Is it Okay for a Game to be Unfair?

[w23eer]

There's a dungeon in Ys: The Oath of Felghana where, about 3/4 of the way through, you have to drop down a chasm (which isn't uncommon). You can drop to either the left or right. If you drop to the left, you'll be fine. If you drop to right, you'll fall into a pit of spikes that'll inflict massive damage over a short period. On the harder difficulties this is basically instant death, but even on the easier difficulties it can be hard to escape and even if you do, you would have lost a good chunk of health.

The spikes are not telegraphed in any way. The only way you could have possibly known is if someone told you about them IRL or you read about it in a walkthrough. This kind of trap is not used before or after this point in the game, so it's not something anyone would expect either.

I mean, that type of thing is just frustrating. The fact that it's pretty far from a save point is just mean. It's OK for a game to be unfair - I guess the developers thought it was a good joke - but it can be bloody unpleasant. The game is already challenging without having unforeseeable psuedo-insta death traps. It's just annoying when you die and it wasn't your fault.

 

[Starik20X6]

Every game is inherently unfair. It's you vs the computer. If your character dies, you lose. If the computers character dies, it just sends an infinite amount more of its characters to kill you. It doesn't follow the same rules you do either and is well known for cheating.

A game can't not be unfair, its impossible.

There's a difference between a game being unfair in the sense that there's a power imbalance, and a game that is unfair because it either doesn't follow its own rules or doesn't inform the player of some rules.

A game featuring a power imbalance between the player and the game itself isn't 'unfair', because that's how that particular game operates. But when a game punishes you for not following a rule it failed to tell you about, or by not following its own rules? That's unfair. To use the OP as an example, I'd argue that is an example of the game being unfair- at no point was it mentioned or demonstrated to the player that evil chests was a thing they could encounter, so for the game to then punish the player for something the game failed to tell them seems unfair.

Now of course one could argue that a game being at times unfair like that is part of its appeal, but appealing or not, I still think it's fundamentally unfair. Personally I don't think games should be unfair, it feels like artificial difficulty due to developer laziness; rather than creating a game that provides an actual challenge through well-crafted environments or cunning enemies that require special methods to defeat, the dev instead opts to betray their own rules without telling the player. Lame.

 

[Guffe]

Ask any FIFA player ever this question.
And you're close to being in the grave due to the RAGE that will explode from said person at that time.
That game is such a *****!

 

[DoPo]

Thought up this idea in the most creative area, the shower. Dark Souls has mimic chests that'll bite your face off. The first one is in a room of other chests and up until that point, no chest wanted you for dinner. So, if you're like me, you die.

So? Don't you die all the time in Dark Souls? It would have been unfair if it was a game over or no other mitigating mechanic, but death in DS is part of the game. Sure, you lose some progress, but it's not much different from any other enemy ripping you to shreds or missing a trap or something. You're expected to die, you're given the tools to handle it, too - at most you'd have to runa bit and fight some dudes. Big deal.

Conversely, rubber banding in racing games just feels like artificial difficulty, a punishment for doing well.

That's just bullshit, though. I was never really good at racing games but I'm not that bad. However, rubber banding is what always killed my interest - I'd never let go the gas pedal for the entire race[footnote]yeah, even on turns. I did say I wasn't really good[/footnote] and I would still be overtaken by everybody and their dog just because.

So, can a game be unfair at times to make it a better game, or should it always play by the rules it makes you play by?

Well, actually the answer isn't quite clear cut. Here, I'll give you an immediate example - play some Cat Mario [http://www.flasharcadegamessite.com/6-cat-mario.html]. Just a minute or two - click on the first text then, the first box to start.

Spoiler: Afterwards open this

The game is what you get if you got Mario on drugs and Mario hates you in his guts. The game is the very definition of unfair - it sets up the expectations by looking like Mario but immediately behaves differently - first hittable box flies off, another one you can't reach because of the hidden coin, etc. And then it starts to grow worse and worse - it starts defying its own rules it has set up - some enemies are unkillable, for example. Then it grows fron "unfair" to just pure "cruel" - sure, at one point a piece of scenery can fall on you (or you could fall through it) but if you're really fast, you can dodge it. You can even start expecting them. But you can actually get trapped with no way of escaping and no way of actually knowing this was possible, sometimes the scenery itself can kill you (the final cloud before the flag, for example), sometimes the weird game mechanics the game uses are repeated, sometimes not, so you might need to use one of these, or you might need to actually try to utilise the warped mechanics in some fashion. And sometimes the game throws something completely out of the left field at you - most of the stuff that happens is relatively normal in Super Mario but then you'll suddenly get shot at by lasers. No real reason - it's just to fuck with you further. You can't anticipate it because, how would you?

But even though it's what it is, it still has some allure. Sure, may be called masochistic and not for everybody but it's there.

 

[loa]

That mimic chest thing in dark souls will happen to you exactly 1 time, then you know that mimics are a thing and then you'll probably even find out how to tell if it's a mimic without hitting the chest so I wouldn't call that unfair, it's just you learning about a thing first hand, so to speak.
Ways of seeing the danger and preventing it were there all along, you just didn't know of them yet.

Rubberbanding can go straight to hell though, that's lazy, boring gameplay.

I'd suggest trying out xcom to find out if unfairness that is completely out of your hands can enhance a game because that game has it in spades and people hate/love it for it.

 

[baddude1337]

I certainly think so, especially dependent on genres. For example, in many fighting games harder AI settings make them read your inputs and don't need to "enter" special move buttons themselves, making them pretty unfair and far above a human player.

Same with shooter games that have AI with crazy accuracy and stuff. Bots in battlefield 2 and it's mods for example can see through smoke and foliage, which is pretty damn unfair.

One thing that does bother me is games where opponents can continue to attack you if you are 'knocked down', meaning you stand no chance in defending yourself, which seems pretty unfair to me.

 

[hermes]

For a game to be unfair is really easy. After all, you are facing a machine. To make it so that it can headshot you from incredible distances as soon as you pop you head out is almost trivial. To make it like it looks like you have a fighting chance against an army of AI takes skill and work... which is why poorly made games don't take the work and look "unfair"

 

[hermes]

The mimics in Dark Souls are a cheap example, though. The game is often sold by people as "not really hard or unfair, it just takes a lot more commitment than other games. If you are good enough and careful enough, you will get through it". But since there is no real way to distinguish a chest from a mimic, the only way to survive their encounter unharmed is already knowing that it is there, either by dying before or playing with a game guide...

 

[BloatedGuppy]

There's a difference between a game being unfair in the sense that there's a power imbalance, and a game that is unfair because it either doesn't follow its own rules or doesn't inform the player of some rules.

A game featuring a power imbalance between the player and the game itself isn't 'unfair', because that's how that particular game operates. But when a game punishes you for not following a rule it failed to tell you about, or by not following its own rules? That's unfair. To use the OP as an example, I'd argue that is an example of the game being unfair- at no point was it mentioned or demonstrated to the player that evil chests was a thing they could encounter, so for the game to then punish the player for something the game failed to tell them seems unfair.

Pretty much this. Some games just have fundamentally unequal sides. A Thin Man might be more accurate/deadly than any of your troops in XCOM, but who is to say he's not? He's an alien. You don't have a Thin Man to compare. You just have to cope with the challenge he represents. Same goes for a game like Dark Souls. Who is to say a particular boss or trap is "too hard". It's as hard as it is. You can argue it's unpleasantly hard, but it's not UNFAIR.

When I think unfair, I think of a game like Civilization, where you're presented with a set of rules and numbers to interact with the world by, and then find out later the AI completely eschews them. There is an illusion of "equal sides" being propped up by dodgy math, and it rapidly begins to feel very "gamey" as you climb the difficulty levels, and it's less about warring against disparate factions and more about solving a series of puzzles presented to you by ludicrously overt AI bonuses.

 

[Mutant1988]

The mimics in Dark Souls are a cheap example, though. The game is often sold by people as "not really hard or unfair, it just takes a lot more commitment than other games. If you are good enough and careful enough, you will get through it". But since there is no real way to distinguish a chest from a mimic, the only way to survive their encounter unharmed is already knowing that it is there, either by dying before or playing with a game guide...

Except there is. The handle on one side is broken on mimics.

There's also this:

The only thing that's really unfair in Dark Souls is its shitty camera control. Also I hate to nitpick, but the first mimic you come across isn't in Anor Londo but in Sens fortress. It's in an empty room with a large pool of blood next to it, kind of a dead give away right?

And from what I remember, it doesn't kill you in one hit if you're at full health.

 

[Janaschi]

Want to know unfair? Try playing the story-modes in any Magic the Gathering video-game. The A.I., quite literally, breaks the rules in order to defeat you, to the point where in many scenarios, the only way to win is by having the RNG Gods smile upon you for once in your miserable existence.

 

[Pseudonym]

I think 'that's unfair' is just something we say in frustration. The problem is not that the game is unfair, it is that it feels unfair. Take for example civ 5. Like in most strategy games I know of, the AI is not competent in the least against an experienced player, so on higher difficulty levels it gets extra resources. It gets an insane amount of extra hapiness for example, allowing it to found new cities quickly without the focus that requires from players on building colloseums, getting a hapiness focussed religion, etc. Now on emperor difficulty this isn't really much of a problem. The AI's extra resources but isn't all that competent resulting in an empire that is about as big as that of a competent human player might be. I can't see what's going on in their empire anyway so my pretense that I'm playing against a competent player stays intact. (as long as we don't go into war and the AI sends its archers up front, melee units behind and that has gotten better since the game was released) On immortal or deity difficulty level however I know instantly that the AI is getting bonusses because they have the great library before it is actually possible to build the great library. They have two cities before I could have possibly finished my first settler. They have 13 inhabitants in a timeframe that allows me to have 5. I am from the start denied all of the early game wonders and I need to incorporate not getting rushed into my strategy. At this difficulty level the game changes from a match against AI opponents into a sort of challenge. Can you exploit the AI enough? (a strategy that works according to people who have finished the game on deity is turning off barbs and using trade routes to get extra science which you get because you are ludicrously outteched) It feels unfair if you approach it with the mindset that it simulates opponents. The reason it feels unfair is because it requires me to approach the game in a way that I don't want to approach it in. I think a mechanic or level feels unfair if it is hard whilst clashing with what you expect the game to be. The killer chests in dark souls aren't that big of a deal because they fit the themes of the game and you respawn usually not too far back. Dark souls has incorporated dying as a deliberate part of their game design both in terms of story and gameplay. It also represents a deeply messed up world that isn't supposed to always be fair. So it gets a pass from me in the case of the killer chests. If a game feels unfair too much there was probably a problem with game design somewhere. Or with the UI not properly indicating certain things.

 

[Denamic]

The Sentinels in Anor Londo are unfair. Their shields prevent all damage and can protect far more than the actual models shows. Unfair is when you are punished not by your skill, knowledge, or lack thereof, but because the game wants you to be punished.

Those are actually among the easiest enemies in the game that aren't common hollows. They're super predictable and slow. They telegraph their attack more clearly than anything else I can think of. Just bait an attack and counter-attack them.

The mimics in Dark Souls are a cheap example, though. The game is often sold by people as "not really hard or unfair, it just takes a lot more commitment than other games. If you are good enough and careful enough, you will get through it". But since there is no real way to distinguish a chest from a mimic, the only way to survive their encounter unharmed is already knowing that it is there, either by dying before or playing with a game guide...

In Dark Souls 1, the chain on the side of the chest is in a different position than normal chests. In Dark Souls 2, mimics have locks whereas normal chests don't. Also, you can see them moving sometimes if you look closely. There's also the numerous messages and pools of blood showing people get eaten.

 

[DrOswald]

I don't know about the mimics being unfair, they never fooled me. Not quite sure why, it has been a while. I think there were lots of messages like "beware of chest" and "trap ahead!", plus I expected them to happen. Mimics/monsters in a box are extremely common, and I was certain Dark Souls would have them. Actually, now that I think about it, I may have just started the game attacking all chests because I assumed there would be mimics.

That isn't to say Dark Souls is fair, I would never claim that. The entire point of the game is that everything is stacked heavily against you. It isn't fair that the skeletons can revive, it isn't fair when you get cursed. And it certainly isn't fair when you get invaded. But most of the unfairness is a good kind, making the game a challenge.

But there is unfun unfairness in the game. For example, the two archers in Anor Londo. That is not fair, and it is not fun. And then the camera has problems. The little flying bugs in blighttown? They don't kill you with damage, they kill you by ruining your camera angle and making you roll off a cliff. Not fun.

Unfair is fun and good sometimes. Other times it is bad.

 

[Aerosteam]

1. Bloodstains
2. Messages
3. They have a differently placed chain
4. And a broken lock
5. They also breath slightly
6. Attacking will aggro them
7. Lloyd's Talismans allows you to get the items without aggroing them

These are SEVEN ways to deal with mimics.

OT: Unfair is a bit subjective. Perhaps a game can be unfair for you, but not for everyone. As for it being okay to be unfair, I think if the objective is possible to accomplish, it's fair.

 

[someguy1231]

Here's how I distinguish between the two:

Fair: I blame myself when I die.
Unfair: I blame the game when I die.

Obviously, people have different ideas of when blame is merited, but I find this to be a good rule of thumb.

 

[TilMorrow]

Well if we want to be absolutely technical then the first mimic chest that you can encounter in Dark Souls is in Sen's Fortress, a place well known for traps and screwing over unobservant players. It's found in a dingy room at the base of the second staircase the boulder trap oversees right before an elevator that rams you into a ceiling full of spikes if you don't react quick enough. Kind of a fair introduction if you ask me and if bloodstains didn't clue you in that they were a bad case of death then unfortunate rather than unfair.

Nevertheless, can a game be unfair and better for it? Well if IWTBTG and Wings of Vi players didn't like their respective games then I would've been inclined to say no.

 

[spartan231490]

Being unfair can help games, in fact, sometimes it is often required. Take Mario Cart, the blue shell is unfair. You can't get it if you're in the lead. But it helps the game because it gives someone who's very new to the game a chance to win and enjoy the game even though they're not as good as the people they're playing with. Extra credits do a video about that kind of unfair design and how it helps games. However, I think the unfairness of dark souls was often hurtful. They went too far with it, and that keeps a lot of people from enjoying dark souls who otherwise would and could.

 

[Ravenier]

When I think of unfair games, I think of Earth 2150's expansion pack "Lost Souls". Now Earth 2150 itself and the first xpack "The Moon Project" already were quite challenging difficulty-wise (with one of the last campaign missions for TPC requiring you to destroy 4 enemy super weapons within 5 or so minutes or else they'd one-shot the building you were supposed to defend and you were not given any warning about those things), but Lost Souls ramped it up to plainly unfair levels:

- Enemy bases were almost inevitably heavily fortified, with defensive and production buildings alike carrying heavy weaponry
- Enemy bases were minefields. Not -had-, -were- minefields. As mines wouldn't destroy your own units but could instakill most enemy ones and can only be safely removed with a specialized (and rather fragile) Minelayer vehicle, this slowed down your assaults to a snail's pace as you had to move combat vehicle and mine layers forward bit by bit.
- Air attacks were early virtually as the enemy base and a large perimeter around it were plastered with devastatingly powerful AA defenses.
- Actually attacking the enemy fortress was only viable after the AI had run out of resources, as the constant trickle of enemy heavy tanks being churned out by their production facilities would quickly grind down entire tank battalions.
- Worst of all the enemy would regularly (read: Every 5-10 minutes) receive free unit injections of about 15 or more vehicles. At best, your slow attempt to dismantle the enemy base building by building was disrupted by them and you lost one or two vehicles that you had to replace with the very finite amount of resources available to you. At worst, the game spawned 10 heavy bombers for the AI inside of YOUR base.

And that was on Easy Mode. I enjoyed Earth 2150 and TMP on normal and hard, but I dare not imagine what kind of madness the developers have in store with the hard more for Lost Souls.