Our series on REMA continues.  We’ve looked at the Rollercoaster games, next up: Experiment games!  The most complex and messiest of games.  The most random and yet most interactive of games.  Onward!

Recall Experiment mode is the second phase of any learning process.  When in Experiment mode, we ask ourselves: “Now that I know what tools I have, what can I do?” “What can I achieve?”  It is the mode of over-enthusiastic scientists, the mode of explorers, the mode of game dynamics.  The mode for players who want to discover the systems that craft themselves from the game mechanics they’ve learned.

Experiment games are games that emphasize Experiment mode.  Experiment games are about exploring systems through choice.  They are the “Or” games.  I can do this or that.  Where there’s no one best option, but there are lots of interesting options.  They are the games in Sid Meier’s “A series of interesting choices” game definition.  The games for Johnny (of Mark Rosewater’s Magic: The Gathering psychographic profiles*).  This is not your polished, trimmed mega-hit.  This is the home of the mechanically behemoths, giant inventories, and open worlds of gaming.  The Experiment designer’s primary role is to provide interesting tools and systems that create predictable results.

Civilization, The Sims, SimCity are the granddaddys of this genre.  But the first was possibly Dungeons & Dragons (1st & 2nd editions), which had simulation at its core (see their rules breadth and what they publish as supplements).  For other examples, consider X-Com, which asks  ”Anything could be out there, how are you going to deal with it?”  Or Minecraft – where the core Experiment play is not the simulation per say but what you can do with it.  Or Dwarf Fortress and Animal Crossing – Experiment games that present worlds of gameplay options instead of simulation.  Experiment games are also the true home of emergent and open world games like Skyrim, Deus Ex, Bioshock, and Grand Theft Auto 3, which have long struggled with their Rollercoaster roots.  All Experiment games share a common heritage of play.  Experiment games are the home of choices, and encompass system investigation and the surprise of discovery.  Thus, it is the genre of games closest to toys, and much of its design springs from the same place, if for an older audience.

Man, I love me some Experiment games.  Ahem.  Experiment games are driven by their rules.  They are the gamiest of games and the most computational of games.  They craft elegant simulacrum out of rules.  They think about the real world.  They ask “What if?” with interaction.  And man, compared to other games, are they strange.

Experiment play has evolved Experiment games to share certain traits:

1. High Number of Choices.  Experiment games are all about seeing what things do when they interact.  So you need a lot of things.
2. Emergent Choices.  And you get even exponentially more choices if you have the choices affect each other.
3. Interdependent Choices.  Even better, interconnecting choices together can create new choices and complex decisions.
4. Procedural.  And procedurally generating choices can create choices forever.  Mwhahahahahaha!
5. Long.  Seeing what happens with all these choices takes time.  Particularly when choices are dependent on earlier choices.
6. Yet Still Replayable.  Despite being Long, the large number of choices encourages players to start fresh several times.
7. Predictable Impacts.  Making frequent choices means rapidly understanding what they will do.  This becomes even more important when there are lots of choices interacting at the same time.
8. Digital Choices.  Choices with discrete states like [on/off] or [0...10] (as opposed to analog choices like aiming or free moving) have outcomes that are much easier to predict, follow, and replicate.
9. Low Consequences.  Likewise, low consequence (and thus low challenge) let players explore their options freely and repeatedly.  Not to mention, if there are only a few relevant choices, well, it wouldn’t take long to figure out the best ones, would it?
10. Time to Think.  Low challenge digital choices mans few physical challenges (things like click speed or reaction speed).  Plus, giving you time to consider all the magnificent ramifications of your options before you select one creates the illusion of even more choices.
11. Mystery.  Even though clear immediate choices with low consequence are desirable, Experiment games want to preserve a sense of long-term mystery.  Otherwise, the right choices would be obvious, so why would you even bother experimenting?
12. Randomness.  Experiment games also use the most randomness, because randomness makes picking the same choice twice more interesting.  Randomness is also very useful in building interconnected choices, maintaining mystery, and making choices and simulations seem more varied.
13. System Driven.  Experiment games, being choice-driven, are about systems first, not content.  This means they are built in a completely different way, relying primarily on top notch design rather then polished art, sound, and other data.  Experiment development teams are much smaller then the modern Rollercoaster teams and use different production techniques.
14. System State Ending.  Being system driven, the end of an Experiment game is defined by reaching a specific rules state, not reaching the end of a content flow.
15. Varied, Internal Success.  Accomplishments in Experiment games are defined by reaching rules goals.  Most of the time players are involved in choosing their own end state, rather then the designer.  Sometimes the systems suggest an obvious end (such as “other players are eliminated”).  Other times, winning is not defined or is defined outside the main game and often ignored.  Have you “won” Minecraft?
16. One Large Place:  Because of the large number of interconnected choices, Experiment games fold in on themselves, repeating interactions in same space.  Thus, instead of a journey, Experiment games are like sandboxes – self-contained worlds that you traverse many times.
17. Mixed Narrative:  Experiment games are so simulation-oriented and player-driven they are not usually a good fit for narrative messaging.  Plus, it is difficult for designers to craft a narrative that occurs during play.  Some messages can be embedded in the content (usually in the form of radios or overheard dialog), but these are often undermined by the stronger messages embedded in the systems themselves, which take time and expertise to decipher.  Experiment games also often form the seeds of Player-defined Narrative, which ties them closely to the Artistic mode of play.

Of these, High Number of Choices, Emergent Choices, Procedural, Time to Think, Randomness, Varied, Internal Success, and One Large Place are all unique to Experiment games, and the others differ from either Rollercoaster or Mastery games (Experiment’s REMA neighbors).  These game traits create inflection points in a game’s design – forcing the modes apart.  As a designer, adding one mode’s traits will naturally push you to add more and more of that mode’s traits.  If you have large amounts of randomness in your design, you’ll find your players pushing other Experiment traits on you, because your players are playing your game in Experiment mode, and they want to stay there.

Experiment designers are often systems designers.  While setting and world building are important to some Experiment games, most thrive off their choices.  The expert Experiment designer can create systems that emulate a fantasy, abstracting away the perfect amount of detail while immersing the player in that world.  The expert Experiment designer creates systems that inspire the imagination, and can get players to exploring every nuance.  And the expert Experiment designer creates deep meaning out of these nuances, as they players come to truly understand what these systems say about the world.

Commercially, Experiment games have been middle-of-the-road between Rollercoaster and Mastery games.  Experiment games require more comprehension from the player then Rollercoaster games, which might explain their lower quantity and lower popularity.  However, the breakout hits of the Experiment genre have also been huge hits.  Players love playing with reality.  ”What can I do?” can seizes the imagination in ways no other genre can.  Plus, a good Experiment game offers better value, often getting several plays and better avoiding the used bin.  Experiment games are notoriously hard to review, because they are so player experience defined.  The whole point of an Experiment game is your choices are your own.  In fact, it’s often easiest to review what they aren’t, rather then what they are.

I’ve found a few of the sub-genre offshoots within the Experiment genre, some of which dramatically push one tenet in its opposite direction as far as it can go:

• Simulations, highly interconnected choice spaces that emulate something specific,
• Real-time games that embrace rather then avoid the physical challenges like click speed,
• Permadeath games which have permanent death or limited total turns to encourage experimentation through fatal consequences (often with limited success), and
• Immersive games which strive to embed you in the game world itself, that create the illusion that you are actually there and that you have every choice a character of that world would have.

Immersive games have been in the news.  This subgenre inspires radical jealousy in Rollercoaster designers because it deeply engages players in avatars and settings, but the tension between Rollercoaster and Experiment games makes it very hard to achieve immersion outside of an Experiment context.

Halfway there.  Next:  the newly revived Mastery games!

* Mark Rosewater’s Timmy is, of course, the psychographic similar to the experience-driven Rollercoaster players, and Spike, as we’ll see, is a Mastery player.  Vorthos and Melvin are forms of Artistic players.

Batman: Arkham City on X360 by Rocksteady. Time Played: 14 hours.  Status: Finished.

1. An open world game doesn’t feel open world when loading screens happen every 5 seconds and the game crashes.  I don’t think it was worth it.
2. I am lost.  ”Landmarks are needed!”  A good introductory tour of the City could have done wonders.
3. The open world phases make the game muddle.  I much preferred the more linear rollercoaster stylings of the prequel.
4. Excellent neon signage.  Batman Forever eat your heart out.
5. The best swinging I can recall.  Spiderman has really established this gameplay style well.  The gliding took a lot of time to get used to, however.
6. The combat is still textbook awesome.  And the critical hit system (which rewards you for not button mashing) combines with the old combo system brilliantly.  Give that man a raise.
7. Mixed boss fights.  The Mr. Freeze fight (when you have a good stealth system, flaunt it!) and the Ra’s Al Ghul fight are both big standouts.  Most of the others fall short due to story placement rather then the fight itself.  Lesson: build your fights to fit the feelings, if you’re going to write your story ahead of time.
8. So many buttons and gadgets though, I struggle to know what I can use when.  Good thing Strike and Counter are so reliable.  A slower gadget intro rate would be my main request.
9. For their complicated controls, they still are masters at tutorialization.  Nicely layered test rooms and optional missions that train you in a specific move one at a time, spread over the first 10 hours.  Dedication.
10. And hint text every time you use a rare or contextual action, or they even guess that you might want to.  Fantastic.  The kind of AI no one notices, and yet is absolutely required.
11. So Many Villians!  No game other then Batman could even attempt it.  3 would have been plenty.  Villian introduction rate: 2 per hour.
12. Grungy.  Everything is so grungy.  The palette seems remarkably narrow.
13. Side quests and rapid pacing still don’t mix.
14. The Riddler’s secrets feel more like pedestrian hidden objects and achievements this go round.  My guess: the open world-ness makes it feel less like you’re “finishing” a room.
15. The Catwoman “Buy-or-Pay” model can’t shake the DLC feeling, no matter how many times they ask you to pay before you start the game.
16. What’s up with the ending?  A story collapse moment for me.

Batman: Arkham Asylum still stands out to me, but this game made me nicely nostalgic for it. (Disclaimer: I used to work for SquareEnix, the publisher, but have no connection with the work itself)

REMA wrap-up:

• Primarily a Rollercoaster game, with the player being driven forward by story and mission goals.  Plenty of classic Rollercoaster touches.
• Nice isolation of the various systems (stealth, combat) with clear delineations allows some manageable mode switching.
• However brief encounters, short-lived successes, inability to repeat encounters, and longer load times limits the opportunities for Experiment and Mastery in the main game.
• Some Experiment possible in the Combat system (lots of gadgets, XP for variation) and in the Stealth system (lots of options for takedowns, XP for variation).
• Primarily Mastery in the Challenge modes, outside the main game (start with same set up every time, global leaderboards, easily replayable).

The reason that I worry about the overly-narrative approach that today dominates the AAA game landscape is that players are almost entirely on rails, and you as a player mostly make only a few choices to surmount a fleeting intermediate little minigame obstacle (a given fight, in the midst of the plot).

It provides one sort of immersion — the one akin to what you get when you read a great book or watch a good movie. But to me games are not about having a story told to you, they are about forging your own path. A linear CGI movie with occasional puzzles to solve is a valid genre that I even enjoy, but it doesn’t provide me any authorial agency as a player, and would often work better as just a book or movie.

I recognize that this is just me and my player type though.

I agree with him:

• Immersion isn’t a core virtue of games (although I think it’s quite possibly a side effect of non-competitive flow, which is a core virtue of Rollercoaster and Experiment games).
• And immersion takes time, and games are expanding to shorter, bite-sized experiences.
• And games are changing, and fantasy is not a core virtue either.

But I find it hard to believe that much will change, because growth doesn’t necessarily imply loss.  Everything could just get bigger.  Strategy games made it through the fire fine, and horror games are still alive and well.  As tools have gotten better, these games have gotten easier and easier to make at lower budgets, and there’s no sign that won’t continue.  We can quite possibly have our immersive games and the rest of our cake too.

Ah, the Rollercoaster game.  The most controversial and most popular of all the game genres, and yet also the least played.  So much to discuss.

But first, I should be clear that Rollercoaster game is a bit of a misnomer.  It’s not that the game itself is a Rollercoaster, it’s that the design heavily encourages players to stay in Rollercoaster mode.  Rollercoaster mode, to refresh your memory, is the play stage where players are asking “Who am I?  What should I do?  What happens next?”.  It is the initial state of learning.  If you’ve ever tried to teach someone a board game, you’re intimately familiar with this stage.  It’s the first step of the process.  Rollercoaster games are about repeatedly asking and engaging this question.  Rollercoaster games most often do this by, well, making where you are seem shallow, and creating expectations of new things just ahead.  What else are you going to do but push ahead to the next room?

For a time, Rollercoaster games were what people thought of when they thought of video games.  Games that were driven by story, that had plots, that took you on fantasy adventures.  Zork was a Rollercoaster game.  So was Mario and Final Fantasy.  A Rollercoaster game is a journey.  They are “And then…” games.  Rollercoaster games guide you through play, giving you limited gameplay in any one space, but presenting lots of spaces, often sequentially.  They also tends to use a narrative to tie the spaces together.  For many players, this narrative is even the primary incentive to play, which is one of the reasons Rollercoaster games are the closest games to movies.

That said, Rollercoaster games are great games too.  Let there be no doubt.  Many of our greatest hits have been Rollercoaster games.  Zelda, Ico, Braid.  Doom, Halo, Call of Duty.  King’s Quest, Day of the Tentacle, and Uncharted.  The Rollercoaster games have been amazing.  They have driven forward real-time graphics, built mind-bending puzzles, and created fantastic worlds and characters.  They invite interpretation, and inspire classic storytelling emotions.

Rollercoaster games are also unique because they are first in the REMA learning chain.  All learning starts in Rollercoaster mode.  This makes the Rollercoaster mode the easiest to insert into games, such as in the missions in Grand Theft Auto.  Because they are the starting point of learning engagement, they are also the easiest to create, and thus have both the highest quality and the most diversity of games, in terms of dollars spent.  There are lots of Rollercoaster games.

The nature of the Rollercoaster journey has evolved them over the last 3 decades towards certain traits:

1. One Time Through:  Rollercoaster games tend to be beaten only once.  Wow, that’s unusual.  Historically unheard of.  But, once you’ve beaten a Rollercoaster game, the questions “What should I do?” and the Rollercoaster follow-up “Guess what happens next?” have been answered, and so players move on.
2. Long:  Since they’re played only once, to justify their cost Rollercoaster games take substantially longer to complete then other games.
3. High Clarity:  The enemy of “What should I do?” is player’s getting stuck.  If a player can’t figure out what to do next in Rollercoaster mode, they stop playing.  So Rollercoaster games have adopted high clarity tools – help and hint systems, tutorials, and simple 1-step mechanic tests are all used to help guide the player forward.
4. Low Challenge:  For the same reason, Rollercoaster games also have a conspicuous lack of challenge.  Since the experience is so short, and getting stuck is so high risk, every player should be able to succeed.  Everyone should be able to receive the complete experience, that so much hard work has gone into.  This has been one of the most obvious evolutions in Rollercoaster games over the past 3 decades.  Where once completing an Infocom game was nigh impossible, today every player is expected to be able to beat a Rollercoaster game or the designers have failed.
5. No Punishment:  The other enemy of “What should I do?” is players getting frustrated.  Thus, more then other modes, Rollercoaster games have driven punishment out of their systems.  For example, minor death penalties have become the norm, and in some games (such as Bioshock) players never even lose progress.  A low challenge bar and lack of punishment along with external motivating incentives is a prominent sign of a modern successful Rollercoaster game.
6. No Randomness:  Because Rollercoaster games are played once, and have short, one-time play experiences, Rollercoaster games don’t use large-scale randomness.  Any randomness is minimized to limited variations in “room-sized” situations.
7. Scripted:  Also, because each set of interactions is only beaten once, Rollercoaster games can be heavily scripted and controlled.  This is both cheaper and often results in a higher clarity Rollercoaster experience.  Rollercoaster games are often defined by how well they shape the player’s experience.
8. Multi-media:  This level of artistic control makes Rollercoaster games the easiest to incorporate other media into, especially sound, graphics, animation, and narrative.  It is no accident that Rollercoaster games have set the bar for games in these areas.
9. Direction:  Rollercoaster games have a path.  They travel.  That’s kind of weird, if you think about it.  A game where you travel is a historical anarchism.  Before computers, games never traveled.  Again, it’s a consequence of repeatedly asking the “What should I do?” and “What happens next?” questions.  Because they have direction, Rollercoaster games end up sharing a lot with linear media like books and movies which tell  ”And then…” over and over.
10. Content-Driven:  Of course, the emphasis on travel and sound and art means that modern Rollercoaster games are very content driven.  They tend to have large teams with lots of skills that spend most of their time making new spaces for players.  When those spaces run out, the game is over.
11. Content-Driven Stopping Point:  Thus, strangely, Rollercoaster games have a definitive stopping point that is not based on the gameplay.  Often there will be a boss or climactic gameplay moment, but the game often ends because the story ends, not because the rules have reached their conclusion.  The gameplay rules rarely have a larger conclusion to begin with.  That’s because…
12. Varied, External Success:  Success is defined externally, by the designer, and varies greatly from situation to situation.  Because designers construct the path, how you move forward is up to them.  For example, many Rollercoaster games will use typical combat mechanics, but the way to win is always designer-determined and often short-term (like doing X damage or surviving for X seconds), rather then part of a larger set of rules that define the game itself (like in deathmatch).
13. Message-Driven:  Because Rollercoaster games have the most designer control, they are often communicate a message from the designer to the player.  You could argue that  the whole point of a Rollercoaster game is to communicate a message, in the form of a story or experience.  Often, the message is the most interesting part of a Rollercoaster game.  Lots of players love receiving message-driven experiences, particularly in the form of narrative.
14. Narrative:  Because Rollercoaster games involve a series of situations, narrative is a natural fit.  It’s so common, a Rollercoaster game without a narrative of some sort is usually just flat out ignored.
15. Simple Gameplay:  Rollercoaster games tend to have relatively simple, easy-to-grasp gameplay, with few nuances (the better to quickly get you into it, and convey their message without hiccup).   Because of this, they are also the natural home for mini-games and puzzles (like Professor Layton).
16. Contextual:  Rollercoaster gameplay also tends to be very context driven (the better to incorporate story and setting).  The simple initial mechanics are repeated in slightly different contexts throughout the experience, to repeatedly engage the “What should I do?” learning process in a way that engages flow while keeping interactions basic.

As we’ll see, the other modes do not share these traits.  These traits are uniquely evolved for Rollercoaster games.  Players of Rollercoaster games want to receive meaning.  I love Sid Meier’s definition of a game (“a series of interesting choices”), but he was not thinking of Rollercoaster games when he said it.  Rollercoaster designers would say “a series of interesting situations”.  This is what creates the fundamental tension between the different play modes, and is why we only play in one mode at a time.  Each mode has different, sometimes opposite, traits, and not knowing where you’re designing is like not knowing who your audience is – often fatal.  I believe understanding these traits is a key first step for any designer to understanding how to design games.  The modes are so different and so distinctive that my hope is once I’ve finished these articles you’ll slap me and say “duh!”, and be unable to look at the world of games any other way.

When working on a Rollercoaster game a designer needs a unique set of skills.  Level Design is obviously useful, since Rollercoaster games are defined by travel.  Writing is (nearly) the exclusive purview of Rollercoaster games.  Most importantly, Rollercoaster designers craft meaning out of their many different mediums.  They can incorporate sound and art and mechanics and camera and level design and pacing into an emotional whole that moves and enlightens players.  The Rollercoaster designer’s strives to author meaning that is easily accessible, that the player can enjoy without taking a deep dip into the game itself.

Since they are simpler to grasp, and incorporate these other media, Rollercoaster games are the easiest to pick up and play, and thus have historically enjoyed the widest audience appeal.  They also have the greatest demand in all games – for a long time Rollercoaster game traits like story and graphics were what your game was judged on, not things like gameplay or experience or competition.  Paradoxically, they have the shortest lifespan of games: played only once.  Rollercoaster games are thus the easiest to review (how do you review Go in 10 hours or less?) , so that has given them dominant critical presence.  Most popular, least played, and yet most controversial – their reliance on other forms of medium blurs the lines between them and other games, causing players of other modes to say they aren’t games at all.

It’s important to reiterate that all these design outcomes flow from that initial player question – “What should I do?”.  Rollercoaster games can be seen as one, epic, wondrously engaging tutorial, introducing you to one new thing after another.  They are the best instruction manuals we’ve ever written.  But they go so much further, deeply engaging our innate desire for storytelling to capture our imagination in ways that go beyond the other denser, more involved modes.  ”And then, And then, And then.”

Like I said before, I believe there are many interesting subgenres of Rollercoaster games.  For example, Zelda is distinct from Halo.  In Zelda and other classic adventure games part of the game is figuring out how to even get to the next room, whereas in Halo and other shooters the method is obvious, it’s the execution that’s the challenge.  Given the core play drive (“Who am I and why am I here?”), this distinction and others in the vast Rollercoaster space deserves closer study.

Up next: Experiment games!

To the Moon from Freebird games.  A story-focused rollercoaster game, stripped down to its minimal, emotional elements.

Total Hours: 6.  Status: Finished.

1. Is a game, or is not a game, that is not the question.
2. In any medium, we appreciate the power of stories about life, death, foibles, hardship, mystery, and love.
3. It might really just require hours of dialogue and time to create this much character and story.  The lack of mechanics is striking.  I didn’t miss the tropes (combat, mini-games, avatar steering) at all.
4. The setup here (2 doctors trying to repair the memories of a dying man) is brilliant, allowing the game to explore all facets of a character.
5. Character introduction rate: About 2 per hour, 12 total.
6. The slow pace of interaction and text scroll sets up the slow pace of the game.  As does the futility of trying to rush it.
7. Piano music is also a fantastic way to set a slow pace.  Particularly in an otherwise silent game.
8. Early, genre-defying references and in-jokes help break your mind out of its expectations.
9. Backtracking doesn’t feel like backtracking when characters and dialogue are the focus and they progress between scenes.
10. Blinking ground arrows are a great tool for the 2D RPG space.  Clearly communicate off-screen passages.
11. Make things that look like they should be stepped over, like flowers, passable.  Particularly to horses.

I’m still not sure whether to be happy or sad.  Well done.

I posted an outline of the REMA model, but I wanted to go into more detail.  Let’s examine the Spore Creature Creator, which goes through all 4 stages.  (Not all games go through all 4).

1.  Rollercoaster mode:  When you start up Spore, one of the first things you do is learn how the Creature Creator works.  You learn you are evolving your creature, that you want to collect parts, that each creature you see has different cultures.  You learn and explore the context of the game.  But Spore quickly moves you into other modes.

2.  Experiment mode:  This is where the majority of most player’s time is spent.  You learn different parts have different effects, and they need to be collected.  You discover how the Creator works – where things can be placed, what it makes Creatures do when you put their legs on backwards.  You learn the behavior of the underlying systems.

3.  Mastery mode:  At some point, you’ll have a pretty good idea of how the Creature Creator works.  You’ll be able to accurately predict results.  If you chose to continue playing, you’ll switch into mastery mode – trying to collect all of the parts, trying to collect enough of a certain part to get a certain look, showing off your creations to others.  You perfect your control over the underlying systems.

4. Application mode:  Lastly, you might decide to apply your knowledge.  This is where players branch out – taking what they’ve mastered and applying it in areas outside the game.  You might write the backstory of the Creatures you’ve created.  You might use the Creature Creator as a modeling tool, exporting your creatures for your portfolio.  You might even try breaking or adding the rules of the game to get a particular result – modding the game to add parts, for example, or doing a speed modelling contest.  You apply and demonstrate your expertise outside the game itself.

Note that these are sequential and player-driven, and take discrete chunks of the player attention.  Players can stay in a mode indefinitely (in say, Gears of War on easy mode), and they can even go back to an earlier mode.  But they can’t skip ahead.  You don’t work to craft a respectable creature until you feel like you’ve learned how the tool works, for example.

But wait!  Spore is bigger then the Spore Creature Creator, you say.  Yes, yes it is.  One of things I’ve seen is that modern games have gotten so large that it makes them hard to break down.  Spore has lots of different ways to play – the Creature Creator is just one game inside it.  For example, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is both a single player and a multiplayer game, played in different ways that are essentially different experiences.

For various reasons we’ll get to, trying to do multiple modes simultaneously just ends up making the player confused.  But there are a couple of tricks designers use to put multiple modes in a game effectively that I’ve discovered:

1.  Products can have more then 1 game in it.  This is what CoD: MW did, and is quite common, particularly amongst single player and multiplayer games.  Starcraft, Tekken, and Need for Speed are other good examples.

2. Separate them by time.  This is even more of a classic.  You do the tutorial, then you move on.  You beat the game, and then you get speed runs.  You add a patch, and players have to re-experiment and then re-master the content.

3. Separate them by reward cycle time scale.  This is also common, but much trickier.  You can deliberately revert players back to an earlier mode, temporarily, on long reward schedules.  Give players a cutscene every hour, and they’ll appreciate the break in their experiment play.  Changing your characters appearance is a nice break between matches.  Players appreciate the variety if it’s not frequent, and has clear separation from the previous mode with clear implications.  Players will often do this on their own as well, sometimes quite frequently, but it’s much harder for designers to prod (at least with current techniques).  Note that it’s easier to go to an adjacent mode then a distant mode.  Experiment players appreciate cutscenes much more then Mastery players do.  (I believe this is due to the underlying needs of each mode, as we’ll see.)

This is what I’ve discovered so far.  There are quite possibly more, which would be awesome, because they are super-powerful.  Using these techniques, you can guide the player through the modes at your own pace, and really extend the interest and power of your game.

1.  The “Rollercoaster” mode exemplified in Uncharted 3, where setting and theme present a message to the player (“What do I do?”, “Why am I doing it?”),
2.  the “Experiment” mode where players discover systems and explore how they work (“What happens when X happens?”,  ”Can I get X to happen?”),
3.  the “Mastery” mode where players practice optimizing those systems (“Can I be the best?”, see American Football, for example), and lastly,
4.  the “Application” mode, where players take mastered knowledge and apply it in creative or artistic ways: Play-as-performance, Creature creating in Spore, player-defined achievements in Nethack, Narrativism (from GNS theory) in indie pnp RPGs.

There is a clear sequence here, where players focus primarily on one aspect of the game, then (potentially) move on to the next.   Players seem to always walk through these stages every time they play.  Players start in rollercoaster mode, doing things like playing a tutorial, learning who they represent and why they are playing.  Sometimes they stay in this mode – they find the designer-driven message compelling.  Other times they move into system comprehension (“experiment”) and then on to system perfection (“mastery”) and creative “application”.  Note the player absolutely controls which mode they are in, but it is in the designer’s best interest to guide them down the path!

I started studying this because I noticed players approaching games in these really fundamentally different ways.  We would talk about “story games” and “game-y games”, and different players gravitated to different kinds of games at different times, but I couldn’t find anyone who had explored why.  Note that most modern games include multiple modes, but take place at different times and on different time scales, because the player is focused on one mode at a time.

Interestingly, these modes are often at odds with each other, and I-as-designer have to make design sacrifices in one mode’s experience to improve another.  Dialogue trees are great for presenting narrative and setting, but undermine experimentation.  Experiment-focused games (such as Nethack) demand a wide variety of shallow systems and should be easy to explore, while mastery-focused games (like Counter-Strike) have relatively few systems and narrative, but they are very deep and need to be capable of being very challenging.  These design tensions are pervasive throughout the different forms of game-play and deserve deep study.

Knowing which mode you are designing to is paramount to being successful.  They often seem to determine the difference between popular success and failure.  If a player comes in expecting to be swept up in a grand epic, and get a few shallow systems with no story, they aren’t going to continue.  I-as-designer need to facilitate my desired play mode as quickly as possible, to guide player expectations. This appears to me the initial foundation of all player-designer game-communication – the guidance of player movement through this mode sequence to the desired mode.

Charles Pratt got me to write this, for which I’m very grateful. I’ve found this lens of looking at game design extraordinarily useful in my work, and I hope it helps you too.  The mode names are the best descriptors I’ve come up with, and I’d appreciate any feedback on fleshing them or the theory out.

Edit: I’d be remiss to not mention Ben Smith’s work over in the Indie RPG space, which I stumbled onto recently and is deeply exploring similar space.

1. You don’t need free navigation to make Space.
2. Abilities on timers are still fun.
3. There’s something interesting about 2.5D that can surprise in ways you don’t expect.  Great illusion.
4. Incentives don’t just manipulate, they also direct.
5. 15 similar items in a menu is too many.
6. High cost to use + Low explanations => Less exploration.  Corrolary: Low cost to use + High explanation => More exploration?
7. The boundary between Rollercoaster, Exploration, and Mastery games is still firmly intact.

I’d been avoiding playing The Binding of Isaac for a while now.

See, I have this problem with thematic games.  Binding of Isaac is about a boy whose being tortured by his mother, and the goal of the game is to rise up and kill her.

Needless to say, this rather bothered me.  I kept hearing again and again, “It’s really good.  One of the best games of the year.”  But I couldn’t get past the theme.  Wouldn’t even try it.

In many ways it’s ironic, because it’s a serious theme about something that actually is a serious problem and deserves attention.  So why wouldn’t I play a game about it, whereas I might watch a movie about it and certainly would read the news about it?

I think it’s because words tell.  It’s ok in movies or books to be told something, to receive it, to sit there not reacting.

But games do.  If I’m going to play a game about a serious topic, it’s going to make me want to do something.  It’s got to be something I want to do something about.  And when I play, I want to be involved in it meaningfully.  Not cursory involvement.  Significant, meaningful impact.  Otherwise, aren’t I just wasting my time.

Conceptually, that’s hard to do.  How can you impact something through a game?  The first-order, direct approach, best represented by the Serious Games movement, has been to literally try and impact the problem.  But that’s as hard to do as it is without a game – and often poorly implemented.  I’m not doing any more then I would without the game.

The second-order approach, giving you deep understanding about the problem, has been tried too.  And some succeed, like the excellent Fate of the World.  But often these games don’t go very deep, and leave me frustrated by inaction.  I might learn, but I’m not doing.  Games have a higher standard.  Often what these games teach me is that doing is beyond my reach.

So, in reflection, the real challenge for these thematic games is one of execution.    Like in any game, of going beyond the simplistic bar, and providing new understanding and new capabilities to the player.  Of solving these problems in your game design.  And my old instincts are still that serious thematic games don’t try.  That they are thinly veiled agendas or manipulations.  That they just manipulate shallow emotions around the topic, leaving me frustrated.  And so my instinct was to avoid The Binding of Isaac.

PS  You shouldn’t.  It’s really good.

PPS And it brilliantly exposes a third-order approach – dealing with problems through humor and catharsis.