Game of Design

I referred to mechanics that work against their flavor. One on my mind: Players view player death as “the end”. Designers use player death to mean “try again”.

This creates a conflict, particularly for new players who haven’t seen it before. I believe this is a core reason why so many players hate death, and we see most “quitters” after death. Here’s a quote from my friend Wyatt watching new players die playing World of Warcraft several years ago:

“Most players didn’t realize that when they were a ghost they had to go back to their body. A lot of players upon turning into a ghost go off wandering and end up very far from their body. Often when somebody tells the player they have to get back to their body to resurrect or get back to a Spirit Healer, that’s when the player decides it’s easier to just quit.”

Games are reexamining this paradigm.  Scanning my shelves, the new Prince of Persia stands out. The narrative of the Prince telling a story and the voice over when you die saying “That’s not how it happened” implies that you made a mistake, but it can be repaired.  Bioshock and Pokemon do a good job of taking this approach as well.

The other approach I can think of is to try removing death altogether and replacing it with a better paradigm.  In a lot of ways, we have death because we have health and it’s analogs.  That seems a lot harder, but it may just be because we haven’t found a better metaphor for “try again”.  If I wanted to get someone to try something again after they made a mistake, I’d put them right in front of the problem again, with no down time.  Lots of games do that too, and we’ve seen the benefits with higher sales and better impressions.  Portal comes to mind, but most First-Person shooters have gone in this direction.  The next question then is, how can we bring that approach to other genres, such as strategy games or role-playing games?  And can we take find a better “try again” narrative metaphor then death for FPSs?

I’ve been talking to and reading articles about parents who are complaining about gaming to much and ruining their kids. It’s an old problem, and after some thought I think it’s a hard problem - bad parenting. I’m definitely not a parenting expert, but let me explain why and what needs to change.

Parents I talk to who understand the games they’re kids play are universally less negative about them. They still think it’s proportionally too much, but they perceive value in them. The negative writing I see almost always starts with the presumption that games are inherently useless (comparable to drugs). I think the key to balancing kids lives is to get kids thinking about this value. They need to practice critical gaming.

Think about books, for comparison. I spent the whole weekend reading The Golden Compass trilogy, and I’d hardly call it a good use of 15 hours. Highly unproductive, non-responsive to other tasks, etc. I enjoyed it sure, but most parents think that’s better because I was reading, rather then being a slob. And why is reading important? Because critical thinking is important. We test for critical reading, to determine how smart people are. I think, we even test for critical gaming. Analytical problems. How to seat people at a table, stay within a budget, quickly solve problems, these are all critical gaming skills.

So I encourage parents to foster critical gaming skills. Just like you don’t want your kids reading junk fiction all the time, you push them out of their comfort zone. You talk and encourage them to read other related, more complicated texts. You ask them critical questions about the book. You ask them what they like and don’t like and what they would change. You get them to write.

All these things we can do with games, and we do do with games. In fact, the inherent analysis part of every game mechanic already encourages critical thinking. If we just teach critical thinking as we do for books (or movies, or news, et all), we can work with kids to expand their horizons and be their best.