Trial and Error Based Gameplay

[Koh]

Consider for a moment what particular genre this person is speaking about for a moment...general consensus is purely close-minded and idiotic.

You misunderstood me again with the article; it overlaps with a lot of the characteristics that define the Trial and Error trope.  While some specific statements pertain more to the adventure/point and click genre, the punishments the player are given or a solution can be reached by following a similar subversion:  You give the player room for error (health bars, lives that don't send you back a million miles, etc.), or try to think of as many general possible reactions to a given situation the player may have, and reward those that are logical or derived from common sense.  I.E  The player sees a boss charging directly at them, they decide to move out of the way in some fashion, whether it be directly (a top-down game like Zelda) or by jumping/ducking (a Platformer like Castlevania).  A trial-and-error game would throw that kind of reasoning or logic out of the window, and have the boss do something the player would have no possible way to know ahead of time.

But, you can manipulate these conditions and fight bosses in the same fashion after figuring out (via trial and error) what player moves prompt what kind of attack is acted out on behalf of the boss.

This is the sort of thing you actually want to avoid if your boss only has one kind of attack for each "range," unless you want your bosses to get cheesed.  The best example that comes to mind is Hugh on Castlevania Circle of the Moon.  His AI is abuseable to the point it's laughable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arjTUq6ICVI

Which leads into...

What you're referring to is telegraphing attacks, which is a facet of pattern recognition, but also is part of a pre-defined pattern in itself. And the player quickly learns what these symbols mean through interacting with them, sometimes at the cost of HP or lives or whatever arbitrary system is used...

Exactly.  Hugh does that by raising his sword in that video, which is fine.  Those are the kinds of visual cues I meant, yes.  If you have a list of things the boss can randomly choose from based on the conditions of the player's position in the room (or how much time has passed in the battle at all, if it does something like fire a sweeping laser every 10 seconds), it can still be readable while keeping each fight unique and interesting, rather than the exact same every time that a memorization-based boss would be C:.

Memorization isn't inherently bad, it can be done well and it can be done poorly; the same is true of trial and error. As a simple reality of learning, the principle of trial and error is neither good nor bad.

I believe the same as well.  It's just a question of when is it too much?  When does it cross over from being okay to being frustrating and TVTropes-like?  In my above scenario, you memorize how a boss behaves based on whatever poses it takes (the telegraphing), which is fair and something you can expect the player to be able to do.  However, it doesn't require that the player dies a bunch of times first, if you give them room for error, and also room to execute their logical/common sense derived method of avoiding these attacks.

Games like I Want To Be The Guy are those extreme examples of the TV Tropes Trial and Error, and the topmost contrast one can give of Trial and Error, due to the nature of the games.  One-Hit Wonder character, Simon Says bosses, totally arbitrary obstacles that the player would have no way of knowing about ahead of time, etc.  Some people may like that, but as the trope outlines, most people don't.

So as a game designer, I'd want to find the perfect, or near perfect equilibrium, where you're using the natural process of learning by trying things, but not being punished over something stupid that goes against the player's reasoning and logic (like I Want To Be the Guy's Apples in the trees).

[TomGuycott]

It is a little unfair to include I Wanna Be the Guy in a serious talk about Trial and Error game design in a traditional sense, as it could be easily retitled "Trial and Error: the Game".

The game has an obvious intention to bend and warp your expectations and reaction time from screen one. It doesn't try to hide what it is, and you either find it funny, challenging, or it's not for you.

[Koh]

Exactly, that's why I said it was an extreme example, and any game that's like that, lol. A more humble example of trial and error would be Bram Stoker's Dracula's 8-bit games. Especially in Scene 3's Nighttime stage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEulHGopzvk

I only got through mostly unscathed because I've played it over and over and memorized where every enemy was placed. But many of them are placed in such a way that it's literally impossible to know they're there, until you've already committed to the jump and taken damage. This sort of trial and error was present in many games of old, like Ninja Gaiden.

[Sketchasaurus]

  I.E  The player sees a boss charging directly at them, they decide to move out of the way in some fashion, whether it be directly (a top-down game like Zelda) or by jumping/ducking (a Platformer like Castlevania).  A trial-and-error game would throw that kind of reasoning or logic out of the window, and have the boss do something the player would have no possible way to know ahead of time.

 Firstly, Games aren't even classified as trial and error games. The only example I can think of is "I Wanna Be the Guy" which was made to be masochistic and initially difficult, it's not designed to be anything other than that. Secondly, how would you ever be justified to expect the player to anticipate everything that's going to happen in a game before even playing it? Playing a game in itself is going into a new experience for which you don't know the outcome or the events that are about to unfold. You're trying to argue about a genre that doesn't exist.

 You give the player room for error (health bars, lives that don't send you back a million miles, etc.), or try to think of as many general possible reactions to a given situation the player may have, and reward those that are logical or derived from common sense

you are essentially restating what I've said previous with my Buzzy Beetle analogy. You facilitate learning through allowing the player to test and observe the new information they're being presented in the game, and leverage the relative risk with potential rewards, that's it. Whether or not a choice is logical to the game designer is moot if the logic of the game isn't communicated to the player; it's easy to fall into the trap of a creator's bias where a designer considers something to be obvious and figures "Oh, this makes sense, I don't need to explain it to anyone" which I shouldn't need to point out, is a poor design philosophy. "logic" and "common sense" are subjective to the game/environment in which they live, you teach the player the logic of the game by allowing them to fail and try again, later on, you can make more "common sense" assumptions, but you don't defy the logic you setup early in the game.

The reality is that there isn't a de facto point of equillibrium; it depends on the genre and the game; a huge part of effective game design is figuring out the balance between risk/reward within the confines of the game being designed.

The trope name of "Trial and Error" is more an extreme label for games in the ilk of "I Wanna Be the Guy" But even so, there's one huge thing that you seem to be neglecting in regard to tropes: Tropes are neither good nor bad, they just exist. A Trope is a recognizable pattern in media, that's what TVTropes is, a collection of observations, and avoiding anything you read on TVTropes as "I read this on TVTropes, therefore it is a bad element" is only going to hinder you from actually trying and figuring things out for yourself.

[Koh]

Oh absolutely.  It's one of those situations where it's like "Oh, I never knew there was a name for this!"  But it also gives one a jumping off point to ask questions of design, such that they don't end up creating an example of a trope that's generally frowned upon by its presence, like Trial and Error or Luck-Based Mission C:.