Star Gazer wrote:I'm confused. Why are we not allowed to experience total failure? Isn't it part of real life? There we are doing really well, life is blossoming, and... ...Stuff happens, and we're screwed. Nobody to come and rescue us, no way out, no fault of our doing, nobody to stamp our feet and say it was their fault, just 'that's the way the cookie crumbles'...
But, then I don't get cheating either. This is a game, but surely the best games emulate the risk/chance elements of real life, without them being life threatening! So, we're not actually going to be marooned in intergalactic space for all eternity, we're just sitting there cursing and threatening to ritually disembowel the programmer who incorporated that feature in the game. And, believe me, in Elite, the sudden occurrence of 'pirates have seized your ship on docking' was even more irritating!
At least with misjumps into the far blue yonder you can allow for such a possibility and have a Galactic Hyperspace Drive on hand to zap to another sector. Boring, but there you are, lots of new shiny planets to visit!
It's the difference between game life and real life: we don't have to put up with the irritating parts of real life in a game. The best games emulate, and enhance, the fun elements of real life, including risk/reward, but they also edit out the lousy stuff.
Life isn't fair, but games should be. Unfair games are usually bad ones. There are different degrees and types of "fair", of course: there's Space Invaders fair, where it's one human (with three lives) versus an infinite number of utterly mindless computer drones. The human will, eventually, lose, or possibly at least just give up, but still: the game is playable because it offers a fair challenge.
An unfair text adventure could contain:
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You are in a clearing. Roads lead North and East.
>Go North
You are on a mountain path. There is a cave to the North. Roads lead North and South.
>Go North
A dragon eats you.
==GAME OVER==
A slightly fairer version of the same could be something like:
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You are in a clearing. Roads lead North and East.
>Go North
You are on a mountain path. There is a cave to the North. Wisps of smoke curl out of the cave and adventurers' bones are piled high around the entrance. Roads lead North and South.
>Go North
A dragon eats you.
==GAME OVER==
The problem with the witchspace malfunction is that it can be entirely random. There's no way for the player to see it coming or avoid it: it just drops on you out of the blue. Frankly, it's even worse than the first text snippet above, because it lets you fight the dragon, and maybe even – after an epic battle – win, and then it
still kills you. And it doesn't even out-and-out kill you: it just leaves you to scrabble around, hunting for a way out that doesn't exist, before you finally give up out of boredom or frustration. Undoubtedly, it's emulating real life, in that it's arbitrary, brutal and without any shred of built-in justice – but those are aspects of real life (like the existence of long, boring stretches where nothing's happening of any note which you can't just skip over, say, or the requirement to be polite to neighbours you can't stand, or ... fill in your own
) which should be left out of a game.
