Saturday Soapbox: Loving the science, but don't forget the art

[Administrator]

We've all got lost in games. I don't mean that we've become so engrossed that external factors cease to matter - toast burns, cats starve, love falters, etc - although if you're reading this site then that's probably true as well. I mean we've gotten lost in games. It used to be a common complaint, in fact, that games spun you around or suddenly stopped saying new things and it would take ages to figure out what you were expected to do.
It used to be a common complaint, but these days not so much. These days it's actually pretty rare, and there's a reason for that: over the past decade, game developers have moved beyond simple bug-testing and started tuning their games in response to the way people actually play them as well. One of the most famous examples of this was Halo 3, for which Microsoft (then owner of Bungie) put the game through exhaustive testing, chronicled by Clive Thompson for Wired, which would reveal, for example, that a lot of players didn't spot some grenades on the floor just before a big skirmish and died as a result. Knowing why people were getting frustrated in situations like that helped Bungie make the game stronger. Just saying that it was the player's fault wasn't good enough any longer.
Just up the road, Valve has gone famously nuts for this stuff. I talked to Chet Faliszek about it a little back in 2009 just before Left 4 Dead 2 came out. "We actually have a psychologist that works with us, and we have outside playtesters come in a few times a week," he explained. "They get recorded playing. The level designers watch what happens when people get lost, and we talk about what's going on. You can normally see. It'll be that they're all excited about this little red thing they see, and it's just a kerb painted red, but they run over there. You see this happen enough times, and you realise you need to lead their eye the other way. You can say the player's wrong the first couple of times, but you get real clarity when the tenth person's still going to that little red thing and excited about it."
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