So last time I left you with a question, what differences are there between parents playing a board game and the issues that arise with the grown-up playing the child's make believe game? Well for one, the rules are written down for everyone to read and understand ahead of time when the parents play a board game together. And something similar in each of the cases would be that in both games the rules tend to be an abstraction of what they are supposed to represent in the real world, instead of being faithful representations. The reason for this is that board games are generally player adjudicated. What I mean by that is that in most cases the board game does not have an independent party overseeing the play of the game. The players have to make sure that they are playing properly and the board game itself has little ability to enforce the rules otherwise. On top of that, the players have to do any micro-managing required by the board game's ruleset in order to carry out the situation it is modeling. For example, someone always has to be the banker in Monopoly or they all have to handle the money themselves. Which is fine and most players can handle it since in monopoly the real-estate modeling being carried out by the game's rules are extremely coarse grained. But imagine if every transaction in which a player wanted to buy or sell a piece of land they had to go through zoning, city council, taxes, inspections, etc., and if every transaction was hit with fractional taxes and fees causing a great deal of difficult math(for most people). The model would be much more fine grained and accurate to the real life situation, but I'm going to go out on a limb and state that this would most likely be more than most players could handle and result in a lot less fun and sales for the game. Whereas in the child's game the entire system and rules are adjudicated by the child indpendatly of the adult player and generally abstracted to a simpler case in the child's imagination versus what the real world counterpart would be. And funny enough this situation is closer to most video games than the adults playing a board game. In video games we can be self-adjudicating much like the child and as such the player is forced to play by our rules. Unlike the child's game and real board games, video games can be more specific with it's models, because the players are not forced to do the computation that a more realistic modeling requires, the PC/Console can carry all of that out for the player as the game requires. Many developers have embraced this and brought us more realistic physics, destruction, lighting, etc. Which is great. What could possibly go wrong with having more realistic systems in our game? Well, for one, you are setting the player up for the same problem faced by the adult playing the child's game. By adding in these advanced systems you also obscure the player's understanding of the rules, because they become so complex that the player can no longer grasp it. Sometimes simplicity is the best. In the Halo series, Bungie toned back the AI on purpose. They made some of the best AI driven enemies of the day. The reason why many people had so much fun fighting the AI was because they could predict what the enemies were going to do and use that against them. For example if you killed the bigger enemy leading a squad of little guys they would immediately panic. Once the player discovered that this was a reliable rule of play they could begin to utilize it as a tactic in future fights. Bungie removed the fuzziness from the system. No random chance. No super intelligent calculation on whether the player could be beaten or not. Simply, if big guy dies then panic. Could they have made it more accurate or smarter? Yes, but they understood that simpler was better, because than the player was more likely to understand the rule and play with it, thereby reducing tension between the player and the game. Allowing it to flow, as we say in the gaming industry. So be mindful that you don't just simulate things more accurately simply because you can. Think about what makes a better game and go with that. If we made self-aware NPCs you would have fewer fun war games. Because the armies would flee from the player, after he killed his way through the first two levels, and then nuke him from orbit.
