness in games? And why may it matter?
What kind of randomness are we talking about?For starters, I think that randomness can be found in 2 different ways within video games:
- Randomness that happens when the game shuffles gameplay elements for a player to deal with. I would call it pre-randomness. That's the randomness that you find in card games, where the cards are shuffled before being dealt, or in Age of Kings, when you start with a randomly generated map.
- Randomness that happens in the expected results for a player's actions, delivering an outcome based on chance rather than skill. I would call it post-randomness. That is the randomness I described in Angry Birds, or in Peggle.
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