Perruchon didn’t own a PS3 until the cheaper and slimmer model hit and had been spending the last few years playing his Xbox 360. The PS3 reminded him how much he liked the DualShock design, which inspired this table.

No word on whether this will actually go into production, Perruchon’s DualShock table uses controllers to buttress glass surfaces. The design is for the black DualShock and the white one. Another concept image below.

Table basse design Sony dualshock … [Stephane Perruchon via Born Rich]

No, actually, I’m not. I’ve been playing Demon’s Souls — a game even its developer admits isn’t “a fun game.” The action-adventure game casts you as a hero confronting where progress is hard-won, recovery supplies are limited and equipment can wear out. The twist is that when players die, they return as phantoms to navigate the same environments in a weakened state in the hopes of earning their bodies back — that’s right, the game actually gets more challenging the more you fail.

And yet I love it.

I can’t stop playing, and I can’t really figure out why. Aren’t games supposed to be accessible, and isn’t frustration supposed to be a killjoy? What’s the allure in this difficult game?

Expanded audiences and accessibility are major watchwords in the present era of gaming. Microsoft Game Studios’ Bruce Philips recently unveiled research at Gamasutra showing that even among Xbox 360 games where completion rates are highest, most users only get about half the potential Gamerscore. And 30 percent of users don’t finish some of the most popular and widely-played titles Philips studied. His theory – and that of numerous other designers crafting games designed to be appealing to wider audiences – is that frustration is what makes players give up.

But even though I’m definitely frustrated with Demon’s Souls at times, I’d say I’m even more driven to succeed and to conquer than I’ve been in a long time. What gives?

“I do not think that games must be accessible to be appealing,” Demon’s Souls producer Takeshi Kajii told me in an interview. “If you make a game accessible it will expand the audience. However, if we were to make all games accessible, wouldn’t you eventually get tired of the same thing?”

Kajii explained that in creating Demon’s Souls the team sought to return to the core of what’s fun about games, and relied on three tenets: challenge, discovery and accomplishment. “People commonly say Demon’s Souls is hard because of this, but we never made the difficulty needlessly high for the sake of being hard, nor did we intend for it to be a selling point,” he said.

Steep difficulty can be appealing. Take the case of indie action-adventure title Spelunky, where the sense of discovery and achievement is maximized by stiff odds. “I think that a tough challenge can make a game much more enjoyable,” said creator Derek Yu. “Don’t we feel the most fulfilled when we overcome something difficult? Without that feeling of getting better, a game turns into a chore – something that you do as a distraction rather than something you do for fulfillment.”

The key to effective difficulty, as opposed to frustration that’s just frustrating, is all in the implementation. “Doing something hard isn’t fun in and of itself,” said Yu. ” It’s not fun to sit in an empty room and try to balance a ball on your head for 10 hours straight. To make challenge effective, you have to provide an interesting game world and create deep mechanics that are entertaining to play with and very satisfying to master.”

Nels Anderson, gameplay programmer at Hothead Games, also feels it’s important to delineate between frustration and meaningful challenge. “Being frustrated usually means the player cannot determine a way to improve or progress,” he said. “Part of the reason Demon’s Souls works so well is because you understand why you failed.”

Demon’s Souls‘ Kajii says that failure needs to be an ever-present possibility if the player is to feel a sense of accomplishment. “We designed it so that players are likely to die if they aren’t paying attention,” he says. “By maintaining this intensity, players will be constantly nervous while playing, but [will feel] a tremendous sense of accomplishment is their reward for doing so.”

Achievements are more valuable, then, when there’s a lot at stake – and failure is less frustrating when it’s clear to the player where they messed up. “Demon’s Souls is a game where you ‘die a lot,’ but as I’ve already said, it is geared so that you will acknowledge that it was your own fault,” said Kajii. “Players will keep playing because they know they can get past a certain point by taking a different approach, using their imagination, and thinking about how to overcome obstacles.”

In a game like Demon’s Souls, then, a frustrating death is simply the game informing me that my strategy didn’t work. The mechanics are such that I can’t blame the game, and my failures never feel unfair. I can then tackle the exact same obstacle with a different approach, until I figure out a tactic that will help me succeed – and victory’s all the sweeter thanks to all of my struggles on the way.

“Dying in a video game is like losing a tennis match, or getting rejected when you ask a girl out, or looking at a painting and not understanding its meaning. You’ll always learn something and the next time will be better,” said Yu. He says that if dying’s fun, that makes it all the better – and Demon’s Souls also features an interesting twist on death.

Enriched by its multiplayer element, the game allows players to see the bloodstains of other fallen heroes, and touch them to view how they died. Players can leave notes and messages for one another warning of tough spots up ahead, and can also recruit the phantoms of players that have died to help them handle challenges. Kajii says this system of strangers helping strangers came from a real-life experience of his, a time when his car was stuck on a snowy mountainside.

Numerous stranded drivers all banded together to push each of the cars in turn, but Kajji couldn’t stay behind to thank his benefactors, lest he end up stranded again. “I wondered about things like whether the last person made it home, whether I’d ever meet the people who helped me again… Maybe if I’d met them somewhere else, I would’ve made friends with them… Many thoughts crossed my mind,” he said. “This occurrence of helping complete strangers was strangely very memorable, and I kept thinking about it for a very long time.

“Demon’s Souls is a game where you die many times, so I thought this idea of helping others would be a great fit. It’s as simple as, ‘We all die so easily, so let’s help each other out,’” he adds. “Unlike other RPGs, each player unfolds their own story, and each encounter with a phantom player expands and diversifies their experience.”

Designers are right to be concerned with players finishing fewer titles, and they’re right to offer low barriers to entry for expanded audiences – to a point. “I think in an attempt to avoid frustrating players, the baby often gets thrown out with the bathwater in terms of difficulty,” said Hothead’s Anderson. “It’s a pretty common misconception that players want easier games.”

He paraphrases some research from Jesper Juul of MIT’s Gambit Game Lab: “Players are more critical of a game that’s too easy than one that’s too hard. The player can improve and make a difficult game fun, but short of handicapping oneself, there’s no way to make a game that’s too easy harder,” Anderson continued. “However, as soon as players feel they don’t have any way to improve, their assessment of difficulty turns much more negative.”

Frequent death and frustration don’t need to be viewed as engagement-breakers in games – as long as the deaths are meaningful and educational, and as long as the player’s frustrated with themselves, not the game. The most important factor is clearly that players must be able to see what they can do differently to surmount a challenge.

The tactic that finally gets me over a bridge swarmed with archers, or through a narrow hallway packed with vicious wolves, might not be the same one that works for another player, but it’s one I’ve developed on my own, through trial and error, experimenting with the environment and with my own abilities.

“This act of trial and error in a tense atmosphere is the heart of challenge and discovery, leading to the strong satisfaction of accomplishment,” says Kajii. “I’d say Demon’s Souls is not a ‘fun game,’ but a ‘game to have fun with,’” says Kajii. “The goal is not to find a pre-defined answer — instead the answer is something created by the player on their own through their own play-styles.”

[Leigh Alexander is news director for Gamasutra, author of the Sexy Videogameland blog, and freelances reviews and criticism to a variety of outlets. Her monthly column at Kotaku deals with cultural issues surrounding games and gamers. She can be reached at leighalexander1 AT gmail DOT com.]

Oh great. I’ve been calling it Corrus-kant all these years. Next someone’s gonna tell me I’ve been mispronouncing Eidos, too. Well, however it’s pronounced, this six-minute vid shows us how BioWare built the city-planet of the Star Wars Universe.

From a design perspective, Coruscant is a planet with zero percent terrain, which poses its own challenge. The city also has an enormous vertical dimension to incorporate, with skyscrapers soaring overhead, and unruly, bombed-out subterranean areas underneath.

The Making of Corsuscant [swtor.com]

In Seattle, last month, I talked to Mac Walters about this. He’s writing next year’s Mass Effect 2 from BioWare. The studio he works for is known for telling long, detailed stories through its video games. The Mass Effect and Jade Empire, to name a pair of recent releases, are crammed with optional, explanatory text. The games’ characters are often ready to provide richer detail about their lives, their tribes or their home planets than the plot requires.

“A lot of the reason that stuff is in there is because we have players who want to know everything and love that,” Walters said. He believes that the details BioWare provide bring some of their players back to “the days they picked up their Dungeons and Dragons [source]books and read about every character in there.”

That deep level of extra narrative detail may be a BioWare signature, but it’s not a BioWare exclusive.

Consider this sampling of late 2009 games: If you find hidden treasures in Naughty Dog’s Uncharted 2, you’ll be prompted to press a button to learn background information about them. Snoop through the spaceship Ishimura in EA’s Dead Space Extraction and you can find text and audio logs that elaborate on the events that preceded your arrival. Rocksteady’s Batman: Arkham Asylum overflows with dozens of discoverable recordings of its colorful secondary characters revealing their deranged states of mind.

It is so common for games to provide all these extra details that I had begun to look at Fumito Ueda as the most unusual of game creators.

The Sony developer’s games, Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, explain almost nothing. Their heroes are ciphers, their side-characters almost mute. They include no scrolls, no tablets and no scannable objects.

They let you wonder. Or, to put it another way, Ueda’s games seldom explain anything.

(A clip from Mass Effect’s Galactic Codex)

In Tokyo last month I asked Ueda if he was intentionally trying to promote a sort of video game storytelling minimalism. “There’s no deliberate idea to do that,” he said through a translator, suggesting it was a less conscious consequence. “My personal preference is that I tend to be more easy-going. I’m not so interested in small text and a detailed background setting.” I talked to Ueda about the propensity of other developers to include a lot of background detail. They do it differently than you, I said. They explain the backgrounds of every character and every sword.

“But I think what it’s trying to achieve is the same goal [as me],” Ueda said. “I think having information about the sword or the character history is trying to add realism to the game as much as possible. And that’s just one method of doing it, to have text and characters speaking. But that’s not the way I chose to go with my games. I’m focusing on realism of the image itself.” His realism, as he put in the context of developing his team’s next game, The Last Guardian, comes from a style of graphics and animation that can convey emotion and a sense of presence in an imaginary world.

Back in Seattle earlier in the month, Walters from BioWare had advocated a sense of mystery but explained the challenges of not explaining things. “It’s always a balancing act between what can be mysterious and what can’t be,” he said. “If it’s something the player has to know, we need to find a way to make sure a player knows it. Sometimes that even involves repetition because, if the player misses it, then they’re just confused and frustrated. But there are things we can sort of leave hanging. That’s something I’m personally a fan of. If I see it in my work or the writer’s work, I’m fine with leaving it in there. As long as we resolve it at some point or there’s a plan to resolve it at some point.”

Explain the key stuff, he said. Leave the rest of it optional.

Pulsipher analogises video games to chess. Not only do the masters play a great deal of it, they study it. When the game became too much work, Pulsipher gave it up.

I felt the same way when I lost momentum in Batman: Arkham Asylum. There was something I wasn’t getting about the Bane fight, sure, and realising I’d have to study, wait for a FAQ or just trial-and-error it for another hour was so unappealing I put the controller down. And more than that, I resented knowing that I was worse at, or poorly prepared for, a brawling game challenge that most gamers could tackle in their sleep.

In these excerpts, Pulsipher argues that game development should move in a direction of inclusive accommodation. That rather than build titles that are either/or, core or casual, innovations that manage one’s state in a game would allow more skilled gamers the challenges and fulfillment they seek, while allowing players less invested in that to still experience the title and its story.

Are Games Too Much Like Work? [Gamasutra, Sept. 4, 2009.]

Movies that resemble video games are often panned by film critics, but recently the well-known critic Roger Ebert said, about the movie Terminator Salvation, “It gives you all the pleasure of a video game without the bother of having to play it.” (He gave it three stars out of four, quite a bit better than the Metacritic average — this was not a criticism.)

Is a future of video games actually movies like this? Or can we enable video games to challenge those who like to be challenged, but accommodate those who just want to ride along?

This requires us to find some way to either remove the disadvantage of failure from the game, or make failure less likely.

[...] Games can do something like Photoshop and 3ds Max: Let a player hit the “undo” key (usually Control-Z) when he gets in trouble or fails, and go back a few actions, or a minute, or five minutes, whatever interval he chooses, to resume the game at a point before the failure.

Yes, it’ll take a lot of computing power. Initially, the “constant undo” capability might extend back only to the second-newest save. Nonetheless, if a game can record a movie of everything that is happening, as some games can, a player should be able to, in effect, rewind that movie to where you want to restart. And we’ve removed some of the work.

“Undo” will help reduce the tedium of game playing, but doesn’t do anything for the people who just aren’t interested in being strongly challenged by a game. For them we need an “autopilot” mode — like Nintendo’s upcoming Demo Play feature.

[...] So we remove work from games, we remove “failure” from games. The hardcore will be disgusted at such wimpiness, but we’ve been working toward this in video games for decades, why not finish what we started? After all, they’re games, not tests of manhood (or womanhood).
- Lewis Pulsipher

Weekend Reader is Kotaku’s look at the critical thinking in, and of video games. It appears Saturdays at noon. Please take the time to read the full article cited before getting involved in the debate here.

Since you’ll be playing as this guy, it looks like the design was shifted over to make him appear more human and certainly less imposing. The design conforms not only to the GamePro cover back in May, but also to one of the early concepts for the original BioShock. And also to this well known image of the original.

Player Big Daddy [Colin Fix's Knuckle Deep, via Official Xbox 360 Magazine]

These are from a piece called “Made in Myth”, and show how cats like Miyamoto and Yuji Naka have been pulling the wool over your eyes for years. Classic video games aren’t digitally composed in a studio; they’re lovingly hand-crafted in a workshop by sweaty, nerd pixies.

Made of Myth [Amusement]

Mario

It was in 1948 when Steve Kordek revolutionised pinball. Asked to design a new pinball at the last minute for the upcoming pinball trade show, Kordek decided to add flippers to his design. Competitors were using six, he decided to reduce the number to two, and amp up the power.

It was a decision based on minimalism, both in design and costs. Its impact changed the face of pinball permanently. He went on to introduce both drop targets and multiballs to pinballing.

Kordek, an outsider to the industry when he walked into his first job to literally seek shelter from the rain, says that the secret to designing a good game is to attract the player. Not the other way round.

In other words anticipate, instead of create, your audience.

It’s a surprisingly simple notion that Nintendo has been tapping into recently with the advent of the Wii and it’s TV-remote like controller as well as games like Wii Fit and perhaps the recently announced Vitality Sensor.

Chicago’s 98-year-old pinball wizard has the magic touch for game design [Chicago Tribune, thanks Kevin]

The most popular designs will be included in this upcoming title. Good idea, right? Right? Have a look at the top five favourite monsters.

The poll opened yesterday and closes on July 13. We’re pulling for red scribble monster. C’mon little buddy!

ジャレコ再生プロジェクト第1弾タイトル the : rpg(仮)改め WiZmans World ワイズマンズワールド [Jaleco Games Thanks, Jean-Louis!]

Held by German firm International Forum Design, WiiSpray (as it’s called) was one of 377 finalists in the prestigious awards, from a total 1,368 entires coming in from 24 countries. So for it to win one (it picked up a “product interface” gong) was pretty damn impressive!

So to WiiSpray’s creators, Martin Lihs and Frank Matuse: congratulations! Maybe the award is enough to convince somebody at Sega that a Jet Set Radio remake would be a good idea.

To see what WiiSpray looks like in action, you can watch the below vid.

» Wii Spray honered with iF design award [WiiSpray, via GameSpot]