Creative Problem Solving in Video Games

Violent video games take a bad rap, perhaps for a good reason. Relatively few people would come out and say they are a good thing. Though it has been argued that they are teaching kids pattern recognition and some such.

Whether or not video games are good teachers (but oh! how they could be) I don't know, but I do know that video games are good testers of problem solving skills, and some of the best testers are First-Person Shooters (or FPS's). Ironically these are some of the most violent video games next to fighting games, but when the going gets tough, the smart stop shooting.

Traditional thought holds that FPS's are mastered by acquiring lightning quick reflexes and precision accuracy. Certainly these elements help a great deal, but only up to a point. After reflexes, memorization often provides great gains in player ability. (Wasn't it annoying switching from Halo 1 to Halo 2 and getting schooled on those multiplayer maps until you too memorized where the rocket launcher was located?)

After decent reflexes and basic memorization are tucked into the player's toolbox, the final element is problem solving. Problem solving is a difficult thing to teach and immensely hard to do under pressure. I suspect that the best gamers are relying on instincts while in the midst of a harrowing multi-player deathmatch. So how does this help? Problem solving helps overcome difficult single player obstacles (which a player can mull over off-line and come back to) and it also can be used to develop multi-player strategies (which will then be theoretically executed without too much mental nail biting online).

Let me lead into the problem of how to actually do creative problem solving with three examples. Note how each of these examples moves away from brute force to overcome difficulties.

The first example comes from the game GoldenEye 007 for Nintendo 64. I am not the kind of person that buys a new computer game every month. I am the kind of person that spends time thoughtfully purchasing those few great games and then playing the snot out of them.

Rare's GoldenEye is a gem. I played it into a pulp and spent many hours shooting at my friends in multiplayer mode. GoldenEye has three difficulty levels and then a fourth un-lockable and modifiable difficulty setting. With this game laid waste and my friends moved on to newer things I wondered whether any level could be beaten with the difficulty settings maxed out. I found one such level, the Facility. On this level, the uber opponents could be undone by careful planning, precise timing, manipulating the poor AI, and if necessary a limited number of head to head battles.

The modifiable setting allowed me to set enemy health to 1000% (ten times the norm), reaction speed up to 100% (still not instantaneous, therefore, I'm not sure what 100% is a percentage of), damage to 1000% (instant kill if they shoot me), and 100% accuracy (if they shoot and can see me, I'm dead). This is known as dark license to kill mode.

No amount of shooting skill could prevail against such enemies and memorizing the level only gets you so far. Instead I formulated a plan with a series of experiments from which I built up strategies by trial and error. What makes completion of the Facility possible on this hardest of all difficulties is the fact that enemies can be dispatched by explosions and the explosions kill instantly without regard to enemy health settings. Combine this fact with the abundance of high explosive crates in the Facility and the clever gamer has a solid chance. Even so, the level requires a great deal of stealth and experimentation to learn how the enemy AI does and doesn’t respond, as well as how to detect game triggers, which is a little bit like Neo looking at walls and seeing the code at the end of the Matrix.

Video and a walkthrough of this accomplishment can be found here.

The second example is from Perfect Dark, another Rare game for N64 that is mechanically almost identical to Goleneye. A hair’s breadth away from having conquered the game I had become stumped by the bonus level "WAR!". Only by injecting a bit of stealth and patience into my play was I able to complete the game.

The scenario in "WAR!" is this: Two teams start at opposites ends of a long twisting hallway with various side-rooms, doors, and other obstacles. Both teams, the good guys and the bad guys, regenerate upon death, but there are a limited number of units from each team that can be alive at any given moment. The only way to win is to kill the enemy leader (at the far end of the hall, naturally), and the only way a player can lose is by dieing (the player is the only good guy that doesn’t regenerate).

Brute force works well for much of this level. The firefights get intense between the relatively large teams in some of the more cramped hallways, but the superiority of a human player lends an edge to the good guys. The difficulty comes at the end of the level. As one approaches the location that the enemies are being generated from, one encounters the enemies much more frequently, while reinforcements from one’s own base take a longer time to traverse the distance to the front line. An added difficulty is that the bad guys have a one-hit-kill melee attack and there are a series of extremely cramped rooms just before the end boss. Forcing one’s way through this part of the level is an exercise in frustration. A thinking player, however, can examine his/her surroundings and easily arrive upon a solution to the problem.

One feature of the level is a cloning facility filled with empty cloning vats near the end of the level (literally one small chamber separates the cloning room from the room with the boss). The problem-solving player drives the enemy back by force and then retreats into one of the cloning vats, closing the door behind them. The vats are made of a semi-transparent green glass that the enemies cannot see through. Patiently the player waits while his allies fall back under the onslaught. Eventually the enemies have forced their way past the vats and are advancing towards the opposite end of the level, foolishly leaving their leader unprotected. The player then emerges from the vat, walks through the last unguarded room to face the end boss, and charges in with guns blazing. In the end, the virtues of patience and clear thinking temper accuracy and a quick trigger finger into a formidable player!

The final example comes from the original Halo. My friend and I were devoted to beating this game on Legendary, the highest difficulty level. We eventually made it past the early Covenant levels (the Covenant is one of the enemies in Halo). Our strategy typically consisted of stockpiling weapons behind an obstacle and unloading all of our seeking ammo to soften up the Covenant before trying to take them on face-to-face. The Flood, however, proved resistant to this tactic.

The Flood are a zombie-like race that can absorb a large amount of firepower and attack in large numbers. The strategy we eventually came up with for the Flood was startlingly simple and effective. Run like Hell.

Basically we ran away from the Flood. And why not? They are lumbering zombies for the most part. It’s like the mummy that walks really slowly with his hands straight out. How scary is that? You have to walk away a little bit faster to escape. Big deal.

Occasionally Halo does force you to fight the Flood before moving on, but running facilitates even this situation because the flood cluster into a herd when they give chase providing a very effective target for grenades or the bulbous flood-lings that burst when damaged.

If the sound of me tooting my own horn hasn't driven you away then you are probably still curious how one goes about creatively solving problems. I will not leave you hanging and, furthermore, these tips are very broadly applicable! Here are my components of creative problem solving.

• Observation
• Hypotheses
• Experimentation

Teachers may have drilled the scientific method into us all while preparing us for the school science fair and even the brilliant George Polya ordered his list of problem solving techniques, but in the real world these components of problem solving are all ongoing simultaneously.

Babies don't wait around formulating hypotheses. They start grabbing stuff and shoving it in their open mouths! If they form an hypothesis they don't worry about the outcome of the experiment with any sort of prediction. No, they jam that peg into the round hole and if it is the square peg, so be it. The observation that it does not fit is in no way priviledged over the observation that another peg does fit.

In the Goldeneye example, hypothesis came first. I hypothesized that a level could be beaten on the highest difficulty. Next I experimented by blowing up crates near uber-enemies. I observed that this killed them. I then hypothesized that a level with lots of crates (the Facility) might be beatable on the maximum difficulty. I began to experiment further. It took a lot of time to figure out where to place all the mines and how to lure the guards into the right position. Observation, hypotheses and experimentation were all required.

A major aspect of creative thinking is ignoring your inner critic and forgetting what you think you know. Most people call this, "thinking outside the box". That is an un-helpful metaphor, just as un-helpful as the advice, "forget what you think you know". Ignoring your inner critic is a bit more concrete. When the critic shouts discouragement ask yourself, "is this really impossible for a verifiable reason? or is it just unbelievable?"

There is a fabulous Foxtrot comic where Jason is playing a video game, but he can't beat a boss. Paige, Jason's gaming illiterate sister, picks up the controller and just walks past the enemy. Jason is stunned and considers how strange it is that a horrifying, incredibly difficult monster is not meant to be attacked. This sums up the idea of thinking outside the box perfectly and neatly mirrors the afforementioned Halo strategy. Video games hammer into players the idea that every thing must be killed before progressing further into the game. Sometimes it takes an outside perspective to realize that rules are meant to be broken.

(Oh, and by the way, if anyone can send me a link to that comic I'll be ever so grateful.)

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