Planning – The Core Reason Why Gameplay Feels Good (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Planning – The Core Reason Why Gameplay Feels Good (2017)

frictionalgames.blogspot.com

158 pointspanic32 comments

> This is how the world looks to the average fish:

Fishes don't experience the world at all like humans do, so comparing one sense (visual) and drawing conclusions from there is just anthropomorphism. There's a lot more to detecting their environment than vision: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_systems_in_fish

Yeah, came here to say that. Can't sharks smell blood in the water miles away or something of the like?

Sharks can detect very small concentrations of blood in the water. They (and some other fish) can also sense electrical fields; humans have no equivalent for that.

> anthropomorphism

The original post is straight up anthrocentrism.

The part discussing video games is great, though.

> Fishes don't experience the world at all like humans do

That's too extreme a statement. Fish and humans share many analogous structures, therefore we must share many perceptual experiences as well. "At all" is too broad.

Humans are a refined superposition of parts from our biological ancestors, some of which were fish.

You need motivation to plan. That motivation comes in the form of simulating life and letting you live it. Without risk reward is paltry. Try playing hold'em without bets, it doesn't work. The game devolves into nothing.

The more open world the game is the more popular it tends to be. It lets people satisfy their own particular motivations.

I spent some time playing Rust recently. That game is downright deserving of a psychological study. It is something else to be out harvesting rocks to build a house and get stripped down and robbed by a pack of astonishingly rude 12 year olds who have fully immersed themselves in a 'lord of the flies' mindset.

> Planning doesn't always need to happen in the long term, it can also be very short term. Take this scene from Super Mario, for instance [...] the player needs to make a plan in a split second. The important thing to notice here is that the player doesn't simply react blindly. Even in a stressful situation, if the game works as it should, the player quickly formulates a plan and then tries to carry out that plan.

If we're going to call split-second decisions a type of "planning", than I'm not sure what isn't planning. The article mentions Dear Esther, but that has very little gameplay at all.

Personally, I generally prefer games that prioritize quick decisions and reactions over careful plans. I do enough of the latter in my daily life.

> If we're considering split-second decision-making "planning", than I'm not sure what isn't planning.

Things that don't involve decisions, for example.

If you think planning quickly isn't planning anymore, what do you think it is instead?

What type of gameplay doesn't involve some type of decision-making?

I suppose a pure reaction time test, but of course that's boring. And some rhythm games, maybe, but those are actually a lot fun despite the lack of "planning".

> What type of gameplay doesn't involve some type of decision-making?

All of it does, but it's on a spectrum of complexity. "Continue to walk forward or maybe to pause for a bit" is still a decision, it's just not every complex.

> some rhythm games, maybe, but those are actually a lot fun despite the lack of "planning".

And the lack of making decisions. So the question remains, at what speed does planning cease to become planning? When a certain amount of it is done subconsciously or by muscle memory? Where would you draw the line?

>What type of gameplay doesn't involve some type of decision-making?

Games of chance! Sorry, chutes and ladders, candyland, etc. Similarly knowledge games (trivia), or indeed entirely reaction games.

Sorry isn't fully a game a chance. You make choices about which pieces to move and some cards give you further options

Rhythm games are actually cited in the article as something you can learn how the routes work over time - what the author calls a form of planning.

Empirically, I do like revisiting the same songs on rhythm games so that I can anticipate the hard parts and practice them. That wouldn't make much sense if it's just about music and dexterity.

Yeah - probably better way to understand it is the predictive mind hypothesis. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_coding)

My measure of games is the feedback loop. I have a problem with activities that have a long feedback loop, and thus haven't been able to pick up chess. I just couldn't make any inferences when the consequences are half an hour away, and dozens of other choices would mutate the course of the game beyond recognition in the meantime. Have I made the right decision on the fourth move? Who the hell knows anymore!

FPS and racing games sat much better with me because the feedback loop is incredibly tight (and it's back to no when we're talking adjusting suspension in the garage). I guess I was like that fish, but give me instagib railgun, and it's time of split-second decisions for an hour.

The irony, of course, is that I had to get good at making longer-term decisions to be able to apply such examination to myself and see why it's useful in the first place.

Finally, I realized I need to pick big games apart into smaller exercises, to see which choices work and which don't. To make a playground with a shorter feedback loop where I could test my decisions before jumping into the real thing. You know, like a game.

> I just couldn't make any inferences when the consequences are half an hour away,

If you play chess fast it does not take half an hour to see the results of a bad decision. In a few turns you would see things fall apart after a bad move.

Yeah, I noticed how everyone who can play chess keeps saying that it's perfectly easy, you just move things around and immediately see though space and time, the garden of forking paths is laid out before you in its entirety, and every choice ever becomes clear as air on a winter morning in childhood.

Notably, those who can't really play tend to not feel that way.

> immediately see though space and time, the garden of forking paths is laid out before you in its entirety, and every choice ever becomes clear as air on a winter morning in childhood

I don't get that from chess, but I do get it from instagib railgun. The problem is, the other player see as clear as a falcon enhanced with some kind of alien nanotechnology, so I get owned, but I still often notice with amazement how many decisions and thoughts fit into a few seconds, it really does feel like time is slowing down by lot. I glance at some timer, a bunch of stuff happens, I glance at it again, and think "I can't believe only 4 seconds passed during all this".

> it really does feel like time is slowing down by lot

It does! Not only that, but after such a game the brain is working faster, so the feeling persists. No coffee can give that effect, and it's the thing I really miss from my FPS days.

However, videogames aren't necessary for that: other activity that needs you to act way faster than usual works about the same. (That becomes easy to notice when your days consist of the same old stuff...) I guess some people use extreme sports for that, but personally I'll have to find something more forgiving.

Who ever said that? I've never heard that. Maybe you're joking (that would make more sense)

I think you might be missing the point here.

A game of chess doesn't need to take half an hour. It can take 15s (7.5s/side for the entire game), e.g. https://youtu.be/G2AMN9tHSB0?t=503 Edit: Here's a bunch more games with that time constraint to show they don't all end by running out of time https://youtu.be/6ieWb3LLBmM?t=380

Don't start trying to play 15s games. But I find 4-6 minute games (2-3m/side) to be perfectly playable even at a low level.

haven't been able to pick up chess. I just couldn't make any inferences when the consequences are half an hour away

The most popular time controls to play chess online seem to be 1 0 and 3 0 - i.e. you have 1 or 3 minutes total to play every move in the game, so the game lasts 2 or 6 minutes maximum. That seems crazy fast to me, but e.g. watch grandmasters play banter blitz on chess24[0], and 3 0 seems quite leisurely, most of the time. (3 0 means 3 minutes to start, with 0 seconds added after each move.) I prefer 5 12, 15 10 or something where you have time to think, to plan. There's not a lot of planning in blitz chess, they mostly play by intuition, playing whatever move feels right. There's no time to think about complicated tactics or formulate a complex plan.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/user/chess24media/videos#top

This really resonated to be true with me, especially about why open-world games feel good.

The images he used in the post were perfect to illustrate this too.

I can think of one instance in which this does not seem to hold true - Dance Dance Revolution, at least for me, was more about reacting than planning. Once I got to the point where I had to memorize and think ahead to the next steps that were about to show up, I lost interest.

DDR exists in an interesting middle ground for me. I find that I really enjoy Standard, and occasionally Extreme class steps (for the uninitiated, that's basically "medium" and "hard") but could never get into the really complex charts. At the medium level of play, the charts are interesting and the planning of my body mechanics to get the footwork to flow naturally is a lot of fun. My friends that are really good at the game though, they set the scroll speed up ridiculously high and seem to be doing some kind of twitch reflex thing. I can tell they enjoy it, but it's so fast and mechanical that it ceases to really feel like dancing. It's not my cup of tea.

So I do enjoy DDR up to, but not past the point where planning ceases to be something I can do in the moment, and transitions into something I must through repetition and practice.

I think a more extreme example of this phenomenon is pinball (physical machines). It's great fun as a beginner, because you're mostly reacting to the chaotic movement of the ball, but as you get better you realize playing slowly gets you higher scores. It's usually a good idea to bring the ball to a halt whenever you can. The multiballs that were so fun before turn into ordinary play with backup balls held in reserve. Reaction time becomes less important, and patience and precise ball control become more important. It's rarely a good idea to attempt difficult shots.

I stopped playing once I understood what I'd have to do to get good.

>Reaction time becomes less important, and patience and precise ball control become more important.

This is the history of human cultural and technological development summed up in a sentence.

>I stopped playing once I understood what I'd have to do to get good.

This is mostly why people stop doing any activity for leisure - when the ideal path to success is a path that feels time consuming and wasteful to pursue. it's why i could never pick up gardening. gardening ideally means dealing with fertilizer and handling pests,both of which i dislike. i realized what i liked was the routine of watering plants - which i satisfy by having a couple of cactuses in the house and a spray bottle.

You can do AI-like meta-planning without using your brain btw. What you do is you choose a simple pattern of reaction to what happens on the screen, then you play. If you like the result you try to do more of what's at the core of the pattern, if you don't like it you change the pattern a little. No thinking and abstracting needed. For a game like DDR it might even be enough to get to the very top.

I think this is a common point for all of those kind of games (let's say action games, I could be Super Mario, an FPS multiplayer game or DDR), where you can have fun just with "reflexes" but to get really good, or otherwise "master" the game, you start to go into the memorizing-planning part. In DDR means you memorize the whole song, and if you play "no bar", there's a huge planning in your movements too. Also in games like Overwatch, you might have a good aim and reflexes, but at some point you'll need some planning skills, just think of "keeping in mind the ultimate status of your enemy and how to counter it". I think you enter in this "master" phase of the game if you truly like it, you stop before if you want to have a more "casual fun" with that game

spiders, planning:

https://rifters.com/real/2009/01/iterating-towards-bethlehem...

The octopus lives in the environment of the fish but can execute sophisticated plans.

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