Why Games Lie to You- The Fallacy of Fairness

in late 2017 world-renowned okay video game destiny - was caught lying as players completed particular missions over and over again you I would show that they got the same out of experience each time but in reality it was being throttled behind the scenes to ensure they didn't progress too fast this revelation sparked an uproar prompting a swift fixing of the mechanic and attempts to calm the playerbase down but why did this happen in the first place what possible reason could there be to lie to players that very people who've paid money to experience your video game for a lot of people the most important part of a game is fairness and why wouldn't it be why play a game where the person you're playing against is cheating right a cheating player makes the whole experience just kind of pointless but what if I told you that it isn't just players that cheat games do it - games like constantly to us in order to make the experience seem more enjoyable to evoke a specific emotional response or just to smooth over some of the glitches in human psychology without ever really telling you what they're doing surely that's the exactly the same as a player cheating right it's a betrayal of trust something that invalidates the experience both retro actively and going forwards simple ethics says the game should always be upfront with their players or at least you'd think wouldn't you I actually argued the opposite it's only because games manipulate us but we enjoy playing them at all now the tactics used in destiny - were pretty cynical anti fun and were almost certainly financially motivated but more often than not these techniques aren't that's why the unenviable task of trying to fence stuff just like this falls to me because no one else is really dumb enough to try lying to players or even cheating behind the scenes is a perfectly valid technique so long as it gets used in the ultimate interest of the player and their experience what's more some of the best games ever wouldn't be anywhere near as enjoyable or even possible if the player were kept in the dark about certain aspects of their design I'm gonna be digging into a lot of games here but the big spoiler warnings go out for Doom XCOM 2 and hell-blade sin Lluis precise energy DC talked earlier this year Jennifer Shelly talks about how games are like magic tricks elaborate illusions designed to trick our perceptions and take advantage of your weird human brains our work is to design for the human mind and the human perception so the human mind is deeply flawed and designing for it means to design with these flaws in mind the comparison seems strange at first magic tricks are all about sleight of hand secret compartments and hidden things it's not until we consider that the facet of video games we experience is a tiny fraction compared to what's happening underneath the surface the things begin to make sense let's start with easy stuff shall we platformers platformers are tight focus tests of skill but you'd be surprised about just how much stuff is done in the background to make it work the average humans reaction speed with a visual stimuli is around 250 milliseconds plus input lag in the form of your computer rendering the graphics and then processing our input we can add old maybe an extra hundred plus another 50 few actually pressing the button at all this is some pretty loose on-the-fly maths but we can confidently say that there can be as much of a third of a second gap between something appearing on your screen and your character reacting to it and that's not even counting animation window this is a big deal because particularly in platformers a single missed input can make the difference between a hard-won victory or a frustrating defeat a third of a second doesn't seem like that long but it's enough for a man to go from here to all the way over here a recipe for potential disaster and the last thing a developer wants is for a player to fail because they thought they jumped at the right time but didn't account for their own reaction speed that's why platformers have something called a grace period jumping all for people who aren't boring Coyote time named after wily coyote from the Roadrunner cartoons coyote time let's characters still jump for a few frames after they've walked off the edge to compensate for our reactions and let us feel like the game is fair even if it really isn't you by all rights miss that jump and you should have fallen but the game bailed you out it's not just platform as either a lot of games will liberally bend the rules in order to give you an advantage in Bioshock the first shot from an enemy's gun will always miss so you aren't taken by surprise old-school shmups have really tiny hit boxes relative to your sprite to compensate for you being bad at judging distances and a lot of third person games will sneakily steal control away from you to stop you getting stuck on terrain even if you don't realize it the game is cheating for you in order to keep you playing the game how it was meant to be played but all these changes are compensating for shortcomings in the way we process information so it's not really cheating right well that's that's basically fair enough but it exposes the idea that what we think is fair and our own psyche are a little more flexible than we might like to consider games cheat not only to level the playing field between imperfect human brains and ultra fast sexy computers but also as a way of manipulating us into specific emotional states take 2016's do which would love for you to think that every fight is a gory battle for survival but it actually fiddles with health in order to change your perception in doom your last few hit points are worth much more than the rest meaning your health will rapidly deplete at the start of a fight making you feel scared of the enemies you're facing but without actually killing you the fact that you're on low health encourages you to use the brilliantly designed globally kill system to get some precious HP giving you what feels like just enough to get your next glory kill health infusion this creates a brilliant gameplay loop spurred on mostly by fear of death that is entirely in your head because the game is lying to you about how much danger you're actually in if your HP total in doom reflected how much damage you could really take then you wouldn't feel the pressure to engage with the parts of doom that make it awesome namely the in-your-face crunchy combat and fantastic gory kills games though just the Seaview and cheap to keep the tension high though they can actually work more directly in your favor for example in spelunky if you're rushing to the bomb either as part of a speedrun or just cause you're in a hurry then you might not notice any of the dreaded dark levels spawning that's because if you finish a stage in under 20 seconds the next one can't be a dark stage so is that speedrunners keep playing the game in the way that's fun for them even if it's technically breaking the rules AI tweaks and cheats in particular I'll use the great effect in order to evoke some specific feelings in the for example in the batman arkham games the various flavors of goon you fight will never pull 180 degree turns so they don't turn around and stop you feeling like the world scratch detective slash advertisement for medical insurance the reverse of this would be the titular alien in alien isolation which actually has two separate a eyes which work together to hunt you down one more traditional one that reacts the noise you make an investigate signs of your presence and another omniscient one that gives the first clues ensuring that it always knows your approximate location giving the eerie impression that it's hunting or toying with you even though the reality is that the game is just twisting what you thought with the rules to keep the fear levels up but the best example of a game that manipulates you into thinking and feeling a certain way is actually one that's heralded as harsh but fair and a testament to the cruelty of random chance a game until recently I didn't know lies and cheats as much as a conservative politician come election time I'm talking of course about ex-con to let's the off with enemies on every difficulty except legendary enemy packs are path away from you all will even run out of combat range to ensure your usually fighting no more than six aliens or twelve lost at a time on top of that each non legend difficulty mission has a chance to generate a substantially easier variant to ease off the pressure after a few deaths on rookie and veteran you have a global 1.2 and 1.1 multiplied respectively on all of your head chances meaning they're displayed 50% hit chance on veteran is actually 55 and on rookie is actually 60 I've done some testing and hit chances seem to be a little higher on average on commander than on legend but we'll chalk that one up to variance the secret maths doesn't stop there on every difficulty except legend when you miss a shot 50% or above the game gives you a stacking aim buff on difficulties below commander you also get a stacking buff to defense when enemies hit you and aim for each soldier below for you have meaning that on rookie if you've only got one guy left he gets a massive plus 45% to his aim the really sneaky part though is that all these bonuses cap out at 95% meaning we'll never be quite sure if the game is helping you or mark and we'll still have a fair few memorable moments where you get angry at the [ __ ] cheating video game come on distracting you from how heavily the game is actually cheating in your favor the only difficulty mode that doesn't cheat for you is the highest one Legend and I bet some of you are thinking that they're just gonna play that from now on well I'm sorry to tell you that a lot of the time fairness it just isn't very fun here's to you tubers and veteran ex-con fans ben and lewis of the yogscast playing XCOM - when what they think about legend difficulty come on I know that legend is legends [ __ ] is kind of well it's just longer that's the thing and it's kind of it kind of bullish it's you on the R&T and we're not playing on safes come with these guys who don't know anything about the behind the scenes cheating actually think the only fair difficulty mode isn't fun that it quote bullshit's you it sounds illogical and it is because humans aren't logical humans love to pretend that they're rational creatures guided by facts but the truth is that you're ruled by subjectivity XCOM is designed to be punitive ly hard in places to give you memorable defeats and losses but is overall weighted in your favor to give you the experience of triumphing over what you think are insurmountable odds but why do this at all XCOM is supposed to be a game about tense tactical battles isn't that ruined if the game is helping you well the lead designer of XCOM - Jake Solomon says that the game is at its best when the player is taking risks and he's right risks are fun and having our tactical know-how payoff in combination with a bit of gambling feels awesome the issue is that when confronted with real statistics we interpret them incorrectly we think that - 50% chances equals one guaranteed hit and that eighty-five percent chances can't miss in the words of Jake Solomon we think about statistics emotionally not mathematically and it's more in legend difficulty feels [ __ ] so instead of being accurate and making you feel bad XCOM rewards your legitimate tactical insight in the way you might expect my feeding you in correct information it knows you'll think emotionally about and then being balanced around the real secret numbers tricking you into having the experience you wanted all along the barriers and challenges games put up aren't the same as the ones another Hugh might they exist purely for your gratification the ideal experience of XCOM just like in almost any other game isn't a fair one because if they were fair you either wouldn't make progress would be forced to play in a very boring way or just plain wouldn't have fun Twitter's don't my point take Mirror's Edge a parkour game which not so secretly uses the color red to tell you where to go by subconsciously being die red to Ted oh that's awful you get to feel like the acrobatic expert the game wants you to feel like and it's a load of fun now turn the red helper color off the game suddenly becomes confusing frustrating and much slower paced robbing you of that cool experience as tough as it is to come to terms with games cheating but it can be in your favor often makes them better let's take a look at a game that makes its name while deceiving you hell-blade send us sacrifice now a secondary spoiler warning here because this is a big one but it's super interesting so go and play hell-blade and then come back okay oh thank god those guys are gone right I mean wow seriously what a bunch of dicks oh no welcome back oh did you enjoy it ah no me neither but it's great isn't it hell-blade sin you--is sacrifice is a game that deals deeply with psychosis a condition which causes those who suffer from it to have difficulty grasping a consistent reality to portray this the game bombards you with disembodied voices offering helpful tips warnings to stay away and outright nice seemingly at random the plot is deliberately a chronological and convoluted blurring the line between reality our metaphor constantly it's great but that is all overshadowed by this big moment here a big moment I may have tastelessly spoiled in a much earlier video yeah row row sorry about that by the way the game tells you that you have limited lives each time you die this infection will creep up send us armed until it reaches our head and then boom save data wiped this is a huge threat and not one many people would say lightly a threat though calls no small degree of control see when it was first revealed this information totally changes the game each mind-bending death inches you closer to having to do it all over again and the paranoia of not knowing how many bets you are away from deletion or how close said you were herself is the death until it's too late is deliciously agonizing but it's not real there is no penalty on the number of times you can die and the game never tells you how brilliant is that all that paranoia your frustration and terror director at the game it was all in your head excellently simulating psychosis as well as revealing a more fundamental truth about game design games are just an assortment of pixel sounds and numbers designed to gauge to feel something and that means that no trick or deception is beyond consideration so long as it improves that experience I think it's important to distance ourselves from this arbitrary and kind of unhelpful idea that games shouldn't try to a trick or lie to us because when you get right down to it no game is really fair sure some games are totally upfront about their mechanics and I mean hell-blade is more or less than most but they're still specifically designed to be interactive with and more often than not beaten coded so that certain things happen at specific times so as to convey ideas take you the player the deeper you look into any game the more the solution falls away Dark Souls bosses deliberately leave openings for you to get a cheeky hit in bracing games use rubber banding to ensure you're always engaging with the most interesting mechanics and every race feels close these timed collapsing building bits in uncharted are sped up or slowed down depending on how well you're doing so you always reach and just in the nick of time and even pac-man can take corners more quickly than the ghosts so you can always get away this is the magic trick that Jennifer surely was on about not to hide a single game mechanic in order to pull a cheap trick of the players expense but to convince them even a little that the game they're playing is real cohesive and fair so as to communicate something so much greater that's why it sucks so much that the highly publicized examples of games lying to players are the ones that give this powerful tool in the development arsenal such a bad name for every gamers scummy boring badly written shallow wait where was going with this all right for every gamers scummiest destiny - there are hundred great games that lie to you in order to give you an experience that you didn't even know you wanted knowing games use sneaky tactics that get us to experience them at different ways won't ruin the experience in the same way that knowing how a special effects work doesn't take away the magic of movies and can even make watching them more interesting the thing to remember is that it's basically ok to feel a bit betrayed when you find out you a tricked but we also need to understand that when games do lie and cheat and mislead they're not doing it for themselves or even for the developer they're doing it for us hi and thanks for watching if you'd like to ruin more game to yourself I'd highly recommend going and checking out Jennifer Shelley's hall talk I based a lot of the points in this video around her writing so do go and give her the attention she deserves now if you'd like to give me the attention I clearly don't deserve then you should try the whole algorithm appeasement thing you know like comment subscribe share the video sacrifice a goat that sort of thing alternatively you could support me on patreon like these cool people my top tier supporters they are Samuel Vander Plaats Alex to launch Dirk Jan Karen bailed raised dad Joseph Robson Joshua Binswanger lunar Eagle 1996 Daniel met jizz strategy in Ultima Patrick Romberg Baxter heal Fido Brian Atari Ani esaron jonathan kirkin s'en Alexis Jenna's and ciao well on that note thank watching stay tuned to another video and I will see you in the next one bye

Channel: Adam Millard - The Architect of Games

Views: 347,015

Rating: 4.7886033 out of 5

Keywords: Games, Gaming, Video Games, PC, Adam, Adam Millard, Architect, Architect of Games, British, Review, Critique, Retrospective, Analysis, Video Essay, Hellblade, Hellblade Senua's Sacrifice, DOOM, XCOM, X-COM 2, War of the Chosen, Lewis, Lewis and Ben, Yogscast, Batman: Arkham, Alien Isolation, Rayman, Destiny 2, Controversy, Destinty 2 Lies, Lying, Tricks, Magic Tricks, Deception, Gaming tricks, Destiny, GDC, jennifer Sheurle

Id: -Aq1M6C09qs

Length: 17min 15sec (1035 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 26 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/majes2]

The degree to which the human brain fails to intuitively grasp even simple statistics continually amazes me. It's no wonder games that incorporate randomness frequently stack the deck in players' favor. One good example that the video doesn't touch on, is Fire Emblem. Like XCom, the game displays hit chances that aren't wholly accurate; most modern Fire Emblem games make two rolls to hit, and take an average to determine if you actually hit. This tends to make the results more in-line with what most people naturally expect: as the displayed hit rate lowers, the actual hit rate rapidly approaches 0, while the inverse is true as well, so it forms more of a curve, rather than a linear probability graph.

[u/dbcanuck]

my understanding is that Gears of War greatly boosts your ability to kill opponents the first match or two, as you understand the objective and playstyle.

they learned through playtesting that if people didn't get a kill in the first match their desire to play again was vastly diminished.

given GoW plays differently than most FPS, it makes sense.

[u/AlekswithaK]

This is a good video, but I think the creator failed to properly address the issues inherent in Destiny's design / didn't create enough of a distinction between games helping the player along and deliberating hindering the players progress. The latter is what everyone is upset about, and they have a right to be. I think most people are aware of hidden mechanics that aid the player are present in most games. What they want addressed and gone are ones that potentially rob players of reward, and the fact that he doesn't draw a line between the two implies that if we're okay with one, then the other can be forgiven, which is kinda nonsense.

[u/410-915-0909]

Some time ago I realized FPS's were something of an inherent lie because even when it was explicitly an ambush and they explicitly knew you were going there was never a patch of flat ground covered by heavy machine guns behind sandbags the way you'd expect some actual military to do an ambush

[u/JeffreyPetersen]

Most people don’t want to spend a couple hours a day at a virtual shooting range for months just to get enough practice to play a “fair” game.

If you want to practice something to achieve mechanical excellence, that’s called a hobby.

[u/system3601]

Well put together video. Really great info.

So basically games cheat for us, its to help us compensate for some perception issues like depth and to help us enjoy the game more like create some sense of paranoia etc... But then again Destiny didnt do any of that, it cheated for their own business benefit to make money and not for us gamers.

So I wish the summary was more like - there are two main types of cheating - for the gamer, and for the benefit of the company.

[u/trauriger]

All the YouTube comments about "XCOM 2 shouldn't lie to me though" are kind of depressing. Why don't you play on legend difficulty then? People just keep finding excuses to blame the game and not accept the fact that fun and rigid, tough rules are often mutually contradictory.

[u/Flyboy142]

This is why I prefer tabletop games like D&D when it comes to chance. If the DM is fudging dice rolls, I know he's doing it for fun, not to make me buy more loot crates. And if a critical hit is rolling a 1 on a D20, then I know it will be 5% and always be 5%.

Ugh. Now I don't want to play Doom or X-COM. No way I can get into such amazing looking games now. The experience is totally spoiled