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Comment by catalogia | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised this article doesn't touch on the topic of enemy spawns. Doom 1/2 and 2016 all frequently spawn enemies into an arena only after the player has entered the arena; denying the player the opportunity to cheese the arena from the door.

Beyond that, I think it's worth examining the motives of the player. Why do players want to cheese arenas in the first place, when more aggressive play-styles are more fun? Why are players drawn to conservative styles of gameplay, and what can be done to change that? I think if a shooter game is well designed, the player will be eager to jump into the fray as soon as they can, and the game will reward them for that sort of aggression. Doom 2016 does a great job of this; aggressive gameplay is rewarded with more abundant health and ammo drops. Conservative gameplay isn't rewarded; moving slow gets you killed, and staying far away from the enemies gets you killed.

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I think one issue is modern AI design. Their chance of hitting you goes down with distance and cover. Speed and surprise might be given some consideration, but you are almost always safest peaking around cover and clicking on enemy heads.

I'm not sure if the original Ghost Recon was actually this advanced, but it felt like enemies got more accurate as they got more evidence of your position. You could find a good sniping spot and take out a couple enemies as they fired in your general direction, but the next enemy that came over the ridge (after hearing your shots) would immediately kill you with their first shot. The solution was to use the rest of your squad. Once you got a couple kills on your sniper, you'd hide completely and switch to an assault in another position. The enemy would run over the ridge, but they'd only have improved accuracy against the sniper. That made them an easy fight for the assault.

Translated into the position graphs in the gamesutra link, there was a penalty for fighting from the same node for too long. This results in an inherent incentive to capture new territory and turns the "safe" hallway into a deathtrap.

I've seen a few blog posts discussing the fact that if you give players a degenerate way to win, it is very difficult in our human psychology to deliberately choose a different, more difficult way to win. I'm not sure I've seen the perfect explanation of why, which is probably not something that would be easy to produce and prove anyhow, but I would observe in general that it's hard to believe natural selection would ever select for critters who deliberately do things the harder way when they know there's an easier one, since it's going to be hard to outcompete the ones doing it the easier way. To the extent that we still sometimes succeed at that, I think it needs to be seen as swimming psychologically upstream, not something game designers should be counting their player base to do.

I'm not convinced this behavior is universal. For instance, I don't see many people cheating when playing solitaire or shooting hoops. Certainly some do, but it seems like video games might encourage this behavior more than other forms of 'single-player' games. I don't know why that might be the case though.

I think 'single player' obscures a bit in this case. Hoops and solitaire are single player and the perceived opponent is you. You can fiddle with the rules to make it harder or easier for yourself but generally there's not much point 'cheating' yourself. In something like an FPS the perceived opponent is the horde of zombies on screen. Doing whatever it takes within the game mechanics to beat the opponent is still ok; taking advantage of the rules is still 'fair'. Most people don't cheat such single player games by installing trainers or enabling god mode, even though these options are readily available - that would be cheating against yourself.

Delayed spawn is a kind of 'hidden information' the article mentions. You could also think of it as a kind of leashing. Doom and a lot of older shooters with discrete levels also tend to offer one way paths - doors get shut behind you, etc. It's a bit odd to say shooters are 'plagued' by this problem given that one of the very first FPS'es puts a great deal of careful design effort into avoiding it.

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