This might be a weird place to ask this, but I'm having trouble sorting through the pile of raid-related abbreviations that is the official WoW forum - as a gamer who *is* getting into WoW, just now, after 4 years, does anyone still run the lower level dungeons, or am I supposed to just grind to 80? Had plenty of high-levels offer to just run me through the instances for equipment, but it seems like there's a fun part of this game I'm missing out on just because I'm a million years late to the party.

Quote: 'One of the most important questions a videogame designer must ask is "How and how much do I want to frustrate the player?" If the answer is "not at all", it's time to make a movie instead.'

Are you sure the word you were looking for there was 'frustrate'? I certainly look at gameplay for challenge but once it becomes frustration for me I'm much more apt to just put the game down and move on. I have many more demands on my time, and many more games to play.

I realize you and Andrew may consider that hair-splitting or semantics, but if I were to read an interview with a game designer that mentions he was looking to create a game with the intention of frustrating the player, I would wonder what in the world was going on in his or her head.

I'd say it's semantics, but frustration might not be the right word. The key is what Vygotsky termed the "Zone of Proximal Development" - the game should be one step beyond the level where the gamer is currently comfortable. "Frustrating" in this sense translates to "challenging enough so that the gamer is not bored, but not so much that they quit and read a book instead."

Wow, Tom. You sure were a huge douche to this guy. Congratulations?

If verisimilitude (or the absence of it?) is what's keeping Nate Eagle -- and his presumably numerous contemporaries -- from gaming, do you think things are really as they should be? Personally, I think it's potentially beneficial if non-gamers take a shot every so often and offer fresh insights that those of us who have been bottle fed on Pac-Man can too easily overlook. Bitterly derisive digs at the observations of a guy like Nate Eagle are a missed opportunity. The effort invested in snide comments as fodder for "us" to point and laugh at "them" could be better spent contemplating this kind of valuable feedback and using it to address issues common to far too many games. How will the medium meaningfully advance otherwise?

Judging from his layman's terminology, it sounds like whatever it is that's keeping Nate from getting interested in games is the same thing that's causing me to lose interest.

Garsh, I think you misunderstood what I wrote. If I came across as "bitterly derisive" or "pointing and laughing", that's a failure on my part.

My point was that Eagle seems to have have neither the time nor the inclination to get into World of Warcraft. That's fine, and he has a good point about its "smoothness". But I take issue when he extrapolates from that to make observations about videogame design. I especially take issue when he claims the whole point of game design is to curtail frustration. I couldn't disagree more.

However, I couldn't resist making fun of the Leibniz connection, so you got me there...

Yep, Pogue, I mean the word frustration, as per Mayer's comment that game design is the art of "enjoyable frustration". It's easy to say you don't want to be frustrated. No one does. But a successful game frustrates you and -- most importantly -- makes you enjoy it.

So in your example of putting down a game and moving on, the balance between enjoyment and frustration is out of whack for you.

Then it has to be a semantic argument we're having here Tom, because I can't imagine that you mean that the way it reads. Let me give you a hypothetical: let's say someone you trust hands you a game, one that you've never heard of. You ask this person their opinion of the game, and they respond one of two ways -- either a) "It's challenging." or b) "It's frustrating." Would you react positively to hearing b? Because I would not. I love a challenging game but when I hear of a game's frustration factor I think of things that are decidedly not (pardon me here) very fun.

Oops, that last one was me.

Pogue, there's a certain "poetry", if I may, to Mayer's observation that games are enjoyable frustration. No one is saying games should be frustrating. The point is that games necessarily involve some degree of frustration. Otherwise, they're simply cutscenes.

The word "challenge" works, sure. Everybody loves a challenge. Challenges are fun! But I don't think "challenge" captures the fact that a crucial part of game design is adversarial. Frustration is a negative concept. It means stopping the player's progress until he figures something out or performs an action. To me, it evokes the tricky behind-the-scenes work required when you make a game. Anyone can issue a challenge. But it takes a special art to calculate enjoyable frustration.

I brought it up because of Eagle's contention that game design is about "curtailing possible frustration". I disagree. Instead, game design is about carefully measuring out frustration, about knowing just how much is enough for the right audience, about anticipating a player's threshold, and most importantly about balancing it with something that's enjoyable (fun!).

So, yeah, it's largely a semantic argument. :)

You should read the Baroque Cycle, by Neal Stephenson. It's a great read and you'd also have heard about monadology; Leibniz is a character.

Tom, thanks for the thoughtful reply. I understand your perspective.

Btw, that's a freaking awesome drawing of Herr Leibniz. Could I use it, with attribution, on my site?