Month: March 2015

Theory: Kigo and Hidden Rules

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This past weekend I had the opportunity to play Jamey Stevenson’s fascinating Kigo. It’s fun, and also an interesting look into the things one can do with digital implementations of board games. Features that are difficult or impossible to incorporate into a board game, like hidden game rules that can only be discovered through play, are completely doable when an analog experience goes digital.

If you follow the link above, you can play Kigo in your browser. There’s a thorough tutorial explaining the game, but basically the goal is to build a tree according to rules inspired by haiku. Getting the tree higher means more points, but also more risk; each turn is timed, and the taller the tree the faster time runs out.

With just the basic mechanisms of play Kigo is essentially a board game, one that could be played with physical pieces and a sand timer. (In fact, I think it would be a lot of fun that way!) However, Kigo’s tutorial includes this fascinating line:

“Rumor has it you can earn even more points through something called a ‘resonance bonus.’ What could that mean?”

That struck me when I first went through the tutorial, and it’s stayed with me since. Board games often have hidden information, but rarely is a whole aspect of the rules locked away to be found through exploration. After all, how would the player know when she had discovered it? In analog gaming players have to be let in on the secret, if only enough to recognize the trigger for the big reveal.

By contrast, in a digital game the computer knows the secret—and how to find it. As a result, the designer can make finding the secret much more satisfying, providing the player with clues without having to give things away at the outset.

Keeping secrets in a digital game is, of course, a problem all its own. Still, I feel that there’s a lot of untapped potential here. I think of digital implementations of board games as providing two things: rules enforcement and easy access to opponents. Kigo suggests one way they can do much more.

Theory: Game Design and Parking Lots

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(Apologies for the weird re-dating of this post. I wanted to add a tag, and either WordPress got confused when I tried to edit a post from some time ago or I pushed the wrong button.)

Game design isn’t just about building better games. It can also be used to think about topics ranging from political strategy to education. During the holidays, we also find out that it can apply to parking lot design.

A mall near my home, like many newer shopping centers, has angled parking. For those who have never seen it, angled parking squeezes the spaces together so that there’s only a single one-way lane between them. The idea is that having the spaces close together is fine, because people don’t need to turn as sharply to get into and out of the spaces. Parking in a normal space involves turning the car roughly perpendicular to traffic, which takes up a lot of room; getting into or out of an angled space never involves being turned more than about 45 degrees, there’s adequate room even with the tighter lane.

Or at least, that’s the theory. In reality angled parking is not always so efficient. People go down the lanes the wrong way, leading to traffic jams. Those accustomed to pulling through discover that when they do so in angled spaces, they either have to go against traffic when they pull out or make a 135-degree turn in a lane not at all intended to accommodate such a maneuver.

Game design can help one see issues like this coming. Designers know that when people are presented with a system, they will often use it incorrectly–not because they are “bad” or inattentive or foolish, but because the system is different from what they’re used to and requires mastery they have not yet attained. Furthermore, designers know that people often misuse systems in predictable ways, trying to do things that worked in the past–e.g., pulling through–even if those strategies are not well-suited to the project at hand.

Game design can also help one build systems that work with their users’ requirements rather than against them. It’s interesting to think about the ideal parking lot, one that has the benefits of angled parking but is proof against the errors people make while using it. Clearer messaging, to encourage people to go down the lanes in the correct directions? Barriers to prevent pulling through? Or something even more imaginative–spaces arranged so that pulling through is actually intended?

Part of the fun of game design is its incredible breadth; there are so many design problems out there to be considered. Mall parking lots are a reminder that many of them don’t look like games at first glance.

Until those problems are solved, be careful while shopping during in late December. 😉

Game Design in the Real World: Prosecutorial Incentives

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I wanted to draw attention to this story in the ABA Journal, in which a former prosecutor explains his missteps in a case that saw an innocent man sentenced to death. Reflecting on his actions and taking responsibility, especially in such a public way, was an act of great courage.

I also think it’s worth noting the comments to that article, several of which talk about the incentives confronting prosecutors. The American Bar Association’s ethics rules for prosecutors include a note that “[a] prosecutor has the responsibility of a minister of justice and not simply that of an advocate,” but the article’s comments describe a variety of factors that might encourage prosecutors to feel that they will be rewarded more for winning than for achieving fairness in a broad sense. We as a society need to make sure that we evaluate prosecutors on their contributions to justice rather than solely on the number of their victories, so that they are supported when they seek good outcomes that don’t involve a jury verdict in their favor.

Hmm. We’re looking for a nuanced scoring system that weighs a number of inputs, most of which have no number or other measurable quantity inherently associated with them, some of them entirely intangible.

Sounds like a job for a game designer, doesn’t it?

Theory: Early D&D as an Indie RPG

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Dungeons and Dragons’ older editions are often treated as progenitors of a genre, historically important but missing key gameplay innovations. Yet, when looked at with fresh eyes the classic versions of D&D reveal themselves to have mechanical and thematic unity, a trait associated with recent trends in role-playing game design. These old games thus have more in common with today’s indie RPGs than one might think.

Over about the last 15 years, a substantial proportion of role-playing games have sought to use their mechanics to reinforce the game’s intended theme. Indeed, this has become an important part of an indie movement in RPGs.* Dogs in the Vineyard, for example, uses poker-style raises to help players think about how far their characters are willing to go to win a conflict. In Polaris, a game about the last defenders of a dying civilization, gaining experience also means being one step closer to succumbing to exhaustion. These games, and others like them, are about something—and their rules meant to drive the point home.

I don’t intend to take up the question of whether aligning theme and rules in role-playing games is a good or a bad approach. That debate has been played out countless times in countless fora. For our purposes here it suffices to say that having mechanics that support a theme is one hallmark—not necessarily the only one or the best one, but a hallmark—of current role-playing game design.

Older editions of Dungeons and Dragons are sometimes criticized as lacking this sort of link between mechanics and theme. These versions of D&D take their cues, it is argued, from The Lord of the Rings; one can play as a ranger like Aragorn, or as a hobbit, or even as a Gandalf-esque wizard, and do the things those characters did. However, the rules are generally focused on combat, with relatively little support for other elements of the LotR story: singing traveling songs, negotiating with the spirits of dead warriors, fighting against the corrupting influence of an evil artifact. The game’s purpose and its rules misalign.

Or so the argument goes. It is fair to say that the early versions of Dungeons and Dragons were combat-focused. Extending that to criticize the games as incoherent, however, is going too far. The early editions of D&D were very good at doing the thing they were specifically designed to do: be games about going into dungeons and fighting dragons.

Paging through the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition Player’s Handbook, one sees this purpose very clearly. Over and over, the rules point toward a game-wide goal of supporting players who want to delve underground seeking treasure. The section on the unique traits of humans, elves, and dwarves specifically notes which species can see in the dark. Gnomes get a call-out for their ability to determine whether a tunnel is soundly constructed or in danger of collapsing. Magic spells for creating light feature in the wizard’s bag of tricks. It’s sometimes said today that when a player puts something on an RPG character sheet, she is signaling that she would like that thing to be relevant in-game; it would be difficult to create an AD&D character whose sheet does not somehow indicate an interest in dungeoneering.

That early Dungeons and Dragons was essentially intended to be about underground fantasy combat, with rules directly supporting that activity, is reinforced by the game’s history. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, the creators of D&D, were wargamers. The very first iterations on what would ultimately become Dungeons and Dragons were essentially squad-based fantasy wargames. D&D grew beyond that, but the early versions of the game reflect a wargaming background and the expectation that combat would be a central aspect of play.

The fact that one could do other things than fight in D&D, even from its earliest days, does not in any respect undermine this argument. Every tabletop role-playing game offers players a wealth of possible options limited only by their imaginations. Being able to do something outside the norm does not make a game incoherent or indicate a divide between rules and purpose. It merely demonstrates that role-playing games, more so than most games, are toolsets that can be put to unexpected uses. Polaris can be approached as an Arthurian romance, and Dogs in the Vineyard could be played as a comedy of manners, but that does not mean either one is somehow broken.

The early editions of Dungeons and Dragons told players what their archetypal activity was, starting with the title, and then presented rules focused on doing that. In many respects those games were old-fashioned or used mechanisms common at the time but largely dispensed with today. With regard to unifying mechanics and theme, however, they tapped into a line of RPG design thinking that would become prominent decades later. They had more indie in them than they, or we, often realize.

* “Indie” is, admittedly, a term whose meaning has been much debated; which games are indie games, and whether there is one indie movement or several, can be hard to say. With that in mind, I think everything that needs to be true for the purposes of this post is uncontroversial: that there is at least one group of people who design RPGs and who want to have mechanics and theme work together.

The Case Study: Sooooo Close Now

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While working on the PC version of Lines of Questioning, I realized that I had incidentally learned how to do everything that had previously prevented me from doing a PC implementation of Over the Next Dune. Since one of my current goals is to get OtND in front of more playtesters, and being able to put a ready-to-play version of the game up for download would certainly help with that, I decided to give it a try.

Currently sitting on my hard drive is a version of the game that works. It’s rules-enforced, although a few rules aren’t implemented yet. It has art–not anything that would win awards, but at least something that demonstrates a theme.

Unfortunately, as of last week the game had two bugs. Absolutely game-breaking, comical bugs. One allowed the enemy to Time Walk the players; the other caused everything to screech to a halt and the game to enter an unrecoverable state.

Today I squashed one of them.

One more bug and the game will be playable, albeit in a cheerfully feature-incomplete alpha state. A few additions past that, and some polish, will have the game ready for speedy distribution to playtesters. At that point we’ll have both a PC version of the game and freely and broadly distributable playtest copies, all in one go. Not bad . . . .

Theory: Knowing Who’s Best Isn’t as Important as Fun

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It’s interesting to read about how sports were officiated years ago, and to compare that with how the same sports handle rules enforcement today. Over time there has been a strong drift toward trying to make sure every call is perfect, and to remove any possible asterisk from the final results. While that’s a worthwhile goal, I think it’s ultimately unrealistic, and pursuing it too far can lead to an inferior experience for players and fans. Better instead to accept that games will always be a slightly imperfect measurement of the players’ abilities, and to emphasize making each game fun rather than trying to turn it into an ideal measuring device for skill.

Historically, umpires, referees, and other people responsible for enforcing a sport’s rules were treated as a part of the game. It was understood that they would be wrong some percentage of the time, and that mistaken calls could affect the outcome just like an unexpected gust of wind or a player getting hurt. To paraphrase Justice Jackson, they were not final because they were right, they were right because they were final. If they made some errors in the course of being “right” with scare quotes, and final without them, well, mere mortals were the only ones available to run our games.

Technology has in many respects freed us from the tyranny of human fallibility in refereeing. We can view plays from different angles, slow them down, and revisit them many times over if necessary. Close calls can now be decided through multiple people’s painstaking examination rather than by a single, rushed observer. Opportunities for mistakes are fewer, and we can say with much more confidence that the players, rather than the rules-enforcers, drove the result of the game.

Yet, this accuracy has come at a cost. Games are slower, sometimes substantially so. As a result, watching professional sports has become, at least for me, a real test of patience; whenever the game starts to develop some momentum the refs head for the replay booth and the thrill is lost. Nor do I think I’m alone in feeling that way; I don’t know how often I’ve heard people bemoan things like TV timeouts, and instant replay has made games longer still.

Although I’ve never spoken to professional sports players about it, I have to think they can grow similarly frustrated as they are dragged out of the moment to wait for a review. Getting into the right mindset is critical in sports. That must be difficult when one is idly knocking about the field, waiting for the game to resume.

Doubtless some games have been won by the more deserving team because of technologically-assisted refereeing. However, I can’t help but feel that in trying to make sure that sports are more accurate, we’ve made them less fun. It’s not fun to wait for the umpires to get the results on a replay. (Whereas by contrast, it can be fun to grouse about blown calls. It’s a grand tradition!) Winning is fun, but winning on a technicality “after further review” when the other team is already dancing isn’t the same. Making sure that the record books are correct is causing us to sacrifice some of the experience on the ground.

In the end, we should accept that sometimes there will be judgment calls that might be made incorrectly. Eliminating those situations has a cost, and–in my view–it is a cost major league sports should not be paying. We watch and attend games for the fun, not for technical precision; let the mistakes be, as they long were, just part of the experience.

A Question for CCG/LCG Players

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Last time I had lots of theoretical questions. This time I have a single, completely practical one.

My understanding has long been that the only acceptable way to shuffle at a CCG tournament is the riffle shuffle. Pile shuffling doesn’t randomize the deck, so it’s useful for checking to make sure a deck has the correct number of cards but is otherwise unhelpful. Side-shuffling (a.k.a. slide-shuffling, mash-shuffling, etc.) allows sleeved cards to stick together and stay together, knifing through the unstuck cards and coming out of the process still grouped. Riffle shuffling randomizes the deck and breaks up clumps, so–so far as I knew–it was the best, and indeed only really acceptable, option.

As a result, I was surprised by this video, which I saw linked on ChannelFireball:

The video demonstrates a side-shuffling technique wherein the cards are held off to one side, so that the player shuffling cannot possibly see the cards.

I understand the value in making sure that people aren’t sneaking peeks while shuffling, but I would be much more concerned about the possibility of an insufficiently randomized deck than I would be about my opponent potentially seeing a card, even an important card. As a result, I feel like I would much rather the opponent be riffle shuffling.

Has the received wisdom on this topic changed?

Theory: Eras of Game Design?

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Are principles of good game design timeless?

In the last post we talked about how the Babylon 5 CCG was a lot of fun, even though it did a lot of things differently from how most games work today. It eschewed elegance in favor of a baroque ruleset, and the game’s cards are text-heavy, more so than is usual in current card games. Was the game fun in spite of its diversions from now-accepted design principles, or was it complying with the standards of a different era?

I’ve been turning that issue over in my mind, and I’ve only ended up with more questions:

1. Has technology created a new era? Imbalances in a game are much more likely to be detected, and optimal solutions are arrived at much more quickly, now that players worldwide can pool data and compare notes. Problems with a game’s design that might never have needed to be addressed in the past can show up very quickly in the internet age. We have seen this dynamic at play with Magic: the Gathering, which actually reduced the amount of information coming out of online tournaments because it was becoming too easy to home in on the best decks.

Yet, it’s always been possible to solve games, or at least to find optimal strategies. The Russian Campaign, a classic Avalon Hill wargame, cheerfully provides the optimal opening positions for the Russians in its rulebook. Players of Starfleet Battles were certain that getting the alpha strike was critical until someone showed that precisely managing one’s weapons to maximize damage over several turns led to better results. Did the internet change the situation for designers, or just contribute to one that always existed?

2. Where is the necessary information? Some game design principles might be contingent on historical factors outside the game rules. For example, I think it’s broadly agreed today that cards should have as much information as possible along the sides, so that the information is visible when the cards are held in a fan. That’s only a rule, however, because most people hold cards that way. Were cards held differently in other times and places? For example, cards might be held vertically so that the tops are visible instead of the sides, leading to a different standard for how cards should be laid out. Where would one find that out? How would one even know to look for it?

3. How universally should the rules be stated? Suppose the rule for cards was not “put information on the sides,” but rather, “put information where it will be visible when the cards are held naturally.” At that point the design rule becomes flexible, able to accommodate regional and temporal variations in how people organize cards in their hands. What design principles can be put in such broad terms? Where they can be, should they be? Or are the idiosyncrasies of each time and place part of what denotes eras of game design?

4. Which rules of design can define eras? “The game should involve interesting decisions” has probably been an important standard for many games throughout history. If there was a time when everyone agreed that games should be boring, it seems like that would represent a distinct era, and we might have to evaluate games from it very differently. What, though, about the information-on-the-sides-of-cards rule? Is that important enough that a change in it would represent a distinct period in game design history?

5. What work has already been done in this area? At times I feel the limits on my knowledge of the academic work in game design keenly. This is one of those times; I’m sure I’m not the first person to think about this, and I wonder what conclusions others have reached.

Theory: Baroque Game Design

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The Babylon 5 CCG was a game about everything.

It’s hard even to begin to explain what players could do in the B5CCG. Each player took the role of an ambassador on a space station, with the goal of accumulating political influence. They could do that through diplomacy, or by intriguing against other players, or via missions of conquest, or with mind-readers who stole valuable secrets, or by generating unrest in opposing factions. Players lent their strength to a budding galactic government, or voluntarily became client-states of ancient powers in return for a portion of their might.

Some strategies revolved around following a single character through his or her story arc–or changing that arc, turning terrible villains into destined heroes or vice-versa. Other strategies were all about building up groups. I mean that literally; there was a card type called “Group,” which gives a sense of just how much was going on in this game.

Votes of the players were common, on every topic from who should gain influence to whether someone should be allowed to play a card from outside the game. Occasionally these votes were rigged through in-game effects. Usually getting a vote passed relied on table-talk.

Games were long, and could be very long. Part of that was just because there was a lot to do; a four-player game might well have five “conflicts” to participate in during a turn, along with playing cards and drawing and otherwise doing card game-y things. Some of the length resulted from the fact that real-life diplomacy wasn’t just encouraged, it was vital. Occasionally a game grew long because of mechanical factors: woe betide anyone who has somewhere else to be if the Shadow War between the ancient powers starts.

In some respects the Babylon 5 CCG is an example of a previous era in game design, when the baroque was more appreciated than the elegant and more detail was considered almost strictly better. This extends from the top-level things one does–even a two-player game involves tracking the influence of five different groups, and basically requires a playmat–to individual cards, a few of which have so much text that they’re difficult even to parse. I still remember a discussion around the table of exactly what “Triple-Cross” did.

Yet, the B5CCG’s intricacies gave it what I can only describe as a rich texture. It felt more like a simulator than like a game, and at its best it was deeply immersive. One plotted and schemed and made deals and broke them, masterminding a rise to power worthy of the television series the game was based on. The mechanics could fall away and be replaced by something more akin to an RPG experience.

One doesn’t really see games like the Babylon 5 CCG anymore. Perhaps that’s for the best; there’s no denying that it was a little frustrating not knowing whether one was sitting down to an hour-and-a-half game or a four-hour one. Still, I sometimes miss that feeling of playing a card game and an RPG at the same time, watching the player to my left manipulate the media while the player to my right tries to keep a fractious alliance of minor worlds together. There’s a lot to be said for simplicity and focus in design. However, the B5CCG taught me that it’s OK to be in the mood sometimes for the ornate.

Theory: Achievements As Communication Between Designer and Player

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I’m a fan of achievements in games. That’s not because of the collection aspect; I’ve never been a completist. Rather, it’s because achievements are a powerful way for the designer to reveal things about the game to players. Done well, achievements help players find fun in the game that they might have missed out on, and thereby get lots of value out of their investment.

We should start by defining exactly what I mean by “achievements.” An achievement is a marker that the player did something noteworthy in the game. The archetypal achievement is publicly available for others to see and does not have in-game effects, but neither of those is a hard and fast rule. The discussion here applies equally to Playstation trophies that can be compared over the Playstation Network but don’t grant any rewards beyond pride, and to Final Fantasy X’s hidden Aeons which will probably only be seen by the person earning them and which confer substantial power.

Knowing what achievements are allows us to consider what they do. Think about them from the player’s perspective. What messages does the player get when she sees an achievement listed?

  1. I can do this.
  2. I will be rewarded for doing it, so I should do this.

Achievements, then, aren’t just a bookkeeping solution for keeping track of how far a player has gotten. They’re also a means of communication, an opportunity for the designer to get outside the strictures of the game to make suggestions about how to play.

Being able to talk to players in that way is very powerful. Normally designers don’t come in the box, and can’t tell people how to get maximum enjoyment out of a game. We have to rely on clues, signals, and the occasional rule to get players on the path toward the best experiences. Achievements are much more direct: they enable designers to say directly “I know where the fun is in this game, and if you do XYZ you’ll find it, too.”

Like all great power, though, there must come with achievements great responsibility. If they can point players toward the fun, achievements can also lead them in unproductive directions. How, then, can we create achievements that work for players?

Achievements Done Right

  1. Incentivize playing the game in an unusual way.

Games are often more open than they appear. Designers and playtesters might find oddball strategies that work, or there might be ways to play that don’t have much to do with the stated goals but are nevertheless interesting. Providing achievements for pursuing these against-the-grain approaches shows players the full range of the game’s options.

Perhaps my favorite examples of this are the speedrun achievements in the last-gen Prince of Persia. (Do we have a name for the PS3/360/Wii generation of games?) Prince of Persia is well-suited to speedrunning, but since the game relies more on careful observation than speed it’s not intuitive to play that way. Having achievements encouraging players to try it thus introduces them to the possibility, and perhaps even to the idea of speedrunning more generally. That’s not bad for a few badges.

  1. Reward exploring the game world.

Many games are big, much bigger than a player who just pushes from start to finish will realize. Achievements for exploring encourage players to seek out all that additional content they might otherwise miss, and to find all the fun that’s waiting for them.

Burnout Paradise is my go-to example for this sort of achievement. Normally Burnout Paradise calls on its players to race through city streets, but the game has lots of out-of-the-way areas players can explore for a change of pace: a dirt track suited to rally racing, a construction yard allowing for some truly death-defying stunts, seaside boardwalks with nice views. I can say from personal experience that finding each of those areas and seeing what they had to offer was a lot of fun, and I’m sure I would have missed some without achievements hinting that they were out there.

  1. Encourage players to achieve mastery.

Achievements can drive players to push the bounds of what’s possible and to strive for new heights of skill. Does the player know how to do a combo? Does the player know how to do a 100-hit combo? Creating an achievement for the latter pushes players to learn about the combo system and experiment with new ideas, and ultimately to experience the joy of attaining mastery.

Of course, there’s no reason why only fighting games can have these skill-driven achievements. Burnout Paradise has an achievement for getting a huge stunt multiplier by chaining many more stunts together than is necessary to win any given event. That achievement kept me wrapped up in Burnout Paradise for a very long time, and the sense of satisfaction when I finally got it is one of the highlights of my gaming life.

Achievements that take away from the fun

It’s worth noting that each category of good achievements has its dark side. Prince of Persia’s speedrunning achievements work because that game has precise controls and well-done movement; by contrast, an achievement for doing something possible-but-frustrating would be problematic at best. Similarly, achievements based on exploring will be irksome without something worth doing or seeing when the players get there.

Fortunately, both of those are rare. Much more common, in my experience, is the achievement that purports to reward mastery but actually encourages boring, repetitive play. If getting X headshots is a demonstration of skill worthy of an achievement, a further achievement for 5X headshots is probably just keeping the player from trying something new and exciting. Calibrate achievements to the point of mastery, and then stop providing them for that particular skill so that the player is incentivized to explore a different part of the game.

Achievements as a marketing tool

I’m not a marketing expert, but I think it stands to reason that players who have a lot of fun with a game, and find the game to be a good value, are likely to buy further products from the same creator(s). Good achievements are helpful in both of those areas. Players who have spent lots of time getting each and every one of many well-designed achievements, enjoying everything the game has to offer along the way, probably feel like they received good value from their gaming purchase. Hence, they’re apt to look at future works from the same person/studio/company/etc. more favorably.

It’s impossible for me to talk about this without going back to Burnout Paradise. (Yes, I like Burnout Paradise a lot.) Completing all of its in-game achievements took years; I played many other games along the way, but always came back to Paradise City to make a little more progress—and every time I did I had fun, because Burnout Paradise is a great game and its achievements do an excellent job of pointing out neat things to try. I now pay attention when Criterion releases a new racing game, because they’ve proven capable of creating something remarkable.

Achieving good achievements

Designers can use achievements as more than just a way to mark progress through a game. They are a valuable means of signaling to players what they should be doing, activities that might be fun to try, places they should take the time to visit, and areas where there’s room to explore the game’s systems and improve their skill. In doing those things achievements can help ensure that players enjoy the game and get as much value as possible out of it, which will encourage them to look for future games from the same designer. Achievements are thus an important tool, one that should be used thoughtfully.

Also, everyone should play Burnout Paradise.