Game of Design

Magic: the Gathering is a great pastime of mine that deserves special recognition because it is probably the most designed game on the planet. The amount of design and development focus that’s gone into the last 10+ years of the game is unparalleled, and it shows in the thousands of cards. A couple of weekends ago I was lucky enough to be invited to my friend’s Magic Rotisserie cube draft, complete, of course, with Rotisserie chicken. The cube was based on the Lowryn block, built with my friend’s favorite cards from the 2 sets. The whole thing took something like 9 hours (4 to draft, 5 to play), and we only drafted the first 30 cards/deck. After the first 10, we had to start picking 2 because it was taking so long. But sooooo much fun. The power level was awesome and it was really interesting how you knew the decks you competing against and adjusted your draft to beat those. I think the best thing about the format was how it brought deck building skill directly into drafting. Highly recommended (if you’ve got the time). Those first picks were agonizing!

For those of you curious, here’s the pick list and final results:

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There was a great article on gamasutra by Lorenzo Wang highlighting some recent lessons from science studies about happiness. It’s worth the read. A lot of these made intuitive sense, which is always nice, and his applications are great, but I found it hard to track all of them together, so I’ll list them here:

1. Happiness is relative.
2. People suck at predicting their future enjoyment.
3. People rationalize their happiness.
4. Feeling in control is a significant predictor of happiness.
5. Happiness is a perspective.

No deep analysis tonight, but most interesting to me is that while these seem simply exploitable, this means it could be a starting point for new games that focus on maximizing people’s happiness.

(I’ve been out of town for a bit, but a couple of weeks ago I discussed some of the initial PR around Valve’s upcoming co-op shooter. I’m going to turn this into a series discussing what I’ve learned about procedural storytelling, hopefully an area of interested and one of my passions and areas of game research.  I’ve unfortunately had little luck finding many experts in this field, so much of my work has relied on science techniques, trial and error, and analysis.  Forgive me if these thoughts are stale and don’t hesitate to point me in an stronger direction.)

This week, I saw this interview with Doug Lombardi:

“A lot of co-op games become very predictable and static after the first or second time you play through it. The AI Director is generating the population dynamically each time you play through the game. It’s also sort of monitoring your success rate and scaling the difficulty, based on if you’re doing well or if doing badly it’ll turn up or turn down, sort of, the action. And it’s also looking at pacing, which is something we found to very important in the creation of the Half-Life games. Trying to avoid too much combat and making the player feel sort of battle fatigued, if you will. Where they need to put the game down, instead we’re trying to schedule those breaks in the game… keep the game dynamically tailoring to the player’s experience whether it’s that difficulty setting, the battle fatigue and scheduling the pacing, etc.”

And I thought the AI Director was a great idea before! 2 thoughts: One, kudos to Valve for actually finding a way to do this. I’ve got a number of friends of there and it’s neat to see them working on this stuff. I’ve found procedural pacing control is still in it’s infancy, and in my experience most developers aren’t willing to take this kind of risk. Second, pacing is a word I haven’t heard in PR before. Why are they using a word associated with storytelling when story doesn’t seem to be the goal at all?  On some level, Valve wants to control the entire player’s flow through the experience, something that very few non-competitive games have done.  I have to admit my surprise to see this coming from the co-op multiplayer sphere rather then the single player realms that I have been focused on, but on reflection it makes sense. Why? I haven’t played Left 4 Dead yet, but to answer that I’ll have to compare it with the last comparable situation I can think of: Diablo 2.

In Diablo 2, a game designed for team play, there was a main game and then a replaying game.  In the runs through the main game, the experience was deliberately planned out, just as most single player games are. Even though it used dynamic spawning, it carefully followed the “easy-easy-hard” difficulty model to create dramatic arcs within the game and give the game a controlled pace and a tense experience. Co-op play increased the challenge a fixed amount, keeping the overall challenge static.  But once players had beaten the main game, they would continue playing by teleporting around and replaying the areas that would give them the best rewards, the “replaying game”. Since the fixed challenge throughout the main game is now too easy, the replaying game flow is designed to become player-controlled to accommodate the array of co-op team skills and character levels, despite leading to “farming” and losing all sense of story.And it was mighty fun! In fact, just like with World of Warcraft today, many fans don’t believe Diablo 2 really starts until you have beaten the main game. Diablo 2 showed that  variety, challenge, and pacing in the main game were not just the basic components of its narrative experience but key components of the game’s replayability, even after the designed narrative experience functionally ended. Players deliberately manipulated challenge, variety, and pacing to maximizing their performance, even at the expense of crafting dramatic arcs. Players, to wit, seem to prefer mechanically rewards, ie leveling up, rather then narrative rewards, but there are manipulatable controls that link the two.

This is significant because it shows a mechanic experiential benefit for storytelling beyond story, a game-y justification that players and designers are already engaged in. Diablo 2 players were taking control over challenge, variety, and pace. In a sense, these players were also creating their own player narrative alongside their maximally fun experience.  It was just a narrative the designers had to let go.  So if we choose to maintain these components it should keep the game replayable and cooperative and could also through a stronger narrative into the mix!  Left 4 Dead sounds like it’s taking a stab at this by addressing the following direct corollaries:

1. Players are bad at forming dramatic arcs in their play, so we should create the structure of them for the player.

2. Players will happily do things that destroy dramatic arcs, so we should not reward them for doing so.

And we are back to Doug Lombardi.  These goals both depend on pacing control.  Game structure is heavily based on controlled pacing - in that it requires some control over sequencing.  Rewards are directly linked to pacing, as seen in the psychological study of reward schedules.

Left 4 Dead appears to be tackling these goals using what I call “Encounter Scheduling”. On one hand, they are tracking the schedule of the players, their current narrative arc, and attempting to manage that using different numbers and difficulties of enemy spawns.  While the narrative here is probably quite primitive, it accomplishes the main goals, namely, building a cohesive line of play for the players, and providing challenge, variety, and likely tension as well.  In my research, I’ve found the narrative limitations here appear to be actually limitations of the game mechanics themselves, not the narrative form, and if the player has bought into the game this style feels quite comfortable.  Multiplayer deathmatches are a good example of similar simple narrative arcs and flows, bounded by their inherent mechanical depth.

Additionally, Left 4 Dead seems to eschew the traditional mechanics that break narrative flow, and consequently co-op replayability.  Level grinding seems absent, for example, as well as (hopefully) backtracking through “cleared” rooms to pick up items and player-created lulls caused by confusion or unfortunate design that suck the air out of most combat games. In the trailers, the game seems to constantly push you forward, encouraging you to engage with the narrative and the game mechanics it intertwines rather then “game” the story.

Narrative and the game mechanics it intertwines.  This startling statement is why I think we find the idea of procedural storytelling so compelling, why I think is likely to become a major component of future game designs and game art, and why I think Left 4 Dead could be so significant.

It’s worth pointing out that this doesn’t seem to be dynamic difficulty as we traditionally understand it, contrary to the press interview, and it brings with it a fair amount of innovation risk, so I’ll make this my starting point next time.  If the difficulty, a function of challenge over pace, is automatically being controlled by the procedural narrative, the “Encounter Manager”, what what satisfaction of accomplishment is ultimately being earned by the player?

guyal brings up a good point in the comments.  Humans seem much more likely to ascribe connections to things on a macro level then a micro level.  In my generated story research, it’s actually proven critical.  Without this trick, this logical leap of the brain, procedural content because much harder to tie together, because the AI has to determine intent on it’s own and then communicate it to the player as well.  It’s easier if people just make intent up themselves, guided by common cultural clues.  Try laying a few randomly chosen game events next to each other and to see the connections and stories people will create.  In an interesting twist, I recall even the chapters of Don Quixote were designed to be read in any order and form an interesting plot, as was the style at the time.

I can’t find an online reference so correct me if I’m wrong.  But my search did turn up these thoughts on some of the rules of story and how to apply them to procedural storytelling.  I get so excited about this stuff.  I’ve researched and used some of these rules, but this covers a broader level of detail then seems necessary in most games, filling in too many details you could say.  But the key here is that there are rules behind stories, and rules are things we can program.  We just could use more precise rules then Mr. Simakov presents here.

The Queen of Interactive Fiction Emily Short posted some great writing tips over on her blogs.  I find IF construction fascinating, and their insights on the genre unique (as seen in Emily’s review of Portal).  Inform 7 is a great training tool if you’re an aspiring game writer, at least as a start.  The games are easy to explore too, and quite exciting and groundbreaking, a must if you haven’t tried them recently and you’ve got a few free hours.

This interview with Valve’s Doug Lombardi highlights Left 4 Dead’s AI Director, which I hadn’t heard of. Dynamic spawning is the first step towards the procedural storytelling I’ve been working on for the last couple of years. Finally some of this stuff is getting published.

Yes, dynamic procedural storytelling might ultimately never work. But, if you’ve played a pen and paper RPG you know it probably can. I’ve run these ideas through enough projects and models to feel it’s one of the next big story game revolutions, and these kinds of interviews get me all excited.

I know, I should write about it. Give me some time.

I’m in a defining mood this year, apparently.

For a long time I’ve thought there were two kinds of games, and they were approached in construction two completely different ways. Mechanics games are the mechanics driven, repeatable, shorter games, like Poker and Tetris, that derive their design from some new concepts. They are easy to spot - their PR tends to focus on these exciting new interactions. Story games are driven by their flavor. They are experience based, have a narrative arc and an ending, tend to steal their mechanics from mechanics games and polish them up. Their PR tends to focus on their characters and setting. Pretty much every big game you’ve ever heard of - Grand Theft Auto, Halo, World of Warcraft, Axis and Allies - is a story game. For a long time, I’ve thought this distinction was useful for the same reason that the PR is different - it helps you identify where you have to focus and what you have to succeed with.

But as time has gone on, this distinction has become less and less, well distinctive. It seems like the biggest distinguishing factor is no longer story or gameplay, it’s money. If your budget is over $500,000, you’re probably a story game. Portal by all rights should have been a mechanics game. It wasn’t. The prequel Narbacular Drop was. Portal was the polished up, story driven version, and it was awesome. We all loves us some story games. But we in the video game industry have lost something that still drives the majority of the market today. People love their simplicity, their mechanics exploration, and their replayability as well. Puzzle Quest, Bejeweled, and Solitaire are popular for a reason too. In a sense, story games are trying to transcend the medium, but in the process we can lose sight of where we started.

But we’re getting better. The key decision point I watch is when that “The End” screen disappears and we’re back at the main menu. If we’ve done our jobs well, story and mechanics together, players will pick “New Game” again every time. The ritual that has defined games for thousands of years.

Update: This blog reminded me of Soren’s Smart vs. Adversarial AI, and how it ties back into these concepts.  I’m thinking his Smart/Fun is directly tied to story games and Adversarial/Good is tied to mechanics games.  This model shifts most multiplayer games into the mechanics genres, which I think is all right.  Look at multiplayer game advertising.