Category: Game design theory

Theory: Learn from the Worst Game

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Rudolf Wanderone, a professional billiards player, once said, “[y]ou don’t learn from smart people, you learn from idiots. Watch what they do, then don’t do it.” While that’s obviously not advice to be taken literally, there are certainly lessons to be learned from the worst games.

There are a lot of lists of “worst games” out there, and everyone has their choices. I’m a little older, so my #1 worst is a PC game from 1994. Everyone, please welcome . . . Outpost!

Outpost is a great game to study because it doesn’t just do one, critical thing wrong. Instead, it makes a bunch of mistakes, all of them different and potentially interesting.

Let’s dig deep on just one of them: the unguided choice of where to go. Early on the player is supposed to decide which star system to travel to—but as the review points out, the data meant to inform that decision is so opaque as to be useless. The player is thus reduced to picking at more or less at random and hoping for the best.

Experience garnered from many games shows that randomness can be entertaining. However, a single random event that can end the game if you get unlucky isn’t a fun implementation. Like a badly-done RPS mechanic, a one-and-done random choice that decides the game at its very beginning isn’t a good experience.

If that were the only sin Outpost’s early game committed, it would be damning. However, things only get worse when one factors in the promises mentioned in the video—that Outpost was to be based on real science, with the choice of where to go based on legitimate astronomy. Trying to live up to that promise likely ate up development time that could have gone into making the game playable. Certainly it built excitement that turned into disappointment when the game hit the shelves. Outpost established expectations, and then didn’t meet them.

Finally, consider the problem the review cites regarding the process of supplying your vessel: you don’t know where you’re going, so you don’t know what you need. What should be an important decision thus becomes an exercise in frustration, almost in being mocked. The game asks the player to make decisions based on information the player can’t possibly have or acquire.

Outpost gives us three examples of things not to do in the very first thing the player does. That’s a pretty good time-to-lessons ratio! If you’re looking for a game that can teach you what not to do, give Outpost a try.

Or maybe don’t. It’s terrible. Just read up on it. 😉

Theory: The Limitations on the Rules

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I propound a lot of rules on this blog, and I present them as things you should always do. However, it’s important to recognize that they are not necessarily immutable or universally applicable. While I don’t believe rules are made to be broken, I do believe that they need to be properly understood—and that means giving due weight to their limitations.

One might reasonably ask why it is that game design rules aren’t as reliable as, for example, the laws of physics. I can see at least four reasons:

1. Game design rules are sometimes in tension, and so it might not be possible to follow all of them at once.

Wargames are called upon to provide reasonably accurate simulations of the conflicts they’re based on. That often means putting in some period detail. Fire in the Lake is a good game about the Vietnam War for many reasons, and among them is how it incorporates actual events and issues to create a you-are-there feeling.

At the same time, elegance is usually seen as an important design goal. Just as too much chrome is bad for the look of a car, too many special cases and deviations from the general pattern is bad for a game experience.

Top-flight wargames can balance these two considerations, detail and elegance, but they will always be in conflict. It’s just not possible for such a game to pursue either elegance or historicity to their fullest extents; doing so will prevent the game from achieving its broader goals. The design rules have to bend.

2. Sometimes you get more by breaking a rule than you do from following it.

League of Legends is arguably the most popular game in existence today. It also, as its VP of Game Design points out, breaks the rules sometimes. That’s not because League’s designers don’t know the rules; it’s because they recognize circumstances where they can get more than they give.

As a non-League example, think back to the Babylon 5 CCG. The B5CCG was probably “wrong” to have lots of off-card states to track. However, those states created levers cards used to impact the table-talk at the heart of the game. B5CCG broke a rule because doing so was important to that specific design.

It may be that this is just a subset of the previous situation; the B5CCG may actually have been following a rule (perhaps one as yet unelucidated) when it added meters that had to be tracked on a playmat. However, I think the question of “should I break this rule, given that I’ll get a lot of benefits” comes up often enough to deserve its own entry. If the cost-benefit analysis supports it, the answer is “yes.”

3. We know that some games break rules and get away with it.

An act that contravenes the laws of physics is going to have big problems, but we know from experience that games can break the rules of design and be a lot of fun. Maybe that means they’re following deeper rules than we’ve yet discovered; maybe that means the rules are mere guidelines. Either way, there’s clearly a limit to how much respect the rules of design are due.

4. I don’t know everything.

The fact is that I’m learning as I go. Sometimes I’ll have an incomplete understanding, and thus propound an incomplete rule; sometimes I may just turn out to be wrong. Rules are best when they’re made by the best, and I’m not there yet.

Try letting go

I like rules. I think they’re useful. I’ll even go so far as to say that I believe in their power and utility.

However, the rules of game design aren’t as ironclad as the rules of science. Perhaps that’s because they can’t be; perhaps we simply aren’t as far along in our understanding of them. Either way, it’s always worth keeping in mind that the rules may not be leading you in the right direction. Recognize their limitations, and allow yourself the freedom to—judiciously—break them.

Theory: Avoid Thematic Mismatch

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We shouldn’t judge books by their cover, but we expect the cover to tell us something about what’s inside. Similarly, a game’s theme sets expectations about what it will be like. What’s more, just as we’re disappointed when a book turns out to be other than what its cover advertised, players are apt to be frustrated when a game’s play diverges wildly from its theme. It’s therefore important to make sure that a game’s experience and theme align, lest players be put off of otherwise good products because they weren’t what was expected.

I saw this issue crop up when playing Ryu. Ryu is absolutely plastered with dragons. There’s a giant dragon on the box, dragons on the player screens, even big dragon meeples! Everything about this game screams dragons.

Pause for just a moment and think about what you would expect to find in a game about dragons. Fire-breathing, maybe. Accumulating a hoard of treasure. Doing battle against knights.

Ryu has . . . visiting islands. It also features a simple economy (expressed through wooden cubes). One wins by building a mechanical dragon.

Not fighting with the mechanical dragon. Not breathing fire with the mechanical dragon. Building the mechanical dragon.

There’s nothing wrong with a building a mechanical dragon, and after playing Ryu I found that the game actually had some interesting things going on. A key dynamic in my play-through was acquiring enough materials to build sustainably without having so many as to be targeted by thieves. Judging when opponents would push the thieves into motion, and how to spend enough to avoid being a wealthy target while saving enough to maintain a critical mass of economic power, was interesting.

However, I couldn’t help but be disappointed as the game drew to a close. I had so very much expected excitement, and I got something awfully dry.

By contrast, Agricola’s box is very clear about what the game is going to be—a family-friendly take on farming. No one ever bought it only to be frustrated when the play didn’t match the cover!

Not every game is a thrill-a-minute affair, and those that aren’t are better off without themes that establish expectations they can’t meet. In the same way, pulse-pounding games will find it harder to attract their desired audiences with sedate art. Choose a theme that works with the game’s play; your players, and by extension you, will be happier for it.

Theory: Blame Your Losses on Yourself

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You don’t need to be a great player to be a great designer, but it does help to play your own games reasonably well—if only so that you can participate better in playtesting. To achieve that, ask what you could have done differently after a loss. The answer to that question will be much more useful than grumping about external factors that may have contributed to your defeat.

Admittedly, it’s sometimes very hard to put a loss on your own shoulders! The temptation to blame the dice, or the cards, or your opponent’s cheesy strategy, can be strong. It’s especially so when the dice were objectively lopsided (don’t trust your memory on this! Write rolls down.).

However, saying “the dice got me” doesn’t tell you anything about your game. That feedback merely teaches that sometimes dice come up with unwelcome numbers at inconvenient times, which is hardly new information.

Taking the emphasis off of the dice, and putting it first and foremost on what you could have done, forces you onto a line of thinking that’s much more likely to end in useful design insights. Was there another strategy you could have pursued, one where the rolls you got would have been sufficient? If so, is that a strategy you want players to rely on when the chips are down? If not, does that point to a design problem, or are you willing to accept that sometimes players will lose despite having made good choices? All of those are much more useful things to think about than “dice sure do hate me sometimes.”

Of course, focusing on yourself instead of on random factors is also a great way to build skill in general—and that will further strengthen your testing. As you improve at a game, or at games writ large, you’ll be able to be say with greater confidence that a different strategy would have worked better, or that you really had no alternatives. There’s no faster or more reliable way to get to skill worthy of reliance than to put your own decisions through the wringer.

Ultimately, asking questions about your own play is a kind of quality assurance for the conclusions you’re reaching about your game. It helps guarantee that you’re identifying the right problems. You’ll find that a valuable contribution; after all, you can’t arrive at correct solutions any other way.

Theory: Test with a Random Robot

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Here’s an easy test that can help determine whether your game has meaningful decisions. It’s boring and silly, but it can be very effective. All you have to do is play entirely randomly.

By “entirely randomly” I mean exactly that. Use a die or a deck of cards in place of a human player and then go from there. Let the random mechanic make every choice.

Your game passes if a person can get better results than random play. At that point you can be confident that the player’s decisions are relevant to the outcome. It might be that those decisions are boring, obvious, or otherwise not very satisfying, but the player at least needs to be involved.

Your game fails if random play beats a human who’s (a) reasonably capable of playing the game and (b) trying to win. Wins for random play mean that human players have no significant role in the game; their strategies, tactics, and choices are superfluous. They’re just there to carry out the physical steps required to move the game forward.

It’s worth noting that this test can be performed even on relatively complex games. Magic, for example, involves a lot of decisions, but you can still set up a random opponent. Does the opponent play a land? That’s a binary decision; flip a coin. OK, it does: which land? Assign each one a number and roll a die. Now it’s time to see if it casts spells, so assign each spell it could play a number, tack on an additional number for “no spell,” and roll again.

This sanity check for meaningful decisions might seem unnecessary. However, sound and fury at times signify nothing; it’s possible for the challenge of managing everything a game has going on to obscure the fact that none of it influences the outcome. (I’ve heard of at least one commercially published game where this turned out to be the case, such that a random player had the same chance to win as anybody else!) It’s worth taking an hour just to make sure you haven’t gotten lost in your own game’s complexities, and that the choices you think matter really do.

Theory: Following Up on Weather-Influenced Games

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When thinking about weather-influenced board games, I asked if anyone was already going down that road. It turns out someone was!

Spider: Rite of the Shrouded Moon is a platformer-mystery game in which the environment changes based on your local weather. Playing at different times of day, or in different conditions, alters the game: perhaps different enemies appear, or an area become accessible that wasn’t before.

Just as a technical feat, changing graphics based on system location is pretty impressive. Additional art assets are needed, programming to integrate the game with the mechanisms different systems use to track and report where they are . . . creating even the most basic link between real-world and in-game weather is no small order.

What really strikes me as remarkable, though, is how S:RotSM’s designers go far beyond that. The weather is integrated into the gameplay. Making it rain in-game when it’s raining outside would have been a neat gimmick; getting real-world weather to influence what the player can do and how the player does it is truly impressive.

S:RotSM is super-cheap if you have an iDevice, and not much more for PCs. Give it a look if you have a chance.

Theory: Final Fantasy XIII is the Best in the Series

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As a lawyer, I actually enjoy the occasional heated debate. Let’s start one! 😉

Final Fantasy XIII is the best Final Fantasy, because it’s the only one that lays out its challenges in a fair, satisfying way. In most Final Fantasies, the designers commit the unpardonable sin of @#$%ing the player just to demonstrate that they can—and the games are worse for it. Whatever problems it may have, Final Fantasy XIII at least refrains from lording it over the player.

Tom “Zileas” Cadwell, Riot Games’ VP of Game Design, has listed among his “basic design ‘anti-patterns’” the situation where the designers “straight up screw over the player, usually with dramatic flair, or maybe just try to make the player feel crappy in a way that isn’t contributing to the fun of the game.” He cites as a “[v]ery [s]evere” example a puzzle that the player can only solve by reading the designer’s mind, and that has painful consequences for failure. Designers who intentionally put this sort of thing into a game, Cadwell says, should be fired.

The vast majority of Final Fantasy games feature one of these puzzles that require mind-reading. They allow players to make progress . . . until they reach a point near the end of the game where there’s a dramatic increase in difficulty. It’s not possible to know in advance where that point is, or even to be sure that it’s coming; the quantum leap in challenge is signaled only by the death of the player’s adventurers in a completely lopsided battle.

What’s more, the penalty for losing that battle is substantial. First, the player loses some of her progress. Final Fantasy games don’t, as a rule, allow quicksaving; the best a player can hope for is that there was a save point not too long before the wipeout.

Second, and more critically, the only way to move forward is to seek out random fights for ten hours, or tens of hours—however long it takes the adventurers to build up enough strength, skill, and stamina to win through. Note that there’s no straightforward indication of how much of them is needed, so a player might have to lose the puzzle-battle many times, testing the waters over and over until she can finally go further. The punishment for not being able to figure out when the designers are going to clobber you can end up being a substantial portion of the overall playtime!

I’ve played Final Fantasies I, III (Japan), III (U.S.), VII, X, Tactics Advance, and XIII. Every one of those games but the last includes the anti-pattern, the moment where the designers pull the rug out and stop all forward movement without warning. I have no reason to believe the ones I haven’t played are any different.

Final Fantasy XIII is the only one to break the mold. Every time a player reaches a new location in the game, the player’s adventuring team is ready for the challenges to be found there. At no point is the player subjected to the anti-pattern, to the designers whacking him over the head for doing exactly what he’s been doing, and getting rewarded for, all along.

One might argue by way of response that death and defeat aren’t necessarily punishments in an RPG—that they can serve to advance the story. I completely agree! The unwinnable battle is a time-tested method for introducing a villain.

However, well-designed unwinnable battles avoid setting the player back unnecessarily. They’re meant as ways to advance the plot, after all, and it’s not very satisfying if the story is moving forward but the player is stuck playing catch-up. I personally saw this happen in Skies of Arcadia, an otherwise very good game with an unwinnable battle that a friend wasted hours and lots of consumables on because it seemed like victory was just out of reach. He finally discovered that it was impossible . . . at which point he couldn’t enjoy the new plot events because had to grind for money to replenish his supplies!

Final Fantasy’s puzzle-battles aren’t well-designed unwinnable fights. They aren’t even unwindable! Instead they’re simply fights with prerequisites that aren’t clear until the battle is over. They’re traps.

Some might also take exception to the idea that grinding for levels is a punishment. That’s fair. Lots of people get invested in improving their characters’ strength, and enjoy the process of doing so.

Other people don’t, however. They accept the random battles associated with walking around in a Final Fantasy game because the fighting is leavened by story progression. Grabbing these story-focused players by the throat and imposing an unexpected requirement that they grind for hours on end before they get any more plot advancement isn’t useful.

Finally, one could suggest that these situations have become a trope of the jRPG genre, and that players expect them. It suffices to say in response that mistakes aren’t corrected by repeating them.

I like Final Fantasy games—even the ones that @#$% with me. I recognize, though, that it’s not good or desirable for them to do that. To the contrary, it’s a serious design flaw, one that the series has repeated over and over. Final Fantasy XIII is the only one without that critical weakness, and that’s a major reason why it’s the best-designed outing in the series.

Theory: The Gold Standard in Thematic Design

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One of the things I love about Netrunner is how the game expresses complex ideas using core mechanics. A given card will use the exact same mechanisms as lots of other cards, but still have something it uniquely, convincingly represents. Each such card is a masterwork in miniature, a perfect building block for a remarkable game.

By way of example, take a look at Yog.0.

8-17-15 - Yog.0

Yog.0 is a simple card—and an amazing design. The italicized flavor text gives us the thematic background: this card represents a tool for hackers, a database containing lots of stolen passwords. While that might seem pretty complicated, Yog.0 only needs two bits of text to fully express the concept.

To see how that’s true, let’s imagine how such a database might work in practice. The player is in the role of a hacker, and the card represents a list of passwords. If the player-hacker needs to break through security and the relevant password is listed, there’s no additional cost in time or money. She has everything she needs. If the password doesn’t appear, however, the database is useless; she must use a different tool.

Both of those aspects are represented on the card. The first is contained in the line above the italics. Without getting into the technicalities of what it means to “[b]reak” a “subroutine,” it’s clear that the player-hacker gets to make progress for a cost of zero. Furthermore, since it costs zero the player-hacker can do it as many times as she wants. Both of those are what we expect from using a list of passwords; so long as the password is in the database, the player-hacker can keep right on going, no additional input required.

Of course, it’s also important to capture the situation where the password isn’t there. That’s handled by the “3” in the lower-left corner. In Netrunner, every security system has a strength. Getting through requires a hacking program of at least equal strength, as noted in the lower-right corner.

Yog.0 has a strength of 3. Right there, we can tell which passwords are on the list. The password to get through this is:

This has a strength of 2, noted in the lower-left.
This has a strength of 2, noted in the lower-left.

But to have the password for this, Yog.0 would need a strength of 4. It doesn’t, so we know right away that this password is missing.

Strength 4 is more than Yog.0 can handle.
Strength 4 is more than Yog.0 can handle.

All of that thematic information, in one line and one number. Yog.0 doesn’t rely on its italicized flavor text to put across what’s happening; we can feel it as we rush through one code gate after another, effortlessly putting in the necessary passwords. We can also feel lit in the sudden stop when we run into something we don’t have the password for!

Compare how Yog.0 works to more complex alternatives. Password tokens could be put on code gates, and Yog.0 could come with some; a match means one can get through. We’d have to keep track of all those tokens, of course. There might also be a need to accumulate more tokens; that could be a minigame, with the player-hacker stealing new passwords. Stealing passwords doesn’t directly advance the player toward winning, though, so there need to be adequate incentives for participating in the minigame. That implies a development issue . . . .

Ack! Thematic design can very quickly lead down an incredibly complex road.

Yog.0, like many of Netrunner’s cards, is brilliant because it avoids that trap. It has all of the thematic power with none of the rules bloat. That’s the gold standard for thematic components, and the key to an elegant, yet thematic, game.

Link: No Girl Wins

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Yesterday, a woman played at Warmachine night.

In a perfect world that wouldn’t be exceptional–but, sadly, it very much was. After playing miniatures games up and down the East Coast over the course of years, I can still count the number of women I’ve seen at the minis tables on one hand. It’s so rare that I think to count them in the first place.

That was on my mind this morning when I saw No Girl Wins, Juliet Kahn’s excellent article regarding the forces, some subtle and others blatant, that discourage women from playing video games as they get older. It’s easy to see a number of the same dynamics at work in other gaming genres, minis among them.

If you haven’t yet, I would encourage you to give the article a read. It’s thought-provoking and filled with concrete factors to consider while designing. The article is well worth your time, even if video gaming isn’t within your bailiwick.