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Cooking up Chemistry

July 23rd, 2007 (Visited 3493 times) Tags:

I finally got around to reading Dan Cook’s The Chemistry Of Game Design on Gamasutra. At the rate other folks are going, I won’t have to write “A Grammar of Gameplay.”

The skill chains he describes are, of course, basically the same as the game atoms I’ve been messing with, and very similar to the diagrams that Andrew McLennan & co. have been working on, and to Ben Cousins’ stuff, and so on. I tend to think that the reason we’re all saying roughly the same thing is because, well, this is kinda how it is.

That said, one of the big gaps between my understanding of how this works and how Dan presents it is that the diagrams he presents seem to be largely linear; he uses the word “chains.” I (and Andrew, for that matter) tend to see these as nested.

In my model, the atoms are nested pretty much indefinitely and arbitrarily. In fact, you can have atoms that are presented in parallel to one another, atoms that are presented as chains, and atoms that are components of other atoms.

In Andrew’s case, there’s a bit more rigid a structure, where the analysis of components can be broken into distinct levels of depth. The most useful levels — indeed, the levels that can actually be quantified — are the ones dealing with (metaphorical) territory possession.

At some point, someone needs to do a unification of all these approaches, plus the MDA and Salen/Zimmerman stuff. Now, if I could just find my notes for the next book…

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Clickable Culture wrote on July 26th, 2007 at 7:15 am:

[...] Raph’s Website » Cooking up Chemistry Commentary on Dan Cook’s “Chemistry of Game Design” article. The way Raph sees it, atoms aren’t necessarily linear chains, but nested “pretty much indefinitely and arbitrarily.” Also see work by Andrew McLennan and Ben Cousins. (tags: games design language commentary systems) [...]

links for 2007-07-26 : Metaverse Network wrote on July 26th, 2007 at 4:25 pm:

Raph’s Website » From the Mailbag: Where’s A Grammar of Gameplay? wrote on November 11th, 2008 at 2:18 pm:

[...] http://www.raphkoster.com/2007/07/23/cooking-up-chemistry/ [...]

Amaranthar said on July 24th, 2007 at 7:07 am:

We are still alchemists of our trade, mixing two parts impure story with one part polluted game play with three parts market voodoo.

Wonderful, absolutely fantastic quote. This really strikes me. As a player, I wonder sometimes if the industry isn’t in danger of killing itself, and I wonder if this isn’t similar to whatever happened when roleplaying games appeared to die before the great revival in the last 10 years or so.

Amaranthar said on July 24th, 2007 at 8:02 am:

Frustration through breaks in the skill chain, as in watching the MOB run away after you escape, and regain all it’s health points almost instantly. To me, this is a glaring example.

I always wondered why games don’t give players more game play through jumping, climbing, and other basic activities that players seem to really enjoy. These things are just plain fun. In WoW, you can jump. But the application falls short of where it could be. The chain is broken. It stops at jumping over objects and up cliff sides. Where are the tests of skill?

In the movie “The Golden Child”, Eddie Murphy has to jump from one stone pillar tp to another to get to the other side of the chasm, and once there he has to solve the riddle of the water and fire. Isn’t there some fun game play in something like this? And something I’ve always wanted to have, rooftop chases (or escapes) that depend on successfully not slipping, and jumping from one roof to another.

Instead we have skill chains tightly controlled in level grinds. (Yawn)

Ola Fosheim Grøstad said on July 24th, 2007 at 9:02 am:

Well, Meridian59 had some of that type of gameplay. (Ledges, timing jumps etc.) EQ did better in the marketplace though, so everybody went off and copied that instead… I think M59 was overall a more varied and entertaining design than your typical DIKU, but it lacked a lot of finish and was to hardcore. Finish matters, goes without saying.

Ola Fosheim Grøstad said on July 24th, 2007 at 9:03 am:

(Well, I guess you can say EQ has some of that too.. Duh. Nevermind.)

David Moles said on July 25th, 2007 at 1:49 am:

Well, I for one stopped playing the updated Prince of Persia on XBLA once I realized I wasn’t any better at timing jumps now than back on my C64 when I was twelve. I think that kind of example probably goes a long way toward explaining why Blizzard didn’t make WoW require a lot of twitch skills.

Michael Chui said on July 25th, 2007 at 4:02 am:

Raph, would you terribly mind creating a webpage on this site linking to all the various grammar-type stuff you’ve found? It’d be a pain to slog through your old posts finding them, and not all of them were worth full commentary or whatnot…

It’d be very nice to have a set of links.

Michael Chui said on July 25th, 2007 at 4:09 am:

Also, there were comments on the article:
http://lostgarden.com/2007/07/chemistry-of-game-design.html

Danc said on July 25th, 2007 at 11:24 am:

A directed graph like the ones found in skill chains can easily represent nesting. Nesting, grouping, or encapsulation is usually a visual technique that might make certain complex graphs easier to read. Video effects program (or shader creation tools) do this all the time. However, nesting doesn’t, at least for skill chains, alter the fundamental structure of the graph.

A -> B -> C is the equivalent of A -> D where D = (B -> C).

“Chains” as directed graphs are important because the structure captures the concept that players must learn basic skills before they learn complex skills. You don’t immediately master a combo kill in Mortal combat. First you need to learn how to press the buttons. This dependency has an important effect on burnout.

It is fascinating to see these similar concepts bubbling up to the surface from multiple perspectives. Though my crystal ball is still fuzzy, work of this nature is going to a major impact on how game design is done in the future.

take care
Danc.

Charles Ellis said on July 25th, 2007 at 11:52 am:

It seems like every time a game has these platforming elements, regardless of genre, many people find it to be extremely frustrating. It may be partly due to the manner in which the jumping puzzles are implemented that makes them to harsh, but I think a lot of times our control possibilities are just not good enough.

That said, many MMOs have “emergent” jumping gameplay, but it’s really up to the player to find it. Jumping up a mountain one vertex at a time to find a way underneath Stormwind is quite challenging, but it largely won’t gain you any advantages in game. Likewise for using whatever jumping/hovering options are available to get on top of buildings. In fact, if you actually tried to gain some gameplay advantage from it, you’d probably be labeled a cheater.

As David mentioned, jumping puzzles require physical/twitch skills and do not fit in with the (MMO)RPG skillset, which is focused on character-management skills. If you further add gameplay incentives to those jumping puzzles, it basically becomes a requirement, and many people who lack the skills (or are simply uninterested), will be annoyed that they have to do this to advance, or to reach parity with the best of their peers. Probably the best solution would be to have these puzzles in there with no gameplay incentive (other than bragging rights), and let interested players go through them. The number of people who would experience this gameplay vs. the time it would require to design and test the puzzles is probably not high enough, though.

Raph said on July 25th, 2007 at 12:59 pm:

Dan, I agree that a directed graph can represent nesting, but I think that seeing everything at only the individual skill atom level is misleading. After all, when individual skill atoms are mastered, what starts happening is that higher-level ones get built out of the mastered components. “You mastered jump… now solve jumping onto this particular ledge.” “You solved jumping onto high ledges. No solve crossing this entire canyon.” And this eventually leads to “get across fifty canyons to rescue the princess.”

Each of these differing levels actually has exactly the same components and characteristics as your skill atoms. And in the way I see it, a skill atom decomposes into elements that are also skill atoms — just that the lowest level ones are interface actions like pressing a button.

Danc said on July 26th, 2007 at 9:52 pm:

Ah, I see what you are getting at. In the skill chains, the atoms further down the chains are fed by skills from the previous atoms. This conveys the same info as explicit nesting. I suspect this is just a very subtle difference in emphasis since we seem to be talking about similar concepts…just shown in slightly different ways.

A directed graph ends up being a bit more flexible when a single atom feeds into multiple other higher level atoms. For example, jump might be used in both “crossing the canyon” and in “climbing the cloud tower” This seems to be a rather common structure.

Strict nesting where a higher level atom contains all its component skills can get quite messy with many duplicated atoms if you show the contents all the time. The opposite problem is that if you don’t show the contents, it becomes harder to visualize the relationships and the ‘flow’ of mastery along the entire chain.

So much of this is ‘just’ visual information design. The bigger question ends up being “What is it important to show explicitly?”

Raph said on July 26th, 2007 at 11:16 pm:

Yes, it’s definitely a question of info design. So in the skill chains, it proceeds from simple tasks and into complexity, because you are following the process from the mastery point of view. I tend to think of it organizationally, I suppose, where you start graphing the game at the highest level, largest challenges, and decompose down until you reach the trivial challenges.

Cooking up Chemistry

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