Students Blog

In Halo 2, my first person shooter of choice, flow is a very prominent and important part of gameplay. Unlike some games, for example strategy or role-playing games (which I love, don’t get me wrong), FPS games must have constant flow because there is no later, delayed payoff. You will not gain items, levels, units, or territory. Any part of the game that feels like work is utterly futile, because it means you are not enjoying the game now, and it will do nothing to make you enjoy the game more later.

Flow being so critical, it is important to continue to come up with ways to maintain it. I had to do this twice while playing Halo 2.

First, I played one on one with my roommate Steve, and since we were about even in terms of skill, we could maintain a flow, at least under certain conditions. I am better at aiming and combat maneuvering (hopping around like a drunk rabbit and being hard to shoot) than he is, and especially better at using grenades; however, he is a much better sniper, and has better timing when it comes to certain weapons, plus he is amazingly better at tactics and maneuvering around the maps. Sometimes he would sneak up and kill me from behind when I could have sworn he was still on the other side of the map. Because we were each better at certain things, we still had places where we could feel the rush of achievement at having out-played each other, but neither of us had enough of a total advantage over the other that the game became too easy or too hard for either of us. As long as we played on maps where both of use could use out talents, it worked out well. Flow was created and maintained, and we had fun.

Secondly, when my roommate David joined us, it presented us with a problem. With only 3 people, normal team games like capture the flag would be utterly unfair, because of the unbalance due to the number of people. But the normal 3-player option, free for all, or as the game calls it, “Slayer,” would have been unfair as well because David is not as skilled at the game as myself or Steve. So he would have been killed rather often, and not gotten many kills, and it would have been frustrating for him. And Steve and I would have had too easy a time killing him, which would be boring, but at the same time we would be frustrated that each other was getting easier kills off of hunting David. So both of these scenarios would have ruined the Flow. Doing capture the flag would be too easy and thus boring for one team, and too hard and thus frustrating for the other. And doing normal Slayer would have been both boring and frustrating for all involved. We had to come up with a solution to the situation.

To solve the Problem, we decided to do a team game of sorts. Because Steve and I are both good enough with the weapons that we can get off kills rather quickly given the right situations, killing two people at once was not an impossibility. And because David is still rather good at the game, working as a team with him was completely doable, using flanking and other tactics to hunt down prey. The game play we devised was this: we would play team slayer, 2 on 1, in maps where there were plenty of opportunities for both long and short range kills, and the possibilities of retreating and running from a fight as well. It ended up working out very well. David would team up with either Steve or myself, and the pair would hunt down the solo player. This was surprisingly balanced. Because the solo player knew that the pair was looking for him, he could hide and set up ambushes. He could backtrack, circle around, catch one of them alone or looking the other way. Kills were obtainable, especially since David served as the weaker link for the duo; if the solo player could take out David quickly and then retreat, he could earn himself a point that way. However, it was almost impossible to kill both of the duo at once, and if the duo ever found the solo player in the open, he had almost no chance at all. This is part of the flip side. As the pair of hunters, once you located your prey via sight or the motion tracking radar that the game includes, you could work together to take them down. Flanking them worked sometimes, or sending one person in as bait to draw the solo player to a place where the second member of the pair could take him out often proved successful. Also successful techniques included; charging in and attacking both at once when the solo player had no easy advantages such as a hiding spot, superior weapons, or a bottleneck, and also; sending one player in to damage the prey and then quickly withdrawing, while the other player went in for the kill, facing an opponent with severely lower shields.

By playing this way, both the pair and the solo player had the ability to gain kills and the opportunity to win. Neither side had it easy, and neither side had it so hard that it became unwinnable. None of us were bored, and any frustration was very short lived, coming from something trivial like a mistakenly thrown grenade or a missed shot or something, and not from the gameplay itself. We managed to maintain Flow, by using our own devised form of gameplay, which I suppose could fall under the umbrella of Emergent Authorship, and it was a way of making uneven skill levels cease to be a hindrance, much as De Koven and his friend Bill did in ping-pong, which I guess makes what we did a sort of CoLiberation as well.