DESIGNER NOTES

Game Developer Column 12: Theme is Not Meaning (Part II)

June 16th, 2010 Soren Johnson

The following was published in the March 2009 issue of Game Developer magazine…

As examined in Part I, a game’s meaning springs from its mechanics and not necessarily from its theme, especially if the two are in conflict. Such a dissonance can leave players feeling lost, perhaps even cheated. Thus, designers should strive to keep the two in harmony. At the very least, they should not be fighting each other.

When they do, the game’s mechanics can actually undermine the theme that the designers want to deliver. For example, Bioshock presents players with a true ethical choice – “harvest” Little Sisters by destroying them or “rescue” them by releasing their minds? The reward for harvesting is double Adam (the game’s genetic-modification currency), which tempts players to choose a morally disturbing path.

However, the game sprinkles other rewards on players who rescue Little Sisters, so that the ultimate difference between the two paths is negligible from a statistical perspective. Players are told by the game’s fiction that their choice matters – that they are making a sacrifice by deciding to rescue the little girls – but the game’s mechanics tell them a different story. Of course, when theme and mechanics are in conflict, players know which one actually matters, which one is actually telling them what the game is about.

Similarly, many traditional RPG’s put the player in an odd position. By giving the player an epic goal from the beginning (“Kill the evil wizard!”), the game casts him in the role of the world‘s savior. However, the actual gameplay involves roaming the countryside killing most of what falls in the player’s path and looting everything else. The story tells the player that he is a hero, but the game rewards him for being something else. Richard Garriot directly attacked this dissonance when he designed Ultima IV, by making the game about achieving eight virtues instead of simply killing a “Foozle” at the end.

A Perfect Union

Sometimes, a designer does achieve a perfect union of theme and mechanics. One example is Dan Bunten’s Seven Cities of Gold, the classic game of exploration. Bunten lost his way one day while hiking in the Ozarks and imagined a game in which the player struggles to keep her bearings in an unfamiliar landscape. From that seed, Bunten took the next step and chose a perfect theme – the age of the conquistadors, of Columbus, Cortez, and Pizarro, who were always partially lost – which provided wonderful raw background material with which to work.

Certain categories match theme and gameplay particularly well, including Wii games (Wii Sports), music games (Rock Band), tycoon games (Railroad Tycoon), sports games (Madden), flight sims (Wings), and racing games (Gran Turismo). Notice that while these examples are based on real-world activities, which helps to keep the mechanics tied to the theme, a designer does not need to put verisimilitude above all else.

In fact, one could argue that Mario Kart is more truly about racing than Gran Turismo is – the former’s rapid exchange of player position as shells fly around the track is perhaps closer to many players’ ideal concept of racing than a stodgy simulation’s more fixed positioning. Put another way, which object is more about Guernica – a photograph of the city’s ruins or Picasso’s masterpiece of anguish?

Further, great games can emerge when the theme simply provides an excuse to experiment with certain mechanics. Left 4 Dead is not really a game about zombies, after all – it’s a game about teamwork. The designers created each special zombies to encourage players to work together as a team – the hunter punishes loners, the tank requires concentrated fire, the witch demands close communication, and so on. The zombie theme simply gave the designers a plausible backdrop in which they could experiment with game mechanics that encouraged teamwork over solo play.

Does Civilization Fail?

The Civilization series provides an interesting study in the challenges inherent in trying to match theme with meaning. The games are purportedly about the sweep of world history, but one does not have to play long before cracks start to show.

To begin, societal progress is constant throughout the game – the player’s civilization can never fall into a dark age or split apart in a civil war. The user community has dubbed this dynamic the “Eternal China Syndrome.” The only entropy a player experiences comes from external invasion.

Indeed, the game actually provides a “Start a Revolution” button, so that the player can change government but only when convenient. (I’m sure Louis XVI would have appreciated such a system!) Indeed, all actions in the game are conducted top-down – the player is some strange combination of king, general, tycoon, and god.

The source of these conflicts with real history is the problem of player agency. In order to be fun, the player needs to be in control. Moreover, the consequence of each decision needs to be fair and clear, so that players can make informed choices, plan ahead, and understand their mistakes. Real history, of course, is much messier and difficult to understand, let alone control.

In fact, the games mechanics tell us less about world history than they do about what it would be like to be part of a league of ancient gods, who pit their subjects against each other for fun. These immortal opponents, after all, are the only characters that can destroy the player. The people themselves have little say in how history will develop.

However, player agency is actually a good thing; indeed, it is at the very center of what makes games so powerful. Perhaps some topics are simply too broad or vague or slippery to be addressed by a game’s mechanics, and – sometimes – themes can just be themes, with the player knowingly entering a fantasy space that speaks not directly to the topic but to some other need or desire.

In the case of Civilization, the desire is to control history, which may not teach us much about it, but it is not without value. Indeed, the game fares well when compared with other artistic disciplines. Few works of art tackle the sweep of world history, and the ones that exist (Birth of a Nation) are often dangerous works of ideology.

Designers who care to make games that actually speak to us about history should focus on a specific era or event, such as Bunten’s Seven Cities of Gold or Meier’s Railroad Tycoon. Put the player in the shoes of a flesh-and-blood person – let her explore the challenges and opportunities of the times but within mortal limits.

Why Theme Matters

Although a game’s theme and mechanics can tell different stories, society at large does not understand that there is a difference between the two, and if the theme is appalling to the mainstream, a good game can be unfairly tarred. For example, Grand Theft Auto has a theme of crime and urban chaos, but the game is actually about freedom and consequence. Every crime increases the player’s notoriety, which can end the game if the police send enough firepower.

Nonetheless, to the mainstream, GTA was simply about killing hookers and running over pedestrians – for outsiders, the game couldn’t be “about” anything else. Players, however, understood that the game was giving them something different – an open-world in which their decisions actually mattered. Consequence was the true killer feature.

Crackdown provides an interesting contrast in that it delivers the same open-world simulation with consequence as GTA but with a theme (fighting crime as a super-cop) much more palatable to the average person. Rockstar may have record sales to show for their work, but designers who believe they have a responsibility to society at large should take note that the criminal theme was not inevitable.

Today, many designers strive to achieve two worthy goals – reaching a mass audience and creating great art. However, both are at risk if theme and mechanics are in dissonance. The average consumer, who is not highly literate in the standard tropes of game design, expects video games to be about whatever is on the cover. Pulling a bait-and-switch – or simply not thinking critically about the lessons that a game actually teaches – will only turn new players away.

As for the question of art, one must first recognize that many great works of art are abstract. Lyrics may give some meaning to a song, but a symphony is generally meant to be interpreted and enjoyed however the listener prefers. Similarly, games can stand on their own without specific themes - Tetris being the obvious example.

Furthermore, even a pasted-on theme can work if the designers are not promising more than the game can deliver - San Juan and Race for the Galaxy are both brilliant, yet similar, card-based adaptations of Puerto Rico. That one is set in the Caribbean and the other in outer space is not a problem as the games are clearly not marketed as re-creations or simulations. The theme simply adds flavor.

However, great art never has theme and meaning in open conflict, in the way many games do. Othello is actually about the “green-eyed monster” of jealousy and not just the life of a Moor in the 16^th-century Venetian military, but the latter does not detract from the former. Can the same be said about Bioshock? About Spore? About Civilization? These games do claim to be about something – do their mechanics tell the same story? To touch people, the play itself needs to deliver on the theme’s promise.

Posted in Columns | 8 Comments »

Game Developer Column 11: Theme is Not Meaning (Part I)

June 14th, 2010 Soren Johnson

The following was published in the February 2009 issue of Game Developer magazine…

Who decides what a game is about?

At first glance, the popular board game Ticket to Ride seems to be another link in the great chain of rail baron games, such as Age of Steam, Eurorails and the 1830 series. During the game, the player draws unique route challenges, to connect certain pairs of cities – New York to San Francisco, Miami to Chicago, and so on.

To complete them, she must claim a series of tracks that connect adjacent cities while also trying to block her opponents from finishing their own challenges. There are sub goals too, such as having the longest contiguous rail line and completing one’s network first, which ends the game for everyone.

Thus, most players would describe Ticket to Ride as a game about building the best rail service, by grabbing choice routes and cutting off the competition. However, the introduction in the rules tells a different story:

On a blustery autumn evening five old friends met in the backroom of one of the city’s oldest and most private clubs. Each had traveled a long distance – from all corners of the world – to meet on this very specific day… October 2, 1900 – 28 years to the day that the London eccentric, Phileas Fogg, accepted and then won a £20,000 bet that he could travel Around the World in 80 Days.

Each succeeding year, they met to celebrate the anniversary and pay tribute to Fogg. And each year a new expedition (always more difficult) was proposed. Now at the dawn of the century it was time for a new impossible journey. The stakes: $1 Million in a winner-takes-all competition. The objective: to see which of them could travel by rail to the most cities in North America – in just 7 days.

The official story comes as a surprise to many players, even veterans of the game, because the theme simply does not match the gameplay. For example, how can a player “claim” a route just by riding on it? Do the trains shut down, preventing anyone else from using that line? On the other hand, claiming routes matches perfectly the fiction of ruthless rail barons trying to control the best connections.

Furthermore, routes can be claimed in any order – there is no sense that the player actually exists in the world as a traveler with real, physical limitation. Instead, claiming routes feels a lot more like buying them rather than traveling on them.

Mechanics Give Meaning

This disconnect leads to some interesting questions. Does a game’s designer have the right to say what a game is about if it doesn’t match what’s going on inside the players’ heads? And if the designer doesn’t have this right, then does a game’s official “story” ever matter at all because it can be invalidated so easily? Isn’t a game about what one actually does during play and how that feels to the player?

Ultimately, designers need to recognize that a game’s theme does not determine its meaning. Instead, meaning emerges from a game’s mechanics – the set of decisions and consequences unique to each one. What does a game ask of the player? What does it punish, and what does it reward? What strategies and styles does the game encourage? Answering these questions reveals what a game is actually about.

Furthermore, while people buy games for the promise of the theme (“I want to be a space marine!”), the fun comes from the mechanics themselves (actually shooting the aliens). When there is a severe dissonance between the two, players can feel cheated, as if the designers executed a bait-and-switch.

The reception of Spore, a game sold with an evolutionary theme, provides a recent example. In the October 2008 issue of Science magazine, John Bohannon wrote the following about how the game delivered on the theme’s promise:

I’ve been playing Spore with a team of scientists, grading the game on each of its scientific themes. When it comes to biology, and particularly evolution, Spore failed miserably. According to the scientists, the problem isn’t just that Spore dumbs down the science or gets a few things wrong–it’s meant to be a game, after all–but rather, it gets most of biology badly, needlessly, and often bizarrely wrong.

The source of this dissonance is that, even though it was sold as such, Spore is not really a game about evolution. Spore is actually a game about creativity – the reason to play the game was to behold the wonder of other players’ imaginations as they used (and misused) the editors to create objects not imagined by the game’s designers – from musical instruments to fantastical creatures to dramatic scenes.

However, even though Spore is not about evolution, the scientists should keep looking because one of the most popular actually is about evolution – World of Warcraft. The game may have a swords-and-sorcery theme, but the mechanics encourage the players to conduct their own form of natural selection when deciding how to develop their characters.

Over years of experience, veterans of WoW have established a number of upgrade paths (or “builds”) for each class, depending on what role the player wants the character to fill. For example, the Paladin class has three main builds: Holy (for healing), Protection (for tanking), and Retribution (for damage-per-second). Further, underneath these main categories, sub-builds exist for player-vs-player, player-vs-environment, and mob grinding. These paths have evolved organically over the years as players tried out different combinations, depending on what the game rewarded or punished.

Seeing Past the Theme

One can look at any number of games through the lens of how the mechanics affect the user experience to find out what the game actually means. Super Mario Bros., for example, is a game about timing, certainly not about plumbing. Battlefield games are about teamwork, not World War II or modern combat. Peggle is a game about chaos theory, not unicorns or rainbows.

Indeed, games with the same theme can actually be about different things. For example, human conflict with aliens has certainly been a popular theme across video game history. Nonetheless, each alien-themed game can mean something very different depending on the rule set. Galaga is actually about pattern matching. X-Com is about decision-making with limited information. Gears of War is about using cover as a defensive weapon. StarCraft is about the challenges of asymmetrical combat.

Conversely, games with different themes but the same mechanics are actually about the same thing. Civilization and Alpha Centauri are set on completely different planets, but the mechanics are largely the same. Alpha Centauri’s mind worms, probe teams, and Secret Projects are essentially identical to Civilization’s barbarians, spies, and World Wonders. Players can easily see past the game’s chrome to see that they are still making the same decisions with the same tradeoffs.

Genre choice can also affect the meaning of a game. Players expect a theme to deliver on certain nouns and verbs. (“I am a Mage – I can cast powerful Magic!”) Unfortunately, genre conventions often put a barrier between a player and the game he imagined while holding a copy in the store. Once again, players buy games for the theme – if the mechanics and traditions of the genre are wildly unfamiliar to the player, at odds with the game in his head, he may feel cheated.

For example, two recent console games - Halo Wars and Brutal Legend – surprised players by being strategy games. With the former, many players expected a Halo game to be about reflex-based combat; with the latter, heavy-metal music is not inherently strategic. Because strategy games are often played at a considered distance, players expecting the visceral thrill promised by the games’ themes were disappointed. The designers may have built fun and interesting rule sets, but the themes sold the games to the wrong fans.

Uniting Theme and Mechanics

One interesting comparison is the board games Risk and Diplomacy, which have identical themes of world conquest. Indeed, at first glance, the two games also seem quite similar mechanically. The game board is split up into territories, which the players control with generic army or (in the case of Diplomacy) navy tokens. These territories switch hands as battles are fought, and – in turn – the victors are able to field larger militaries from their new lands.

However, a small difference in the rules makes the two games about something very different. In Risk, turns occur sequentially while, in Diplomacy, they execute simultaneously. This difference makes Risk a game about risk while Diplomacy becomes a game about diplomacy. In the former, players must decide how much they can achieve during their own turn and then hope the dice are not unkind. With Diplomacy, however, there are no dice; players can only succeed with the help of others, which can only be promised but not actually delivered during the negotiation round. Only when the secretly-written orders are revealed between turns is it clear who is a true friend and who is a backstabbing traitor.

Diplomacy, in particular, is a perfect marriage between theme and mechanics. Indeed, President John F. Kennedy considered it his favorite game. The game is about exactly what it claims to be about – the twists and turns of diplomatic negotiations. On the other hand, when a game’s theme and mechanics are sharply divorced, players can react negatively to the dissonance. Part II shall discuss examples of games which made a successful union of the two and ones which did not – and the rewards and costs of doing so.

Posted in Columns | 6 Comments »

Game Developer Column 10: Challenging Design

April 1st, 2010 Soren Johnson

The following was published in the December 2009 issue of Game Developer magazine…

The surgery game Trauma Center was one of the earliest examples of how the Nintendo DS could change our industry. By turning the stylus into a scalpel, the designers let players immerse themselves into the role of a doctor as never before. Unfortunately, the game simulated the pressures of actual surgery as well by presenting staggeringly difficult, time-pressured levels.

Failure blocked the player’s progress, which proved to be a fatal flaw for the game because there were no difficulty levels at all – no way for the player to decide what level of challenge was appropriate. Considering the wide demographic of gamers today, from young children to seniors, this decision doomed the game to a tiny slice of the DS’s audience.

Challenge has always been a core component of game design. However, after video games left the arcades – in which quick difficulty ramps were a necessity of doing business – most designers realized that their games could appeal to more people if they tailored the challenge to meet the needs of the individual user.

Dynamic Difficulty

Call of Duty 4, for example, measures the player’s performance during the training level to suggest an appropriate difficulty level. Other games – such as Left 4 Dead – have developed dynamic difficulty algorithms which adjust enemy spawns and health drops to the player’s current situation and demonstrated skill.

However, dynamic difficulty can be a tricky proposition as – similarly to AI cheating – if the player can see the invisible hand controlling the challenge, the spell is broken. Players need to perceive that they are improving against a fixed measuring stick. The RPG Oblivion turned off many people by scaling the weapons and skills of enemies directly in relation to the player character’s level.

Once this mechanic became obvious, many absurd strategies emerged, such as never leveling up to ensure that enemies always stayed weak. More significantly, this dynamic ruined one of the core features of an RPG – power progression. After developing advanced characters, players enjoy easily brushing aside monsters which earlier in the game could have destroyed them.

Elective Difficulty

Indeed, the core mechanic of RPG’s – that the player character grows slowly in power after each successful battle – can be seen as a way to give players the ability to adjust the game’s difficulty themselves. Gamers who feel comfortable with the combat system can push ahead through levels at the edge of their abilities while players who prefer a more comfortable experience can grind their way to overpowered characters before proceeding. Most importantly, this system puts the player in control, not the designer.

Although selecting a difficulty level at start was a simple, early innovation, only recently have games allowed players to switch between them during normal play. On every third death in Ninja Gaiden Black, players could elect to drop to “Ninja Dog” mode, which weakened enemies but also forced Ryu to wear pink ribbons as punishment. This mechanic – minus the mockery – was quickly adopted by other games, such as God of War.

Indeed, elective difficulty itself can be a core gameplay mechanic. The browser-based Desktop Tower Defense has no difficulty levels at all but does allow the player to speed up the game (and thereby increase the challenge) by triggering attack waves prematurely. Then, the final score is calculated from not just how many enemies were destroyed but also from how quickly the game finished. Therefore, beating DTD on the default speed is just the beginning as players must learn how to master the speed-up mechanic to start improving their scores.

Orthogonal Challenges

While the difficulty levels of Thief do not determine the number of guards nor their awareness on a given level, they do specify the challenges the player sets for herself during the level. For instance, the requirements of Easy may only be stealing a certain number of jewels and artifacts while Hard also necessitates finishing the level without killing a single guard.

These different modes suggest orthogonal challenges within the same game, a smart way to extend a game’s life for the hard-core. Other official examples include the One City Challenge and Always War options in Civilization 4 and the Hardcore mode (with permanent death) in Diablo 2. Indeed, Xbox Live Achievements provide a fantastic infrastructure for adding new challenges via unorthodox goals to games that might otherwise no longer interest core gamers.

Furthermore, other settings can adjust the challenge of a game without changing the difficulty, per se. For example, a real-time strategy game could have both a difficulty setting and a speed setting, so a player could try a more difficult AI but at a slower speed if he did not enjoy time pressure. One sadly forgotten setting is the complexity option that appeared in earlier games, such as M.U.L.E. and Lords of Conquest. This option provided a simpler version of the game – with less types of resources, for example – but still with a fully-capable AI that could provide a challenge for new players.

Challenge and Punishment

However, some games choose to punish players on top of giving them a fair challenge. Games without generous save systems, for instance, are vulnerable to being ruined by challenging sub-sections, which might require multiple attempts to pass. If a player needs to repeat a lengthy but easy section (or, more shamefully, a non-skippable cut-scene) before getting to the difficult bit, the game is punishing the player instead of challenging him.

One of the most elegant solutions to this problem was the time control mechanic in Prince of Persia: Sand of Time, in which the player is able to rewind past mistakes a limited number of times to try again. This system reduced the overhead of repeating a difficult jump to a relative minimum while still retaining tension because of the finite number of rewinds.

Another example of reducing punishment can be seen in the history of MMO’s. World of Warcraft famously reduced the penalty for death found in its predecessors, such as Everquest and Ultima Online. By removing corpse runs and experience loss, WoW enabled people to play the game they way they wanted to play it. Instead of only attacking easy monsters which would never cause the loss of experience or loot, players could attempt a difficult battle knowing that, in the worst case, they would be warped back to a safe location.

Thus, games with severe penalties for failure can actually warp the core gameplay by strongly encouraging players to always choose the safe route. Defense of the Ancient, the popular mod for Warcraft 3, rewards the opposite team with gold every time a player is killed, which makes bumbling new players extremely unpopular with their teammates. This simple dynamic makes the DotA community notoriously nasty and unpleasant, even by the meager standards of the Internet.

After Punishment

The strategy/puzzle hybrid Puzzle Quest took WoW’s forgiving nature to the logical extreme by removing all forms of punishment from the game entirely. Players are even rewarded for losing battles, albeit much less than they would be for winning them. In fact, this mechanic has an interesting side benefit; Puzzle Quest has no need for a visible save system. Because players are never penalized in any way, the game can comfortably auto-save after every battle or action, knowing that a player will never feel the need to revert to an earlier save.

Such a forgiving system is not for every game. Bioshock used a similar mechanic by respawning dead players for free in Vita-Chambers placed throughout the game. Furthermore, enemies health rates were not reset on a player respawn, which meant that the player could chip away at any enemy with any weapon, including the wrench, if she was willing to die and be reborn enough times. This feature felt like an exploit to enough players that Irrational eventually patched in an option to disable Vita-Chambers.

However, the problem may have been with the expectations of Bioshock’s intended audience instead of any fundamental flaw with the respawn mechanic. Lego Star Wars uses an identical mechanic, which is perfect for the target audience of a dad and a son playing together in a forgiving environment. For Bioshock, core gamers expected the game to force them to use advanced strategies to progress instead of an easy out.

Perhaps the best solution is to always allow players to progress but to rate their performance against some constant metric. Elite Beat Agents hands out letter grades of S, A, B, C, and D for each song performance based on the player’s timing. The game continues as long as the player finishes the song, but few will not want to go back to try and improve. If Trauma Center had only adopted such a simple system, the game may have become more than just an interesting footnote. Designers should take care not to head down the same dead-end.

Posted in Columns | 7 Comments »

Game Developer Column 9: Playing the Odds

March 3rd, 2010 Soren Johnson

The following was published in the October 2009 issue of Game Developer magazine…

One of the most powerful tools a designer can use when developing games is probability, using random chance to determine the outcome of player actions or to build the environment in which play occurs. The use of luck, however, is not without its pitfalls, and designers should be aware of the trade-offs involved – what chance can add to the experience and when it can be counterproductive.

Failing at Probability

One challenge with using randomness is that humans are notoriously poor at accurately evaluating probability. A common example is the Gambler’s Fallacy, which is the belief that odds will even out over time. If the Roulette wheel comes up black five times in a row, players often believe that the odds of coming up black again are quite small, even though clearly the streak makes no difference whatsoever. Conversely, people also see streaks where none actually exist – the shooter with a ‘hot hand’ in basketball, for example, is a myth. Studies show that, if anything, a successful shot actually predicts a subsequent miss.

Also, as designers of slot machines and MMO’s are quite aware, setting odds unevenly between each progressive reward level makes players think that the game is more generous than it really is. One commercial slot machine had its payout odds published by wizardofodds.com in 2008:

• 1:1 per 8 plays
• 2:1 per 600 plays
• 5:1 per 33 plays
• 20:1 per 2,320 plays
• 80:1 per 219 plays
• 150:1 per 6,241 plays

The 80:1 payoff is common enough to give players the thrill of beating the odds for a a big win but still rare enough that the casino is in no risk of losing money. Furthermore, humans have a hard time estimating extreme odds – a 1% chance is anticipated too often and 99% odds are considered to be as safe as 100%.

Leveling the Field

These difficulties in accurately estimating odds actually work in the favor of the game designer. Simple game design systems, such as the dice-based resource generation system in Settlers of Catan, can be tantalizingly difficult to master with a dash of probability.

In fact, luck makes a game more accessible because it shrinks the gap – whether in perception or in reality – between experts and novices. In a game with a strong luck element, beginners believe that, no matter what, they have a chance to win. Few people would be willing to play a chess Grandmaster, but playing a backgammon expert is much more appealing – a few lucky throws can give anyone a chance.

In the words of designer Dani Bunten, “Although most players hate the idea of random events that will destroy their nice safe predictable strategies, nothing keeps a game alive like a wrench in the works. Do not allow players to decide this issue. They don’t know it but we’re offering them an excuse for when they lose (‘It was that damn random event that did me in!’) and an opportunity to ‘beat the odds’ when they win.”

Thus, luck serves as a social lubricant – the alcohol of gaming, so to speak – that increases the appeal of multiplayer gaming to audiences which would not normally be suited for cutthroat head-to-head competition.

Where Luck Fails

Nonetheless, randomness is not appropriate for all situations or even all games. The ‘nasty surprise’ mechanic is never a good idea. If a crate provides ammo and other bonuses when opened but explodes 1% of the time, the player has no chance to learn the probabilities in a safe manner. If the explosion occurs early enough, the player will immediately stop opening crates. If it happens much later, the player will feel unprepared and cheated.

Also, when randomness becomes just noise, the luck simply detracts from the player’s understanding of the game. If a die roll is made every time a StarCraft Marine shoots at a target, the rate of fire will simply appear uneven. Over time, the effect of luck on the game’s outcome will be negligible, but the player will have a harder time grasping how strong a Marine’s attack actually is with all the extra random noise.

Further, luck can slow down a game unnecessarily. The board games History of the World and Small World have a very similar conquest mechanic, except that the former uses dice and the latter does not (until the final attack). Making a die roll with each attack causes a History of the World turn to last at least three or four times as long as a turn in Small World. The reason is not just the logistical issues of rolling so many dice – knowing that the results of one’s decisions are completely predictable allows one to plan out all the steps at once without worrying about contingencies. Often, handling contingencies are a core part of the game design, but game speed is an important factor too, so designers should be sure that the trade-off is worthwhile.

Finally, luck is very inappropriate for calculations to determine victory. Unlucky rolls feel the fairest the longer players are given to react to them before the game’s end. Thus, the earlier luck plays a role, the better for the perception of game balance. Many classic card games – pinochle, bridge, hearts – follow a standard model of an initial random distribution of cards that establishes the game’s ‘terrain’ followed by a luck-free series of tricks which determines the winners and losers.

Probability is Content

Indeed, the idea that randomness can provide an initial challenge to be overcome plays an important role in many classic games, from simple games like Minesweeper to deeper ones like NetHack and Age of Empires. At their core, solitaire and Diablo are not so different – both present a randomly-generated environment that the player needs to navigate intelligently for success.

An interesting recent use of randomness was Spelunky, which is indie developer Derek Yu’s combination of the random level generation of NetHack with the game mechanics of 2D platformers like Lode Runner. The addictiveness of the game comes from the unlimited number of new caverns to explore, but frustration can emerge from the wild difficulty of certain, unplanned combinations of monsters and tunnels.

In fact, pure randomness can be an untamed beast, creating game dynamics that throw an otherwise solid design out of balance. For example, Civilization 3 introduced the concept of strategic resources which were required to construct certain units – Chariots need Horses, Tanks need Oil, and so on. These resources were sprinkled randomly across the world, which inevitably led to large continents with only one cluster of Iron controlled by a single AI opponent. Complaints of being unable to field armies for lack of resources were common among the community.

For Civilization 4, the problem was solved by adding a minimum amount of space between certain important resources, so that two sources of Iron could never be within seven tiles of each other. The result was a still unpredictable arrangement of resources around the globe but without the clustering that could doom an unfortunate player. On the other hand, the game actively encouraged clustering for less important luxury resources – Incense, Gems, Spices – to promote interesting trade dynamics.

Showing the Odds

Ultimately, when considering the role of probability, designers need to ask themselves ‘how is luck helping or hurting the game?’ Is randomness keeping the players pleasantly off-balance so that they can’t solve the game trivially? Or is it making the experience frustratingly unpredictable so that players are not invested in their decisions?

One factor which helps ensure the former is making the probability as explicit as possible. The strategy game Armageddon Empires based combat on a few simple die rolls and then showed the dice directly on-screen. Allowing the players to peer into the game’s calculations increases their comfort level with the mechanics, which makes chance a tool for the player instead of a mystery.

Similarly, with Civilization 4, we introduced a help mode which showed the exact probability of success in combat, which drastically increased player satisfaction with the underlying mechanics. Because humans have such a hard time estimating probability accurately, helping them make a smart decision can improve the experience immensely.

Some deck-building card games, such as Magic: The Gathering or Dominion, put probability in the foreground by centering the game experience on the likelihood of drawing cards in the player’s carefully constructed deck. These games are won by players who understand the proper ratio of rares to commons, knowing that each card will be drawn exactly once each time through the deck. This concept can be extended to other games of chance by providing, for example, a virtual “deck of dice” that ensures the distribution of die rolls is exactly even.

Another interesting – and perhaps underused – idea from the distant past of gaming history is the “Element of Chance” game option from the turn-based strategy game Lords of Conquest. The three options available – Low, Medium, and High – determined whether luck was only used to break ties or to play a larger role in resolving combat. The appropriate role of chance in a game is ultimately a subjective question, and giving players the ability to adjust the knobs themselves can open up the game to a larger audience with a greater variety of tastes.

Posted in Columns | 12 Comments »

Game Developer Column 8: Turn-Based vs. Real-Time

February 1st, 2010 Soren Johnson

The following was published in the August 2009 issue of Game Developer magazine…

One of the most important choices a designer makes at the start of a project is deciding whether to make a turn-based game or a real-time one. Each type of base game mechanic provides potential benefits and drawbacks. While turn-based games favor more strategic and transparent play, they can feel a little stodgy to players used to action-oriented titles. Real-time games, on the other hand, are more immersive and multiplayer-friendly but can also easily overwhelm new players if they are not well-paced.

Turn-based games, of course, descend directly from the board game tradition which predates video games. Indeed, the fanbase for turn-based games still overlaps significantly with the fanbase for board and card games. Real-time games (excluding sports) were only truly possible with the advent of computers. Indeed, quite a few games - Super Mario Bros., Team Fortress, FIFA, Pac-Man – could only ever conceivably be developed as real-time games.

However, quite a few games could go either way, with an understanding that each path comes with its own set of trade-offs. Roguelike dungeon-crawlers, for example, have been made as both turn-based and real-time games. Early versions, such as NetHack, were purely turn-based; the game’s clock only moves forward each time the player takes an action. However, Blizzard’s Diablo put the same explore-and-loot formula into a real-time environment and created an experience that was less strategic but more visceral and potentially addictive. Furthermore, without the waiting inherent in a turn-based system, the designers could develop a viable multiplayer mode.

Nonetheless, Diablo has not surplanted the continuing popularity of turn-based roguelikes, such as Pokemon Mystery Dungeon or Shiren the Wanderer, which maintain their own tactical charm. Thus, deciding between turn-based and real-time is not a question of which system is “better” or “worse” but rather a question of which set of trade-offs best fits the game the designer wants to make.

How Much Stuff?

One simple way to look at a game is by asking how many game systems and elements the player needs to master to feel competent. For example, a typical shooter might have ten weapons; a real-time strategy game might have fifteen units per side; a role-playing game might have twenty spells available. New players can often be intimidated by the sheer quantity of new concepts and options a game presents to them, and the time pressure of a real-time game only makes this learning experience an even greater challenge.

When first prototyping the original Civilization, Sid Meier originally built the game as a real-time simulation. Inspired by Will Wright’s SimCity, he tried to extend the concept to a global scale. He quickly found, however, that players were overwhelmed by the high number of new game systems they needed to juggle at once. After all, SimCity had no diplomacy, no trade, no combat, no research, and definitely no marauding barbarians. Thus, he changed course and rebuilt his prototype as a turn-based game, and the phrase “just one more turn” entered the gaming lexicon.

Designers always should be aware that each game can only contain so much “stuff” before the center cannot hold, and the experience overpowers the senses. By removing time pressure, turn-based games allow players to adjust the learning curve to their own needs. Veterans can still play quickly, but new players can take their time poking around the interface and thinking through their moves.

Thus, turn-based games are generally more accessible than real-time ones. It is no surprise that many of the most popular casual games are turn-based, from staples like Solitaire and Minesweeper to PopCap’s stable of Bejewelled, Bookworm, and Peggle.

Deterministic or Chaotic Play?

At their core, turn-based and real-time games play to different strengths. One example is the question of whether an experience should be deterministic or chaotic. With the former, success often depends on knowing exactly what the results of one’s actions will be; in Puzzle Quest, for example, the player needs to know that when a row of four skulls disappears, the other pieces will fall in a specific way so that a new column of consecutive red gems might form. Just because some luck elements are involved – such as the unknown new pieces which fall from the top – doesn’t mean that the player isn’t mapping out an exact series of events in her head. This sequential gameplay is one of the core strengths of turn-based games.

On the other hand, chaotic, unpredictable gameplay is a strength of real-time games. When players first spot a heavy-medic combo in Team Fortress 2, they know that they are probably in trouble, but the sequence of events to follow is so varied that players know it’s impossible to overanalyze the situation. A sniper could kill the medic. An explosion might knock the heavy off a platform. A spy might sneak up behind them. An event on the other side of the map might encourage one side to simply abandon the area. Real-time games support chaotic gameplay best because, with the added pressure of a shared clock, players are not able to reduce each situation down to a repeatable series of moves and counter-moves.

Multiplayer or Single-Player?

Another divide which defines the different strengths of turn-based and real-time games is whether the focus of the experience is multiplayer or single-player. Generally speaking, multiplayer games work best in real-time wheras turn-based games usually focus on single-player sessions. Turn-based games, like Advance Wars and Civilization, have only a tiny, hard-core multiplayer audience. On the other hand, real-time games with similar themes, such as Command & Conquer and Age of Empires, respectively, gained much of their popularity from their multi-player modes.

The reason for this divide is clear – waiting for another player to finish his turn is anathema to fun – so designers looking for a synchronous, multiplayer experience almost always prefer real-time games. However, because no one else is waiting, designers of purely single-player games give themselves the option of using turn-based elements whenever convenient, to either add some spice or allow more strategic play. For example, the single-player game Fallout 3 allows players to pause real-time combat and enter V.A.T.S. mode to strategize which enemy body parts to target, even displaying the exact probability of success for each possible choice. Similarly, the Baldur’s Gate series is a hybrid model, with real-time combat that pauses depending on certain player-selected events, such as when a character receives damage or a new enemy becomes visible.

Breaking the Rules

Indeed, these games are but a few of the many games that blur the line between “pure” turn-based and real-time systems. For example, what about turn-based decisions with a time limit, such as Madden’s play-calling clock? What about X-Com, with its crunchy real-time strategic shell surrounding a gooey turn-based tactical core? Or the Total War series, which does the exact opposite? What about Europa Universalis, which is technically real-time but plays out so slowly that it “feels” like a classic, sprawling turn-based strategy game. How about asynchronous Web-based games like Travian, which play out over months instead of minutes, eliminating the time pressure but keeping the multi-player benefits of real-time play? What about Bang! Howdy, which plays as a typical tile-based tactical wargame, except that each unit’s turns regenerate in real-time? In reality, a vast continuum stretches from one extreme to the other, and most games find a space somewhere in the middle.

Therefore, the most important thing to focus on is not the labels themselves but what types of gameplay they represent. For example, the tower-defense game Plants vs. Zombies is ostensibly real-time, but its characteristics are more in line with traditional turn-based games. Besides being solely a single-player game, the gameplay itself is strictly deterministic, even moreso than many turn-based games. The map consists of five tracks along which the zombies progress, each with exactly nine slots on which to place defensive plants. Furthermore, the zombies’ behavior is entirely predictable – Pole Valuting Zombies will always jump over blocking Wall-nuts, even if that means falling right into the jaws of a Chomper plant. The game may look chaotic to an observer, but – like most tower-defense games – the strategic play is built upon predictable enemy behavior. The real-time mechanics simply provide time pressure, not the other qualities usually associated with the format, such as chaotic play or a multi-player mode.

Likewise, Boom Blox is a turn-based game which eskews the usual strengths of the format. In the game, players have a discrete number of throws during which to knock down various block-based structures. Unlike most turn-based games, however, Boom Blox is a very chaotic affair, with unpredictable physics-based game mechanics. Furthermore, unlike Plants vs. Zombies, in which players’ actions take place on a precise 5-by-9 grid, players of Boom Blox use strictly analog controls to point at the screen and then “throw” the ball with the WiiMote. Chaos theory dictates that an identical series of throws will almost never happen twice in a row. Furthermore, this unpredictable nature coupled with the very short turns (each only a single throw) makes Boom Blox an excellent multi-player game, a rare feat for turn-based video games.

Thus, in the end, deciding whether to make a game real-time or turn-based is less important than deciding which aspects of those formats are most relevant to the overall design. As they say, one needs to learn the rules to know how to break them.

Posted in Columns | 3 Comments »

Game Developer Column 7: Our Cheatin’ Hearts

September 1st, 2009 Soren Johnson

The following was published in the May 2009 issue of Game Developer magazine…

The designers of Puzzle Quest have a frustrating burden to bear – everyone thinks they are a bunch of dirty cheaters. The game centers on a competitive version of Bejewelled, in which players duel with an AI to create the most “match-3” colored patterns.

The problem comes from how the pieces on the gameboard are created – when, for example, a column of three green orbs is lined up and removed from play, new pieces fall in to take their place. However, sometimes, these three new pieces happen to be of all the same type, which means that a new match is automatically made, and the player scores again. The odds of such a result are low (around 2% for getting three of the same colors in a row), but they are still high enough that a player will see it many times with enough games played.

Of course, the AI is playing the same game, so the player will see this lucky match fall into the enemy’s lap as well. At this point, human psychology takes over. Because the new pieces are hidden from view, how does the player know that the computer is not conducting some funny business and giving itself some free matches?

The human mind is notoriously bad at grasping probability, so many players are convinced that the AI is cheating. The developers have pledged over and over again that everything is fair and even, but whether they like it or not, the player experience has been affected by the simply possibility of cheating.

Trust Me

Games do not start with a player’s trust – this trust needs to be earned over time. Our audience is well aware that we can make a game do whatever we want under the hood, so the transparency and consistency of a game’s rules contribute significantly to player immersion. The worst feeling for a player is when they perceive – or just suspect – that a game is breaking its own rules and treating the human unfairly.

This situation is especially challenging for designers of symmetrical games, in which the AI is trying to solve the same problems as the human is. For asymmetrical games, cheating is simply bad game design – imagine the frustration which would result from enemies in Half-Life warping around the map to flank the player or guards in Thief instantly spotting a player hiding in the shadows.

However, under symmetrical conditions, artificial intelligence often needs to cheat just to be able to compete with the player. Accordingly, designers must learn what cheats feel fair to a player and what cheats do not. As the Puzzle Quest team knows, games need to avoid situations in which players even suspect that the game is cheating on them.

Cheating is not the same thing as difficulty levels – by which the players are asking the game to provide extra challenges for them. Cheating is whether a game is treating the player “fairly” – rewarding them for successful play and not arbitrarily punishing them just to maintain the challenge. Unfortunately, in practice, the distinction between difficulty levels and cheating is not so clear.

Show the Mechanics

Fans of racing games are quite familiar with this gray area. A common tactic employed by AI programmers to provide an appropriate level of challenge is to “rubberband” the cars together. In other words, the code ensures that if the AI cars fall too far behind the human, they will speed up. On the other hand, if the human falls behind, the AI slows down to allow the player to recover.

The problem is that this tactic is often obvious to the players, which either dulls their sense of accomplishment when they win or raises suspicions when they lose. Ironically, games which turn rubberbanding into an explicit game mechanic often becomes more palatable to their players.

For example, the Mario Kart series has long disproportionately divvied out rewards from the mystery item boxes sprinkled around the tracks relative to the riders’ current standings. While the first-place racer might receive a shell only useful for attacking other lead cars, players in the rear might get a speed bullet which automatically warps them to the middle of the pack.

These self-balancing mechanics are common to board games – think of the robber blocking the leader’s tiles in Settlers of Catan – and they don’t feel like cheating because the game is so explicit about how the system works. Thus, players understand that the bonuses available to the AI will also be available to themselves if they fall behind. With cheating, perception becomes reality, so transparency is the antidote to suspicion and distrust.

Cheating in Civilization

Sometime, however, hidden bonuses and cheats are still necessary to provide the right challenge for the player. The Civilization series provides plenty of examples of how this process can go awry and drive players crazy with poorly-handled cheating.

Being turn-based, the developers could not rely on a human’s natural limitations within a real-time environment. Instead, Civilization gives out a progressive series of unit, building, and technology discounts for the AI as the levels increase (as well as penalties at the lowest levels). Because of their incremental nature, these cheats have never earned much ire from the players. Their effect is too small to notice on a turn-by-turn basis, and players who pry into the details usually understand why these bonuses are necessary.

On the other hand, many other cheats have struck players as unfair. In the original version of the game, the AI could create units for free under the fog-of-war, a situation which clearly showed how the computer was playing by different rules from the human. Also, AI civilizations would occasionally receive free “instant” Wonders, often robbing a player of many turns of work. While an AI beating the human to a Wonder using the slow drip of steady bonuses was acceptable, granting it the Wonder instantly felt entirely different.

How a cheat will be perceived has much more to do with the inconsistencies and irrationality of human psychology than any attempt to measure up to some objective standard of fairness. Indeed, while subtle gameplay bonuses might not bother a player, other, legitimate strategies could drive players crazy, even if they know that a fellow human might pursue the exact same path as the AI has.

For example, in the original Civ, the AI was hard-wired to declare war on the human if the player was leading the game by 1900AD. This strategy felt unfair to players – who felt that the AI was ganging up on the human – even though most of them would have followed the same strategy without a second thought in a multi-player game.

In response, by the time of Civ3, we guaranteed that the AI did not consider whether an opponent was controlled by a human or a computer when conducting diplomacy. However, these changes still did not inoculate us against charges of unfairness. Civ3 allowed open trading – such as technology for maps or resources for gold. An enterprising human player would learn when to demand full price for their technologies and when to take whatever they could get – from a weak opponent with very little wealth, for example.

We adapted the AI to follow this same tactic, so that it would be able to take whatever gold it could from a backwards neighbor. To the players, however, the AI’s appeared to be once again ganging up against the human. Because the AI civs were fairly liberal with trading, they all tended to be around the same technology level, which led the player to believe that they were forming their own non-human trading cartel, spreading technologies around like candy (or, in the parlance of our forums, “tech-whoring”).

Perception is Reality

Once again, perception is reality. The question is not whether the AI is playing “fairly” but what is the game experience for the player? If questions of fairness keep creeping into the player’s mind, the game needs to be changed. Thus, for Civ4, we intentionally crippled the AI’s ability to trade with one another to ensure that a similar situation did not develop.

The computer is still a black box to players, so single events based on hidden mechanics need to be handled with great care. Sports game developers, for example, need to be very sensitive to how often a random event hurts the player, such as a fumble, steal, or ill-timed error. The dangers of perceived unfairness are simply too great.

Returning to our original example, the developers of Puzzle Quest actually should have considered cheating, but only in favor of the player. The game code could ensure that fortunate drops only happen for the human and never for the AI. The ultimate balance of the game could still be maintained by tweaking the power of the AI’s equipment and spells – changes which appear “fair” because they are explained explicitly to the player. The overall experience would thus be improved by the removal of these negative outliers that only serve to stir up suspicion. When the question is one of fairness, the player is always right.

Posted in Columns | 13 Comments »

Game Developer Column 6: Asynchronicity

July 1st, 2009 Soren Johnson

The following was published in the March 2009 issue of Game Developer magazine…

One of the first things that separated video games from board, card, and parlor games was real-time interaction. The computer could handle all the details and challenges inherent in allowing two (or more) people to play the same game at the same time. Indeed, despite the name, the first multi-player video games may have had their roots more in sports than in games. Pong, after all, was inspired by table tennis. These early experiences were inherently synchronous, meaning that the players experienced the game together, at the same time, on the same machine. Since then, the synchronous format has been the default model for multi-player video games, and – with the arrival of online gaming – this same experience could be enjoyed even by people who were not necessarily in the same location.

The synchronous model is so deeply embedded in the standards and traditions of the industry – think Doom, StarCraft, Madden, EverQuest, and so on – that few designers consciously consider that synchronous play is simply a design choice. Another option exists – asynchronous play, meaning multi-player games that can be experienced in bite-sized chunks at different times for each player. The board-game world provides examples of games which can be played using this format, such as play-by-mail chess or wargames. The most successful game for this format is clearly Diplomacy, the classic game of back-stabbing, which rewards secret negotiations and hidden pacts difficult to achieve in a synchronous format. Indeed, with the appearance of the Web, a number of unofficial sites have sprung up giving players a moderated, asynchronous Diplomacy experience online.

One of the reasons Diplomacy works so well as an asynchronous game is that the turns are executed simultaneously. In other words, unlike sequential games like chess, in which players take turns performing actions, all moves in Diplomacy are done at the same time. Players submit their orders secretly to a gamemaster who then handles all interactions and conflicts according to the carefully crafted rules. This format is ideal for an asynchronous experience because all players get to make a decision every single turn. More traditional board games, from Risk and Monopoly to Carcassonne and Ticket to Ride, would slow down to a painful crawl in asynchronous play because the vast majority of turns are spent waiting for other players to make their moves. Thus, asynchronous play favors a specific style of game mechanics, ones which minimize waiting and keep players involved as much as possible.

Games for Real People

Asynchronous games hold a number of advantages over their synchronous counterparts. To begin, the time pressure of a standard turn-based game is eliminated. No more are 4 or 5 other gamers sitting around a table, waiting for the slow player to make up his mind. Instead, a player could take an hour deciding what to do without negatively impacting the flow of the game. Furthermore, asynchronous play allows multi-player gaming – still the richest, most engaging experience available – to fit the schedule of regular people with busy lives and unpredictable free time, across multiple time zones. Few adults can afford the total devotion required to participate in a five-hour, 40-man MMO raid. In contrast, an asynchronous game can allow a large group of friends to play together as long as each player can find 15 minutes per day to check the game. In Diplomacy, the English player can submit her moves in the morning, and the French can do it at night – or vice-versa – whatever works best for each one.

Indeed, the ideal online asynchronous game goes a step further than Diplomacy, which can still hang if one player neglects to send in a turn, by moving to a real-time format in which the game progresses regardless of an individual player’s specific actions. In fact, fantasy sports games follow exactly this model. Once a league is initiated, scores are tabulated each day of the season whether players log-on or not. However, the players are all full participants in their league whether they check their teams once every other week or hit the waiver wire multiple times per day. The strength of this model can clearly be seen by the astounding popularity of online fantasy leagues, with at least 30 million North American players in 2007, according to a study by the Fantasy Sports Trade Association. (In fact, a case could be made that fantasy sports are the most popular form of multi-player gaming in the world.) Players with different commitment levels can play together and still enjoy the experience – a statement which definitely cannot be made about your typical RTS.

Looking to the Web

Few good examples of asynchronous gaming exist for AAA retail video games, besides some play-by-email modes for older strategy games. For Civilization 4, we created a PitBoss (“Persistent Turn-Based Server”) option which allowed large games of up to 32 players in which players could log-on at any time to execute their turns. Combined with simultaneous movement and a 24-hour turn timer, epic games of Civilization were finally manageable thanks to the asynchronous format. One could also say that World of Warcraft’s focus on solo content is a form of asynchronous play, in that players could finally participate in a traditional MMO without needing to juggle the logistics of managing a raid schedule or looking for a pick-up group. Furthermore, Leaderboards and Achievements are also a form of asynchronous interaction layered on top of traditional single-player or synchronous multi-player games, enabling a extra level of socialization for gamers across multiple sessions.

However, most of the innovative asynchronous games exist on the Web, a platform already built upon asynchronous interactions. Many Facebook games, like Wordscraper (née Scrabulous), manage the persistence of simple turn-based games while using the social networking aspects of Facebook to make it easier to challenge one’s friends. Games can be played between two friends over a few hours or a few months – whatever matches their level of commitment. Asynchronous MMOs exist as well, such as Mob Wars and Knighthood on Facebook or Nile Online and Travian on their own sites.

All of these games allow players to grow and develop some entity within a larger world, for prestige or challenge or the simple pleasures of levellings. In Nile Online, for example, players control a city on the banks of the Nile, each one with a unique resource, such as cedar, gold, or oil. As the cities grow, they begin trading with nearby players to acquire the resources they need – perhaps bronze for sculptures or emeralds for jewelry – or to sell their own excess goods for a profit. Eventually, players can see their cities rise in the global rankings or create great Monuments for further renown.

Meaningful Interaction?

The challenge with these asynchronous MMOs is that, while they do have some of the advantages of a multi-player environment, they tend to feel more like a less predictable single-player game. Player interaction is fairly light as most of mechanics focus simply on developing one’s own domain, without much concern for the neighbors. Allowing meaningful interaction between players is a challenge because, by definition, the system can only assume one player is logged-on at a time. If one player could wipe out another player’s city, what if the latter player is asleep? Would it be fun to wake up and discover all of one’s hard-earned progress destroyed without a chance to counter the attack?

Thus, most of the games include options to lessen the impact of other players’ actions. In Travian, for example, a player can build a Cranny which automatically protect her resources when another player ransacks the town. However, these mechanics are ultimately self-defeating; player interaction is either meaningful or it is not. If zero-sum mechanics, like resource raids, are too powerful and negate the advantages of asynchronous play – the ability to set one’s own play schedule – then the developers should focus on the parallel competition mechanics of the game instead, building a Wonder first or achieving economic dominance.

One asynchronous web-based game which tries to solves this problem while keeping meaningful zero-sum mechanics is Duels, a fantasy-themed MMO in which characters level up by fighting one another. The system is asynchronous because players do not actually need to be online when their characters fight. Instead, a warrior might challenge a wizard to a duel, which is only played out when the wizard actually accepts the challenge later that same day. The advantage is that while the conflict and interaction is meaningful, the players themselves can still play the game at whatever pace they prefer without worrying about looking for games in the lobby or rage-quitters spoiling the battles. However, the problem is that, because players can be offline when combat occurs, no meaningful decisions actually occur during the duel itself. Thus, combat is a “black box” which takes in two characters and spits out a result. If a good game should be a series of interesting decisions, Duels paints itself into a corner by taking control away from the player.

Native Asynchronous Play

Truth to be told, asynchronous games are still in their infancy from a design perspective. Their future is promising as the potential audience for asynchronous multi-player games is much great than the potential audience for synchronous ones – although anyone who can find time for synchronous games can find time for asynchronous ones, the opposite is not true. The challenge is, instead of aping mechanics from established synchronous games, finding game mechanics native to the format itself, ones which make sense only in an asynchronous world. The best example of such a game is Parking Wars, a Facebook game in which players earn money by parking for an extended period of time on another player’s street. The trick is that if a car is parked illegally, then the owner of that street can steal all the money the car had earned by handing out a parking ticket.

Thus, the best strategy is knowing what times one’s friends are less likely to be checking their streets for illegally parked cars and using that knowledge to earn money. The counter-strategy, of course, is to check one’s own street at unexpected times to catch one’s friends trying to do the same. Thus, the game cleverly uses the actual time players are off-line as the game’s content. Unlike the mechanics of the other asynchronous games mentioned previously, the rules behind Parking Wars could not work at all in a synchronous environment. Designers of future asynchronous games should follow this precedent – the time has come to stop retrofitting synchronous mechanics into an asynchronous shell and to find the format’s native voice.

Posted in Columns | 5 Comments »

Game Developer Column 5: Sid’s Rules

May 1st, 2009 Soren Johnson

The following was published in the January 2009 issue of Game Developer magazine…

Most game developers are familiar with Sid’s dictum that “a good game is a series of interesting choices.” In fact, my co-columnist Damion Schubert started his recent article on player choice (October 2008) by referencing this famous quote. However, over the course of his career, Sid has developed a few other general rules of game design, which I heard him discuss many times during my seven years (2000-2007) at his studio, Firaxis Games. As these insights are quite practical lessons for designers, they are also worthy of discussion.

Double it or Cut it by Half

Good games can rarely be created in a vacuum, which is why many designers advocate an iterative design process, during which a simple prototype of the game is built very early and then iterated on repeatedly until the game becomes a shippable product. Sid called this process “finding the fun,” and the probability of success is often directly related to the number of times a team can turn the crank on the loop of developing an idea, play-testing the results, and then adjusting based on feedback. As the number of times a team can go through this cycle is finite, developers should not waste time with small changes. Instead, when making gameplay adjustments, developers should aim for significant changes that will provoke a tangible response.

If a unit seems too weak, don’t lower its cost by 5%; instead, double its strength. If players feel overwhelmed by too many upgrades, try removing half of them. In the original Civilization, the gameplay kept slowing down to a painful crawl, which Sid solved by shrinking the map in half. The point is not that the new values are likely to be correct – the goal is to stake out more design territory with each successive iteration.

Imagine the design space of a new game to be an undiscovered world. The designers may have a vague notion of what exists beyond the horizon, but without experimentation and testing, these assumptions remain purely theoretically. Thus, each radical change opens up a new piece of land for the team to consider before settling down for the final product.

One Good Game is Better than Two Great Ones

Sid liked to call this one the “Covert Action Rule,” a reference to a not-altogether-successful spy game he made in the early ’90s:

The mistake I made was actually having two games competing with each other. There was an action game where you break into a building and do all sorts of picking up clues and things like that, and then there was the story which involved a plot where you had to figure out who the mastermind was and what cities they were in, and it was an involved mystery-type plot. Individually, each part could have been a good game. Together, they fought with each other. You would have this mystery that you were trying to solve, then you would be facing this action sequence, and you’d do this cool action thing, and you’d get out of the building, and you’d say, “What was the mystery I was trying to solve?” Covert Action integrated a story and action poorly because the action was actually too intense – you’d spend ten minutes or so of real time in a mission, and by the time you got out, you had no idea of what was going on in the world.

In other words, even though both sections of the game were fun on their own, their co-existence ruined the experience because the player could not focus her attention on one or the other. This rule points to a larger issue, which is that all design choices only have value in relation to one another, each coming with their own set of cost/benefit trade-offs. Choosing to make a strategic game also means choosing not to make a tactical one. Thus, an idea may be “fun” on its own but still not make the game better if it distracts the player from the target experience. Indeed, this rule is clearly the reason why the Civ franchise has never dabbled with in-depth, tactical battles every time combat occurs.

However, sometimes multiple games can co-exist in harmony with each other. Sid’s own Pirates! is an example of a successful game built out of a collection of fighting, sailing, and dancing mini-games. However, these experiences were always very short – a few minutes at the most – leaving the primary focus on the meta-game of role-playing a pirate. Each short challenge was a tiny step along a more important larger path, of plundering all Spanish cities or rescuing your long-lost relatives.

Another example of a successful mix of separate sub-games is X-Com, which combined a tactical, turn-based, squad-level combat game with a strategic, real-time, resource-management game. As with Pirates!, what makes X-Com work is that the game chose a focus – in this case, the compelling tactical battles between your marines and the invading aliens. The high-level, strategic meta-game exists only to provide a loose framework in which these battles – which could take as long as a half hour each – actually matter. One doesn’t fight the aliens to get to manage resources later; instead, one manages resources to get to perform better – and have more fun – in future battles.

Do your Research after the Game is Done

Many of the most successful games of all time - SimCity, Grand Theft Auto, Civilization, Rollercoaster Tycoon, The Sims – have real-world themes, which broadens their potential audience by building the gameplay around concepts familiar to everyone. However, creating a game about a real topic can lead to a natural but dangerous tendency to cram the product full of bits of trivia and obscure knowledge to show off the amount of research the designer has done. This tendency spoils the very reason why real-world themes are so valuable – that players come to the game with all the knowledge they already need. Everybody knows that gunpowder is good for a strong military, that police stations reduce crime, and that carjacking is very illegal. As Sid puts it, “the player shouldn’t have to read the same books the designer has read in order to be able to play.”

Games still have great potential to educate, just not in the ways that many educators expect. While designers should still be careful not to include anything factually incorrect, the value of an interactive experience is the interplay of simple concepts, not the inclusion of numerous facts and figures. Many remember that the world’s earliest civilizations sprang up along river valleys – the Nile, the Tigris/Euphrates, the Indus – but nothing gets that concept across as effectively as a few simple rules in Civilization governing which tiles produce the most food during the early stages of agriculture. Furthermore, once the core work is done, research can be a very valuable way to flesh out a game’s depth, perhaps with historical scenarios, flavor text, or graphical details. Just remember that learning a new game is an intimidating experience, so don’t throw away the advantages of an approachable topic by expecting the player to already know all the details when the game starts.

The Player Should Have the Fun, not the Designer or the Computer

Creating story-based games can be an intoxicating experience for designers, many of whom go overboard with turgid back stories full of proper nouns, rarely-used consonants, and apostrophes. Furthermore, games based on complex, detailed simulations can be especially opaque if the mysterious inner workings of the algorithmic model remain hidden from view. As Sid liked to say, with these games, either the designer or the computer was the one having the fun, not the player.

For example, during the development of Civilization 4, we experimented with government types that gave significant productivity bonuses but also took away the player’s ability to pick which technologies were researched, what buildings were constructed, and which units were trained, relying instead on a hidden, internal model to simulate what the county’s people would choose on their own. The algorithms were, of course, very fun to construct and interesting to discuss outside of the game. The players, however, felt left behind – the computer was having all the fun – so we cut the feature.

Further, games require not just meaningful choices but also meaningful communication to feel right. Giving players decisions that have consequence but which they cannot understand is no fun. Role-playing games commonly fail at making this connection, such as when players are required to choose classes or skills when “rolling” a character before experiencing even a few seconds of genuine gameplay. How are players supposed to decide between being a Barbarian, a Fighter, or a Paladin before understanding how combat actually works and how each attribute performs in practice? Choice is only interesting when it is both impactful and informed.

Thus, in Sid’s words, the player must “always be the star.” As designers, we need to be the player’s greatest advocate during a game’s development, always considering carefully how design decisions affect both the player’s agency in the world and his understanding of the underlying mechanics.

Posted in Columns | 24 Comments »

Game Developer Column 4: Designing for Free

March 1st, 2009 Soren Johnson

The following was published in the November 2008 issue of Game Developer magazine…

In China, a new MMORPG with a very aggressive business model, entitled ZT Online, has gained significant popularity. With an ARPU of $40/quarter spread over one million paying users, the game has made its publisher, Giant Interactive, one of the most profitable online entertainment companies in China.  Like many Asian games, ZT is free-to-play (F2P) and focuses primarily on player-vs-player gameplay. Not only can players steal from their defeated foes, but weaker characters can even be kidnapped and held for ransom, locking their owners out of the game.

Access to equipment in ZT is very limited. First of all, there are no loot drops from killing monsters or completing quests. Further, all items in the game are completely bound to the owner, so there is no way to trade for better weapons with other players. Instead, the primary way to gain equipment to empower one’s character is by paying real money directly to the publisher to open “treasure chests.” Essentially in-game slot machines, these chest have only a small chance of producing something useful, and finding the best equipment often requires opening thousands of chests. In fact, each day, the game confers a special bonus to the player who has opened the most chests, meaning the player who has spent the most real-world money to obtain better items.

ZT Online’s complete embrace, at every level of the game, of real-money transactions (RMT) may be appalling to some in the West, but the game is in many ways at the vanguard of a trend to develop games that take advantage of the players’ appetites for spending money to gain in-game advantages. Ironically, the F2P-with-RMT model traces its origins to the challenge of getting Asian gamers to buy boxed, retail games, most of whom preferred the free ride of easy and widespread piracy. In response, Korean companies like Nexon and NCsoft built server-based online games which could not be pirated and would require alternate business models.

Starting with subscriptions (including the world’s first million-subscriber MMO, NCsoft’s Lineage), the Korean industry eventually shifted to F2P games that made money from micro-transactions, such as Nexon’s KartRider and MapleStory. With many of these online games serving tens of millions of players, the Korean model has begun attracting the attention of major Western publishers, who have chartered their own F2P games in Asia, such as EA’s FIFA Online, Valve’s Counter-Strike Online, and THQ’s Company of Heroes Onine.

The promise of F2P games is that gamers will get hooked on a free game and then eventually spend their own money on their new passion. However, designing these games is not a simple endeavor; in fact, the challenges of F2P design can make developers appreciate how fortunate they were when they could design for a fixed-cost product, either a boxed, retail game or a standard, subscription-based MMO. In a fixed-cost world, the designer can focus on just one thing: making the player’s experience as engaging and interesting and fun as possible.

For a F2P game, however, designers have to balance making free content fun enough to engage first-time players but not so much fun that they would not yearn for something more, something that could be turned into a transaction sometime in the future. Every design decision must be made with a mind towards how it affects the balance between free and paid content. Thus, the true cost of piracy is that the line between game business and game design has become very blurry. As games move from boxed products to ongoing services, business decisions will become increasingly indistinguishable from design decisions. Of course, the industry has seen game designers play businessmen before – a fundamental part of arcade game design was understanding how to suck the most quarters out of players. Thus, understanding how successful F2P game have navigated these waters is instructive.

Business or Design?

The aforementioned 2D MMORPG MapleStory has an in-game RMT store in which players can purchase items for their characters. These purchases can range from purely cosmetic items, such as funny shades or blue-colored hair, to consumables which give actual in-game bonuses. These consumables include tickets for earning double experience points over 24 hours, avatar warps for triggering instant travel, and ability resets for realigning character traits. In a nod to in-game fairness, these bonuses only save the purchaser time instead of directly increasing the power of his character. This distinction is important as RMT can still have in-game meaning without needing to be tied to the game’s best weapons and equipment, as with ZT Online.

Another popular F2P game with a different business model is the web-based MMORPG RuneScape, which uses optional subscriptions instead of optional microtransactions. Subscribers gain access to more quests, new areas, player housing, and extra skills. Again, the designers have to decide where to draw the line between free content to grow the game and paid content to drive revenue. As one in every six active players currently chooses to subscribe, they have struck a good balance.

Travian, a successful web-based MMO strategy game, does allow players to purchase temporary in-game bonuses, such as +10% attack strength or +25% wood production for a week. These bonuses have been controversial among the community as many players feel obligated to buy them in order to compete at the highest level. Gamers can also purchase Travian Plus, which unlocks an improved interface to make playing the game more efficient. The Plus mode includes a larger map display, a combat simulator, empire management tools, graphical info screens, and queued construction orders.

As a comparison, all of these features would be expected in a similar boxed, retail strategy game, such as Civilization 4. However, by withholding their best, the designers are walking a dangerous line here as players could be turned off by the purposely crippled interface. For example, in Travian, each of your towns can construct only one upgrade at a time. Thus, players are encouraged to visit their towns every time an upgrade is finished, and as each upgrade might take half an hour, players may need to check the site many, many times each day just to keep pace with their competitors. A simple order queue would fix this problem, but the designers purposely decided to offer this feature only to players willing to pay for Plus.

Whether this decision was right or wrong remains an open question, but perhaps a more important question is who made this decision? Game designers or businessmen? Does it even make sense to think of them as being different in a world where every element of a game can be given a price? Without a good balance of the needs of profit and of fun, F2P games will feel either like a con job designed to suck away all of the player’s money (as with ZT Online) or a charitable endeavor that never acquires the resources needed to develop and grow. However, when facing a difficult decision, one should always err on the side of providing the best free content possible. Greedy developers looking to maximize profits in the short-term risk losing their evangelizers willing to spread the word about a great game which is genuinely free-to-play.

A Free Market Solution

One interesting way to solve this problem – pioneered by Korean companies like Nexon – is the dual currency system, which lets the free market manage the balance. The Java-based MMO Puzzle Pirates employs such a system to meet the needs of both players who are time-rich and players who are cash-rich. One type of currency, Pieces of Eight (PoE), is earned by spending time playing puzzle games while the other type of currency, Doubloons, is bought directly with real money. A wide variety of items are available for purchase, with effects ranging from aesthetic changes to in-game upgrades. However, as items often cost both types of currency, players who cannot afford to buy Doubloons can trade for some by giving their PoE to cash-rich players. These latter players may need the PoE because they don’t have the time to spend earning it by playing puzzles for hours. By allowing players to freely trade the two currencies, the designers have created multiple paths to earning any single purchasable item.

Thus, the designers avoid the balance issues faced in Travian by making sure that all content and features are available to all players, whether they are willing to spend money or not. In fact, when a time-rich player trades for Doubloons, the cash-rich player is essentially “sponsoring” her peer – every Doubloon spent in Puzzle Pirates earns the developer money, whether the Doubloon is spent by the original purchaser or not. A natural free market dynamic keeps the two sides balanced. If too many time-rich players flood the game, the value of PoE will plummet, tempting players on the bubble to spend a little cash to take advantage of the low prices. Thus, with the help of the auto-balancing market forces of the dual currency system, the designer’s goal simply becomes creating a compelling experience that keeps people playing the game.

Even Giant Interactive is beginning to understand the limitations of the soak-the-rich design of ZT Online. The publisher is developing a subscription-based version of ZT (without the casino-style treasure chests) that is being launched for the low-income market not happy about playing a game full of rich players who have bought their way to the top. Another game they are publishing, Giant Online, aims for the middle-income segment by allowing RMT but adding spending caps to prevent a monetary arms race.

These developments are welcome because the free-to-play format holds great promise. F2P games have a much larger potential audience than their fixed-cost counterparts because of the former’s ability to satisfy different levels of player commitment, both in terms of time and money. Further, the potential for innovation is greater because consumers are no longer required to make a “leap of faith” when making a large, up-front retail purchase. However, the challenge of developing F2P game is that being “just” a game designer is no longer sufficient. Success, both in terms of profit and popularity, will be determined by how well the game design matches the business model.

Posted in Columns | 26 Comments »

Game Developer Column 3: Game Economics

January 23rd, 2009 Soren Johnson

The following was published in the September 2008 issue of Game Developer magazine…

Game design and economics have a spotty history. Designing a fun and functional economy is no easy task as many design assumptions tend to backfire when they come in contact with the player. For example, the early days of Ultima Online were infamous for the game’s wild and chaotic economy. Zachary Booth Simpson wrote a classic analysis of UO in 1999, detailing some of the more notable problems experienced at launch:

• the crafting system encouraged massive over-production by rewarding players for each item produced
• this over-production led to hyper-inflation as NPC shopkeepers printed money on demand to buy the worthless items
• players used vendors as unlimited safety deposit boxes by setting the prices for their own goods far above market value
• item hoarding by players forced the team to abandon the closed-loop economy as the world began to empty out of goods
• player cartels (including one from a rival game company!) cornered the market on magical Reagents, preventing average users from casting spells
  

MMO economies have come a long way since then; World of Warcraft’s auction house is now a vibrant part of the game’s economy and overall world, with many players spending much of their time “playing the market” to good effect. CCP, developers of EVE Online, even hired an academic economist to analyze the flow of resources and the fluctuation of prices within their game world. Indeed, understanding the potential effect of market forces on gameplay is an important ability for designers to develop.

Can the Market Balance the Game?

Many designers have used economic game mechanics as a tool for balancing their games. For example, in Rise of Nations, every time a unit – such as a Knight or Archer – is purchased, the cost of future units of the same type goes up, simulating the pressure of demand upon price. This design encouraged players to diversify their armed forces, in order to maximize their civilization’s buying power. By allowing the “values” of different paths and options to float during a game, designers present players with a constantly shifting landscape, extending replayability by guaranteeing no perfect path to victory.

However, if taken too far, efforts to auto-balance by tweaking the economy can destroy a game. In 2006, Valve conducted an interesting economic experiment within Counter-Strike: Source, implementing a “Dynamic Weapon Pricing” algorithm. According to the developers, “the prices of weapons and equipment will be updated each week based on the global market demand for each item. As more people purchase a certain weapon, the price for that weapon will rise and other weapons will become less expensive.”

Unfortunately, the overwhelming popularity of certain weapons trumped the ability of the algorithm to balance the game. For example, while the very effective Desert Eagle skyrocketed to $16,000, the less useful Glock flatlined at $1, leading to some extreme edge cases (such as the pictured “Glock bomb”). A game economy is not a real economy; not everything can be balanced simply by altering its price. Gamers just want to have fun, and if the cost of the option considered the most fun is constantly tuned higher and higher until the price becomes prohibitive, players may not just alter their strategy – they may simply go play another game. The current price of gas may be making our real lives “unfun”, but only one real-world economy exists, leaving us no choice. Gamers are not in the same situation.

Ultimately, designers should remember that achieving perfect balance is a dubious goal. Players are not looking for another game like rock/paper/scissors, in which every choice is guaranteed to be valid, essentially encouraging random strategies. Players are motivated by reasons beyond purely economic ones when playing games. Raising the cost of a player’s favorite weapon is simply going to feel like a penalty and should only be done if the imbalance is actually ruining the core game.

Putting the Market Inside the Game

Perhaps a more appropriate use of economic dynamics is as a transparent mechanic within the game itself. The board game world provides some great examples of such free market mechanics at work. German-style games Puerto Rico and Vinci both use increasing subsidies to improve the appeal of unpopular roles and technologies, respectively. In the case of the former, every turn no player decides to be the Craftsman, one gold piece is added as a “reward” for choosing that role. As the gold increases slowly, few players will be able to resist such a bounty, which nicely solves the problem of making sure all roles are eventually chosen.

Puerto Rico still has some clearly better and clearly worse options – they just change from turn to turn based on the current reward. In this case, auto-balancing actually keeps the game fun because players are rewarded for choosing less common strategies, instead of being penalized for sticking to their favorites. Perhaps more importantly, the effects of the market are spelled out clearly for the players ahead of time, so that no one feels the game is biased against them.

Perhaps the most elegant example of a pure free market mechanic based around actual resources and prices can be found in Power Grid, another German-style board game. In this case, players supply their power plants with a variety of resources (oil, coal, uranium, and garbage), all of which are purchased from a central market. Resource pieces are arranged on a linear track of escalating prices. Every turn, X new pieces of each resource are added to the market, and players take Y pieces away as purchases. As the supply goes up and down, the price correspondingly goes up and down, depending on where the next available piece is on the market track.

By making the supply-demand mechanic so explicit and transparent to the players, the market becomes its own battlefield, as much as the hex grid of a wargame might be. By buying up as much coal as possible, one player might drive the price out of the range of the player in the next seat, causing her to be unable to supply all her plants at the end of the turn, a disastrous event in Power Grid. Thus, with a true open market, price can be used as a weapon just as much as an arrow or a sword might be in a military game.

The Benefits of Free Trade

Similarly, a number of modern strategy games, including Sins of a Solar Empire and the Age of Empires series, have included free markets in which players could buy and sell resources, influencing global prices with their actions. These markets serve as interesting “greed tests” in that players are often tempted to sell when they need cash or to buy when they are short on a specific resource, but they know in the back of their minds that each time they use the market, they are potentially giving an advantage to another player. Buy too much wood in Age of Kings, and your opponents can make all the gold they need selling off their excess supply.

Unfortunately, the market dynamics of these games tend to repeat themselves, with prices usually bottoming out once the players’ total production overwhelms their needs. This effect stems from the fact that the game maps emphasize economic fairness – in AoK, each player is guaranteed a decent supply of gold, stone, and wood within a short distance of their starting location. Spreading resources randomly around the map could lead a much more dynamic and interesting market mechanic but at the cost of overall play balance for a game with a core military mechanic. If your opponents attack with horsemen, what if there is no wood with which to build spearmen, the appropriate counter unit?

However, a game with a core economic mechanic does not suffer from such limitations. In most business-based games, specializing in a specific resource is a basic part of the gameplay. Thus, a free market mechanic can become a compelling part of a competitive game. The ultimate example of such a game is the ’80s classic M.U.L.E., in which four players vie for economic dominance on a newly-settled world. Although only four resources exist (food, energy, smithore, and crystite), economies-of-scale encourage players to specialize. More importantly, players can rarely produce all the resources they need on their own, requiring them to buy directly from other players.

The game has a brilliant interface for facilitating this trade between players. Buyers are arranged along the bottom edge of the screen, with sellers on the top. As buyers move up, their asking price goes up accordingly. As sellers descend, their offer price decreases as well. When the two meet in the middle, a transaction occurs. Once again, the mechanic is explicit and transparent – player inventories and market prices are all clearly visible to everyone. Players understand that they either have to adjust their own prices to make a deal happen or hope that their rivals cave. Knowing how desperate another player might be to acquire the energy needed to power his buildings or the food needed to feed his labor, the temptation to pull ever last penny from him is strong. In such a case, prices tend to fall only if the player is afraid someone else might sweep in to reap the profits! The game mechanic mined here by M.U.L.E. is deep and rich. Impoverishing one’s enemies can be just as much fun as destroying them.

Posted in Columns | 13 Comments »