Tag: game design

Pure Co-Op Games Are . . . Well, Games (a Response to Jake Thornton)

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A few days ago Jake Thornton posted some comments on why he doesn’t like “Pure Co-op” games. Reading it, I was surprised to find myself disagreeing. Mr. Thornton is a great designer, but I think he’s off the mark in his essay. He’s conflated unaddressed design problems with flaws inherent to the genre.

Before going on, I want to emphasize that I have enormous respect for Mr. Thornton. I’ve been playing his games for years, and they’ve always been great fun. It’s sometimes happened that I’ve had to say to excellent lawyers “I think you’re wrong this time;” here as in those instances, I’m only taking issue with the argument, not with the person.

Mr. Thornton’s post is linked above, but in summary he feels that pure co-op games (which he defines as games where “all players on one side are working towards exactly the same goal and play as a group. Usually they either win or lose collectively, ie all win or all lose”) are like group projects in school: either you’re carrying the weight for others, or a (possibly) more knowledgeable person is telling you what to do. Since neither dragging freeloaders along nor being puppeted about are much fun, he finds this sort of game unsatisfactory.

These problems arise, Mr. Thornton argues, because a game requires that the players be in competition. So long as the players are competing, everyone can–ironically–get along. When the players aren’t competing, he feels, power dynamics emerge and people start to feel badly.

Pure co-op board games only work, Mr. Thornton argues, as enablers for “social get-togethers.” Instead of watching the ballgame and chatting, the group plays a cooperative board game and chats. Although he doesn’t say it explicitly, my impression is that he feels pure co-ops in this setting avoid the problems that normally frustrate him by making the outcome unimportant. Good players don’t feel the need to carry weight and no one gives the weaker players orders, simply because no one really cares about winning.

As is so often the case, the problem here stems from a definitional issue. Mr. Thornton reads the definition of game as meaning “two or more players, all of whom are competing with all the others.” That isn’t required by the definition he uses (“a competitive activity involving skill, chance or endurance on the part of two or more persons who play according to a set of rules”), and it seems like a flawed perspective from the outset. He excludes anything involving teams, such as most professional sports, from being “games!” Sometimes having a correct definition involves slaying sacred cows–witness the fate of Pluto–but the position that football and baseball can’t even be considered games isn’t tenable.

The faulty definition leads, predictably, to a faulty result: games with teams, pure co-op games included, aren’t games. Mr. Thornton views that as reasonable because in his experience pure co-ops aren’t fun. However, there’s an alternative explanation which doesn’t require adopting an extreme definition of “game:” the pure co-op games he has played may simply have been flawed.

It’s no secret that cooperative games can have a power dynamic between the players, and that that dynamic can be unpleasant. However, game designers have been grappling with that problem for some time, and have found ways to deal with it. In fact, they’ve found so many solutions that, as you can see from the linked posts, there’s dispute about which ones are best! That some games haven’t implemented good solutions doesn’t require that they be excluded from the definition of “game.”

Mr. Thornton isn’t obliged to like pure co-ops. However, I’d like to see him recognize the game design challenges they pose, and take on those challenges in a serious way. (Currently he feels that “Pure Co-op is actually relatively easy to design once you have everything else in place,” which is only sustainable because he concludes that pure co-ops aren’t really games and don’t need to be rigorous.) He makes great games, and I’d play a pure co-op he designed to tackle these issues in a heartbeat.

Concept, the Concept behind it, and the Concept of Game Design

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Over the weekend I had the opportunity to try Concept. I’ll be frank: it didn’t grab me at first. However, as time has gone on I’ve started to appreciate it more and more. It’s really forced me to think in detail about the boundaries of what counts as a game.

Concept is a lot different from most other games; it’s sort of like Pictionary with pre-set images. There is a board with pictures, and on your turn you mark various pictures to try to get the other players to guess a word or phrase from a card. For example, at one point a teammate and I had “Mount Rushmore;” we marked a picture with a rock, a picture with an arrow that we hoped would denote “tall,” and put four markers next to a picture of people in historical garb. (We also put down lots of other markers, which proved to be incredibly confusing to the group and generally a bad idea. 😉 ) Those who had played before felt that the scoring system in the game didn’t add much to the experience, so we played without keeping track of who was winning; the only goal was to communicate as effectively as possible.

Immediately after playing I found the game was interesting, but kind of odd. Another player commented that it was more of an activity than a game, and I felt like that was about right. There was a task, and when you completed it you moved on. A fascinating exercise–expressing “heritage” with pictures was not easy–but not a game.

Yet, when I compare Concept to the rules for what-is-a-game, I find it meets all of them. Played for fun? Check. Rules? Nothing complicated, but they’re there. We played without scoring, but measuring victory isn’t a requirement for a game; think about SimCity, or some variations of Minecraft, or 99% of all role-playing games.

Moreover, of all the games I played over the weekend Concept is the one I keep thinking about. It was undeniably interesting, with tough decisions and a lot of thought involved. (Oh man, “heritage.” Don’t get me started.) Concept was also by far the newest experience. One of my tests for “should I buy this game” is “do I already own something that provides similar gameplay;” I don’t have anything on my shelf that’s like Concept.

So why was I cold on it at first? I think it was because I went in expecting . . . well, something that felt like other games. What I got was a really offbeat experience. It wasn’t until I had time to sit and think about Concept that I realized that (a) there’s a game there and (b) for all that it threw me off-balance, I greatly enjoyed it.

At this point, I think the best word for Concept is “refreshing.” Being so different from other games while still being a game and pushing the emotional and intellectual buttons games do is an accomplishment. It renews my faith in game design as a field; it doesn’t have to narrow down to a few valid designs, but can instead open up to many different experiences that all work.

When I taught school, seeing really great teachers made me want to teach like them. As an attorney, watching great lawyers work inspires me to litigate the way they do. In game design, Concept makes me want to try to build something that extends the boundaries of games the way it does. If you’re interested in the field, I would urge you to check it out; I think you’ll find it as interesting as I do.

Something Completely Different: Throwing Dice at Dad’s Plastic Army Men

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Not every game needs to be complicated. I recently saw a discussion of simple, off-the-cuff rules for miniatures, and it reminded me of a game I used to play with my father. Here’s how it worked:

1. Grab some plastic army men. Players should probably have the same number–about eight is good.
2. Go outside. Both players can build a little fortress out of whatever stuff is around, or one player can build a fortress and the other player can be the attacker (in which case the attacker gets to make some shallow ditches to serve as trenches, set up low walls, and otherwise prepare the terrain).
3. Put your army men in sensible places, pretty close to each other–there shouldn’t be more than a couple yards of “no man’s land” between the players’ armies. Feel free to have your army men take cover in your fortress or in the terrain, but you’re not allowed to completely hide army men from your opponent and you’re not allowed to wedge your army men in or otherwise make it unnaturally hard for them to fall over.
4. Take turns throwing a die–just a regular six-sided die from a board game–at the opponent’s army men. You have to throw from close to one of your soldiers, so positioning matters. If you knock down or flip over an opponent’s army man, that guy is out. If you just jostle an army man but it stays upright, the army man can keep fighting.
5. Players have to move way out of the way during the opponent’s turn, so that no one gets hit by the die. This is a very safe game so long as everyone is reasonable about it; be reasonable by moving aside so that the die can’t hit you if it bounces (or if the opponent just misses).
6. During your turn you can move one of your army men the length of a short stick–maybe six inches. You can use a stick from outside, or if you cut the army men off sprues you can use a sprue. It doesn’t matter so long as both players have the same length stick. (Be careful with the sticks, of course.)

That was it. In fact, that’s enormously more rules than my father and I actually had; we just kind of figured things out as we went. It seemed logical that army men should be able to move, so we grabbed some plastic sprues from the army man set and used them to measure how far they could go. The game wasn’t fun when army men were braced and impossible to knock down, so we said that that wasn’t legal. We never wrote the rules of this game down; the listing above is the first time they’ve been recorded in any kind of formal way (at least by me–I’m sure other people have played similar games).

And you know what else? That game was super fun! It was very thematic (which wasn’t the word I used when I was eleven, but you get the idea). Good tactics were important, but there were also elements of physical skill and luck that allowed for comebacks after a tactical mistake. (Plus, throwing things has an entertainment value all its own.) Building the fortresses was great; we played on a rocky beach that had lots of building materials.

I’d like to say I have a big point about game design to make with this post. Maybe there is something here about how understanding game design in a rule-driven way doesn’t have to lead to ossification of the art, or how the fun of building something in the context of a game can extend to building the game itself. If I’m being honest, though, my real motivation was to say this:

Play outside with your kids. They’ll treasure those memories. I know I do.

Something Completely Different: Making Competing Players Powerful – Rules

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How can a two-player competitive game reinforce both players’ feelings of might and prowess, where the game is played synchronously in the real world?

There aren’t a lot of competitive games that are designed so that all of the players feel good at the same time. Usually it’s exactly the opposite: at any given moment someone is losing, knows it, and feels lousy. Miniatures games are no exception; since everything is (usually) right there on the table, it’s easy to see when you have taken greater losses than your opponent or are further away from an objective.

Since minis games weren’t helping me find rules germane to the issue, I ranged around a bit. Here’s what I came up with:

1. Players should “fail forward.”

This one comes from role-playing games. In essence, it says that failure should not mean that the player’s turn just ends in defeat. Instead, something interesting should happen.

Knowing a little role-playing game history might help clarify how this rule works in practice. (It’s also interesting in its own right.) Dungeons & Dragons, arguably the first major role-playing game as we’ve come to think of the term, was designed by wargamers. Those designers modeled D&D’s combat on the wargames they were familiar with: dice were used to model the uncertainties of combat, with a good result meaning you succeeded in hitting the target and a poor result meaning failure. This system is used even by game designers with military experience, so I assume that it’s at least a reasonable way to model people fighting.

Over time, however, problems revealed themselves. When playing a wargame, one normally controls many pieces. A single piece’s bad roll is just one part of a larger turn, so even when the dice go against you it’s still possible to have a satisfying turn overall. By contrast, in role-playing games the player usually controls a single character who makes a single roll in a turn. If that roll comes up snake eyes, that’s it–the turn ends on a down note.

Failing forward is one solution to that issue. (It also relates to other role-playing game design issues, to say nothing of the term’s use in self-help books and other arenas; I’m focusing on this particular application of the idea.) In essence, it says that failure should make things more interesting instead of just being a stopping point. The player doesn’t get what he or she wanted, but does get something else: plot advancement.

So, for example, in D&D (or at least, some versions of D&D) a player might try to swing a sword at a monster in order to slay it. If the player fails to slay the monster, that’s it; the player’s turn is over. By contrast, in a fail-forward model the player might fail to slay the monster–and be carried back to the monster’s lair. That means a whole new set of opportunities and options: maybe the player will have another go at fighting the monster, or sneak away, or find out that the monster’s lair is full of the monster’s artwork and the monster is actually a sentient being. Instead of the player’s turn just crashing to a halt with failure, the player is left with new possibilities to consider while waiting for his or her next chance to act.

Failing forward doesn’t mean failure is impossible or that players are choosing between a menu of good options. It just takes some of the sting out. The player missed the mark this time, but something interesting still happened and so the player can focus on that instead of stewing over the failure.

2. The game should involve building something the player can take pride in.

Agricola is a controversial game, which is surprising for a farming simulation with tried-and-true mechanics. A lot of people find the theme dull, or don’t like the “Euro” design sensibility wherein much of the game boils down to constructing an economic engine. I can’t say those criticisms are unfair–I’m not, I have to admit, all that interested in agriculture myself–but Agricola is nevertheless one of my favorite games. That’s for one simple reason: each and every time I play, I get a sense of accomplishment from building my little farm even if I lose.

I see the same dynamic play out in the Civilization series of video games, Minecraft, even building toys like lego. It’s fun to make something. Creating is enjoyable even if you lose, or even if the game is such that winning and losing aren’t meaningful concepts. Seeing something neat that’s new in the world, and being able to say “I did that,” is for many people compelling regardless of the context in which it occurs.

Building doesn’t have to be linear or unopposed; Civilization, Minecraft, and many other games involve building in an environment of challenge with the possibility of setbacks. Overcoming those obstacles can be another part of the fun, and can even give character to one’s result. The key is the sense of accomplishment; players need to be able to take pride in the results of their efforts, even if those efforts don’t result in winning.

That last sentence deserves a little more emphasis. It’s critical that the players end up with something they can take pride in. Agricola’s building is fun because your farm is a nice, productive spot even if it doesn’t earn the most points. Games where the building is just another way to keep score–where one can end the game with a useless half-constructed building, or a spaceship that could never fly–don’t provide this kind of satisfaction.

So what does all this mean?

I’ll be honest: I’m not quite sure yet how rules from role-playing games and a farming simulation apply to a miniatures wargame. However, I feel like these rules are already pushing in interesting directions. This game is supposed to play out a story, and failing forward involves plot advancement; doesn’t that suggest a very different kind of minis game? One where success is measured, not in the number of opposing units destroyed, but in telling a story? Where does that story come from? How does the building factor in? What are the players building? A thing? Character competence? The story themselves? How is the building handled so that players can enjoy the result even when they lose?

At the risk of being unfair, I’m going to leave those questions hanging for a little while: on Friday I’ll have the results for the latest round of Over the Next Dune’s playtesting.

Something Completely Different: Making Competing Players Powerful–Issue

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It’s not the project at hand, but I haven’t been able to get my mind off of the idea of “reinforc[ing] the players’ feelings of might, prowess, and general awesomeness” when the players are directly competing. How does one create a situation wherein both players feel good about themselves and what they’re doing, even when someone is losing?

Legal analysis says that we shouldn’t just wander in the woods trying to answer this question. Instead, we need to define the issue carefully and find out what the relevant rules are.

As we cast the issue we need to be specific about the situation we’re dealing with. The answers might be different for games played by two people, for three people, for two people cooperatively, for asynchronous play over the internet and simultaneous play on the tabletop, etc. Knowing the limits of whatever answer we come up with is important.

Since this is a miniatures game, let’s assume that we have two people playing against each other on a tabletop. That has at least three advantages:

1. Having the players set against each other makes the question harder–and, I suspect, more interesting.

2. Allowing more than two players leads to tricky balancing considerations which could distract from the project as time goes on.

3. Two players against each other in a real-world, synchronous match is the classic setup for a miniatures game. Being traditional isn’t a good enough reason by itself, but if this game is similar to others from a macro-level perspective it gives us some points of reference and examples for comparison. Again, the goal is to focus on specific ideas and innovations; it’s not necessary or desirable to start from scratch in every area.

With that in mind, the issue can be framed as:

How can a two-player competitive game reinforce both players’ feelings of might and prowess, where the game is played synchronously in the real world?

(I omitted “general awesomeness” as a feeling because it’s not very descriptive–we’d end up with a whole new issue of what “generally awesome” feels like. I’m pretty sure that if the players feel mighty and like they have great prowess, they’ll feel generally awesome.)

The more I get into this the more interesting it becomes. Both players have to feel strong, but they’re facing each other IRL in a competitive enterprise. It’s a situation rife with opportunities for one player putting the other down, and we have to build them both up. I love it! Let’s talk rules next time.

Theory: Make the Right Choice the Default, Part 2

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Last time‘s post was about why having getting up slowly be the default in Street Fighter 4 is a problem. Briefly, making players input a special command to get up fast–which they will want to do virtually every time–is more a rote action than an interesting decision. It makes players feel bad when they know what they’re supposed to do but something goes wrong and they fail. New players are hurt especially badly, because they have to divide their energies between learning the strategy of the game and mastering this uninteresting-but-important skill.

Making the better choice–getting up quickly–the default resolves these issues. It removes the false choices that sound like they might be an opportunity for strategic decision-making but almost never are. It eliminates the “feel-bad” moments, since the game’s design now prevents the player from fouling up something basic. New players have one fewer hurdle to clear before they can get into the interesting aspects of the game.

This doesn’t mean that getting up slowly must or should be eliminated from the game entirely. To the contrary, giving players the choice to stay down in the unusual situations where that could be useful can lead to interesting gameplay. Making quick-standing the default, and slow-rising the special maneuver requiring extra player input, retains the strategic option for the rare situations where it’s intersting without the problems that slow-rising-as-the-default brings.

Seeing this rule applied in other contexts really brings home to me how important it is. For example, the League of Legends character Volibear has a special ability wherein, when he is near to being slain, he gets a second wind and regenerates a great deal of health. LoL is designed in such a way that Volibear will virtually always want to activate this ability when he is in a bad way; is is very, very unusual for Volibear to be in a situation where he would want to hover near death to save this ability for another moment. (Off the top of my head, if a teamfight just ended in an ace the Voli player might be happier backing with the passive intact and healing at the fountain–but it would probably still be better to use the passive and push for an objective. Sorry, back on topic.) If not activating this ability were the default, Volibear would suffer from the same problems as SF4’s slow-rising: false choices, player frustration, unnecessary burdens on new players.

Fortunately, League’s designers did it right: they made Volibear’s second wind completely automatic. When it’s available and called for, it just switches on. The opportunities for strategic choice about whether or not to regenerate were so limited that the faux decision was removed entirely, with a net positive effect.

Compare this with League’s “Barrier” ability. Barrier protects a player from some damage, but it can only be used once every few minutes. There is an actual decision to be made about whether or not to use it, even when one’s health is low: if a fight is going badly, it might be better to accept defeat and save the ability for later. Moreover, even if you know you plan to use Barrier the exact timing matters; since the Barrier only lasts for a few moments, you might want to hold off until you become the focus of enemy fire. Hence, it’s often better not to use Barrier–and indeed, that is the default.

SF4 and League of Legends demonstrate that it’s not enough to give players choices. It’s also important to think about how players interact with those choices. If the game makes it hard for players to choose correctly, it will be harder to play. It might even be aggravating! When there’s a consistent right choice, just make it the default so that players can move on to more engaging decisions.

Theory: Make the Right Choice the Default, Part 1

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I love fighting games–Street Fighter, Guilty Gear, King of Fighters (especially ’98 and, for all its warts, ’03), Virtua Fighter, Capcom vs. SNK 2, Marvel vs. Capcom 2. The change list for Ultra Street Fighter 4 came out recently, and it reminded me of something I saw a long time ago–a design rule that I think makes a lot of sense but that many games, especially fighting games, get wrong. If a given option is almost always the right choice, it should be the default.

Street Fighter 4 is a good example of what happens when the default is the less-desirable option. For those not familiar with its genre, SF4 is a two-player game in which each player controls a single martial artist. The players use their chosen martial artist’s kicks, punches, and unique abilities (e.g., breathing fire or throwing rocks) to defeat opponents. SF4 is fun, popular . . . and has a somewhat silly way of handling players knocking each other down. It makes it hard to get up fast and easy to get up slowly.

In SF4, as in most fighting games, it is almost always best to get up as fast as possible after being knocked down. This is for two reasons. First, it gets the knocked down player back on offense more quickly–and being on offense is how you win. Second, and perhaps more importantly at high levels of play, the time a player spends knocked down is time the opponent can spend repositioning and setting up his or her next attack. Minimizing that opportunity is very important.

There are rare occasions when staying down is good. If the opponent comes at you with an attack that will meet you as you rise, it might be advantageous to stay on the ground. The attack will pass harmlessly over you, and then you can get up and counterattack. However, these situations are unusual; in most cases it’s still best to stand quickly and use your full arsenal of martial arts maneuvers to deal with the attack. (Fighting game aficionados will understand me when I say that you would rather quick-stand and DP.)

(Unless it’s a cross-up, in which case DPing might be wrong, but you still don’t want to be down, you want to get up and block backwards, since being down doesn’t stop them from continuing the block string and just turning it into a meaty.)

(OK, sorry, back on topic.)

SF4’s mistake is that it makes getting up slowly, which is almost always wrong, the default. If you get knocked down and do nothing, you will get up slowly and be at a disadvantage. Getting up fast, which you want to do at least 95% of the time, requires an extra joystick motion done with precise timing.

The fundamental problem with this is that it doesn’t make the game more interesting. Since you should do it virtually every time, it’s just adding rote behavior. Get knocked down, tap down as you hit the ground to quick-stand. It doesn’t even sound interesting when you say it!

Having slow-standing as the default also leads to what Mark Rosewater calls “feel-bad” moments. It’s entirely possible for a player to know that quick-standing is right, try to do it, and fail. Missing the input just makes the player feel embarrassed and frustrated. Since fighting games are often played online, where internet lag can cause the game to think an input was mis-timed even when the player did it correctly, these “feel-bad” moments can occur with substantial frequency.

Last but not least, slow-standing as the default makes the game harder to learn. Fighting games are not easy to play. They involve enormous execution barriers–it’s hard for a new player to get the fire-breathing and rock-throwing to happen consistently. Clearing those hurdles is only the beginning, because then the player is ready to start the real journey of learning fighting game strategy. That could be a book unto itself, but suffice it to say that to play fighting games well one must make split-second decisions in an environment of uncertainty. Saying to a new player “by the way, on top of everything else you need to tap down 95+% of the time when you get knocked down” is pretty rough.

I love SF4, but I can’t deny that it suffers from all of these issues. Quick-standing is a rote element of gameplay. I feel bad when something goes wrong and I miss it, especially when it seems like lag was the cause rather than an error on my part. It was a checkbox I had to spend time filling before I could “really” play the game.

OK, so the way SF4 does things isn’t ideal. Why is quick-standing as the default better? I’ll talk about that Friday.

 

Something Completely Different: Design Rules

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With the current playtesting project underway, I feel like it’s safe to talk a little more about the idea of a Dynasty Warriors-themed miniatures game. Playtesting can be somewhat grindy; a mental break can only do us good. 😉

If we were to pursue this game, the first step would be to come up with the core rules guiding the design. I can’t imagine not starting with:

1. The decisions must be interesting.

Part of the original idea was to use the game’s elements–its rules, its components, its play, everything–to put across emotion, much like how authors use words and sentence structure. That kind of guiding principle deserves to be a rule:

2. All aspects of the game must help convey an emotion.

In that formulation Rule #2 is question-begging: what’s the emotion in question? If this is a Dynasty Warriors-esque experience, there’s only one good answer:

2 (revised). All aspects of the game must reinforce the players’ feelings of might, prowess, and general awesomeness.

(Wait, this is really interesting–how do we reinforce competing players’ positive feelings at the same time, given that one of them is probably losing? So tempting to spend time on this . . . this is why it’s dangerous to work on other projects during playtesting! 😉 )

That wasn’t all the game was trying to do, though: it was also trying to create a sort of story arc. I don’t feel qualified to delve into what a “story arc” is, but I feel comfortable saying that a three-act structure counts.

3. The game experience must involve three acts, as in a three-act story.

I’m not sure what that means, exactly, but it sounds like a lot of fun to think about.

Theory: Why Do People Play Magic?

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One of the great things about Mark Rosewater’s articles is that not only do we get a window into his design thinking, we also get a window into the market research Wizards of the Coast benefits from. Most of us can only speculate about why players do as they do. WotC has answers backed by data.

Among the conundrums WotC set out to solve is “why do people play Magic: the Gathering?” The results are fascinating, and I’ve found that they’re informative for other games as well. If you’ve ever run into discussion of “Timmies” or “Johnnies” online, and wondered what people were talking about, this is the answer. If you haven’t, I would still encourage you to take a minute to look Mr. Rosewater’s article over. It’s a classic.