game design

  • Am I a game neoconservative?

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 21 Comments

    I love arguing with Ian Bogost in public. 🙂

    Every now and then someone objects to game design methods by arguing against “historical aberrance.” This line of reasoning claims that a particular trend is undesirable on the grounds that it is new and abnormal, unshared by historical precedent.

    First, a few years ago Raph Koster invoked this argument about single player games. As Koster put it, “the entire video game industry’s history thus far has been an aberration. It has been a mutant monster only made possible by unconnected computers. … Historically speaking, single-player games are indeed an aberration.”

    …following Koster’s retort, we could fault Heavy Rain for replacing human storytellers and listeners — who are good at making rapid judgments and improvisations based on different actions and their possible outcomes — and replacing them with a much coarser narrative simulation system that operates only according to the limited interpretations possible by a computer.

    …Video games aren’t science. They are not a mystery of the universe that can be explained away via testable predictions and experimentation. We need to stop looking for answers

    — Gamasutra – Features – Persuasive Games: From Aberrance to Aesthetics.

     

    Oddly, I am a fan of both Heavy Rain and Sleep is Death. The context of my original remark was at a business conference, not a design conference, and was aimed much more at shaking up preconceptions about the game industry than anything else.

    I do believe firmly that single-player is fighting the tide, in that it works against some fundamental characteristics of the *real* canvas on which we work, which is the human brain. And I say this as a huge fan of single-player games. I think it is inevitable that single-player gaming drifts towards two poles: the interactive narrative and the puzzle, precisely because of this canvas. I also think it is inevitable that they will come to be wrapped, at all times, with multiplayer and social components — and I suspect that in the years since my original statement, this has gotten a lot less controversial than it once was!

    That said, I will disagree with this statement: “Video games aren’t science. They are not a mystery of the universe that can be explained away via testable predictions and experimentation.”

    I think they are, and this doesn’t preclude them also being an art. I think they are a mystery of the human brain that can be explained with greater knowledge of ourselves, and can have hypotheses proven or disproven by testable predictions and experimentation.

    What’s more, I think that said predicting-and-hypothesizing is happening today at a very rapid pace, and that we are in fact learning more and more every day about an emerging science of game design.

    The artists among us — a group in which I count myself! — can be and rightly should be troubled by this, because it evokes the spectre of a time when the market comes to be dominated by mathematically derived pablum designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator hindbrain triggers in our psychology, much like film (link, or see the orange-and-blue phenomenon) or music (see the soundwave analysis firms that predict hit-worthiness of music algorithmically) or graphic design or or or.

    See, I am not advocating these positions. I am observing things, and arriving at conclusions. In fact, when I have engaged in advocacy, it has been to argue the case of art, for aesthetics, for broader influences and diversity — in fact, this exact topic is one I wrote about five years ago in a post called “The Algorithm or Art?” When I said at Project Horseshoe a few years ago that “I think games are math, and it worries me,” I really mean it.

    I don’t think that greater understanding of color theory, golden sections, and perspective necessarily preclude there being art in the process of making paintings, though. It may well be that by taking up a given medium, though, we are choosing our shackles, choosing which constraints we limit ourselves with. Game grammar, theory of fun, social mechanics, etc, are just my attempt to explicate to myself, what the building blocks of this medium are.

    That means I can enthusiastically sign on for Ian’s call “Let’s make games. Let’s make good ones. Let’s try to figure out what that means for each of us. Let’s help our colleagues and our players and our critics understand it.” But it also means that I disagree with Clive Bell, whom he cites at the end of the article, inasmuch as I do regard the tensile strength of clay as a essential and yes, exhaustible quality of the art made with said clay. My goal would be to turn that to strength rather than weakness.

  • 10 Game Design Lessons for Games-as-Service, my CC2011 talk

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 11 Comments

    Title slideThis was my talk delivered yesterday at Casual Connect Seattle — somewhat shorter than my usual, as it was a 25 minute slot. The topic was designing for games-as-a-service; a lot of folks are migrating from casual games into social games right now, and need to know more about what the design best practices are.

    I ended up reaching back to the Laws of Online World Design and many other older materials both mine and of others, on the grounds that it was likely to be new and perhaps educational for many who have been doing fire-and-forget software in the casual space.

    I am fairly sure that the conference will be posting video of the presentation — they normally do — so keep an eye out for that. In the meantime, here’s the deck in a few formats:

    I did try uploading it to Slideshare, but boy, did it mess up the fonts. I take a lot of care with the graphic design of my decks, and it was just too ugly to tolerate. 🙂 I am sure I could figure it out given time, but I don’t have said time. So if someone else wants to take the PPT and get it uploaded in a way that actually resembles the PDF, go for it.

    The slides should be pretty self-explanatory, but the core message is not unlike the much more detailed version of things I put forth in my recent blog on on Marketing.

  • Speaking at Casual Connect

    Hours Categories Game talk

    I’m speaking at Casual Connect tomorrow at 11:30, in the Recital Hall. Topic:

    Ten Lessons from Game Design for Games-As-Service

    Designers design inside of contexts: the business model, the distribution channel, the platform, the intended audience. Sometimes, these change, and the change profoundly affects how we create games that players like to play and pay for. Few changes have been as profound as the move from games as fire-and-forget products to services played for months if not years. Raph Koster, VP of Creative Design at Playdom, has been working exclusively in games-as-services for over fifteen years, and in this talk he’ll present to you the top ten lessons you need to learn for this environment: What does “service” really mean? What mechanics always work? Why and how do you measure things differently? And what, in the end, makes the games fundamentally different?

    I’m only at the conference for one brief day — fly up in the morning, and back in the evening. As usual, I will have slides posted up here after the talk.

  • Does a virtual economy affect player retention?

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 26 Comments

    This Virtual World Economics blog asks the question “Does a virtual economy affect player retention?”

    The answer is unquestionably yes.

    It is well-established that broken economies will chase away users. Two examples:

    • The economy in Ultima Online was severely broken because of limited resources being hoarded, resulting in items not spawning. Essentially, insufficient liquidity in the market results in player loss.
    • We have also seen that excess liquidity results in player loss; it’s well established that duping, which generally results in an excess of both cash and items in the game, shortens player lifespans as well.

    It’s harder to see whether having a robust virtual economy extends player lifespan, since it’s proving a negative. But we have seen that the removal of economic features to simply the economy results in the loss of users; the removal of the merchanting professions in Star Wars Galaxies had a negative impact. We have also seen, via that same game and via Eve, that given the option, a substantial amount of players will choose economic gameplay as their primary means of interacting with the game system.

    Economic play is not a tertiary feature in game worlds, unless you consider loot to be a tertiary feature. Loot is reward for labor, albeit in a crudely simulated fashion. You can’t not design economics into your virtual world.

    The question the blog post is really asking is about the degree of player-driven economy. Typically, we see a few gradations:

    • A completely managed economy — you buy and sell only to the game
    • A centrally controlled economy where the NPC shops provide price floors and ceilings, but players can transact among themselves; all items are sourced from shops and loot.
    • As above, but items start to be sourced from other players as well via crafting. Typically this is also where you add item damage and decay as well.
    • A “player-driven economy” where items of variable quality are sourced primarily from players rather than from NPCs, and there is minimal price-setting performed by the game engine. This can reach the point of being a complete laissez faire environment.

    Once you get to the top tier, there’s additional wrinkles you can add into the mix, the biggest of which is whether you have a perfect information economy or not (WoW’s auction house is global, and basically acts like eBay, flattening prices; original SWG merchants and UO vendors were local, and therefore you could hunt for the best prices). The degree of customizability not just in visuals but in statistics permits varying quality goods, etc. Price fluctuations over time can lead to more sophisticated play tactics such as shorting, arbitrage, and the like.

    Economic play is a proven game mechanic of great appeal going back to the earliest games, because it provides varying challenges in a defined system model, susceptible to varying tactics and preparation. In other words, it hits all the items on the “fun checklist.”

  • GDC Vault posts my Social Mechanics talk for free

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 6 Comments

    GDC Vault – Social Mechanics for Social Games [SOGS Design] is a link that takes you to the GDC Vault where you can watch a full video of the presentation, with the slides side by side, for free.

    Of course, you didn’t need that, right? Because you already paid to get access to the utterly awesome GDC Vault. 🙂

    There are a couple more free talks released today as well, including the AI rant and an inside look at the Humble Indie Bundle. You can check out all the free talks here.