collision detection: The allure of the "boss battle": My latest Wired News gaming column

May 08, 2006

The allure of the "boss battle": My latest Wired News gaming column

Wired News just published my latest video-game column -- and this one is about why we so love "boss battles". You can read it online at the Wired site, or via the archived copy below!

Who's the Boss?
On the peculiar allure of the "boss battle"
Clive Thompson

I was barely one hour into playing Kingdom Hearts II, gaming's latest bona-fide hit, when I encountered the first "boss battle." It was a three-story tall gray monstrosity -- I barely came up to his knee. We lunged about, frantically trading blows, until I finally located his weak spot and plunged my "keyblade" in. Boom: He dissolved into black dust, leaving me with a sore thumb and a system full of adrenaline.

And the curious sense of satisfaction that comes from a boss battle. They're among the most cherished tropes in gaming: Get a bunch of gamers together to talk about adventure games or action titles, and sure -- everyone will praise the wonderful characters, the superb graphics, the intriguing narrative. But it's the boss battles that leave scars on their souls. They wind up sounding like grizzled war veterans, reminiscing wild-eyed about facing The Flood in Halo, four-armed Goro in Mortal Kombat or even Bowser in Super Mario Bros. Bosses dominate the psychic landscape of games.

It's partly because a boss battle is the most mythopoeic part of gaming. An adventure game, after all, typically puts you on some dread quest in which the foes get bigger and nastier until you face one final, hellish climactic baddie. This is a pure apocalyptic narrative -- the same story line that has obsessed the West for millennia, from the Bible to Das Kapital to the Epic of Gilgamesh. Boss battles make games seem cosmic.
But personally, I think the allure is much more straightforward than that, and also, in its own way, more complex. We love boss battles because they represent game design at its purest and trickiest.

Every game has to strike a careful balance: It has to be teasingly difficult, but not overly frustrating. But when the boss battle comes along, the game is supposed to become suddenly more difficult. That makes the balance all the harder to strike.

"The really good bosses seem impossible at first -- but they provide incremental clues to weaken them," said Ian Bogost, a game-design theorist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, when I called him about the subject. "That's where the sense of mastery comes from. A good boss has to kill you a few times first. It has to be arduous, physically and mentally." His favorite villians were the overlords in Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, partly because their gargantuan size came as a thrilling shock after the hobbit-like proportions of everyone else in the rest of the game.

The danger, of course, is a game that goes too far: Nothing grinds a game to a halt more than a boss that is hair-pulling impossible to kill. Such was the case when Luke Smith -- a friend of mine who works at 1UP -- took a band of high-level World of Warcraft characters to battle with C'Thun, a squid-like creature that spawns endless "flay eyes" and "claw tentacles". "For months it was improperly tuned, literally unkillable," Smith ranted. "You simply could not put out the damage required to kill everything before the fight spiraled out of control. It kept spawning, and you never caught up."

With an overly-fierce boss, nothing you've learned in the game seems to work -- which makes you think, I slogged through weeks of this game only to be repaid with this?

The well-tuned boss vibrates in perfect harmony with the skill level of the game. Tom Byron, the editor in chief of the Official US PlayStation Magazine, told me his favorite boss was the vizier at the end of Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones. "He's flying up in the air, and whipping these stones down at you -- so you need to use literally all of the prince's acrobatics that you've learned. You're doing all these wall-runs, and there are fireballs, like, everywhere," Bryon gushed. "It's just awesome!"

That's the key: A good boss demands you to call upon every technique you've painstakingly learned over hours of play -- each special jump and magic combos. In Kingdom Hearts II, for example, I'd played around a bit with the different settings for Donald Duck's magic-healing ability (boy, that's a weird sentence) -- but I'd never understood how important it was to tweak it until I faced down the Hydra, and was getting flayed alive by its seven heads.

It's like bosses are the SATs of the game world: "It's a culmination," Byron notes. "It's not asking you to suddenly learn new skills. It's asking you to remember everything you've learned." You're aiming for that "aha" moment when, desperate for some way to topple the boss, you suddenly hit upon a clever new way to apply your powers -- and the insurmountable becomes manageable.

That's one of the best feelings ever -- and it's also one we rarely get in everyday life. The enemies we face in our contemporary world are so much more ambiguous and internal, and half the time it's ourselves. We try to find a meaningful job, to hack through a bad relationship, to blunder through the red tape of money and taxes. Even our modern literature of struggle has been blunted. The Greeks and Romans imagined their lives through metaphors of heroes facing down arcane monsters; we read The Corrections or Indecision or A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, tales of neurotics struggling just to get out of bed.

Our enemies are nowhere, and everywhere. Targets of resistance melt away in all directions. Terrorists seem frightening only so long as they elude the authorities. Death creeps slowly in hospital wards. And so, perhaps, it's a comfort to see our fears rear up in an honest-to-god monstrosity. Bring it on.

Posted by Clive Thompson at May 08, 2006 11:30 AM

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Comments

also notable should be some bosses from metal gear solid, with the standout being the old guy sniper from 3, who literally takes about an hour. the girl who deflects bullets in 2 is pretty interesting too for the simple fact that you can't actually beat her.

Posted by: frunch at May 8, 2006 12:18 PM

Yes -- the Metal Gear Solid games had great bosses!

Posted by: Clive at May 8, 2006 3:11 PM

I believe you misspell the Zelda game as "Wind Walker". It's Wind Waker.

As far as awesome videogame boss experiences go, the PS2's God of War takes the cake. As you said, it walks the tightrope of difficulty and frustration beautifully, usually culminating in an interactive, cinematic "fatality" of sorts.

I played through God of War twice -- the second time on Hard. I reached the end of Pandora's Temple with half my health and little magic remaining. The "boss" is nontraditional, a large gauntlet filled with minor enemies in overwhelming numbers. Oh, and the floor constantly moves, slamming you into the spike-covered walls. And if you stand on any of the stable areas for too long you're instantly incinerated.

Beating that gauntlet on Hard, with little health and magic, took at least twenty tries (it was either beat it or start the entire game again). It is my single greatest achievement in a videogame. Ever. I was physically shaking when I finally won.

Posted by: Jonathan Dobres at May 8, 2006 7:36 PM

Another game definately worth mentioning here is Shadow of the Colossus. It's nothing but boss battles, so you really learn new abilites with each boss. I think if a regular boss are the SATs, then one of these would be boot camp, forcing you to learn and use at the same time.

Posted by: Jasontheperson at May 8, 2006 8:47 PM

"...and the insurmountable becomes manageable. That's one of the best feelings ever"

That's fiero. It's a major emotional payoff for some videogame players, but not all. Anyone *not* playing a videogame for fiero finds bosses to be a frustration, and more often as not a deal breaker for playing the game at all.

A very narrow view of bosses. Still, it's nice to hear someone express why they think bosses are worthwhile.

Posted by: Chris Bateman at May 9, 2006 2:50 AM

Wind Waker -- yep, thanks, correcting it now!

Jonathan, migod, that God of War story demonstrates monklike devotion. I am in awe! Physically shaking ... sounds like me after trying to play Ninja Gaiden on "hard" setting ...

Jason, yep, Shadows of the Colossus was a brilliant game conceit: Get rid of the midgame action, and just cut directly to the boss battles!

Chris, sure, that argument makes sense. If bosses ain't your thing, they'd be a ridiculous time-waste inside a game for sure. I know plenty of people who dig roleplaying games for the strategy, levelling, go-anywhere world, or other reasons, and hate the boss fights.

Posted by: Clive at May 9, 2006 10:58 AM

Based on my brief-but-continuing experience as a game developer, boss battles dominate the "psychic landscape" on the design side as well--ultimately, past all of the graphics and physics and optimizations, it's creating a beatable and fun boss whose behavior actually makes sense that is the most challenging, and sometimes the most tedious.

Posted by: Jeff Lee at May 9, 2006 11:33 AM

I'm with Chris B, for the most part: Bosses just get in the way of exploring (I'm a tomb raider-type of guy...

that said, the reverse of a good boss can be pretty sucky, too: Tomb Raider Two ends with a battle against a dragon. But since you appear before the dragon does, you can just stand behind one of the columns that dots the arena and avoid the dragon's flaming breath. Wait for the dragon to turn it's back and fire away with your distance weapons. You're eating smoked dragon meat in just a few rounds, and completely avoiding a scorching...
and I'm thinking: "Months of game play comes to an end with pot-shots at an idiot dragon? Snore..." There were harder bosses in the middle of the game...

Posted by: bud at May 9, 2006 7:31 PM

Jeff, that's really interesting to hear!

Bud, heh, I never made it to the end of Tomb Raider 2 ... now I'm glad I didn't!

Posted by: Clive at May 10, 2006 10:42 AM

Does anybody know when the word "boss" was first used to describe these opponents at the end-of-the-game battles? I vaguely remember playing the Simpsons arcade game in '92, and one of the bosses was, literally, the boss, Mr. Burns.

Posted by: samplereality at May 15, 2006 11:50 AM

The bosses in KHII actually made the game. They wern't overly hard..it's the nature of KH that if you survive for a few seconds you can fill your life back up. They can kill you if they get the jump on you, but whatever.

Of course, I'm different than most people in that I never really had a problem with the bosses in DMC3 really. The first one, Cerebus was hard and annoying, but past that I found that they were very skill based and never really cheap. As long as my timing and movements were not..well..stupid, I could kill them without too much problem.

Posted by: Karmakin at May 18, 2006 11:53 AM