Horrible Pain

I didn’t see the Olympic rip-off of Ferry Halim’s Winterbells but I did get to see this:
http://www.bannerblog.com.au/2008/04/offset_the_evil_panda.php

This also looks like a Winterbells clone. But some of the ways in which it differs serves to underline what was so good about Winterbells.

It has the same basic idea. In Winterbells, you control a rabbit that hops on bells, which disappear when you jump on them. In this banner ad, you control a panda that hops on rainbows.

Now, the panda game is being deliberately garish, with a bright pink panda while Ferry Halim makes a visually pleasing game, as usual. That’s the easy difference.

The game play difference is similar to the one I touched on the last time I wrote about Ferry Halim, when I was disappointed with the gameplay of The Crossing, and tried to explain why.

It’s game state flexibility, and the ability for player action to alter that game state. This is something that Winterbells does very well.

Note what happens every time you jump on a bell: The rabbit bounces off of the location of the bell, and the bell disappears. This changes the game state, now the rabbit is at a different height, and there is one less bell to jump on.

The panda game does the same thing. But then it fails on flexibility. Note that the spacing of the bells in Winterbells always places two bells within the reach of one jump. This means you have a choice. But the Panda game gives you one and only one rainbow. This means you never have any choice as to which rainbow to jump on.

I can see why they made this change. The play area, to fit advert size, had to be smaller. So they cut the number of bells in half. But it does have the consequence of removing all the flexibility from the game.

Consider this Orisinal example:
You can jump on bell A or bell B.
If you jump on A, you can jump on B or C.
If you jump on B, you can jump on C or D, or you can jump back onto A.
If you then jump back onto A, then the only bell in range is C.
If you jump on B, then C, and then back to A, you will have no more bells in reach.
So there you have examples of how your choices in the game can change your game state so you have anywhere between 0 and 3 options. So there’s a feedback loop, where one choice immediately influences what state you are in, which changes what choices are available to you.

The panda game, in contrast, provides you with one and only one choice at each stage of the game.

Carrington Vanston posted about video games. This is similar to some thoughts I’ve had before. He says:

That’s the big lie of video games: the illusion of activity.

This is something that first occurred to me in the middle of some isometric RPG. I had gone through an ordeal to get the sword that was one level better than the sword I had previously. I was feeling quite proud of myself, but then it occurred to me that the only difference between the old sword and the new sword, physically, was three bits of memory. (There were 8 different swords in the game. 2³=8) If my access to those bits weren’t restricted by the rules of the game, it would be a simple matter to change them.

Of course, I could say the same thing about chess, that I could just take the other player’s pieces off the board if I weren’t restricted by the rules of chess. But something about that deflated the fleeting sense of accomplishment I had from the game.

I think the addictive aspect of video games comes from an ability to instill an inflated sense of accomplishment. From primitive times, your brain is wired to enjoy gathering berries and hunting animals, and a lot of video games replicate those activities.

I won’t completely condemn video games, because of something similar to what Simon Cooke posts here about projecting yourself into the game mechanics. A game can create its own ways of observing and interacting with its simulated world, and you learn to accommodate that.