How Perlin's Law Makes Gaming Credible 59
simoniker writes "Veteran game designer Ernest Adams has posted a new column on 'Perlin's Law' which suggests that all books, movies, and games have a 'credibility budget'. For games, both the designer and the player decide what happens: '...the story itself can only tolerate a certain amount of improbability before the credibility budget is exhausted, and the story is ruined.' According to this new law, named after Ken Perlin, who gave birth to the concept, games should not be infinitely wide-ranging or allow the player to do anything he wants."
What About Ender's Game? (Score:4, Insightful)
I've always secretly hoped that games would one day evolve to a point of them becoming specific to the user. This "mind game" that Ender played had seemingly limitless possibilities and also seemed to reflect the user's psyche back at them and cause them to make connections they never knew existed.
Maybe the next step for video game engines isn't graphics rendering but instead, stimulus/response rendering? Where by the game reacts to user input using rules, heuristics and a bit of randomness and the game states are loosely defined. Why is Spore so popular? Possibly because of the number of proposed outcomes of the game.
We're no where near this kind of game play yet but it may be possible in the future. Perlin's Law seems kind of like a restriction that I honestly wish game developers and publishers wouldn't try to adhere to. Only when people take chances and think outside of the box will we find true gems in the video games. I'm sick of repackaged games and ideas.
Re:What About Ender's Game? (Score:2)
Where are we going to get that?
Re:What About Ender's Game? (Score:1)
Jaysyn
Re:What About Ender's Game? (Score:2)
Computers evolve scenarios far faster than humans ever could. We just havent bothered giving them enough imagination yet.
Re:What About Ender's Game? (Score:2)
Anyway, Deep Blue was a crock. Well, I'm sure technically it was very impressive, but as a competition it sucked. After each game, the programmers were allowed to step in and massively tweak the algorithms. I think they were also allowed to veto any "stupid" moves the computer made. If I was Kasparov, I would never have agreed to those rules.
Re:Spore? Number of outcomes? (Score:2)
Oh, by "number of outcomes" you mean: The exact same thing but now they have three arms and live in round buildings?
Re:What About Ender's Game? (Score:2)
At the end, yes, there was areas that nobody had seen another child enter, but they -assumed- that they were unique to him. There was no proof of that.
A similar scenario could have been made by having the player enter pictures of certain figur
Re:What About Ender's Game? (Score:2)
Isn't it a little early to be calling it 'popular'? It doesn't even exist yet. No matter how excited people are about the game *right now*, it can still be a flop (though the fanboy mentality is making that more and more difficult. Nobody seems to want to admit they were wrong anymore).
I believe the term you were looking for was 'hyped'.
Re:Zonk: (Score:3, Interesting)
First Hitler! (Score:2)
What he says makes sense. I was watching my stepson play Thief 2 on Xbox last night and I knew I couldn't play the game. The thief comes across a guard who is directly in front of a burning torch. So, shoot a water arrow (yes a water arrow, there's also a noisemaker and moss arrow- which already strained my credulity) at the torch and put it out. Does the guard even notice that he's now in total darkness? No. Does he try to re-light the torch? Nope. Does he continue walking in the
Re:First Hitler! (Score:2)
Ridiculous! In what universe would they make things whose purpose is making noise!
I can see how this would strain the credibility. Next you'll be saying that the main character shoots the arrows using a bow rather than with telekinesis.
Re:First Hitler! (Score:3, Insightful)
The issue is that those actions have only extremely limited and unrealistic results in the game world. What we need aren't restrictions on what the player can do (returning back to older games), but rather an improvement in how games react dynamically to unexpected user input.
Real life is not a state machine, moving from one state to another on linear paths. Games that try to be as expansive, or more so, than real li
Re:First Hitler! (Score:1, Funny)
Re:First Hitler! (Score:2)
However, there are limits to what is practical to do in the interests of making a game playable, particularly with MMORPGs. For exam
Re:First Hitler! (Score:1, Insightful)
Sooo stupid and inconsistent with the rest of the universe. Also, enemies never pick up powerups.
Re:First Hitler! (Score:2)
Sooo stupid and inconsistent with the rest of the universe. Also, enemies never pick up powerups.
Well, have you ever heard about suspension of disbelief? [wikipedia.org] Now, a guard completely ignoring sudden darkness requires too much suspension of disbelief for the game to be pleasant, in this example. This is what this law tries to express.
Re:First Hitler! (Score:1)
Game Design is about the unholy trinity: Realism, Logicalness/Consistency, Convenience
Unfortunately, far too mamy players are argueing about the wrong thing, usually the red herring of realism.
Robin Hood - The Legend of Sherwood (Score:2)
A few
Re:First Hitler! (Score:1)
They can be "simulations" of real life or they can be simplified or fantasy versions. All the different genres of game show this too - today I might want to play an RPG, tomorrow it may be some kind of sport or racing, FPS, strategy, etc.
But I agree, poor AI by in-game characters can spoil an otherwise good game, but maybe in the game the guard is an authentic simulation of an idiot.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:True for TV? (Score:2)
Is the credibility budget exhausted with each show? If not, then the story in each show is not ruined, and as long as each show itself is credible in of itself, in conjunction with the other shows then the story of the season, and then the entire series remains credible.
Re:True for TV? (Score:3, Interesting)
You pretty well just proved that you missed the whole point of this theory. X-Files bounced around, but greys, the black oil, and the super-soldiers all fit very nicely into the same universe. X-Files requires you to suspend disbelief, but only s
Re: (Score:2)
Re:True for TV? (Score:2)
Sorry, I didn't watch every episode... but what's wrong with the black oil being the seed and there being an embryo later?
Re: (Score:2)
Re:True for TV? (Score:2)
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Re:True for TV? (Score:3, Interesting)
In Unreal Tournatment, Battlefield2, etc, the restrictions are static and well understood by the players. Even though they have a "story" behind every map in BF2, I couldn't tell you what it is because it's wholly irrelevant to gameplay and I never bothered
Re:True for TV? (Score:2)
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Oblivion/Morrowind, God-Mode, and Game Balancing (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Oblivion/Morrowind, God-Mode, and Game Balancin (Score:2)
The cheat codes really made that aspect of the game more fun for me. I got to enjoy parts of the game that never would have become available to me otherw
Re:Oblivion/Morrowind, God-Mode, and Game Balancin (Score:2)
I on the other hand don't have the ability to concentrate closely enough on every dungeon wall and have been killed a few times by traps (I play with deadlier traps - oncoming spiked logs should HURT) and have merely reloaded. Is it a cheat, or much more fun? I
Cheats vs. Difficulty Level (Score:1)
This is not a new law. It's not even a law. (Score:5, Insightful)
No matter how much you start out with you must never cross the line and have a character do something that is inconsistent with the world in the story. You cannot have a character from The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter leap into the air and fly. You MIGHT be able to get away with that in a Star Trek story.
Re:This is not a new law. It's not even a law. (Score:3, Insightful)
1. Credibility can be treated as a quantifiable substance that can be codeified in a game
2. In interactive fiction, both the developer and player draw from a common pool of credibility, making it unique from other fiction
3. Players can destroy their own enjoyment of the game by using playing strategies that lead to wins but hurt the story telling element- Telling a story and beating a game
Thank you. I did not know this. (Score:2)
Scope Constraints vs. Behavior Constraints (Score:3, Interesting)
This seems to conflate two very different ideas, one of which is obvious, the other seems misguided. Clearly, if there are no constraints at all on what players can do, that's going to strain credibility, in and of itself (at least, if complete freedom isn't limited to a special distinct mode designed for editing the environment rather than intended for "playing the game").
But I don't see how an increasing scope is countradindicated, so long as items in the game are designed for credible behavior and reaction. Sure, infinitely wide ranging requires infinite programming to create credible behavior, but its a nonsense limit anyway, since you'd need an infinitely powerful computer to run the game, and infinite media capacity to deliver it, anyhow. "You shouldn't do things that are impossible" isn't really a necessary warning.
Re:Scope Constraints vs. Behavior Constraints (Score:2)
On the flipside, without restrictions there are no goals or rules. And a game without goals or rules is not a game; it's a utility program or a toy, depending on whether it is useful or not.
prevalence of narrative structures (Score:3, Funny)
This tension is an essential element of classical (Freudian) phychology. Substitute the terms Id and Ego for player and designer, respectively. Indeed, in a post-structuralist view (informed by Lacan), any discourse structured as a narrative (that is, nearly all, internal or external), Perlin's Law offers interpretive value. For example, a measure of the bounds of normativity for an internal discourse (whether you consider yourself crazy) is a function of Perlin's Law over the constituent terms of that internal narrative.
Further study: Can we apply the concept to shared narratives like normative social behavior or political formation? Is the concept redundant with the contributions of the Frankfurt School?
Extra credit: Does this idea offer a description of the development of political reaction in response to sharply divergent, even orthogonal, shared narratives (q.v.--the Bush team vs. *the reality-based community*)? Is it persuasive?
Indeed, credibility has been a consistent focus of Rhetoric since the inception of the Western cultural tradition. Perhaps Mr. Perlin's own modesty should prevail over the enthusiasms of the geek community in general and Mr. Adams in particular?
The cost is relative (Score:3, Insightful)
When I drive off a ramp, flip over and cause a 15 car explosion in GTA, it doesn't really affect my notion of the game as a vaguely believable caricature of America. However, if that happened all around me constantly it would bust that and I'd feel like I were in crazy stunt world or something.
I think that the difference in credibility effect between player impetus and game impetus is so great that the mere suggestion that player freedom is a bad thing is almost entirely busted.
It certainly makes it more difficult for the -game- to respond to the player in credible ways, but it isn't directly what the player did that hurts that credibility.
I'd say that arbitrarily limiting a player's freedom has a credibility damaging effect as well, since you feel like you are in an invisible straight jacket whenever there exists a mind numbingly obvious solution to a problem that can only be dealt with in the circuitous manner decided by the game developer.
Re:The cost is relative (Score:2)
The part that uses up the credibility is that unlike in GTA, doing that in real-life won't result in you appearing outside the nearest hospital with less money in your pocket.
Say what now? (Score:2)
Re:Say what now? (Score:1)
i.e.
Baraka
Tetris
--
Game Design is about the unholy trinity: Realism, Logicalness/Consistency, Convenience
Unfortunately, far too mamy players are argueing about the wrong thing, usually the red herring of realism.
Laws are meant to be broken (Score:1)
Because we said so. And it's a law now so you have to follow it. pfhhhh.
I'm gonna go play some Grand Theft Auto and Spiderman 2 now...
Nothing really surprising there (Score:2)
I have a fairly good knowledge of medical areas, from my time working in a pharmacy and studying to be a paramedic. I can already tell that the new TNT network show "Saved" is
Because Reality Is So Much Fun (Score:2)
Because I, for one, don't like there to be any improbability whatsoever in my games. They should be exactly like real life, diverging in no way whatsoever. Escapism indeed! Gaming should be sheer drudgery and nothing more or you won't truly appreciate it.
I've had nothing but the worst experiences of my life killing Hitler armed with twin gatling guns, wiping out every
Re:Because Reality Is So Much Fun (Score:2)
I mean, maybe all the 'vette owners in the city did just decide to leave the state for a day, a rally or something, sure...
Things don't have to be like real life, but they need to not be arbitrary and change based on the designers convenience.
Interesting behavior (Score:2)
In this particular case, I believe the author is incorrectly connecting two different factors;
1. Giving the player consistent purpose
2. Deciding how or whether they move towards that purpose
Elder Scrolls has been a fine example, although a little short and unclear on criteria #1 (furthermore, earlier ES's lacked a a form of internal consistency such that the player could, in effect, get trapped outside of plot due to stupid bugs). The player truly
Aestetics cannot be reduced to a stupid law (Score:1)