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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

Six words about innovation or plagiarism (or both) in games

Six words about innovation or plagiarism (or both) in games

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, and casual games.

This time the challenge is this: say six words about innovation or plagiarism (or both) in games.

Cooperative games

I recently listened to episode #16 of the “Ludology” podcast, about cooperative games.  As usual the discussion between Ryan Sturm and Geoff Englestein was quite interesting.  And it made me reflect again on a cooperative game I designed recently and played several times, but which I put aside because it doesn’t work suitably.

The game is about up to four players representing star faring nations defending themselves against the attack of massive war-machine intelligences whose only objective is the destruction of all life.  You may have read Fred Saberhagen’s “Berserker” series that depicts such a situation.  My game is a wargame where the players are trying to hold off the annihilators long enough that their research will give them an upper hand and enable some of their planets to survive.  The very powerful annihilator units are face down for “fog of war”, and their movements are regulated by a deck of cards.  Toward the end of the game as the players’ units and mobility improve tremendously thanks to research, they have lost so many planets that they cannot maintain many units.  It’s a race to see whether enough planets can be saved and enough annihilators destroyed to save humanity. 

A key part of the game is four annihilator bases at the outer edges of the concentric-circle board, bases that produce more annihilators.  The players have to eliminate at least some of these bases, and ultimately all of them, while still defending enough planets to support enough units at the end of the game.  They have to devote enough economy to research, while still having enough units to slow down the annihilators and destroy the bases.  Inexorably the annihilators move inward and destroy human planets.  If the humans win a battle, there are always more annihilators coming if the bases are intact.  If the humans send strong forces to the bases, will they have enough to slow down the annihilators?

I planned to include a set of event cards to provide more variety but my main purpose in testing was to see whether the idea would work.

And it does work as a model of the situation, but as I said not suitably for a commercial cooperative game.  The biggest flaw is that there’s no “momentum” toward a finish.  In a close game the balance between the remaining annihilators and remaining humans could be such as to produce a near stalemate.  This is poison to a cooperative game.  People want the game to come to a tense climax and then end.  Yet the theme of the game does not encourage a time limit or a believable way to maintain the momentum.  I could introduce a Deus ex machina research track that would automatically save the humans when it was reached, but I don’t much like that idea.

Another flaw is that all of the players are doing the same things.  In a good cooperative game you want each player to be doing different things so that one idea or person will not dominate play.  If each person is doing different things and is individually accountable you’re less likely to get the situation where one player is essentially persuading everyone else how they should behave.  In my game each player is accountable insofar as the success of his nation is concerned, but he’s doing the same kinds of things as every other player.

Another flaw, which is very hard to avoid in the game without intelligent opposition, is that the game is always essentially the same puzzle.  In the first few plays a group of players is learning how to solve the puzzle, but when the puzzle doesn’t change then the flaws in group dynamics for solving problems begin to appear.  I read long ago, and cannot specify the source, that if a problem is well-understood, for best results you should assign one person to solve it rather than a group.  As a trivial example, one person should add a column of numbers, not a committee!  If it's a poorly-understood problem, then a group of people will do better than one.  The first time people play a co-op the problem is likely to be poorly understood.  But after playing some times, the players understand the problem and may begin to lose interest, or to interfere with each other in undesirable ways.

Event cards could help vary the circumstances and increase the amount of plays before this “too well understood” situation occurs.  The only way to really solve this is to have intelligent opposition.  RPGs are different-than-boardgames cooperative games, and much better ones, because there is intelligent opposition (controlled by the referee).  The traitor mechanism works well in otherwise-cooperative boardgames because it provides some intelligent (albeit hidden) opposition. 

Computers can be programmed to provide a semblance of intelligent opposition, board and card games cannot.  A game with nothing more than card "programming" to provide opposition is definitely a puzzle, and is likely to be solved with just a few plays.

And of course, where there's human opposition, the problem can and likely will change over time, so "this problem is well-understood" does not apply as strongly.

I don’t think people want to play very long cooperative games, either.  And my game, even if it had momentum, appears to be 2 to 3 hours

There are ways to avoid one of the big problems of cooperative games, that they are essentially solitaire games and one person of a group can end up being the main player with the others as followers.  One method is to limit the communication between the players; another is to include a time limit so that no player has enough time to figure out what he’s going to do and also advise everybody else.  In conjunction with different functions for each player this may work pretty well, but we still have the problem that the cooperative “game” is a relatively simple puzzle, not a game, and it will soon be solved.

I have had in mind for many years, and have designed the mechanics for the non-cooperative part, a cooperative role-playing game that does not require a referee.  I’ve even tested it a little bit with myself acting as the referee.  But I have no confidence that I can devise a set of cards to control the opposition that will be sufficiently interesting.



During the Ludology podcast the guys talked about the necessity that players buy into the theme of the game and not treat it merely as a set of mechanics, not treat Shadows over Camelot as just poker hands.  My game, being a wargame-model, doesn't appear to have that problem.

Another technique they discussed was a game where there is only one winner instead of the group winning, yet the group must cooperate sometimes or everyone will lose.  The flaw there is a player who regards everyone-losing as just as good as everyone-winning, and so will hold the others to ransom by threatening to cause the loss.  I do not care for this technique; in effect with this technique you're providing a form of intelligent opposition from the players themselves, but I prefer the traitor method so that the roles are clear cut, rather than"one wins but everyone can lose".

They also talked about the desirability of co-op games with one way to win but many ways to lose.  Again in sync with my theme, there is only one way to lose as the annihilators destroy planet after planet.  In a sense it is too linear, even as it models the situation well.  But models don't always make good games, as we saw again and again in the SPI era.

Something my game does have is the feeling that you're making progress, because you're researching technologies that help you resist the annihilators, yet things are getting worse and worse as the annihilators move toward the center of the board and destroy planets along the way.

I suppose that, in the end, I am not much attracted to co-op tabletop games without intelligent opposition, because without that opposition the game must be a puzzle, and must lack gameplay depth (though it may have puzzle or story depth, or even model depth).

So the game is "on hold", and likely will remain so forever.  Unless I try to rework it so that there is one player for the annihilators, but that kind of "one against many" game must be a nightmare to balance.

February Miscellany

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

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I will be at PrezCon in Charlottesville, VA from Thursday through Sunday.  I'm scheduled to give a talk and question/answer session about game design at 9PM Friday.

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We've been talking about depth in games, and how games and gamers have changed.  The following quote from Dame Eileen Atkins, a famous British stage actress ("Dame" is the female equivalent of "Sir"), provides some backup for what I've been saying, from an entertainment realm other than games.  She was talking to a newspaper writer in New York in October 2003, more than eight years ago now:

 "In England, as here, there are always two kinds of audiences: the Royal Shakespeare and the West End. In the last 10 years, audiences have been changed by television. One can tell: people don't concentrate and they expect lighter fare - and I do hate disappointing the audiences. One lady came up to me afterwards here [NY], very complimentary, and then she said 'Well, this is terribly heavy.' And I thought 'Oh dear, you think this is heavy? Because it isn't, it's just serious.'"

Gameplay depth, which requires concentration and planning and some attention to detail, tends to be "terribly heavy" entertainment these days.

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"Copy-cat" games--direct, blatant clones--are a big problem in the video game industry, especially the small games popular on Apple iOS.  For example see http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2012-02-06-apple-removes-cloned-games-from-app-store .  Long ago, Diplomacy was cloned in Brazil (with the addition of a supply center somewhere in the south, I think).  I recall seeing an ad a couple years ago for a game called something like "Tetris the Strategy Game" that was clearly a blatant copy of Blokus, but I don't follow publishing closely enough to hear of other examples of cloning.  Is cloning becoming a problem on the tabletop?

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5th edition D&D is supposed to unify the editions so that players can customize the game to suit their tastes, whatever edition they prefer.  But I notice that to comment on Monte Cook's discussions, you must be a subscriber to D&D Insider, so people who aren't 4e fans (Insider subscriptions are for 4e players) are excluded.

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"Multiplayer solitaire" is usually a case of a puzzle that's been turned into a contest.  A contest is any activity that can be timed or assigned points, or measured in some other way (as in how far a coin falls from a wall or how far one can throw a baseball).  If two or more people try to beat one another's performance in this, and have no way to hinder or help other participants, then you have a contest.  Another example, type for five minutes and whoever types the most words wins the contest.

Races are much like contests, but include some method (if only blocking) to hinder an opponent.

Contests, in and of themselves, are not games.  There is no design involved.  Games and puzzles require design.

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For generals and admirals, war is a lot of risk-taking in the face of high uncertainty.  There's sometimes a strong element of "yomi", reading the intentions of the other side and taking advantage of that.  Chess, in contrast, is full of certainty, with nothing hidden other than the intentions of the other player.

This is one of the big problems with wargames: if they truly reflect conditions in war, they're games with a lot of chance and yomi, and that's not what some game players want.  I was attracted to Stalingrad and Afrika Korps, 50 years ago, because I was able to have some control over what went on, it was something like war but also something like chess.  It was "strategic".  But it wasn't anything like a real war.  (Of course, you can say NO boardgame is going to be anything like a real war . . .)

As Patrick Carroll says, "Chess players have the advantage of lots of 'live practice.' Generals don't. There just aren't enough wars. Of course, this relates to the issue of friction, that study does not equal reality. "

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Someone tweeted "sometimes I feel like @lewpuls just doesn't like euro games, and he tries to justify this by denigrating them."
Say what?  Obviously I don't care for them as a category.  No, I don't have many good things to say about them.  Yet I certainly have no need to "justify" my dislike, any more than I need to justify dislike of coconut or extremely horrific movies or regular-season baseball.  Did the poster assume that Euros are "good" and anyone who dislikes them has to justify being "ungoodthinkful", as Orwell would say?

The odd thing is that some people (not necessarily this tweeter) take it personally.  If you like the kinds of games you like, what the hell do you care what someone else says?  I don't frenetically blast away as Michael Barnes used to (eloquent as he could be), I try to explain.  But not over and over when someone is convinced that I'd like the games if I just really understood them.  I do understand them, and  I don't like them, *as a category*.  They do not supply what I am looking for in games, in fact for me many of them are much closer to puzzle-contests than to games.  I don't much like puzzles.

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I received a PDF of McFarland's spring 2012 catalog listing my book "Game Design: How to Create Video and Tabletop Games, Start to Finish".  I'm guessing it will be out in spring or summer; at this point I have not received galleys nor have I made the index.  Web site at http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/book-2.php?id=978-0-7864-6952-9 .

Why would you read a book? When I was a kid in the 50s and 60s, as for generations before, a book was a treasure trove of information, something to be read carefully and absorbed as much as possible.  While the book is no longer the absolute treasure trove, it still organizes information in an easily digestible form.  But more important, a book can convey the experience of the author to the reader, and if that experience is valuable then this is something the reader won't get anywhere else. A major purpose for me in writing the book is to help beginning game designers avoid the "school of hard knocks" that I had to go through, applying my experience in teaching novice game designers as well.

Nowadays people are much less impressed by books because there are so many other sources of information, but if you really want to learn about something in depth a good book is probably the best way to do it other than having an experienced person teach you directly.

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The Web and computing in general have brought about a mindset that "digital should be free".  Fortunately tabletop gaming is relatively immune to this, because a tabletop game is a very tangible product.  But what will happen in the long run with video games, especially now that so many are free-to-play?  Will the "digital should be free" mindset ultimately drive many of the AAA video game makers out of the AAA business because they won't be able to successfully charge $60 or so for a game?  If it does happen, that won't necessarily be a Good Thing, but market forces often cause Bad Things to happen.

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I was the guest on the Ludology podcast #26 about epic tabletop games (not about the video game company).  It was posted Feb 19 (find it on BGG or search for "Ludology podcast site").  Ludology is the only podcast I listen to, because it's about "the why of games", not about new games or community chit-chat or fanboyism.

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 I am gradually extracting my old articles from various game magazines to compile three novel-sized books.  Often because of poor scanning or weak OCR I have to make quite a few corrections so I'm reading some of it as I go along.  It's always interesting to read something that you wrote as much as three decades before, though I'm glad to say that I usually agree with myself.  :-)  Most of what I'm working on is RPG material and I see that much has stayed the same over three decades.

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I need to find a 50-60 year old dictionary and look at the definition of "trial and error".  To me it means guessing at a solution, trying it, and then if it doesn't work, guessing at another and trying--until you get lucky and guess right.  But dictionary definitions now are broad enough that the scientific method, which is quite different from guessing, could be called trial and error.  Someone suggested the substitute phrase "guess and check", so that's what I'll try to use from now on.  "T&E" appears to be yet another phrase whose meaning has changed significantly over time.

The Fundamental Differences between Board and Card Games and How Video Games Tend to Combine Both Functions

What are the fundamental functional differences between boardgames and card games?  I’m not sure how important this question is from a game player’s point of view but it’s certainly important for game designers (even for video game designers).  The obvious physical format is important, but now that we can convert physical non-electronic games to electronic formats the lines are less clear.  More importantly, each type of game emphasizes or encourages different kinds of challenges and gameplay, regardless of the physical format.

It’s also possible to take a game that originated in one format and make something like it in the other format.  I have done this with a dungeon delving game and even made a prototype version of Britannia using cards.  I believe this happens a fair bit in the Eurostyle games.  For example, San Juan is a card game based on Puerto Rico, and so is Race for the Galaxy.  But as we’ll see many Eurostyle boardgames do not use a board in the traditional way, for maneuver and location, instead they use the board to keep track of other information.  So what is the traditional way?

The most important difference between the two kinds of games is that card games are inherently games of hidden information and boardgames are inherently games of maneuver and location.   (When I say location I mean the location of actual pieces, not a representation of some virtual commodity such as the amount of money you have or the amount of victory points.  “Location” implies maneuver or placement.)

Card Games
By their nature cards make it easy to hide information.  The information is often hidden from all the players, but commonly in card games one player has some information that none of the other players can access: the cards in his hand and what they can be used for and what they can do.  Anyone who has played many card games has encountered this usage again and again.

There are exceptions.  The traditional card game Bridge is unusual insofar as, after bidding, one player’s cards are revealed (the dummy).  And this tells the Dummy’s partner what cards his opponents have, though not which individual opponent has which cards.  Texas Hold ‘em is another card game where some of the information is revealed to everyone and only two cards per player are hidden from the other players.  But Five Card Draw poker hides all the cards, sometimes even after the game ends.

Hobby card games such as Bang!, Atlantic Storm, Brawling Battleships, and Lost Cities have hands of cards but some cards are placed on the table so that they can affect everyone in the game.

Boardgames
Most really old traditional board games are games location and maneuver-mancala, chess, checkers, Nine Men’s Morris, Parcheesi, backgammon, Go, and Japanese/Chinese forms of chess.  In some of these games there is only placement (and removal) of pieces, for example in Go.  In others the initial placement is predetermined and the game is all about maneuver, as in chess or checkers.  There are few games that include both placement and maneuver.

Notice that few of these old games use dice.  Dice provide uncertainty within a range of possibilities, a kind of hidden information but not the same kind as we get with cards.  Dice were the typical way to provide uncertainty before games could include cards.  Handmade playing cards first entered Europe in the late 14th century. The technology to make uniform decks of cards did not exist until the invention of printing, so the really old traditional games do not use cards.

Card games are probably more popular than boardgames for a variety of reasons.  First they’re less expensive, second they tend to take less time to play, third they can be more colorful than boardgames because of the artwork on each card.  Most important perhaps, the hidden information tends to make it harder for a planner-style player to dominate play, introducing elements of uncertainty and chance that make it possible for a less calculating player, or perhaps I should say one who is less a classical/planner player, to win a minority of the time.  Another way to put this is that casual players have a better chance of winning in hidden information games than in games of perfect information, most traditional boardgames being perfect information games.

Hybrids
It is possible to use cards to create the equivalent of a board, but then we have something that is functionally a boardgame not a card game.  I have done this in two prototypes were my objective was to make a game with only cards as components (to simplify production), yet I wanted to have maneuver and location.  Many games that now use cardboard tiles to create a board on the table would once have used cards for the same purpose.  While we might think of these as boardgames, such as Settlers of Catan and Betrayal at House on the Hill, they could have been produced with cards, and in the latter game the tiles are used to hide information in the same way that cards hide information before they are drawn from a deck.  Tikal and Carcassonne do the same kind of thing.  Settlers uses the board for placement, Betrayal uses it for maneuver, Carcassonne uses the “board” as the unit of placement rather than placing pieces on a board.

In a boardgame location and maneuver tend to dominate play.  Chess, checkers, backgammon, even Parcheesi, are games of maneuver.  Hex and counter wargames are typically games of maneuver, though we also have combat and chance elements in dice rolling.  Monopoly is not a game of maneuver because you have no control over where you go, but there is the element of location.  In Tic-Tac-Toe (Noughts and Crosses) you don’t actually move pieces once you put them on the board but where you put them is vitally important.

Race games (getting to a finish line before anyone else) are generally about maneuver and location, whereas speed contests (something is timed individually and best time wins) are not.

You can introduce an element of hidden information into boardgames, of course.  This is not new. More than a century ago we had a variation of chess called Kriegspiel where each player could only see his own pieces and a referee told a player when an opposing piece took his piece or checked his King.  While the phrase “block games” tends to put one in mind of the wargames published by Columbia Games, the technique goes back at least to the game L’Attaque patented in 1909, more familiar in the copycat game Stratego.  The Columbia games add dice and more complex boards to the equation but the key element is hiding some of the information that normally is exposed everyone in a boardgame. 

Flat (cardboard/chipboard) pieces that are placed face down introduce another element of hidden information.

In contrast to typical boardgames, many Eurostyle games include boards that are not used for maneuver or even for location.  The board is used to help keep track of other kinds of information.  Player layouts for tracking amounts of virtual commodities are small boards.  But even in games with larger boards, the board may not represent location or present opportunities for maneuver.  Kingsburg is an example. 

Actual warfare is a combination of hidden information and maneuver, among other things.  Given the prominence of maneuver in warfare, it’s not surprising that board wargames are much more common than card wargames.

Games that are neither type
There are many games that are not primarily either hidden information games or location and maneuver games. Some Euro games that have lots of parts and cards and boards are primarily games of resource management– Puerto Rico for example.  There is neither maneuver nor much hidden information, though there is uncertainty.  Resource management depends on hidden information and uncertainty.  Uncertainty can come from many places, but mainly comes from the players, hidden information, or dice or other random elements (which cards can also provide).

Auction games aren’t really either type, though they lean toward hidden information more than location and maneuver.  You can argue that resource management comes down to set collection, just as auction games do.

Further afield we have games of deduction (which is largely about hidden information, though Clue/Cluedo includes location and maneuver as well).  It might be nice if we could pigeonhole all games into a very few slots like “hidden information”, “resource management”, “location and maneuver”, and “auctions”.  But I don’t think this is practical, at any rate I see too many exceptions to almost any set of categories at this point.

Collectible card games are largely about hidden information, though some have an element of location (cards face up on the table) just as some traditional card games do.

Tabletop RPGs involve both maneuver and hidden information in abundance.  They are closer to video games than to either board or cardgames.

Competition in board and card games
It's fashionable in the hobby tabletop game industry to produce "Eurostyle" games that reduce direct conflict between players to a minimum.  They are often more like puzzles that have been turned into speed contests, not games, and "multi-player solitaire" is a common description of many tabletop games.  Wargames, on the other hand, emphasize competition and confrontation, of course.

Mark Johnson suggested in a recent "Ludology" podcast that card games are less competitive than boardgames.  Is that so, and why?  I think it is.  Because boardgames are naturally about maneuver and location, they tend to involve more direct interaction than cards, where you can play cards onto the table and do very little to affect other players.  Traditional boardgames tend to involve tearing down the opposition, not building up, you start with some pieces and lose them as the game goes along.  (Even in Go, where you add pieces to the board, you're taking your opponent's pieces as well.  Go is not much like other traditional boardgames, in any case.)   Traditional card games usually involve building up sets or tricks.  You start with nothing but a hand of cards and gradually build up your position.

In more-than-two-sided boardgames the system of maneuver and location often means that you are not able to attack/hinder all the opponents, because some are too far away.  In more-than-two-sided card games you do have a player on your right and on your left, and the rules may allow you to attack only those players, or "anyone".

Video Games
We can ask what the nature of video games is in comparison to card and boardgames.  First, it’s relatively easy to make a computer game where most of the information is hidden from the player or players, a card game characteristic.  When you program a video game you have to deliberately decide to show information to the player, or he’ll know nothing.

That information can be shown on the equivalent of a board, though the board can be rather more complex than a physical board.  Pac-Man is a quintessential game of maneuver, as is Space Invaders.  Civilization uses a board, a square grid through Civilization IV and a hex grid in Civilization V (version V generally exhibits a greater influence from board wargames).

Many “strategy” video games appear to be games of maneuver, for example Starcraft and Civilization. Hidden information is also quite dominant.  But there are so many layers of production and technology involved that these games are more about resource management than either maneuver or hidden information.  When cut down to a simple version as a social network game, Civilization becomes almost entirely a resource management game.

A video platformer is a game of maneuver.  An old-style text adventure game is a game of hidden information.  Yes there is more to both, especially to the old-style adventures, but these are the major delineations.

The abstract game Tetris is a game of maneuver much more than a game of hidden information.  Bejeweled is a game of location and maneuver insofar as you move gems in order to cause groups of gems to disappear.  Shooters are games of location and maneuver as well as games of hidden information. 

What video games are particularly good at is combining the two major elements of board and card games together as in shooters and real-time or turn-based strategy games.

Some distinctions between types of war-related games

One of the disadvantages of writing articles for magazines, such as “Against the Odds,” is that it can be literally years from the time it is submitted to the time it is published.  I recently sent ATO an article about different kinds of war related games, and I’m going to briefly categorize its 4,000 words in 400. 

I will not respond to any comments here, sooner or later the full article will be published.

Joe Angiolillo’s taxonomy of war related games:
●    Games about war
●    Wargames
●    Simulations

Games about war
●    no connection with reality
●    symmetric
●    no variation in terrain and units
●    no representation of actual or even fictional events
●    no attempt to tell a story
Games such as Conflict, Risk and Chess fall into this category.

Wargames
●    asymmetric
●    variation in terrain and units
●    real or fictional event is depicted
●    there is an explicit story involved (remember "story" is part of hisSTORY)

Simulations
●    wargames taken to an extreme
●    term papers with board and pieces and no concern for play balance
●    more or less forces particular outcomes in order to match history


Now a different distinction, between war game (two words) and battle game:

War game
●    the heart is economy
●    ultimate objective is to improve your economic capacity and destroy the enemy's
●    for two players, occasionally for more than two
●    cover years or even centuries
●    territory usually equates to additional forces, following the age-old principle that land equals wealth
●    more likely to use areas (like a normal map)
●    generally large-scale and strategic

Battle game
●    no economy, instead an order of appearance
●    ultimate objective is to destroy opposing units because they cannot get more
●    intermediate objective (e.g. territorial, or even “capture the king”) as a victory avoids much of the tedium of destroying units
●    almost always for two players
●    usually cover a few days to a year or so
●    territory is only useful for the terrain and geopolitical implications
●    usually maneuver-focused, and often use a hex or square grid
●    generally smaller scale and tactical/grand tactical

Finally another category:
Conquest games (Risk, History of the World, Vinci/Smallworld)
●    can be either war or battle game, usually war
●    are usually in Joe’s “Games about war” category
●    very few "realistic" or real world restrictions on what you can do--"freedom to do whatever you want"
●    attacker can always get the upper hand (odds favor those who attack-attack-attack), so it’s not strategically wise to play defensively
●    usually symmetrical
●    typically large scale
●    combat typically very simple
●    particularly attractive type of game related to war for those who aren’t hobby gamers

Take it as it is, please, I am not at liberty to discuss it further.

What do we mean by "elegance" in games?

When someone says a game is "elegant", what do they mean?  I'm not sure, so I've done a bit of investigating.

Is it used much?  In my Info Select database, which includes my own notes about game design and teaching, and material that I've scraped off the Internet about those same topics in the past seven years, there are 84 notes containing the word "elegant" and another 34 containing "elegance".  Clearly the term is used a lot in conversations and writing.

What about dictionary definitions of the word?
dictionary.com
el·e·gant   adjective
1. tastefully fine or luxurious in dress, style, design, etc.: elegant furnishings.
2. gracefully refined and dignified, as in tastes, habits, or literary style: an elegant young gentleman; an elegant prosodist.
3. graceful in form or movement: an elegant wave of the hand.  [my emphasis]
4. appropriate to refined taste: a man devoted to elegant pursuits.
5. excellent; fine; superior: an absolutely elegant wine.
Synonyms:  1. See fine. 2.  polished, courtly. [my emphasis]

World English Dictionary
elegant — adj
1.     tasteful in dress, style, or design
2.     dignified and graceful in appearance, behaviour, etc
3.     cleverly simple; ingenious: an elegant solution to a problem [my emphasis]

Wikipedia
Elegance is a synonym for beauty that has come to acquire the additional connotations of unusual effectiveness and simplicity. It is frequently used as a standard of tastefulness particularly in the areas of visual design, decoration, the sciences, and the esthetics of mathematics. Elegant things exhibit refined grace and dignified propriety. [my emphasis]


So could we say, for games:  "A solution to a design problem that is seen as ingenious or cleverly simple, polished, and effective?"


At some point I wondered what the difference is between "elegant" and "clever"?  For me, something can be clever without being worth doing; something that is elegant is likely worth doing.  So I might see a game and say "that's a clever juxtaposition of mechanics", and still not think the game was worth bothering with.   I would tend to think of games that model something in interesting or intriguing ways as elegant, whereas games that don't model something may only be clever.

So one man's clever may be another man's elegant.
clev·er
adjective, -er, -est.
1. mentally bright; having sharp or quick intelligence; able.
2. superficially skillful, witty, or original in character or construction; facile: It was an amusing, clever play, but of no lasting value.
3. showing inventiveness or originality; ingenious: His clever device was the first to solve the problem.
4. adroit with the hands or body; dexterous or nimble.
Synonyms
ingenious, talented, quick-witted; smart, gifted; apt, expert.

There is no Wikipedia entry for the word "clever".


A last expression of the idea of elegance, from the point of view of 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-Exup'ery
When you achieve this "perfection", you also achieve elegance.



So what do you mean when (if) you describe a game, or part of a game, as "elegant"?

Impressions of Castle Ravenloft (Avalon Hill/Hasbro)

Recently I came across a new cooperative game related to Fourth edition (4e) Dungeons & Dragons, Castle Ravenloft.  The game lets each player act as a novice 4e character, complete with hit points, armor class, and at-will, utility, and daily powers.  There are replayable scenarios for 1 to 5 players, with the opposition governed by simple rules related by cards drawn from specific decks.

For $50 the contents of the box are quite impressive.  There are several dozen unpainted plastic miniatures in various colors representing the five player characters, undead, typical dungeon denizens, a flesh golem, and the huge dracolich.  There is a large stack of roughly 4 x 4" heavy cardboard interlocking dungeon tiles.  There are several decks of cards.  And there are lots of other heavy cardboard pieces such as hit point markers and character cards.

Gameplay in Castle Ravenloft is very tactical and decisions offer only a few choices.  To a considerable extent you can say the same thing about 4e D&D, though the intelligent opposition from a referee ought to make a huge difference.  When the opposition amounts to what the monster(s) do when you draw cards the simplicity is not surprising.  The number of hit points for each character is much lower than in actual 4e D&D (e.g. 6 for the wizard), and each hit point is represented by a cardboard marker.  You can customize your character though your choice of powers.  There are five different classes, but no way for a group to have two of the same class.  You can even gain second level, though this is unusual.

When you fight a monster it generally inflicts two hits when it succeeds and one hit when it misses.  Everyone on a tile fights all the monsters, and all take damage, so there isn’t maneuver doesn’t amount to much, other than which tile you’re in.  If you move to the edge of the “board” you draw a tile and one kind of card to see what you encounter; if you are anywhere else (probably fighting a monster) you draw a different kind of card.  Adult players can be frustrated because some of the cards simply inflict damage on everyone, regardless of location.  This moves the game toward a conclusion, but does not seem “fair” or real.

The party has two healing surges, plus some of the characters have healing powers. The game ends when one of the characters in the party dies and there is no healing to bring them back into the game, or when the objective (such as unmaking the Draclich) is achieved.

A five player scenario takes more than an hour.

Cooperative games without human opposition have become quite popular.  I’m sure there are many reasons for this, but one is that such games are essentially puzzles, and they rarely have much gameplay depth to them (as is often the case with puzzles), so players don’t have to concentrate/think hard, even if they’re playing solo.  And of course when they’re playing with several other players then the truism “two heads are better than one” means they have to think even less.

I suspect this game is aimed at non-adults, though I saw it at a college game club.  It looks great but there really isn’t much to it.  Like many games nowadays it offers variety but not depth.  Compared to real D&D there’s little if anything to recommend it, other than no need for a referee/DM.  Those who have never played a fantasy RPG may well find it much more interesting than those who have.

It’s a cooperative game.  It’s good-looking, and clever for what it is.   But what it is, is a game for 10-15 year olds, or for adult game players who want to play a youth-like game, for adults more a time-waster than a mental exercise.

Six words about stories in games

    According to a recent tweetdeck, one of the trending:worldwide topics on twitter was 6 word stories.  In the past few months I've asked people to say 6 words about game design, programming, wargames, and casual games.

    This time the charge is this: say six words about stories in games (or stories and games, if you prefer).

Depth versus Variety: a Fundamental Change in Game Playing in the Past 30-40 Years

Recently I was discussing via blog posts what depth is in games (http://gamasutra.com/blogs/LewisPulsipher/20111219/9125/What_is_Depth_in_Games.php and elsewhere), and then ran across a discussion of how role-playing games have changed since D&D was first published
(http://shirosrpg.blogspot.com/2011/12/i-weep-for-newbs.html#comment-form ).  I’ve realized that there is a connection between the two, that what gamers are looking for in games has changed in a fundamental way in the past 30-40 years.

That fundamental change is that 30-40 years ago many hobby game players looked for gameplay depth (and occasionally narrative depth) in their games.  Now most game players don’t look for gameplay depth but look instead for variety, which is quite a different thing.  Many more people now also look for narrative in their games, but I’m not sure whether they’re looking for narrative depth or narrative variety.  Game playing has become much more passive where long-term decision-making is concerned, and that's incompatible with gameplay depth.  Yes, there's lots of activity in many kinds of video games, and short-term decision making, but the decisions and choices often don't really matter in the long run.

Variety tends to lead to replayability, but game depth also leads to replayability.  So they are two paths to the same objective, getting people to play the game over and over again.

Is variety "bad?"  Certainly not.  Is gameplay depth "good?"  Not in and of itself, though it's what I have tended to look for in over 50 years of game playing.  Regardless of my preference, this discussion is a recognition of reality, what IS, not a criticism of the change.

(At this point I hope it's obvious that I'm talking about trends and tendencies, about majorities, not about every hobby game player.  Of course there are many, many exceptions in a group as large as ours.)

I’m talking here about hobby gamers, about people who play games frequently as a hobby.  Family gamers are a very different group, and have never been people who looked for depth in a game.  Nor did they look for variety, 30-40 years ago, their purpose in playing games was and is to socialize with their families and friends.

What do I mean by depth and variety?  I’m working on a very long piece discussing gameplay depth and other kinds of depth in games.  For our purposes here I'll say that deep gameplay requires players to make many significant decisions, decisions that make a difference in the outcome of the game, and those decisions have multiple viable choices so the player can pick a better choice rather than a worse one, but more than one choice has a good chance to be successful.  (A "viable" choice is one that, at least a reasonable part of the time, can lead to success, as opposed to "plausible" but not viable choices that look like they might work out well but rarely if ever will.)  There is often an element of emergence in such games, choices (and sometimes decisions) that players don’t even recognize when they first play the game.  This is often associated with decision trees, decisions that lead to others that lead to others and so on in a sort of tree shape, that give a good chance of success in the game.  Yet perhaps paradoxically, if a game has *too many* decisions and *too many viable choices*, then it loses depth as each individual decision and choice becomes insignificant to the outcome of the whole.

Variety, on the other hand, is doing lots more of the same kinds of actions and related activity without providing additional significant decisions and viable choices.  Variety occasionally replace one decision with a different one, or more often replaces a choice or choices with different ones, but the volume of significant decisions and viable choices, and the depth of the decision trees, remains the same.  Variety can be added by additional scenarios or levels, variable maps, different character classes, and random events (among others).

How things have changed
So much for brief definition.  How (and why) have things changed?  40 years ago we didn’t have video games, nor did we have CCGs, we had board and card games and we had RPGs just about to emerge.  The development of RPGs reflects the 30-40 year fundamental change.  Many of the players of original, first, and second edition D&D wanted gameplay depth.  In third edition D&D the emphasis changed to ways of optimizing characters using a stupendous variety of published classes and skills and feats, a striving to make the perfect one man army for tactical combat.  D&D became fantasy Squad Leader.  It was much harder to die and in fact the “fear of death” was slowly being removed from the game.

In computer RPGs this was happening much more strongly.  If you died then at worst you just loaded your saved game and continued.  In many computer MMO (massively multiplayer online) RPGs you don’t even need to save your game, you just respawn and continue.  After all, the makers of the MMOs do not have gameplay depth as an objective, their objective is to keep you playing the game as long as possible so that they can collect the monthly fees.  (Now monthly fees are much less common because we’ve gone to free to play games, but the objective is still to have people play as long as possible so that they will spend money on virtual goods and other advantages.)   In order to retain players, many online video games reward players constantly rather than make them responsible for earning their advancement and advantages.  If there’s no responsibility for earning advancement, decisions become much less significant, and choices matter much less.  Social networking games have taken this to the extreme.  Engagement has replaced gameplay.  (See http://whatgamesare.com/2011/04/how-engagement-killed-gameplay-language.html for more.)

Not only responsibility for your actions but the fear of death has been removed from electronic RPGs, and with it most of the gameplay depth has been removed.  If it doesn’t really matter whether you die, if you can try again when you fail, then your decisions no longer make a difference to what happens in the long run, so they are no longer significant in the gameplay depth sense.  World of Warcraft is a game with so little gameplay depth to it that professional “pharmers” can, in an economically feasible period of time, play characters up to high levels and sell them to other people who don’t want to *bother* to play the game to get to the maximum level.  “The grind” characterizes play, and for many people playing the game is “like work.” (See http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/ .) I’ve said that variety has been substituted for depth in games but in WoW there doesn’t seem to be much interest from the players in variety until after you’ve reached maximum level.  As characters work their way up there's little interest in the journey, only in the destination of maximum level.  For those at max level, variety is essential to maintain interest in the game.

Even at maximum level, big raids amount to characters doing the same thing, their “role” (DPS, healer, etc.), for extended periods of time.  By all accounts it’s regimented and  repetitively automatic, and does not involve making significant decisions with multiple viable choices.

In some video games we have the phenomenon of “mini-games”, completely different games that have been inserted into the main game for players to play when they get bored of the main game.  Again it’s variety that is the attraction, not depth.

The recent fourth edition (4e) of D&D reflects this change of emphasis.  Some responsibility is still there, but the fear of death has been almost entirely removed through lots of beginning hit points, healing surges, easy ways to come back into the action when you’ve been incapacitated, cheap healing potions, and so forth.  Characters no longer have much capability to gather strategic (or tactical) information through spells.  In the past D&D players had to speak in character to gather information, or figure out how to use spells to gather information: now they roll dice.  Some of this may derive from video games where the referee–the computer–is nowhere close to smart enough to deal with a wide variety of dialogue and a wide variety of player intentions, so everything is reduced to dialog trees and numbers and dice rolls.  4e is now, in its "natural" form, almost entirely tactical battles without much long-range planning and consequently with very little strategy. 

The blog commenters I mentioned above talked about players complaining about secret doors in 4e D&D.  This appeared to be regarded as a “nasty DM trick”.  As a counter-comment a 4e DM said he didn’t use secret doors because he knew where he wanted his players to go and what he wanted them to do and there was no point in hiding the path.  In other words, in a game where variety and linear narrative is the objective then secret doors only get in the way.  In a game where gameplay depth is the objective then secret doors can be a differentiator, and the choice to look for secret doors or not look for them can be significant.

RPGs are now arranged much more for players to experience variety, rewards, and winning rather than to experience gameplay depth and the possibility of losing.  They are becoming more entertainments (something like movies) than games, if by games we mean something where there’s a significant opposition that requires thoughtful reaction.

I also think it’s much more common in RPGs nowadays that the referee devises a story and makes the players conform to that story.  As Monte Cook observed several years ago at Origins, the published tabletop adventures tend to be much more story-based than in the past.  The old-style alternative was to set up a situation and let the players make a story rather than forcing them to follow a linear path.  In video RPGs, the Japanese/console style has been to force the players to follow along a particular linear story.  (The American/PC style is more like WoW.)  In fact some people have characterized the famous Final Fantasy series as stories punctuated with repetitive episodes of exploration and combat that make virtually no difference to what actually happens in the stories.

Favorite Games
30-40 years ago most game players had one or a few favorite games, ones that they wanted to play over and over again.  This is far less common now.  Ask younger gamers, especially video gamers, what their favorite game is and most will be unable to tell you or will simply name the game they’re currently playing.  Some are even surprised at the idea of having a favorite game.  They want to name a dozen or more as their favorites, if they can narrow it down that far.  The very idea of playing a game a hundred times or 500 times (I know people who have played my 4 to 5 hour tabletop game Britannia more than 500 times), or the video game equivalent, playing the same game for many hundreds of hours, is foreign to most contemporary gamers.  Many of the younger people who do have a favorite game that they play over and over have settled on Magic:the Gathering or Yu-Gi-Oh.  Yet the very nature of CCGs is to change the game over time (providing immense variety) in order to persuade players to buy new cards; sometimes the game rules are changed as well.

Many AAA video games involve a puzzle or a story, and once you solve the puzzle or experience the story there is no reason to continue.  Some of the games will give you several different characters to play so that variety is added to the game.  But there is little gameplay depth.  A game with deep gameplay can be played again and again while revealing new aspects and possibilities.  Puzzles tend to be solved, and once solved hold little interest.

This fundamental change may reflect all forms of leisure activity these days.  There are many more distractions and many more opportunities for entertainment than 30-40 years ago.  Now we have the World Wide Web, we have hundreds of TV networks, we have movies and TV programs on recordable media and available through instant download, we have smart phones and texting and free long distance and iPads and MP3 players and so forth, none of which was available 30 or 40 years ago.  People just don’t seem to stick to one thing the way they used to and that applies to games as well as everything else. 

Playing a game with deep gameplay usually requires patience and a commitment to planning.  These characteristics are in short supply nowadays as people rely on their cell phones to provide both distractions (time killing) and a way to compensate for poor planning or lack of interest in planning.

We have become “entertainment bathers.”  Sound/music bathers like to have 1000 or 10,000 songs on their MP3 players but likely don’t listen to any one of the songs very much.  (Clearly of an older generation, I can listen to the same song over and over for an hour sometimes, if it’s a really good song; how many young people would even dream of doing that?)  Game bathers like to have lots and lots of games to play but don’t play any one of them very much.  Variety is the goal.  We've become a jaded society. 


This is not the only fundamental change over that period.  Even among many who want to fully use their brains when playing games, puzzle-solving (which rarely involves gameplay depth, it is a different kind of skill) has displaced gameplay depth.  And in the video game world, engagement has tended to replace gameplay as the objective of designers.  But those are topics for another time.

Game descriptions, rules, and mechanics: what are the differences and similarities?

Recently a student in a video game design curriculum posted a note on the IGDA Game Design SIG about an assignment.  The assignment was to describe mechanics for a game and he said his instructor had told him he’d written rules instead, with the result being a poor grade.  I generally emphasize to students that the rules for a tabletop game detail the mechanics of the game, so the question became “what is the difference between rules and mechanics.”  And as I discussed this privately with the student I saw that part of the possible confusion was the difference between description and specification, between the general and the specific.

From a teaching point of view the problem is that students often describe what they would like a game to do– a wish list--but not how the game is going to do it.  (Which is usually because they really don’t have a clue how it’s going to do it.)  If you’re writing rules or writing a specifications of game mechanics you have to say how the game is going to “do it.”  (See “When you start a game design, conceive a game, not a wish list” http://pulsiphergamedesign.blogspot.com/2011/10/when-you-start-conceive-game-not-wish.html).  A general description is not good enough for tabletop players to play the game, or for game programmers to produce the software.

When you’re conceiving a game you can say that you intend to use such and such mechanic, for example simultaneous movement or combat using a combat table.  But when you write rules or specify mechanics, whether in a video game design document or in actual game rules, you’re going to have to go into much more detail (especially about combat).  Sometimes the name of the mechanic, such as “simultaneous movement,” can say a lot to experienced game players or video game developers, but there are lots of ways to implement simultaneous movement and your game rules or game design document specifying mechanics must be absolutely clear.  That’s hard to do.

When you’re starting a game you begin with what you want the game to do and you need to get to the point of how it’s going to do it.  I think there’s an intermediate stage where you’re considering the structure of the game, and that’s where my nine structural subsystems and the essential questions to ask yourself help you bridge the gap between the what and the how.  (The latest version of each will be in my forthcoming book about game design, and you can find versions on gamecareerguide.com.)  It’s usually hard to simply jump from what you want the game to do directly to the specific mechanisms or even to the categories of mechanisms.

But back to the original question, what is the difference between rules and mechanics?  The rules of a game must include details of mechanics so that someone reading the rules understands exactly how the mechanics work.  If the rules are complete, they MUST describe the mechanics of the game as well.  The mechanics are a subset of the rules.  The principle purpose of the rules is to describe how the mechanics work, but usually include other things as well.

By the way, I have seen people confuse what the player does with the mechanics of the game. Mechanics are what the computer enforces, the player’s actions are his choices that interact with the mechanics to provide a result.   A tabletop game requires the players to enforce the mechanics as specified in the rules.  Player actions to play the game are not mechanics.

But it’s easy to say what a mechanic is NOT.  I haven’t even attempted to get into the morass of exactly what a “mechanic” is.  I once started to make a list of “all” categories of game mechanics.  I quickly discovered as I looked around the Internet to see what other people have done that “mechanics” varies in meaning greatly from one place to another.  As I made my list I found many items “on the edges”.  In other words it is not clear what a mechanic is and what isn’t.   This is compounded by the tendency to use categories instead of specifics when discussing a mechanic.  For example, “simultaneous movement” or “roll and move” are categories of mechanics that can be implemented many ways.  For example, the latter can be “roll two dice and move your piece forward that many places,” or “roll two dice and move your piece forward or backward a number of spaces equal to one die and then the second” or “roll two dice and move your piece forward the distance equal to one of the dice, or the sum of both”, or “roll two dice and move one piece the distance of each die” and so forth.  And those brief phrases (especially the second one--I’m taking shortcuts) may not be sufficiently detailed to be absolutely clear.  All four are of the category “roll and move” but each is different from the others.  Mechanics are specific, categories are general.

Mechanics must be sufficiently explicit, sufficiently specific, that there can be no misunderstanding.  Most take the form of “if situation A exists, player can do (choices),” or, “if player does X, result is Y (with possible multiple possibilities)”, both forms of if:then:else statements.  You don’t have to be a programmer to write rules, but you have to be as explicit in the rules as programmers are in their software.

Despite the uncertainty about exactly what a mechanic is, I’m pretty sure there are some things in game rules that are not mechanics.  For example there’s usually an introduction,  something that gives the player an idea of the context of the game, what in general he’s doing, without referring to any mechanics let alone specifying any.  There is also early in the rules a “how to win” section that lets players know the objective of the game but does not necessarily specify all of the mechanics that determine who wins.  The actual mechanic(s) of winning are usually at the end of the main section of the rules along with mechanic(s) determining how the game ends.  The early sections provide a context for the play of the game, and extend the atmosphere or theme, if any.

A set of rules may also include hints about good play.  Finally, a good set of rules will include examples, which are not mechanics but which illustrate how the mechanics work.  These sections provide a different kind of context but are still included to help people enjoyably play the game.

Once again, however, the main thrust of rules is to describe exactly the mechanics of the game.  You could write a set of rules that only did that but it would seem abrupt to many players and might be difficult for some to grasp.  Something that sets traditional classic games apart from most contemporary games is that they have few mechanics and the rules can include only mechanics and still be understood by most gamers.


I think you could argue that the more a game is marketed to people who are not accustomed to playing games, then the more the rules will include information other than mechanics.  I thought it quite notable, when I first bought a copy of tabletop Settlers of Catan to find out what made it so popular (this is about 2004-5), that there were two differently-explained sets of rules included to try to help non-gamers understand how to play the game.  There was also a table showing the probabilities when rolling two dice, which is an important part of the game.  Those probabilities are not part of the mechanics but are a consequence of the mechanics of rolling two dice.  Yet for players who don’t understand the probabilities this inclusion probably helped.  Once again this is part of the context of playing the game although it’s not part of the story of the game.  But as with the story-context, if you understand the probabilities you’ll enjoy the game more and better understand what’s happening.

So we can in summary say that game rules include specifications of mechanics and a description of the context of the game: “how” and “what/why.”  That context can include the atmosphere or theme as well as other game-related material.

One of the problems of teaching people to design games is that they really don’t understand how complex game mechanics can become, and so they don’t try to set in their minds exactly what mechanics they’re going to use.  After all, most of them are accustomed to video games that enforce the mechanics on the players without effort from the players.  If they’ve played traditional tabletop games that “everybody knows how to play” because they grew up with them, they don’t remember misunderstanding how to play the games.  So they might think it enough to say that a game uses the risk assessment mechanic.  Well, the game player says, “what the heck is the risk assessment mechanic?”  Even if the beginning game designer uses a mechanic name that is more informative such as “simultaneous movement” there are still many more questions to be answered.

The result is that when students write rules they very commonly leave out important considerations.  But heck, even experienced designers leave out important considerations from early drafts of rules, despite all their experience.  So we keep plugging.