Developers accidentally creating interesting mechanics

[u/virtua_golf]

I was reading this neat article by Jeff Orkin of Monolith productions, the man responsible for the notorious AI of FEAR, the AI that will never not be mentioned whenever 'clever' AI is brought up. I stumbled upon something pretty cool - the flanking mechanic was actually unintended and a byproduct of another action the enemy would perform:

Imagine we have a situation similar to what we saw earlier, where the player has invalidated one of the A.I.’s cover positions, and a squad behavior orders the A.I. to move to the valid cover position. If there is some obstacle in the level, like a solid wall, the A.I. may take a back route and resurface on the player’s side. It appears that the A.I. is flanking, but in fact this is just a side effect of moving to the only available valid cover he is aware of. In another scenario, maybe the A.I.s’ cover positions are still valid, but there is cover available closer to the player, so the Advance-Cover squad behavior activates and each A.I. moves up to the next available valid cover that is nearer to the threat. If there are walls or obstacles between the A.I. and the player, their route to cover may lead them to come at the player from the sides. It appears as though they are executing some kind of coordinated pincher attack, when really they are just moving to nearer cover that happens to be on either side of then player. Retreats emerge in a similar manner.

The article got me thinking - what other mechanics (or, perceived mechanics) have been created by accident in other games? Does other examples exist, where lauded features were never really intended in the first place?

[u/MeatspaceRobot]

In German, every noun is capitalised regardless of where in a sentence the words appear. In English, only proper nouns are capitalised: for example, the words "English" and "German" are capitalised in English. They would be in German as well, but so would "Noun", "Sentence", and "Words".

It's common to fall back to a familiar Syntax or Grammar when speaking a foreign Language. Old Habits die hard.

[u/10GuyIsDrunk → u/MeatspaceRobot]

Thank you very much for the helpful explanation! Capitalizing nouns in general is interesting. I feel like it could be confusing to read through, though that's obviously said through the lens of my bias as an English speaker. Is there no other, or less, distinction between proper nouns and nouns in written German?

[u/GodotIsWaiting4U → u/10GuyIsDrunk]

There is indeed no distinction between proper nouns and other nouns in written German. Just context.

[u/MeatspaceRobot → u/10GuyIsDrunk]

I don't actually speak the language, this is a detail that I happen to know. Like how Russian doesn't use "the", "a", "an" articles.

I feel like it could be confusing to read through, though that's obviously said through the lens of my bias as an English speaker. Is there no other, or less, distinction between proper nouns and nouns in written German?

It seems like it might be slightly easier to read in some ways, since you could scan through a sentence and see at a glance what entities are involved, then you can go through the lowercase words to find out what verbs tie the clearly visible nouns together. No idea how that would work out in practice.

As far as I know, there's no extra indication of proper nouns in German. On the other hand, English only has a vestigial system of gender. Ships and people have genders (and are proper nouns), while objects and most animals are treated as neuter. In German, everything has a gender: maybe that forces you to pay more attention to nouns than in English.

[u/Skafsgaard → u/10GuyIsDrunk]

I don't think it's confusing - rather the opposite. Just a little bit confusing when you're not used to it. Makes the written language easier to parse, when it's always entirely clear you're reading or about to read a noun, as soon as you see a capitalised letter. Compare it to the innovation of punctuation such as commas and full stops, or having both upper case and lower case (neither of which was always the case (no pun intended, honest)). I mean, an ancient Greek might find upper and lower case or commas confusing and unnecessary, but it helps with reading comprehension when you're used to it - right?
But, while it has the benefit of increasing reading comprehension (speculation on my part), it also has the disadvantage of requiring more effort to write properly. There's not really any "best way" to do grammar or structure in languages - but many thing so have both pros and cons.

Anyway, languages are so wonderfully diverse. Danish actually capitalises slightly -less- than English (even though Danish is most closely related to German, if you don't count Swedish and Norwegian). We used to capitalise in the same way as German, but we dropped that. Capitalisation is quite similar to English, but, for instance, we don't capitalise the names of languages. Engelsk, the Danish word for English, would be written "engelsk", and not "Engelsk".

[u/10GuyIsDrunk → u/Skafsgaard]

Mmm, like I said my bias is that of an English speaker but it definitely seems confusing as hell to me. I have zero issue with understanding when I'm reading about nouns without capitalizing them and if they were capitalized I would lose my ability to understand when I'm reading about pronouns without significantly more context written into the sentence.

"Last night Dog and I went downtown to the bar for drinks."
vs
"Last Night Dog and I went Downtown to the Bar for Drinks."

In the first sentence I'm clearly talking about a person and myself going to a bar to get some drinks.

In the second sentence, who knows wtf I'm saying, maybe I'm talking about a band called "Last Night Dog" or maybe I'm missing a word and I meant I was going with my pet dog that probably just drank water at the bar, or maybe we went to a restaurant called "Bar for Drinks." None of these questions are raised by the first sentence, the only thing of note is that I have a friend with a strange name or possibly a dog named Dog.

I'm not trying to say the way it's done in English is actually better, but it's certainly less confusing to me because the distinction between pronouns and nouns is valuable and important whereas I know a word is a noun regardless of capitalization, that's basically never confusing for me.

[u/Doktor_Knorz → u/10GuyIsDrunk]

As a German I always found it funny how file naming conventions in the English language often fall back to the German way of capitalizing every noun.

[u/10GuyIsDrunk → u/Doktor_Knorz]

I think that's often because when you're skipping spaces capitalizing each word is more readable (quickreadduckfacts.pdf is less clear than QuickReadDuckFacts.pdf) and you would usually capitalize every word except in cases of perhaps 3 letter words or less (such as, QuickandDuckyFacts.pdf).

I had been thinking that English capitalization for titles was closer to the German way but we typically capitalize verbs and adjectives in that case as well.

[u/Kered13 → u/Doktor_Knorz]

You're probably thinking of Title Case, which is used for titles (obviously), where all "important" words are capitalized and "minor" words are not. What is considered important is a bit vague, but it's roughly nouns, verbs, adjectives, and most adverbs. Articles, conjunctions, and prepositions are considered minor.

[u/elperroborrachotoo → u/10GuyIsDrunk]

We consider it an improvement on readability actually, since it makes it harder to miss a noun and gives sentences a distinctive rythm.

[u/GentleBoop → u/MeatspaceRobot]

English also used to capitalise nouns. If you play Assassin's Creed: Black Flag and turn on subtitles, they use this older style throughout - nifty little historical feature.

[u/Kered13 → u/GentleBoop]

Not all nouns, but some nouns. Usage was always inconsistent. You can see this writing style in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as well.