Game of Design

With apologies to Rod Humble and Charles Joseph, I’m believing differently.  Mechanics have meaning because of their flavor, not in spite of it.  Much the same as in mathematics or the sciences, your tests and data only mean something when put in context of a hypothesis.  The stock market only matters because it’s tied to company well-being.

This doesn’t mean mechanics shouldn’t represent their flavor well.  Clearly, the stock market wouldn’t be useful if it utilized the U.S. terror color chart, or even a company leaderboard.  In fact, and maybe more importantly, this goes both ways.  Mechanics provide meaning to flavor just as flavor provides meaning to mechanics.

Is finding the connection between the two where game design stops being a science and becomes an art?

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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(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?

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.

(If you missed it) - a survey of the Top 10 most popular emotions while playing games. Fantastic work Chris. I had a lot of trouble understanding Bliss. I thought I got it, but realized later that I was really thinking of Contentment. I wonder where I experience Bliss over Contentment, if at all?

I can tell you I didn’t experience many of these emotions playing Devil May Cry 4 over the weekend. I got a whole different suite - Frustration, Anger, Bemusement, Boredom, and Sadness. Apparently not for me. Is there a survey of most common negative emotions somewhere as well?

So, after visiting “or” in Game Grammer last week, I’ve become more convinced “or” exists. There are lots of games that are complete enough and encompassing enough to be considered “or”s. World of Warcraft is a good example. It’s hard to argue that raiding and social play is not a fundamental part of the game, if not more fundamental then the leveling. But I’m still not clear on the value added.

In the most common cases, “or”s seem to add variation, very similarly to “with”s. The main difference is that “with”s are subtler and more optional - “or”s represent a broadening of the variation grey area next to “with”s. Many of these “or”s are not optional if you want to have the presented game experience, and they have the production and polish to show for that. But because there is limited focus in most products and they are not optional (World of Warcraft excluded), they seem to drag the overall quality of the game down. e.g. if you have both required combat and required vehicle levels in your game, both of them have to be easy and accessible enough that every potential player can complete them to continue. This is one of the reasons I think puzzle games may have struggled so much - puzzle games essentially are a sequence of “or” games strung together because the puzzles rarely build on learned skills over demanding new ones.

So what’s the lesson here? Be very careful adding “or”s to your game. If you can, find a way to tie them into the core game mechanically (”and”s) or make them optional (”with”s). If you can’t, recognize you’ve bitten the bullet and consider dumbing down at least one of your “or”s so that it’s not a barrier to entry and is easy to polish. And try again to tie it mechanically back into your main “core”, even if it’s just score or money. If you don’t try something early, you might find yourself dumbing all of your “or”s down instead of all but one.

Hi, my name is Exploration. People love me, but I can’t seem to find my mechanics. Can you help me?

Leave no stone unturned!

Chris Hecker coined a comparison at GDC 2008 this year, what I call Simple, Tricky, and Wicked problems.  In a similar vein I’ve coined a comparison of my own: good and bad problems.  Just as some problems are easy or hard to solve, some problems are important to solve and some aren’t.  Or rather, some problems are worth solving and some aren’t.  It was worth solving “rewinding gameplay” for Prince of Persia because it significantly improved the game.  Strict design control of hundreds of characters is a bad problem. Bad problems aren’t bad design decisions, necessarily. Rather, they are production problems that can led to more work then the problem is worth to the game.  AI Engineers run into this all the time, because a lot of AI work is concentrated on it just not looking bad.  As a team member, being able to identify where coming at a bad problem sideways or avoiding it all together is a valuable learned skill.  The more you can look at a design and identify the good problems to solve - the problems where you get a huge audience payoff vs. the problems that no one will notice the effort - the better your product will be.  I claim exponentially better.

I’ve long theorized about the existence of primary, secondary, and tertiary gameplay. Primary gameplay is the core of the game, secondary is mechanics that provide variation to keep the game from getting boring, and tertiary are mini-games, games that are complete within themselves but operate independently from the primary gameplay. And I’ve also theorized that you should only have one core set of mechanics as your primary gameplay, rather then two or three.

One silly way to think about this is with a game grammer of “ands” and “withs”. For example, Halo’s is “Shooting combat and vehicles”, because vehicles are an integrated part of the whole experience, and thus mechanically part of the primary gameplay whole. Grand Theft Auto is “Driving with Shooting”, because the shooting is largely not integrated into the driving gameplay and serves to break up the core of the game. Or does it?

There is a problem with this singular primary gameplay approach. Some games may be “ors”. “or”, in this context, symbolizes 2 different kinds of primary gameplay, ones that are fundamentally not joined together, but are important enough to the depth and quality of the game that you can’t imagine the game without it. And even if you could, was having to do 2 completely different games simultaneously in the same game design space worth it? I’m not convinced, so I’ve constructed a (rough) list of where I think some game’s mechanics fall:

Ands

• Diablo - Class-based combat and other class-based combat and player cooperation with loot gambling
• Poker - Card Analysis and Bidding and Player Analysis
• Starcraft - Unit management and Economy management? (Tricky here because the strong shared mechanic is time, invisibly. Should this be the “or” that disproves the rule?)

Withs

• World of Warcraft, MMOs - Skill-economy combat with market economy and with social clubs
• Ratchet and Clank - Shooting Combat with weapon market and with environment traversal
• Final Fantasy - Action Selection Combat with Character advancement
• God of War - Button Timing Combat with traversal

Ors

• Uncharted, Tomb Raider - Environment traversal or Combat or “Puzzle” solving
• Grand Theft Auto - Driving or Shooting?
• Mass Effect - Shooting Combat and Skill-economy combat or Dialogue Selection

So, there are some games that I can’t realistically call “ands”. There just isn’t a strong enough cross-integration of the core mechanics across the different game mechanics to justify it. But is it a good thing? How does one decide whether one should add “ands” or “ors” when starting from scratch? My gut says you always want “ands”, and to take it one step further, “ors” weaken both sides of the equation (mechanically and experientially). But I think I might be wrong. Is there a way to plan 2 seperate forms of core gameplay? Is it even black and white? How does the “or” strengthens it’s part?

I got a cabin with some friends and went snowboarding over the weekend, and in the evening I had the interesting opportunity to do some gaming with a large group of 10. We grabbed a deck of cards and started playing the game of design. Read on to see how we had more fun then Scattergories!

10 is a really interesting number of players with cards. Your hands have to 5 cards or less. 5 cards actually works really well, because there are 2 cards left over to work with, and there are a number of interesting win conditions possible with 4 or 5 cards from poker. But it’s also bad because losing a player puts you at 9 players, creating 7 left-over cards and a very awkward situation. Practically, any good game should scale up or down a bit, so this proved a challenge, but made it feel like virgin design space.

• First, we tried a “reverse” draft mechanic. With a hand of 5, we passed a card to our right repeatedly, and the first to get a straight flush hand won. The 2 extra cards were public and considered part of everyone’s hand. People really liked the draft mechanic, the luck involved in winning (ie anybody could win at any time), and the speed of the game, which took about 5 minutes. 5 minutes is awesome. All the other card games were jealous. But I was concerned because there really wasn’t much skill because there was so little information available about other players. You could be able to get very good at this game, but it was hard. We tried different methods of reversing the draft direction to help - but reversing was too confusing and slow, and didn’t really give enough information anyways. The game was too fast!
• So suggestions started coming in from the group and the first was to get their greedy hands on those 2 cards in the middle of the table. Swapped for a card from their hand, in fact, at any time. This turned the game more into a variation of Spit then draft. While you could theoretically still pass cards, everyone was way more focused on watching the cards on the table. The kinetics of it was very exciting, games were still fast, and there was more yelling and cries of “cheater!” then I’d heard in a month. I had to step in a couple of times and stop the game tell things were sorted out. But… People disliked how competitive it was and how speed rather then thought was emphasized. Honestly, it felt like being back in high school, and might have appealed more to that crowd. But we’re not in high school, so, moving on.
• But at least with Spit-variant you had a sense of what cards people needed. You couldn’t do much with it, but it was progress. So we tried taking out the real time aspect and doing it in turns. It didn’t work - going around the table took a lot of turns and swaps, and couldn’t the game slowed down tremendously. We dropped down to 9 at this point, which led to a “mystery deck” of that players hand that people could swap with instead of with a face up card. But while I knew what peope were trying to get now, the game was still to slow, and I wasn’t interacting with them again. Essentially, to fix this we were headed to 9 player go-fish. So we called it a night. We played for about 2 hours.

Takeaways:

• Evolving games can be more fun then the game itself! People love to be designers. Even though I wouldn’t call any of the above a great game, everyone still seemed to have a real blast, because people were simulataneouly playing the larger game design game.
• We had some good ground rules: Have an arbitrator, majority votes, try only 1 or 2 rules changes at a time, keep the games short, and yes/no vote on the rules changes after each game. No idea was bad, so if there was only 1 idea on the table, then the doubters just sat through the short trial run. Don’t be afraid of major design space changes. Non-designers will yank your game around, but they get excited about it. The Spit game above wasn’t where we wanted to go, but it was a fun break from the pace of draft.

So, what would I have done next? I think I came away with 3 games that I would have liked to try:

• Go-fish variant: Hands of 5, on each turn player asks for a suit rather then a specific card. Everyone else puts down a card face-up, of that suit if they have it. The asker may then swap a card from their hand with any player’s face-up card. The asker then puts a card down on the table as well (any card). Then all players pass the card on the table to the right. First to 4 of a kind or maybe straight flush wins. 2 extra cards are shared. Ways to interact with the entire table, and less hidden information. But the play flow could be an issue. Would scale to larger hands well.
• True Draft variant: Pass around hands of 5. Each player picks 1 and places it on the table, every other card face down. Then they pass the rest of the hand to the right. Player with best poker hand wins. 2 cards in the middle are shared. Probably would do rounds and assign 3/2/1 points for 1st/2nd/3rd. First to 5 points wins. Draft is lots of fun, and this is as straight a conversion of that as I can think of.
• “Reverse” Draft variant: I’d like to try the first game from above again, but each player would have 2 cards face up on the table at all times that they are not passing. That should help solve the hidden information problem, and let the draft card swaps provide the desired interaction.

I’d definitely do this again. It was a lot of fun and I think opened my friend’s eyes a bit towards what I do for a living.