Anyway, if you remember from yesterday's blog post, I had talked extensively about the idea of heuristic gaming (i.e. a fancy way of saying "playing by just doing it and not reading the manual") and even gave a few examples in PC gaming history. This blog post, however, will focus on the dangers of this type of thinking. Well, "dangers" is such a harsh word and probably not that appropriate considering the context of how terrible real life can be sometimes... Let's say we'll be focusing on the "disadvantages" instead!
Remember the non-gamer example we talked about before? You know, the guy who doesn't play video games that often, and how we're talking about the scenario where you try and entice the guy to play this great new video game because you need him for your awesome gaming group (like, say, for a survivor team in L4D or L4D2)? As we established, the non-gamer is not interested in learning about the intricacies of the game, nor figuring out the best way to optimize his playing such that he does well; all he cares about is having fun! This, of course, is the very crux of gaming... Why play a game if you don't have fun? Why play a game if you can't jump into it immediately and figure things out as you go?
Thus is the first disadvantage to heuristic thinking. When game developers need to appease to this form of thinking (in order to boost their sales by enticing both the gamer and non-gamer to purchase their product), they can approach this dilemna in one of two ways. The first and easiest choice is to dumb down the gameplay such that the game can be quickly learned; pretty good for movie-to-video-game tie ins as well as console ports (Splinter Cell: Conviction, while a very cool game to watch, does feel a little drier in the stealth department than previous games from the Splinter Cell series). The second, and considerably more difficult, choice is to ease the learning curve for the player by creating a quick tutorial or forming a single player campaign to ease the player into new gaming concepts. This can be done while still keeping the game complex and hard to master.
A great example of this is CCP's MMO Eve Online (the only MMO I ever liked playing!), which is the pinnacle of complex gaming thanks to its fairly convoluted gaming systems. Optimizing the training of skills; something which every Eve Online player has to deal with, has its own forum section! Wow! However, to keep the learning curve on the down-low, CCP has been pretty hard at work to make the tutorial and the UI a little more accessible to the masses and to hopefully entice more newbies into the game.
Let's get back on topic! As you can see, a society that prefers to adapt an after-the-fact style of learning as opposed to a RTFM (read the freakin' manual) style of learning can potentially result in a general dumbing down of certain products. At a corporate level, the desire to take risks in video game design and create a complicated (though possibly fantastic) new game is just not there thanks to our preference for heuristicism! That sentence, that right there, is the SECOND disadvantage to this sort of thinking; a loss of innovation in the available products of play.
Now, there's nothing to be said about making more money from appealing to more people. It's a fantastic business strategy and one that can keep a company's bottom line well in the black. However, being TOO accessible takes the risk of alienating the more hardcore of players, which can be a loss in terms of a company's video game production credibility (then again, I know a lot of hardcore players who'd prefer to pirate video games than actually pay for them... meh...).
The third "disadvantage" of heuristic thinking? Using the word heuristic too much when trying to anticipate other people's behavior.
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