Game of Design

There’s been a number of stories lately on how scary robots look on the inside.  Reporters keep pointing out how if you take the skin off a robot it doesn’t look so cute and reassuring any more, so those feelings of tenderness and empathy must be fake.  See NPR’s Morning Edition this morning about the seal Paro.  This strikes me as odd.  If we took the flesh off a human, we wouldn’t call the bones cute and cuddly.  We’d be kinda freaked out.  I’ll bet you were just freaked out by me mentioning it.  Why should it be any different for anything else we feel is alive?  Doesn’t that make robots more alive, not less alive?

Ah, adaptive difficulty. Nothing makes designers happier, and players angrier, then a game that scales to meet exactly the player’s needs. And it’s a natural benefit (or curse) in procedural storytelling. Players just don’t want to hear that the game is gaming them back. They don’t want to be reminded that a computer is pulling the strings, outsmarting them in a sense, even if it is “for their own good”. At least when a designer lays out the level it’s a human doing it! This is a tough problem, but I think you can approach it 2 ways. Either you approach it as an AI problem (yes, the computer is better then you), or you approach it as a perception problem (this is just how the game was made).

I prefer the latter, but it’s not exactly the same, and it requires a few tweaks. The same kind of tweaks you’ll find in “bad” AI. I think the key is to make the difficulty laggy, like it’s reacting in “real” time as opposed to instantly. In practice, this is good anyways, because in procedural space we’re dealing with discrete fixed difficulty blocks anyways, “encounters”. What this means is that the player can always be “better” then the system. And it can clobber them for getting sloppy, for a little while. I think it also helps to have “tiers” if you’re in an RPG space, an area where the player knows the difficulty ranges between here and there relative to their own level. Consider Diablo 2’s Acts as an example. This has the effect of the player telling the designer what difficulty they want to be challenged at. The more ways you can do this, the better. Just don’t take it to the level where the AI responds immediately. The World Ends With You dynamic leveling setting is brilliant at this - to the point that it’s not really adaptive difficulty at all.

And of course, that’s always the final option. You don’t really need adaptive difficulty based on player intent to do procedural storytelling. You could progress the difficulty based on time passed, or the meta-arc, or the stage in the current story arc. In fact, you absolutely should progress it based on the micro story arc, because this contributes to the story’s tension and builds to a climax. But that will be my next topic.

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.

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.

I was going to start a page to compile some of the specialized Starcraft knowledge I’ve learned over the years, stuff that missed on the outdated battle.net page.  Unfortunately the wordpress.com software doesn’t seem to support linked page as well as say, google sites or a traditional wiki.  Does anyone have a recommendation on some way I could integrate this as a subpage into my blog?  Or a site that’s already doing this that I could contribute to?

Freerice.com is an interesting game, particularly in light of me highlighting Questionaut before. Not because Freerice is for charity (I have no confirmation whether it is real or not), but as an example of how taking a rather banal but important skill, studying vocabulary, and making it fun. A broad challenge set tailored to each player, a satisfying reward, simple presentation with direct usability, fast replayability, and a game with multiple skill dimensions (related words and good guessing skills really help!) make this game stand out again. We had quite a good time playing co-op too. What more can you ask?

This is officially my first post, so I wanted to lay out expectations and what not.

I’ve been blogging on Facebook for quite some time now, and several of my friends and co-workers have convinced me to go public. I intend to continue writing in the same idea-meet-head dashy style that I employed over there, and I’ll be RSS feeding this onto my Facebook Notes so that my old followers out there won’t miss out. As this site develops, expect the unexpected. I’ve still got a lot of toys to play with, and I’m open to suggestions on blog names as well. This was just the best of the quick list.

As you can probably see, there are actually posts before this one. I’ve ported over some of the highlights of my previous Notes to kick this site off. Thanks for visiting, and don’t hesitate to join in the discussion.