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Lewis Pulsipher
United States
Linden
North Carolina
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Do games “naturally” fall into three parts as dramas supposedly do?
The classic idea of film and stage play plots is that there are naturally three parts (often called simply Act I, Act II, and Act III rather than use descriptive names). These Acts involve first introducing the protagonist, then introducing the problem or antagonist(s), and finally resolving the conflict and sorting out the aftermath. Wikipedia (accessed 20 May 10) describes it this way:
“A three-act structure is a type of dramatic structure. It includes three broad actions:
1. Setup (of the location and characters)
2. Confrontation (with an obstacle)
3. Resolution (culminating in a climax and a dénouement ).” [the “ever after”, or at least the beginning of it]
This is a structure for dramatic tales, tales of conflict, not necessarily for all kinds of stories. Some people believe the structure is common in games (e.g. see Jeff Tidball’s http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_1...). (I’m going to use the word “stages” for the rest of the article, if only because plays occur on a stage, though when dramatic structure is not the subject I prefer to use “phase” as in my previous post, explicitly to get away from the idea of dramatic acts or stages.)
Insofar as games sometimes tell dramatic stories and often involve conflict, they may follow this path; but games, especially rules-emergent games, games that don’t explicitly impose a particular story, tell so many different stories that there’s no expectation of three-act structure.
The three-act system has been taught in film schools for many years, but there’s a trend to say “there’s no such thing”– or that it’s five, or nine, acts. Nonetheless, the idea that there are different stages along the way to a dramatic story’s endpoint can be useful to a game designer. While many games are not explicitly stories, there’s always a narrative in the sense of the player being able to say “this is what happened to me when I played this game”.
Games tend to vary over time in what happens, in what the players DO, in the focus of activities. This variance is generally desirable, as it increases the variety in the game and therefore the potential interest and replayability. Arcade-style games going back to Pong and Space Invaders typically have just one stage or phase, with speed increases providing the variability. Further, games that tend to have the same gameplay over time may be more like puzzles than like games (think Tetris or Bejeweled).
From my point of view, video games that are trying to tell an explicit story, which includes many of the well-known AAA games because those very expensive games are offering players an “experience”, may follow the three act structure or some variation of it, but most games do not. And dramatic stages don’t always correspond to game phases. Nonetheless, as an exercise in a class I was teaching we tried to list three-part games. These three parts often don’t correspond to the three acts of dramatic structure but I think the result is interesting.
[Because BGG isn't friendly to tables, I'll have to provide a link to this one: http://www.pulsiphergames.com/presentation/three-part-games....
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In the end these are more strategic than dramatic stages. Other games have different stages, for example Spore with five parts Britannia with four historical parts. And many shorter games have only one stage.
In many of the games listed above the stages arise out of the nature of the gameplay. Some games have stages ordained by the rules (including order of appearance) rather than by the evolution of play. For Power Grid there are three “steps”, for Britannia there are four phases (Roman conquest and defense, Anglo-Saxon dominance, Vikings, 4 Kings) defined by the reinforcement order of appearance and by “major invasions”. While history usually has an element of drama, there is nothing very dramatic about buying and supplying power stations and cities.
I suspect that three-parts is more common in video games than tabletop games, perhaps because video games more often follow a dramatic story.
Most games are not dominated by an explicit dramatic story, if such a story exists at all in the game. For most game designers, gameplay is more important than story, and the story must conform to the requirements of gameplay. I disagree with Tidball and others, and conclude that games, by and large, are not subject to the classic three dramatic acts, leaving it to others to decide whether films and novels fit the three act form.
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Lewis Pulsipher
United States
Linden
North Carolina
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[My thanks to “Sagrilarus” of Fortress:AT for the question that stimulated this attempt at classification.]
Phases (sometimes called stages) in a game design are important. These are distinctly different periods of play through the course of a game. They provide at least a perception, if not an actuality, of change, growth, and learning. Phases help the feeling that there's more variety in the game, as well. They help avoid a perception of "sameness" in the gameplay. A game that is "too long" may feel too long because there are not enough phases, not because any specific amount of time has passed. In contrast, many short games have only one phase.
Other entertainments and activities in life have phases. A horse race has phases, movies have the three (or five, or nine) act structure that changes the focus as the movie progresses. Life itself has phases such as early childhood, adolescence, and retirement/old age. In that sense people expect phases in their entertainment and their activities.
What differentiates one phase from another? I don’t think we can closely define that. Much of it must occur in the minds of the player(s). When a game changes from one phase to another the player is thinking about different things, as he or she decides what to do, than he thought about in the preceding phase. Probably the best way to put it is, the phase changes when the immediate (short-term) objective(s) of the players change. I’ll give some examples in a moment.
The longer the game is, the more phases it should have. After all, if a major purpose of phases is to avoid sameness, then the need becomes greater as the game becomes longer.
Some single-episode games that are easily played “best two out of three” have one phase, for example rock-paper-scissors (RPS). Tic-Tac-Toe is another such game, with a maximum of five moves for the "X" player I don't know how sensible it would be to talk about phases. Other very simple games like Candyland and Chutes and Ladders often have one phase. We might be able to characterize short games as "one phase games", although I think we could find fairly short games of more than one phase.
In contrast, Chess can be quite a long game--players are allowed two hours each for 40 moves--so it stands to reason that it needs to have more than one phase. These phases are normally called the opening, the mid-game, and the end-game. The opening phase is a consequence of the severe constraints on movement of pieces at the start of the game, given the standard set up, and of the centuries of study of the best moves to bring pieces into the open and control the center of the board.
Contrast this with Risk, where the opening phase is the placement of armies before the conflict begins, and that placement can vary greatly from one game to another. Even if you use the French setup where the cards are dealt and territories are occupied randomly, you have a setup that varies greatly from one game to another.
Contrast that with many wargames where there is a standard setup, but a player can move every one of his pieces in one turn. As a result the game moves beyond the standard setup very rapidly, as opposed to chess when moving one piece at a time means the opening phase takes 10-20 moves by each player.
And contrast those with games where you have no units, or no maneuver (where geographical location of assets does not matter). Often these games are symmetrical rather than the asymmetricality common in wargames. There can still be an opening phase, but it is not related to maneuver of units.
A second reason for the existence of phases in chess, other than the very constrained initial position of pieces, is that the number of pieces gradually decreases while the area of action remains the same size, thus opening up longer lines of play and new possibilities. There’s a third reason, the piece mix for each player may deviate from the symmetric, from being identical, for example after an exchange of a Knight for a Bishop. Forces can also become imbalanced when one player gains a material advantage, e.g. being a pawn ahead. The mid-game in chess is also a change because players are no longer following the standard openings, but have an immediate objective of gaining positional or (more likely?) material advantage.
The end-game occurs as the number of pieces is much reduced. There is more room to maneuver. Further, the immediate objective becomes checkmate of the opponent’s king, rather than material or positional advantage. Players now try to use a material or positional advantage, if they’ve gained one, to end the game.
Every chess game has an opening and a mid-game, though the latter can be cut short by a quick win. Except when a player stumbles onto a checkmate while still trying to gain positional or material advantage, there will always be an end-game, that is, a phase when players are focusing on checkmate.
What about other games? Play changes in a simple puzzle-game like old PCTetris because the pieces fall faster. At some point there is no further increase in falling speed, and a good player can settle into a cathartic repetition until he or she tires and makes mistakes. We can say there’s the ramping-up phase and then the “maximum fall” phase, a phase only experienced players reach.
Play in RPGs and FPSs changes as player avatars acquire more levels, perks, and loot (especially more and better weapons). The monsters are tougher, the bosses are tougher, the player(s) have many more options. In effect, the rules are modified by the loot, by perks, and by new capabilities gained by leveling up in RPGs. There may also be changes in immediate objective as the story associated with the game develops.
Setups
Is the setup a phase? Yes, if players make decisions that affect the outcome, as in American (not French setup) Risk. No, if they don’t, as in chess or checkers.
Many games have no setup phase. Every player begins symmetrically (all players with identical situations and assets), and if he has assets that can be maneuvered, they have not yet been maneuvered into significant positions. Card games are almost always of this type. Chess and most traditional boardgames are also. Turn-based and real-time-strategy video games are symmetrical insofar as each player begins with one unit "somewhere", though the sides are not symmetrical owing to unit differentiation. Most video games are asymmetrical but have a mandated setup.
Historical wargames that might be called "simulations", on the other hand, are almost always asymmetrical (differing situations and assets) in the setup, but sometimes allow players to choose their setup. Games that simulate historical battles are always asymmetrical, but sometimes the setup is mandated by the game, while other times the players can set up pieces as they like. More abstract (non-simulation) wargames are often the opposite. For example Stratego is symmetrical but players can set up their pieces as they like, so the setup becomes the first decision phase of the game. Risk is the same. On the other hand, Diplomacy is asymmetrical but the initial setup is mandated by the game.
Video games involving an avatar are severely asymmetrical, with one character facing numerous opponents. Add the avatar customization opportunities that are so popular in these games and you have thousands if not millions of possible setups.
Phases and rule changes
Phases ideally should not include changes in the rules but may include cases where rules that did not matter earlier in the game come to matter later, or where rules are added through acquisition of loot, or cards, or perks, or levels. For example, there may be a rule that limits the number of pieces a player can have, perhaps reflecting supply or maintenance restrictions. This rule may not matter at the beginning of the game but will as players build up their forces.
Ideally the same rules should apply throughout the game, with changes in circumstances leading to changes in phase. Yet sometimes the story or history of the game demands changes in rules. In my game Britannia, which represents 1000 years of British history, the rules are generally the same throughout, but the identity of the offensive nations and defensive nations changes over time owing to invasions and withdrawals. However, the rules are quite different for the Romans at the beginning of the game, and slightly different for the clash of Kings at the end of the game. We have the phase of Roman conquest where submission rules enable British nations to survive the conquest despite the unique power of Roman roads, forts, and legionnaires. This is followed after Roman withdrawal by the phase of Anglo-Saxon invasion and domination, followed by the phase of Viking raids and conquest (the Anglo-Saxons become defenders rather than attackers), followed by the clash of Kings where we have additional reinforcements and cavalry, four phases for a 4 to 5 hour game.
In traditional Risk the phasing is provided by the increase in the number of armies received for turn-in of territory card sets. If you ever play Risk with a low repeating number of armies for card sets, such as 4-6-8-4-6-8, you'll find that it stays in one phase for a very long time. There is less randomness this way, but there is little momentum toward completion. The ever-increasing number of armies received for card sets in the standard (pre-2008) rules provides the momentum to complete the game, although it can still take quite a while. In the 2008 redesign of Risk using mission cards, completion of missions provides the momentum toward completion. I don’t know whether the new style game has many phases or not.
Even a game as poorly-designed as Monopoly has phases. The initial phase is the slow acquisition of properties (slow even when the correct rules, auction when a player chooses not to buy at list price, are used). When players begin to get monopolies they move into the next phase, building houses and ultimately hotels. The last phase is a lot of dice rolling to see who lands on whose built-up properties without being able to pay the piper.
The bottom-of-the-game-design-barrel social network games on Facebook can have phases, in fact phases are important to avoid the extremes of tedious repetition. As players progress in Farmville they can expand their farm, automate it, change their principle crops (or animals, or orchards) as new ones are “unlocked”, and so forth. This provides a feeling of movement and progress in what is essentially a mass-market “game”, working within the rules complexity limits of mass-market games.
Episodic games
Some games don’t have phases, but are episodic. You play several times rather than just once, sometimes with “best two out of three” determining the winner, sometimes with more complex scoring. Video fighting games tend to be of this type, but many traditional 52-card games are the most obvious example.
Typically, these card games do not have phases. You play a hand, the hand is completed, you play another hand, that hand is completed, and so forth, with the game reset to its beginning situation each time, except for the score. In some cases you maintain an accumulating score (or as in poker an amount of chips that varies from player to player). In many cases what happens in previous hands does not affect what happens in later hands. In other cases such as Bridge and poker what has gone before affects each hand, whether through the points and vulnerabilities of Bridge or through the amount of chips/money each player has accumulated (or lost) in poker. Of course, in all of these games players can learn about how others play, and that can affect their own play as time passes.
Flow and learning
Mihaly Csikszentmikalyi’s concept of “the Flow” has been adopted by many (e.g. Raph Koster) as a model for games. (See my explanation in "Why We Play" http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/625/why_we_.php .). Ideally, a game should become more difficult as players become better at it.
Koster talks about games as learning in a safe environment. Phases mean there’s more to learn in the game. If the phases don’t involve rules changes, all the better, the learning is about how to play well, not about how to deal with new mechanisms of the game. Phases don’t necessarily mean the game becomes harder to play well, but they may still contribute to “the Flow”.
Repetition
Virtually all games involve repetition, whether it's repetition of turns or something else. The question is whether this repetition can be conducted in varying circumstances which amount to different phases. You can play two rounds with exactly the same rules, yet the results from the first round mean that what goes on in the minds of the players in the second round is rather different. This is most likely to be seen in Eurostyle games with a limited number of rounds in which a lot can happen.
If one round can be, in terms of rules, just like the preceding one, but owing to changes in circumstances it feels different to the players, you’ve effectively increased the variety of the game. And for 21st century gamers, variety is very much “the spice of life.”
Once again, the phase difference is in the mind of the player, and as such it is not something that we can define rigidly. But it usually means that the short-term objective(s) of the players have changed from one phase to the next.
Other reasons for phases
Another reason to have phases in a game design is to mitigate the uncatchable-leader problem. If, after half a game, the player who leads will almost always win, why play the rest of the game? If the game has distinct phases with different gameplay, that can help other players overtake the leader.
Here’s a final, subtle, reason why phases are important. Designers are in some danger of having game fans treat games the way some basketball “fans” treat basketball. These fans only watch the end of a basketball game because they feel that what goes before doesn’t matter to the outcome. They don't recognize that there are phases and variations in basketball that are as interesting as the results. They're only interested in the destination, not in the journey. We see this in video game players who find cheat codes, play only the end of a game, and then say they “beat the game”. Phases help make the journey more interesting, for those willing to experience it.
The point, for game designers, is to find ways to vary their games so that phases, significant changes in what happens in the minds of the player(s), occur. This is likely to make the game more appealing, and more long-lasting. Fortunately, if you're designing a game that lasts more than half an hour or so, it may naturally fall into phases as you work on its other aspects.
In a few days I’ll briefly discuss whether the proverbial "three act structure" that is so often ascribed to films, plays, and novels, is typical in games.
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Lewis Pulsipher
United States
Linden
North Carolina
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Several years ago I tried to find out as much as I could about the effect on sales of tabletop games when an online version was available for play. My conclusion was that not many people were likely to pay for the privilege of playing a tabletop game online, so any commercial advantage would come from the publicity and the ability to “try the online version before you buy” to improve sales of the tabletop version. I have several games myself that I would like to see playable online as a way to generate interest that might help me find a publisher when I get to that point, but I’m not enough of a programmer myself to make such versions. See
BGG discussion:
http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/176081/does-online-play-of-p...
and blog post:
http://pulsiphergamedesign.blogspot.com/2007/07/does-online-...
Curtis Lacy of globalgamespace.com has proposed a solution for this and for people who want to find playtesters online for their tabletop games. He wants to create a program that makes it easy for nonprogrammers to create online games, whether for playtesting or for publicity purposes, or both.
Curtis devised a list of 29 (later expanded the 60) functions that would be required in his software, and explained many of them in interesting videos. I’m sure he has received further suggestions since then. These videos are available at globalgamespace.com.
Curtis lists many existing programs (“prior art”-- http://www.globalgamespace.org/index.php/prior-art/ ) that can provide some of the features he has in mind, program such as VASSAL and Magic Set Editor. His plan seems to be more comprehensive than any of these programs that I have looked at.
The list of 60 features alone will be interesting to game designers and those interested in the theory of what games are and how they work. That list is at http://www.globalgamespace.org/index.php/blog/31-more-featur... .
Curtis has reached the point of a Kickstarter campaign to raise money so that he can spend his time creating the full software. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/468008685/global-gamespa... . (You’ll see from his videos that he already has mockups.) The software will be released under a “fairly permissive license” which Curtis calls a modified MIT license, details linked at the Kickstarter site.
I have never supported a Kickstarter campaign, but this is the kind of thing that could be very worthwhile. It is not a product that’s going to be created through the commercial world because, as I’ve said, there doesn’t seem to be much money in online play of tabletop games in and of itself.
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Lewis Pulsipher
United States
Linden
North Carolina
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2012 East Coast Game Conference, Raleigh North Carolina 25 to 26 August
http://www.ecgconf.com/
This is both a report about the East Coast Game Conference and comments about the nature of video game markets and the new mass market.
The fourth annual East Coast Game Conference (ECGC), billed as the “largest gathering of video game professionals on the east coast” took place this past Wednesday and Thursday.
Unlike many professional video game conferences, such as the GDC conferences, that are money earning concerns for a company that makes much of its revenue from conferences, the ECGC is still organized by volunteers, and this is reflected in the relatively low $99 entrance for professionals and much less for students. For co-founders, John Austin, Walter Rotenberry, Troy Knight, and Wayne Watkins it is still a labor of love, not a labor for profit. I don’t know what the attendance was this year but it was about 800 in 2010 and 1,200 in 2011. One critic on Gamasutra has compared this conference to the very much larger Game Developers Conference in California, and of course there’s no way a four-year-old volunteer run conference can compare with professionally run and enormously expensive GDC. Yet it provides a practical alternative for those who cannot afford the long journey and expense of GDC. You could say that ECGC reflects the “new South” as well as the old in the same way that GDC reflects the great size and sheer craziness of California.
The Raleigh Convention Center is a fine venue with lots of space. As with most video game conferences the focus of the ECGC is one hour talks (48 altogether) by experts in various video game related fields. There were also keynote speeches in the early afternoon both days, and finally there was “Unreal University” where people could learn about using the Unreal Engine developer kit (Epic Games is located in the area). There is a small exhibition hall, but that seems to me to be a sidelight rather than highlight of the conference.
Before I describe some of the more interesting talks (to me anyway) I want to say something about how these are conducted. Something that surprises me about this conference– I don’t know how it goes at GDC -- is that almost every speaker gets in front of the audience and talks at them for 45 minutes without interaction, then invites questions and comments. Necessarily, when you write something (like this piece) it's very difficult to have a conversation with people, you are stuck with "talking at" them. But when you have a live audience you should acknowledge that audience as you go along, especially at the start. Why not make a few comments and ask a few questions? The only questions I can remember any of the speakers (other than myself) asking were related to what proportion of the audience was developers and what proportion students.
Audiences at many of these talks are predominantly younger people, certainly people who love to use interactive video software. They often crave interaction. There is no interaction when you "talk at" people. I look at it from the perspective of the teacher, and lecturing at students is a sure way to turn off all but the most motivated. There may be times when there's not another practical way to convey information but these should be rare rather than the standard. The university teachers who get up in front of 100 to 500 or more students and talk at them for an hour are not actually teachers, they are providing an oral book. A book can certainly teach, and of course an oral book is in some ways easier to work with than a book you have to read, with young people much less likely to read now then a generation or two ago, as is often testified by game developers. (Real teaching, influencing a person's behavior and worldview, requires much smaller groups.)
I am going to partially describe some of the talks I attended, and then the keynotes. I hope I don't seriously misrepresent what speakers have said.
Alan Wilson (of Tripwire Interactive) described "A case study of failure in funding and success on Steam". He described how his company, which began as a modding group, have become self publishers. They explored more traditional methods of funding your games but in the long run most of their funding has been through second mortgages and then the success of previous games, including their success in building communities that continue to invest in their games.
They have found ways to increase over three years the sales of their cooperative zombie fighting game Killing Floor. Community map contests with cash prizes provide new free maps to users, but they do not sell new maps. They don't want to divide their customers into those who can play on a new map and those who cannot because they haven't bought it. Their policy is to only sell cosmetic additions, with the limit being new character skins.
They found that some of their fans have become what Alan calls "collectionists". When Tripwire decided to sell boxed copies of the game in Europe with an exclusive character the company got pounded on their forums by the collectionists who demanded to be able to purchase that character!
While the effective copy protection of Steam has helped them, Alan felt that some of the techniques could be used for ordinary retail sales. Steam obviously has helped them acquire up-to-the-minute statistics about play and purchase of their games. They found that a sales spike occurred whenever there was a sale price or an offering of new content for the game, and more importantly that sales stayed higher after the spike than before.
I suspect that the cooperative nature of Killing Floor has helped them build community although Allen said similar techniques were used for their Red Orchestra games as well.
Ethan Levy discussed "Game design is business design". When you design a free to play (F2P) game you have to design the monetization method that same time. According to a recent survey 15% of the US population aged 2 and up have paid money to F2P games. The question is how to persuade people to pay money.
In Levy's view emotion is the key to monetization, and when he is involved in the initial design of a game he identifies the emotions that will be used. These can be:
Impatience. But there are more effective ways than the typical Zynga energy deficiency. A company called Kixeye makes 20 times the normal daily average revenue per user (which is 4 cents). Zynga makes 6 cents.
Revenge. Someone harms you, you offer a bounty for others to harm them if you cannot, as in Mafia Wars.
Dominance. You want better scores in your friends and you're willing to buy temporary boosts to help you achieve this. If the scores reset every week you have a constant stream of revenue.
Jealousy. Your friends have a particular decoration or possession, you're willing to spend real money to get the same thing.
Accomplishment. Achievements and trophies. People are willing to pay real money to unlock achievements that they can then pursue.
Exhilaration. I suppose this amounts to a form of gambling. Levy's example was a game in which players could earn the opportunity to open a goodie box and get some perks. They knew what the chances were for each perk, and they could use real money to increase their chances of getting the better perks. This works wonderfully.
I am not a fan of games that put in "pain points" (frustration) to try to persuade people to pay money. Most of the above emotions involve frustration, but the last two do not, and this makes me more optimistic about F2P games in general.
Rafael Chandler is one of the best speakers I've heard at game conferences and conventions. While his talks about story in games usually illuminates the entire process of game production, this time in "Story Production for Games" he gave us a faux post-mortem of a game ("Full Metal Rabbits") to directly illustrate how the story of a game could be ruined by production problems.
Ideas ought to be cut out as the game progresses from preproduction to completion, but in practice things are often added on, sometimes by the developers themselves and sometimes by people "above" such as publishers. This makes a mess. Someone has to be in charge of meetings and the focus of meetings (though not necessarily of final decisions).
Failure to prototype the sound early on using amateurs to provide voice acting leads to problems at the end when it's too late to fix the professional actor version.
Minutiae often distract developers from what's important. That's because it's easy to research and discuss something that's not really important, rather than answer big questions about the core of the game.
Zany documentation can be a problem. Skip the entertainment in the docs, which are a blueprint. You don't expect the blueprint to be amusing or entertaining. Concentrate on clarity and precision.
Creative direction is vital, there needs to be one vision not a different one for every person. There must be a sole vision of the game that is jealously defended.
There is a notion that voice actors are too expensive. It's better to spend more (money and time) on voice actors, not less. Remember that under union rules you have 4 hours with an actor, don't just use him or her for 35 minutes, record alternate dialogue and multiple ways of delivering the same dialogue.
The first draft is not the best! Drafts need revision, revision, revision. "Writing is revision".
During questions Chandler pointed out that unfortunately in video games, much as in Hollywood, the writer may be the one least responsible for a game's narrative. And where the choice is between gameplay and story then gameplay is more important.
Chris Totten, who has a Masters degree in architecture, described how architectural principles could be applied to make better video game levels. He described how ideas of Narrow space, Intimate Space, Prospect Space, Refuge space, and Secondary Refuge could be applied to level architecture, as well as height, shadow, and shade to provide emotion in survival horror style levels, ending with a small level he'd created to demonstrate his points.
Totten's Gamasutra piece "Designing Better Levels Through Human Survival Instincts" http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/134779/designing_bette... describes the same ideas.
There are lots of things more important when making a level than these subtle points of architecture, but once you have grasped those most important points then a presentation like this can make you think about level design from a new perspective.
I was trying to do the same thing in my own talk, for more than 75 people, providing a new perspective by talking about managing and creating frustration in game design.
The slides and an audio recording can be obtained at http://pulsiphergames.com/teaching1.htm. I expect a written version to become available on Gamasutra one way or another, though of course there are lots of differences between an oral presentation and an article. [A preliminary written version has already been on BGG. This "final" version will be on Gamasutra.]
Whereas there were six talks plus an Unreal session going on at the same time, the two keynotes had timeslots all to themselves.
BioWare Senior Creative Director, Paul Barnett, gave the keynote on Thursday. Though he could have a second career as a standup comic, he nonetheless made some very interesting observations. One was that every game player who wants to make games has had a golden age or golden years, a time when he was young and had no responsibilities and nearly infinite time and patience to play games. The games of his Golden years, according to Barnett, tend to dominate the rest of his gaming life, and in many ways he is trying to remake those games. If you want to communicate well with someone in the game industry, whether they are older or younger, you need to understand the games of their Golden years. Here I can't speak for video game makers because my Golden age occurred before video games existed, even on mainframes. But I'd like to think, and certainly believe, that the games I design now are not like the hex and counter Avalon Hill games that were much of my Golden years, and are in no way an attempt to remake them.
Barnett felt that there is very definite division and mindset between people who have actually made a game and got it out there for other people to play, and those who only talk about it. It doesn't need to have been sold commercially but it has to be out there for people to play. I agree completely: the last part of the subtitle of my forthcoming book for beginning video and tabletop game designers is "Start to Finish". This is not meant to imply that one book can tell you everything you need to know, it's meant to mean you have to complete games, finish them, before you can really call yourself a game designer, and that the biggest mistake beginners make is to not finish anything. Of course I don't mean finish as in quit, I mean finish as in get it done so that you have a reasonable product that other people can play. "Get it Done" could have been the title for the book as a whole, though the most descriptive short title would have been "Learning Game Design".
Barnett was so amusing and entertaining as well as informative that he got a standing ovation at the end of his talk. There were no accompanying slides but I hope an audio version will become available. All of the presentations were being video-recorded for use by the local community college, Wake Tech.
Zynga East Coast Executive Producer, Paul Stephanouk, gave the keynote the day before. I was surprised at his description of how much players of the many -ville games appeared to love what they were doing. When he goes out he typically wears a T-shirt with the name of one of those games printed on the front. For a period of six months he was batting 1.000 for having people come up to him when they saw the T-shirt and tell him how much they loved the games, even before they learned that he had worked on some of them (especially Frontierville). To a typical longtime game player these games are very very very simple puzzles, but they mean a lot more to people who are not typical game players. And Stephanouk had recognized this, saying that he no longer designs games for himself but designs games for his family, which includes a wife who is not a typical game player and a five-year-old daughter and somewhat older son.
This illustrates to me where video games have gone. Although Paul did not use the term, video games have finally reached the same kind of market that mass-market tabletop games have reached for many decades. Most video games that attract game players are too complex or too intense or involve too much opposition for the kind of people who like to play Monopoly, Sorry, Game of Life, and other traditional more-or-less family games. These tabletop games cannot have more than two pages of rules because that becomes too complicated for most people. The very simple social network "games" on Facebook are reaching that same audience. Facebook itself has made this possible because people who do essentially nothing on a computer but use Facebook can play Facebook games even though they might struggle to install and play any other kind of game. In other words the technological barrier is much lower.
The casual audience is not the mass-market audience. Casual gamers may play games for many hours a week, they may not mind having the game oppose what they're trying to do, they might accept a little frustration, they might not need to be told what to do next as Cityville or Empires and Allies does. Many casual gamers still recognize that they may be asked to earn something as they play. Mass-market gamers want to be entertained, not challenged. Even if they’re capable of overcoming gamer-like challenges, they're not interested. They are the opposite of the hard-core who want to be challenged and who enjoy overcoming challenges. Mass-market games make absolutely no demands on the player (which is why children can play them), whereas many casual games do demand some thought or quickness of action from the player.
This description of "entertained, not challenged" also often applies to casual gamers, and we can say that the mass-market gamers are the least challenge-oriented (and much the larger) end of the casual game market.
Modern action-adventure movies often have very simple, straightforward plots because movie-makers think that movie-goers are easily confused. (I think most self-described game players are much more savvy.) Mass-market games are similarly designed to avoid confusion.
Just as with the tabletop mass-market, people play mass-market video games because their friends told them about them and because they've been identified as easy to play by the very fact that they're on Facebook (the mass-market tabletop games are identified by being sold at Toys "R" Us and Walmart). There may be games on Facebook that are not so easy to play but they're not the ones that everybody hears about, and they're not the ones that I hear elderly ladies talking about in the local pharmacy, just as I would be unsurprised to hear someone talk about Monopoly or Game of Life in the local pharmacy.
And make no mistake about it, to people who might call themselves game players, mass-market tabletop games are "the pits". The Game of Life and Monopoly have just as bad a reputation amongst tabletop game players as the -ville games have amongst video game players. But if you want to make a really large amount of money as a publisher of games then you want a successful mass-market game. Hasbro has to sell 300,000 to 1,000,000 copies of anything they put on the shelves to make it worthwhile, even though typical tabletop games and toys sell 1/10th to 1/1000th of that. Similarly a mass-market social networking game has to reach an enormous market of tens of millions of players to make it worthwhile for Zynga to support.
The American publishers of Settlers of Catan, which is a casual game rather than a hard-core game in both the original tabletop and computer versions, were working on a "broad market" version, not quite mass-market but simplified from the original. Broad market is not well defined in the tabletop industry, no more than it is in the video game industry, though I think the casual video games that still attract self-described heavy game players, such as Bejeweled and Tetris, constitute the broad market.
The hard core video game market can still generate millions of sales for games like Call of Duty. Hard core tabletop games like chess still sell in the millions, and hobby tabletop games that win the German "Game of the Year" award can sell more than a million copies. But most tabletop games, like most video games, sell immensely less than a million copies. In the long run, "millions of sales" are the domain of the mass market.
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Lewis Pulsipher
United States
Linden
North Carolina
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Thoughts about some game-related topics that are not long enough for separate blog posts.
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Quotation: "There's an old saying that I love about design, it's about Japanese gardening actually, that 'Your garden is not complete until there is nothing else that you can remove.'" --Will Wright (SimCity, The Sims, Spore, etc.)
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Is it more fun to be an expert, or to be in the process of becoming an expert, at playing a game?
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I am scheduled to be a speaker at the East Coast Game Conference in Raleigh, NC, April 25 and 26, specific time to be determined. (Topic: Much of Game Design Is Managing (and Causing) Frustration. That may sound familiar to some readers . . .)
For those unfamiliar with video game conferences, they are very different from tabletop game conventions. The major activity at the latter is game playing, and attendees are mostly consumers. The major activity at a conference is dissemination of techniques for making and marketing video games, and this is done principally through talks and workshops. Attendees are mostly video game professionals, and those who want to be (students). And as with professional conferences in academic disciplines, they tend to have more expensive entry fees than game conventions, and tend to be on weekdays rather than weekends. This one is Wednesday and Thursday.
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Game designers: How many times do you expect people to play your game? My answer varies with the type of game. If it's a sweep of history game, I think in terms of many, many plays, as I know people who've played Britannia 500 times, though I'm sure the average even amongst the game's fans is closer to 50 than 500.
If it's a "screwage" game, I think in terms of 10-25 times rather than 100 or 500.
But I never think in terms of, say, 5 times. Yet it seems to me that the majority (a great majority) of games published nowadays are designed as though 5 plays is sufficient.
And I suppose it is, for a great many game players. Variety (which often means playing lots of different games) is valued over depth (which involves learning more about, and getting better at, a particular game).
Of course, I usually get to see (and occasionally play) at least 30 plays of most games that I "finish". But the game changes over time, so it isn't quite the same thing as playing the same game over and over.
And if a prototype doesn't hold my interest over five plays, I shelve it.
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Game studies scholars like to use the term "Meaningful Play". Whenever I see it I turn off, because to me it's terrifically vague and, well, unmeaningful.
Unfortunately, the structure of education in the USA means that anyone who is an actual practitioner of a discipline--for example, a game designer or a novelist--is discounted by academics, who emphasize degrees and reference to what other academics have said/written. "Practitioner" is often a dirty word among people who have sailed through college to grad school to a terminal degree and then right into teaching. Which helps explain why our educational system has less and less to do with the real world, as time passes.
"Games studies" is about culture, not about game design. The scholars do not pretend to offer anything to help game designers.
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On Facebook I've seen lots of graphics, "what <profession or vocation> really does" with six photos of how different people perceive the "profession". For example, what hockey players do. What home schoolers do. I've not yet seen one for game players.
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Designers of video games, especially video game interfaces, will benefit from reading Jakob Nielsen's posts about Web usability. For example, http://www.useit.com/alertbox/disrupting-users.html?utm_sour...
talks about smooth workflow and disruptive workflow. Workflow is just as important in a game as in Web usage.
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Comic books might be the midpoint between RPGs that resemble novels and those that resemble tentpole (fantasy) adventure movies like Indiana Jones. Not that most comics make any attempt to be believable.
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Someone wrote to me about a graphical exposition about instant gratification, and I discovered others as I looked around the Web site (which is generally about online graduate school). Generations ARE different, and these graphics (which site their data sources) help illuminate this. I've also added a report of a recent survey.
http://www.onlinegraduateprograms.com/instant-america/
Instant gratification
http://www.onlinegraduateprograms.com/generation-screwed/
Millennials and work
http://www.onlinegraduateprograms.com/millennials/
Meet the Millennial generation
http://chronicle.com/article/Millennials-Are-More/131175/
Millennials Are More 'Generation Me' Than 'Generation We,' Study Finds
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Anyone who designs interfaces or interaction for video games should read the following.
http://www.asktog.com/columns/022DesignedToGiveFitts.html
And marvel at how many interfaces fail to recognize such fundamental rules of behavior . . .
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There's a tendency for people to think that a game is the sum of its mechanics. To me a good game is more than the sum of its parts. How those mechanics work with one another, and how they work with actual human players, makes a big difference in the outcome, and is much less than entirely predictable beforehand.
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Most free-to-play video games rely on in-game purchases to speed up progress in the game, to bypass certain tasks. Aren't games meant to be fun? Who watches good movies and wants to skip to the next scene so they're further into it, who skips pages in a book so they can boast how far along they are in it to their friends? None of the people who are actually enjoying the experience, that's for sure.
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I've been reading the GenCon event rules. I was considering offering game design talks as I do at Origins, WBC, and PrezCon, with the added possibility of selling copies of my book, which may be available by that time. (This is a common activity of authors of books of all kinds.)
But seminars at GenCon don't give the speaker any credit toward the entry fee. Game sessions do because players are charged fees to play, and GenCon collects the fees. Further, for all practical purposes, sales outside of the Exhibit Hall are prohibited.
My publisher exhibits at GenCon, so all is not lost. But for now, I'll skip it.
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Does practice make a difference in game playing? Are you going to play better when you've been practicing the game, or once you've become a top player will it all come back to you immediately?
A friend of mine loves Robo-Rally. He plays a lot, teaches other people to play a lot, and goes to PrezCon in Charlottesville every year to play in the tournament. This year he played 23 games at PrezCon, and won the tournament. I think practice does help.
Another game he's come to love is Merchant of Venus. He's played once every two weeks in the past year. But at PrezCon the game was played on the old board rather than the lovely custom-made set he uses. Though there are few if any functional differences, he had a hard time seeing what was going on. On the other hand, Merchant players came by as he played with his custom board, and remarked how hard a time they had seeing it.
So he was practicing, but on the wrong board, and maybe that's why he didn't make the finals in Merchant this year.
Certainly practice makes a big difference in games that are related to sports. For example, the top video game competitors in games that require a lot of manual dexterity (FPS, RTS) practice 8-10 hours a day. And we know how much professional athletes practice nowadays.
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If you're going to make a game as complicated as a video game, then let it be a video game. If you're going to make a game where people matter, then make it as simple as you can, so that the people vs. people can occur.
I see a lot of complicated tabletop games lately. Some are complicated for atmospheric reasons, the story. Some (the puzzles turned into contests) are complicated so that the puzzle is harder to solve. The presence of other people is, to a greater or lesser extent, there only to help you keep score and provide variation (the way a computer would provide variation).
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In most general terms, playing games used to be about earning something, and possibly failing; now they're about getting rewarded for participation, without the significant possibility of failure. Especially video games.
For example: at one time it was the referee's task in D&D to make the players fear for the lives and livelihoods (possessions, relationships) of their characters. Now it seems to be the referee's task, in 4e D&D at any rate, to present a (usually harmless) tactical mess, then reward players for participation.
And in many other cases it's the referee's task to tell a story, not to threaten characters (unless that fits with the story).
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Stages in a game are important. They provide at least a perception, if not an actuality, of change/growth and learning.
More important, if there are no stages players may wonder why they're playing the game as long as they are. Why not play half as long?
Game designers want to avoid the kind of thing some basketball "fans" talk about, they only watch the end of a game because they feel what goes before isn't important. They don't recognize that there are stages and variations in basketball that are as interesting as the results. They're only interested in the destination, not in the journey. If you're only interested in the destination, why watch at all, just get the score after the game is over.
Stages help the feeling that there's more variety in the game, as well.
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I've read that novelists don't enjoy reading novels as much as ordinary people, as they tend to think about how the novel is constructed while they're reading. In fact they're particularly happy when a novel is so absorbing that they forget to think about how it was made.
I have the equivalent, "game designers' disease". When I watch a game or play a game or talk with gamers I'm almost always thinking about how the game is put together or what the motivations of the players are. I don't know that that reduces my enjoyment, since my favorite game is the game of designing games, but it certainly makes for a different point of view.
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A tweet from a confused punter: @lewpuls This guy thinks he is Egon from Ghostbusters with his dig against books. "Print is dead", HA!
I guess that's from my last Miscellany when I talked about why someone might want to read a book. But it would be really odd for someone whose book is about to be printed, to say "print is dead". *Shakes head*
(Though you know, I've heard that Amazon now sells more non-print than print books.)
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Strategy and Tactics
Strategic: plan well ahead. That includes planning what additional forces you want/need to acquire. Ultimately, everything that happens is of interest to you (Diplomacy, HotW, Brit).
Tactical: do the best you can with what you have RIGHT NOW (most games depicting a particular battle)
So Twilight Struggle is described as a very tactical game because it is so much an improvisers' game, it's very hard to plan ahead if I can believe what people write about the game.
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Lewis Pulsipher
United States
Linden
North Carolina
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One of the first things I do with beginning game design students is give them sets of "Clout Fantasy" pieces and a large vinyl chessboard, in groups, to have them make up games. I have water-soluble markers so that they can draw on the chessboards if they choose. They enjoy the exercise, they get used to working in groups (which also helps them get to know one another), and ultimately they learn that designing a good game isn't as easy as they thought it would be. It also teaches them to work under constraints.
"Clout" pieces are very nice clay chips (like high quality poker chips) with artwork and two numbers on them (and also zero to four dots, but students rarely use the dots). I bought a bunch very cheap ($8 for 12 starter sets listing at $14.95 each) because Clout failed strikingly in the marketplace (production ended April 2007). I give each group four differently-colored sets of 15 pieces--two starter sets. The sets are standard, but the pieces differ between each color. Students are free to use the numbers and dots or not as they choose.
So checkers is a game they could play immediately with the sets. I don't give them dice, but they often ask sooner or later to use them , and I agree.
So much for preliminaries. Students often make some kind of wargame, given what they have, and I find that the students often don't understand how maneuver and combat methods work together.
When I say "maneuver", I mean that the location of pieces matters, and separates good play from bad, rather than how they fight. Chess and checkers are games of maneuver. Go is a game of maneuver, even though the maneuver comes through placement of pieces rather than actual movement. Even Tic-Tac-Toe is a game of maneuver, in this sense.
Games of "combat dominance" are defined mainly by the rules of how pieces conflict/fight. This often involves dice. Yes, there is conflict in chess, but the rule for it is very simple, whoever moves into the square, wins. Checkers is similarly simple, Go nearly so.
The most typical dice combat I've seen from beginners is that each side rolls a die, and highest wins. There is no provision for one side to gain an advantage from local superiority of numbers. So if one side has 10 pieces and the other 3, the odds in combat are still 50-50. Unit strength may modify this (say, with the numbers on the Clout pieces). Consequently, maneuver is *pointless*. Why bother to get numerical superiority in an area when it makes no difference to your success? And you have a game that absolutely amounts to dice rolling and no more, when unit strengths do not vary.
About the time three units defeat nine thanks to a run of luck, students will get this, if not before. The ideal to be impressed on the students is that maneuver ought to be important just as the strength of unit can be important.
Of course, combat rules can be quite intricate, though rarely are in the context of this exercise. Shooters and fighting games can have quite complex combat rules, though they are also games of maneuver.
It might be interesting to go through the typical list of military "principles of war" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principles_of_War) and try to apply to simple games. "Maneuver" is one, as is "economy of force" and "mass", if I recall correctly.
(Note: Civilization I-IV (computer versions) use one-on-one combat, ignoring other forces present, but I think this is intended to emphasize differences in technology, so that one really good unit can defeat many lower-tech units. Nonetheless, maneuver IS important in Civ., but in a very large context--strategic movement, not tactical movement.)
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Lewis Pulsipher
United States
Linden
North Carolina
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(I've had some medical problems that have distracted from writing about games lately, but this should be of interest.)
According to tweetdeck, one of the trending:worldwide topics on twitter not so long ago was 6 word stories. In the past few months I've asked people to say 6 words about game design, programming, wargames, stories in games, casual games, and innovation (and plagiarism) in games.
This time the challenge is this: say six (interesting or amusing) words about zombie games.
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Lewis Pulsipher
United States
Linden
North Carolina
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[Unfortunately this is even longer than “Frustration”, but given the disagreements over what is a puzzle, I figured it was lengthy explanation.]
Sometimes we use the term “game” to mean “playing at something”. For example, several years ago I made a “game” out of thinking of phrases to represent a college-student friend, and my friend liked to try to guess from the acronym what the phrase was. (For example, “THG”–Tommy Hilfiger Girl, because she often wore that company’s garments.) Was that actually a “game”? No, I think I was making up puzzles, which is a kind of puzzle in itself, and of course it was a puzzle for her, not a game.
I don't like solving puzzles--though I enjoyed making them up for my friend-- because to me, in the end, solving a puzzle is a waste of time. It achieves nothing, and I feel no sense of accomplishment when I solve one. If it's an obstacle in my way, I deal with it and get on about my business, but I don't like it. I'd rather use my time to create something or to socialize, or use my brain to find a solution to a practical problem. Why bother with a puzzle?
Yet puzzles are more popular than games. “Brain-teasers” and cross-word puzzles are in most newspapers, Sudoku is ubiquitous. The venerable Games magazine, founded in 1977, is self-described as "a consumer magazine featuring a wide variety of verbal and visual puzzles, brainteasers, trivia quizzes, and many other features, as well as reviews of new board games and electronic games." It's a lot more about puzzles than games. When I go to a bookstore I see far more books about puzzles than games in the "Games and Puzzles" section.
One reason why single-player video "games" have become so popular through more than 30 years is that they are interactive puzzles, not games--especially the widely popular social networking "games." Many of these “games” cannot be played “badly”, and many make suggestions to the player. With sufficient patience, every player will succeed. They are not quite as straightforward as Candyland or Chutes and Ladders, but they’re not far from them, perhaps on a level with Tic-Tac-Toe–except that you cannot lose.
There are significant differences between games and puzzles in how you play, and how you design them, and that's why I've undertaken the task of defining the two types of play. Much of the discussion of video games and video game design resolves and revolves around the difference between what I am calling games and “interactive puzzles”, but hardly anyone comes to grips with the fundamental difference.
I’m looking for definitions that make a difference for designers, as well as for players. It only confuses things when we call both single-player video “games” and more-than-two-player family games, "games." Yes, in both there are challenges to overcome. But climbing a mountain is a challenge, though not a game (perhaps more like a puzzle, now that I think about it). We need more than just “challenge”.
In the end, no definition is going to satisfy everyone or every case. But thinking about definitions can help you understand better what you’re doing when you try to design a game--or a puzzle.
First, the Summary
If we had to make one very broad generalization about games and puzzles it would be that games are about people and psychology, and puzzles are about calculation and logic (and, if all else fails, about guessing (trial and error)).
A “puzzle” usually has a goal, some state that you want to reach. Puzzles have a correct answer. Card Solitaire (a puzzle, not a game) has a correct answer--or no answer--for each possible arrangement of the cards, but by shuffling the cards we are able to create a great many slightly different puzzles.
A puzzle can be solved. And once you’ve completely solved it there’s not much point in doing it again. Some puzzles, like a jigsaw puzzle, may be so big and complex that you can’t remember the solution. Where the traditional video game has no chance factors, such as the arcade version of Pac-Man, then you can ultimately solve it just as arcade Pac-Man has been solved. In 1999 someone perceived the patterns (later explained in a Gamasutra article analyzing the programming ( http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3938/the_pacman_dossie... ) and played all the way through 255 levels to the end, eating every ghost and never dying, at which point the game crashed. We call the card activity Solitaire a game, but in fact it is a puzzle, by this definition. So we see how some things that we call games are more properly characterized as puzzles.
Moreover, puzzles do not involve conscious intelligent opposition. There is (as yet) no intelligence or consciousness in a computer, although it can do some complex calculations. The key element, in the end, is that puzzles are for one person and games are for at least two persons (or semblance of persons) in opposition. A cooperative game like the popular boardgame Pandemic is essentially solitaire, even though you substitute several players for the solo player. And it is a puzzle, not a game, as there is no semblance of intelligent opposition. It includes several ways to change the strength of opposition, but in the end players solve the game and are much less likely to play thereafter.
Games do not have solutions, right answers, or if there is a solution to the game as there is for chess, it is beyond human capacity to figure it out. Furthermore, you can’t influence the psychology of the “opposition” in a puzzle, and you can in a game. Even in a perfect information, heavily studied and analyzed game like chess, there is a psychological element, as you can fool the other player or break his will to resist even if your position technically does not justify his surrender.
People who don't like people-to-people interaction in games, who want to turn all games into math, are unlikely to like my separation of game and puzzle. One astute blogger about video games, Tadhg Kelly, has an interesting “Primer” (glossary) that defines “game” very broadly, and does not even include entries for toy or puzzle. http://whatgamesare.com/primer.html Treating games and puzzles as the same thing makes no sense to me. I think the following table indicates the yawning differences between the two.
Characteristics
I’ve listed the characteristics of games and puzzles in the table, then I’ll discuss each one in turn. This list is naturally a black-and-white division, though in practice there are many activities that are in the large gray area between game and puzzle, so after the discussion of characteristics I'll try to determine how game and puzzle meet.
[Not finding a way to insert this table satisfactorily, I have had to post it on my Web site and provide the URL here.]
http://pulsiphergames.com/Articles/Games&PuzzlesTable.htm
Choices and Solutions
Games have multiple choices that can lead to success. Good games do not have dominant strategies or saddle points, a single best move that must always be pursued for best success. Saddle points (surefire, always-best moves) and dominant strategies are common in puzzles; the solution to a formal puzzle is often a saddle point. Pure puzzles, ones without uncertainty or random elements, are always solvable (one course of action ends in success, that is, the entire activity has a succession of saddle points). Another way to put this is that pure puzzles are deterministic. In general, if you do the right thing every time, it will always work (and solve the puzzle) every time.
However, at some point the solution to a puzzle becomes so complex that no human can encompass it. Checkers, for example, has been brute-force solved via the computer program Chinook, which has a database of every possible position and the best move for each position. The remarkable human checkers champion, Marion Tinsley, lost only seven competitive games during his very long reign, and defeated Chinook before the final solution was incorporated into the program. Chess will be solved sooner or later, and it has already been proved mathematically that a perfectly played chess game will always and in the same way, although the proof did not indicate whether that was a white win, a draw, or a black win. So while checkers and chess are puzzles according to our definitions, they are so complex that no human can successfully figure out the solution and we can treat them as games.
Theoretically, you can use the mathematical Theory of Games of Strategy to calculate mixed strategies for games, but in practice most commercial games are so complex and involve so much uncertainty that no one can reduce the possibilities to mathematical percentages. Furthermore these mixed strategies are stochastic (probabilistic) rather than deterministic. While these mixed strategies are best for the “perfect player” they do not guarantee success the way a saddle point does.
"Contests"
Occasionally puzzles are turned into contests, where each player individually pursues the objective, and first one to achieve it wins. These can be described as “multi-player solitaire”: everyone works at a puzzle within a contest framework, and whoever does best by the “time” limit wins the contest. You can time how long it takes someone to do something and declare whoever is fastest the winner, but that’s not a game.
A race is a contest where there is some way to directly affect an opponent, typically by blocking their path, and that ability to affect other players moves the activity toward game and away from puzzle. But most races are closer to puzzles than to games, as the major problem is “how to go faster”, not “how to deal with opposition”.
Consider how different traditional Olympic speed-skating is from the newer short track style of Apolo Anton Ohno. They are both “racing” but the former is very close to a puzzle, while the latter includes a strong tactical element.
“Contests” are not games. Virtually anything that can be timed or measured can be turned into a contest. Nor does a contest require design, and if we call a contest a game then virtually everything becomes a game and we have a useless definition.
In “games” with more than two players, a contest will usually have symmetric starting positions, so that everyone has the same task. Games for more than two players with asymmetric starting positions are unlikely to be contests.
Failure
In a game, if you make mistakes or otherwise fail, you probably lose unless the opposition makes more mistakes. Trial and error (guessing then checking) is not suitable behavior, because while you’re guessing your opponent is likely to make better moves and win the game.
In a puzzle there is no danger of "losing"–if you fail you can just try again. Trial and error (guessing then checking) can be used to find the way. At worst you decide not to continue. Video games have enshrined trial and error through respawning and save points, when played as single-player games.
This has an interesting effect on player egos. Some people don’t like to put their ego on the line by playing and possibly losing a game against other people. On the other hand there are people who gain nothing from solving a puzzle and just feel stupid if they have trouble solving it.
Puzzles that are turned into contests typically maintain a noncompetitive attitude so that players don’t feel very ego-involved. Many Eurostyle boardgames are of this type.
Opposition
Games require intelligent opposition. Intelligent opposition can provide active obstacles/challenges and can adjust to another player’s moves. Puzzles provide passive
obstacles/challenges that have been devised by the designer(s) rather than the active opposition of other players.
In card Solitaire the obstacles are clearly inactive. In Tetris, there is purely random selection of the next block, not involving significant decision-making, not “active” to me. In Left4Dead, on the other hand, the Director is active opposition, changing the situation according to how well the players are doing. Computer programming provides the opportunity for an inanimate object to provide some form of active opposition, sometimes resembling intelligence. As the programming of computer opponents improves the computer can come closer to providing intelligent opposition.
A puzzle will present the same problem and solution again and again. In a game, the presence of intelligent opposition ought to mean that a variety of problems will be posed at a particular juncture, not the same one over and over. The presence of randomness and uncertainty can play a strong part here.
Origin of challenges
In a game the challenges come largely from other players, within the context established by the designer(s). In a puzzle the challenges come from the puzzle-maker(s).
Yomi
Games include the possibility of "Yomi", reading the intentions of the opposition; this is much more practical when the player is face-to-face with his opponents, able to read visual, auditory, and other clues, then online. In a puzzle "Yomi" is only possible if you can read the intentions of the puzzle creator; this is very difficult to do because the puzzle creator is not present offering cues to his intention.
Some games can be played as yomi if all participants are willing, yet if one uses a system solution, all end up conforming like it or not (Rock-Paper-Scissors is an example).
“Completion”
A play of a game may end, but the game can never be "completed", and you can never "beat the game". If the game is good there's always a reason to play again. I’m sure there are people who have played chess, checkers, backgammon, go, and other games more than a thousand times, and I know people who have played my game Britannia – 4 to 5 hours per play – more than 500 times.
Puzzles can be completed: there's no longer any reason to play once you know how to do the puzzle. You can "beat the game" [puzzle], and once you’ve beaten it there’s little reason to play again. Yet some puzzles, like many one player video games, either have enough variety or challenge that people play again and again, if only to try to improve their score.
Perhaps an in-between occurrence is a game that depends heavily on its story for its attraction. Once players know the story, many will stop playing the game. Many people enjoy a story because they want to know “what happens next”, and once they know that they’re no longer interested in the story. Other stories are timeless and can be enjoyed over and over.
System versus psychological
Games, especially those with more than two players, have a strong psychological component; players mostly contend with the other players, not with the system. Puzzles have little or no psychological component; player(s) mostly contend with the game system, not with the other players (if any, as in a contest).
In video game terms we can call the psychological PVP (player versus player) and the system PVE (player versus environment).
Two player games tend to fall in the middle. There are no opponents to persuade, just someone who controls the other side. But that person can be misled or befuddled. (Actually warfare is “two player”. Yet Napoleon said that in war the moral (psychological) is three times more important than the physical (system).) While you can try to psychologically manipulate a single opponent you must also understand the system very well or no amount of psychology will save you from losing.
A “game” that's pure system is a puzzle, one that's pure psychology is a game.
Conflict
Games (like stories) usually involve direct conflict amongst participants. Puzzles lack conflict (though there are obstacles), in considerable part because there’s only one participant. Puzzles that are turned into contests rarely have direct conflict but there may be indirect conflict in the form of obstruction, something like a race.
As you move toward the game end of the spectrum and away from the puzzle and it's more likely that there will be obvious conflicts between players.
Story
Both games and puzzles may have an explicit story component. If the game depends heavily on the story component then once players have experienced the story they may no longer play. More often, the story provides a marketing hook and a context for play, but the quality of the gameplay is what will determine whether people keep playing the game.
The story component of a puzzle provides a context for what the player is doing and consequently could include hints about how to solve the puzzle.
“Mastery”
A game--unless it is very simple, such as Tic-Tac-Toe or Rock-Paper-Scissors--can never be entirely mastered, it always depends on the quality of opposition. Puzzles can be completed. Puzzles can be played “perfectly”. Those with point scales can be played to improve mastery (high score). Arcade Pac-Man is a puzzle finally completed by someone in 1999 after many, many years of play. Up to that point, the point score indicated mastery.
Randomness and Uncertainty
A game need not have randomness or uncertainty, though a two player game with neither is probably solvable and is really a puzzle, for example chess or checkers. Randomness and uncertainty can be present in something that still conforms to most of our puzzle characteristics; there can still be dominant strategies although there are unlikely to be saddle points.
Many puzzle solvers do not like randomness. For example a reviewer in Gameinformer magazine noted that "combat was accurate and satisfying--when we missed it was because our aim was off, and not because we came up short on some hidden die roll."
Other puzzles have some random element to provide variation. The player optimizes what he’s going to do in light of the knowledge that there is variation.
Do we have to say that elements of randomness or hidden information are necessary for something to be a game? Not exactly. While theoretically chess is a puzzle, in practice no human is able to understand "the solution", even computers have not yet attained it although they will. So while technically chess is a puzzle we treat it as a game.
Where do game and puzzle meet?
Puzzles versus problem-solving
There has to be a vast gray area where game and puzzle meet. What identifies or characterizes it? One difficulty I've had in differentiating puzzles and games is determining at what point the capabilities of a powerful programmed computer can mimic intelligent opposition, and also at what point puzzle-solving becomes problem solving.
Games certainly involve problems to solve. Where does puzzle-solving become problem-solving? From the player point of view, I'm not sure. From the designer point of view, it may amount to this: when someone devises a puzzle, he or she has in mind a particular way to solve it. And might not even allow other solutions that, in real world terms, ought to work, but won't in the "game". On the other hand, when someone devises a problem to solve, they don't have a particular solution in mind, they pose a situation and let the player figure it out.
When you have uncertainty (if only about the human participants’ intention) or chance involved, you often have problem-solving; if you have no chance, and only uncertainty that can be predicted absolutely (you know what possible shapes are coming in Tetris, there is no human-unpredictability) then you have puzzle-solving--because the solution always works.
Here's another way of looking at it, from a discussion of the future of video adventure games in PC Gamer magazine #217 (Richard Cobbett). Recall that adventure games are traditionally narratives expressed through puzzles.
Puzzles need to be largely retired in favor of problems. What's the difference? With a puzzle, the challenge is working out how the designer wants you to solve it; a problem is something that you solve on your own. A puzzle is something you get stuck on; a problem has consequences and those consequences are all the more effective because you're more responsible for them. [Emphasis added]
By this definition many single player video games have moved beyond puzzle to problem. But by this definition a "problem" is still closer to a puzzle than to a game.
Someone suggested that “games are a series of players presenting new puzzles to each other each and every turn." No, players present problems to other players, not puzzles. Puzzles have definite solutions, problems rarely have just one approach that can be successful.
Hybrids
Many modern "games" are hybrids of game and puzzle. We can recognize that formal puzzles tend to be pure puzzle and some games tend to be pure game but there can be a mixture in many others. For example many games players can benefit from being able to calculate probabilities in a game. One version of Settlers of Catan that I own includes a table of probabilities for sums of the roll of two dice, a vital facet of the game. People who understand the probabilities will play better than those who do not. This calculation of probabilities is a solution, there is just one right way to do it. In that respect it's like a simple puzzle in the midst of a game.
While Settlers is a simple example familiar to both tabletop and video gamers, there are many AAA list games that rely heavily on computer opposition. Varying with the success (and designer intent) of the "AI" we have a mix of game and puzzle as the computer opponent more or less successfully mimics a human opponent.
We have the question, what do we call a hybrid, a game or a puzzle? I don't know how we can identify/define a middle ground and say on one side it's a puzzle, on the other side a game. So it will depend on the individual. Some people are going to suppose that anything which isn't a pure puzzle, is a game. I dislike puzzles for many reasons, so I'm going to suppose that I'll probably dislike something that's mostly puzzle, even if it isn't "pure", and I'll call it a puzzle (or "puzzle-like" as it moves farther from puzzle).
Most single-player computer “games” are clearly puzzles (only a few AAA games have really good computer opponents), most tabletop games (that are not multiplayer solitaire) with more than two players are clearly games. But computer games are moving toward the characteristics of the tabletop (more than one player), and tabletops are moving toward the characteristics of video games (puzzle-contests, stories (RPGs)).
The gray areas come with computer opponents, and with "games" that are primarily intended as stories, whether video or some forms of RPG. When is a computer opponent good enough to provide a semblance of intelligent opposition?
The computer-intelligence "Turing Test" amounts to whether you can tell if you're dealing with a human or a computer. Computer opponents (probably a better term than the hifalutin "AI") 25 years ago would never be mistaken for a human, but now in some circumstances they might be. Yet even now, everything I've read or heard (I don't play video games online) is that when someone becomes skilled against the computer in a single-player video game, and then goes online to play that game, he usually finds the human opponents are MUCH better than the computer.
Clearly a non-computer non-human opponent (such as Pandemic's) will be painfully simple, again like those computer opponents of 30 and more years ago.
What makes human opponents (good ones, anyway) better than computer opponents? Perhaps unpredictability is the first thing, followed by... Imagination? Creativity? Qualities that no computer opponent can yet have.
In some computer games the programmers try to give the computer opponents human characteristics, such as aggression, defensiveness, friendliness, and so forth. Sometimes you can choose what kinds of opponent(s) you want to play against.
Then again, you get to something like computer Diplomacy and the opponents are obviously programmed (and poorly, by all accounts).
Uncertainty revisited (along with determinism)
With all we've said about uncertainty, however, we can harken back to our first generalization, that games are about people and puzzles are about calculation and logic.
Where there is no uncertainty, I'm not sure you can have a game in the long run, although if there's enough complexity then that provides a form of uncertainty. Tic-Tac-Toe does not provide enough complexity to create uncertainty and so it is easily solved despite best efforts of the opponent. To the human mind chess provides a great deal of uncertainty because of the complexity. But it's likely that computers will solve it someday, just as they have solved checkers.
When I was a kid I was a determinist, thinking that if you had a sufficiently powerful computer and enough knowledge then you could calculate everything that was going to happen. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, among other things, put paid to that notion. While theoretically the mathematical Theory of Games of Strategy enables a "perfect player" (one who is maximizing minimum gain) to identify possible strategies (moves) and calculate the percentage of time he should use each one in a given situation, this doesn't mean the game always happens the same way, it will vary at each play with the dice rolls that pick which strategy you use THIS TIME. Well, it does play the same each time if there's one strategy that should be used 100% of the time (Tic-Tac-Toe), but most games are more complex than that. So each play of the game can be different even if it is solvable.
Yet in practice the "determinist" view, which might be that you can always calculate the right mix of strategies, is impossible in the real world. Among other things it's usually impossible to agree to the value of particular results when using various strategies. Chess programs used to be written that way, relying on values of squares or pieces or positions, but I'm guessing that nowadays they're mostly brute-force look-aheads, given the speed of big computers.
Games are not all math, nor is game design primarily a mathematical exercise. When it approaches a mathematical exercise, the design is probably a puzzle, not a game. You might be able to say that "all puzzles are math," but games are not.
Number of players and player interaction
While we cannot say that a game must have randomness, I think it must have uncertainty. That uncertainty can come from having more than one opponent. Diplomacy is a classic boardgame for more than two players that has no random element, but lots of uncertainty through seven players, compounded by the simultaneous movement method. A two player game can have uncertainty about the other player's intentions, but because there is only one other player then you can try to account for all possibilities in a way that is usually impractical with more than one opponent.
You can have more than one or two players when you have a puzzle that has been framed as a contest. Many Eurostyle boardgames are constructed this way. I don't think people often consciously think of Eurostyle games as puzzles, but in practice they treat them that way, as something to be solved. It's not at all unusual to see Euro players helping each other during a game to make closer-to-optimum moves. If every player is getting closer to the solution to the game, they can feel good about themselves even if they "lose" that particular play. More broadly, people are playing against the game system far more than they're playing against other players. There are lots of exceptions in this enormously broad category, of course, and some of the most popular Euros are far from puzzle-like.
What about player interaction? (This is interaction within the game, not social interaction amongst the players.) "Multi-player solitaire", which often amounts to a puzzle-contest, is by definition lacking in player interaction (“solitaire”). On the other hand, how can you play a game with other players if you cannot interact with them in the game? Can a puzzle have interaction with other players? As always with computers, we can ask ourselves how much a computer can substitute for a human.
I think that player interaction is one of the defining characteristics of games, one that is missing from puzzles. There tends to be less player interaction as the “game” is more puzzle-like. You can have a poorly-designed game, such as Monopoly, that has little player interaction because of poor design choices rather than because it is puzzle-like.
"Yomi" revisited
David Sirlin's outstanding book "Playing to Win" on playing video fighting games is full of the psychology of play and "yomi" (reading the opponent’s mind)--but he's talking about a two-player game, not a one-player-and-computer game. http://www.sirlin.net/ptw .
There is no Yomi, no reading of the minds of the opposition, in a puzzle, because there’s no opposition. To generalize, the more Yomi can help a player succeed the more we have a game and the less Yomi can help a player succeed the more we have a puzzle. In a pure puzzle Yomi is useless except in that strange case that you somehow divine what the puzzle-maker was doing. In a pure game the player who is best that reading the minds the opposition will probably be most successful.
An important distinction is whether the opposition is also trying to rely on Yomi or is trying to rely on Game Theory. If someone is minimaxing, and relying on a stochastic method to determine which of a mixed set of strategies to use, Yomi is useless. But in games of significant complexity few players will be able to figure out mixed strategies.
For example in Rock-Paper-Scissors (RPS) the Game Theory solution is play each choice one third of the time. And that is quite literally the way I would play if I had a randomizer available, that is I would play each possibility one third the time. Other people try to outguess the opposition, to use Yomi. If both players are trying to do that then the one who is better at it will probably win in the long run. But if someone is trying to use Yomi against me it won't make any difference, in the long run the game will still be 50-50. (I don't think the other player will do worse because he's trying to guess.) So in one sense RPS is all about Yomi and in another sense it is solved.
After all, the intention of the game is to determine something randomly. (Odds-Evens is even purer: each player "throws" one or two fingers, one having taken an "odd" to win and the other an "even" sum.)
Tic-tac-toe is practically a puzzle because it's so easy to solve, although people who haven't solved it may use Yomi when playing. This may work if both players are trying to use Yomi, but if one follows the solution, the game will end in a draw, or the one following the solution will win.
Poker is an epitome of Yomi. Players who best divine what the other players are trying to do are the most successful in the long run. The system is easy to figure out and relatively easy to calculate odds for, although there are some people who cannot do it. So lots of people know the system of playing poker, but a lot of them are not very good at it because they're not good about hiding their intentions and divining other players’ intentions.
I'm often surprised that people play poker online, because many of the signals that provide information for Yomi are not available. All you have left is trying to analyze the pattern of play of the opposition.
Another way to put this is that a puzzle is challenge without Yomi. And without the unpredictability of human intervention.
"Experiences"
Many designers of “AAA list” video games try to create “an experience” for the player. They want the player to feel he’s experiencing something different, unusual, often larger than life, they want the player to feel like he’s really there. This is usually related to some kind of story, though not necessarily a linear one. Are these games, are they puzzles, are they something else again, such as “interactive stories”? The play has many characteristics of puzzles, yet it’s immensely more complex and elaborate than most puzzles. The designers might say that it doesn’t matter whether it’s a game or puzzle or something else, what matters is the story. And that’s different from most games and puzzles, where the story (if any) only provides a context for what you’re doing, it isn’t the point of the whole activity.
Game Design Books
What do some well-known books have to say about games and puzzles?
Rollings and Adams in Fundamentals of Game Design give a simple definition of the difference between toys, puzzles, and games. Toys have neither goals nor rules. You do whatever you want with them. Puzzles have goals but not rules. And games have both goals and rules. This is a useful rule of thumb, yet I always have a problem with this definition because most puzzles do have rules even if they are not explicitly written out. For example, if you’re trying to work one of those puzzles with string and wire one of the rules is you cannot cut the string. Let me illustrate it this way: Alexander the Great, when confronted with the extraordinarily complex Gordian knot, clearly a puzzle, broke the rules by using his sword to cut the knot.
On the other hand some tabletop role-playing games specify no goals, but players have their own objectives.
Zimmerman and Salen in Rules of Play after 80 pages constructing a definition of games find that puzzles ("The Puzzle of Puzzles") and role-playing games don't quite fit. In the end they punt: "We are not going to split hairs. In our opinion, all puzzles are games, although they constitute special kind of game." I refuse to punt: the differences between puzzles and games are fundamental and of great importance to designers.
I think any book that approaches game design from a video game point of view is trapped by the past: people call single player interactive entertainment software "video games" even though there are so many puzzle-like characteristics to single player video games. Dear Esther is neither game nor puzzle, but it is sold along with video "games", so it’s reviewed in computer “game” magazines. Wii Music and Wii Fit are also not games or puzzles, but are marketed by a video game company (Nintendo) along with other video games, so we tend to call them games. A more practical/descriptive name for the video game industry is the video entertainment software industry.
The glossary in my forthcoming book "Game Design: How to Create Video and Tabletop Games, Start to Finish" has this entry for "puzzle":
Formal puzzles have a unique solution, and once you've solved the puzzle there is little point in playing further. Many single player video games are interactive puzzles, some with a single solution where there’s no random factor, some (which include randomization to avoid complete predictability) with “optimal ways to do things”–dominant strategies and tactics. Games, in contrast, cannot have “solutions” or a dominant strategy because of the unpredictable and infinitely-varying influence of the opponent(s).
Designing games versus designing puzzles
Both games and puzzles need to be designed. But the objectives and methods are somewhat different because the method of posing of challenges is different (from other players, or from the system). Design overlaps, but there are parts of game design that have nothing to do with puzzles, and parts of puzzle design that have nothing to do with games (see diagram).
From a design point of view, it’s a lot easier to test a puzzle than to test a game. You only need one person, except for puzzle-contests, and you don't need to design something that can be enjoyably played a hundred times, because people typically play puzzles only once, or a few times–only until they know the solution. On the other hand, games can usually be simpler than puzzles, because the players provide much variation.
An example, which is which?
Recently I thought about definitions of game, puzzle, and toy in relation to three gambling activities: Texas Hold'em, Blackjack, and Slot Machines.
In playing slot machines there is nothing to solve, no opposition, pure chance–but it isn’t quite a toy, because you can’t change anything to suit your own desires. Is it just an activity?
In BlackJack, there is no opposition except in a programmed sense, and it can be solved (by the card-counters over the course of a session, not individual hands). It's a puzzle.
Texas Hold'em is all about what’s in the mind, though there is also considerable chance, you can make all the right choices and still lose. As with BlackJack, you must look at it by session, not by individual hand. An individual hand played in isolation is much more like a puzzle as you try to calculate your odds and the opponent's odds.
Another example
Consider the "game" show Jeopardy. Is this a game, a puzzle, somewhere in between? Most of what the players do is answer trivia questions. The only mechanism that lets a player affect another is to "beat them to the buzzer," to answer a question before anyone else can. There are possible psychological effects that are aspects of the contest, and even a small chance for "yomi" when the players choose how much to bet/risk on the big bonus.
If players took regular turns answering questions, this would absolutely be a puzzle-contest. The buzzer introduces a way to hinder other players, or at least to help yourself at their expense, and takes Jeopardy a distance toward game (a form of race) and away from puzzle. It is still much more puzzle than game.
The bottom line
Games are about people and psychology, puzzles are about systems, about calculation and logic (and, if all else fails, about guessing (trial and error)).
Game designers devise ways for players to challenge other players. Puzzle designers devise ways for the puzzle (perhaps implemented through a computer) to challenge the player or, in a puzzle-contest, to challenge all the players. Some games and some puzzles involve both.
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Lewis Pulsipher
United States
Linden
North Carolina
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[Insofar as this is a blog, it rarely contains “completely finished” work. One of the purposes of a blog–this one, anyway--is to rely on readers’ observations in order to improve the work. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn’t. This has already been posted on F:AT and revised as a result, now we’ll see what more can be revealed by comments. LP]
You can make a case that “game design is all about frustration.” I don't agree with that extreme, but examining how frustration works and doesn't work in game design can be quite beneficial for designers. Certainly a large part of a designer’s task, in the 21st century, is managing player frustration.
A recent review summary in Gameinformer magazine illuminates the essential problem. The reviewer (of Shank 2) complained that “Despite some improvements and a fun new co-op mode this sequel packs in too much unnecessary frustration.” The question for a designer is, what frustration is a necessary part of the game, and what is not, and how do we get rid of the unnecessary frustration. Much of the answer to what is necessary depends on the target audience. For example, to one player of an FPS, automatic aiming is necessary to enjoyment of the game, to another it’s frustratingly “too easy”. If the FPS is aimed at the “hard core” then it will leave out automatic aiming, if it’s aimed at a much broader market, automatic aiming will be necessary. But there’s also the frustration that results from poor design.
Frustration can arise when you cannot get what you want. Yet the very act of playing a game implies that there could be frustration because the game itself, or the players in the game, are trying to prevent you from achieving your goal. Potential frustration must be part of the game, but what roles do different kinds of frustration play in game design? Some kinds are much less desirable than others, and as with most game design questions a large part of the answer is "it depends". It depends on what players expect, it depends on the kinds of players they are, it depends on what kind of game you're designing.
A major purpose in game design throughout history has been to "put the player on the horns of a dilemma", so that the player has to decide what is the better choice. But what we would have taken, “back when,” as part of the dilemma at the heart of games, the failures, the inability to always do what we want, is now seen by many as undesirable frustration.
Inevitably there will be some frustration in a game, but some kinds of frustration come from elements extraneous to the actual play of the game that the game designer cannot always control, while other kinds of frustration come from choices of the designer--limitations in the manipulation of the game (the interface) and choices the designer has made that are not gameplay choices per se but still frustrate players. These non-competitive frustrations are ones the game designer should eliminate as much as possible.
Definition
Let's consider some definitions:
frustration (WordNet 3.0)
"1. the feeling that accompanies an experience of being thwarted in attaining your goals
2. an act of hindering someone's plans or efforts
3. a feeling of annoyance at being hindered or criticized"
Wikipedia: "Frustration is a common emotional response to opposition. Related to anger and disappointment, it arises from the perceived resistance to the fulfillment of individual will."
Wikipedia's definition is particularly interesting because it includes will and opposition. When people are playing a competitive game they expect opposition. If they're playing against other people then the source of opposition is obvious. The game system doesn't oppose a will, people do. If they’re playing against the computer then questions arise about whether there is actually opposition or just a situation or puzzle that needs to be solved. But harkening back to WorldNet's first definition, a puzzle can thwart a player.
Frustration as a reaction to opposition used to be regarded as normal in games, where you played against opponents. Now many tabletop games and most single-player video games are more or less puzzles, without an opponent, or without one who can do much to hinder/oppose you. (As time passes computers become more able to provide opposition resembling a human's, but those who have played a single player video game and then gone online to play usually say that humans are much more formidable opponents than computers can be.)
People don't want their entertainment to be frustrating. "A lot of people say, 'Well, I like a challenge.' I don't like challenges. Life is tough enough without any challenges." This was Jackie Gleason, a very successful actor and comic, among other things, born as long ago as 1916. This attitude has always been with us, but seems to be more ascendant today. People today are much less likely to accept any kind of frustration as part of their entertainment than they were 40 years ago. "Instant gratification" and "convenience" and the "Easy Button" have changed expectations. Many younger people expect to be rewarded just for participating. And many younger people are likely to quickly quit an activity they find frustrating.
When someone plays a game they may be thwarted by four sets of circumstances:
• other players (tough decisions, opposition)
• the game system (tough decisions, maybe opposition,)
• the game interface
• other factors
Another way to list this would be:
• Frustration with other players
• Frustration with the game mechanics
• Frustration with the interface
• Frustration with other factors
Frustration and Opposition from other players
The other players in a game are on obvious source of opposition and consequently of potential frustration. But a game can be designed in a great variety of ways to maximize or minimize that potential. A cooperative game for example pits all the players against non-player opposition, in effect a single player game with several players cooperating to substitute for one player. The other players can be frustrating by making plays that you think are substandard but they're not usually opposing you.
A race involves opposition but often there is very little that your opponents can do to hinder you. Blocking can be employed to limited effect, and of course in games like Mario Kart there's a lot you can do to interfere with other players actions. It depends. In traditional Olympic speed skating a participant skates with only one opponent, so barring bad luck there is no way for players to affect their opponents. The newer short track speed skating style (Apolo Anton Ohno’s style) affords many more chances for one player to hinder or otherwise affect another. It makes for quite different racing.
In a boardgame like Britannia each player has his own point scoring objectives, and in order to prevent other players from scoring he may have to sacrifice some points he could score. In other point games you may have very little opportunity to prevent an opponent from scoring points so you concentrate on scoring your own points. In other games there may be a limited pool of points available and in order for you to gain you have to take from someone else. In a cutthroat game like Diplomacy the norm is that players will lie, cheat, and steal in order to thwart you and promote their own well-being. The only way to gain strength in the game is to take it from someone else (it's a zero-sum game).
So there's a spectrum here from games in which players are not supposed to hinder other players (cooperative) through games where there is limited hindrance to games where hindering other players is the major path to success. A major design question in a multi-sided game is how easy is it to hinder other players, moreover how easy is it to hinder other players without sacrificing your own efforts to succeed. Some games are designed to let everyone build up but one person builds up a little faster. Other games are designed to tear down until one player survives. Many traditional boardgames are the latter type, think of chess and how as the game goes on players have less and less to work with. Many of the recently developed Eurostyle board and card games emphasize building up and strictly limit how much you can do to hinder another player. Much of that hindrance comes from anticipating what another player might want to do and doing it first so that the other cannot, which is quite different from more direct kinds opposition that you might see in wargames. It is subtle and of more limited impact than direct opposition.
Frustration and Opposition from the Game System
The game system is the mechanics of the game. In video game terms the section above is about “PvP”, player versus player, and this section is about “PvE”, player versus environment. The game system is the mechanics of the game and how they fit together.
Players used to accept that the game would sometimes prevent them from doing what they wanted to do. Nowadays people are much less tolerant of frustration. They don’t want the game mechanics to put obstacles in their way.
This is quite obvious in the evolution of video games. We now have many games that aim his gun for a player automatically once the player points in the general direction. A game that actually keeps track of how much ammo you have has become the exception rather than the norm. Unlimited ammo is less frustrating. And of course in a video game it’s immensely easier to hit something with a shot than it is in real life.
An example of a specific boardgame mechanic that used to be quite common but is generally frowned upon now is losing a turn, such as an "opponent loses turn" card. Gamers today often "hate" to lose a turn, and are less likely to play a game with that possibility. Why? 40 years ago "lose turn" was regarded as part of the competition of a game, just another way to achieve a goal. Today many people have grown up with video games where they're constantly active, and strongly dislike not being able to do anything. In some cases, one of their primary motivations for playing the game is to DO something, and when they lose a turn they cannot do anything.
Whether you think this way or not--as an older generation person I don't--as a designer you have to take this into account. If you choose to design a game that includes down time, lost turns, and a need to spend time thinking about what you're going to do, you necessarily limit your market.
Frustration from the game interface and other factors within control of the designer(s)
User Interface. Every tabletop and video game offers some means of telling the game what you want to do and of enabling the game to tell you what's happening. This is the broadest definition of "user interface". This is usually designed by the game designer(s), and a poor interface can ruin the experience for many people. People tend to take interface for granted in tabletop games but it can make quite a difference. Players tend to be more aware of interface and interface problems in a video game, perhaps because it’s fundamentally harder to tell a video game what you want to do, compared with a tabletop game.
Fortunately, testing a game with people who have not been involved in the process of creation ought to identify interface problems. The biggest interface mistake in the video game industry is to only have the people who are involved with the game test it, because they become accustomed to using a less than optimal interface and may not realize how frustrating it will be for other people.
This is why it's often a better choice to use a common interface rather than a new one, because the new one becomes a frustration at least temporarily, while a common one does not. Even if you think your new interface is "intuitive", "intuitive" is a BS buzz-word that amounts to "what's familiar to the person". Take some people who truly do not play games (if you can persuade them to play) and you'll find that what's "intuitive" to them is quite different, because they have a different experience to work from. So stick to what is likely to be familiar to the players in your target audience, not to what you think is "intuitive".
Entire books have been written about game interfaces so to save space I’ll say no more about the interface here.
There are other aspects of a game that can be frustrating to people that the designer can control.
Arithmetic/calculation. The first of these is the use of calculation in a game where the computer does not automatically take care of the arithmetic, so it’s primarily a tabletop game problem. My observation is that people, especially young adults, are much less able to do math in their heads than they were 40 years ago. Even the simple act of adding the results of the roll of several dice can be frustrating to many people. In the millennial generation the proportion who like math is very small. Whether this is a generational change or a failure of education, it is one reason why STEM education (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) is at a crisis for lack of interested students.
When I first discussed this frustration in a blog there were many comments that game designers should be helping people get better at arithmetic. If you want to promote arithmetic capability, games are excellent. I've maintained for decades that playing D&D is beneficial insofar as players must do arithmetic (though less in 4th edition than 1st, you'll notice). But most designers are interested in entertainment, not in helping kids learn to do arithmetic.
Another objection was that "ALL games are math". My response is that games are all about people, reading people, persuading people, misleading people, and so forth. Puzzles are often about math. (Single-player video games are often interactive puzzles, not games.)
The object of the designer of hobby games is to have people enjoy the games. If players are easily frustrated by something, it may be necessary to take it out of the game. Arithmetic clearly frustrates most young people. Ergo, take it out of the game unless it's more important than the frustration it causes. The general guideline might be: only allow arithmetic in a game when the inclusion is worth more than the frustration it may cause.
Hasbro has recognized this frustration with arithmetic in Monopoly. There is now a version of Monopoly that uses debit cards with a machine so that players do not have to add and subtract dollars. And there is a new computer assisted “tower” version of Monopoly with changed rules and a monitored pace (the tower is a computer) that completely avoids the drudgery of arithmetic and dice rolling, while it reduces downtime.
One of the great advantages of computer games is that the computer can do the arithmetic so that players avoid that frustration.
Sameness. "Variety's the very spice of life, That gives it all its flavour." --William Cowper. Stages in a game are important. That is, the nature of the game should change over time, so that we can speak of stages similar to the chess opening, middle, and end games. Stages provide at least a perception, if not an actuality, of change/growth and learning.
More important, if there are no stages players may wonder why they're playing the game as long as they are. Why not play half as long?
Designers want to avoid the kind of thing some basketball "fans" talk about, they only watch the end of a game because they feel what goes before isn't important. They don't recognize that there are stages and variations in basketball that are as interesting as the results. They're only interested in the destination, not in the journey. If you're only interested in the destination, why watch at all, just get the score after the game is over.
Color Blindness. Color-blind people (5% of the population) cannot differentiate red and green, or less commonly blue and yellow, and sometimes other color combinations can be difficult. Sometimes a designer cannot influence the color of manufactured pieces, sometimes he can. (I recall asking Fantasy Flight Games not to have green pieces on a green map in the second edition of Britannia (2006), to avoid a minor problem of the older editions. They didn’t use a green map, but changed the purple pieces to yellow, and made the predominant color of the map yellow. Oh, well.) Designers can usually decide the colors used in video games, but they must have this problem in mind.
Writing things down. When Fantasy Flight was republishing Britannia, they clearly felt that requiring players to write down scores was unacceptable, even though that was how the game had always been played. So they told me they were going to put a scoring track on the board. I said, in a 4 or 5 hour competitive game that track is going to get messed up, probably more than once. So instead they included little scoring markers of 1, 5, and 25 denominations. This avoided player frustration (from their point of view) and some arithmetic errors and even added some options/conveniences to the game.
(Arithmetic errors do occur in scoring. I recall checking some sheets from the World Boardgaming Championships tournament and found one case where correcting the errors resulted in a different winner.)
Once again, video games have the advantage.
Number of choices. Another frustration the designer can control, but which he may choose to include in the game, is the number of plausible choices and the number of decisions a player must confront.
To some game players the whole point of the game is to make the right choice. Yet there are very popular games that offer very few choices for the appropriate target audience, for example Candyland and Chutes and Ladders where there are no choices at all. Too few choices can frustrate the strategic gamers while too many choices can frustrate casual gamers. In other words the number of choices and decisions that make a difference to the outcome must be appropriate for the target audience. I’ve discussed this at considerable length in “How Many Choices is too Many”, http://gamasutra.com/blogs/LewisPulsipher/20111025/8731/How_... .
Simple game mechanic choices. Here’s an example of potentially frustrating game mechanics. In a prototype fantasy skirmish game, two creatures can fight one another. Each rolls independently to hit. The result can be that both are hit, one or the other is hit, neither is hit. The question is, should the rules mandate that if both hit, they block the hits and roll again? That clearly favors the better hitter (the larger, tougher monsters). Players said that would be frustrating, for the "little guy" to get a lucky hit and then have it taken away. So I have left the possibility of mutual destruction in the game.
Here’s another example. In the game Stratego and its ancestors going back to 1909, stand up pieces are arranged so that a player can see the identity of his pieces but the opponent cannot. When there is a conflict the identity of the pieces is revealed. Then the pieces are once again hidden and it’s up to the opponent to keep track by memory of where that piece is located. If his memory fails then he may make an unnecessary mistake. I had a Stratego-like fantasy game published in Britain around 1980 (Swords and Wizardry) that retains this characteristic. Recently I have devised two prototypes using some of the same principles but in much more fluid situations. In those games once a piece’s identity is revealed it stays visible to both sides so there is no memorization. In my view a memorization requirement in a game of this type is frustrating to most contemporary players, and is not central to the hidden-identity/bluff nature of the game.
In general, the short-term memories of people are so poor that no game should ask them to remember something that could be tracked mechanically (or by computer). Jakob Nielsen explains this in connection with Web pages, but his discussion applies to games as well: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/short-term-memory.html .
Planning ahead. One of my hybrid Euro-wargame prototypes, Seas of Gold (Italian maritime republics in the age of the Crusades), has been very well received by playtesters (some of whom tend to play Euro-games, but who are generally in their 40s rather than younger). I played it with some people very knowledgeable about the game market a while ago. In the game you need to choose six actions, indicated by action cards, in a round, and place the cards face down on a display. Then each player chooses an event card, and those are executed first. Sometimes this event can mess up your plans, for example you may be excommunicated and cannot trade to Catholic lands, or a marriage alliance occurs which means you cannot attack a particular player. Or you may find as the action cards are played that you didn’t anticipate something, and that messes up your plans. This is frustration, but to me it's "part of the game" when you're playing competitively. These gents suggested that it won't work that way with Eurostyle players, people don't want to be frustrated: they don't tolerate "dead cards".
This game was designed several years ago. Now, I have two versions. In one, players choose their action cards one at a time. The player can adjust his strategy and need not plan well ahead. The other, more “advanced” game, requires the planning entailed in putting down six action cards per round.
But Free to Play Games Are Intended to Frustrate
Now we come to the strange case of free-to-play (F2P) video games, especially those played over social networks. The general idea in designing these games is to make it easy for players to "get ahead", but at some point to frustrate them to the point that they will spend real money to overcome the frustration. One person at GDC (Game Developers Conference) characterized this as designing "pain points" into the game. People spend their money to alleviate the “pain.” The frustration may be at slow progress because the player has run out of "energy" or game money or something else that fuels activity. A player can wait until enough time passes that his energy is renewed, or he can spend real money to renew, and continue to play the game right now. It’s like a “lose turn” card, because for quite a while you cannot do anything at all.
The makers of free-to-play games that depend on small buys by the players (microtransactions) to make money, must specialize in frustration rather than try to eliminate it! When players become frustrated with their rate of progress, or frustrated that they don't have THAT cool weapon or THAT cool armor or even THAT cool decoration or fish, then some of them will spend real money to end that frustration.
In other words we have something that's exactly the opposite of what we as game designers normally try to do, to avoid frustrating players except within the gameplay of the game, and then only carefully in the 21st century. This is why some people say that designing free to play games is not designing games, it's designing revenue streams.
There’s a lot of potential in “social networking” games to reproduce something approaching the face-to-face gameplaying experience, a true social experience. But as long as the “pain points” method of game design works we’re unlikely to see much progress toward truly social video games.
Frustration from Extraneous Factors the Designer(s) Cannot Control
I've not included the word "opposition" in the title of this section because I'm using “opposition” in a way that implies a decision to prevent something from happening. Extraneous factors do prevent things from happening but there is no decision to do so, it is accidental. Sometimes it's an accident of where you're playing or when and sometimes it's an accident of poor design of the game.
Extraneous factors can be things like the noisiness and temperature of the room you're playing in, lag in your Internet connection, hacking by people using the online game system, and other things that neither you nor the game designer(s) have any control over. (I'm assuming that if it's too cold you'll arrange to have the temperature get warmer; but sometimes that's not within your control.)
Unfortunately, there is little or nothing a designer can do to change this kind of frustration.
Low Tolerance of Frustration
The evolution of video games can be described as a movement away from competition (which implies the possibility of frustration) toward entertainment. Entertainment is not supposed to be frustrating. Early video games were arcade games, where failure was built in so that players would spend money to play again (and get the high score). As home video games gradually overwhelmed the arcades, it took designers many years to recognize that quick and frequent failure was no longer necessary. With the evolution of mobile and casual gaming, and games played over social networks, video games have become time-killers--as Jakob Nielsen says, “killing time is the killer app” for mobile platforms-- and they’ve become entertainment rather than competition. Players are rewarded frequently and frustrating elements have been removed from many games. The “death of death”, that is, the removal of failure, has become the norm. "Games should be fun" has a different meaning for non-competitive gamers than for competitive gamers. Game designers have recognized this. In most general terms, playing games used to be about earning something, and possibly failing; now they're about being rewarded for participation, without the significant possibility of failure.
This is also related to the general dislike of being thwarted, to the "age of instant gratification" and “age of convenience”, to "Generation Me". “Patience used to be a virtue” (billboard alcohol advertisement). People want things now and don't see why they should have to wait. What was once regarded as a convenience is often now regarded as a necessity. Further, many people want to "do just enough to get by".
(And when you make people do things in a game that have nothing to do with their entertainment, then you sometimes have what is derisorily called an "educational game".)
Hard-core gamers often believe this is “dumbing down”, that it’s ruining games. I don’t see why competition and entertainment cannot coexist through different difficulty levels and "autopilot", but frequently competition is removed from games because competition requires frustration, opposition to the player’s will.
When people are focused on being active and not on winning and losing (you can't “lose” a one-player video game), it's a different experience entirely. Players are not so concerned with succeeding, they're concerned with DOING something (and thus passing the time). Similarly we have a dislike of "down time" in board and card games, even though, for the more cerebrally inclined, that "down time" gives players the opportunity to *think*. Because so many modern games don't require deep thought, players don't use the time to think the way people would have 40 years ago. My guess is that intuition (which doesn't take much time) is more often used in all walks of life today; certainly, when a person isn't doing their living-providing job, they're more inclined to rely on intuition than logic. (Intuition can be very effective: I’ve read that the famous chess champion Jose Capablanca said he didn’t look ahead, he simply chose the best move. But I’d bet most chess champions rely on logic most of the time.)
Chance elements in games reduce the frustration of having to analyze. In 2004, when I fist looked into Eurostyle games, dice were a despised element for tabletop non-wargames, but now are much more commonly used.
Games versus Puzzles
Here we need to differentiate between puzzles and games. Puzzles have solutions. Many "games" nowadays are actually puzzles turned into contests to see who can first reach a milestone (such as a certain number of points), but by the nature of the "game" they are much easier on the egos of the players who "lose". In a sense, you don't lose a puzzle, you just learn more so that ultimately you can solve it. You play a few times, figure out the puzzle, and move on to the next "game".
The willingness to directly compete separates the hard core video and board (war)gamers from the casual video gamers and Euro-style boardgamers.
We see it in 4th Edition D&D (tabletop), where there is never a case that a character cannot do something in a turn because there are several "at-will" powers to choose from. This is quite a contrast to 1st and 2nd Edition D&D, where spell casters had to decide whether to use a precious spell from his limited supply for the day or do nothing for a turn. (These are the “Daily Powers” in 4th Edition.) Between encounters you renew most of your capabilities, including hit points using “healing surges”. It’s almost impossible to get killed in 4th Edition D&D, and after you are incapacitated (not killed) it’s very easy for you to come back into the game with a little help from your friends.
Another way to say this would be that the early editions of D&D were much more true to life in the possibility of death and the possibility of having to be patient at times, and the new edition is much more like a cartoon, or like World of Warcraft. It is now much more an entertainment (like a movie) than like a game or puzzle.
Try playing some of Zynga's very popular social networking games, such as Farmville, Vampire Wars, YoVille, Cityville, Fishville. These "games" are super-simple puzzles that most anyone can manipulate successfully. (If you can get online and get in the game, you can succeed.) Frustration is removed from the gameplay (if you can dignify what players do with that word), then reintroduced at "pain points" to persuade players to spend real money.
Game and puzzle designers have always had to choose whether to aim at a hard core group or more casual players (for example, family gamers). I believe that as a percentage of all gamers, the hard core group, the ones who like competition and regard frustration as acceptable, is becoming smaller, and the casual group for whom games and puzzles are more like pure entertainment, who will not accept frustration, is becoming larger. If you want to appeal to something beyond the apex of the hard core market, you must carefully manage frustration, choosing where and when to allow it, where and when to eliminate it.
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Lewis Pulsipher
United States
Linden
North Carolina
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Six words about innovation or plagiarism (or both) in games
According to tweetdeck, one of the trending:worldwide topics on twitter not so long ago was 6 word stories. In the past few months I've asked people to say 6 words about game design, programming, wargames, stories in games, and casual games.
This time the challenge is this: say six words about innovation or plagiarism (or both) in games.
Wed Mar 14, 2012 12:50 am
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