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As a content designer on Auto Assault, a lot of things about the core of the game were not my job to deal with, but they had a significant impact on what I did, none-the-less. Things like, the speed of the game, the UI, core game mechanics, AI or heck, even the camera position. The decisions in these areas, while I always had input, were the responsibilities of the system designers, the game's design director and the heads of the company. Some folks might consider not having to deal with those problems a happy release, but for me, not having a lot of control in this regard was a constant source of frustration and fear.

The reason it bothered me was simple; it had to do with one of the most-heard buzzwords in this industry, this decade, "Accessibility."

Auto Assault was an attempt to blend skill-based gaming, such as you see on console games, with traditional online MMO gameplay, like you might see in an Everquest or WoW. On top of this, Auto Assault was to carry on the tradition of Jumpgate and incorporate physics based gameplay into the mix. As you can imagine, this combination of paradigm bending ideals had never been integrated into a single project before. The fact that this made it all an unknown - that we didn't even know if it would work let alone be fun - gave ulcers to a lot of folks on the team. I actually wasn't one of them, but I'd taken to Jumpgate like a duck to water so I knew gamers could get it, as long as we didn't make it impossible to control... still, a lot of people weren't convinced that we could deliver a physics based automotive combat model that players could actually understand.

As a result, there was a constant push to make the game as accessible as possible. This seems laudable, right? I mean the way to make your game sell a bazillion copies is to make sure it can be picked up and played by as many people as possible, right? It certainly felt that way to a lot of people at the time, but after awhile I began to suspect that we'd fallen into a trap.

You see, the idea that being able to pick up and play the game will result in a sale presupposes that the game itself is fun. If your game isn't all that fun, it doesn't matter how easy it is to play; people won't play it, anyway. Do you follow me? If you're about to argue about the meaning of "fun" then go ahead and swap "fun" for "entertaining" - for this conversation, they mean the same thing.

Now, let's imagine that you've created a game which, on paper, sounded awesome, but in reality is a little less compelling or gripping or just downright fun, than you had expected. What do you do? You analyze it and try to figure out how you make it more fun, right? But what if the game you're making is sufficiently different from everything else out there that you can't really tell why it's not fun; what do you do, then?

Well, if my experiences in this industry are any indication, you latch on to the things you see that weren't all that fun in other games, anyway -- even if the game they weren't fun in doesn't really have any parallels to your game, at all. I suppose it's a way to putting your first foot on an unsteady path and moving forward - you start with something small that you know and you change it. The next time you play the game, you see the change you made and it fixes that little problem you saw, so you think to yourself, "Good job! If we can just do that a thousand more times we should have a game that's a lot more fun to play!"

The problem there, is that you can fall into one of those game development traps I'm always going on about. Did you really make the game more fun, or did you automate a process that, viewed independently of the game, you'd rather not do?

Let me see if I can illustrate my point with a concrete example: Let's say you're making an open world game. Heck, let's use San Andreas, shall we? (Apologies to the R* designers - I don't know any of them, I'm just using them in a hypothetical example. Please don't think this quotes them or anything.)

OK, so you're the designer on San Andreas (lucky you! Sell your stock the day you ship!), and you're playing your game. It's awesome. That dating part is kinda lame, you think maybe you'll turn it off or cut some of it, but otherwise it's great, right? So how come your jaded QA team is treating coming into work like kids having to go to school after coming back from a trip to hawaii? You talk to them and they bitch that they keep having to drive down from San Fierro to Los Santos all the time and it's mostly just empty roads. It's SOOO boring! All just to test these stupid courier intercept missions, which they know work, anyway. They say the game would be SOOO much cooler if you could just teleport straight to each city, after you'd been there once to "unlock" them.

Huh. That would make things easier, you think... And... maybe if that were easier more people would finish the game... and if more people finish the game, they'll tell their friends how cool it was and their friends will buy copies of their own! This is a good idea!

Or, is it?

I used San Andreas as the example here for a reason. I apologize if I am spoiling anything for GTA players, but once you've been to each airport, you can then use them to fly commercial airliners to the others - avoiding the need to drive there and skipping the tedium with a little cinematic that takes a fraction of the normal drive time. It turns out, according to [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Andreas_(Grand_Theft_Auto)#Transportation|Wikipedia]], that you can get train tickets and they work much the same way, too.

Obviously, they did feel that giving you a way to skip the tedium was a good idea - that it would make the game more accessible. However, what they didn't do - and I applaud them here for reasons I'll get to in a moment - was make teleporting around the normal mode of world travel.

Now, let's talk about Auto Assault. Auto Assault had the exact same problem as San Andreas. It even "addressed the accessibility issue" the same way - by giving players a method to teleport from major location to major location - INC. However, in Auto Assault, INC feels essential. No one drives all the way from zone to zone, right? [Drove, excuse me. *sigh*]

[I'm not even going to let you think I know all the answers, here. There's no such thing as a design expert, period. Instead, I'm going to take a moment and point out that I don't know Jack, nor his German friend Mr. Schitt. I'm just a dude that's made a grip of games in his time, nothing more.]

That being said, I can't help but feel that the reason INC is the "normal" mode of travel, major location to major location, is because of how damned easy it is to use. The button is right there on your hotbar UI; you can push it pretty much any time you want, anywhere you want and INC will come get you and take you somewhere you want to go. It's like a "get a chauffer free" card for every player. The answer to the question of, "Should I drive? Or should I take INC?" is clear - It's better to take INC. It takes way less time and there's no real downside to doing so. In short, by making it so easy to use, they took away an interesting choice and replaced it with a no brainer - a non-choice.

Sid Meier once said that a game is a series of interesting choices. I've heard that quote used a few times now by people who interpret it to mean that you should eliminate all of the small choices - the logic being here, I think, that small choices are seldom interesting and therefore get in the way of the interesting choices. Once noted designer has even gone so far as to say, essentially, that if you can eliminate every uninteresting choice, you will have made the perfect game. I'm not sure I agree and I think the example above speaks a bit as to why.

You see, in San Andreas, the choice of whether to fly or drive is just as small as it is in Auto Assault - just as uninteresting... At least, that's the case at first glance. But the mechanic works differently in San Andreas and, because of that, the choice has ramifications that aren't obvious or even in your conscious mind, when you make the decision.

To fly in San Andreas, you have to make your way to the airport - this alone opens a window of opportunity for something interesting to happen, in the time it takes for you to get from your current location to the airport. It also means that the answer to "should I fly or drive?" isn't always the same - the distance between you and the airport vs. the distance between you and your destination is a comparison that has to be made first to see if flying has any real value. That's true in AA too, but to a such a significantly reduced amount as to make the measure meaningless (unless you're at the zone boundary, the answer is still pretty much "INC," in every case).

Next, San Andreas' commercial flight mechanic takes time. While you're watching the flying animation, game time is passing (I think at an acellerated rate, but I don't remember)... Thus the only time benefit you actually reap from flying is realtime not game time. Since much of that game is time dependant, that modifies the choice's value a great deal, in some cases... and very little in others, which again helps to make the choice more interesting.

Finally, there's more than just a binary choice in San Andreas - It's not just "Drive or go to the airport" because, past a certain point in the game, you can take a plane or other flying vehicle and fly there yourself, getting to your destination significantly faster than driving, but while still playing. This is a third dimension to the choice and one that makes things significantly more interesting.

It's also something that Auto Assault never had. The designers on San Andreas realized, apparently, that the choice was more interesting than it seemed and they found a way to fix the frustration without robbing the game of any gameplay at the same time. We didn't do as well on AA, I'm afraid.

In AA we addressed the frustration and made the game more accessible, but sacrificed a great deal of potential play in the bargain. Since no one drives, no one just happens onto an unexpected encounter, or social interaction or game event that they weren't planning to see already. They miss out on all those opportunities because of what might seem like an innocuous choice to enhance accessibility - the decision to make INC accessible from anywhere, from a prominent UI button.

It was felt that players would have less to have to remember that way. It was felt that if we did anything else, it would make it too complex. Players would have to know the map (is that really bad?), have to know where they were in the world and would have to know how to get to the nearest INC station -- it was felt that that was a lot to keep track off, while driving and fighting. That's why we did it a different way, a simpler, easier way: No need to remember where the nearest INC station is! You can just press the button and be whisked away to the next place you want to have fun at... missing every single fun place you could have stopped, along the way.

Which leads me to the point of this little write up - Accessibility and complexity are not at odds with each other. Believing they are is the trap. It leads to the fallacy that simpler is better because simpler is more accessible. It's often coupled with the idea that making a game easier will make it more accessible, because more people will win (which is "better" in this line of false logic).

Ease and fun - entertainment value - are not always the same thing. Sometimes they are, but often, they're not. Which is more fun, Poker or Solitaire? Which is harder? More complex? Which is the better game?

The complexity level of the game need have nothing to do with how accessible or inaccessible it is, neither does the ease of the game (I speak of ease in a challenge sense here, not in an "ease of use" sense; forgetting the term has a dual use in our inudstry is often where developers begin to confuse simplicity and ease). Far too often, we developers seem to think the two - complexity and accessibility - are intimately linked. We come to believe that making a game easier makes it more accessible and that making it more accessible makes it more fun, thus believing that making a game easier -- simpler -- makes the game more fun.

How many games have been robbed of their most interesting and most compelling entertainment experiences in this quest for accessibility?

How many games have been handicapped, in the quest to make them handicapable?

I lament that you can't get out of your car in Auto Assault and I know this very topic is the reason why players never could. There was no technological reason you couldn't, but many were afraid that allowing it would have made the game too complex, that it would have been a "barrier to entry" to less hardcore players. I sob a little inside, when I read so many comments online from gamers that say they would have given the game a chance if it had that feature, but hey... at least the game was very accessible for what it was...

...and that's good, right?

- Snipehunter

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