Devil's Advocate: Games should be random

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Months of thought, planning, testing and honing go into making a single level of a modern action game, which is an enormous waste. Because it's all for the sake of crafting a balanced, paced, convincing experience, and that's not what games should be. Games should be random, brutal and bizarre. I didn't believe that until I played Spelunky.

It's a low-res, crudely cartoonish platform game where you delve ever deeper into randomly generated caves (get it here). Games that work this way are usually called Roguelikes, after the top-down dungeon-crawling game from 1980 that generated a new dungeon made of ASCII characters each time you played.

Usually Roguelikes are deep, complex role-playing games in which you can spend hours painstakingly developing your character, only to lose it forever to a monster you've never encountered before. That's a certain kind of gamer's cup of tea - Kieron wrote with great affection about Roguelike Zangband in PCG 137 - but it's the reason I've never really been arsed with them.

Call of Duty 4: impressive, but I have no desire to play this bit again.

But Spelunky is a quick, simple platformer that's easy to learn. It's still hard as a masonry drill, but you're typically only losing a few minutes of play each time you're viciously murdered. And because level 1 is completely different when you restart, restarting is as fun as getting to level 2. The difference between Spelunky and a game like Call of Duty 4 - and the reason I prefer Spelunky - all comes down to death.

Death is overrated

Why do we fear death, normally? Partly we're buying into the fiction of the game, and our survival instinct carries over. But the real cost of death is progress: we're reset to our last savepoint, the start of the level, or sometimes the start of the game. After which, we're made to repeat that painstakingly designed level, rather than progress to an exciting new one.

This has always struck me as wonky. The fact that a game isn't as fun the second time through is being leveraged to punish us as players, rubbing our faces in the game's deficiencies as penance for our mistakes. Sometimes not even our mistakes, but the mistakes of that enormously time-consuming design process. When a designer has an idea of what the player should do, it's easy for the player to fail just because it hasn't been made clear to him, or because he wants to try his own thing rather than obey.

So we play the carefully crafted level, we have challenges where the developer wants us to have challenges and rewards where they want us to have rewards. Then we hit a spot where we're not sure if we're supposed to wipe out these enemies or run past, and we die. For which our penalty is to see just how much less fun a carefully crafted level is when you already know what's going to happen.

I shouldn't already know what's going to happen. All of the time I spend playing a game should be a journey into the unknown, even if I've just started again. That's the way it is with Spelunky, and if more games had evolved from Rogue's template since 1980, that's the way it would be with most of what we play. Games would be a unique artform, incomparable to cinema or literature.

Diabolical design

Diablo: random, but in a way that barely mattered.

The name that often springs to mind when random level generation gets mentioned is Diablo. But that game and its sequel used it rather superficially: level layout was randomised, but level layout only really determined what direction you trotted while bashing balanced hordes of whatever monster type the designers deemed appropriate for your level.

The kind of randomisation I want, and the kind of randomisation some Rogue-likes have, means shuffling the fundamental elements of the game. Deadly traps can end up next to terrifyingly overpowered monsters, and spectacular loot far beyond your means can be tucked away in innocuous corners. Decisions about whether to fight or flee are made on honest appraisals of your chances, rather than second-guesses at the level designer's intention. Sometimes your deaths are sudden in a game like Spelunky, but surprisingly often the difficulty spikes just become puzzles to work around.

Spelunky: levels follow a few fixed rules but are otherwise random in shape and content.

These games exist, of course, but they're mostly hardcore old-school Rogue-likes with ultra primitive graphics. Spelunky shows that the random element of these games works in a lightweight action-platformer, and could work even better in other genres. If game designers had realised that in 1980, the tech we'd have today for generating a different 3D environment every time you entered an Oblivion dungeon, for example, could be phenomenal.

Instead, somewhere along the line, we all decided games should be just another vehicle for feeding us pre-packaged stories, pre-planned experiences, pre-meditated thrills. All great, once. All good, twice. But 200th time through, level 1 of Spelunky is still so good it's making me unhappy with everything else I play.

This article was originally printed in the July 09 issue of PC Gamer UK, in our monthly Devil's Advocate column.

Tom Francis