Something Completely Different: Shifting Gears

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I’ve got a big announcement today. Starting in the fall I’ll begin a game design MFA at NYU!

Needless to say, I’m very excited. When I was a junior in college, my girlfriend asked me if I wouldn’t rather be studying something related to games rather than what I was doing. I responded that, unfortunately, a career in games wasn’t really accessible to any but a lucky few. Times have changed, and when that same woman—now my wife—renewed her suggestion, I decided the time was right to make the leap.

As you might imagine, there’s a lot involved in the transition between careers. Furthermore, I don’t know yet what my schedule is going to be like come the fall. It might therefore become necessary to change the update schedule. If so, you’ll see that here.

Thanks for joining me on my journey through game design up to this point. Here’s to the next leg of our trip!

Theory: Advice for Teaching Games

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Little, if anything, has more impact on a new player’s experience of a game than how it is taught. Poor teaching sends the player into the game confused, bored, or flatly annoyed, all but guaranteeing a weak experience. By contrast, good instruction encourages active, interested participation—and ultimately more fun.

Below are some lessons I’ve learned over the years about how to teach games. They’ve consistently been true across different groups; I’m absolutely confident that they’ll work for you as well.

1. You can do it. I’ve occasionally heard people say that they “can’t teach.” That’s not true! Anyone who can read aloud from the rulebook can teach a game. Everything after that is refinement of technique. The thoughts below will help you get started.

2. One voice. Decide who’s going to teach the game, and then let that person speak, beginning to end. “Helpful” comments and suggestions are usually just confusing for the learner; they divide attention and break up the logical flow of the instruction. If at the end the person teaching has missed a rule, mention it to the instructor.

3. No advice. Rules instruction should be entirely about rules, with no tactical tips. New players have enough to do grasping how to play. Adding how to play well on top of that does them no favors.

3a. No advice during play, either, unless it’s requested. The first play of a game—and sometimes the second and third plays, for complex games—are part of the learning process. New players often need to explore what moves are legal in a concrete way before they can grapple with strategy. Refrain from adding the strategic dimension too early.

If the new player does request advice, stick to generalities and legalities. “In this situation you can do X, or Y, or Z. All of those moves have potential, depending on what you want to accomplish.” Letting the new player make decisions is critical; it’s not fun to feel puppeted about.

(3) and (3a) are especially important, in my experience, when men are teaching women. I have noticed that men are much more likely to give very specific, “you should do this” advice to women—and that the women usually resent the being patronized in that fashion. If you don’t give advice unless requested, and stick to generalities when it is, you’ll be fine.

4. Find out whether the new player wants a comprehensive overview, or to learn-as-you-go. Some people get frustrated when they’re partway through a game and are told “actually, you can’t do that;” others are annoyed by having to wait through long rules explanations. Ask specifically what the new player wants, so that you can provide it. If you’re teaching a group, try to get a consensus; failing that, use your best judgment as to which approach is better.

4a. Have a plan for both methods. Teaching in the classroom has shown me that there’s no substitute for preparation. Think through, at the very least, the order in which you’re going to present information. If you’re not sure, following the rulebook is most likely fine.

4b. For “lifestyle” games, default to learn-as-you-go. Warmachine has, I would estimate, about 100 pages of rules. Trying to teach a new player all of them is madness; even someone with a photographic memory would be hard-pressed to grasp everything that was going on. If the game is clearly too complicated to teach all at once, don’t even offer that as an option; just launch into the learn-as-you-go style.

Keep in mind that choosing this option dictates certain things about the game to be played. It’s not OK to tell someone they’re going to learn on the way, and then seed the experience with gotchas that will leave them feeling helpless or like their decisions were unimportant. By committing the other player to go in with incomplete information, you commit yourself to making that information sufficient.

5. Stop after each topic and ask for questions. People often don’t feel comfortable asking about things that have confused them, because they don’t want to interrupt or don’t want to look foolish. Explicitly giving them opportunities for questions makes it clear that (1) this is a good time and (2) having questions is reasonable.

Of those, I would especially emphasize “one voice” and “no advice.” I see those principles violated constantly, and it never works out. Stick to the points above, and your rules teaching will go much more smoothly.

Theory: Contests

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First, I wanted to follow up on last time’s post regarding Twitter by noting Eric Lang’s “TCG Design 101” tweets. Each one is a superb distillation of years of design experience. They’re the kind of content that makes Twitter so valuable to designers, and are well worth checking out.

Unfortunately, sometimes one isn’t inspired to create the next great TCG—or much of anything else, for that matter. When that happens to me, I often check out game design contests. They’re very useful for breaking through mental blocks, getting out of comfort zones, and generally putting the creative engine into gear.

Contests provide two invaluable things to designers searching for inspiration: a seed (e.g., “a game involving kings and queens” or “dexterity game”) and a deadline. The value of the former is plain. In game design as in writing, one of the most challenging parts is facing a blank page and having to narrow down the universe of ideas. Having a requirement to work from makes things a lot easier.

Imposing a deadline, too, ought not be underestimated. There’s nothing better for forcing movement, for getting past speculation and starting to design. When you’re in a rut an impetus to do something now can actually be very helpful.

There’s a range of contests out there, formal and informal, some with long histories. I’d encourage anyone looking to get past a roadblock, or improve their skills, or get some feedback, or just to try their hand at the art of design to give one a try.

Something Completely Different: Concrete Uses for Twitter

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Designers are often told that they should have a Twitter presence; they’re less often told why it will be useful and what they can expect to get out of it. That’s not a very compelling way to make an argument, so I thought it would be useful to be more specific about what Twitter has to offer. It turns out to be a pretty valuable tool–albeit one with some important limitations.

Below are some concrete advantages I’ve derived from Twitter. I don’t use it as actively as others, and based on my experience I would say that anyone can get these benefits with very little investment.

1. Tips and advice. There are great designers on Twitter who post about what they’ve learned, either directly or as links to articles. Reading their messages is a bit like sitting in on a conversation between masters of a craft; just listening can be informative.

2. Updates from organizations & people (that send out updates on Twitter). The Unpub group advertises local playtesting opportunities on Twitter. Cardboard Edison points out quality articles. Some designers use Twitter to announce when their latest games go to press.

3. Advertising. I’ve gotten some readers who found my posts on Twitter. (Welcome!) Posting there is a quick, free way to reach a broader audience when you feel you’ve created something—a game, an article, a podcast episode, a forum post, etc.—of general interest.

Of course, like any tool Twitter has its limits. These are the ones I’ve encountered or become aware of; I’m sure others have found more.

1. Difficult to build substantial relationships. You’ll note that “get to know people and make new connections” doesn’t appear on the list above. I haven’t found Twitter especially useful for that purpose, although that might be a function of my relatively limited use of the platform. As a general matter I would say that Twitter is more useful for finding people you want to build a connection with than it is for actually creating that connection.

2. Not everyone updates on Twitter. It’s still necessary to check many websites individually. Twitter can be a useful aggregator, but it’s not a one-stop shop.

3. The fuzzy boundary between chatting and marketing. In a field where successful designers become to some extent brands unto themselves, the line between personal statements and official ones can be very thin. It’s vital to think about how a tweet might be interpreted by readers, and how those interpretations might reflect back on your work.

4. Hostility and harassment. Although these are, thankfully, not part of everyone’s Twitter experience, they do occur. I wouldn’t blame anyone who looks at recent events and decides that they’d rather not expose themselves to an anonymous public in such an unmoderated way.

Despite the platform’s weaknesses, I think it’s worth having a Twitter account. Even a dummy one under a pseudonym is enough to follow along, which allows one to get benefits (1) and (2). The key is to find a way to interact with the platform that ensures one gets the advantages without running afoul of its pitfalls.

In the Workshop

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I’ve been in the workshop recently, prototyping something new. The project is in the very earliest stages and subject to enormous changes/complete scrapping, but I’m excited about it. Much of the fun of game design is the beginning, when you can imagine that an idea will work smoothly. 😉

(Mental note: “in the workshop” sounds much better than “at an old desk in the utility room.”)

This game’s concept is no more than two weeks old, which means that not only is it possible to prototype it, it’s high time to do so. Many if not most design problems cannot be solved just by envisioning how a game will play. Only putting the game on the table will tell you how it’s really going to work. As Yogi Berra put it, “[i]n theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.”

Now, back to the workshop. I still need to finish up some cards . . . .

Theory: Add Instead of Subtracting

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Sometimes game design is about filing down rough edges, implementing things in ways that remove small but irksome play issues. I’ve run into one opportunity to do that recently: it’s often better to add than to subtract.

This might seem pretty trivial; after all, addition and subtraction are basic skills everyone learns in elementary school. However, it turns out that subtracting can lead to weird rules issues. Rather than have to deal with them, it’s often better to see if the same effect can be achieved through addition.

By way of example, consider a game where players roll dice and try to get above a certain number. (In other words, the vast majority of games with dice in them!) As the designer, you’ve decided that in certain situations the player should be less likely to succeed. Should you subtract from the player’s roll, or add to the total needed?

From a mathematical perspective, the two might be exactly the same. Subtracting, however, can create problems in extreme circumstances. What if the total of (roll – penalty) is less than zero? Does that have meaning?

Don’t laugh—it’s possible that a negative result could. In an economic game, for example, negative cost might serve as a way to reflect economies of scale. In a wargame based on ancient Greece, where morale was the most important factor for a defending army, a negative attack value might represent an attack so weak that it actually reinforces the defenders’ confidence in themselves.

If a roll of less than zero doesn’t have meaning, how exactly will it be handled? The value could just stop at zero, with a rule that it’s impossible to go lower. In that case it becomes necessary to address order-of-operations issues; if there are both penalties and bonuses to a roll, canny players might apply them so that some of the penalties are “wasted” by the not-below-zero rule.

At least one game I’ve played tried to avoid that problem by tracking negative values, but treating them as zero; the negatives only came into effect when a bonus tried to bring the total back up. The resulting system was mathematically workable, but somewhat hard to explain to new players. “You’re actually at -2, but we play like it’s 0, unless you try to increase it, in which case it’s -2.” Wrapping one’s brain around that while also trying to keep track of the basic game rules was not trivial.

Compare all of that to what happens if we just add to the total needed. In the abstract, that raises absolutely no rules questions. Nor can I think, offhand, of any specific game where it would.

Sometimes a game has to have subtraction. Keep in mind, though, that subtraction has a certain measure of built-in complexity. Where possible, use the mirror-image addition instead; it’s probably equally intuitive, and it will usually avoid creating FAQ entries.

Theory: The Redemption of All-Chat

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It’s an article of faith that all-chat is a cesspool. That reputation is richly deserved. However, it’s not a given that channels for communicating with players on other teams will only ever be used for flinging insults. Global chat channels can work in games designed around them.

Let’s start by laying out the problem to be solved. As a rule, all-chat—that is, a communication mechanism in online games that allows every player in a game or match to talk to each other—is silent at best and hurtful at worst. It says something that one of the first things League of Legends did to curb unpleasantness in its playing community was to set all-chat to “off” by default. Perhaps more remarkable, MMOs now allow players to opt out of their global chat channels. That’s how bad the situation is: an entire genre built on the social aspects of gaming has to let players shut down a primary means of socializing because it’s so awful.

What would it take to make all-chat good? There are two things I can think of:

  1. A good all-chat has a gameplay purpose. Everything in a game should have a gameplay purpose. Social features used to get a pass on that, on the theory that more ways for players to talk to each other automatically made for a better overall experience; time has put the lie to that belief. If all-chat is going to be rescued it will have to earn its place.
  2. All-chat needs players to be reasonable when using it. Making all-chat in its current form central to a game would make that game the least pleasant thing on the internet. For it to be beneficial the messages that go through all-chat must be free of the lowest-common-denominator vitriol so common today.

We can discuss each of those in turn.

The simple part: making all-chat important to the game

The former problem is relatively easy. Opposing parties talk with each other all the time, and there are plenty of ways to bring that into a game. Negotiation, for example, can be a centerpiece of strategic play; Diplomacy is a sufficient proof of that. For a sneakier version of communication, a wargame might include the concept of sending false messages to the enemy, or an economic game could involve market manipulation. Co-ops and team games often demand synchronized effort. Semi co-ops involve lots of talking as players try to balance their personal goals with the group’s needs. There’s no kind of game that can’t be built so as to encourage the players to talk to each other.

The hard part: kinder communication

It’s the latter issue, that of achieving good behavior, that’s the tricky one.

Solution 1: Put the players in an environment where dominating others isn’t the goal.

Keith Burgun recently presented an interesting argument that a game’s thematic elements affect how players view what they’re doing, and by extension how they interact with each other. When players are told in advance that the goal is to have fun together, he explains, they generally act in ways that are consistent with everyone having fun. He cites as an example his very different experiences in games with different art styles; players were nicer to each other in Team Fortress 2 than in Counter-Strike, even though they’re both violent games, because TF2’s cartoonish visuals emphasized that everyone was there to have a good time.

It’s when players are told that the goal is to dominate and harm others, Mr. Burgun argues, that they adopt language to suit. “[W]hile a player is operating in a world of violence, he is more likely to think violently.” (emphasis omitted) Players naturally respond to a game that tells them to hurt the enemy by trying to do so in every way they can, cruel words included.

Mr. Burgun’s theory points toward games that are built from the ground up to send specific messages: that winning doesn’t require achieving power over the other players, that the overall project is fun rather than in-game success, that other players are co-participants in the overall project and should be treated as valued teammates rather than as obstacles. Global chat could work fine in such a context. Without the nudge toward unpleasantness that comes from a violent theme, most players will default to a reasonable mode of conversation. Outliers will hopefully be few, and easily dealt with.

Solution 2: Effective deterrence.

There are games that don’t look at all like Mr. Burgun’s ideal, and yet the conversation manages to be civil. Diplomacy is again my go-to example. It’s a wargame that’s expressly about conquering Europe and eliminating players, but it’s unusual to run into someone who’s openly nasty. By and large people are cordial, even when they’re stabbing each other in the back and overrunning each other’s territories. Why does Diplomacy work?

Here’s my theory: Diplomacy, along with Twilight Imperium, the Game of Thrones board game, and others of their ilk, has the most effective deterrence around. In fact, Diplomacy has a level of deterrence that the criminal law envies! The structure of the game ensures that players who want to be mean are powerfully and reliably discouraged from doing so.

I recognize that that’s a pretty bold claim, so let me back up and discuss this more fully. Deterrence requires at least three things: (1) there is a rule you want people to follow, (2) people know about the rule, and (3) people are more afraid of the consequences of violating the rule than they are eager for the rewards to be had from doing so.

(1) is trivial. (2) is very much not trivial. New laws, highly technical laws, laws about unusual issues–all of these can have a weak deterrent effect simply because people don’t understand what’s forbidden or don’t think to ask whether there’s a law on point. Still, for our purposes we can assume that (2) is easily achieved in the context of rules about “don’t be a jerk on the internet;” everyone’s been told not to be unkind at some point.

(3) is the hard one. This is for a couple of reasons. First, humans discount the threat of punishment by the chance that it won’t happen. Put simply, people aren’t afraid of violating rules when they think they can get away with it. The greater the odds of getting away with it, the weaker the deterrence.

Second, humans aren’t very good at weighing future events against current ones; we tend to discount future harms based on how far away they are. The longer it will take for punishment to happen, the less we tend to care about it.

These foibles make it harder for the criminal law to achieve its deterrent purpose. Every time somebody goes to break a law, they implicitly weigh the consequences against the ideas that (a) they might not get caught and (b) the price of getting caught will be paid at an indeterminate point in the future, whereas the rewards will be here promptly. As the continued existence of crime demonstrates, some people do that calculus and come to a regrettable conclusion.

Diplomacy, on the other hand, creates an environment where those human failings aren’t given much room. The negative consequences of being nasty to other players happen right away and are extremely predictable. Negotiations break off; other players won’t provide the assistance necessary to progress; the game ends in swift defeat. The whole process takes a few hours at most.

As the theory of deterrence predicts, that leads to most Diplomacy players being polite. Tempers can flare and the gameplay is often vicious, but the kind of hateful, profanity-laden speech one finds in online games is absent. It’s remarkable: Diplomacy is basically built around all-chat, but it doesn’t sound like the all-chat we’ve come to know and disdain.

Compare this to games that try to achieve deterrence by having rules in the Terms of Service and banning users who break them. They suffer from the very problems of uncertain and distant punishment that the criminal law does, with the added weakness that banning isn’t nearly as severe as what the criminal law can impose. The sad reputation of all-chat is in part due to the fact that the deterrent effect in these games is very weak indeed.

From Diplomacy and similar examples I think that deterrence can be an effective mechanism for promoting good communication behavior in games. However, strong deterrence isn’t achieved simply by hiring some mods. It requires that the game be designed from the ground up to have a short feedback loop that consistently discourages unkindness.

Build from the right foundation

We’ve learned from sad experience that all-chat isn’t something that can be tossed on top of a game. The results are unsatisfactory, to say the least. However, global chat could be a valuable, positive thing. A game designed with the needs of all-chat in mind from the beginning, tuned in such a way as to bring about friendly communication, could elevate the global channel from cesspool to centerpiece.

Catching Up

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I’d fallen grievously behind on responding to comments over the past few weeks, so my work on the site today was devoted to remedying that situation. My apologies for the long delay!

I also added two new links, to Dave Sirlin‘s and Keith Burgun‘s websites. Both have a more theoretical bent than most, and are invaluable resources for people looking for that kind of information.

Inquiring Minds Want to Know: Gating Power Behind Mechanical Skill

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A while ago designers at Riot Games suggested that they didn’t intend to make the more mechanically difficult characters stronger. They viewed mechanical difficulty as an opt-in experience for those interested in that particular kind of challenge.

On the other hand, fighting games often make the harder-to-play characters the strongest ones. The Street Fighters series’ Yun and Guilty Gear’s Zato-1 are both top-tier characters–in some versions of those games, dominant characters–who are very difficult to pick up.

I’ve been struggling with which approach is better for a while, and I haven’t come to any firm conclusions. Certainly I find Riot’s position appealing; it’s not obvious that mechanical challenge directly equates to interesting decisions. Furthermore, when the mechanically difficult characters are better they inevitably rise to the top of the tier lists; players will practice as much as they need to to access their power. However, Jay has reminded me previously that getting the mechanics down is part of the fun for some players; they are attaining a kind of mastery that’s important to the game, and perhaps they should be rewarded for it.

Are games with a mechanical component inherently so focused on the physical requirements of playing that we should reward players who are the best at them? Or are mechanics just a buffer between a “real game” that plays out in decisions and a “physical game” that we want to reflect the real game as perfectly as possible?

Theory: Playing Isn’t Working

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Being a good game designer involves having a reasonable familiarity with existing games. Every kind of artist learns by studying the works of others, after all. It’s important to recognize, however, that playing other designers’ games is not the same as doing design work. To make real progress, design time needs to be spent hammering away at one’s own games.

One of the perils of game design, I’ve found, is that research can be an awful lot of fun. Part of how I learn about fighting games is by playing them–and I really like fighting games. So too for wargames, worker-placement games, co-ops, semi co-ops, deckbuilders, and on and on. Learning is fun, because “have fun with this” is the default way to interact with the medium.

So far, so good. The danger is that it can feel natural to flip the equation around, turning “learning is fun” into “fun is learning.” From the latter statement, it’s easy to arrive at “having fun is also doing work.”

Unfortunately, that last position is wrong. Playing other people’s games might help one refine ideas for one’s own games, or be a source of inspiration, or demonstrate a useful technique. It will never, however, bring one’s own games into actual physical existence. It will never playtest them or write their rulebooks or do any of the other things that need doing to make one’s own games happen. Having fun isn’t doing work; it’s taking one away from the tough stuff.

This doesn’t mean that a designer should only work, leaving no time for play. Experiencing other designers’ games can be very valuable. Again, no artist would be expected to practice in a vacuum, ignoring the masterworks of his or her field.

What it does mean is that play time and work-on-own-designs time need to be kept separate. Don’t set aside two hours to work on a project, and then spend them playing Flower “to learn about non-conflictual games.” Play Flower during free time, and put those two hours into creating the next generation of non-conflictual gaming.

It’s often said that ideas aren’t worth much in game design, because lots of people have them; what’s rare and valuable is the follow-through to make an idea into a publishable game. Getting into a “playing = working” mindset is an easy way to end up on the wrong side of the ideas/follow-through divide. Play, definitely play–take it from a lawyer, making some time for not-work is a good idea–but recognize that playing doesn’t move one’s own designs forward, and keep the time for that latter goal sacrosanct.