oizys

Preview post of the concepts chapter for Tatha

http://docs.google.com/View?id=dhpn5xkg_44g9fpxwsj

Originally published at The Ephemeral Notebook. You can comment here or there.

I’ve been playing a lot of Little King’s story lately and I can’t help but notice one major design curiosity:

The game becomes more usable and coherent as you go along.

Normally it makes sense to introduce concepts to the player in a nice smooth logarithmic/sigmoid fashion to optimize learning.  A game begins as simple as it can and adds complexity after enough time to digest the previous mechanics has passed, limiting the amount of instantaneous new mechanics.  However, with Little King’s story, nearly every time a new feature was added (especially in the early stages of the game)… I felt like it was a convenience issue or it was long overdue.

Each time a feature was added it didn’t feel so much like a new thing to learn, but a shortcut to a boring or frustratingly impossible task previously.  It feels as if they started with the final game and removed interface and features until they arrived at the beginning.  Some may feel this is a sound design methodology, but I do not.  The beginning experience is the most cruicial to the game - it can be looked at as a subtractive version of the game’s concepts, but it should be just as compelling as later play.  On examining this I noticed even I noticed some conflicting viewpoints on this issue, even within myself.

On one side, the beginning should be representative of the gameplay, pure and enjoyable in its own right.  This is especially true of casual games and seems to come from the casual game part of my brain.  The idea is that there is no immediate ‘end’ which you are going to, you are enjoying the gameplay as it is and as it progresses.  To me, this is the very zen-like concept that attracts me to more mechanics-based and casual games to begin with.

On the flip side, if you’ve designed a game that has a degree of complexity to it, you can’t give it all up at once.  So, like any good school - you introduce a problem, then a skill, and then test for application (designers take note: it’s more effective to introduce the problem before the skill than the other way around).  This method leads to a very ‘tutorialish’ beginning, especially if condensed together (skill-skill-skill-game vs skill-game-game-skill-game-game).

Neither side is wrong, but there’s definitely some nuances in the approach that make it worth exploring further.  As much as I do truly enjoy Little King’s Story, I did feel like I was playing through about 5 hours of a mediocre / frustrating / aimless game to get to a more polished, enjoyable game later - and I didn’t even know that was going to pan out that way through the first 5 hours (not quite like begrudgingly sitting through tutorials).

Regardless of the design method with respect to the beginning (additive or subtractive), one should never skip polishing the beginning and examining it from a ‘what if this were all it was’ viewpoint.

Originally published at The Ephemeral Notebook. You can comment here or there.

Normally whenever the question “Are video games art?”  is raised, I have to force myself to avoid it, as I feel that describing my take on the subject will take far longer to type than the given blog/tweet post’s comments will be active for.  However, recently having read Damion Schubert’s take on it and having seen the subject bounce around on #gamedesign a lot, I decided I should give this a shot, so here goes.

The biggest difficulty I tend to find in discussions on this subject is that people aren’t always aware of what it is they are asking nor do they come to the discussion table with a shared set of definitions.  I am going to attempt to clean up this mess a bit with some simple logical statements and metrics, peppered with just a bit of subjective thought process.  So first off:

What is Art?

Perhaps the biggest culprit is a unclear definition of Art.  If only this were a problem limited to those discussing it as it applies to video games.  The true definition of art has been argued for quite some time (see also Aesthetics).  I’m going to try to pluck off the relevant issues.

Art can mean a reference to a field of study, a technique related to creative skill as relates to aesthetics, a product or work of art, or more colloquially ‘fine art’.  We’re going to need to pick or build a definition.  How about the first line in the Wikipedia entry - it’s gotta be the most relevant, right?

“Art is the process or product of deliberately arranging elements in a way that appeals to the senses or emotions“.

Yup, games definitely do this!  We’re done!  The answer is yes!   Not so fast.

There is much debate about this subject so it can’t possibly be that simple… Let’s try another definition.  How about Britannica Online’s defintion:

“the use of skill and imagination in the creation of aesthetic objects, environments, or experiences that can be shared with others.” [my italics]

Well that one seems to fit with games pretty easily.  I don’t seem to be getting very far with this, so I’m going to work on my own definition.   I’ll use existing things that we readily call art as a way of removing away that which it is NOT, leaving that which it is.  Likewise, if the definition excludes things we conventionally call art, then the definition itself will be invalidated.

Is art a physical object?  No, or else music or performance would not be art.  Is it creative skill or technique?  No.  It cannot be simply a technique.  If you go a gallery to appreciate art, this definition works (appreciating the technique), but if you then buy the art, you are not buying the technique.  So clearly it is neither the sum of its materials nor the sum of its techniques - it is neither simply artwork or artistry.  What ties the two together but is wholly neither?  Well a concept does.  Concepts can be equated to thoughts and words.  Are words alone art?  Just a series of words strung together?  No, we do not call this art.  However, words written down or spoken can be poetry, which is definitely art.  So what is the difference between the intrinsic set of concepts floating along and that which we call art?

Well, both written and spoken word have the potential to communicate the concept from one individual to another.  So if I walk up to you and say something, is this art?  The problem here is that the communication is direct.  What if I yell the same words to a crowd, indirectly?  Now this is could be either performance art or the actions of a crazy person (or both).  We are now very close to the great writer Leo Tolstoy’s definition of art:

“a use of indirect means to communicate from one person to another”.

I like to call this ‘proxy communication’.  Or in diagrammatic form:

Artist -> Medium -> Audience

Does it really need an audience?  Must a work of art be shown to one other than the original artist?  If an artist paints a work and it is left in their attic, and their house is bulldozed, did the work of art exist?  This is doubly ponderous if the artist is also a mime. Well, here we can satisfy that formula to say that perhaps the artist was also the audience.  But is this cheating?   Well, consider a person talking to themselves (casually like assurances into the mirror, not schizophrenia).  That is direct communication from yourself to yourself.  However, if that same person wrote a diary, and perhaps drew a sketch in a diary to try to express their feelings (to be later read by themselves again long after they do not recall the original feeling), then that is indirect communication and as such we can call it art.

Read the rest of this entry »

Originally published at The Ephemeral Notebook. You can comment here or there.

I’ve noticed recently that I’ve become increasingly agitated at services that do not either readily allow access to any data I generate, and/or pro-actively work with other existing systems.  Many of these are of course features I never would have expected 4 years ago.

Some examples:

• If you’re a music related site, service or software and you’re not able to read or scrobble to my last.fm, I shake my head
• In fact, I’m annoyed that my car stereo doesn’t somehow magically record what I play and that I can’t look back at my history to see what they just played on the car radio.
• Any social networking system that doesn’t try to connect / pull info from my gmail, myspace or facebook and requires me to re-enter information generally gets a pass from me.
• Working with files on a hard drive that are not in an SVN or CVS repository makes me feel vulnerable now that I use Wikis, Google Docs and SVN for everything:  What happens if I want to go back?  How do I share this with someone and see their changes?
• The fact that any software or service geared towards the creation of a document or data that still doesn’t have an “undo” feature or better version control irks me
• Streaming sources, or sequential documents (image galleries, etc) that do not allow random access feel like relics from the past
• Any online service (specifically social network, share-based or collaborative) that doesn’t feature a folksonomy, rating system, and/or a “others who liked this liked…” feels like a service that didn’t get the memo.

There are many more examples.

In short, know your user’s expectations before you write a feature list or a design doc.  This would seem obvious but it still seems to catch honest people off guard. As it applies to games: if your user expects a waypoint based auto-save and you make them start the whole level over again, they’re going to feel that their expectations were not met. So prior to making a design doc (or in your design doc), make sure to do some competitive research and work to extrapolate some likely expectations based on how you plan to position yourself in the marketplace.  It will save you a lot of costumer ‘grrs’.

Originally published at The Ephemeral Notebook. You can comment here or there.

Much is often mentioned about the cultural disconnect between the Business, Design, and Programming fields within the game industry.  Different attitudes, different terms and languages, different expectations.  I’ve always felt this has been a self-perpetuating problem (when diagnosing it we canonize it by declaring that this is “just how it is” - further reinforcing the meme), and a rather large problem at that.

As one who considers all three to be a passion I may be speaking from personal bias but I see this as a problem with a relatively easy solution.  To me, Business, Design and Programming are based on the same fundamental principle:

Define the goal clearly, research the available choices, then weigh the pros and cons of each choice to arrive at the optimal solution.

[This should seem familiar if you read my previous entry]

There is little benefit to shrouding a profession in mystery and much to be gained by integrating these goals into a single representation.  The commonly occuring pattern is the separation of these goals into components.  The other parts of the original goalset show up in each component typically as a ‘restriction’, but information is lost in this process.

Let’s take a simple example:

You and a friend are looking to go out for dinner and you want something relatively cheap and relatively good.  You deliberate for a bit and realize that you know a lot of quality places, and your friends knows a lot of cheap places - so you decide to specialize and divide the problem.  You try to find the best restaurant you can under 30$ a person, and your friend meanwhile tries to find the cheapest place with at least 4 stars on Zagat.  The chances that you will arrive at the same solution is slim to none (and reduces as the population of choices increases).

This is how game development often actually works.  The game needs to be relatively fun and impressive, while being relatively stable, maintainable and scalable, while also being done relatively quickly and cheaply.  The meetings are held, restrictions are put in place (typically time via milestones), and then each team optimizes for its pet criteria.  This can occasionally cause conflict  as all of these are mutually exclusive.

This type of problem is an optimization problem, and there are a few common patterns to solving it:

1. Positive Optimize - Pick the one that matters MOST, this reduces one of the variables (e.g. we have exactly 2 years worth of funding to release this - what can we make in 2 years?)
2. Negative Optimize - Pick the one that matters LEAST, this also reduces one of the variables (e.g. it doesn’t matter how stable it is - it’s just a prototype).  In patterns containing three goal variables, this I like to call the ‘Pick Two’ method, based on the saying: “Cheap, Good, Fast - pick two” or other patterns of “X,Y,Z - pick two”.
3. Simultaneous Optimize - this can be difficult to approach but is typically going to be the most accurate.  Programmers (especially AI programmers, Collective Intelligence programmers and Data Miners) will likely recognize this one.  The idea is to assign a fitness function and then try a number of different techniques to get the best possible result (all of which are generally little more than an advanced version of a random shot in the dark).  The ‘king’ of these techniques is more often than not a genetic algorithm.

When faced with a relatively small set of choices, I have a favorite way of tackling the full on simultaneous optimization:  Using a spreadsheet, the goal components of the fitness function become columns and the available choices become rows.  You rate each cell by how well that goal is satisfied by that choice (use the SAME SCALE for all cells, something like 0-5 or 0-10).  Then you apply a weight to each goal as to how important it is to the final fitness.  The sum of each cell in the row multiplied by its corresponding  weights per column is the choice’s final fitness.  It helps to throw in a couple dummy extreme choices to help you balance the goal weights to make sure your balancing is sane.

As soon as there are more variables or interactions between the choices, it becomes clear that you need something more like a genetic algorithm.  Luckily we all have something very much like that already - intuition.  I like to define intuition as “the sum of all knowledge and experience related to the subject”.  Humans are exceedingly good at making good guesses when presented with a problem that they have a wide knowledge and experience base to draw from.  However each large missing piece of knowledge or experience will heavily skew our guesses.

A few examples:

• a game designer wants to make a modification to a feature, thinking that it should be easy to change, sneaks it into the schedule - but it turns out to be very difficult
• a programmer finds after implementation that a design concept is not at all scalable, and codes up a tweak to make it scalable that defeats the original purpose of the feature.  Not wanting to have ‘lost’ the time on the gantt, the decision is made to keep the ‘fix’ in the final version.
• an executive looks at the gantt and examines where the product will be at for magical tradeshow X - a new trade show the company wants to do that’s 3 months before magical tradeshow Y for which there is a demo planned, and requests a demo version to send with the demo team to show X.  The team crunches and gets it done, but has to make enough hacks that the demo for tradeshow Y needs to have some features cut and is now behind on the entire schedule.

What am I arguing for?  Simply this:

Open and continual communication of goals so as to bring the choices people make closer to ‘optimal’ for the company/game as a whole.

and

An attempt by all to increase the cross-departmental intuition of everyone involved.

What I am arguing against is the ’silo’ effect and hyper-compartmentalization of culture and experience that is common of large hierarchies and specialization of labor.

A few things that help towards this end:

• Agile Development or similar methods
• Prototyping
• Small Teams (preferrably multi-disciplinary)
• Task Forces
• A relatively flat heirarchy (which is related to the previous two)
• A shared company calendar or internal blog/rss
• A wiki with an interconnected glossary of terms
• More multi-disciplanary employees (designers who can code, business heads who know design, etc)
• Task transparency (via the workflow management systems)
• Decision transparency (hearing a detailed explanation of a decision works to teach others about that discipline)
• Financial transparency (many companies cannot do this, but for those who can, it often works well)

Originally published at The Ephemeral Notebook. You can comment here or there.

Today I was catching up on some reading when I came across James Portnow’s opinion piece on the difference between Choices and Problems (The Problem of Choice).  I disagree with the separation entirely and see the presentation of them as separate as a form of False Dilemma that is all too easy to fall into.

Choices are among the fundamental elements of game design, economics, behavioral psychology and computer science.  In all of those fields, the concept of choice is defined roughly the same way:  (from wikipedia) “Choice consists of the mental process of thinking involved with the process of judging the merits of multiple options and selecting one of them for action.”

Making a choice requires a mental formulation - the generation of some model for weighing the merits of each option.  Merits are directly connected to goals, and one can often discern one’s goals through their choices.  It is also said often in economics that “choice defines preference” but preference is a tricky thing to pin down.

What James appears to me to be discussing is the transparency of the game’s own reward model.  When players align some of their goals with the game’s mechanical goals (as is generally the case when you wish to win), their merit models begin to look more like the game’s.

At this point it can be said that their merit model is far more mechanical than personal.  However, this shift is highly personal in nature.  Players are driven by a varying amount of drive for success (the Achiever Bartle type).  Take three extreme examples on the same game:

1. Player A wishes to win the game with the utmost ‘completion’, and so goes out and purchases a hint book which makes fully transparent all of the mechanical merits of each choice.  The player then chooses each in accordance with the walkthrough and obtains the ultimate score or reward sought.
2. Player B wishes to maintain the mystery of the game and avoids spoilers or hints from any source, wishing the game experience to be as personally driven as possible
3. Player C has little to no interest in completing the game and instead explores the mechanical simulation but with different goals in mind than the main ’success’ goal of the game - for example seeing how big of an explosion one can make, or how silly one can die with ragdolls, or if the game story breaks if you try to kill everyone.

As is obvious, choices with merits that apply to more than one possible goal are evaluated differently by different people.  My disagreement stems from the attempt to separate choices which are mechanical in nature to those which are personal in nature into two separate concepts.  I think this is highly dangerous as it generally assumes a singular goal system.  Where are goal systems most singular?  In traditional story-driven single player games.

Goals and Endings

Let’s take a game like Bioshock.  Instead of having a singular goal, there are multiple endings.  Each ending is now an available goal.  The problem with this is that while situations may change during the course of gameplay, long term goals and gameplay decisions of players rarely do.  This means that each player selects the ending goal that they wish to achieve early in play and now all choices become False Choices.

This is especially true of the hintbook-user who starts by reading up on all the possible branches and endings and makes their selection at the beginning (see also Mass Effect sex scene).  However even someone who is only cognizant of the fact that a game has multiple endings (read it on the back of the box - multiple endings is a feature list slick item), they will pre-construct likely ending goals in their mind, select one and then act accordingly.

This is the basis of role-playing.  If you decide you want to play an evil character with a soft spot for cuddly looking things, then you will make your choices accordingly and you hope that the ending or rewards that you get respect some element of this decision (for example at least that you decided to be evil).  The problem here is the ending - the concentration of goals on the game ending.  Pen and paper roleplay works because it is often open-ended (if you’re not playing strictly from an adventure with an unimaginative GM, you don’t know that the game will contain roughly 40 hours of play time before you start playing it).  The solutions here are to spread the goals out - achievements, chapter-based games, social systems, and economic systems.

The Myth of Purely Aesthetic Choices

So what about choices that aren’t attached to a goal mechanism?  It turns out a rare few of these are purely choices without goals.   Examples in the real world are common in non-essential purchases - what flavor of chips do you buy for yourself?  what color of a particular shirt do you choose when one is offered in multiple colors?  However they can quickly be turned into goal-based variations:  what flavor of chips do you buy when you’re having guests over (maximize for utilitarian benefit), what does this shirt say about me? (does it further the goal of presenting myself to others the way that I wish to?).

In online games, even aesthetic choices become intertwined with social or economic goals.  Let’s take a look at some examples:

• Choice of Color:  This can be an economic merit judgment (based on rarity), and a social persona merit judgment.  Example - a hardcore PvPer picking a pink colorset for its memorability and humor value.  If one is in a guild, color coordination may be desired, limiting choice.
• Choice of Name: Economic factors are huge here (is the name already taken? am I willing to live with Legolasx345 or do I want something truly unique?), as well as roleplay and persona considerations (one trying to play an elf might want an elf-like name).

The name selection example is perhaps the best.  Trademark and domain name selection for a company or product is based on a huge ‘problem’ equation of relative merits - Pronounce-ability, Length, International Meanings and Pronunciation, Logo/Glyph possibilities, Linguistic distance from similar trademarks, Search loading (what is currently found by that name through searches), Legal Availability (and cost to acquire), DNS Availability (and cost to acquire), Social network Availability, and Linguistic connection to the desired evoked emotions or symbols are just a few of the criteria.  This creates a giant ‘problem’ equation, where the stakeholders balance the merits of each to be able to mechanically rate the possibilities - if the company is hiring a marketing firm or is a min/maxer in the player terms.  A company who is like player B in the above example might just pick a name and hope for the best.

The Single Player Game

Ok, so digging further - let’s come up with the most pristinely pure-choice example we can come up with.  The choice of aesthetics or actions within a purely single-player game that has no predictable affect on the outcome.  I say purely single-player because these are a rarity today.  Any game that is connected with online achievements, gamer scores, or leaderboards is no longer ‘purely’ single player in that the motivations for winning change.  Increasingly with fraps, machinima, youtube, and other forms of shared media, even the most single player experience can become a social one, much like when a friend watches you while you play.

One obvious problem with these kinds of purely surface choices is that they are bad design!  Presenting choices that have no measurable effect can easily disenfranchise the player.

On the opposite side, easily transparent mechanical goals also removes much of the fun of choosing.  If every text option in a game like Fallout had next to it in parenthesis how many XP points you gain by selecting that option, much of the fun would be immediately drained from the game.

The Multi-player Game

When choices can be boiled down to merit equations based on a preset list of goals, they become less interesting.  However, one simple way to stop this is to obscure the mechanics by introducing an external (unpredictable) factor.  The classic examples of this are found in the birthing of games themselves:  Go, Chess, etc.  When one cannot easily predict what situation a choice will wind one up in, the choice becomes more difficult but also more meaningful.   Life is mostly comprised of these choices.

Traditional games don’t have the issue of transparent choice mechanics or purely aesthetic choices, nor do connected games - only single player ‘movie’ games do - a problem we have invented for ourselves as game designers.  Sometimes choice doesn’t matter in these games (when the game is purely linear and driven by twitch skill) - but this to me is a somewhat sad shallow concept of interactivity that doesn’t take full advantage of the medium.

Solutions

While I may disagree with the conclusion in Mr. Portnow’s piece - I agree with the prescription - we should be more cognizant of what we call choice in video games.  And since I never like to just rant without providing some solutions (ok that’s not entirely true… a good rant is fun, too), here are ways I think we can improve the ‘choicyness’ of the single player game experience:

• More achievements and mini-goals, especially ones off the beaten path
• Shareable media awareness (best examples of this are shareable replays in racing games or the snapshot camera in Little Big Planet)
• Episodic game play (smaller, sooner goals)
• Condition-driven systems (instead of using a hidden character ‘alignment’ number, test for conditions present in the world that could indicate alignment)
• Better, more unpredictable AI (the more human ones’ opponents are, the harder the equations are)
• Adapting mechanics (less of Oblivion’s level adaption with reduces impact, more things like enemies having an increased chance of resistance to the tactic/ability you use more often)
• Random scenario changes (this works best in repeatable content, but things like Left 4 Dead’s slight changes in the level layout keep it from being just an equation)
• External stimuli changes (massively single player games, rendering of ghost player data into the game, using external factors to drive economies)
• Generally be more graceful with player ‘mistakes’, build in teaching mechanism to choice systems, allowing a player to get better

And finally, some things we need to do less of:

• Stop thinking of choice being between GOOD and EVIL
• Early-branch trees (e.g. good/evil, character class choices in System Shock 2 - each problem has multiple solutions, but only one generally valid based on your class)
• Using optimal-path scoring (i.e. leaderboards with only total points, time to completion, etc), instead score sections, allow mistakes
• Not planning for the meta-game goals and looking only at our own mechanics

Originally published at The Ephemeral Notebook. You can comment here or there.