Nintendo Kid posted:

"Degenerate play" is the exact sense of "degenerate" used in the term "degenerate art" - it's play that's not what they like, just like it was art that is not what they liked.

Alain Post posted:

I think there are two separate, but related contexts where this term is used-

one of them usually involves strategy games, where the dominance of a certain strategy or tactic has the effect of making a large amount of the game meaningless, in a way that seems to have been clearly unintended. This is usually the result of designer oversight- the clearest example I can think of is ICS in certain games of Civilization. It's "obvious" that the designers didn't want players to poo poo out bad quality cities all over the map, but it's their fault that they failed to make a system that prevented this. In this case, the play is called "degenerate" because it has the effect of radically simplifying the game by eliminating the importance of many of its systems.

The other context is when players act in ways that are contrarty to the assumptions of the game. In MP, this can be bad- if you've ever played a board game where someone ends up loving poo poo up becuase they aren't trying to win anymore, you know this. In SP, this is just harmless fun- like trying to stuff your house full of forks in Skyrim, or whatever. At this point, the player isn't trying to win- like I said, that's fine, becuase a huge part of the appeal of sandbox games is to have fun like this.

Falsum posted:

Not at all. When talking about gameplay, the technical definition "lacking some usual or expected property or quality" would be the most appropriate.

Cream-of-Plenty posted:

IDDQD is inherently evil because if Hitler had it we'd all still be "heil"ing and goose stepping around town; our economy would be rendered null and void by IDKFA...

Alain Post posted:

Adolf Hitler was bad.

Nintendo Kid posted:

The proper term for this is emergent gameplay, in no small part due to the fact it doesn't automatically look down on people not playing precisely as intended, Degenerate gameplay is usually used by people who inherently dislike any case of emergent gameplay.

Linguica posted:

closeted republican posted:

With one post, I've managed to completely destroy several classic game's core mechanics and become an uber Nazi that even Hitler would think is excessively Nazi. Fear me.

Nintendo Kid posted:

Which is also what the Nazis were using when they used that term. The missing property was "Germanism". Like dude do they not teach history wherever you're from?

Nintendo Kid posted:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degenerate_art

Alain Post posted:

I think you're applying unintended conotations to the term.

In any case, there are certainly instances of degenerate play that are harmful- kingmaking and collusion is usually called a bad instance of degenerate play, for instance. And I don't think any strategy gamer thinks it's a good thing when a formerly complex game becomes radically simplified because of the dominance of a single strategy. "Emergent play" doesn't seem like a useful term for these instances.

Falsum posted:

From your link, not mine.


"Such art was banned on the grounds that it was un-German, Jewish or Communist in nature" Those are not technical qualities, those are ideological properties.

"While modern styles of art were prohibited, the Nazis promoted paintings and sculptures that were traditional in manner and that exalted the "blood and soil" values of racial purity, militarism, and obedience" Those, again, are ideologies.

It follows that 'Germanism' is a ideological property, not a technical property.

Alain Post posted:

The reason I mentioned save systems is that I think game developers make games too often without considering the effect the game's save system will have on it. Unlimited quicksave/quickload can be tremendously damaging to a game- I think Dishonored was the most recent game that I thought was badly comprimised by giving the player the ability to save whenever he wanted. The goon OP of Dishonored even said "don't use quicksave", because people were coming in, and saying that they weren't having fun quickloading every time someone saw them, instead of living with the mistake, and using the cool combat system to fight their way out of trouble.

my bony fealty posted:

Prey had a neat death mechanic where you had to shoot some arrows in spirit world at ghosts, then you got to revive.

More games should have that even if it is fundamentally the same as just reloading at a checkpoint with a pointless mini-game in between

Nintendo Kid posted:

No, dude, the word is intended to have a negative connotation. This is the entire reason "emergent gameplay" became the accepted term to use.

Kingmaking and collusion should be natural results of any sort of multiplayer game where it's possible to hurt one opponent by temporarily helping another. It's a property that emerges from the rules as stated. If the developer intends the game to not be simplified, it's up to them to provide intentional penalties against such action.

Nintendo Kid posted:

"People didn't play it exactly the way I wanted them to"

Falsum posted:

"By degenerate, I mean play that departs from the original game structure to the point where it doesn't really resemble what "normal" play of the game system looks like- I don't mean it as a pejorative."

This is all absurd and besides the fact that degenerate is not a Nazi word.

Alain Post posted:

Well, yeah, that's kinda true- and any game designer knows that degenerate play is the result of poor game design, and not the fault of the players. If anything, this is about not blaming the player- players will always try to game the system, and good game designers will account for this.

Zaphod42 posted:

That's pretty unique. I probably missed something by never playing Prey, I didn't even hear about it until way after it was released. I should check it out.

Bioshock had kinda the same situation where they had vita-chambers instead of dying/respawning, but in the end it didn't really make much of a difference. You still died and came back, its just the world state didn't reset; it kept going. Which was kinda nice so you didn't have to do the same thing over and over and over.

Nintendo Kid posted:

Emergent gameplay, dude. Degenerate play isn't a thing.

Stuntman posted:

Really though, Brutal Doom just completely ruins the core balance of the game. Like, there's literally no point to playing with it on because the default gameplay of Doom is already well-balanced enough that fun arises from that ruleset. Brutal Doom just kind of throws out that balance in favor of flashy gore effects you'd find on the cover of a death metal album made by literal 12 year olds and by adding modern features such as headshots, (hint: Doom is not balanced around being able to kill a hell knight in one SSG shot if you just aim right) it completely ignores the Doom style of gameplay in favor of turning it into a slog where all you do is point and click at monsters without thinking of the best way to deal with them.

Alain Post posted:

It is. I'm sorry that you don't like the term, but it's a valid term.

Linguica posted:

Zaphod42 posted:

Nintendo Kid, what they're calling "degenerate play" here is what most gamers would call "cheap". Like playing a certain character in Super Smash Bros and using a specific move over and over and over because its hard to counter; its not the intended form of gameplay and people feel that it disrupts the normal gameplay. I haven't heard that term before but if that's what they wanna use, whatever.

Mogomra posted:

I have reached the enlightened Nirvana beyond IDDQD, goons. I use Buddha Mode.

Nintendo Kid posted:

Dude, the people who make Smash Bros explicitly intend that. They don't care that ~competitive smash~ players don't like it.

Nintendo Kid posted:

It's an obsolete term, that people discarded for a good reason.

Alain Post posted:

Quake 2 isn't classic. It blows.

Nintendo Kid posted:

It's an obsolete term, that people discarded for a good reason.

Alain Post posted:

I think they're separate, but somewhat related terms. Putting things like collusion under the umbrella of "emergent play" seems to do damage to the idea of emergent play.

bbcisdabomb posted:

See this is a fight worth having. Quake 2 isn't the best game in the world but it's still fun

RyokoTK posted:

I think it's more the case that, game design principles or not, sometimes I want to stop playing a game now and want to throw down a save without fear of some sort of in-game punishment for it.

One of the things I do like about Marathon is how saves are handled. You can't save anywhere; you can only save at certain locations, but you can use them as much as you like (so long as you can get back there). I make maps for Marathon, and one of the challenges in doing so is designing the map to restrict access to saves in certain locations. The liberating thing about this is that it functionally assumes that people will use the save points, since they are explicitly a part of the gameplay, so I can include instant death traps or monsters that can kill you in one or two attacks without feeling bad about it, since I can just plunk down a save point right before that encounter and not feel bad about players losing progress for it. If the player chooses to not use a save location, it's their own fault, not mine.