You Have No Idea How Hard It Is To Run A Sweatshop, Part 2

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I gave a talk on games and meaning at GDC 2023, which is now available on YouTube:

However, I fully scripted the talk ahead of time, so I decided it would be worth taking the time to post the slides online, in three parts to have mercy on your browser.

Besides the question of whether we know what we are doing as designers, what about the question of whether games can teach us anything about our world.

Or, maybe, let’s set the bar lower and see if games can at least teach us anything about sports.

To do that, we need to talk about baseball analyst Voros McCracken.

Who, despite his preposterous name, has no relation to either Zak McCracken or the Alien Mindbenders

Instead, Voros McCracken revolutionized our understanding of baseball with an idea he first published on Usenet in 1999. He called it DIPS, which stands for Defense Independent Pitching Stats.

The basic idea is that while pitchers do have control over balls and strikes, once the batter hits the ball, the results are no longer in their control. In other words, barring a strikeout or a walk, pitchers don’t control how many hits they allow.

This may seem like a fairly simple observation, but baseball is a very old game, and for over a century, everyone had assumed that the opposite was true – that some pitchers were better at getting batters out than others.

The initial response to McCracken’s idea, which threatened to turn our understanding of pitching upside-down, was shock, disbelief, even hostility.

Although Bill James, the patron saint of progressive baseball analysis, was initially skeptical, after doing the research, he determined that McCracken was correct and that he felt “stupid for not having realized this 30 years ago.”

So, why am I talking about DIPS? What does this mean for video games? Well, one part of the appeal of games is that they can theoretically simulate the real world and teach us about it, that we can make choices and see those choices be modelled accurately. But, to use just this one specific example, how could a game written before McCracken’s insight on pitching have any claim to accurately model baseball? The programmers writing these games would absolutely make some pitchers better than others at preventing hits because that was how everyone thought baseball worked before McCracken. And of course, if garbage goes in, garbage comes out. These games could only simulate a faulty understanding of how baseball works.

To underline this point even more, consider this article Bill James wrote in 2015, arguing that baseball managers were using their starting pitchers incorrectly. For decades, teams have used a five-man rotation, meaning that there is a new starting pitcher every fifth day so that each one can pitch at full strength after four days of rest. James argues that teams should instead use a three-man rotation but with much lower pitch counts, relying more on relief pitchers.

Let’s say someone wanted to test this theory with a baseball simulation. Well, even with a sport like baseball that is ideally suited for simulation as it is essentially a turn-based game, there is no way to get good results on a three-man rotation because baseball simulations are written by trying to get their internal numbers to match real-world results, not from some deeper understanding of how baseball actually works which would then produce accurate results. Because no one has tried a three-man rotation in real life, no one knows what would actually happen, how a pitcher would hold up to pitching every three days instead of every five. Game designers would just be guessing.

So, what can games simulate? Strangely, the best example I can think of is a game trying to recreate a situation MUCH more difficult to simulate than baseball, life as a border agent in a totalitarian country. Papers Please succeeds because instead of trying to simulate reality, it is trying to simulate the personal tensions someone in this position might feel.

The game puts you in difficult situations as a border agent processing immigrants who have compelling stories for why they are trying to cross the border. Would you stop a young girl fleeing from abuse just because she doesn’t have all her papers in order? Who will you let in and who will you keep out? What laws will you enforce and what will you turn a blind eye towards?

However, letting people in illegally can lead to citations which carry fines that might lead to your son dying because you don’t have enough medicine.

Is this an accurate simulation? I mean, who knows? But it creates a genuine emotional conflict which we can all relate to – Is there a right thing to do when helping someone in need will hurt your family? Losing your family is a loss condition, so you can’t just perform as a paragon.

Through this tension, Papers Please gives players an understanding of why resistance against an oppressive system is so hard for people with real lives and, thus, why the powerful are able to stay in power. 

So, to put it simply, games can simulate empathy much better than they can simulate reality.

Speaking of which, here’s a classic line on one of game’s most famous simulations: SimCity doesn’t actually simulate a real city. It simulates the inside of Will Wright’s brain.

Except that’s not exactly true. Very crudely, here are the two poles of 20th-century urban planning. Le Corbusier, who was a proponent of top-down, rational city planning, which separated residential, commercial, and industrial areas. In contrast, Jane Jacobs challenged this idea with proposals for mixed-use development which reflected how cities traditionally grew without central planning.

When Will Wright talks about urban planning, he is much more likely to praise Jacobs than Corbusier. Her more contemporary ideas are the ones he would commonly refer to in his sprawling game design talks.

For example, in this interview, when asked about the inspirations for SimCity, the one urban planner he mentions is Jane Jacobs, not Corbusier.

However, Wright was not making a game in the abstract. He was trying to create a whole city on a very real Commodore 64, and the ideas of these two designers required very different types of coding. Jacobs’s mixed-use urbanism, which focused on pedestrian flow, would require agent simulation, which would be much too complex for an 8-bit system. On the other hand, Corbusier’s residential, commercial, and industrial superblocks could be handled by much simpler cellular automata, which is what Wright choose to use. In other words, the limits of the technology determined what type of city SimCity would simulate, regardless of what Will Wright might have actually believed.

So, SimCity ended up with the famous residential/commercial/industrial split that a rationalist planner like Corbusier might admire, and which – it needs to be said – is today considered bad urban design that leads to crime, slums, and general economic and social decline. As an admirer of Jacobs, Wright probably understood this too – so that leaves us with the question, what meaning should we take from the first SimCity if it represents an urban model that the designer himself doesn’t even believe in?

Is this intentional design? Accidental design? Something else?

There is actually a successful city builder based on the type of agent simulation needed to support Jacob’s ideas. Pharaoh doesn’t use districts; instead, its systems are built around little walkers that move around your city and do their jobs, so that the layout of your streets and the adjacency of your buildings actually matters. The game is considered a high-water mark for city builders, and a testament to how choosing the right model can matter.

I’d like to talk about another game, Kent Hudson’s narrative simulation, The Novelist, which explores the story of the title character who has troubling balancing his three biggest priorities – his wife, his work, and his son.

The game presents you with choices over the course of nine chapters, moving you up or down in those three different categories. The inner math is zero-sum so if you gain two points in your marriage, you lose two points between your work and your son.

However, after playtesting, Hudson realized that his game’s meaning was the exact opposite from what he wanted:

My game was telling players: You can’t have it all. Life is zero sum. You can’t win.
I don’t believe that statement to be true, but people were taking a message from the game that I fundamentally disagreed with.

Games can escape the intentions of their designers just so easily.

I think one of the issues games like The Novelist face is that it’s hard to find human meaning in a game with just simple math at its core. Yet, games absolutely can teach us about ourselves. Telltale’s Walking Dead games provide a great example of this by showing you how your choices compare to everyone else’s. If you are one of the 25% of players who killed Stephanie, you might reflect on why you made that choice when so many others didn’t. Maybe the best way for games to be about people is simply to inject more real people into the game.

Let’s talk about another example of designer intent going awry. This is a SPENT, a well-intentioned game that wants to build empathy for the poor by showing players just how difficult their life can be, how they sometimes need to choose between paying the gas bill, repairing their car, and attending their grandfather’s funeral. That’s a bold goal, but is it effective?

One researcher aimed to find out. Here is an article from Psychology Today about an experiment she ran to see how effective SPENT was at increasing empathy for the poor.

She writes:

After I analyzed the results from this study, I was dismayed to find that playing the game had no effect on positive feelings toward the poor. In fact, the game had a negative effect on attitudes among certain participants – including some people who were sympathetic to the poor to begin with.

The problem is agency – when holding the mouse and making the decisions, it’s very natural to assume that the poor have the same agency that you do as the player. Consider this choice right here – should you spend the money to attend your grandfather’s funeral? The problem is that it’s very easy for the player to not spend the money by just hitting the Skip the Memorial button and then end up thinking: Why do these poor people have such a hard time saving their money?!?

One very interesting finding was that the game did produce empathy… when people watched the game instead of playing it. From my perspective, this is a devastating finding because the whole thing we as game designers have been going on and on about for decades is how games are empathy machines because they put you in the shoes of someone else’s life, but here we see the exact opposite effect, and to make it worse, a passive, non-interactive medium is the one that produces empathy instead.

However, maybe things are not so dire. Why, for example. does Papers Please succeed where Spent fails? The answer is actually just game design. Papers Please took the time and energy to give bite to your decisions – either from what happens when you turn away those in need or from how your acts of defiance hurt your family. In Spent, there is no actual cost to pressing the Skip the Memorial button and saving the money, which keeps the player from actually empathizing with the protagonist.

However, even if designers take the time to build out all of the mechanics needed to create real emotional tension, things can still go awry. Consider Sweatshop, a game designed to raise awareness about the hostile labor conditions in modern sweatshops. Indeed, this game earned the honor of being banned from the Apple App Store for its depiction of child labor and unsafe working conditions, which perhaps hit a little too close to home for them.

The game puts you in the role of the sweatshop manager who, in order to meet increasingly unreasonable quota demands from the corporation, has to cut corners by lowering safety standards, hiring children, and pushing workers past their limits. 

This is what Simon Parkin, one of the designers, had this to say about their intentions and the game’s meaning:

Whereas a film documentary might piece together the sweatshop story through footage and anecdote, the game allows players to experience the system from the inside with all its cat’s cradle of pressures and temptations. [A] game can present the system in a more objective manner thereby building a different sort of empathy and understanding.

However, trying to get a message across with interactivity is playing with fire. This is what journalist and game designer Tom Francis said about his experience playing Sweatshop:

At the end of it, I thought, shit, it’s hard to run a sweatshop. Previously, I was like, oh, it’s terrible these conditions in the sweatshop. Now, I’m like, man, you don’t know what pressures they’re under. It’s hard to meet these quotas!

The problem is that the game puts you in the role of the manager, so your empathy is for the pressures he is under instead of the workers. You end up understanding why managers make the compromises they do and why children end up being mutilated.

Now, there are a couple of different ways to look at that. If players are able to step back and think about what they just did, it’s sort of amazing that a game could get you to kill kids to hit your t-shirt quota.

But I think it’s just as likely that, in less obviously baleful situations like a sweatshop, players will always subconsciously identify with whoever they control in a video game. What does that mean for games where you play the king, the queen, the ruler, or – more generally – the status quo, the existing power structure?

Perhaps the most famous example of a designer’s intent being thwarted is Elizabeth Magie’s The Landlord’s Game from 1906. It was designed to shows the negative effects of rampant capitalism, with an alternate set of rules to show how all the players would be better off if they adopted a tax system where rents were paid into the public treasury instead of into the landlords’ pockets.

The original ruleset contain a very interesting passage that lays out the designer’s intentions. Magie points out that players will quickly realize that, under the default, monopolistic ruleset, “one player will own everything on the board.” The Landlord’s Game was Das Kapital made of cardboard and dice. She invented player elimination to prove out the evils of monopolies. Unfortunately for Magie, collecting rents from your properties and pushing your rivals into bankruptcy proved to be a lot more fun than having all the money going to the public treasury, and…

Today the game is known as Monopoly, minus the socialist tax ruleset. The lessons here are subtle – Monopoly absolutely does demonstrate how a capitalist system will concentrate wealth in the hands of the few and impoverish the many, which is what Magie intended after all, but I somehow doubt…

…this is exactly what she had in mind or if players perceive of the game as a critique of capitalism.

Fun is an insidious requirement for a game to be played and, perhaps more importantly, re-played. Games that aren’t much fun tend to just disappear, and we have to grapple with that as designers.

The very nature of a game makes it extremely difficult to express a strong position on an issue. In order to be a game with different potential strategies, Prison Architect has to suggest that rehabilitation and punishment are both equally viable options. The game-shaped box it is in prevents it from picking a side, regardless of what the designers think.

What it can do is show the problems with each path – you can punish prisoners by searching for contraband every day, which means your addicts will go into withdrawal when they can’t get their drugs and act out violently. On the other hand, you can create job training programs, but that lets the prisoners get their hands on screwdrivers and other items that can be turned into weapons. You can have visitation programs but then you’ll discover a pipeline of drugs being smuggled into the prison.

The game is not – and never could be – an accurate simulation of prison because that’s impossible, but it can help players understand the tradeoffs, compromises, and tensions that they may not have considered before playing.

Now let’s talk about Defcon, a game about nuclear holocaust. (We are really hitting the high points, aren’t we?)

An interesting study was conducted on how playing the game affected player’s opinions of nuclear war.

The experiment separated the subjects into two groups, a control group that read articles on the dangers of nuclear war and a treatment group which played Defcon instead. There were significant differences in how these two groups changed their opinion after the experiment. Although the control group became more worried about a nuclear war in the near future, the Defcon players strangely became less concerned. On the other hand, the game players were more pessimistic that they would survive a war. The researchers’ conclusion, based also on qualitative data, was that playing Defcon was more effective at showing players how destructive nuclear war would be so that they then assumed that our governments would be more incentivized to never resort to nuclear war.

However, there is one important wrinkle in the overall results, which are divided up here by high, medium, and low frequency gamers. Note that every single group became more concerned about the threat of nuclear warfare except for one – the high-frequency gamers in the treatment group, meaning the ones who play games the most frequently. The hypothesis is that core gamers quickly saw past the setting and no longer saw a game about nuclear war and instead saw an RTS game with an unusual art style. This highlights a huge challenge for trying to communicate using game design – if you are working within familiar genre constraints, over time, both the game’s setting and meaning will eventually disappear.

A similar finding showed up in a study run by Dr. Stephen Blessing and Elena Sakosky based on a Geoff Engelstein thought experiment about whether players of Incan Gold would change their behavior based on simply changing the setting of the game. Incan Gold is a push-your-luck game where you delve into an ancient temple for gems and artifacts but risk losing it all the farther you go. To see if the setting affected players, they reskinned the game twice – first, as a firefighter game where you rescued victims instead and, second, as an abstract version where you are just playing for points.

The results they found were that players did change their behavior based on the setting, at least at first. This graph shows how often players returned to the base, which means that they have stopped pressing their luck. In the firefighter setting, this means rescuing less victims, while in the abstract version, it simply means scoring less points. In the experiment, the firefighters would push their luck more, taking more risks to save more people. However, and this is the important part, by the fourth game, the results had largely converged and players of all three versions were playing the same way. Players were now seeing past the setting and just optimizing to score the most points, whether they were called gems or victims or just points. Setting can matter, but we need to be aware that players will eventually gravitate to the game’s inner logic and start to ignore the setting. The more the setting and the rules are disconnected, the bigger a problem this becomes.

These four games have very different settings and meanings, with a very different set of messages and emotions for the player. And yet, there are significant parts of these four game that play out the exact same way, could even be built on the same shared codebase. Putting players into an established genre dulls the designer’s intent because, over time, players will stop engaging with the message and meaning of the game and instead just fall back on instinct. They are now playing shooter #34, not a philosophical game about a submerged dystopia or a jaunty adventure with a lovable rogue or a contemporary high-tech military thriller. Instead, players are warped back into their dorm room in 1994 and booting up Doom. Meaning is not a layer built on top of someone else’s game. A game’s meaning starts with its basic building blocks, the core actions that the player is going to be repeating over and over again.

Part 1, Part 3

You Have No Idea How Hard It Is To Run A Sweatshop, Part 1

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I gave a talk on games and meaning at GDC 2023, which is now available on YouTube:

However, I fully scripted the talk ahead of time, so I decided it would be worth taking the time to post the slides online, in three parts to have mercy on your browser.

Hi everyone, I’m Soren Johnson, and welcome to You Have No Idea How Hard It Is To Run A Sweatshop

Here are the published games that I’ve worked on over my career, some of which I will touch on over the next hour.

I also do a podcast where I interview game designers about why they make games, and the episodes tend to run long, so check it out if you have any 4-hour road trips coming up.

So, the talk I am about to give is something of a sequel to one I gave in 2010 entitled Theme is Not Meaning. I argued then that we need to stop assuming that a game’s theme or SETTING determines its meaning and, instead, that meaning comes from the mechanics themselves. Since then, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about games which do a good job of constructing meaning from their mechanics and also about ones which do it poorly. I’d like to talk about some of these examples today and examine how best to build meaning in our games. Games have great power to affect players but, and I’m going to be bringing this up over and over again, that power can so easily slip out of the designer’s hands and sometimes end up delivering the exact opposite message from what the designer intended.

First, let’s talk about soccer and the 1994 Caribbean Cup, where they introduced a unique rule concerning Golden Goals, which are overtime goals that instantly end the game. In this tournament, Golden Goals would now be worth 2 goals instead of 1, which could matter if two teams are tied in the standings and need to use the difference in goals scored as the tiebreaker.

So, here are the standings before the final game between Barbados and Grenada.

Let me explain what we are looking at here. These columns are the number of games played and the wins and losses so far. Note that if Barbados beats Grenada, there will be a three-way tie.

In a three-way tie, each team will have 3 points in the standing because each win is worth 3 points.

So, in the event of a three-way tie, the team which advances is the one with the best Goal Differential, which is Goals For subtracted by Goals Allowed.

Thus, even though Barbados is currently in last place here, if they can beat Granada by two goals, they will advance from their group by having the highest goal differential. Remember when I said earlier that a Golden Goal is worth double? That’s called foreshadowing.

Near the end of the game, Barbados is up by exactly two goals, with a score of 2 to 0, so if the game were to end at that moment, Barbados would have the goal differential they need to win the tiebreaker.

But then, in the 82nd minute, Grenada scores and, even though Barbados is still winning the game, they will not advance because they have lost a point in goal differential. Barbados needs another goal, or they will be eliminated.

So, if Barbados can score a third goal in the final eight minutes of the game, the standings will look like the chart on the right, Barbados will get back to a +1 goal differential, win first place, and advance to the next round.

Five minutes pass, and Barbados is running out of time to score the third goal they need. If nothing changes, they will win the game but be eliminated.

However, someone on the Barbados team remembers the special Golden Goal rule and realizes that if they score on themselves and force the game to overtime, they would have a full thirty minutes to score a Golden Goal which would then be worth two goals and put Barbados into first place as you can see on the right. And so this happens…

Barbados brings the ball back to their own side and intentionally scores on themselves.

Obviously, Grenada figures something is up, and they quickly realize that they now have two very different paths to first-place, represented by both charts here. Either they score a goal to break the tie – you know, the old-fashioned way – OR INSTEAD they intentionally score on themselves to lose the game but win the group by goal differential.

Which leads to what must be the most unusual soccer game of all time because Barbados now needs to defend BOTH of the goals, and Grenada just needs to score in either one, leading to this totally, totally normal arrangement of players.

Ultimately, Grenada fails to score in either goal, and the game goes to overtime. Naturally, Barbados does score a Golden Goal, now worth double, and goes onto the next round. Their plan to score on themselves and win in overtime actually worked.

Here is the response of the Grenada manager to this outcome:

I feel cheated. The person who came up with these rules must be a candidate for a madhouse…. Our players did not even know which direction to attack: our goal or their goal… In football, you are supposed to score against the opponents to win, not for them.

Of course, Barbados did nothing wrong. They are just playing by the rules of the game, and the rules put them in a situation where scoring against themselves made sense. I’ve certainly had the same experience where a rule or mechanic I’ve added to a game ends up creating a perverse incentive that leads to the exact opposite player behavior that I wanted to encourage.

One way to put this is that nobody knows anything.

Here’s the rest of the quote from screenwriter William Goldman – Not one person knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.

Certainly, that can be said for video games. I would never have bet on a ultra-detailed dwarf simulator using ASCII art.

Or on a game with 1 winner and 99 losers.

Or on a turn-based game that plays by itself.

Or on a twin-stick shooter minus one of the sticks.

Much of game design is determined by constraints which are out of the hands of the developers. DOTA 2 and League of Legends both inherited their design from the original Warcraft 3 mod Defense of the Ancients, which had two distinctive mechanics that were just baked into how Warcraft 3 worked – Creep Denial (which means being able to kill your own minions) and Last Hitting (meaning that the experience points go to the last hero to hit the target). Dota 2 kept Creep Denial, and both games kept Last Hitting, which suggests that their existence is a happy accident as no one actually quote-unquote designed them. They were just inherited constraints from a game in a different genre.

So, is game design just sorting through accidents like this to see what works?

Consider the case of Fortnite, which started as a game about building forts while fighting off waves of zombies. Even after Fortnite blew up into the world’s largest battle royale game, these building mechanics stuck around as this weird, inherited vestige of the original game. It took Epic years to finally do the obvious thing and just get rid of them entirely so that the end of a Fortnite death match was no longer this strange, frantic building contest.

Indeed, it’s hard to describe Fortnite as intentional design at all when you draw out the strange path things took. Here is a rough history of the various games and mods that led to Fortnite Battle Royale as we know it today. Arma is a realistic tactical shooter while DayZ is a free-form survival game while PUBG is a 1-vs-100 cage match. Nobody planned this all out – it just happened. Fortnite was more discovered than designed.

So, when we design a game, are we really just throwing darts? Do we have any idea what we are doing?

Another problem with game design is that we often overcorrect from whatever lesson we just learned. With Offworld Trading Company, because the game had random maps, each game started with a short exploration phase where you scan the map and found your colony with only part of the terrain revealed. We learned quickly during Early Access that the multiplayer community didn’t want exploration at all because it added luck, and they wanted NO LUCK at the game’s start, so we added a mode with a fully revealed map for these players.

When we built Old World’s multiplayer, we assumed that we would have a similar multiplayer community which would want us to minimize randomness. So, at great effort we maintained a…

…No Characters mode where the game has literally no characters, no events, no families, nothing that could add randomness to the game. However, almost no one uses this mode. To our surprise, the multiplayer community loves the randomness; they love seeing and adapting to fresh events each game.

The lesson here is that every game finds a unique subset of players from the audience that you think you are targeting and from the ones that you aren’t.

You might have made the same mistake if you had listened to my GDC Offworld Postmortem. None of us really know what we are doing. Remember that at GDC, we are all talking about why we THINK we were successful not why we actually were successful, which is essentially unknowable. Half of what you hear at GDC is BS. Half of the rest doesn’t apply to your game. Most of what remains you can’t implement. The rest might be useful, maybe? Keep in mind, this chart itself might also be BS.

For an example of the type of thing you might have heard at GDC that turns out to be wrong, we’ve been told for years by product managers that people buy cosmetics in free-to-play games so that they can peacock, to show off their skins in front of everyone else. Well, in Valorant, all animations, graphical effects, and sounds are only visible to the purchaser. Your enemies don’t see them. So, it turns out that people will pay for cosmetics even if they are the only ones who can see them.

Part 2, Part 3

Think Like A Game Designer Podcast

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At this year’s GDC, I mentored Justin Gary on his Tabletop Summit talk on SolForge Fusion and, afterwards, he invited me onto his excellent game designer podcast Think Like A Game Designer. It’s a bit like my podcast except its 90% tabletop designers (although I will be having more tabletop designers on in the future). As I’m not afraid of going too long, he had to split my recording into two parts, but they serve as a pretty good overview of my career. Take a listen if you’ve got some free time!

Part 1: https://www.thinklikeagamedesigner.com/podcast/2019/11/14/think-like-a-game-designer-49-soren-johnson

Part 2: https://www.thinklikeagamedesigner.com/podcast/2019/11/14/think-like-a-game-designer-50-soren-johnson2

Designer Notes 77: Cole Wehrle

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In this episode, Soren interviews tabletop designer Cole Wehrle, best known for his work on Root, Oath, Pax Pamir, and John Company. They discuss whether John Company is satire, how the East India Company was like QWOP, and the importance of German postal rates. This episode was recorded on March 22, 2023.

Games discussed: Stratego, Dungeons and Dragons, Battlecry, Diplomacy, Mafia, Oath, Settlers of Catan, Struggle of Empires, High Frontier, Pax Pamir, John Company, Pax Porfiriana, Levy & Campaign series, Root, An Infamous Traffic, Republic of Rome, Greed Incorporated, QWOP, Kremlin, Power Grid, Old World

https://www.idlethumbs.net/designernotes/episodes/cole-wehrle

My Velvet Underground

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Just watched the Todd Haynes documentary on The Velvet Underground, and it sure leaves a mark. I’m not sure how much I need to add to the mythology of the VU but, simply put, white popular music can be split into two eras, before the Velvets and everything after. Before them, white popular music was always safe, somehow both too naive and too calculated. The songwriting might be melodic enough, but there was never enough grit. Listen too much and one might get a little sick – Haynes uses “Monday, Monday” by the Mamas & the Papas as a punching bag multiple times to prove this point. (The few exceptions to this rule tended to be white musicians trying their best with black music, such as the Rolling Stones finally putting the Diddley back into “Not Fade Away” after Buddy Holly couldn’t quite get the job done.) After the Velvets, there was an explosion that ripped popular music in a multitude of directions; each of the four core albums created entire genres.

However, because each of the original albums was so unique, not everyone’s Velvet Underground is the same. Todd Haynes makes his own version clear from the start – the first words we read are a Baudelaire quote, the first face we see is John Cale, and the first sound we hear is Cale’s droning viola lifted out of the Lou Reed’s masterpiece, “Heroin.” Cale is a brilliant musician but, with the Velvets, he was also a true modernist at an innovative peak, with all that entails. Thus, Haynes’s Velvets are the Velvets of Andy Warhol and his Factory, of experimental musicians like La Monte Young, Tony Conrad, and their Dream Syndicate, and – perhaps most relevant to the director Haynes himself – of the many avant-garde filmmakers of 1960s New York whose works he uses to place the Velvets in the context of the contemporary art scene. It’s all very well put together, but it’s in service of a version of the band that I admire but don’t love.

The first two Velvet albums have sublime moments – “Heroin,” of course, and the piano vamp of “All Tomorrow’s Parties” which shows how Cale’s fearlessness could pay off. However, they are difficult albums to listen to end-to-end. “European Son” starts off well but then descends into time-filling noise. “The Black Angel’s Death Song” now betrays what it always was, Reed aping and perhaps even satirizing Dylan. Much of White Light/White Heat sounds like the jokey backing track to a long-forgotten experimental art film. Sure, “Sister Ray” still squeezes out the sparks, but it can’t match its sequel “Roadrunner” by Velvets superfan Jonathan Richman (who claims in the film, adoringly and adorably, to have seen them 60-70 times and apparently opened for them as a teenager).

If the Velvets broke up when Reed pushed Cale out of the band, then I doubt I would care about them much more than I care about, say, Frank Zappa or Captain Beefheart – interesting music in the back of my collection that I still usually skip when it comes up on shuffle. In the film, drummer Maureen Tucker makes it clear that Reed got rid of Cale so the band could “be more normal” – which is quite a statement to make about Lou Reed! Incredibly, after Reed replaced Cale with bassist and singer Doug Yule, the Velvets somehow began making music which was both wild, unhinged, AND listenable. John Cage had magically transformed into John Adams. The songs easily outshone everything being made at that time: “I Can’t Stand It,” “Pale Blue Eyes,” “What Goes On,” “After Hours“, “Lisa Says,” “Sweet Jane“, “Who Loves the Sun“, “Head Held High“, “Rock & Roll“, and the compulsive “Foggy Notion” (which, amazingly, was not released until 15 years after the band dissolved because that’s just how it is with the Velvets).

The difference was actually quite simple. Rock and roll is first and foremost dance music. Even if people aren’t actually dancing, the music is meant to move you, to make you feel happy to be alive. Joe Strummer once described rock as the feeling of, after coming across a can on the street, kicking that can because it’s proof that you are alive, and it simply feels good to be alive. Go back and listen to Yule’s amazing bass line in “Foggy Notion” – it’s six minutes and forty-seven seconds of life, that much time without pain. Reed was now writing songs that could be danced to but that still had a perverse edge, a wild buzz, with the mysterious extra tones that Richman describes in the film. The heart of what made the Velvet Underground great was the hopped-up go-go band that still remembered sock-hops. (Consider how Velvet successor Pere Ubu’s best track is essentially a rave.)

Strangely, Haynes seems to be aware of this essential part of the band’s legacy even if it is always treated as subtext in the film. He cuts twice to Bo Diddley, once to “Road Runner” when Cale discusses the first time Tony Conrad added amplification to his musical experimentation and again when he describes the repetitive beats he loves in rock and roll. (Besides the obvious musical connections with the Velvets, Diddley was also one of the few early rock musicians with a key female instrumentalist.) I had to stop the film just to recover when Maureen Tucker described her experience when she first heard The Rolling Stone’s “Not Fade Away” while drive home from school – the sound hit her so hard that “I pulled off the road because it was too exciting to keep driving.” That’s the moment I recognized MY Velvet Underground in the film; I felt the exact same way, the exact same way, that she did when I first heard the avalanche of rhythm in that song. I recognized my Velvet Underground again when Haynes cuts directly to “Foggy Notion” – the band’s greatest song – to introduce Yule joining the group, a pitch-perfect moment.

While Haynes does recognize Yule’s contributions, it is also unclear if he tried to interview him for the film. Indeed, Doug Yule has always occupied an odd place in the Velvet’s orbit. He is typically viewed as the most lightweight member of the band – a journeyman drafted to replace the irreplaceable Cale – but I can’t help feeling that, without his arrival at just the right time, the Velvets would have never hit their peak, never become the band that I love. Cale makes a stunning admission in the film – that he has never met Doug Yule. Although original guitarist Sterling Morrison lobbied for his inclusion, Reed and Cale did not include Yule in their 1992 reunion, underlining that he was somehow not a part of the “real” Velvets. Well, Doug, if you ever somehow read this, you are absolutely part of my Velvet Underground.

I first heard of the Velvets as a teenager when thumbing through the sublime third edition of the Rolling Stone Album Guide, which described them as “the most influential rock & roll band of the last 20 years – no contest.” That was an intriguing statement, but how would I even hear their music? The few music stores of my hometown of Centralia, WA, certainly didn’t stock them, and even trips to nearby Olympia didn’t produce anything. They certainly weren’t played on our local radio stations, which was ironically in the full throes of early 90s alternative music at the time, a direct descendant of the Velvets. MP3s shared over the Internet were still a few years away and not something I could even imagine at the time.

Strangely, the first time I heard the band was on the soundtrack to Oliver Stone’s The Doors, which I had borrowed so I could dub Carmina Burana onto one of the camcorder movies my friends and I produced during high school. (We used Carmina Burana as a musical punchline because, even then, it was a cliché for overwrought direction.) The track immediately before that one was “Heroin” which to a sheltered teenager growing up in rural Washington state sounded like it might as well have come from the moon. I barely knew who the Talking Heads or the Clash were, and I certainly had no idea who Television or Gang of Four were. I had never heard anything so audacious, something so propulsive and unnerving at the same time. How could something this disturbing also sound so good?

Still, it took years and years for me to hear more Velvets. I caught up quickly on music before them, falling hard for Little Richard and Bo Diddley, while also finally getting ahold of their progeny such as Horses, London Calling, Marquee Moon, and More Songs about Buildings and Food. I noticed that one of my Columbia House catalogs finally had one – ONE! – Velvet Underground album, the compilation The Best of the Velvet Underground, which was a revelation when it finally arrived in the mail. For the first time, I heard “Sweet Jane” and “I Can’t Stand It” – songs which, again, sounded like nothing else I had ever heard.

Of course, I needed to get my hands on their actual albums, and if you grew up in the age of either iTunes or Spotify, it will be hard to describe to you just how difficult that was back then. Loaded, for example, was actually out-of-print in the US and only available via import. In other words, Americans had to pay foreigners to manufacture albums from one of the greatest American bands and then ship them on boats to us because, apparently, we had bad taste in music or something. I finally found my own copy of Loaded in a London CD shop in the spring of 1997 while spending a quarter at Oxford, costing me 20 pounds of my food stipend. Thus, I finally heard “Who Loves the Sun” while sharing a room with Christopher Tin on the portable CD player and mini-speaker I had packed with me from home. It was all worth it.

Years later, one of the perks of leading the design of Civilization IV was that I got to select the music for the game’s soundtrack, from the medieval Giovanni Palestrina through the modern John Adams. When it came time to pick music for the video of the Rock & Roll Wonder, a new addition for the series, I knew exactly which band I wanted. I asked Take-Two, a little sheepishly, if we could get ahold of The Velvet Underground or, at least, their label. I really had no idea what to expect, whether they would even consider it or how much it might cost. To Take-Two’s credit, they humored me and contacted Universal to find out. Turns out, we could get “Rock & Roll” for $5K, which sounded like a bargain to me.

The song choice itself was perhaps a little too on-the-nose; I probably thought having the song share its name with the Wonder would help distract my superiors from noticing that I was licensing a song from the people who had brought us the very family-friendly “Heroin.” Next time, I’ll just ask for “Foggy Notion” instead because it would be the best way to introduce a teenager living in rural Washington to the Velvet Underground.

Designer Notes 76: Tanya Short

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In this episode, Soren interviews veteran game designer Tanya Short, co-founder of Kitfox Games and best known for her work on Moon Hunters and Boyfriend Dungeon. They discuss why her parents had to get a second phone like, how she accidentally made a roguelike, and whether Moon Hunters should have combat. This episode was recorded on March 23, 2023.

Games discussed: Bubble Bobble, Various MUDs, Boyfriend Dungeon, A Tale In the Desert, Morrowind, World of WarCraft, Ultima Online, Age of Conan, The Secret World, Fashion Week Live, For Honor, Dungeons of Fate, Moon Hunters, Puzzle Pirates, Oasis, Dragon Age Legends, Shattered Planet, Civilization, King of Dragon Pass, Spore, 80 Days, Seven Cities of Gold, Worlds of Ultima: The Savage Empire, Hatoful Boyfriend, Dream Daddy, Pentiment, Immortality

https://www.idlethumbs.net/designernotes/episodes/tanya-short

Designer Notes 75: Moonbreaker

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In this episode, Soren and Leyla interview veteran game designer Charlie Cleveland, founder of Unknown Worlds and best known for his work on Natural Selection and Subnautica. They discuss why Moonbreaker is the first digital miniatures game, if players would notice if critical hits were removed, and whether the game should have an undo. This episode was recorded on March 19, 2023.

Games discussed: Moonbreaker, Warhammer series, Hardspace: Shipbreaker, Magic: The Gathering, Civilization 4, Duelyst, Marvel Snap, Air Land & Sea, Old World, KeyForge, Subnautica, CPU Bach

https://www.idlethumbs.net/designernotes/episodes/moonbreaker

Designer Notes 74: Charlie Cleveland

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In this episode, Soren and Leyla interview veteran game designer Charlie Cleveland, founder of Unknown Worlds and best known for his work on Natural Selection and Subnautica. They discuss why Charlie Cleveland moved to Cleveland, how he did Kickstarter before Kickstarter, and whether Subnautica was intended to be a survival game. This episode was recorded on March 20, 2022.

Games discussed: Pong, Dungeons and Dragons, Magic: The Gathering, Diplomacy, Aquarium Fighter, MindRover, Empire Earth, Natural Selection, Roblox, Natural Selection 2, Subnautica, Don’t Starve

https://www.idlethumbs.net/designernotes/episodes/charlie-cleveland

My Elephant in the Room, Part 3

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I gave an Old World postmortem at GDC 2022, which is available on YouTube:

However, I fully scripted the talk ahead of time, so I decided it would be worth taking the time to post the slides online, in three parts to have mercy on your browser.

After shipping Civ 3, one thing I heard often from the Civ 2 community was that the modding tools lacked support for something called “events” which I eventually learned meant a system of triggers and effects that modders could use to give games a narrative arc. It could create a series of chapters, for example, which pushed the story forward when the player achieved certain milestones. I tried out a series of mods to see what was possible and was surprised to see how effectively people could push the Civ engine to create something completely new. For example, here is a Civ 2 Fellowship of the Ring mod which lets you retrace Frodo’s journey from the Shire to Moria, encountering all the events of the book along the way.

So, to enable this type of narrative-focused mod, we added triggers and effects to Civ4 using python as the scripting language and, ultimately, just released the game source code itself, which led to some amazing mods, like Fall from Heaven…

…and Dune Wars, both of which completely transformed the game and proved the amazing potential for both story and modding in 4X games. However, although I had given modders all the power they needed, I hadn’t actually done the work myself on how to make narrative work in a 4X game.

I noticed that events were starting to show up in various strategy games, with increasing depth and complexity. They added real texture to the experience and, perhaps more importantly, variety.

The most interesting mixture of strategy and events was the cult classic King of Dragon Pass, a 1999 game that vanished without a trace on release and then somehow snowballed into a hit decades later as word spread of its wild mix of traditional 4X strategy, clan management, and dynamic narrative. The event system was the star, and your choices largely determined the path your game took, often in wildly unpredictable ways. Each event forces you to make difficult tradeoffs between the demands of various factions, both internal and external to your tribe, just as we wanted to do with Old World.

However interesting this was, it’s not a game I could make. First of all, the game has an actual beginning, middle, and end, and I have neither the interest nor the ability to tell a single, cohesive story. More importantly, Dragon Pass doesn’t tell you the effects of your decisions, you are meant to just intuit the results, which works for some games but not for Old World, a game where transparency is one of the most important design aesthetics. The event system might surprise you, but the direct result of each of your decisions needs to be clear. For me, the promise of a strategy game is understanding what’s going to happen each time you click a button while still not being able to predict the future.

So, because transparency was important, I turned to the world of board games for inspiration. Specifically, the dynamic narrative masterpiece Tales of the Arabian Nights, which comes with a gamebook of over 2,000 events, randomly drawn from a deck of cards, and which both react to and can change the player’s current state. The mechanics for choosing events and how they affect the player are transparent and easy to understand, which was necessary because, as with all board games, the players have to do all the work themselves.

So, for example, having the Wit and Charm trait might help you escape a Vengeful Sorceress while an unlucky player without that trait might end up Ensorcelled, which will affect further events down the road. What inspired me about this system was that it was robust – it’s not an intricate event tree where missing a node might cause a story chain to break. Instead, the events are loosely coupled as they are meant to work together regardless of which random set you draw each time you play the game.

One of the benefits of a loosely coupled system is that multiple authors could create events at the same time, without requiring close collaboration or really even any collaboration. Here are some of the authors of the over 3,000 events currently in Old World, led by our CEO and Creative Director Leyla Johnson. Many of these writers worked on the project at completely different times, creating dynamic story arcs by accident. One writer might add an event that results in your Leader becoming a Drunk while another author, years later, creates an event that only triggers if the Leader is a Drunk, and now we have the makings of a little story. Indeed, as we add more events with each bi-weekly update, the story system becomes more and more cohesive as more events are added to cover all the unusual permutations that might happen for each playthrough.

Here are just some of the possible inputs that the event system can look for and most of these can be changed by the system as well. So, the event system is a virtual deck of events where each one has a potential trigger (such as meeting a new nation), a set of requirements (like a childless leader), and possible effects (like a foreign spouse). It’s a broad, deep system that makes one look forward to each new turn to see what will happen next.

What I might be proudest of is that the multiplayer community for Old World plays with events turned ON – we had assumed that players who wanted to play competitively with each other would be put off by the randomness of the system, but they feel like the game is not complete without it. In fact, we put a lot of work into maintaining an alternate version of the game without events or characters or families or all the things that increase randomness, but I’m glad to say that it was probably a waste of time.

One of the best thing about the event system is that it adds content to the game without bloating the design, without adding new rules for the players to learn. We currently have over 3,000 events, but doubling or tripling that number will only add variety to the game without adding any more complexity. Often, with strategy games, less is more, but this is one place where more is actually more. It’s the same reason why card-based wargames like Twilight Struggle and We the People have become popular – it creates a deeper experience while keeping a slimmer ruleset.

Ultimately, the event system ensures that no two games play out the same way as there are endless possible stories as one event leads into another, changing the path of your game while your in-game choices feed back into the event system itself. I accidentally built a interactive fiction engine inside of a 4X game, and I am very excited to see where our writers – and the modding community – can take it.

In Civ 3, we introduced the bargaining table to the 4X genre, pick and choose what you want to give and to receive from all sorts of potential options. It’s become a staple of the genre.

Here it is in Galactic Civilization 3.

In Total War: Three Kingdoms.

In Total War: Warhammer.

In Stellaris.

Unfortunately, it was a big mistake. My first inkling there was a problem was after Civ3 shipped and people started to complain that the AIs all tended to have the same techs. The reason was that the AIs were using the bargaining table the same way humans did – every time they got a new technology, they would contact all of their friends, rivals, and even enemies to see what they could get in return by trading it away – which cost them nothing but could get them a little something in return.

From the human’s perspective, it looks like the AIs were part of a giant tech cartel and were selling techs to each other at bargain prices, but the AI was simply pursuing the optimal strategy. Again, we have a system where players were ruining the games for themselves because there was no cost to contacting every civ every turn and also endlessly tinkering with how to get the best deal possible. No reason not to put just one more gold piece on their side of the table until you’ve hit the AI’s maximum price for what you are trading away.

There are ways to mitigate this issue, but this is a Cursed Game Design problem as defined by Alex Jaffe in his fantastic 2019 GDC talk, which I recommend everyone should take the time to watch. There is a conflict here between the power and flexibility of the bargaining table and the give-and-take of real diplomacy where flawed personalities come into play and you can’t nickel-and-dime a rival without offending them.

Ultimately, we come back to this – there is no solution here because we are giving the player all the tools to ruin the game for themselves.

Fortunately, Old World had a system in place that could solve this problem by replacing the bargaining table with something else – the Event System! Here is one example – you married a Babylonian many years ago and now because of that connection you must choose a side in the war between Babylon and Carthage.

This system presents the player with interesting diplomatic events and choices that react to the current game state, serving up possible paths to war at a pace that is healthy for the player. Getting rid of the bargaining table was a risky decision because players expect it by now, but the end result could be so much more dynamic and interesting and free the player of the burden of trying to min-max the table. So, when you ask another nation for a truce or for a trade mission or to start an alliance, the game gathers all the events with those specific triggers, throws out the ones that are not applicable to your current situation (such as the events that require a child ruler), and then randomly picks one to present you. Angry nations are still less likely to want to trade with you, but the actual result of a trade mission will still be unexpected, making it a worthwhile gamble to take.

In this example, you can get out of a war if you captured a hostage during combat – a good example of the loosely coupled events I mentioned earlier.

In this example, based on a story from Livy of a meeting of Hannibal and Scipio Africanus after the end of the second Punic War, you are forced to choose who is the best general, either one of your own or one of theirs. You must choose between damaging your own legitimacy or angering your guests. These incidents stir the pot of diplomacy and make the game dynamic.

Here, Rome is offering you one of its unique units, a Hastatus, as a Mercenary, a good example of something we’d be afraid to put on the bargaining table because it would be abusable, but it works fine as a random event which isn’t guaranteed to appear.

Now, here is the great beast, the biggest design challenge for every 4X out there – how to bring the game to a satisfying conclusion after hundreds of turns and an untold, perhaps embarrassing, number hours in front of the computer. I view Victory Conditions as a necessary evil; for awhile, I had hoped that maybe we could do without them altogether, like the Paradox Grand Strategy games do. No one really cares about winning or losing those games, it’s all about the experience, MAN, so maybe victory conditions had become old-fashioned. Maybe I was old-fashioned! The truth is that games like Crusader Kings and Europa Universalis are really more like simulations than they are like games, and one important fact about 4X games is that they are g-a-m-e-s games. Players expect to win, or give up trying.

One thing I did not want to inherit from the Civ series was themed victories – another thing that I helped get rolling back with Civ3 which added Cultural and Diplomatic victories to the traditional Conquest and Space Race. The problem with themed victories is that, because they require a high bar, the player has to aim for them early on, which warps all the decisions made over the course of the game. Aiming for the religious victory? Make sure to always make the religious choice each time you get it as an option! Thus, I needed something more, well, generic, and I needed it quickly because we were playing Old World as a multiplayer game within the first six months of the project.

So, I went for the most boring solution possible – victory points – and it worked out surprisingly well. The reason it worked is because we tied them to city sites – which were a known quantity because we determined how many sites there were at the beginning of the game. If a 4X game without city sites had a victory condition that simply required X cities to win, then it’s no mystery what would happen – the game would have the worst case of ICS ever as players would be cramming cities everywhere. Instead, because we knew that a specific map had only 30 city sites on it, it became easy to pick some threshold which would trigger victory. 

Of course, while victory points are a perfectly serviceable win condition, they hardly fire the imagination, so we needed something a little more interesting, a little more thematic. I wanted a victory condition that dynamically told the story of your dynasty and hopefully even pushed you to play a little differently. I found my inspiration for this from Jetpack Joyride, which had a mission system that encouraged you to achieve one of three random goals, often ones that forced you to play the game differently. Our initial ambition system worked just like this, three random ambitions which give a bonus upon completion and which get replaced by slightly more difficult ones.

Eventually, we made these part of the character system as the Ambitions would be attached to your leader, similar to how it works in Crusader Kings. Further, the Ambitions that come up would be related to the current game state. In this case, the leader is a Builder, so she gets Ambitions to build Wonders. However, they were not initially part of the victory system.

In fact, the initial reason I tried turing Ambitions into a Victory Condition was actually to save the original name of the game, Ten Crowns. The name initially meant that you had ten lives to play the game, ten rulers before the game would end, but that proved too hard to work out in practice as ten rulers could last 50 turns, or they could last 500. Thus, I tried to retcon the name by renaming “Ambitions” to “Crowns” and then the victory condition would be right in the title! However, the team didn’t buy it, and we of course shipped with a different name.

Speaking of which, when we ran the trademark search for Old World, we got a one-line note from our lawyer that Amazon had reserved the word New World for some upcoming video game. I didn’t give it much thought because how often does Amazon actually ship their games…

…yeah, it was fun trying to spend the end of last year explaining on Twitch that we weren’t some weird prequel to New World.

So, the game would be called Old World, and we now had a simple, thematic victory condition – fulfill ten ambitions picked by the rulers of your dynasty and win the game. However, one issue I have often seen with the themed victories of Civ is that, because they can focus on internal progress that is not visible to other players, when one player achieves a Cultural or Religious or Scientific victory, it can some as quite a surprise, and I don’t believe a player should ever be surprised by a “You Just Lost” popup after a twenty hour game. So, we made the simple decision that the AI could not win via Ambitions, they could only win with victory points, which are much more straightforward (and always visible in the upper-left corner).

This type of asymmetry is unusual in a 4X game where the AIs are ostensibly supposed to be stand-ins for human players, but that’s always been a myth. Players don’t actually want the AIs to behave like humans – as a simple example, real human players would usually all gang up on a player who is coming close to victory, regardless of previous relationships. However, if you have the AI behave that way, players will accuse it of treating the human unfairly, of not letting them win fair and square. There’s nothing inherently better about symmetrical design – indeed, I’d say much of the most interesting work in the tabletop renaissance is with deeply asymmetrical games like Root or the COIN series.

Once we broke the seal of asymmetry, it opened up the design space significantly. The AI, for example, doesn’t get events because we wanted events to have meaningful results. It’s ok for one of YOUR events to end a war because you convinced the AI’s heir to seize the throne – however, it wouldn’t be ok for that to happen to you just because the AI drew that event. Trust me, that may sound interesting theoretically, but it’s not going to go down well with players. Further, without symmetry, we could rethink difficulty levels. Instead of giving the AI bonuses, like faster research or cheaper troops, we simply start the AI with more cities than you.

Thematically, you are a new nation in an Old World, somewhat like Rome was in the fourth century BC, a small kingdom centered on one city and surrounded by larger, more ancient empires like Greece, Egypt, Persia, and Carthage. Thus, the AI in Old World plays without any bonuses or cheats at all, simply with a significant head start depending on the difficulty level. We felt players would enjoy knowing the AI was playing by the same rules as the player while also finding a way to provide a challenge for veterans.

Maybe this is a better animal themed metaphor for where I am now as a designer. I’ve gone deep on 4X games during my career. I probably know more about these types of games, what works and what doesn’t work, than is really healthy for a person. My design journey with Old World was truly about putting that knowledge to good use, to not let it go to waste, so that we could push the genre forward in an intelligent, considered way.

Often the best source of innovation is from new blood coming into the industry with new ideas, but I’d like my work now to show that it’s possible to innovate after 22 years in the industry as long as you’re willing to give an honest assessment of what parts of your games have been making players’ lives better and which parts have been making them worse. Many of the mechanics and systems from Civ that I’ve rejected with Old World are ones that I came up with myself. The bargaining table and themed victories, cultural borders and strategic resources, are ideas that I pushed for when I was 24, just out of college.

Old World is a conversation with myself as a younger designer, and I feel fortunate that I got the opportunity to have that conversation. Opportunities like this don’t come along everyday.

Thank you.

Part 1, Part 2

My Elephant in the Room, Part 2

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I gave an Old World postmortem at GDC 2022, which is available on YouTube:

However, I fully scripted the talk ahead of time, so I decided it would be worth taking the time to post the slides online, in three parts to have mercy on your browser.

Now, let’s talk about the tech tree, which has always had a problem with golden paths. For example, at the start of Civ 4, you can just click on Gunpowder, and the game will show you exactly which 11 technologies to research to get there. For a game with average playtimes in the hundreds of hours, this becomes a real problem. Indeed, with the popularity today of games based on random runs, fixed tech trees are going against the grain of contemporary design.

I found a solution from deck-building games like Dominion – what if we treated all the techs like cards instead?

So, all techs currently available are in the deck, and you draw four at a time. The cards you don’t pick go into the discard pile along with any new cards that you unlock. Then, you draw four more for your next choice and don’t reshuffle until you have exhausted the deck. This doesn’t just add variety – it also makes the decisions more interesting because you know that when you don’t pick a tech, it won’t be available again until it comes all the way back through the discard pile through the draw pile and then back to your hand. Passing on Ironworking means that you might not see it again for a long time.

The system is certainly more complicated than a traditional tech tree, but it helps a lot that many players are already familiar with deck-building mechanics because of their popularity.

Turning techs into “cards” also enables the idea of bonus cards, which give an instant boost, like a Free Settler, as you see here, or a Great Scientist or a lump sum of Stone. There is a nice short-term vs. long-term tradeoff here as science points are not easy to come by, so slowing your progress for a short-term boost is a difficult choice, an interesting decision.

If you’ve played my last game, Offworld Trading Company, you know that I love stockpiles and markets and building improvements that spit out resources at different rates, so I wanted to give that a try for Old World.

One of the reasons Civ games haven’t done this is that cities can get stuck because they couldn’t build something – if you have no access to Stone, are you just not able to build buildings? What happens each turn then? We solved that problem by borrowing the dynamic open market from Offworld.

Need some iron to build a Swordsman? Just buy it from the market. If the price of iron is too high, then sell off your excess stone first.

Note that although we were making a game with a free market, it’s not a game ABOUT the free market, so instead of having a single price for all goods, there would be some friction, so we used the original system from Age of Empires where the buy price is double the sell price. Thus, while buying resources from the market is always an option for the player, it’s generally best to produce them yourself.

Civ has always had a generic Production resource, sometimes called Shields, Hammers, or just Production, but it went into building everything – Settlers, Warriors, Temples, the Pyramids, everything. I wanted to split this production into different categories so that cities could actually specialize, one might be good at building military, another at developing specialists, another at creating settlers and workers, so we split Production into three categories: Growth, Training, and Civics.

I didn’t originally know what to do with these yields when the city wasn’t producing that type of item, but the stockpiles for food, iron, wood, and stone were working so well that I decided to try that for Training and Civics. I didn’t know exactly what I would use it for but was confident that I would find a use for it over time. As you can see, we eventually found plenty of uses for the global Training and Civics stockpiles.

I put together this chart of all the non-resource yields and how they connect with the game. You can see how every yield occupies a unique place in the game, and even this is an incomplete list! We could also do it by Shrines, by Theologies, by Council, and so on.

Another benefit is that the code considers all of these yields, including food, iron, wood, and stone, the same type of thing, so it is very easy for the event system to suggest some unusual tradeoffs. Would you like to sacrifice some orders for some extra science? Maybe trade your civics to another nation for food in return?

One of Civ’s most troublesome systems is the tile/citizen model, where your food, production, and commerce is determined by which tiles your citizens work. It’s a complicated system. Here’s the Civ 1 city screen – I remember one Civ developer once quipped that it’s best feature was that if you clicked anywhere, it just went away and you were no longer afraid.

Each citizen in a city is assigned to a specific tile, and these tiles all have different yields, and the player has the freedom to move every citizen around every turn. Over time, the designers have added all sorts of automated systems to encourage players not to mess with their citizens. (And remember with workers how automation is a red flag?)

Even worse, for hardcore players, the citizen system is a temptation to lose hours and hours of time with needless micromanagement because there is no cost to moving your citizens around every turn, to eek out some small 1% benefit. These are not fun decisions. There’s a pattern to these systems which suck the player into boring micromanagement – they lack any real tradeoffs, either because they have no costs or because they are temporary. Interesting decisions come from giving something up and from making decisions that you’ll have to live with for the rest of the game. Decisions where you have to think holistically past the information horizon. You aren’t just doing math to figure out what gives you a single extra food this turn; instead, you are making an intuitive decision about what might get you more food farther down the road AND whether food will be more or less valuable to you latter on than it is right now.

Our way out of this problem is to have ALL improvements produce yields on their own, but Citizens could be permanently turned into Specialists on an improvement to boost its output by 50-100% and give multiple other benefits, like extra science. Further, these Specialists would each have a cost, both a food cost and an opportunity cost. Building a Trapper or a Poet doesn’t just cost Food, it also means your city is not building a Chariot or another Settler. More importantly, though, your decisions would be permanent, there is no opportunity to go back to micromanage and rewind your decisions. Permanent decisions are a very important tool for a designer – it gives the player the freedom to move forward and not optimize the fun out of the game.

Finally, let’s talk about Culture, which as I mentioned before, no longer determines borders. Instead, Culture is now measured in four discrete steps that determine the internal advancement of your cities. (Brian Reynolds actually suggested I rename Culture to “Civilization”… but that was too cheeky for me.) Having four separate culture levels per city was a new orthogonal way to measure progress outside of the tech tree. Thus, Wonders are not unlocked by techs but by CULTURE, which also allows us to rotate the ones available each game.

We could also tie your nation’s unique units to a city’s Culture level, and also many urban buildings, so Courthouses would require cities with Developing Culture, Ministries would require Strong cities, and Palaces Legendary ones.

Now that we felt good about the gameplay, we felt it was safe to start exposing publishers to our ideas. This is the first slide of our pitch deck. Note that it used to be called Ten Crowns, and the simple elevator pitch is right there in the first slide: The Fun of Civilization plus the Drama of Crusader Kings. Expect many things to change about your design, including the title, but it’s important to have a core vision that doesn’t change. Indeed, most of the reviews for Old World describe the game exactly this way, as a hybrid of Civilization and Crusader Kings.

The initial impetus for characters originally came from the popularity of Crusader Kings – we could see how much players latch onto real characters who are born, grow, age, decline, and die. It’s not just CK, though, you could see this trend from XCOM through the Total War series up to new games like Wildermyth. People want to care about the characters in their games.

However, the bigger question is WHY would a game like Civ benefit from characters. First off, we should mention that it’s actually impossible to put flesh-and-blood people into Civ because the game covers 6,000 years of history. That’s why we limited our timeframe to just Classical Antiquity, so that the game could plausibly last a few generations. Nonetheless, ignoring the thematic issues, how would characters change the GAMEPLAY of Civ?

To answer that question, let’s talk about another long-standing problem with Civ known as ECS – the Eternal China Syndrome. It means that over time, Civs become more stable, less dynamic, and less interesting to manage. As they add more and more buildings and wonders and laws and technologies, the internal problems get less and less interesting. A bonus that was interesting 30 turns ago now just fades into the background. The only real pressure exerted on the player is from external forces – enemy players.

Character, however, provide a way out of the ECS problem. Buildings and technologies never get old and die, but character sure do. If we attach powers to characters, the game will shift as different leaders take and leave the throne – not to mention new courtiers, heirs, councilors, spouses, and so on. The dynastic landscape is constantly changing. Civ might be a lot more interesting if, say, the map changed every so many turns. Unfortunately, that just doesn’t make any sense thematically even if it would be good for gameplay.

However, characters changing, growing old, and dying, doesn’t just make sense, players EXPECT it to happen. I can’t overstate how significant that is – taking powers away from the player in Civilization is basically a non-starter, yet here is a situation where players would be upset if they DIDN’T lose these powers.

Indeed, we can add powers to characters that would normally be impossible to add to the game if they were accretive in the way Civ usually works – meaning that once you unlock the power, it never goes away. Each character in Old World is one of 10 archetypes, each with special powers if that archetype sits on the throne. Because players only have partial control of archetypes, we can add significant, game-changing abilities here, knowing they will be active roughly 10% of the time. Hero leaders can Launch Offensives (which allows units to attack twice a turn), Orators can hire tribal units as Mercenaries, Tacticians can Stun enemy units, and so on.

Dynamic characters are also a huge boon for diplomacy, an area where sudden changes are always tricky to pull off. In Civ games, if a friendly ally suddenly attacks you, it’s often describe as “random” or “unpredictable” AI, even though it’s crucial for the flow of the game that the AI’s ARE willing to change their opinion of you (or else the Eternal China Syndrome applies to them as well). With characters, however, it’s expected that a nation will change its opinion of you when a new ruler takes the throne. We didn’t design this – it just flows naturally from adding real people into the game. Thus, a problem that has bedeviled Civ for decades was solved in a way that feels natural to the player.

Part 1, Part 3