A big special thanks goes out to Brooks, Clark and Richard for their patience and great stamina to pound through another version of my Twilight Imperium board game mod ‘Dawn of Thrones’.  I took no pictures unfortunately, but if I had, they would look a lot like the picture above.  The game went much better this time and we cut our TI game play time in half with the new rules.  For those board game geeks out there, I’ll be posting my V2 rules shortly after I’ve cleaned them up.  Thanks again to the players!

What is it about Mario games that allows them to span 20 years with their control schemes relatively intact and their concepts only slightly evolved?  Why is classic Mario more popular than the Mario traveling between worlds in Galaxy?

A significant factor are simply the controls.  While any console designer, or even video game designer, will likely tell you that the controls are of paramount importance, few will agree that completely following convention is better than adding their little tweaks to the status quo.  Consider two game franchises, Halo (left) and Call of Duty (right).

Halo Reach (Left), Call of Duty: Black Ops (Right)

These two are the most popular shooters on modern console.  Both feature similar views, and gameplay.  You run around in first person with a gun visible in front of you in roughly the same proportion.  Both have evolved over time but have each found two different control schemes.  One of the things that makes these games so popular, is that you know when you play the latest version, most of the skills you’d learned from the previous will carry over.  Shoot will be on the same button as it was last time etc.  Now consider this, the two control schemes vary in a very interesting way.

A Few Halo Reach Controls

• Run (Left Shoulder Button) [Use Equipment Actually]
• Throw Grenade (Left Trigger)
• Crouch (Hold Left Stick down)
• Aim (Click Right Stick)
• Melee Attack (Right Shoulder Button)

A Few Call of Duty: Black Ops Controls

• Run (Hold Left Stick down)
• Throw Grenade (Right Shoulder Button)
• Throw Special Grenade (Left Shoulder Button)
• Crouch (B button)
• Aim (Left Trigger)
• Melee Attack( Click Right Stick)

Both games use the X Button to reload and the right trigger to shoot, but if you are very familiar with one set of controls, playing in the other game won’t be transparent.  The rhythm of play is so important that your skills in one game will not necessarily translate.  Simply running in Halo would make you throw grenades in Call of Duty, while aiming in Call of Duty would have you throwing grenades in Halo.  These games have been optimized around these controls and support play that uses these differences.  Hopefully, otherwise it would be a big waste.  You have to switch your mindset when you move between these two games.  The designers of both games could easily provide a litany of reasons why their controls are superior, but ultimately, they are different and largely incompatible.

Imagine a different world where you had to relearn how to ride a bike for every brand of bike riding.  Sure there were commonalities but each featured its own way of doing things.

While all these bikes are interesting experiences in their own right, most riders will likely learn the one they like and stick with it.  When we release new games, we hope people will buy them, love them and show them to their friends.  Learning a new control scheme could be a part of the magic that sets your game apart, but it could also be a barrier by and audience fatigued by having to learn new ways of expressing the same ideas, i.e. Run, shoot, throw grenade.

To illustrate this, I’ve thrown together this quick graph showing a high level of how control complexity or sophistication affects the audience.

This graph is not plotting any quantitative data, but just illustrating a few conjectures on my part.  The first is that controls that are non-existant or too simple are unappealing to a large audience.  At some point, the controls reach what is popular to a very broad audience, after that, it falls to those that have a great deal of experience with learning and mastery controls and finally fades off to only those willing to put in the time to seriously master something.  The larger the number of similar but not identical control schemes may actually increase some peoples challenge playing games.  The success of social games like FarmVille may not just rest in their fantastic game design, but their conscious choice to re-use interaction paradigms.

Farmville (Left), FrontierVille (Right)

Zynga and its ilk know that for a user to transition to their game, they only have a few short minutes during their first play to hook them.  Hours spent learning a new control scheme is not part of the vocabulary.

So what’s the problem?  It’s possible that the wonderful experience design of something like BioShock is made inaccessible to a larger audience simply due to the sophistication of the control scheme.  While purists would say that this is the very essence of the game, there is much more to BioShock than the control scheme.  Could it be that there’s another way to play more sophisticated games that makes those experiences available to a broader audience without weakening the games core presence?

Mario Galaxy (Left), Super Mario Bros Wii (Right)

The Mario Galaxy series undersells its 2D brother, the remake “Super Mario Brothers” on the Wii.  While most may chalk this up to nostalgia, and that played a big part, it could also be that 2D platforming play is simply better for a larger number of people.  If that’s true, then most of the worlds we have left to conquer as 3D game designers lead us away from a large audience and only to more and more niche experiences.  With the fantastically high level of experience design in most modern games, this feels like a terrible loss.  What’s the answer, I don’t know, but I’m going to look for it.

Federations is a collection of short stories by various contemporary science fiction writers.  Overall, I found it greatly enjoyable.  While I was tempted to leave things at that, I guess a little more information would be helpful.  Its twenty-odd stories about various aspects of large galactic federations explore many interesting ideas, worlds, characters and cultures.  Not the hardest of Sci-fi, but a sweet spot between space opera and work that takes itself more seriously.

I have a rant I must rant.  It is about the diversity of emotion within games and how we can evoke something more than ‘smug’ superiority.

The debate on whether games are art is decades old and has come to the surface over the last year or so with Roger Ebert’s comments igniting the ire of the game design royalty.  While I am a believer that games are an art form like any other, I am saddened by the seemingly narrow range of emotions that most designers focus on.  Clint Hocking talks about BioShock and his criticism of game’s continuing down a path of reduced agency.  While I agree that allowing greater agency can lead to rich experiences, I do not agree that they get us closer to what we want, which is for the author to express something and the player to feel or experience something.

Even in games like FarmVille where the author is reduced to crafting the meta-structure and the playscape is entirely player crafted, it is the evoking of emotions within the player that is most important.  Is agency fun?  What are we crafting here?

While the play pattern of FarmVille and its ilk is essentially a currency grind, with a small amount of story layered on, the game has reached an audience unavailable to all but the most successful ‘AAA’ games.   My core question is does FarmVille essentially provide all (if not more) of the emotions provided by more sophisticated games but in an easier to use package?  Once all these new audiences have grown used to our typical toolbox of compulsions and incentives, will they continue playing games or go back to mediums that provide richer emotional experiences?

What we need in games is not necessarily greater agency, but greater emotional engagement.  This doesn’t necessarily mean cut scenes, or photo real characters, but rather the attention paid to the variety of emotions we create in the player and techniques we use to craft them.  Peter Molyneux has been talking like this for years and Fable seems to be proving him right.  While released on a hard-core console, Lionhead’s flagship game is reaching a broader audience while maintaining perceived quality.

The smug winner or the dejected loser seem to be the canonical archetypes of gamers.  The tension of the battle ended by the delight of victory or the bitterness of defeat have their place, but are they the end of things?  FarmVille has no winner or loser and it is both popular and profitable while barely qualifying for what some would call a game.  Perhaps it is because FarmVille provides players with both a broader and deeper range of emotions while still providing the standard feelings of progression, growth and mastery.  Social games have shown us that there are other ways to use this medium and I hope that its only the beginning.

I’m sure others have said it better and said it more often but it seems to me that there are fundamentally only two sides to something, the light side and the dark side.  Derived from the day and the night, the eternal cycle gives us one of the largest fundamental dichotomies of our existence.  While there are nuances, structures and sophisticated forms, the fundamental idea of light and dark permeate so much of our art, story telling and play.  While obvious and fundamental to us all, it has been a bit of a journey of mine to explore this idea over last few weeks.

It starts with Walt Disney.

Walt had an idea.  He wanted to make a theme park where families could go and feel good about life, where they could feel ‘reassured’.  He wanted to make every part of the experience to give them a feeling of being home, always knowing where they were, always feeling like there was something for them, that every thing was going to be ok.  This idea was so powerful that he used it to create billions of dollars from the products created from this emotional source.  The movies, the attractions, the experiences were all based on the idea of creating reassurance.  The impact this had on the animation industry was huge.  In order to be different, you had to find a niche that said a different message.  Competing with Disney on production values was suicide.

Warner Brothers tried something different.  Television was the primary medium and the blend of violence and consequence free action gave us what was likely the ‘edgy’ side of animation for the time.  As values changed, what was edgy became mainstream.

This took us to Robert Crumb, Ralph Bakshi and Fritz the Cat.

This was the alternative to Disney.  It was edgy, dark, dirty and raw.  It didn’t reassure you, it didn’t make you feel better but it did evoke something within you.  They were trying to push the medium.  Reassurance was so powerful that to define yourself strongly otherwise you needed to not reassure, you need to challenge.  Ralph Bakshi’s animation never made mainstream success but still found a large cult following.  Given the power of Disney’s message, to define yourself the polar opposite was to narrow your appeal to a very small group yet to define yourself by overlapping with Disney meant a watered down compromise.

Then along came video games.

Nintendo, with their good wholesome fun attitudes aligned quite closely with Disney’s core value of reassurance.  Their simple core messages of rescue the princess if you learn the simple patterns lets you know again that everything is going to be ok.  The bad guys will be punished, the hero will get the girl and everything will be rainbows and roses.  Now we have a problem.  To define yourself otherwise means you’re going to need to play the role of the darkness, the challenger.  You will need to counter the light created by reassurance, and you will need to embrace the darkness to succeed.

Marcus’ world is falling appart.  He starts in a prison cell, put there by his own command.  His friends are dying, his family is dead and the world is almost in ruin.  He can barely hang on to his life will cutting people in half with chainsaws.  There is no safety here, there is nothing to feel good about, this is darkness.

This is not to say that there are only two games.  There are many who play to the light or dark or those that try to find some grey.  The real art is in the nuance, but the power is in the archetypes.  While you may not choose to define yourself so clearly, which probably means you’ll make better art anyway, some of your peers will or will have done so.  It has already been done in games.  The lines have already been drawn.  Nintendo chose over twenty years ago.

Yet in all stories of the dark, there is the story of the light.  It is the contrasts and the temporary transgression of the archon who bring light to darkness or darkness to light.  It is in the telling that we gain the most enjoyment.  We do not like things to be the same, always.  With a name like Pheonix, Marcus in Gears of War is the ultimate example.  They grey is what we have to tell great stories and live great experiences, but ultimately we choose to return to the light or the dark to call home.

]]> http://onehundredfeet.wordpress.com/2010/06/16/the-two-sides-of-play/feed/ 0 onehundredfeet http://onehundredfeet.wordpress.com/2010/05/08/what-a-game-is/ http://onehundredfeet.wordpress.com/2010/05/08/what-a-game-is/#comments Sun, 09 May 2010 01:21:21 +0000 onehundredfeet http://onehundredfeet.wordpress.com/?p=269 ]]> Please forgive my academic indulgence:

Flow is a feeling of escape and timelessness

Experiencing flow is fun

Play is an activity in the pursuit of fun

A toy is an artifact to facilitate play

A puzzle provides goals to facilitate play

A game establishes relationships through play

Some puzzles are toys

Some games are puzzles

Fin.

Social games pwn.

Naughty Dog have it buttoned up.

I wish I had been born a level designer.

I am an artist-persuader who dreams of being a fulfiller-artist.

I had no idea what a ‘chiptune’ was but it was awesome.

I can’t wait for next year.

]]> http://onehundredfeet.wordpress.com/2010/03/29/gdc-2010-thoughts/feed/ 0 onehundredfeet Screen shot 2010-03-29 at 10.39.58 PM IMG_0676 http://onehundredfeet.wordpress.com/2010/03/27/twilight-imperium-dawn-of-thrones-mod/ http://onehundredfeet.wordpress.com/2010/03/27/twilight-imperium-dawn-of-thrones-mod/#comments Sat, 27 Mar 2010 23:44:31 +0000 onehundredfeet http://onehundredfeet.wordpress.com/?p=235 ]]>

Warning: Has nothing to do with Vampires, or even vampires.

Hot off the press!  I’ve published my mod for Twilight Imperium, the board game.  This was intended to change the game to suite the playstyle of my group of game friends.  I’ve tried to reduce the amount of interpersonal politics and make the races more ‘role-playey’.  The high level idea is to put a three act structure in with victory conditions unique to each race.

This will require a lot of playt-esting and tuning, but the bulk of it is done.  I have made counters and cards for the game that I will be uploading.

Warning – It’s a very dry read.  Read only if you’re interested in board game rules design or need to fall asleep at your desk.

Click Here to read them

or on the pages tab to the right.

I have what I would consider a fairly typical group of gamer friends.  These guys have grown up on D&D, board games and table-top games.  We all love games and have our own relationship to them.  Something unusual happened over the last few game sessions.  We abandoned the game we all loved and respected for a shallower version of the same game.  Our sin was liking the experience more but we took so much joy in the fact that we were all on speaking terms by the end of the night.  I have so much respect for the game that brought us so much misery, that I had to take a deeper look.

The game that we all loved, and loved to play, but hated how we felt at the end was Twilight Imperium.

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/12493/twilight-imperium-3rd-edition

This is possibly my favourite board game of all time.  It’s amazing.  It has everything you need in a sci-fi galactic conquest game.  The problem wasn’t the game, it was the players, or was it?

This game had it all.  Battles, alliances, back-stabbing, exploration, high technology and cool little plastic spaceships.  We all loved this game.  But given the richness of the game, and at its core it was a competition, all of us used the game to advance our social agenda.  Brothers would ally against the rest, brother would betray brother, friends competing for who’s the best strategist.  Any betrayed pact would be paid for in blood.  By the end of the evening (8 hours of play or so) a victor would emerge, but the victory would be hollow.  Everyone would grumble about this or that being imbalanced or the game is about victory points and not killing or they got the wrong race or something.  The point is this, almost all the players left the table unsatisfied.

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/22827/starcraft-the-board-game

After years of playing several editions of the game, we switched to StarCraft for a few games.  StarCraft is by the same company and influenced by the same designers.  Much to our surprise we had a great time.  A lot of the same pieces were there.  Battles were abundant.  Turtles could turtle.  There was technology and awesome plastic spaceships.  So, why did we have a better time?  We all acknowledged how much more Twilight Imperium offered.  It had every amount of richness while starcraft was so very streamlined.

I believe that the largest difference came down to two things, the time to play and the politics.  Eight hours of play is too much for most people to play.  The political element of Twilight Imperium is amazing and powerful.  It’s also is the largest source of social drama.  StarCraft had told us, everyone else is the enemy, FIGHT while Twilight Imperium told us make friends with your neighbours long enough to find a stick bigger than theirs.  This opportunity for friendship and partnership made the highs higher, but made the lows very much lower.

Maybe my gaming group is unusually competitive, or perhaps Twilight Imperium did too good a job of allowing us to show our true feelings.

I took a few lessons from this experience.  First, a competitive game can be made more competitive by introducing flexible co-operative mechanics into the game.  Second, an eight hour play experience is in general not a good thing.  Lastly, in competitive/co-op experiences, when having the players take on a role, its dangerous to ill define the role.  A well defined roll is necessary to help the player decide when betrayal is the right thing or not otherwise it is the baggage the players bring to the game which helps them decide. Given that, I’m going to write up some new rules this weekend to see if  can fix it.

Good Night All.

While looking into compulsion, I found that I couldn’t avoid looking directly at emotion.  The above picture is from Heavy Rain, a game where the creators are trying to introduce more emotion into games.  I must admit that I was skeptical for a long time and passed it off as artistic indulgence.   Something came along and changed my mind completely yet I haven’t played the game.  Emotion isn’t the sign of indulgence but perhaps the complete opposite in a medium rife with shallow emotional connections to simply sensational experiences.  While I do not speak with any authority on the subject, I am passionate about it and want to learn to do it right.

I’m not even going to enter into the debate about whether games are art or not because the answer is obvious.  I’m more interested in how we create a stronger emotional engagement in our audience.  How do we craft games that directly create or allow to be created emotions that are deeper or richer than other mediums.  I’m sure to most of you what I’m stating below is obvious, but I need to get it out.  I’ll start with a simple light survey of the prevailing emotional notes we hit.

Mastery is at the core of our legacy in video games.  Puzzle games use it as the primary motivation.  I feel awesome because I have mastered this intellectual or dexterity challenge.  I have improved and risen to the challenge and over come.  We think that challenge is inherently linked to games but it is simply one of the easiest emotions to create with games.  There are other games, they are just harder to create.  A satisfying feeling of mastery is also very hard to create, this is where game design as an art form has stepped up since chess or checkers to give us the most satisfying feelings of mastery.

Dominance also is well known to us.  It is related to mastery, but it is a different emotion.  We feel something different because while we are expressing our mastery, we are doing so by demonstrating someone else’s lack of it and establishing a social order.  We feel awesome because we are better than someone.  Any adversarial multiplayer game, like Halo has heavily leveraged this emotion.

Fear is one of the emotions that emerged when games became able to better create atmospheric environments capable of a greater degree of immersion.  We’ve been creating horror games for a long time.  Fear has been used in games like Doom extensively as the core experience.  Fear and mastery working together is a strong combination.  Silent Hill is a great example of well crafted fear with an interesting puzzle twist in the mastery.

Joy has been oddly hard to express.  Delight could be considered joy.  People feel joy when feeling mastery.  They feel relief after being scared.  They delight in new things and places they can explore.  A game like Flower is my pick for pure Joy.  It does leverage some amount of mastery but very little, the game just creates beautiful imagery and a feeling of serenity.  It has easy controls and very little in the way of mechanics.  While others may disagree, I feel creating joy not associated with mastery or dominance is actually very hard to do.

Partnership is old in games as it goes back to early arcades but is being explored heavily in games like Resident Evil 5, Borderlands, Gears of War MMORPG’s and other modern games.  Co-op play throughs are much more common now.  Partnership with pre-made characters like Resident Evil 5 offer something different than avatar based partnership in something like an MMORPG.  Parternship demonstrated by the main characters, supported by mechanics, create the feeling in the player.  As important as the you-get-the-key-while-I-open-the-door gameplay is the feeling of partnership demonstrated by the characters.  In Borderlands, it assumes that the people over the microphones feel like partners.

Competition is similar to dominance but it’s what we feel before the win or loss.  It’s an intense feeling and really well support by games in general.  It’s interesting to contrast the feels of competition in something like Street Fighter to that in an avatar based game like WOW.  Competition has many nuances and variations.

Belonging is supported well by MMORPG’s and team based multiplayer games.  World of Warcraft is probably the crowning example of belonging but I’m going to site one a little smaller.  Counterstrike, and it’s modern brother Team Fortress 2, brought belonging through team based multiplayer play to life.  These games aren’t just awesome mechanics, but they created feelings not available from other games.  Counterstrike has gone through many revisions but the core emotion remain unchanged.  Team Fortress 2 is much more sophisticated than what I’m stating here.  Each character has nuances, each game mode, each environment all tells different emotional stories.

Love is actually a rare emotion in games.  Given its prevalence in every other medium games have been remiss in including it.  The fact is that creating believable love is really hard.  I was reading an article about Uncharted 2 and the author was noting not its amazing graphics or great gameplay but rather its successful delivery of a story of a love triangle with an adult emotional depth.  Now, no one is going to say that its the greatest love story ever told, but they told a love story.  It’s a love story with the backdrop of an action game, but a love story nonetheless.

Since Love is so neglected, I’m giving it another game mention.  Today I die is a great game, everyone should try it out.

So I often find myself standing alone in design discussions, so perhaps I’m not meant for it, but I feel that the goal of creating experiences is to have someone feel something and by focusing on that we can determine the right mechanics to do so.  The richer, the more interesting feelings we can give people the better our medium will be and the better people’s lives will be.

The emotions above are just core basic emotions.  To get deeper into subtleties requires more time, and another post.