"Don't Make Me Think" (about the interface)

A major objective of any game designer should be to avoid inflicting unnecessary frustration on the player(s).  In video games in particular it’s easy to find reviews that criticize the user interface for being difficult or fiddly or confusing.

Sometimes we can find good advice in disciplines that are not part of the game industry.  One of these is the Website design industry.  The World Wide Web is particularly susceptible to some of the kinds of problems that can bedevil video game interfaces.  Web users tend to spend very little time on a particular page and are unwilling to expend effort to find information or to read the information they find.  Typical advice is to write half as much as you normally would and to use bullet points rather than narrative, because that’s the way most Web users read things.

And Web users as a group tend to be technologically inept.  They are poor at searching, frequently giving up if their first search doesn’t work, and rarely going to the second page of search results. (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/search-skills.html .) In one test Jakob Nielsen found that “only 76% of users who expressed a desire to run a Google search were successful. In other words, 1/4 of users who wanted to use Google couldn't do so. (Instead, they either completely failed to get to any search engine or ended up running their query on a different search engine — usually whatever type-in field happened to be at hand.) “  (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/designer-user-differences.html ).  For most anyone reading this, this would be very easy, but we’re not a group representative of Web users as a whole.

This is the caliber of people who are playing social networking games on Facebook.  Facebook is a great blessing to the video game industry because it enables technologically inept people to play video games.  Just as many people struggle to do a specific search at a specific search engine, many people struggle to do much of anything on the Web, but many have learned to use Facebook.  Apparently for many people Facebook IS the Web, as far as they’re concerned, and they rarely do anything on the Web outside of Facebook.

Nielsen is the guru of Web usability, and his Website (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/) has provided biweekly articles about usability for many years.  I think that anyone who designs video games should read many of these articles, nor will it hurt people who design tabletop games even though problems with the user interface are less common on the tabletop.

I’ve seen people who claim to know a lot about Web design praise Websites that are hard to figure out but pretty.  Pretty may be important for certain audiences, up to a point, but not for many purposes and rarely for serious purposes.  The same can be said for game interfaces. There are also lots of Web designers who don’t test their sites, and that works about as well as game designers who don’t test their games – wretchedly.  Nielsen’s objective is to serve his market of people doing business on the Web, where a site that’s difficult to use can literally cost millions of dollars of business.  His major thrust for Web usability is that you have to test your sites regularly with the intended audience while developing them, and he devotes many of his articles to discussing how he tests and also discussing his test results in terms of preferences for different age groups.  As with the games one of the most important things is to understand who your audience is.

Nielsen has written more or less scholarly books about Web usability, but I first recommend a small book by Steve Krug titled “Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability”.  Of course Krug doesn’t mean no thinking at all from the user, he means don’t make people think about how they’re acquiring their information, don’t make them make decisions that could interfere with finding and consuming the information they’re looking for.  Once they find what they’re looking for, if they want to think about that, fine. (Warning: the book predates “Web 2.0", so the examples are seen as dated, by some.  But much of the point of “don’t make me think” is “don’t fool around with extraneous displays of cuteness”, a common failing of contemporary Web sites.)  I’ve not read his more recent book about testing, “Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems”.  A look at Nielsen’s own Web site, which is very utilitarian but very easy to use, is instructive in itself.  Krug’s site (http://www.sensible.com/) is not quite as utilitarian, but still simple and straightforward.  (Keep the audience in mind, in both cases.)

Let me interject here, I don’t use the word “intuitive” because it has become meaningless, a sloppy replacement for the word “easy”.  If anything is intuitive on computers it’s because people are familiar with the task from other software.  There is nothing particularly natural about how humans work with computers.  The natural way would be that we would talk to the computer as though it were a human and it would understand, but we’re not there yet.  Another natural method is that we would think at the computer and it would know what we wanted to do, and that’s even further away.

When you think about it, games should be as easy to use as the Web needs to be.  The player should not have to think about anything except the actual decisions and challenges of the game.  They shouldn’t have to think about how to make their avatar move, they shouldn’t have to think about how to shoot, they shouldn’t have to think about keeping track of information such as the turn number.  The game should make this so easy that they don’t need to think about it.

“Don’t make me think” isn’t quite the same as K.I.S.S. - “Keep It Simple, Simon” - as you can have a complex game that nevertheless doesn’t make the user think about how to manipulate it and tell it what to do (e.g. chess).  K.I.S.S is akin to my favorite maxim about game design, "A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."  (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)

Some games that require a lot of thought for success, chess-like games or “strategy games”, may require more thought in areas other than the actual gameplay because the game itself is more complex.  Yet chess itself is an example of a complex strategy game with a very simple interface.

Book proofs arrive

The proofs for my book "Game Design: How to Create Video and Tabletop Games, Start to Finish", have arrived for me to proofread and to make an index (tedious but necessary).  It is likely, given the printing schedule, to be available at GenCon in mid-August, where McFarland exhibits.  And it now seems likely I'll attend GenCon.

http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/book-2.php?id=978-0-7864-6952-9

Dreamers

An amazing number of teenagers dream of making games for a living, if my informal surveys at local schools and colleges can be expanded to the entire generation.

There are all kinds of individual delusions (see http://pulsiphergamedesign.blogspot.com/2010/09/student-illusions-about-being-game.html ), but I’m talking about the big dream: “I’m going to be famous (and rich) as a video game maker.”

Perhaps the dreamers fall into two categories, those who dream without having any idea how to get there and no plan to get there, and those who dream while doing something to try to get there.  The first group is much the larger, as is likely true with any kind of dreaming.

Teachers are “stuck in the middle” when it comes to dealing with dreamers.  I’ve heard many people say “you shouldn’t destroy their dreams” while others, including me, think that people of adult age (as are college students) need to understand reality, and the ones who dream strongly and are willing to do something despite the odds still have a sufficient chance to succeed.  In other words, they won’t be put off because one teacher or even all their teachers show them that their dream will be very, very hard to attain. 

We have a K12 school system (in the USA) that has endeavored for years to avoid the negative, to pump up student self-esteem without requiring any action to earn self-respect.  People are awarded for participation, and competition is discouraged.  It is the opposite of the real world.   When students enter the real world they're shocked that they're not special, that people won't do things for them "just because" of who they are.  Part of a college teacher's job is to help students realize what the real world is like, to help students learn to take responsibility for themselves and to *earn* respect.

When kids are quite young then they’ll have many dreams and a teacher is probably going to encourage them to find dreams that really fit their personalities and desires.  When the student is close to graduating from high school or is in college then they need a big dose of reality so that they don’t waste years pursuing something that they may not be suited for.

A disconnection with reality seems to have become the norm amongst pre-adults.  In 2007 I had a class of high school students taking a college course in Web design.  We had a discussion about fame and about famous people, and I asked them to think of famous people from the local county.  In the end we could only come up with three football players, all of them retired by that point, and one deceased governor, out of 300,000 people.  We did a little math to show that it was quite unlikely that anyone from a group as small as the class would be famous.  Then I asked them how many of them thought they would be famous in their lives and about a quarter raised their hands.  I understand that this is not an unusual proportion for millennials (Gen Y).

This is an extreme of dreaming.  You can dream of being really good at something and enjoying it but that doesn't make you famous; these folks dream that they're going to be famous.

The tremendous lack of initiative of young people as a group (there are of course many exceptions) has really impressed (or depressed) me.  A "generation expert" speaking at a teachers’ conference described the "ambitious but aimless" tendencies of millennials (Gen Y). They have a goal, but not only don't know how to get there, they may not even be willing to pursue a path to it when the path is available. The expert's example: millennial says "I'm going to be an astronaut".  Well, that's very praiseworthy, but that requires a lot of work, you'll likely need at least a master's degree in some science-related subject, you have to take physics, math, etc. "Nope, I don't do math," says the millennial. Then how can you be an astronaut? "I'm going to be an astronaut". They don't see the connection between where they are and where they're going, but somehow it's going to happen.

Dreams are not a bad thing--as long as you DO SOMETHING about them.  Dreams should be about goals and how to attain them, not pure fantasies.  Talking about dreams isn't likely to go well, as you'll get a dose of reality from those with more experience.  Dreams on their own are empty, vacuous even.  You need to try to get results.

It’s common to hear people say “well, I could do as well if I tried that”.  But they never try it.  And while it’s usually not true in practice that they’ll do as well, sometimes it is, as with the 35-year-old Edgar Rice Burroughs (Tarzan, Barsoom) in 1912 when he felt he could write stories as good as the ones he was reading in magazines.    The difference is, ERB went for it, he didn’t just talk about it.

Sid Meier, talking about the original Civilization game, said  "Most of the letters we'd get were almost a standard form.  They were like, 'Dear Sid.  I liked your game Civilization.  Here are the five things I would change to make it a much better game.'"  People who almost invariably had no clue about game design, but thought "I can do just as well as he did," told Sid where he went wrong. Ridiculous.  (And that’s as much the previous generation as millennials, in the early 1990s.)

Fantasist-dreamers can get to the point that they're personally offended by someone who describes a reality much different from the one the fantasist-dreamer would like to imagine.  And blames the person "delivering the reality".  For example, many people love RPGs so much and imagine what great work they can do, then meet the reality of a market that used to be very active, but collapsed several years ago leaving only a few companies able to make much profit.  Some of these folks are actually offended when someone describes how and why the market is quite small (beyond the efforts of those few big companies).

Before I taught curriculum game design, I was at a college where I mainly taught computer networking, and taught a game class on the side.  I was able to find enough students for the curriculum (for college credit) game class, even though there was no degree, but when I tried to do a continuing education (inexpensive, not-for-credit) class almost no one signed up.  A 16-year-old who did sign up said he tried to get some buddies to come as well, but they were "too busy".  I'd bet a lot of their busy-ness amounted to killing time playing video games; but if you're a person who thinks that somehow things will just work out, you're not likely to take the initiative to change the state of affairs.

Admittedly, this lack of interest in learning isn’t confined to younger people.  At my Origins seminars about game design this year I asked people how many had read a book about game design.  Very few.  Admittedly, until my book comes out, there is only one book that begins to discuss tabletop game design (though it’s free), and most of my audience were interested in the tabletop, not video games.  The audience did take the time to come listen to what I had to say.  But surely, if you’re really interested in game design, wouldn’t you read at least one of the well-known (video) game design books?

Remembering that this blog is about game design, my point is this: it won’t just come to you, you have to do it, you have to pursue it, you have to take every opportunity to learn about it (read!).  Then again, if you’re reading blogs like this, you’re already ahead of most of your contemporaries who dream of being game designers.

A Eureka Moment about Training, Education, Puzzles, and Games

I was thinking about a time when my department head came to my game design class unannounced to evaluate my teaching, and I wasn’t “lecturing” to the students.  They were working on game projects.  (This was not an introductory class.)  She seemed surprised that I wasn’t lecturing, but that may be because she typically taught introductory computer literacy style classes such as how to use Microsoft Office.  Classes that teach use of specific office software can be taught more or less by rote: if you want to make something bold you highlight it and press control-B or click the Bold button.  If you change margins you do thus and so.  And so forth.

These intro software classes don’t have to be taught entirely by rote but commonly they are, complete with what I call “monkey books”.  These books have students follow steps to accomplish something, but students tend to focus on getting through as rapidly as possible, and when they’re done they don’t know what they did and haven’t learned much.  Like the monkeys who, if they type long enough, type Shakespeare’s works . . .  You can learn from monkey books, but only if you want to learn and make the effort to learn.

Designing games is not and can never be taught by rote.  Teaching by rote is training, not education.  Education is about why you do things, why some things work and others don’t, about understanding what you’re doing.  Training is about exactly how you get a particular thing done.  I recognize that not everyone follows those definitions but I find it very useful to make this distinction, and other people with other purposes when defining education and training may make different distinctions.

Designing games is about education, not training.  Designing games is about critical thinking, and much of it is thinking, which is the antithesis of training.  You’re trained to do things automatically, without thinking.  (Reiner Knizia on twitter recently said, "To summarise my experience: Design is a way of thinking!")

Video game production at the outset can be taught by rote because people are learning how to use particular software, for example Maya or 3DS Max, or they’re learning how to program.  In the long run there is a process of education there, especially for programming, but in the short run for introductory classes a lot of it is simple straightforward “this is how you do it”.  There just isn’t much of that in game design.

But where the Eureka moment occurred was when I realized that an analogy can be made from this to games and puzzles.  A puzzle is something that has a solution, or perhaps several solutions, with the defining characteristic that once you figure it out the solution(s) always works.  So you can teach someone by rote how to beat the puzzle by teaching them the steps required.  It’s possible that those steps require certain skills such as hand-eye coordination levels that the person may not have attained, but once they attain those skill levels they can follow the solution and complete the puzzle every time, or as it is said in video games, “beat the game”.

A game does not have these kinds of solutions, and cannot be “beaten.”  To be good at the game requires something much more akin to education than training.  You have to understand why you’re doing what you’re doing, and when that isn’t the best thing to do, when something else is the best thing to do.  There is certainly problem-solving in games, but there aren’t solutions to the game as a whole that will always work.  Frequently this is the difference between having human opponents and having no opponent or a computer opponent, though computer opponents continue to become better over time.  Frequently this is the difference between, on th one hand, perfect information or uncertainty that can become predictable, typical in puzzles, and on the other hand uncertainty that cannot be predicted or accounted for by simple mathematical processes–the kind of uncertainty that comes from having several human opponents.

You can teach someone, by rote, how to win at Tic-Tac-Toe, or even Tetris, and you could for chess if anyone had completely solved the extremely complicated puzzle.  The checker program Chinook, as I understand it, plays by rote, playing what it knows to be the move most likely to lead to a win from whatever the current position is–no reasoning required.  You cannot teach someone how to win at Britannia or Dragon Rage, Diplomacy or even Risk, by rote, they have to understand how it all works and then think as they actually play.

Looking for a publisher for new edition of Britannia

After sales of 16,000 the FFG version of Britannia has sold out (though it's still available in some stores, FFG has no more).  I've received a notification from FFG that the contract is terminated.  So I can immediately begin looking for another publisher for a revised edition.

This will include three new versions of the game and a slightly-revised version of the current game published by FFG.  The idea is to offer games that will answer all of the major objections to the current version of Brit, and include the current version, so that the package will be suitable for a larger audience.  (The objections: too long, too scripted, too much chance; and occasionally, not sufficiently realistic in one respect or another.)

One new version is a much shorter game, played on a simpler map on the second side of the board.  There are two candidates for this version.  One of these uses battle cards instead of dice.  The other is very reduced (eight nations), and uses dice, but the method reduces the effects of chance. 

There is also a simpler and shorter version using the same map and sides (colors), so it is an alternative when there's not time to play the current version but players want something much like the original.  It also uses the less-random dice method.

The "Epic" version is more detailed and "historical" than the current version of Brit, and adds Ireland to the existing map.  The rules are not more complex, but there are more nations within the standard 16 turns, so it is a longer game.  The colors are quite different, so there is a new set of strategies to explore.

Obviously the short versions will have broader appeal than the Epic version.  But the Epic version will be "more historical" than the current version.

All of these versions exist and have been played by people other than myself, but are not sufficiently playtested.

Any suggestions as to publisher are welcome.

Origins 2012–-“Diminished”

This is not a “convention report” per se, as I had no interest in the banquets and awards, nor in the special guests, nor (with few exceptions) in new games and announcements about games.  The featured guests were media people--film and TV--rather than game people, though Wil Wheaton does a boardgame videocast (which I have not seen).  The others were Felicia Day and Adrienne Wilkinson. There were only two game design guests of honor (Rob Schwalb and Jeff Tidball), quite a departure from days past, one artist (Sandra L. Garrity), and one author guest (Aaron Allston, formerly a D&D writer).  SF author Timothy Zahn was scheduled to be around as well.  In years past Reiner Knizia, Richard Garfield, and Jim Dunnigan have been guests of honor, but if people of such stature in game design were present I did not see or hear of them.

The convention has moved from late June-early July to early June.  I heard this was to avoid a clash with GenCon, when they move to earlier in the summer.  But the result, so close to the end of the K12 school year, was that a lot of people evidently could not make it.  Next year Origins will be on 12-16 June.

I was surprised at how few people I saw in the game-playing rooms.  Further, there was a time when most tabletop game manufacturers came to Origins, but not now.  Wizards, Fantasy Flight, GMT, Columbia, and smaller outfits like Avalanche weren’t around.  There’s a lot more room in the exhibit hall than I remember from, say 2005.  I think the entire convention this year would fit into the exhibit hall used at GenCon.

I like the system used at WBC and PrezCon, where you pay your entry fee (about the same as Origins) and you can play any game or attend any event.  But those are boardgame conventions.  At GenCon, as I vaguely recall from my one visit, the seminars were free to attendees, but some tournaments and RPG events may have cost additional fees.  At Origins there are many more additional fees, and they get extreme with a fee for the wargame room, a fee for the boardgame room (though there is also open gaming), fees for so many seminars even though there’s plenty of room for listeners, and so on.  The exhibition hall and art show are free, fortunately, and that helps bring in the people paying the one-day $10 fee.  (The line for the one-day pass was very long on Saturday morning.)

I don’t go to conventions to play games, that’s something I can do much nearer home.  I like to attend relevant seminars and panel discussions, but this year there were fewer than usual (and half a dozen of those were cancelled because of a family emergency for the speaker).  For the past seven years at Origins (excluding 2009, when I didn’t attend) I’ve given free seminars about game design for beginners.  This comes partly from my inclination to teach, and partly (more recently) from a desire to publicize my game design book that’s due to be published late this summer.

There was also a scheduling problem as many seminars that were supposed to be free were listed in the program at $2, and others were listed at $2 more than intended. Only my Friday seminar had the $2 price, and some others that were repeated on the weekend were free then, but $2 on the weekdays.  It was as though someone had done a global addition of $2 to seminars up through 9AM Saturday.  In past years the master event list was sent to people who had submitted events, but this year it was not.  By the time I thought to check, I was able to find it online and then have the error removed, and this was reflected in the computer so that people who registered for the Friday talk were not charged, but at that point the schedule book probably had gone to the printers and could not be corrected.

When a person or group offers to do a seminar (or any other event such as a tournament or RPG session) they choose their time and day without knowing what else might be scheduled.  Scheduling is very important for the seminars, with late Saturday morning evidently being the best time, and Sunday morning the least.  There are also many more people at the con on the weekend than on weekdays.  This year I was able to schedule two hour blocks to allow for lots of questions and discussion, in previous years I’ve usually been restricted to one hour blocks.  (This may also reflect the small number of seminars altogether, there were more time slots available.) 

I was up in the seminar area a lot, and monitored attendance as I did so, to help me figure out the best times for the future.  Most seminars had about a dozen or fewer listeners.  The most-attended seminar I saw was mine at 11AM Saturday about “Starting a Game Design,” with 28 people.  I was surprised at this because by chance, at the same time, a game designers panel discussion was scheduled in the very next room, including some well-known designers who make a living in game design.   The count there was 23.  You might hope that Origins would catch such scheduling conflicts and give one or the other the chance to move to a non-conflicting time, but not this year.

Later Saturday afternoon I attended talks by James Ernest (formerly of CheapAss games) and Kenneth Hite (RPGs), both excellent speakers, but with only a dozen listeners. 

Ernest talked about themes in games.  He much prefers games with themes, disliking those with “themes” added on after design.  As I put it to him in a comment he agreed with, I prefer that a play I make in a game has a clear analog with reality, rather than simply being a move in a game–unless the game is out-and-out abstract.

Though there is no theme in Dominion, Ernest still enjoys playing the game.  I’m more extreme.  When it first came out I watched a game and saw that there was virtually no interaction amongst the players, a puzzle-contest.  People have told me that with certain cards there’s a lot more interaction, but it is still mostly about people individually solving the puzzle of the game, and I don’t care for that at all.  As for the lack of a real theme, Earnest says the theme was added after the game was finished, and in the end they took the medieval clipart they’d been using just to use something, and created the theme from it (which is what I would call an atmosphere, because it has no effect on gameplay or game design).

Hite talked about getting the heart of a genre right in an RPG.  It’s the story the genre tells that’s important, he says.  For example, at the heart of Noir is Sam Spade being beaten up or otherwise thwarted (as in, the police try to stop his investigation), yet from this he learns more information that ultimately lets him solve the mystery. 

I asked if Hite was familiar enough with Steampunk to say what the story is in that (to me) obscure genre.  He pointed out that it’s now more an aesthetic than a genre, the goggles and leather and glass and so forth (and corsets for women?).  Yet he then made an erudite comparison, saying that just as fairy stories helped Victorians reconcile with what was a pretty ugly past (and where the real fairy stories were “don’t go out on the moor at night or they’ll eat you), steampunk helps people reconcile with technology.  Modern technology is a “black box” to most people, but most people can understand that hot steam expands and can move things, and feel comfortable with the steam engines and “clockwork” of Steampunk.  Steampunk helps people come to terms with technology.  A remarkable answer.

I don’t look for new games at conventions, so I can’t say anything about such with a couple exceptions.  I did see two games that caught my eye, published by Catalyst Labs, who are known for miniatures, not boardgames.  Hibernia, played on a map of Ireland although it could be played as well on any map with the addition of a color scheme, is a bloodless wargame.  Using a color scheme on the map, plus the roll of a color die, four or fewer players expand throughout Ireland.   The designer explained it, and my comment was “clever”.  It felt like a traditional Eurogame, if only because it is a clever game and is not a model of any reality.  I first noticed it because I have a prototype “Hibernia” game, about actual Irish history (such as we know) in the Dark Ages; I’ll have to add a subtitle to it. 

Another Catalyst game is Balance of Power.  Though ostensibly about the Napoleonic world, it is even more abstract than Diplomacy, with a traditionally Euroish feel to it.  There is no uncertainty other than the intentions of other players.  With turn-based play, the other source of uncertainty in Diplomacy, from simultaneous movement, does not exist.   Nor is there the significant tactical aspect to it that counterbalances the strategic in Diplomacy.  “. . . Players carefully create and move Kings, Generals and Bankers as they capture territories and expand their empires.”  Bankers?  In Napoleonic Europe?  At first glance it appears that Prussia and Austria are “stuck in the middle” between England, France, Russia, and Turkey.  It may be clever--because of the apparent strategic imbalance I reserve comment--but it is not a model of any reality.   The game does allow secret negotiation, making it more like Diplomacy than games that only allow over-the-table negotiation.   And I’m told it’s a much shorter game than Diplomacy.

In both of these games, maneuver is very limited, and there are not many choices at a given time, as befits traditionally Euroish games.   Boardgames tend to be games of maneuver, but do not need to be. 


To go back to the convention as a whole, one publisher, who sells via Internet and conventions only with few exceptions, remarked that the retail game distribution system is broken.  He pointed out that even at the convention many people now scan the codes on games with their smartphones, then look for cheaper prices online, before deciding to buy.  Game shops are struggling or non-existent, suffering from competition with Internet sellers who sometimes go to extremes (as one US-based seller who offers Dragon Rage for $59, much less than the 50 euro list price dewspite the cost of shipping games from Europe to the USA).  Someone told me about an area of 600,000 people, part of a larger city, with not a single game shop.  I live near a sprawling 230th largest metropolitan area in the US, 300,000+ people with a high proportion of young people, where there are just two tabletop game shops, only one of which offers many boardgames.

When I walk into the Columbus Convention Center for Origins I always think initially, “why have I bothered to come here?” (it’s a thousand mile trip).  I actually skipped 2009.  Yet as in the past, I found some interesting people to talk with, though I missed one I wanted to meet.  People seem to like my talks, and this year on the spur of the moment I even recruited some to playtest a couple of my games.  I don’t know whether I’ll be back next year, it depends on how things go in the publishing world and on circumstances in general.  For most gamers, I have to suggest that GenCon is a much more interesting convention.  If it were an equal distance from where I live, I’d go to GenCon every year and frequently skip Origins.

Book review: Masters of Doom

Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture, by David Kushner, is a history of Id Software, famous for Doom and Quake as well as many other games, and its founders John Carmack and John Romero.  This is history written in a very personal form, as though it was a novel, and it is written very well.  The author had extensive access to almost all of the major characters, and even then there is much dialogue that had to be invented by the author because no one who was there was going to remember all of those details – and these guys don’t seem like the types who would be recording almost everything they said, though Romero has an extensive archive.

In fact, the guys as a group seem to be the opposite of meticulous, except where programming is concerned.   For years they worked in an apartment amidst pizza boxes and soda pop cans and wild and crazy nights of game playing and programming.  It’s a quintessential story of misfit kids rising through video games to become the equivalent of “rock stars”.

The story of the two Johns is told in great and fascinating detail.  It’s like the kind of novel that you have a hard time putting down.  This is true even for me, long past the young adult stage and not at all inclined to worship anybody, especially “rock stars” – though I grew up with the beginning of Rock I never wanted to be a rock star. 

This book certainly gives youngsters a story to wish for and heroes to emulate.  Unfortunately, the software industry has passed the stage where innovation alone has value: it has matured.  Games must appeal to a broader market, and designers often must design for other people, not for themselves.  The Id Software guys designed games that they wanted to play, and had a great deal to do with the invention of first-person shooters and the fascination of hard-core players with realism in blood and gore, but what really made it go was the genius of John Carmack, who programmed the game engines used in the software. 

I remember when Doom first came out (as shareware, mind you).  I played it for 15 minutes, said “that’s nice”, and had no desire to play again.  I’ve never been a fan of shooters beyond something very basic like Space Invaders.  Yet a 20-something friend of mine who only had a laptop (which couldn’t keep up with Doom’s demands) came over and played it on my desktop, with the speakers turned way up, cackling and laughing as he slaughtered the enemy, and I really enjoyed watching him having so much fun.  Though after a while I left him to it!   My friend was representative of how Doom was received by experienced video game players. I am still fascinated to watch people play shooters, perhaps because I don’t find them interesting to play.

The early history of Id shows the advantages of teamwork when the skills of the team members complement each other.  Workaholic Carmack really does seem to be a genius, someone who found ways to go beyond the evident constraints of early PCs and make them do more than anyone thought possible.   Romero provided the game design, some of the marketing, the tools programming, and the hype, but ultimately Carmack was the linchpin, and when they fell out Romero was forced to leave.  He formed ill-fated Ion Storm and created the even more ill-fated Daikatana, while Ion Storm owed whatever success it had to Will Spector and his game Deus Ex.  In the end Eidos bought Ion Storm and fired Romero and his people, keeping the Deus Ex gang.

In contrast to the late 80s and early 90s, nowadays the technology is not usually a limiting factor.  Any game designer operates under a variety of constraints, and in the past the technology limitations of the platforms was one of the biggest constraints. Where in the past video games have often been as much about technology as about games, now we’re at a stage where most people aren’t interested in the technology, they just want to play games.  While platforms are still a constraint they are much less so than 20 years ago.  And I think this relative independence from technology (along with the costs of the best technology) limits pretty strongly the possibility that a small group of people can take the gaming world by storm because they’ve solved technological problems the way Id Software did.  Games that are big overnight successes like Angry Birds or Draw Something, or games with vast numbers of players like Farmville and Mafia Wars, do not begin to push the technology envelope.

The book is so obviously based on interviews with most of the participants that I was almost surprised to find a list of sources at the end.  The biggest source was extensive interviews with dozens of people, and especially the two John’s themselves. There are end notes and a bibliography as well.

I have a 2004 paperback edition (original was issued in 2003) with an  afterword by the author.  You can carry the story further through Wikipedia.  Kushner, a video game journalist, has recently published another book, Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto.  He didn’t get quite the full access to participants that he did for Masters of Doom, but I expect it will be similarly riveting reading.

(It’s often interesting to see which names are recognized by Dragon NaturallySpeaking, my voice recognition software.  It appears that some of the more well-known people in the contemporary world are embedded in the software.  At any rate it had no trouble with either of the Johns’ last names.)

Attending Origins in Columbus

I'll be at Origins in Columbus OH next week.  I'm fairly easy to spot if you'd like to talk, at 6'6", 305 pounds (I was impressed with the size of NFL offensive tackles until I became that size), bald on top (not male pattern baldness, just a general lack of hair), mustache, glasses.  I may be wearing a hat at times so the baldness may not be evident.

I am giving four different (free) talks about game design, Friday at 7 PM, Saturday at 11AM and 7, and Sunday at 10AM. One hour to talk, then up to an hour for questions.  See the program for topic details.

Do Games have dramatic “acts”or “stages”

Do games “naturally” fall into three parts as dramas supposedly do?

The classic idea of film and stage play plots is that there are naturally three parts (often called simply Act I, Act II, and Act III rather than use descriptive names).  These Acts involve first introducing the protagonist, then introducing the problem or antagonist(s), and finally resolving the conflict and sorting out the aftermath.  Wikipedia (accessed 20 May 10) describes it this way:


“A three-act structure is a type of dramatic structure.  It includes three broad actions:
   1. Setup (of the location and characters)
   2. Confrontation (with an obstacle)
   3. Resolution (culminating in a climax and a dénouement ).” [the “ever after”, or at least the beginning of it]


This is a structure for dramatic tales, tales of conflict, not necessarily for all kinds of stories.  Some people believe the structure is common in games (e.g. see Jeff Tidball’s http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_195/5909-A-Videogame-in-Three-Acts).  (I’m going to use the word “stages” for the rest of the article, if only because plays occur on a stage, though when dramatic structure is not the subject I prefer to use “phase” as in my previous post, explicitly to get away from the idea of dramatic acts or stages.)


Insofar as games sometimes tell dramatic stories and often involve conflict, they may follow this path; but games, especially rules-emergent games, games that don’t explicitly impose a particular story, tell so many different stories that there’s no expectation of three-act structure.


The three-act system has been taught in film schools for many years, but there’s a trend to say “there’s no such thing”– or that it’s five, or nine, acts.  Nonetheless, the idea that there are different stages along the way to a dramatic story’s endpoint can be useful to a game designer.  While many games are not explicitly stories, there’s always a narrative in the sense of the player being able to say “this is what happened to me when I played this game”.


Games tend to vary over time in what happens, in what the players DO, in the focus of activities.  This variance is generally desirable, as it increases the variety in the game and therefore the potential interest and replayability.   Arcade-style games going back to Pong and Space Invaders typically have just one stage or phase, with speed increases providing the variability.  Further, games that tend to have the same gameplay over time may be more like puzzles than like games (think Tetris or Bejeweled).


From my point of view, video games that are trying to tell an explicit story, which includes many of the well-known AAA games because those very expensive games are offering players an “experience”, may follow the three act structure or some variation of it, but most games do not.  And dramatic stages don’t always correspond to game phases.  Nonetheless, as an exercise in a class I was teaching we tried to list three-part games.  These three parts often don’t correspond to the three acts of dramatic structure but I think the result is interesting.


[Because Blogger isn't friendly to tables, I'll have to provide a link to this one: http://www.pulsiphergames.com/presentation/three-part-games.htm
]
   
In the end these are more strategic than dramatic stages. Other games have different stages, for example Spore with five parts Britannia with four historical parts.  And many shorter games have only one stage.


In many of the games listed above the stages arise out of the nature of the gameplay.  Some games have stages ordained by the rules (including order of appearance) rather than by the evolution of play.  For Power Grid there are three “steps”, for Britannia there are four phases (Roman conquest and defense, Anglo-Saxon dominance, Vikings, 4 Kings) defined by the reinforcement order of appearance and by “major invasions”.  While history usually has an element of drama, there is nothing very dramatic about buying and supplying power stations and cities.


I suspect that three-parts is more common in video games than tabletop games, perhaps because video games more often follow a dramatic story. 


Most games are not dominated by an explicit dramatic story, if such a story exists at all in the game.  For most game designers, gameplay is more important than story, and the story must conform to the requirements of gameplay.  I disagree with Tidball and others, and conclude that games, by and large, are not subject to the classic three dramatic acts, leaving it to others to decide whether films and novels fit the three act form.

Phases in Games

[My thanks to “Sagrilarus” of Fortress:AT for the question that stimulated this attempt at classification.]

Phases (sometimes called stages) in a game design are important.  These are distinctly different periods of play through the course of a game.  They provide at least a perception, if not an actuality, of change, growth, and learning.  Phases help the feeling that there's more variety in the game, as well.   They help avoid a perception of "sameness" in the gameplay.  A game that is "too long" may feel too long because there are not enough phases, not because any specific amount of time has passed.  In contrast, many short games have only one phase.

Other entertainments and activities in life have phases.  A horse race has phases, movies have the three (or five, or nine) act structure that changes the focus as the movie progresses.  Life itself has phases such as early childhood, adolescence, and retirement/old age.  In that sense people expect phases in their entertainment and their activities.

What differentiates one phase from another?  I don’t think we can closely define that.  Much of it must occur in the minds of the player(s).  When a game changes from one phase to another the player is thinking about different things, as he or she decides what to do, than he thought about in the preceding phase.  Probably the best way to put it is, the phase changes when the immediate (short-term) objective(s) of the players change.   I’ll give some examples in a moment.

The longer the game is, the more phases it should have.  After all, if a major purpose of phases is to avoid sameness, then the need becomes greater as the game becomes longer. 

Some single-episode games that are easily played “best two out of three” have one phase, for example rock-paper-scissors (RPS).  Tic-Tac-Toe is another such game, with a maximum of five moves for the "X" player I don't know how sensible it would be to talk about phases.  Other very simple games like Candyland and Chutes and Ladders often have one phase.  We might be able to characterize short games as "one phase games", although I think we could find fairly short games of more than one phase.

In contrast, Chess can be quite a long game--players are allowed two hours each for 40 moves--so it stands to reason that it needs to have more than one phase.  These phases are normally called the opening, the mid-game, and the end-game.  The opening phase is a consequence of the severe constraints on movement of pieces at the start of the game, given the standard set up, and of the centuries of study of the best moves to bring pieces into the open and control the center of the board.

Contrast this with Risk, where the opening phase is the placement of armies before the conflict begins, and that placement can vary greatly from one game to another.  Even if you use the French setup where the cards are dealt and territories are occupied randomly, you have a setup that varies greatly from one game to another.

Contrast that with many wargames where there is a standard setup, but a player can move every one of his pieces in one turn.  As a result the game moves beyond the standard setup very rapidly, as opposed to chess when moving one piece at a time means the opening phase takes 10-20 moves by each player.

And contrast those with games where you have no units, or no maneuver (where geographical location of assets does not matter).   Often these games are symmetrical rather than the asymmetricality common in wargames. There can still be an opening phase, but it is not related to maneuver of units.



A second reason for the existence of phases in chess, other than the very constrained initial position of pieces, is that the number of pieces gradually decreases while the area of action remains the same size, thus opening up longer lines of play and new possibilities.  There’s a third reason, the piece mix for each player may deviate from the symmetric, from being identical, for example after an exchange of a Knight for a Bishop.  Forces can also become imbalanced when one player gains a material advantage, e.g. being a pawn ahead.  The mid-game in chess is also a change because players are no longer following the standard openings, but have an immediate objective of gaining positional or (more likely?) material advantage.

The end-game occurs as the number of pieces is much reduced.  There is more room to maneuver.  Further, the immediate objective becomes checkmate of the opponent’s king, rather than material or positional advantage.  Players now try to use a material or positional advantage, if they’ve gained one, to end the game.

Every chess game has an opening and a mid-game, though the latter can be cut short by a quick win.  Except when a player stumbles onto a checkmate while still trying to gain positional or material advantage, there will always be an end-game, that is, a phase when players are focusing on checkmate.


What about other games?  Play changes in a simple puzzle-game like old PCTetris because the pieces fall faster.   At some point there is no further increase in falling speed, and a good player can settle into a cathartic repetition until he or she tires and makes mistakes.  We can say there’s the ramping-up phase and then the “maximum fall” phase, a phase only experienced players reach.

Play in RPGs and FPSs changes as player avatars acquire more levels, perks, and loot (especially more and better weapons).  The monsters are tougher, the bosses are tougher, the player(s) have many more options.  In effect, the rules are modified by the loot, by perks, and by new capabilities gained by leveling up in RPGs.  There may also be changes in immediate objective as the story associated with the game develops. 

Setups
Is the setup a phase?  Yes, if players make decisions that affect the outcome, as in American (not French setup) Risk.  No, if they don’t, as in chess or checkers.

Many games have no setup phase.  Every player begins symmetrically (all players with identical situations and assets), and if he has assets that can be maneuvered, they have not yet been maneuvered into significant positions.  Card games are almost always of this type.  Chess and most traditional boardgames are also.  Turn-based and real-time-strategy video games are symmetrical insofar as each player begins with one unit "somewhere", though the sides are not symmetrical owing to unit differentiation.  Most video games are asymmetrical but have a mandated setup.

Historical wargames that might be called "simulations", on the other hand, are almost always asymmetrical (differing situations and assets) in the setup, but sometimes allow players to choose their setup.  Games that simulate historical battles are always asymmetrical, but sometimes the setup is mandated by the game, while other times the players can set up pieces as they like.   More abstract (non-simulation) wargames are often the opposite.  For example Stratego is symmetrical but players can set up their pieces as they like, so the setup becomes the first decision phase of the game.  Risk is the same.  On the other hand, Diplomacy is asymmetrical but the initial setup is mandated by the game.

Video games involving an avatar are severely asymmetrical, with one character facing numerous opponents.  Add the avatar customization opportunities that are so popular in these games and you have thousands if not millions of possible setups.

Phases and rule changes
Phases ideally should not include changes in the rules but may include cases where rules that did not matter earlier in the game come to matter later, or where rules are added through acquisition of loot, or cards, or perks, or levels.  For example, there may be a rule that limits the number of pieces a player can have, perhaps reflecting supply or maintenance restrictions.  This rule may not matter at the beginning of the game but will as players build up their forces.

Ideally the same rules should apply throughout the game, with changes in circumstances leading to changes in phase.  Yet sometimes the story or history of the game demands changes in rules.  In my game Britannia, which represents 1000 years of British history, the rules are generally the same throughout, but the identity of the offensive nations and defensive nations changes over time owing to invasions and withdrawals.  However, the rules are quite different for the Romans at the beginning of the game, and slightly different for the clash of Kings at the end of the game.  We have the phase of Roman conquest where submission rules enable British nations to survive the conquest despite the unique power of Roman roads, forts, and legionnaires.  This is followed after Roman withdrawal by the phase of Anglo-Saxon invasion and domination, followed by the phase of Viking raids and conquest (the Anglo-Saxons become defenders rather than attackers), followed by the clash of Kings where we have additional reinforcements and cavalry, four phases for a 4 to 5 hour game.

In traditional Risk the phasing is provided by the increase in the number of armies received for turn-in of territory card sets.  If you ever play Risk with a low repeating number of armies for card sets, such as 4-6-8-4-6-8, you'll find that it stays in one phase for a very long time.  There is less randomness this way, but there is little momentum toward completion.  The ever-increasing number of armies received for card sets in the standard (pre-2008) rules provides the momentum to complete the game, although it can still take quite a while.  In the 2008 redesign of Risk using mission cards, completion of missions provides the momentum toward completion.  I don’t know whether the new style game has many phases or not.

Even a game as poorly-designed as Monopoly has phases.  The initial phase is the slow acquisition of properties (slow even when the correct rules, auction when a player chooses not to buy at list price, are used).  When players begin to get monopolies they move into the next phase, building houses and ultimately hotels.  The last phase is a lot of dice rolling to see who lands on whose built-up properties without being able to pay the piper.

The bottom-of-the-game-design-barrel social network games on Facebook can have phases, in fact phases are important to avoid the extremes of tedious repetition.  As players progress in Farmville they can expand their farm, automate it, change their principle crops (or animals, or orchards) as new ones are “unlocked”, and so forth.  This provides a feeling of movement and progress in what is essentially a mass-market “game”, working within the rules complexity limits of mass-market games.

Episodic games
Some games don’t have phases, but are episodic.  You play several times rather than just once, sometimes with “best two out of three” determining the winner, sometimes with more complex scoring.  Video fighting games tend to be of this type, but many traditional 52-card games are the most obvious example.

Typically, these card games do not have phases.  You play a hand, the hand is completed, you play another hand, that hand is completed, and so forth, with the game reset to its beginning situation each time, except for the score.  In some cases you maintain an accumulating score (or as in poker an amount of chips that varies from player to player).  In many cases what happens in previous hands does not affect what happens in later hands.  In other cases such as Bridge and poker what has gone before affects each hand, whether through the points and vulnerabilities of Bridge or through the amount of chips/money each player has accumulated (or lost) in poker. Of course, in all of these games players can learn about how others play, and that can affect their own play as time passes.

Flow and learning
Mihaly Csikszentmikalyi’s concept of “the Flow” has been adopted by many (e.g. Raph Koster) as a model for games.  (See my explanation in "Why We Play" http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/625/why_we_.php .).   Ideally, a game should become more difficult as players become better at it.

Koster talks about games as learning in a safe environment.  Phases mean there’s more to learn in the game.  If the phases don’t involve rules changes, all the better, the learning is about how to play well, not about how to deal with new mechanisms of the game.  Phases don’t necessarily mean the game becomes harder to play well, but they may still contribute to “the Flow”.

Repetition
Virtually all games involve repetition, whether it's repetition of turns or something else.  The question is whether this repetition can be conducted in varying circumstances which amount to different phases.  You can play two rounds with exactly the same rules, yet the results from the first round mean that what goes on in the minds of the players in the second round is rather different.  This is most likely to be seen in Eurostyle games with a limited number of rounds in which a lot can happen.

If one round can be, in terms of rules, just like the preceding one, but owing to changes in circumstances it feels different to the players, you’ve effectively increased the variety of the game.  And for 21st century gamers, variety is very much “the spice of life.”

Once again, the phase difference is in the mind of the player, and as such it is not something that we can define rigidly.  But it usually means that the short-term objective(s) of the players have changed from one phase to the next.

Other reasons for phases
Another reason to have phases in a game design is to mitigate the uncatchable-leader problem.  If, after half a game, the player who leads will almost always win, why play the rest of the game?  If the game has distinct phases with different gameplay, that can help other players overtake the leader.

Here’s a final, subtle, reason why phases are important.  Designers are in some danger of having game fans treat games the way some basketball “fans” treat basketball.  These fans only watch the end of a basketball game because they feel that what goes before doesn’t matter to the outcome.  They don't recognize that there are phases and variations in basketball that are as interesting as the results.  They're only interested in the destination, not in the journey.  We see this in video game players who find cheat codes, play only the end of a game, and then say they “beat the game”.  Phases help make the journey more interesting, for those willing to experience it.



The point, for game designers, is to find ways to vary their games so that phases, significant changes in what happens in the minds of the player(s), occur.  This is likely to make the game more appealing, and more long-lasting.  Fortunately, if you're designing a game that lasts more than half an hour or so, it may naturally fall into phases as you work on its other aspects.

In a few days I’ll briefly discuss whether the proverbial "three act structure" that is so often ascribed to films, plays, and novels, is typical in games. 

Kickstarter proposal for software to make online play of tabletop games simple for non-programmers

Several years ago I tried to find out as much as I could about the effect on sales of tabletop games when an online version was available for play.  My conclusion was that not many people were likely to pay for the privilege of playing a tabletop game online, so any commercial advantage would come from the publicity and the ability to “try the online version before you buy” to improve sales of the tabletop version.  I have several games myself that I would like to see playable online as a way to generate interest that might help me find a publisher when I get to that point, but I’m not enough of a programmer myself to make such versions.  See BGG discussion and my blog post.

Curtis Lacy of globalgamespace.com has proposed a solution for this and for people who want to find playtesters online for their tabletop games.  He wants to create a program that makes it easy for nonprogrammers to create online games, whether for playtesting or for publicity purposes, or both.

Curtis devised a list of 29 (later expanded the 60) functions that would be required in his software, and explained many of them in interesting videos.  I’m sure he has received further suggestions since then.  These videos are available at globalgamespace.com.

Curtis lists many existing programs (“prior art”) that can provide some of the features he has in mind, program such as VASSAL and Magic Set Editor.  His plan seems to be more comprehensive than any of these programs that I have looked at.

The list of 60 features alone will be interesting to game designers and those interested in the theory of what games are and how they work.

Curtis has reached the point of a Kickstarter campaign to raise money so that he can spend his time creating the full software.  (You’ll see from his videos that he already has mockups.)  The software will be released under a “fairly permissive license” which Curtis calls a modified MIT license, details linked at the Kickstarter site.

I have never supported a Kickstarter campaign, but this is the kind of thing that could be very worthwhile.  It is not a product that’s going to be created through the commercial world because, as I’ve said, there doesn’t seem to be much money in online play of tabletop games in and of itself.

Book progress

I'm told that my game design book is in copy-editing, after which the proofs will be sent to me for checking, and so that I can make an index (not something I'm looking forward to). 

I expect to be at Origins in Columbus in a couple weeks.  They received my proposal to do the usual talks, but as of a few days ago I haven't seen their master event list, so I don't know the actual state of things.

Frugal Dad (http://frugaldad.com/top-board-game-sites/) lists 33 boardgame blogs, a useful list.  (They call them "top board game sites" but don't include BGG--though they include Purple Pawn which is not quite a blog.  *Shrug*)

2012 East Coast Game Conference, Raleigh North Carolina 25 to 26 August

2012 East Coast Game Conference, Raleigh North Carolina 25 to 26 August
http://www.ecgconf.com/

This is both a report about the East Coast Game Conference and comments about the nature of video game markets and the new mass market.

The fourth annual East Coast Game Conference (ECGC), billed as the “largest gathering of video game professionals on the east coast” took place this past Wednesday and Thursday.

Unlike many professional video game conferences, such as the GDC conferences, that are money earning concerns for a company that makes much of its revenue from conferences, the ECGC is still organized by volunteers, and this is reflected in the relatively low $99 entrance for professionals and much less for students.  For co-founders, John Austin, Walter Rotenberry, Troy Knight, and Wayne Watkins it is still a labor of love, not a labor for profit.  I don’t know what the attendance was this year but it was about 800 in 2010 and 1,200 in 2011.  One critic on Gamasutra has compared this conference to the very much larger Game Developers Conference in California, and of course there’s no way a four-year-old volunteer run conference can compare with professionally run and enormously expensive GDC.  Yet it provides a practical alternative for those who cannot afford the long journey and expense of GDC.  You could say that ECGC reflects the “new South” as well as the old in the same way that GDC reflects the great size and sheer craziness of California.

The Raleigh Convention Center is a fine venue with lots of space.  As with most video game conferences the focus of the ECGC is one hour talks (48 altogether) by experts in various video game related fields.  There were also keynote speeches in the early afternoon both days, and finally there was “Unreal University” where people could learn about using the Unreal Engine developer kit (Epic Games is located in the area).  There is a small exhibition hall, but that seems to me to be a sidelight rather than highlight of the conference.

Before I describe some of the more interesting talks (to me anyway) I want to say something about how these are conducted.  Something that surprises me about this conference– I don’t know how it goes at GDC -- is that almost every speaker gets in front of the audience and talks at them for 45 minutes without interaction, then invites questions and comments.  Necessarily, when you write something (like this piece) it's very difficult to have a conversation with people, you are stuck with "talking at" them.  But when you have a live audience you should acknowledge that audience as you go along, especially at the start.  Why not make a few comments and ask a few questions?  The only questions I can remember any of the speakers (other than myself) asking were related to what proportion of the audience was developers and what proportion students.

Audiences at many of these talks are predominantly younger people, certainly people who love to use interactive video software.  They often crave interaction.  There is no interaction when you "talk at" people.  I look at it from the perspective of the teacher, and lecturing at students is a sure way to turn off all but the most motivated.  There may be times when there's not another practical way to convey information but these should be rare rather than the standard.  The university teachers who get up in front of 100 to 500 or more students and talk at them for an hour are not actually teachers, they are providing an oral book.  A book can certainly teach, and of course an oral book is in some ways easier to work with than a book you have to read, with young people much less likely to read now then a generation or two ago, as is often testified by game developers.  (Real teaching, influencing a person's behavior and worldview, requires much smaller groups.)

I am going to partially describe some of the talks I attended, and then the keynotes.  I hope I don't seriously misrepresent what speakers have said.


Alan Wilson (of Tripwire Interactive) described "A case study of failure in funding and success on Steam".  He described how his company, which began as a modding group, have become self publishers. They explored more traditional methods of funding your games but in the long run most of their funding has been through second mortgages and then the success of previous games, including their success in building communities that continue to invest in their games.

They have found ways to increase over three years the sales of their cooperative zombie fighting game Killing Floor.   Community map contests with cash prizes provide new free maps to users, but they do not sell new maps.  They don't want to divide their customers into those who can play on a new map and those who cannot because they haven't bought it.  Their policy is to only sell cosmetic additions, with the limit being new character skins. 

They found that some of their fans have become what Alan calls "collectionists".  When Tripwire decided to sell boxed copies of the game in Europe with an exclusive character the company got pounded on their forums by the collectionists who demanded to be able to purchase that character! 

While the effective copy protection of Steam has helped them, Alan felt that some of the techniques could be used for ordinary retail sales.  Steam obviously has helped them acquire up-to-the-minute statistics about play and purchase of their games.  They found that a sales spike occurred whenever there was a sale price or an offering of new content for the game, and more importantly that sales stayed higher after the spike than before.

I suspect that the cooperative nature of Killing Floor has helped them build community although Allen said similar techniques were used for their Red Orchestra games as well.


Ethan Levy discussed "Game design is business design".  When you design a free to play (F2P) game you have to design the monetization method that same time.  According to a recent survey 15% of the US population aged 2 and up have paid money to F2P games.  The question is how to persuade people to pay money.

In Levy's view emotion is the key to monetization, and when he is involved in the initial design of a game he identifies the emotions that will be used.  These can be:

    Impatience.  But there are more effective ways than the typical Zynga energy deficiency.  A company called Kixeye makes 20 times the normal daily average revenue per user (which is 4 cents).  Zynga makes 6 cents.
    Revenge.  Someone harms you, you offer a bounty for others to harm them if you cannot, as in Mafia Wars.
    Dominance.  You want better scores in your friends and you're willing to buy temporary boosts to help you achieve this.  If the scores reset every week you have a constant stream of revenue.
    Jealousy.  Your friends have a particular decoration or possession, you're willing to spend real money to get the same thing.
    Accomplishment.  Achievements and trophies.  People are willing to pay real money to unlock achievements that they can then pursue.
    Exhilaration.  I suppose this amounts to a form of gambling.  Levy's example was a game in which players could earn the opportunity to open a goodie box and get some perks.  They knew what the chances were for each perk, and they could use real money to increase their chances of getting the better perks.  This works wonderfully.

I am not a fan of games that put in "pain points" (frustration) to try to persuade people to pay money.  Most of the above emotions involve frustration, but the last two do not, and this makes me more optimistic about F2P games in general.


Rafael Chandler is one of the best speakers I've heard at game conferences and conventions.  While his talks about story in games usually illuminate the entire process of game production, this time in "Story Production for Games" he gave us a faux post-mortem of a game ("Full Metal Rabbits") to directly illustrate how the story of a game could be ruined by production problems. 

Ideas ought to be cut out as the game progresses from preproduction to completion, but in practice things are often added on, sometimes by the developers themselves and sometimes by people "above" such as publishers.  This makes a mess.  Someone has to be in charge of meetings and the focus of meetings (though not necessarily of final decisions).

Failure to prototype the sound early on using amateurs to provide voice acting leads to problems at the end when it's too late to fix the professional actor version.

Minutiae often distract developers from what's important.  That's because it's easy to research and discuss something that's not really important, rather than answer big questions about the core of the game.

Zany documentation can be a problem.  Skip the entertainment in the docs, which are a blueprint.  You don't expect the blueprint to be amusing or entertaining.  Concentrate on clarity and precision.

Creative direction is vital, there needs to be one vision not a different one for every person.  There must be a sole vision of the game that is jealously defended.

There is a notion that voice actors are too expensive.  It's better to spend more (money and time) on voice actors, not less.  Remember that under union rules you have 4 hours with an actor, don't just use him or her for 35 minutes, record alternate dialogue and multiple ways of delivering the same dialogue.

The first draft is not the best!  Drafts need revision, revision, revision.  "Writing is revision".

During questions Chandler pointed out that unfortunately in video games, much as in Hollywood, the writer may be the one least responsible for a game's narrative.  And where the choice is between gameplay and story then gameplay is more important.


Chris Totten, who has a Masters degree in architecture, described how architectural principles could be applied to make better video game levels.  He described how ideas of Narrow space, Intimate Space, Prospect Space, Refuge space, and Secondary Refuge could be applied to level architecture, as well as height, shadow, and shade to provide emotion in survival horror style levels, ending with a small level he'd created to demonstrate his points.

Totten's Gamasutra piece "Designing Better Levels Through Human Survival Instincts" http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/134779/designing_better_levels_through_.php   describes the same ideas.

There are lots of things more important when making a level than these subtle points of architecture, but once you have grasped those most important points then a presentation like this can make you think about level design from a new perspective.

I was trying to do the same thing in my own talk, for more than 75 people, providing a new perspective by talking about managing and creating frustration in game design. 

The slides and an audio recording can be obtained at http://pulsiphergames.com/teaching1.htm.  I expect a written version to become available on Gamasutra one way or another, though of course there are lots of differences between an oral presentation and an article.

Whereas there were six talks plus an Unreal session going on at the same time, the two keynotes had timeslots all to themselves.

BioWare Senior Creative Director, Paul Barnett, gave the keynote on Thursday.  Though he could have a second career as a standup comic, he nonetheless made some very interesting observations.  One was that every game player who wants to make games has had a golden age or golden years, a time when he was young and had no responsibilities and nearly infinite time and patience to play games.  The games of his Golden years, according to Barnett, tend to dominate the rest of his gaming life, and in many ways he is trying to remake those games.  If you want to communicate well with someone in the game industry, whether they are older or younger, you need to understand the games of their Golden years.  Here I can't speak for video game makers because my Golden age occurred before video games existed, even on mainframes.  But I'd like to think, and certainly believe, that the games I design now are not like the hex and counter Avalon Hill games that were much of my Golden years, and are in no way an attempt to remake them.

Barnett felt that there is very definite division and mindset between people who have actually made a game and got it out there for other people to play, and those who only talk about it.  It doesn't need to have been sold commercially but it has to be out there for people to play.  I agree completely: the last part of the subtitle of my forthcoming book for beginning video and tabletop game designers is "Start to Finish".  This is not meant to imply that one book can tell you everything you need to know, it's meant to mean you have to complete games, finish them, before you can really call yourself a game designer, and that the biggest mistake beginners make is to not finish anything.  Of course I don't mean finish as in quit, I mean finish as in get it done so that you have a reasonable product that other people can play.  "Get it Done" could have been the title for the book as a whole, though the most descriptive short title would have been "Learning Game Design".

Barnett was so amusing and entertaining as well as informative that he got a standing ovation at the end of his talk.  There were no accompanying slides but I hope an audio version will become available.  All of the presentations were being video-recorded for use by the local community college, Wake Tech.

Zynga East Coast Executive Producer, Paul Stephanouk, gave the keynote the day before.  I was surprised at his description of how much players of the many -ville games appeared to love what they were doing.  When he goes out he typically wears a T-shirt with the name of one of those games printed on the front.  For a period of six months he was batting 1.000 for having people come up to him when they saw the T-shirt and tell him how much they loved the games, even before they learned that he had worked on some of them (especially Frontierville).  To a typical longtime game player these games are very very very simple puzzles, but they mean a lot more to people who are not typical game players.  And Stephanouk had recognized this, saying that he no longer designs games for himself but designs games for his family, which includes a wife who is not a typical game player and a five-year-old daughter and somewhat older son.

This illustrates to me where video games have gone.  Although Paul did not use the term, video games have finally reached the same kind of market that mass-market tabletop games have reached for many decades.  Most video games that attract game players are too complex or too intense or involve too much opposition for the kind of people who like to play Monopoly, Sorry, Game of Life, and other traditional more-or-less family games.  These tabletop games cannot have more than two pages of rules because that becomes too complicated for most people.  The very simple social network "games" on Facebook are reaching that same audience.  Facebook itself has made this possible because people who do essentially nothing on a computer but use Facebook can play Facebook games even though they might struggle to install and play any other kind of game.  In other words the technological barrier is much lower.

The casual audience is not the mass-market audience.  Casual gamers may play games for many hours a week, they may not mind having the game oppose what they're trying to do, they might accept a little frustration, they might not need to be told what to do next as Cityville or Empires and Allies does.  Many casual gamers still recognize that they may be asked to earn something as they play.  Mass-market gamers want to be entertained, not challenged.  Even if they’re capable of overcoming gamer-like challenges, they're not interested.  They are the opposite of the hard-core who want to be challenged and who enjoy overcoming challenges.  Mass-market games make absolutely no demands on the player (which is why children can play them), whereas many casual games do demand some thought or quickness of action from the player.

This description of "entertained, not challenged" also often applies to casual gamers, and we can say that the mass-market gamers are the least challenge-oriented (and much the larger) end of the casual game market.

Modern action-adventure movies often have very simple, straightforward plots because movie-makers think that movie-goers are easily confused.  (I think most self-described game players are much more savvy.)  Mass-market games are similarly designed to avoid confusion.

Just as with the tabletop mass-market, people play mass-market video games because their friends told them about them and because they've been identified as easy to play by the very fact that they're on Facebook (the mass-market tabletop games are identified by being sold at Toys "R" Us and Walmart).  There may be games on Facebook that are not so easy to play but they're not the ones that everybody hears about, and they're not the ones that I hear elderly ladies talking about in the local pharmacy, just as I would be unsurprised to hear someone talk about Monopoly or Game of Life in the local pharmacy.

And make no mistake about it, to people who might call themselves game players, mass-market tabletop games are "the pits".  The Game of Life and Monopoly have just as bad a reputation amongst tabletop game players as the -ville games have amongst video game players.  But if you want to make a really large amount of money as a publisher of games then you want a successful mass-market game.  Hasbro has to sell 300,000 to 1,000,000 copies of anything they put on the shelves to make it worthwhile, even though typical tabletop games and toys sell 1/10th to 1/1000th of that.  Similarly a mass-market social networking game has to reach an enormous market of tens of millions of players to make it worthwhile for Zynga to support.

The American publishers of Settlers of Catan, which is a casual game rather than a hard-core game in both the original tabletop and computer versions, were working on a "broad market" version, not quite mass-market but simplified from the original.  Broad market is not well defined in the tabletop industry, no more than it is in the video game industry, though I think the casual video games that still attract self-described heavy game players, such as Bejeweled and Tetris, constitute the broad market.

The hard core video game market can still generate millions of sales for games like Call of Duty.  Hard core tabletop games like chess still sell in the millions, and hobby tabletop games that win the German "Game of the Year" award can sell more than a million copies.  But most tabletop games, like most video games, sell immensely less than a million copies.  In the long run, "millions of sales" are the domain of the mass market.

April 2012 Miscellany

Thoughts about some game-related topics that are not long enough for separate blog posts.

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Quotation:  "There's an old saying that I love about design, it's about Japanese gardening actually, that 'Your garden is not complete until there is nothing else that you can remove.'"  --Will Wright (SimCity, The Sims, Spore, etc.)

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Is it more fun to be an expert, or to be in the process of becoming an expert, at playing a game?

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I am scheduled to be a speaker at the East Coast Game Conference in Raleigh, NC, April 25 and 26, specific time to be determined.  (Topic: Much of Game Design Is Managing (and Causing) Frustration.  That may sound familiar to some readers . . .)

For those unfamiliar with video game conferences, they are very different from tabletop game conventions.  The major activity at the latter is game playing, and attendees are mostly consumers.  The major activity at a conference is dissemination of techniques for making and marketing video games, and this is done principally through talks and workshops.  Attendees are mostly video game professionals, and those who want to be (students).  And as with professional conferences in academic disciplines, they tend to have more expensive entry fees than game conventions, and tend to be on weekdays rather than weekends.  This one is Wednesday and Thursday.

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Game designers:  How many times do you expect people to play your game?  My answer varies with the type of game.  If it's a sweep of history game, I think in terms of many, many plays, as I know people who've played Britannia 500 times, though I'm sure the average even amongst the game's fans is closer to 50 than 500.

If it's a "screwage" game, I think in terms of 10-25 times rather than 100 or 500.

But I never think in terms of, say, 5 times.  Yet it seems to me that the majority (a great majority) of games published nowadays are designed as though 5 plays is sufficient.

And I suppose it is, for a great many game players.  Variety (which often means playing lots of different games) is valued over depth (which involves learning more about, and getting better at, a particular game).

Of course, I usually get to see (and occasionally play) at least 30 plays of most games that I "finish".  But the game changes over time, so it isn't quite the same thing as playing the same game over and over.

And if a prototype doesn't hold my interest over five plays, I shelve it.

**
Game studies scholars like to use the term "Meaningful Play".  Whenever I see it I turn off, because to me it's terrifically vague and, well, unmeaningful.

Unfortunately, the structure of education in the USA means that anyone who is an actual practitioner of a discipline--for example, a game designer or a novelist--is discounted by academics, who emphasize degrees and reference to what other academics have said/written.  "Practitioner" is often a dirty word among people who have sailed through college to grad school to a terminal degree and then right into teaching.  Which helps explain why our educational system has less and less to do with the real world, as time passes.

"Games studies" is about culture, not about game design.  The scholars do not pretend to offer anything to help game designers.

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On Facebook I've seen lots of graphics, "what really does" with six photos of how different people perceive the "profession".  For example, what hockey players do.  What home schoolers do.  I've not yet seen one for game players.

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Designers of video games, especially video game interfaces, will benefit from reading Jakob Nielsen's posts about Web usability.  For example, http://www.useit.com/alertbox/disrupting-users.html?utm_source=Alertbox&utm_campaign=177afcdf52-Disruptive_Workflow_Design3_12_2012&utm_medium=email
talks about smooth workflow and disruptive workflow.  Workflow is just as important in a game as in Web usage.

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Comic books might be the midpoint between RPGs that resemble novels and those that resemble tentpole (fantasy) adventure movies like Indiana Jones.  Not that most comics make any attempt to be believable.

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Someone wrote to me about a graphical exposition about instant gratification, and I discovered others as I looked around the Web site (which is generally about online graduate school).  Generations ARE different, and these graphics (which site their data sources) help illuminate this.  I've also added a report of a recent survey.

http://www.onlinegraduateprograms.com/instant-america/
Instant gratification

http://www.onlinegraduateprograms.com/generation-screwed/
Millennials and work

http://www.onlinegraduateprograms.com/millennials/
Meet the Millennial generation

http://chronicle.com/article/Millennials-Are-More/131175/
Millennials Are More 'Generation Me' Than 'Generation We,' Study Finds

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Anyone who designs interfaces or interaction for video games should read the following.
http://www.asktog.com/columns/022DesignedToGiveFitts.html
And marvel at how many interfaces fail to recognize such fundamental rules of behavior . . .

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There's a tendency for people to think that a game is the sum of its mechanics.  To me a good game is more than the sum of its parts.  How those mechanics work with one another, and how they work with actual human players, makes a big difference in the outcome, and is much less than entirely predictable beforehand.

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Most free-to-play video games rely on in-game purchases to speed  up progress in the game, to bypass certain tasks. Aren't games meant to be fun? Who watches good movies and wants to skip to the next scene so they're further into it, who skips pages in a book so they can boast how far along they are in it to their friends?  None of the people who are actually enjoying the experience, that's for sure.

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I've been reading the GenCon event rules.  I was considering offering game design talks as I do at Origins, WBC, and PrezCon, with the added possibility of selling copies of my book, which may be available by that time.  (This is a common activity of authors of books of all kinds.)

But seminars at GenCon don't give the speaker any credit toward the entry fee.  Game sessions do because players are charged fees to play, and GenCon collects the fees.  Further, for all practical purposes, sales outside of the Exhibit Hall are prohibited.

My publisher exhibits at GenCon, so all is not lost.  But for now, I'll skip it.

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Does practice make a difference in game playing?  Are you going to play better when you've been practicing the game, or once you've become a top player will it all come back to you immediately?

A friend of mine loves Robo-Rally.  He plays a lot, teaches other people to play a lot, and goes to PrezCon in Charlottesville every year to play in the tournament.  This year he played 23 games at PrezCon, and won the tournament.  I think practice does help.

Another game he's come to love is Merchant of Venus.  He's played once every two weeks in the past year.  But at PrezCon the game was played on the old board rather than the lovely custom-made set he uses.  Though there are few if any functional differences, he had a hard time seeing what was going on.  On the other hand, Merchant players came by as he played with his custom board, and remarked how hard a time they had seeing it.

So he was practicing, but on the wrong board, and maybe that's why he didn't make the finals in Merchant this year.

Certainly practice makes a big difference in games that are related to sports.  For example, the top video game competitors in games that require a lot of manual dexterity (FPS, RTS) practice 8-10 hours a day.  And we know how much professional athletes practice nowadays.

**
If you're going to make a game as complicated as a video game, then let it be a video game.  If you're going to make a game where people matter, then make it as simple as you can, so that the people vs. people can occur.

I see a lot of complicated tabletop games lately.  Some are complicated for atmospheric reasons, the story.  Some (the puzzles turned into contests) are complicated so that the puzzle is harder to solve.  The presence of other people is, to a greater or lesser extent, there only to help you keep score and provide variation (the way a computer would provide variation).

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In most general terms, playing games used to be about earning something, and possibly failing; now they're about getting rewarded for participation, without the significant possibility of failure.  Especially video games.

For example:  at one time it was the referee's task in D&D to make the players fear for the lives and livelihoods (possessions, relationships) of their characters.  Now it seems to be the referee's task, in 4e D&D at any rate, to present a (usually harmless) tactical mess, then reward players for participation.

And in many other cases it's the referee's task to tell a story, not to threaten characters (unless that fits with the story).

**
Stages in a game are important.  They provide at least a perception, if not an actuality, of change/growth and learning.

More important, if there are no stages players may wonder why they're playing the game as long as they are.  Why not play half as long?

Game designers want to avoid the kind of thing some basketball "fans" talk about, they only watch the end of a game because they feel what goes before isn't important.  They don't recognize that there are stages and variations in basketball that are as interesting as the results.  They're only interested in the destination, not in the journey.  If you're only interested in the destination, why watch at all, just get the score after the game is over.

Stages help the feeling that there's more variety in the game, as well.

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I've read that novelists don't enjoy reading novels as much as ordinary people, as they tend to think about how the novel is constructed while they're reading.  In fact they're particularly happy when a novel is so absorbing that they forget to think about how it was made.

I have the equivalent, "game designers' disease".  When I watch a game or play a game or talk with gamers I'm almost always thinking about how the game is put together or what the motivations of the players are.  I don't know that that reduces my enjoyment, since my favorite game is the game of designing games, but it certainly makes for a different point of view.

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A tweet from a confused punter: @lewpuls This guy thinks he is Egon from Ghostbusters with his dig against books. "Print is dead", HA!

I guess that's from my last Miscellany when I talked about why someone might want to read a book.  But it would be really odd for someone whose book is about to be printed, to say "print is dead".   *Shakes head*

(Though you know, I've heard that Amazon now sells more non-print than print books.)

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Strategy and Tactics

Strategic: plan well ahead.  That includes planning what additional forces you want/need to acquire.  Ultimately, everything that happens is of interest to you (Diplomacy, HotW, Brit).

Tactical: do the best you can with what you have RIGHT NOW (most games depicting a particular battle)

So Twilight Struggle is described as a very tactical game because it is so much an improvisers' game, it's very hard to plan ahead if I can believe what people write about the game.

Games of Maneuver vs. games of "combat dominance"

One of the first things I do with beginning game design students is give them sets of "Clout Fantasy" pieces and a large vinyl chessboard, in groups, to have them make up games.  I have water-soluble markers so that they can draw on the chessboards if they choose.  They enjoy the exercise, they get used to working in groups (which also helps them get to know one another), and ultimately they learn that designing a good game isn't as easy as they thought it would be.  It also teaches them to work under constraints.

"Clout" pieces are very nice clay chips (like high quality poker chips) with artwork and two numbers on them (and also zero to four dots, but students rarely use the dots).  I bought a bunch very cheap ($8 for 12 starter sets listing at $14.95 each) because Clout  failed strikingly in the marketplace (production ended April 2007).  I give each group four differently-colored sets of 15 pieces--two starter sets.  The sets are standard, but the pieces differ between each color.  Students are free to use the numbers and dots or not as they choose.

So checkers is a game they could play immediately with the sets.  I don't give them dice, but they often ask sooner or later to use them , and I agree.


So much for preliminaries.  Students often make some kind of wargame, given what they have, and I find that the students often don't understand how maneuver and combat methods work together.

When I say "maneuver", I mean that the location of pieces matters, and separates good play from bad, rather than how they fight.  Chess and checkers are games of maneuver.  Go is a game of maneuver, even though the maneuver comes through placement of pieces rather than actual movement.  Even Tic-Tac-Toe is a game of maneuver, in this sense.

Games of "combat dominance" are defined mainly by the rules of how pieces conflict/fight.  This often involves dice.  Yes, there is conflict in chess, but the rule for it is very simple, whoever moves into the square, wins.  Checkers is similarly simple, Go nearly so.

The most typical dice combat I've seen from beginners is that each side rolls a die, and highest wins.  There is no provision for one side to gain an advantage from local superiority of numbers.  So if one side has 10 pieces and the other 3, the odds in combat are still 50-50.  Unit strength may modify this (say, with the numbers on the Clout pieces).  Consequently, maneuver is *pointless*.  Why bother to get numerical superiority in an area when it makes no difference to your success?  And you have a game that absolutely amounts to dice rolling and no more, when unit strengths do not vary.

About the time three units defeat nine thanks to a run of luck, students will get this, if not before.  The ideal to be impressed on the students is that maneuver ought to be important just as the strength of unit can be important.

Of course, combat rules can be quite intricate, though rarely are in the context of this exercise.  Shooters and fighting games can have quite complex combat rules, though they are also games of maneuver.

It might be interesting to go through the typical list of military "principles of war" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principles_of_War) and try to apply to simple games.  "Maneuver" is one, as is "economy of force" and "mass", if I recall correctly.


(Note: Civilization I-IV (computer versions) use one-on-one combat, ignoring other forces present, but I think this is intended to emphasize differences in technology, so that one really good unit can defeat many lower-tech units.  Nonetheless, maneuver IS important in Civ., but in a very large context--strategic movement, not tactical movement.)

Six words about zombie games

(I've had some medical problems that have distracted from writing about games lately, but this should be of interest.)

According to tweetdeck, one of the trending:worldwide topics on twitter not so long ago was 6 word stories.  In the past few months I've asked people to say 6 words about game design, programming, wargames, stories in games, casual games, and  innovation (and plagiarism) in games.

This time the challenge is this: say six (interesting or amusing) words about zombie games.