Punishment in games - a crutch, or an effective means of motivation?

Punishment in games is exactly what it sounds like to any gamer – negative reinforcement in order to show the player what they did is wrong, or in order to add challenge to the game. With this said, there can certainly be other reasons for punishment, but this is a general definition. Now, I had always thought that punishment in games was a sort of crutch that game developers relied on in order to show the player the ropes and challenge them, but I always thought that there had to be a better way to do those things than punishing the player – it’s just easier to rely on punishment, since a working alternative would take so much creativity. After all, negative reinforcement in the real world generally is frowned upon in comparison to positive reinforcement, because positive reinforcement typically works better for human beings in general. However, a comment that one of my friends (a gamer, not a game developer, mind you) made about his latest favourite game inspired me to write this blog post this week, because he said words I never thought I’d hear: “I love the punishment in this game.”

The game my friend was referring to was Dark Souls – but how could the punishment in the game be so memorable and so positive in the eyes of a player? Even when punishment works in a game, I always thought that if the player consciously realized that the game was very punishing, then it would be less enjoyable. This game proved me wrong.

The player collecting their souls in Dark Souls

 

Now what is it about the punishment in Dark Souls that makes it enjoyable? Just to get this out there, I haven’t played the game – yet – though now I want to. However, I’ve seen my friend play it, and so I know a bit about how the game works. Essentially, the heavy punishment in the game is that all of the experience, or “souls”, the player collects from the last save point they visited can be lost as soon as they die. This means that the player can go through a level, collecting plenty of experience along the way, but die at the hands of the boss and lose all experience they accumulated along the way. So I asked, why is this not frustrating? How could this be a positive thing. My friend answered this for me: the lost souls can be retrieved if the player can reach them after dying without dying again along the way. In this way, the player feels that despite being punished, they have the ability to earn back what they’ve lost. On top of this, the player will likely feel that if he or she dies along the way and loses the collected souls for good, then it was a well-deserved punishment. Because of this, I realized the game Dark Souls in particular uses punishment so well that lack of punishment actually becomes a great reward. This made me then question – what is it that makes punishment work or fail in other games?

I thought of games I have personally played, and remembered different ways I recall being punished in a few of them. Unfortunately, most memories of punishment are negative ones, but I discovered some commonalities between the negative punishments. The first common negative punishment I can think of is the notorious game over screen. Sure, sometimes this is appears to be the best option in order to keep some challenge in the game (after all, a player shouldn’t be able to keep progressing after they die), but one particular type of game over screen is a little too negative for my taste. I am referring to the concept that if the player dies, they lose all progress from their last save. The harshness of this punishment varies depending on where and when the player can save. For instance, if the player can only save at certain save points, and these save points are very spread out, this punishment can be very frustrating. Another similar punishment that I am not a huge fan of is the way that the Pokemon series punishes players. If the player’s entire party faints in a battle, the player “blacks out”, teleports to the last Pokemon Center they were at, and loses a good chunk of their money. I see this as being far better than the lose-all-progress game over screen, but still can be frustrating to the player. But what do these two punishments have in common? The player may be tempted to just turn off the game after being punished in these ways. I have been victim to that mindset as well – if I hit a game over screen and lose a whole ton of progress I’ve made, I often get so upset that I turn off the game and don’t want to play it again for a while. Even in Pokemon, though the player doesn’t lose all progress, there is less incentive to keep going after fainting than there is to turn off the game and try again – though at least, I’d be more likely to try again after being punished by Pokemon than if I was punished by a game over screen. It seems that the makers of Pokemon realized that their punishment was too harsh in the earlier games, since the player would lose half of their money if they blacked out, but this amount was adjusted in later games to be far less if the player had accumulated plenty of cash over the course of the game.

Blacking out in Pokemon Diamond/Pearl

Another punishment that stood clearly in my mind was completely different from the previous two mentioned, but had a great impact on my memory though I haven’t played the game for a while. In The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, the creators stuck in a really obscure punishment based on morality. I am referring to the fact that if players are sneaky enough to manage to steal from the shop in the game, they are punished for the rest of the game through shaming. I tried this out of curiosity the first time I played the game. I managed to steal an expensive item from the shop, and when I returned, the shop owner killed me. I thought that was it in terms of punishment. I saved the game and kept going. However, everyone in the game from that point on kept calling me “THIEF” instead of the name I picked at the beginning of the game. At first, I ignored it, even laughed a little, but I realized it actually upset me when I saw cutscenes that were supposed to be serious and touching, and the other characters still kept calling me “THIEF”. I actually felt far more ashamed of stealing that one item than I ever thought I would be, because that took away from my experience for the rest of the game. On one hand, this punishment was extremely effective because I felt very ashamed, just as the makers of the game had intended. But on the other hand, I despised this punishment because that one mistake haunted me for the rest of the game. A little bit of curiosity ended up making me really resentful. Thus, I’ll always remember this punishment very negatively in my mind.

So, what really makes punishments bad, and what makes them good? There are many answers to this question, but I’ve personally discovered a few based on my own experience, and the experience of my friend who played Dark Souls. Any punishment in a game that makes it so that the player wants to turn off the game, or has no incentive to keep playing, is clearly bad. Also, any punishment that haunts the player for the entirety of the game without fair warning is also bad, because if the player really dislikes the punishment, they may feel that all of their progress up to that point was wasted if they don’t want to continue with the lingering punishment hanging over their heads. However, punishments that the player has a fair opportunity to recover from can be positive, such as in the case of Dark Souls, or even in a game like Minecraft where the dying player loses their items, but can recover them if they make it back to the spot that they died. Because of this, I learned that punishment isn’t only not always a bad thing, but it can be a very good thing in enriching a game experience for players.

Ratrocity Design

This week, my group designed and made a unity game and a paper prototype out of a very obscure concept. The theme used was “game where you play a life support machine in a hospital but during the night you turn into a diseased rat”. We called the game Ratrocity. We thought this idea had potential to be a sort of balancing game – as a life support machine during the day, you are trying to heal patients to keep them from dying. As a diseased rat at night, you are trying to spread your disease to the patients to make their health go down so that they don’t heal enough to leave the hospital. In this way, the hospital will make the most money since patients will stay under its care for the greatest possible amount of time if they can’t die or heal enough to leave.

Mechanics

The mechanics of this game are fairly simple. There are six patients lying in bed on the screen, and the player must click a patient in order to give them health during the day while they are dying, or inflict harm at night while they are healing. The goal is to keep all patients alive and in the hospital as long as possible. The player gets points based on the amount of time that they can keep patients in the hospital. If all patients die or are fully healed, the game is over. The player must quickly and repeatedly click patients to have a great impact on their health. The player must move the mouse from patient to patient in order to keep them all at moderate health.

Aesthetics

                The art and sounds of the game are also not very elaborate. The general look of the game is friendly, with a smiling sun and moon representing day and night and other cheerful looking elements, but with an ugly rat at night to contrast the cheerfulness of the rest of the images. This could represent the hospital itself in the sense that it disguises itself as being good and working to heal patients, when meanwhile patients are harmed at night in order to keep them in the hospital – meaning, the ugly side of the hospital comes out at night.  

                The patients in the game are represented by hospital beds with a simple red health bar above which shrinks and grows. There is a sun or moon shown at the top right corner of the screen to represent day and night, and the screen also changes from bright (day) to dark (night) to really stress the change in time. The score is shown at the top left corner of the screen, and the player is represented by a life support machine during the day, and an ugly rat at night.

                The game does not have any music because the sounds used provide enough atmosphere that we thought any music might be distracting. As background noise, there is the beep of the life support machine going at all times. Every now and then at night, the rat will squeal. During the transition from day to night, the sound of crickets plays. During the transition from night to day, the sound of a rooster plays. These sounds also help to stress the change in time along with the change in colors and the sun or moon image at the side. Altogether, the sounds are simple, but they serve their purpose.

Dynamics

                The dynamics of the game are all shown through player choice, and how the player personally chooses to play the game. For one, the player has to make the decision between trying to keep all patients alive and in the hospital, or focusing on a select few. Ideally, keeping all patients alive would earn the player more points than just having some of them alive, though currently the score of the game is solely determined by the amount of time the player lasts without losing all patients. However, if the score was determined by both time and the number of patients in the hospital, this would give the player the choice of whether to take the riskier route in trying to keep all patients in the hospital as long as possible to earn the most points, or the safer route in trying to keep a few patients at moderate health while letting the others die or heal. The first option would be risky because it is more difficult to keep track of more patients. 

                Another interesting dynamic that is affected by player choice is the idea that since the time shifts between day and night with little to no warning, the player must make sure that they don’t heal or injure the patient too much. This is because if the player were hurting a patient with the rat at night and then the time switched to day, the patient would then begin to lose health on their own, and then the player would have to frantically take care of that patient to keep them from dying. This means that the player has to be careful to keep patients at a very balanced health rather than trying to do a whole lot of damage or healing at once.

                All in all, it was very interesting to make a game from such a strange and random concept.  To improve Ratrocity, we would have to balance the mechanics more in order to make it more difficult in lower levels (so the player can’t get by with doing nothing) and easier in higher levels (so it is actually possible to beat later levels). However, the game is still fully playable, and could actually be a lot of fun if we’d put a lot of time into balancing.