Tag Archives: game design

La Règle du Jeu

Posted by under game design, munchausen

I finally played Puerto Rico, Andreas Seyfarth’s award-winning boardgame from 2002, over the weekend. I’ve had it sitting on my games shelf for well over a year, but for some reason I’d forgotten I’d never got around to giving it a try.

On Saturday evening I was forcibly reminded of that reason. It wasn’t the long and complex game set-up phase, but the rules or more precisely the rulebook. Puerto Rico has the worst-explained set of rules of any boardgame I’ve ever played.

For those who don’t know Puerto Rico, it is currently the top-ranked game at Boardgamegeek. To give you some idea of the competition, that’s on a list of 3804 names, and chess is #186. It’s a resource-management game of building a mercantile empire in the eponymous 16th-century city, and in terms of complexity it’s on a par with popular German boardgames like Settlers of Catan or Carcasonne.

We sat there reading the rules, four adults educated to degree level and beyond, two of us being people who design games for a living, and after half an hour none of us had even grasped the structure of the game and what you were trying to do in order to win, let alone the minutiae of each part of each turn. Every part of the rule book is bad: the structure, the language, the layout, the terminology, the component descriptions. I defy anyone to work ouit how to play the game from that set of rules as written. It can’t be done.

In despair I turned to the web. The Wikipedia entry gives a three-line summary of the game that summarises its object and structure, which was better than anything in the actual Puerto Rico rules. It also provided a link to a 150-page PowerPoint presentation that not only explained the rules in a clear and systematic way but also gave a thorough example of play that had some good jokes in it. We read through that, everything fell into place, and we played the game. And it totally rocks.

Had my broadband been down, that copy of Puerto Rico would have been on fire. Literally.

I know that it’s an old truism in the computer-game world that nobody reads the instructions. But my design background is tabletop RPGs where the rules are everything, or at least they were. First-edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons was 512 pages, of which 509 were nothing but rules and games stats. Those other three pages were an example of play, and I maintain that without it the majority of readers would never have understood how the game should be played. When I published Nobilis, the notoriously ‘difficult’ (read: non-combat oriented) RPG, it had a 20-page example of play that walked the reader through all the major features of the game’s rules and showed them how to structure a campaign as well. And I’m intensely proud of The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen (which I wrote) and De Profundis (which I published and wish I’d written), both of which are genre-bending RPGs in which the description of the rules is also the example of play.

Video games, of course, don’t have examples of play. They used to have attract modes, a pre-recorded snippet of play that gave prospective players a rough idea of what and what not to do, but these seem to be preserved for arcade games these days. Some games do have tutorial levels, and some of these are better than others. Halo‘s first level, which wasn’t just an introduction to the game but many peoples’ first use of the Xbox controller too, is still the best I’ve ever seen.

These days what games do have is downloadable demos. Whether it’s Xbox Live or Manifesto Games, or a cover-disc for the Luddites out there, those gaming Amish whose view of the world has not been allowed to progress beyond 2003, almost any game worth a damn will let you try it for size. And I have lost count of the number of games I’ve played for maybe two minutes, quit and deleted because I couldn’t work out what to do, or how to do what I wanted, or simply because the game didn’t play the way I expected it to. Foomph, gone, and with it any chance of selling me a copy.

What’s the most depressing sight in a video game demo? A diagram of the controller listing fifteen or twenty different functions that the player is supposed to remember. What’s worse than that? Only displaying the diagram for fifteen seconds. What’s worse still? No diagram at all… in which case either your game had better have the most intuitive controls in the world or a tutorial level, or you’re stuffed.

Understand this, demo-makers: my investment in your demo is nil. It has cost me nothing. I have no emotional capital riding on liking your game. I am waiting for you to impress me, or at least to not piss me off. If you can’t structure the first two minutes of your demo to give me a smooth and enjoyable introduction to your creation and how to play it, why should I assume that you can do better with the full retail product? And you will not get a second chance.

I admit I have been wrong before, and famously. Two notable card-games were launched at Gen Con 1993, Magic: the Gathering and Once Upon a Time, and once I grew tired of demoing the latter I went to see what the fuss about the former was. Joanne White (later editor of Scrye magazine) offered to show me how it worked. She cracked a new deck and we played a game in which, due to being dealt a truly sucky hand, I was unable to cast a single spell. I walked away thinking, “It’s a shame about Wizards of the Coast, they’ve done some nice stuff in the past but this Magic thing is going to kill them.” But that experience had everything to do with poor luck and nothing to do with the quality of the demonstrator.

Because, of course, the way that most gamers learn a new set of rules is not from reading the rulebook but from having the game explained by friends. If everyone had to learn to play Puerto Rico from its rulebook it wouldn’t be topping the charts on Boardgamesgeek right now. It was Jonny Nexus who observed that almost nobody plays Monopoly by the proper rules because almost nobody has ever bothered to read them: they just absorb them—along with interesting variants, omissions, errors and house rules—from playing the game with other people.

It’s the same with video games. Anyone can use a demo to play, but to learn to play well you’ve got to watch other players, or at least ask their advice. In the days before Gamefaqs there were tips mags, and in the days before them we used to cluster round arcade machines to witness and take notes. Video games, of course, can’t be changed by house rules but the secrets to beating them are passed on the same way. I defy anyone to work out all the secrets, tricks, hidden areas and easter eggs in any game purely on their own.

Games are social. Not necessarily in their play—though Puerto Rico is pretty dull solo—but they encourage interaction, working with others to map the territory of gamespace and dig up its secrets. Which is why the stereotype of gamers being lonely or loners is such complete tripe. A good game is a treasure hunt, and a good treasure hunt is a party.

And that’s enough about games, treasure hunts and parties for the moment, before I shoot my fat mouth off.

Footnote: my brief moment as a conduit of game wisdom, or at least my best one, concerns Area 51, the 1995 Atari arcade light-gun shooter involving zombies and aliens. 1995 was about the time that John Woo’s movies were breaking big, with Chow Yun Fat’s two-fisted pistol stylings, and Jose Garcia of Daedalus Games showed me that it was possible to emulate this in Area 51, with one person playing both Player 1 and Player 2, a pistol in each hand. Later, in a London arcade, I worked through the game this way and turned away from the machine to find—for the first time in my life—a crowd of onlookers, who all now wanted to try the same thing.

Rough Trade

Posted by under game design

You’re alone in a foreign country, on a mission of international security. Your police escort has been killed, and you’re in the middle of nowhere, armed only with a pistol and a few rounds of ammunition, most of which you’ve already had to use on malevolent locals. You’ve been captured and injected, you’re alone, no backup is coming, and the background music is really beginning to creep you out. And then, behind a building, you meet a cloaked figure.

“Got a selection of good things on sale, stranger,” he says, “heh heh heh,” and every shred of suspension of disbelief that Resident Evil 4 had built up flies up and away, disappearing like a startled crow.

There aren’t many games that handle traders and merchants well, but RE4 handles them astonishingly badly. For a start, what the hell are itinerant salespeople doing in a survival-horror game? Obviously, yes, there’s a market for high-powered weaponry in a section of Spanish countryside populated by zombies, but the risk-to-reward ratio has got to be higher than opening up a boutique by Seven Sisters tube. Plus, if you did decide to earn your living by selling weapons to passing US Secret Service agents (“enough weapons to start a small war” as the game says at one point), you would stock some ammunition as well. Mr “Heh heh heh” has apparently forgotten that. Or maybe it’s his way of making sure that you don’t buy a nice new gun and a clip of ammo, and then blow his fool head off with it and nick his stuff, T-800 style.

Of course, of course, that last point is for game balance: survival-horror is nothing without ammo shortages. But then why bother with power-up weapons at all? Make the player fight through the whole game with a small selection of guns, none appreciably better than another? I mean, if it’s good enough for the Master Chief…

But I’m digressing. The moment the merchant appears Resident Evil 4 stops being about surviving mad zombie attacks and saving the president’s magic football, and becomes about exploring the environment to find enough cash and things to sell in order to buy better kit. In other words, the presence of the merchant fundamentally changes the game. I’ll go further: it ruins the game.

Off the top of my head, I can think of three better ways to handle the character’s progression up the equipment tree:

  • Solve puzzles. Work out how to open a locked gun cabinet, for example. There are plenty of puzzly puzzles in RE4. It would make a lot more sense to have them protecting something of immediate game-value like a weapon, instead of a gem that needs to be fitted to another item and then sold to the merchant to buy that weapon.
  • Equipment drops. The character is in radio contact with base. They are in a position to send reinforcements and air-drop stuff. Instead they mostly supply obvious answers to your character’s asinine questions, and occasionally email you files telling you how to kick things.
  • Give it to enemies. Put a sniper at the top of the church tower. The player could dodge the sniper-fire and avoid the encounter, but if they choose they can climb the tower and kill the undead sod. If they do, they get its rifle.

(This last one gets more on my nerves every time it crops up. If I kill an enemy that’s been attacking me with item A, I want to be able to pick up item A and use it. I do not want it to disappear, or to lie on the ground but not let me grab it, or be mysteriously replaced by another item, usually a health potion that the enemy could have used to stay alive but didn’t. Please. How hard is this, really?)

Games in general have never handled the matter of traders convincingly. Many adventures for tabletop D&D featured poor farming communities in the deepest countryside that somehow supported not only a large tavern but also at least one shop filled with weapons, armour and adventuring supplies. Games like Moria and Angband continued that tradition (Angband starts in a town of eight buildings: three magic shops, two adventurer supply shops, a weaponsmith, an armourer, and your house). Now the twin principles that (a) there must be traders and (b) what they sell must be geared exclusively to the character’s needs (and (c) that they must also be willing to buy any old tat you want to sell them) are so thoroughly set into most games that experienced gamers don’t think twice about it and new players wander around thinking how completely unlike a real, believable town this is.

The Final Fantasy series is a good example of what I call the three-shop town rule (weaponsmith; armourer; magic and provisions), and usually there’s an inn as well for the supply of rumours and bedspace. Final Fantasy has never been about realism—the word ‘fantasy’ in the title is a bit of a give-away—but realism and believability are two different things. And if you don’t believe in a game-world on some level then basically you’re just twiddling your fingers.

I’m not saying, obviously, that every community in every game needs a corner shop, general hardware store, laundrette and Chinese take-away. On the other hand, shops in games shouldn’t just be places to buy and sell goods. Build them into the back story. Build their owners into the story. Ask yourself why they’re there in the first place. Some games do already. Other games just include traders because other games of the same genre include traders. The designers of the latter games need punching.

I will say, as kind of a footnote, that Fable gets it sort-of right. Although most of its towns do only have adventurer-centric shops they also have a feel of bustle and community, you can buy and sell trivialities. But you can also encounter merchants on the road and (this is cunning, so pay attention) they’re almost inevitably either selling hairstyles or tattoos. So if you kill them or if they die while in your company, you shouldn’t be disappointed when their wares aren’t scattered on the ground. That, I thought, showed intelligence and a degree of wit.

Though, on the other hand, an early mission in Fable involves escorting two merchants to Darkwood Camp. Darkwood is full of bandits and werewolves, not a regular trade route in a world that has teleport-gates, and yet when you finally reach it Darkwood Camp turns out to be a three-shop trading village… dependent for its market, one expects, on adventurers lured there by merchants hiring them as escorts. That was the moment I realised that Fable wasn’t a fable, it wasn’t even a good story, it was the usual fantasy hotch-potch nonsense written by someone who Hadn’t Thought It Through, and my heart sank another little bit. Not as far as it sank at the words “Got a selection of good things on sale, stranger”, though. Because there is only one instance where it’s permissible to mix shopping and zombie-horror, and that’s Dawn of the Dead.

I may at some point write up my theory that Fable is Moria with nicer graphics, and Fable 2—in which, as previously noted, you have a dog—will therefore be Nethack with nicer graphics. The theory is mostly balls but it generally gets a laugh and starts a decent pub-debate, and therefore serves its purpose.

Diana Jones Award 2007: short shortlist announced

Posted by under game design

London, 27th June—After much debate the shortlist for the seventh annual Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming, covering the year 2006, has been announced.

The Diana Jones Award is given to whatever the Diana Jones Committee believes has best demonstrated ‘excellence in gaming’ in the previous year. This year the committee has shortlisted three potential winners. In alphabetical order, they are:

The Great Pendragon Campaign by Greg Stafford (White Wolf)
In terms of sheer scope alone, Greg Stafford’s Great Pendragon Campaign breaks new ground, presenting almost a century’s worth of continuous story with gemlike clarity; in almost fractal fashion, any given year can become its own campaign. Its greatest structural successes are those of Stafford’s Pendragon: a superbly compact yet never sketchy adventure format, seamless hard-wiring of characters into setting and continuity, and unprecedented emphasis on epic, generational storytelling. Thematically, it is a triumph of Arthurian art in its own right, the roleplaying form’s equivalent of Tennyson’s ‘The Idylls of the King’ or Wagner’s ‘Parsifal’—a brilliant personal engagement with one of the foundation myths of Western fantasy.

Pieces of Eight by Jeff Tidball (Atlas Games)
In Jeff Tidball’s Pieces of Eight, each player in the game holds a customizable stack of coins in one hand. This represents a pirate ship, complete with captain, and the players do battle with each other by moving and using the coins in their hands to harm other ships and help their own. It’s a perfect example of a game that is simple to learn but fun to play for beginners and long-time gamers alike, it can be played just about anywhere, and it offers layers of customization and strategy found in few games of any kind, as well as an elegance for which all great game designers strive.

Stefan Pokorny, creator, sculptor and painter of the Master Maze line of miniature terrain from Dwarven Forge
Stefan Pokorny is a fine artist by trade who has studied extensively in the US and abroad. He holds a Master’s Degree in Fine Arts from the University of Hartford and he has taught at some recognized fine art schools. For the past 11 years he has been pouring his artistic energies into the creation of the finest miniature terrain in the world—the Master Maze line from his company Dwarven Forge. While his efforts have always garnered much praise, the year 2006 was an especially rewarding year for Stefan and his work. He released three new incredible sets: the Cavernous River and Walls Set, the Cavernous Lake Set and the Medieval Building Set. Each of these is not only an incredible work of art and craftsmanship, but also represents the absolute pinnacle of game accessory quality. They serve to remind everyone of the unmatched artistic work that Stefan has accomplished over the last 11 years.

The award will be announced and the trophy presented on Wednesday 15th August, at a ceremony the day before the opening of Gen Con Indianapolis.

A fuller description of the history of the Diana Jones Award and its extraordinary trophy, plus details of all the previous winners and shortlists can be found at the award’s website, www.dianajonesaward.org

Wondering monsters

Posted by under game design

I’ve spent the last week in the south of France, just outside Aix-en-Provence, drinking Banyuls and wondering why developers wait for a body to go on holiday before flooding him with emails.

It’s been delightful apart from one evening when we were attacked by a scorpion in the house. We were in the kitchen when it pounced, making a brutal lunge for my mother-in-law who was barely able to parry with a frying-pan. I pushed her out of the way, grabbed a breadknife and engaged it in hand-to-hand melee until it finally reared up and I was able to stab its defenceless underside. As it died it dropped a number of gold coins before its corpse evaporated.

Actually it sat in the middle of the tiled floor, not moving at all, until my brother-in-law squashed it with a beach shoe.

Here’s my point: the number of animals that attack people on sight in the real world is nil. (Okay, possibly trained attack dogs.) In video games, it’s all of them except chickens. Whether you’re playing Tomb Raider, Zelda, Oblivion or Fable, animals have a mysterious homicidal urge towards human beings that they don’t have towards their natural prey creatures–a homicidal urge that usually turns out to be suicidal. See the player, attack the player. Whereas elephants, rhinos, bears, lions, tigers, crocodiles and sharks don’t do that. If they’re angered, if they’re scared, if they’re hunting, then yes. But they don’t attack on sight. Not even rabid animals do that.

This is because in the real world animals occupy a niche in a complex environment, and in games they’re a source of XP and treasure. They exist for two purposes: to pose a threat and to be killed. And frankly this is not just unrealistic, it’s also a bit boring. If the only threat they pose is one of violence then your game is sending all kinds of message not only about the world in which it’s set (hostile) but also about the character’s role in that world (violent, oppressed, ultimately as unthinkingly aggressive as the animals he or she is slaughtering on sight).

Let’s have animals that behave like animals, and that force the player to adapt their behaviour to avoid them. Stealth-it-up to avoid a nursing elephant; recognise bear tracks to sneak round where a grizzly is sleeping (we have next-gen technology, we’ve been able to do footprints in snow since the PS1, we can do bear tracks); pursue rare and valuable animals that would rather flee than attack; and more interestingly watch animals for that moment when you get too close and they switch from being wary to charging you. Not that much harder, but much more fun.

London ZOIZ

Posted by under game design

Not my usual post about games and design, but….

A lot’s been said about the just-unveiled logo for the London Olympics in 2012, most of it negative. I feel that it’s not been given a fair crack of the whip. It’s not as bad as people are saying. It’s much worse.
Lisa Simpson giving head
Brand consultancy Wolff Olins was paid £400,000 (US$800,000) to design “an emblem that represented the four key ‘brand pillars’ of access, participation, stimulation and inspiration, culminating in the brand vision of ‘Everyone’s Games’.” Their response to this spectacularly poor brief has been, it seems, to submit the opening titles for a childrens’ sports programme circa 1985 and see if anyone notices before they can cash the cheque.

(Do watch the video. It’s truly horrible, but the guy in the red top playing murderball (wheelchair rugby) is my mate Justin. Things get really retro-dreadful about 1’30″ in.)

It is apparently aimed at ‘young people’, by which I guess Wolff Olins means four-year-olds. “The powerful, modern emblem symbolises the dynamic Olympic spirit,” says the press release, “and its inspirational ability to reach out to people all over the world.” And unite them in hatred at shoddy design.

The thing is, as a nation the UK has an astonishing history of design classics. When it comes to symbols and branding, we stick two fingers up to the world—because, as Winston Churchill showed, that’s all it takes to create an image that can win a war. We have given the world some of its most memorable and elegant typefaces: Times Roman, Gill Sans, and Caslon, to name just three. (In 2003 I won a graphic-design award for a book set entirely in Caslon. It’s that good.) The typeface in the Olympics logo is so anonymous that What the Font has no idea what it’s called.

Four hundred thousand pounds is six and a half pence per UK inhabitant. Not a major amount but a measurable one. I’m pretty sure Churchill never submitted an invoice for the V-sign. One wonders what gesture he’d make to the symbol above.

There’s a petition. You know what to do.

Update: and if you thought that was bad, the Paralympics one is even worse.

At least the blind athletes will appreciate it more than the others.

Cahiers du Cutscene?

Posted by under game design, narrative

Wired has suddenly got a bee under its bonnet about the idea that video games need a critical vocabulary before they can begin to be any good, or at least taken seriously. Annalee Newitz argues that film didn’t flower till the 1940s and it was the publication of French film-crit magazine Cahiers du Cinema in 1951 that allowed audiences to truly understand and discuss how films work.

She’s wrong, for three reasons. First of all an artform that had produced Greed, M, Sunrise, Gone with the Wind, The 39 Steps, Duck Soup, The Wizard of Oz and Snow White is an artform that had clearly already flowered, and certainly didn’t need another ten years and a bunch of French critics to tell it how to do things right. Secondly Cahiers du Cinema has never had any real influence on mainstream American cinema because mainstream American directors have never paid it any attention—not because it’s French but because it’s in French, something that most American film directors believe is a type of mustard or a way of kissing.

And thirdly, narrative games already have a perfectly serviceable critical vocabulary, if they choose to use it. It’s been developed over the last fifteen years or so and is used to describe and discuss those other narrative games, the tabletop roleplay types, notably at places like The Forge. It evolved naturally, is quite developed and I rather like it.

You want Cahiers du Cutscene, go ahead, publish it. Don’t expect to make any money, don’t expect anyone to be grateful, and don’t be surprised when people tell you half the work’s been done before.

Dogs about towns

Posted by under conference, game design, narrative

Over at Extenuating Circumstances Dan Hon has already done an excellent job of liveblogging chunks of GaME 07 (Imperial College, yesterday) so I won’t duplicate his effort. I will say that it was a good day, the talks were of variable quality, and the stand-outs—as you’d expect—were David Braben talking about ‘Creating Games for the Next Generation’, and Peter Molyneux talking about ‘Emotion in AI’.

Braben swiftly junked the idea that better graphics, better sound and more realism are enough to make a next-gen title (as if the success of the Wii and the failure of Motorstorm hadn’t comprehensively proved that they’re not) and talked a great deal about The Outsider. So far as I could tell TO is a free-roaming open-ended urban game in the post-GTA mould, with two important differences:

  1. Game characters react to environment, context and behaviour, not just yours but those of other NPCs. Save a cop’s life, word will spread among cops that you’re okay.
  2. The game starts just after the assassination of the US President, and you may or may not have been the guy behind the rifle.

As we used to say at Bizarre magazine, “Money down.” I’m sold.

Molyneux did a re-run of his much-documented GDC talk about Lionhead’s next game Fable 2, only without the Powerpoint slides because he’d just dropped his laptop and without the game-sound because Imperial College couldn’t make the sound on an Xbox 360 work. Specifically, he talked about the dog. Every player of Fable 2 will acquire a dog. They won’t all be the same dog; they’ll start off looking different, and will grow to resemble their owner as the game goes on. As Molyneux put it: “If you turn out to be an evil bastard, you’ll have an evil bastard’s dog.”

(—Dan had left by this point and I did make a concerted attempt to liveblog the talk, but my laptop died half-way through, despite having been recharged over lunch. Thank you Asus, that’s why I pay an extra £100 for an extended life battery. Honestly, I tried. Sorry.)

The thing is, I went into the talk as a skeptic. We live in a post-Nintendogs world, and putting a cute animal into a plot to elicit player-empathy is a cheap trick. I was expecting to be unimpressed, and twenty minutes in I was a convert. Not an evangelist, mark you. I can see how this can work. I’m not saying it will work, but I think it might.

The dog is more than just a companion and a tool, which were my two fears. (Having said that, it’s a fine companion and tool. It’s been built around the intelligence and training AIs developed for Black & White, plus Molyneux’s Three Laws of Dogotics, and thanks to some nifty graphics work including animating the tongue, ears and tail separately from the main body, looks and behaves like a believable dog. It’s not under the direct control of the player, but of your avatar—this is something I’d been messing with for Frup the day before, in the context of ‘Dei-Ex-Mechanicae‘, which I will describe in a later post—so you make the avatar make the gesture for ‘Bad dog’ and it’ll react and learn from that. And yes, you can issue commands by whistling into the Xbox 360 headset. The dog will also apparently pee on the corpses of your enemies. Like I said, money down.)

But more than that, it’s a lens for the rest of the game-world. The dog is a path-senser, an enemy detector and will fight to protect you, yes, but those are all tool aspects. But game characters won’t just react to you, they’ll react to your dog as well. Even if you’re not a dog person, even if you regard the dog as a game-resource to be optimised, another useful bit of equipment that you don’t suffer encumbrance for… if someone kicks your dog, you’re going to object to that. Because it’s yours. And if Molyneux has got it right and you do feel a sense of emotion towards the dog, then you’re going to feel that kick yourself.

I don’t think this is the solution to the problem of getting players to react emotionally to their experiences in video games, but I do think it’s a start. Like I said a while back, we’re going to spend a long time taking small steps and getting things half-right. (Braben says that, in movie terms, it’s about 1930. I’d say it’s 1925. We’ve found our Keaton and our Chaplin. We’re still waiting for our Welles and our Hitchcock, and talkies.)

For example, I have worries about whether, in a narrative game with a fantasy setting, it’s a wise idea to have the game-element the player cares most about be a dog, and I said as much. Molyneux’s answer was as polished as the rest of his talk but gave me the sense that he’s actively thought about this and built compensating mechanisms into the game. Whether he’s built them into the narrative is another matter.

But… after all, this is a game where the player’s avatar can marry and have children, and we know there will be other dogs in the game too. Can your dog find a mate and have puppies? And dogs have a shorter lifespan than humans… multiple generations of dogs? The whole subject opens up a ton of possibilities, and if there’s one developer who can be relied on to think through the implications and do something interesting with them, it’s Peter Molyneux.

Having said that, if the dog turns out to be a prince who’s been transformed by an evil fairy, I’m going to go down to Guildford and pee on every car in the Lionhead carpark.

A Hiding to Nothing?

Posted by under game design, street games

So Hide and Seek the pervasive games festival happened over the weekend. It was a shame it was such a rainy, vile three days for it. But people seemed to have a good time regardless. And it was interesting to see a games event organised by a group with a primarily theatrical background rather than a more pure game-based approach (I have to wonder how Mind Candy would have done an event like this.)

I won’t go into too much detail about the organisation and structure of the whole thing, because I don’t want to come over as a know-it-all wise after the fact. But I will say that if you’re organising a four-hour game that takes over a hundred players on a chase across London and finishes with a party on the Thames beach below the Festival Pier, you should read the tide tables to check the beach will actually be there.

The last event was a debate about whether “Pervasive Games are the new Punk Rock”. No, they’re not. Don’t be silly. Punk was about spontaneity, ease of access, low barriers to entry and rebellion. It was about this
Now form a band
and this

It was easy, it was cheap, go and do it

It was about doing it for yourself. It wasn’t about getting a grant from the Jerwood Charitable Foundation and putting on a three-day event at the BFI. Pervasive games of this kind have a huge and inherent divide between organiser and audience/players, which is completely anti-punk. Journey to the End of Night could have been a completely autonomous, self-running, more ‘punk’ experience if the organisers had made the chasers simply a different class of player; or it could have been all about the play-experience if the chasers had been more tightly co-ordinated and briefed (functioning as NPCs, to use an RPG term). In the event it fell between… ah, but I said I wouldn’t go there.

Though it’s worth noting thatif anyone’s got a cool arty game-project they want to get off the ground the Jerwood Foundation seems to be a soft touch for funding.

Tomorrow: GaMES

Things to do in game design #1: cheat

Posted by under game design, street games

(This post is a follow-up to “Things not to do in game design #2: cheat“)

Because it’s not about fairness or balance or level playing fields. It’s about the user experience.

Let me tell you about a game you’ve never played. It’s called StarPower.

StarPower was created in 1969 by R. Garry Shirts and published by Simulation Training Systems as an educational game for use in schools, colleges and training situations. It’s a face-to-face turn-based game for 18-35 people that models a simple market-based society. Players draw random counters from a bag and must trade them in order to make combinations that score points. High-scoring players get Square badges, mid-scorers get Circles, low-scorers get Triangles, And from the third turn onwards the Squares can change the rules, altering how the game functions and what players can and can’t do.

What happens, of course, is that the three groups stratify and insularise quickly and the Squares make rules that keep them in the lead and force the other players to continue to lose. The Circles work to consolidate their position in the middle and appease the Squares, and the Triangles begin to feel oppressed, apathetic—or angry.

StarPower is often used to teach historical and sociological principles like class stratification, the abuse of power, and the roots of popular revolutions.

Here’s the big secret-that’s-not-a-secret-at-all: the game is fixed. The draw of the counters is not random. Once the Squares have started to win they will continue to win. Once you’re a Triangle it’s almost impossible to move up a group. StarPower is, by all conventional standards of game design, broken.

In educational-game circles StarPower is a legend.

No matter how liberal the players, the Squares always take advantage of their position, and when the Triangles gets angry, often they get really angry. Though I’ve been unable to confirm it, a senior member of ISAGA once told me about a game of StarPower in an American university where a member of the faculty who’d become a Triangle became so overwrought about the state of play and the abuse of power he was witnessing that he walked up to a member of the Squares and stabbed him.

He didn’t attack the people running the game. He didn’t walk out. He became so involved in the experience that he actually stabbed another player.

How’s that for an emotional response to a game?

I admit that frustration, hatred and homicidal rage are not necessarily the emotions that we as games designers want to create in our players. But still, the designer of StarPower created a game that cheats and managed to focus the players’ resulting feelings not at the game but at the other players. I know I said that two paragraphs up. I’ll keep saying it until the implications sink in1.

Of course games cheat. Computer games have cheated since the original single-player Pong. Of course it’s possible for the computer to play a perfect game of Pong, implacably batting the pill back at you until you falter and miss. But nobody would have played it if it did. So it cheated and missed a few shots on purpose, and voila there’s the games industry.

Because it’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you experience the game. Good experience means repeated plays, more quarters in the slot, whatever. I mean, if I only bought boardgames that I can win I’d have a much smaller collection than I do.

The most obvious contemporary example of cheating is rubber-banding in racing games: letting the AI opponents exceed their supposed top speed and performance so they can catch up with the player. Because racing on your own around a track isn’t nearly as enjoyable, particularly if your vehicle has forward-mounted weapons. Rubber-banding is occasionally frustrating but crucially the player doesn’t feel that the game is cheating. You may suspect it is, or treat the reappearance of an opponent with momentary disbelief, but did the game cheat or did you over-brake on that last corner?

On Friday I played Journey to the End of Night, an urban chase-game that’s essentially British Bulldogs with checkpoints. Players had to race across London via six checkpoints. If they were caught by a Chaser, they became a Chaser. I was a Chaser. Here’s the thing: we started chasing from the get-go, but we deliberately didn’t catch any players till checkpoint 3. Two reasons: too many chasers early on unbalances the game; and secondly it’s not as fun for the players to be caught. Of course, the players didn’t know they were initially safe: they still ran like rabbits (or in one case froze like rabbits) as we swept down on them, yelling. We were—or rather the game was—cheating, but it was a better game for it.

Back in the day when tabletop RPGs were still fresh one of the first big debates to rage was whether rules should emphasise realism or playability. The argument wasn’t just simplicity vs complexity, though that’s often the way it worked out: the perception was that the more complex the game, the closer to verisimilitude it was. There was even one game, The World of Synnibarr, that was so keen on fairness and transparency it insisted that after a scenario was over the GM should give the players his notes, and if they found any discrepancy between the game as written and the game as played they could claim extra experience points for each deviation.

Twenty years on and the argument’s dead, as is the realistic end of the market and thankfully The World of Synnibarr too. Nobody wants realism or player/GM balance in an RPG any more. They want something that models its genre in an interesting and amusing way, and that’s fun whether to play or to GM.

I’m not going to pretend that the roots of all good game design lie in tabletop RPGs—

Bwah hah hah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

oh, I’m sorry…

hah ha ha ha ha ha

heh.

—but every genre of games has lessons to teach and lessons to learn from every other genre. And tabletop RPGs, at least some of them, are very good at using rules to model their genre. So if you’re designing a racing game, what the player wants is racing, and racing needs opponents. If the game has to bend the rules to get them to catch up with you, the good outweighs the bad. Same reason that the player always starts at the back of the grid: it makes for a better game. Not necessarily a more realistic or believable one, but more fun in the long run.

…course, if you’re taking a long run then there’s no need for rubber-banding. Slowcoach.

1 Boardgames, or some of them, draw players in and elicit emotional responses possibly better than any other type of game. Kids kick boards over. I’ve seen a friendship end over a game of Junta. Cat’s parents, diplomats on a foreign posting, once played Diplomacy with the Russian ambassador and his wife: a furious row broke out between the two and they got divorced shortly afterwards. I suspect that the bloom was already off the rose there and the stresses of the game just exacerbated an already damaged relationship, but for the sake of the anecdote I’ll pretend it was down to the ever-tricky problem of controlling the Mediterranean.

 

Things not to do in game design #2: cheat

Posted by under game design

 Yeah, I’ve been playing Puzzle Quest.

The thing is, any single-player videogame actually has two roles. Firstly it provides the player with the context of the game: the setting and set-up. Secondly it provides the player with their opponents. And you, the player, automatically assume that it, the computer/game, is keeping those two things separate. You assume it’s not manipulating the play-space to the advantage of the NPCs you’re competing against. You assume it’s playing fair.

To use a tabletop RPG metaphor, it’s as if the player-characters are facing off against a badass badguy, and in the real world the players are watching as the GM keeps rolling his dice behind his screen and announcing that every single attack’s a critical hit for max damage. The GM can’t do that. The players trust him to play by the same rules he enforces for them. If he breaks that trust he has broken the game, the suspension of disbelief and everything else that makes the RPG experience work.

The difference between that and a video game is the same as the reason why so many businesses make their clients deal with technology rather than people: you can’t argue with a machine, you can only accept its terms or abandon the transaction. (Or hack it, but that’s a whole other nest of worms.) So when a game cheats, or rather when a player perceives that a game is cheating whether it’s actually cheating or not, there’s no way the game—or its designer—can ever win the player back 100%.

Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords (Infinite Interactive, 2007) is a work of genius: a fantasy RPG that uses a slightly modified version of Bejeweled (Popcap, 2001) for combat, spellcasting, gaining experience, item crafting and magic research. Admittedly it’s a work of genius largely borrowed from Puzzle Pirates (Three Rings Design, 2001-2007), which uses modded versions of Bejeweled and other recent arcade classics (Bust a Move, Tetris, etc.) for most of its in-game skill-based tasks, but PQ has one crucial difference: it’s this year’s gaming crack. Removing the twitch aspect of Bejeweled and turning it into a two-player strategy game where the colours of the pieces matter is a jump comparable to the difference between draughts and chess. There are reports of it causing the Tetris Effect in players. It is fantastically good.

I believe it cheats.

I believe it cheats in three different ways. Firstly, I believe the game gives itself better ‘drops’ and more  conveniently timed extra moves than it gives the player. I cannot prove this. Secondly, the captions it flashes up, particularly to announce 4-of-a-kind and 5-of-a-kind lines and their respective rewards, obscure a large section of the play-board. In modes with short time-limits per move (3 seconds, say), this means that the human player cannot see a quarter of the board for a decent portion of their move. However, the computer player can see the board obscured by the caption, and will play on as if it wasn’t there. Thirdly, the magic-resistance percentages are mis-stated. Adversaries with a stated 20% resistance should not be able to turn away a spell 60-70% of the time, but they do.

(I do realise that this is gibberish if you haven’t played the game, and I apologise. Bear with me.)

Point 2 above, may not technically be cheating but it definitely unbalances the play-experience. Admittedly battling against superior opponents is part of what good games are all about, but this doesn’t feel like that, it feels like shoddy design and it is frustrating as hell. Points 1 and 3—I have no idea if the game is actually cheating by design, or whether it’s buggy in a way that favours the AI, or whether I am developing a persecution complex. But I know I’m not alone, to the extent that the game’s programmer has had to issue a public statement saying that no, the AI doesn’t cheat, it’s too stupid to do that.

(I’m just speculating, but… Maybe the opponent AI doesn’t cheat but the world AI, the one that generates the ‘random’ drops, does. If you read Steve Fawkner‘s post above, is it me or is that weasel-wording in there?)

Partly it’s a fault with the way the game is coded. The AI player’s moves, particularly its combo moves, are executed so quickly—and sometimes behind a huge caption—that it’s impossible to tell if they’re valid or not. On the spell-research screen, where the player must rack up a certain number of points before running out of moves, if you lose then the game will just announce that you have no more moves and wipe the board before you can examine it to see yeah, okay, I screwed up. I wittered on about “show, don’t tell” in my big post on story in interactive media a while back. That applies here. Don’t tell us we screwed up, let us see it for ourselves, or we may not believe you.

Puzzle Quest makes it easy for a player to think it might be cheating, because its use of the play-area is not transparent. There are many ways it could have overcome this, but it didn’t. And while that hasn’t stopped me playing the game, it has made me respect it a lot less.

Two points, then:

  • Cheating should never be a substitute for good computer AI. And:
  • If your players think your game is cheating, you did something very wrong.

Coming next: when cheating is good. Coming eventually: that long-promised post on ambient games.