9 ms·

Why Sonic the Hedgehog is 'incorrect' game design

52 points by klez 9y ago

waqf 9y ago
All great art violates some existing genre conventions — if it doesn't, then by definition it's generic art.
- justinjlynn 9y ago
  One must first learn all the rules so that one may break them properly.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - SubiculumCode 9y ago
    Sometimes knowing the rules traps you as well, and it would have been better to just seek the pureness of the muse.
    - bicubic 9y ago
      In my experience this is critical to advancing the state of the art. Knowing the rules tends to lock one into a 'faster horse' mindset. If you want to invent a car, you're best off being ignorant of horse rules and conventions.
      - crush-n-spread 9y ago
        While that may be true for most people, I think that knowing everything about horse rules & conventions would give a car designer an upper hand _if_ that car designer was also the type of person to easily let go of his own presuppositions about things. What I'm trying to say is that there are people who are not held back by knowing what the rules of the game are, because they are not afraid to throw them away, even if learning those rules took a great mental investment.
- logicallee 9y ago
  What conventions did Michaelangelo's David violate?
  - jpzisme 9y ago
    Probably proportion. David's right hand holding the stone is massive in comparison to his body. It draws attention to the impending conflict.
    - pavel_lishin 9y ago
      Wasn't that done intentionally for perspective's sake, to make him look normally proportioned from certain, expected angles?
  - chmod775 9y ago
    Using the grandparent's understanding of "generic", art could be generic, yet still exceptionally good/well executed.
    - booleandilemma 9y ago
      To do a common thing uncommonly well brings success. - Henry J. Heinz
    - tnecniv 9y ago
      I was reading a comment on a jazz album and it essentially said "expertly done but doesn't move the genre forward so meh." I think people forget that sometimes you just want a good, standard jazz album.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
rainmouse 9y ago
Or perhaps people get quickly tired of the same formulaic garbage. Endless superhero movies in every scene that go exposition, cgi action, witty one liner. Repeat. That nearly every 3 minute pop track follows the same formula as the scenes in every James Bond movie. Some things are just popular. Snakes and ladders technically isn't a game. You have ZERO agency in the outcome of events but it's based upon a game that's been played at least since the Indus Valley Civilisation 3000 BC. It's when committees and statisticians get involved that the fun goes away. Hence the endless reboots and sequels of exponentially more funding yet almost always fall short of the originals.
- nonbel 9y ago
  >"Snakes and ladders technically isn't a game. You have ZERO agency in the outcome of events but it's based upon a game that's been played at least since the Indus Valley Civilisation 3000 BC." I have to wonder if that was true back then. Did they have "fair" dice, or was there room for influencing the results or otherwise benefiting from knowledge of the imbalance? This could be either by choosing between dice for each roll, betting on the outcomes midgame, or getting the desired roll more often than usual.
- scottLobster 9y ago
  A lot of strategy games and RPGs suffer from the same. Starcraft II for instance was a lot more fun IMO when it was new and the strategies hadn't been refined. I remember wasting a ton of time/resources turtling, building a giant mass of carriers and then steam-rolling the map, just because I could and thought the visual of a dozen carriers sweeping the map would be awesome (it was). Good luck doing that now in a public server. Too many games have obsessive fans that are hell-bent on discovering the mathematically perfect way to play a game, and once the one or half-dozen working formulae are discovered, that's it. No one else can play any other way and hope to win, and that really takes the creativity and fun out of it. I'm not sure where these people come from, I got into video games as a distraction from math homework, not an extension of it. :P
  - nickpeterson 9y ago
syphilis2 9y ago
Another retrospective look at Sonic's design (2014): http://redlettermedia.com/pre-rec-sonic-the-most-overrated-game-ever/ http://redlettermedia.com/pre-rec-sonic-the-most-overrated-g...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- wodenokoto 9y ago
  That was a really good analysis of Sonic.
jandrese 9y ago
IMHO the article is right that Sonic is a terrible platformer, because it's not a platformer. It's a speedrun game. It's all about memorizing the map and being able to make twitchy inputs to get the biggest rewards. It's a fundamentally different kind of game than Super Mario Brothers, even though they look superficially similar.
- andy_wrote 9y ago
  I definitely agree with your point, though I'd recast it slightly away from "twitchy"/"speedrun"/map memorization and towards the thrill of things being fast and disorienting. [1] Sonic involved lots of bright lights, fast animation, and noises. It was fun because everything ran out of control sometimes, or at least seemed to, and I think this, aside from considerations of wanting to optimize for efficiency of solution, was a large part of its joy. (I say "seemed to" because I remember elements of levels that blasted you through loops and walls at dizzying speed, but in practice served as just a rail that took you from point A to B.) I didn't realize before I read this article that the design of Sonic (even excluding Sonic Spinball) was driven by pinball, though it makes tons of sense in retrospect. Pinball's got the same thrills; you're constantly in an unstable state, not really learning a puzzle so much as trying to manage a high-degree of chaos before you inevitably get thrown off the horse. It's a different brand of fun than the article's "correct" game design, less/more appealing to different people and less/more appealing when you're in the wrong/right mood. [1] "Ilinx" in the taxonomy of Roger Callois's "Man, Play, and Games," though a personal caveat that I didn't really enjoy that book.
  - jandrese 9y ago
    Oh yeah, that line about it being influenced by Pinball gave me one of those "of course it was" moments where something has been obvious forever but you never noticed it. Bumpers, spinners, bouncers, Sonic himself when he gets going... It's semi-linear pinball.
  - colanderman 9y ago
    > Sonic Spinball Which, ironically, is possibly the slowest and most plodding Sonic game. It should have just been endless variations on Casino Night Zone.
cwyers 9y ago
I can find several other examples of games that are "incorrect" in much the same way, and I don't just mean Sonic knockoffs. Doom is pretty much a seminal moment in game design, and it looks nothing like the "ideal" design of Mario. I think the game design principles that are being tossed around here are very, very far from being universal.
- setr 9y ago
  It's not even clear that they're correct for the one example they go by. It's difficult to argue that "teaching" is essential to good design; to me it's just important for on-boarding (that the "tutorial" stages aren't canned info-dumps and dreadfully slow, interruptive, and staged events that treat the player as incomprehensibly incompetent). I'm more inclined to the idea that good design is found in the ability to explore a ruleset, and the ruleset being interesting enough to justify exploring it. The art, music, themes and such all supplement the exploration of that ruleset (or even help define it). Good "levels" push you to explore the ruleset in ideally unintuitive ways, and lays the foundation for further exploration in future levels. Ideally, the game shouldn't "teach" you how to play. It should simply exist as a world, and its rules, and you'll figure out the rest. Incentivized to explore particular areas of the world/rules, but thats about it. Bad design comes from limiting your ability to explore. Rules that appear general (applies to all NPCS), but it turns out you can't punch the kids, because. You can normally jump around as much as you want...but this particular area you have to sit down and walk because its movie-time. You can run around as much as you wish, but here there's an invisible wall because you're not at the designated level for it. Or the lack of things to explore. Poorly designed procedural generation games like No Man's Sky and Borderlands come to mind. The generation rules constantly produce different/new things... with little difference to your actual ability to interact with the world. It gets boring, fast, because it's not affecting the ruleset to any interesting degree. But a proper roguelike on the other-hand has you forced to explore corner cases of the ruleset every time you find a new enemy with some special combination of [dangerous] skills. The roguelike ruleset is potentially interesting (and expansive), and the procedural generation pushes you to explore all its corners. No Man's Sky has a much more limited ruleset, and the generation leads you to explore all its corners... very, very quickly. And then ofc you have other aspects like compositional rules and feedback loops that allow the player a much freer exploration, of the world, to the point that you have genres defined around it (eg simulations, grand strategies, etc).
trumpownsyou 9y ago
peep the faggot OP
trumpownsyou420 9y ago
peep the faggot OP
jack9 9y ago
> Sonic is incorrect game design Roguelike also require repetition to learn and master, in conjunction with skillful assessment. Games are the exploration of a fixed environment to discover and exploit linear optimizations for abstract goals. Historically, this has been a training tool for children and students, to prepare for life challenges. e.g. Wargames are for those who are students of war. There's nothing inherently wrong about the game design of Sonic, which is why the conclusion does not fit the stated premise.
rootedbox 9y ago
Green Light is just a bad song.
ddingus 9y ago
Or, "Why The Guardian does not understand Sonic games."
AdmiralAsshat 9y ago
By this logic, all on-rails shooters are 'incorrect' game design.
Fej 9y ago
The notion that a work of art could be "incorrect" is absurd on its face. Just because a game (in this case) does not remain confined to accepted norms does not make it "incorrect". The use of this word is pretentious as all hell, as if the author is the be-all-end-all of art criticism. If one does not like a game, we have a word for that: "bad". There are plenty of bad games to analyze. Why the author picked Sonic the Hedgehog is beyond me. As he said: it works. Therefore, to twist the word "incorrect" to its breaking point as he does is ridiculous.
- lucideer 9y ago
  The fact that he put the 'incorrect' in quotes indicates that he likely agreed with you on the use of the word and the you probably missed the intent of his use of it. Unlike 'bad', a subjective word indicating opinion, 'incorrect' is objective: anything can be incorrect according to a certain set of parameters, and the author is selecting a particularly traditional set here from the book in order to frame the discussion. He's not implying that Sonic is bad. He calls it a masterpiece! It's quite likely he's also a Lorde fan.
- zemo 9y ago
  that's literally the point of the article.
- aidenn0 9y ago
  In both the cases of the game and the song though, they aren't pure works of art, but also entertainment. With pop songs and games, there are formulae that, if you just follow them correctly, you are basically guaranteed to make something that is at least mediocre. Breaking the rules is more interesting, but also more risky. For every sonic and every Green Light, there are hundreds or thousands of crappy games and songs that thought the rules didn't apply to them. Analyzing successful "incorrect" games is interesting because it tries to pin-down the je ne sais quoi that gives them their appeal.
beeswax 9y ago
I loved Sonic on Master System, Game Gear and Mega Drive/Genesis and was completely thrown off guard when I played Sonic Generations on the 360 decades later ("whoa how can anyone keep up with that pace?"). Once you embrace that pacing (which has been there all the time) you'll be able to appreciate that special kind of game/level design. It seems that Team Sonic was able to apply that principle to Quote a good number of titles with the IP. Back in the days the controller would have been soaked in several people's sweat ofc and there were no persisted save points. If you want to improve on persistence, priorities and quick decision making: Go play these games on their original hardware (or at least don't use the emulator's snapshot abilities).
git-pull 9y ago
For anyone here who wants a very well-made nostalgic dive into the art / feel of Sonic the Hedgehog, namely Sonic & Knuckles, I recommend this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdxQmgC2Bhw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdxQmgC2Bhw
terrage 9y ago
I would also like to point out that one of the greatest parts of the Sonic games IMO was the ability to enable the in-game debug mode, allowing edits to the level with various sprites. A definite source of childhood curiosity with gaming/code/design. http://sonic.wikia.com/wiki/Debug_Mode http://sonic.wikia.com/wiki/Debug_Mode

52 points by klez 9y ago

waqf 9y ago

All great art violates some existing genre conventions — if it doesn't, then by definition it's generic art.

justinjlynn 9y ago
One must first learn all the rules so that one may break them properly.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- SubiculumCode 9y ago
  Sometimes knowing the rules traps you as well, and it would have been better to just seek the pureness of the muse.
  - bicubic 9y ago
    In my experience this is critical to advancing the state of the art. Knowing the rules tends to lock one into a 'faster horse' mindset. If you want to invent a car, you're best off being ignorant of horse rules and conventions.
    - crush-n-spread 9y ago
      While that may be true for most people, I think that knowing everything about horse rules & conventions would give a car designer an upper hand _if_ that car designer was also the type of person to easily let go of his own presuppositions about things. What I'm trying to say is that there are people who are not held back by knowing what the rules of the game are, because they are not afraid to throw them away, even if learning those rules took a great mental investment.
logicallee 9y ago
What conventions did Michaelangelo's David violate?
- jpzisme 9y ago
  Probably proportion. David's right hand holding the stone is massive in comparison to his body. It draws attention to the impending conflict.
  - pavel_lishin 9y ago
    Wasn't that done intentionally for perspective's sake, to make him look normally proportioned from certain, expected angles?
- chmod775 9y ago
  Using the grandparent's understanding of "generic", art could be generic, yet still exceptionally good/well executed.
  - booleandilemma 9y ago
    To do a common thing uncommonly well brings success. - Henry J. Heinz
  - tnecniv 9y ago
    I was reading a comment on a jazz album and it essentially said "expertly done but doesn't move the genre forward so meh." I think people forget that sometimes you just want a good, standard jazz album.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

rainmouse 9y ago

Or perhaps people get quickly tired of the same formulaic garbage. Endless superhero movies in every scene that go exposition, cgi action, witty one liner. Repeat. That nearly every 3 minute pop track follows the same formula as the scenes in every James Bond movie. Some things are just popular. Snakes and ladders technically isn't a game. You have ZERO agency in the outcome of events but it's based upon a game that's been played at least since the Indus Valley Civilisation 3000 BC. It's when committees and statisticians get involved that the fun goes away. Hence the endless reboots and sequels of exponentially more funding yet almost always fall short of the originals.

nonbel 9y ago
>"Snakes and ladders technically isn't a game. You have ZERO agency in the outcome of events but it's based upon a game that's been played at least since the Indus Valley Civilisation 3000 BC." I have to wonder if that was true back then. Did they have "fair" dice, or was there room for influencing the results or otherwise benefiting from knowledge of the imbalance? This could be either by choosing between dice for each roll, betting on the outcomes midgame, or getting the desired roll more often than usual.
scottLobster 9y ago
A lot of strategy games and RPGs suffer from the same. Starcraft II for instance was a lot more fun IMO when it was new and the strategies hadn't been refined. I remember wasting a ton of time/resources turtling, building a giant mass of carriers and then steam-rolling the map, just because I could and thought the visual of a dozen carriers sweeping the map would be awesome (it was). Good luck doing that now in a public server. Too many games have obsessive fans that are hell-bent on discovering the mathematically perfect way to play a game, and once the one or half-dozen working formulae are discovered, that's it. No one else can play any other way and hope to win, and that really takes the creativity and fun out of it. I'm not sure where these people come from, I got into video games as a distraction from math homework, not an extension of it. :P
- nickpeterson 9y ago

syphilis2 9y ago

Another retrospective look at Sonic's design (2014): http://redlettermedia.com/pre-rec-sonic-the-most-overrated-game-ever/ http://redlettermedia.com/pre-rec-sonic-the-most-overrated-g...

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
wodenokoto 9y ago
That was a really good analysis of Sonic.

jandrese 9y ago

IMHO the article is right that Sonic is a terrible platformer, because it's not a platformer. It's a speedrun game. It's all about memorizing the map and being able to make twitchy inputs to get the biggest rewards. It's a fundamentally different kind of game than Super Mario Brothers, even though they look superficially similar.

andy_wrote 9y ago
I definitely agree with your point, though I'd recast it slightly away from "twitchy"/"speedrun"/map memorization and towards the thrill of things being fast and disorienting. [1] Sonic involved lots of bright lights, fast animation, and noises. It was fun because everything ran out of control sometimes, or at least seemed to, and I think this, aside from considerations of wanting to optimize for efficiency of solution, was a large part of its joy. (I say "seemed to" because I remember elements of levels that blasted you through loops and walls at dizzying speed, but in practice served as just a rail that took you from point A to B.) I didn't realize before I read this article that the design of Sonic (even excluding Sonic Spinball) was driven by pinball, though it makes tons of sense in retrospect. Pinball's got the same thrills; you're constantly in an unstable state, not really learning a puzzle so much as trying to manage a high-degree of chaos before you inevitably get thrown off the horse. It's a different brand of fun than the article's "correct" game design, less/more appealing to different people and less/more appealing when you're in the wrong/right mood. [1] "Ilinx" in the taxonomy of Roger Callois's "Man, Play, and Games," though a personal caveat that I didn't really enjoy that book.
- jandrese 9y ago
  Oh yeah, that line about it being influenced by Pinball gave me one of those "of course it was" moments where something has been obvious forever but you never noticed it. Bumpers, spinners, bouncers, Sonic himself when he gets going... It's semi-linear pinball.
- colanderman 9y ago
  > Sonic Spinball Which, ironically, is possibly the slowest and most plodding Sonic game. It should have just been endless variations on Casino Night Zone.

cwyers 9y ago

I can find several other examples of games that are "incorrect" in much the same way, and I don't just mean Sonic knockoffs. Doom is pretty much a seminal moment in game design, and it looks nothing like the "ideal" design of Mario. I think the game design principles that are being tossed around here are very, very far from being universal.

setr 9y ago
It's not even clear that they're correct for the one example they go by. It's difficult to argue that "teaching" is essential to good design; to me it's just important for on-boarding (that the "tutorial" stages aren't canned info-dumps and dreadfully slow, interruptive, and staged events that treat the player as incomprehensibly incompetent). I'm more inclined to the idea that good design is found in the ability to explore a ruleset, and the ruleset being interesting enough to justify exploring it. The art, music, themes and such all supplement the exploration of that ruleset (or even help define it). Good "levels" push you to explore the ruleset in ideally unintuitive ways, and lays the foundation for further exploration in future levels. Ideally, the game shouldn't "teach" you how to play. It should simply exist as a world, and its rules, and you'll figure out the rest. Incentivized to explore particular areas of the world/rules, but thats about it. Bad design comes from limiting your ability to explore. Rules that appear general (applies to all NPCS), but it turns out you can't punch the kids, because. You can normally jump around as much as you want...but this particular area you have to sit down and walk because its movie-time. You can run around as much as you wish, but here there's an invisible wall because you're not at the designated level for it. Or the lack of things to explore. Poorly designed procedural generation games like No Man's Sky and Borderlands come to mind. The generation rules constantly produce different/new things... with little difference to your actual ability to interact with the world. It gets boring, fast, because it's not affecting the ruleset to any interesting degree. But a proper roguelike on the other-hand has you forced to explore corner cases of the ruleset every time you find a new enemy with some special combination of [dangerous] skills. The roguelike ruleset is potentially interesting (and expansive), and the procedural generation pushes you to explore all its corners. No Man's Sky has a much more limited ruleset, and the generation leads you to explore all its corners... very, very quickly. And then ofc you have other aspects like compositional rules and feedback loops that allow the player a much freer exploration, of the world, to the point that you have genres defined around it (eg simulations, grand strategies, etc).

trumpownsyou 9y ago

peep the faggot OP

trumpownsyou420 9y ago

peep the faggot OP

jack9 9y ago

> Sonic is incorrect game design Roguelike also require repetition to learn and master, in conjunction with skillful assessment. Games are the exploration of a fixed environment to discover and exploit linear optimizations for abstract goals. Historically, this has been a training tool for children and students, to prepare for life challenges. e.g. Wargames are for those who are students of war. There's nothing inherently wrong about the game design of Sonic, which is why the conclusion does not fit the stated premise.

rootedbox 9y ago

Green Light is just a bad song.

ddingus 9y ago

Or, "Why The Guardian does not understand Sonic games."

AdmiralAsshat 9y ago

By this logic, all on-rails shooters are 'incorrect' game design.

Fej 9y ago

The notion that a work of art could be "incorrect" is absurd on its face. Just because a game (in this case) does not remain confined to accepted norms does not make it "incorrect". The use of this word is pretentious as all hell, as if the author is the be-all-end-all of art criticism. If one does not like a game, we have a word for that: "bad". There are plenty of bad games to analyze. Why the author picked Sonic the Hedgehog is beyond me. As he said: it works. Therefore, to twist the word "incorrect" to its breaking point as he does is ridiculous.

lucideer 9y ago
The fact that he put the 'incorrect' in quotes indicates that he likely agreed with you on the use of the word and the you probably missed the intent of his use of it. Unlike 'bad', a subjective word indicating opinion, 'incorrect' is objective: anything can be incorrect according to a certain set of parameters, and the author is selecting a particularly traditional set here from the book in order to frame the discussion. He's not implying that Sonic is bad. He calls it a masterpiece! It's quite likely he's also a Lorde fan.
zemo 9y ago
that's literally the point of the article.
aidenn0 9y ago
In both the cases of the game and the song though, they aren't pure works of art, but also entertainment. With pop songs and games, there are formulae that, if you just follow them correctly, you are basically guaranteed to make something that is at least mediocre. Breaking the rules is more interesting, but also more risky. For every sonic and every Green Light, there are hundreds or thousands of crappy games and songs that thought the rules didn't apply to them. Analyzing successful "incorrect" games is interesting because it tries to pin-down the je ne sais quoi that gives them their appeal.

beeswax 9y ago

I loved Sonic on Master System, Game Gear and Mega Drive/Genesis and was completely thrown off guard when I played Sonic Generations on the 360 decades later ("whoa how can anyone keep up with that pace?"). Once you embrace that pacing (which has been there all the time) you'll be able to appreciate that special kind of game/level design. It seems that Team Sonic was able to apply that principle to Quote a good number of titles with the IP. Back in the days the controller would have been soaked in several people's sweat ofc and there were no persisted save points. If you want to improve on persistence, priorities and quick decision making: Go play these games on their original hardware (or at least don't use the emulator's snapshot abilities).

git-pull 9y ago

For anyone here who wants a very well-made nostalgic dive into the art / feel of Sonic the Hedgehog, namely Sonic & Knuckles, I recommend this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdxQmgC2Bhw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdxQmgC2Bhw

terrage 9y ago

I would also like to point out that one of the greatest parts of the Sonic games IMO was the ability to enable the in-game debug mode, allowing edits to the level with various sprites. A definite source of childhood curiosity with gaming/code/design. http://sonic.wikia.com/wiki/Debug_Mode http://sonic.wikia.com/wiki/Debug_Mode