A while back, I wrote a post about breaking into the games industry by simply starting to make games. To this day when people ask me how to do it, I link them to that post.
Adam Saltsman just totally owned me with a far superior post on the same subject. So uh, go read his.
And then make a game. 
Sometimes, ya just gotta game jam. And then you make things like this:
Micro.Bit is a retro arcade-style game. Collect microchips, avoid evil spacemen, and achieve the highest score possible before time runs out!
You can download or play it online right here.
I built Micro.Bit over the course of a week or so as a brief creative diversion from Fail-Deadly. It’s amazing how refreshing it can feel to just do something different for a change.
What I’ve posted here is still a development version of the game, as I have a couple minor features I still want to add, and there’s probably a lingering bug or three. Feedback is always welcome!
On Friday I attended a Pixar Story Masterclass with Pixar’s head of story, Matthew Luhn, who’s been with the company since the original Toy Story. There are only three of these seminars scheduled for North America for the whole of 2011: Montreal, New York City, and Austin. And as if the odds of the class coming to my city weren’t already low enough, it just so happened that the venue — the amazing Long Center for the Performing Arts — is literally just a few blocks from my apartment.
I think this is the kind of thing storytellers tend to refer to as “fate”. 
This is a writeup of that all-day event, in the same vein as my GDC writeups from the past couple of years.
The “controlling idea” is central to the story. Also referred to as a logline, elevator pitch, or high concept, this is a one-sentence description of the story. You should come up with this first, and nail it. Everything else about the story emerges from this controlling idea.
Here are some examples. Note how easily you can identify the following movies:
Once you’ve nailed your controlling idea, you can start looking at the high-level structure of the story. Classical story structure, on which the vast majority of stories are built, looks like this:
You’ve probably seen this before. But one thing that jumped out at me is the crisis/climax pairing. Previously I had always thought of structure in simpler terms: exposition, rising action, climax, resolution. But crisis/climax is important: the crisis is the moment at which the hero is compelled to make the choice that will change him forever, and the climax is the action that occurs as the result of that choice. Typically, one of these is an “upper” moment while the other is a “downer”.
Our brains are hard-wired to think about stories in this structure, because this structure is how we give meaning to our life experiences. It makes more sense when you think of it in terms of the “story spline”, which is essentially a structured plot prompt:
Luhn illustrated the power of the story spline with the help of an audience volunteer and a quick improv segment. The rules were simple: each player fills the answer to the next point on the story spline, with the first thing that comes to mind. Here’s what they came up with, in about 60 seconds:
This is far from a perfect story, of course, but the point of the exercise is to show the power of structure. Even though the details of this story don’t make a lot of sense, we understand it as a story because it fits the structure. Understanding structure, and working within its constraints, frees your creative mind to come up with the details without worrying about inadvertently ruining the story.
Characters must have identifiable human traits. The story is not just a stack of plot points that the character climbs, but rather the sequence of answers the characters has to the challenges in his path. A well-defined character is much easier to build the story around.
When creating a character, consider:
Fear is arguably the most important thing to know about a character, because fears (or deeply-rooted passions) drive his choices. One of the best ways you can learn what makes someone tick is to understand what they fear.
Strengths and weaknesses tell you how the character will react to any situation. Characters play to their strengths and their opponents exploit their weaknesses. The “dark side” hints at the protagonist’s behavior at either the crisis or climax moment in your story: these are the moments when the protagonist is pushed to his very limit.
Traits that get your character in trouble are great jumping-off points for coming up with the successive complications of the story. Traits he admires in others tell you what other characters the story needs.
Most characters go through an arc, meaning they undergo some kind of change as they move through the story. You can start building an arc by asking these questions:
The answers to these questions are driven by the character’s fears, strengths, weaknesses, dark side, trouble traits, and admired traits. A character who fears loneliness wants friends; one who fears obscurity wants fame and recongition; one who fears poverty wants money. Weaknesses and trouble traits show you how the character will take his want to an unhealthy level: a character who is obsessive pursues his want at the cost of those around him, and one who is short-tempered may drive away the friendship and acceptance he seeks. The character’s “dark side” can inform the moment or means by which he realizes that his pursuit has become unhealthy, and the change – the culmination of the arc – is the lesson learned, or (in tragic stories) the failure to learn.
This approach to character development helps you develop characters that seem human, and that audiences can relate to. One of the most common mistakes writers make is to build characters by simply copying or compositing characters from other stories. Draw from personal experience when developing your characters; otherwise they’re likely to seem cliche.
To pull it all together, Luhn had the audience think about their childhood bully (everybody had one) and describe him/her in terms of the above questions. Here’s mine:
That only took about a minute to work out: the point of focusing on a childhood bully, rather than inventing a character from scratch, is that everybody vividly remembers that real person and thus can draw from life very quickly. Note that you don’t know who my bully is: you don’t have a name, a physical description, even an age at which I knew this person. But what you do have already is a pretty good idea of who this character might be, and how he might act in different situations.
Which, incidentally, is exactly where Luhn took it next, asking the audience to consider how their bully would react to four different situations. Here’s mine:
Those four situations represent a pretty broad spread, but I was able to put my bully in each of them and very easily imagine how he’d react. Once you really understand your character’s fears, his strengths and weaknesses, his dark side, his trouble traits, and the things he admires in others, his reaction to any situation becomes all but obvious.
This part of the class was the most directly related to animation and film, as opposed to general storytelling, but the concepts presented are easily applied to the development of scenes in any medium.
Sequences are distinct story points, containing a point of conflict and a progression of intensity. In a film, they’re usually a few minutes long. Monsters, Inc. had 31 sequences, ranging from about a minute to just over five. A sequence may consist of numerous beats, but every one is driving toward the sequence’s main story point.
Developing a sequence is 80% thinking and 20% drawing storyboards. When working out the beats, ask lots of questions. What should the audience feel during this sequence? What are the characters’ intentions? Get as much information from the director as possible!
Break sequences down into beats: individual, brief moments that generally last just a few seconds each. When brainstorming beats, ask yourself “What is this sequence about?” Answer in broad terms: it’s about “giraffes dancing”, or “cowboys doing laundry”. Don’t get too specific. “Wild Bill Hickock doing laundry” limits you to only those ideas which make sense for that specific cowboy. If your sequence is about “cowboys doing laundry”, jot down everything that comes to mind that might happen in that context. The specific beats you choose aren’t nearly as important as supporting the sequence’s overall plot point and delivering on its premise.
Once you’ve selected your beats, identify which are the most intense and which are the least intense. Intense beats don’t have to just be physical action: they can also be the divulgence of critical information, moments of intense emotion (either positive or negative), and so on. Sequences should have variation and progression of intensity. You can increase the intensity of a beat by using value contrast (dark-on-light or vice-versa), diagonal lines, and closer shots. You can reduce intensity with flatter shading, horizontal lines, and wider shots.
Horizontal lines are passive, stable, low-intensity. This is called “flat staging”. Comedy (especially TV sitcoms) works best with flat staging, but otherwise you’ll want to avoid it unless you have a very good reason for using it, because it’s not very interesting. Vertical lines are medial and aware. These are good setups for action. Diagonal lines are active and off-balance, best for your most intense beats. You can get these with upshots (looking up from a low position) or downshots (looking down from a high position), as well as with dutch (tilting the camera left or right), and with clever use of perspective and motion in the frame.
Lower the horizon for more dynamic shots. A common mistake is to put the horizon right through the vertical center of the frame, which looks boring and flat. The lower the horizon is in the frame, the more dynamic the shot will feel. You can even push the horizon off the bottom of the frame entirely, which typically results in an upshot and strong, active, diagonal lines.
Symmetry generally works only when you’re showing something regal or important: a king on his throne, the Cross, etc. Most of the time you’ll want to keep characters and focal points to one side of the frame or the other. This is related to the “Rule of Thirds” in composition, where you divide the frame like a Tic-Tac-Toe board and put points of interest on one of the axes or at intersection points, rather than in the center of the shot.
Consider shot economy. Don’t go to a new shot unless you must, and have a very clear motivation (such as cutting to a different speaker). Zooming in and out do not count as new shots. What you’re really looking at is staging: where is the camera relative to the subject? If the camera isn’t moving or rotating, you’re still in the same shot.
If you’re changing shots too frequently, consider combining shots. For example, can you move the action in shot B into the background of shot A, or line up A and B and pan across instead of cutting to a new shot?
With moving shots (and moving characters), be sure to preserve screen direction. If a character is moving from left to right in one shot, and then you cut to a new shot, he’d better still be moving generally left to right unless we saw the character explicitly stop and change direction. If you break this rule, the audience gets confused and doesn’t understand the layout of the scene. Similarly, if a character is facing left, keep that character facing generally to the left from throughout the sequence; and if he’s on the right side of the screen, keep him generally on the right.
Breaking the above rule is called “breaking the line”. Imagine a line that bisects your scene: it doesn’t matter where, though if you have multiple actors onscreen it will generally run between them. The camera must stay on one side of the line throughout the entire sequence in order for the audience to understand what’s going on. If the camera crosses the line, we immediately lose our sense of spatial awareness. You can move and rotate the camera all you want, just as long as it stays on one side of the line.
While there were a lot of things in this class that I already knew, the real value of classes like these – for me, at least – is that they provide a different perspective on that knowledge. It’s like I have all the pieces of the puzzle on the table in front of me but I don’t necessarily know what order they go in, and then I go to a class like this and it’s like, “Oh! You put these over there and this up here and then it makes sense!”
I’ve been vaguely aware of a weakness in my approach to story development for a while now, which is that I tend to try to build plot first and then add characters to it. I had read that the best stories are character-driven but for some reason that never fully clicked, until this class. What did it for me was seeing, and thinking through, the specific applied examples I outlined above, and realizing how many ideas just “fell out” once I had answered the right questions, like “What does this person fear?” I’m not thinking of story development as brute-forcing my way through the structure any more. Now, I’m thinking about it as a series of simple questions, designed such that their answers lead naturally to the right next questions.
As a game designer, it’s only natural that I think about ways to apply Pixar’s story development approach to games. It seems obvious when you think about applying it to game stories, but what about applying it to game design in general? What kinds of questions can we design, that lead naturally to the right next questions? I feel like we often start new game designs by asking: “What’s the core mechanic?” Does that answer lead us in the right direction? How often does it lead us to the game’s central aesthetic, to the identity of the player/avatar, or to the mood and tone of the game? Would we be better off if we started somewhere else, somewhere like “What life experience is this game about?”
Miyamoto has often said he takes game design inspiration from simple life experiences like gardening (which led to Pikmin) or managing his health (which led to Wii Fit). In this 2008 USA Today article (thanks, Google!) he said: “When I design games, what I am trying to do is find a way to take something that is fun or entertaining from something I have experienced and to bring that to other people so they can experience that same degree of joy.” Is that perhaps a more Pixar-like approach to game design? It certainly doesn’t seem to track with conventional wisdom – where does the ubiquitous first-person shooter come from, if we all design games based on our life experiences? – but this is Miyamoto we’re talking about, and also Pixar, and I can’t easily dismiss that.
The class left me with a lot of unresolved thoughts. Maybe those will turn into an article or two sometime in the future, but in the meantime, what do you think?
This article is a bit late on account of my return from GDC dropping me straight into a pretty insane work-week, and also my random decision to re-do the site last weekend (hooray for priorities!)
While there was an entire Social and Online Games Summit at GDC this year, I attended just two sessions: a debate on the legitimacy of social games, and the annual rant panel for which this year’s topic was “Social Game Developers Rant Back”. (They’re ranting back against the anti-social games attitude that was prevalent at last year’s GDC, if you were wondering.)
Instead of just writing up my notes on each session, I’m going to merge together the various arguments from both sessions, along with some of my own opinions and responses, in an attempt to get a little broader look at this year’s view of social gaming.
One oft-repeated argument in favor of social games was that they drive real-world social interaction. Nabeel Hyatt (Zynga) related an anecdote about a group of 40-year-old housewives who meet every week to play social games together, saying it resembled a LAN party. Curt Bererton (ZipZapPlay) indicated that social games have increased his own interaction with friends and family; he also talked about how in-game gifts like customized greeting cards, cupcakes, and other items can act as triggers for out-of-game conversations.
Bryan Reynolds (Zynga) said that he got into social games mainly because he loves Facebook, and that social games are doing audiences a service by giving them more ways to socialize. He also suggested that part of the attraction of the space is that it reaches larger and more diverse audiences than traditional games. But like traditional games, he asserted that social games are full of interesting choices, patterns, discovery, and surprise. He did admit that social games aren’t yet where he wants them to be, but he seemed convinced that they’re on the right track.
I understand these perspectives, and I agree that promoting social interaction is a good thing. But I’m not sure any arguments against social games also include arguments against promoting social interaction, nor do they suggest that social games have absolutely no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Highlighting this feature of social games seems like it’s evading the debate.
Hyatt raised an interesting point: the games industry has fought for decades to legitimize itself (with a great deal of success) but now seems hellbent on de-legitimizing its own social games sector. Ryan Henson Creighton (Untold Entertainment)[1] noted that we often brag about games making more money than Hollywood, but when Zynga comes along and makes a lot of money we complain that it shouldn’t be this way. Brenda Brathwaite (Loot Drop) reminded the audience that our industry has dealt with many similar conflicts before[2], and that we always came out stronger when we banded together rather than fracturing apart.
These are thought-provoking arguments which seem to highlight some hypocrisy by critics of social games. To a certain extent, this is the “You made your bed, now sleep in it” argument: we wanted games to take their place alongside other mainstream media, to be considered legitimate art and legitimate business, to make a lot of money and to touch millions of lives… and now we’re here, and we’re holding up our hands and saying, “Wait, no, this isn’t right.”
But to an extent, it isn’t right. When Bererton started talking about the artistic merits of social games and Ian Bogost (Georgia Institute of Technology) cut in with a snarky, “Where’s the art?” he captured the feelings of many of us in the room: that the idea of social games has much more potential than their modern execution has bothered to realize. We got mainstream, we got culturally legitimate, and we made a lot of money, but we lost something somewhere along the way. Sure we’re connecting people, but as Bogost said, what we’re really doing is turning our friends into resources. Is that the ultimate expression of social games? Is that what we really wanted to achieve all this time? I think for most of us, the answer is a resounding “No!”
Hyatt talked briefly about metrics, and while there was (curiously) almost no discussion on that topic outside of his own comments, his point still merits examination. He asserted that metrics bring the game designer out of the ivory tower, creating a feedback loop for design iteration that attends to the needs of the audience rather than the whims of the designer.
For many in the industry, “metrics” seems to have become a dirty word. But as Bererton at one point reminded us, metrics can be used for good or for evil. In my opinion, the correct relationship between the designer and the data is that the designer should use the data to understand the player’s subjective experience, but make decisions based on what the designer means to communicate and not what the player prefers. The designer’s vision is the soul of the game, its fundamental expression. If you trade that away and let the metrics control your decisions, you might end up with a commercially successful game, but it will still be a soulless one.
But to be fair to Hyatt’s point, if you ignore the data entirely then you really have no idea if the player is experiencing anything remotely like what you intended to express, and you’re liable to miss the mark entirely. Metrics are a means by which we can compare subjective experiences. That they’re often not used that way is not a failing of the concept, but of its execution.
One of the most common criticisms of the social games space in recent years has been that they are an army of clones. Zynga in particular has come under fire for this: critics claim a clear lineage from Farm Town to FarmVille, from Social City to CityVille, and so on.
Hyatt defended this accusation by asserting that first-person shooters are all quite similar and that the formula for TV sitcoms hasn’t changed in decades. He said this indicates that those creators have found something that works for their audiences, so they’ll keep providing that for as long as it keeps working. He also asserted that FarmVille and CityVille have in fact built new innovations on top of their predecessors.
Daniel James (Three Rings) was more sympathetic to this criticism, indicating that the perception of rampant, outright cloning is a major factor in traditional game developers shying away from the social games space entirely. He also noted that a culture of clones creates a very difficult environment for independent developers who might want to get into social games: an indie’s only recourse is to innovate, but then a huge, well-established company (like Zynga?) comes along and better executes that innovative idea, effectively killing the indie which is now in no position to compete.
Scott Jon Siegel (Playdom) railed enthusiastically against his own sector, asserting that social games were in a much better place two years ago than they are today. Two years ago, he said, social games showed signs of creativity and innovation, citing games like Parking Wars, Bejeweled Blitz, and Mouse Hunt. He said these were genuinely interesting games, but then Farm Town came along and the industry became totally fixated on that game’s success. “Two years ago we made a hard right turn and never looked back,” he said. “We need to start over.”
This is probably my biggest complaint about social games. The Farm Town formula, subsequently immortalized by Zynga in FarmVille, seems like it’s become the de facto blueprint for the modern social game. But we’re looking at a platform and a paradigm which are capable of things games have never been capable of before!
I want to know why games like Neptune’s Pride and Blight of the Immortals never seem to come up in conversations about social games, and why so few social games work that way. I want to know why social games are about using your friends as resources, rather than truly playing with (or against) them. I want to know why the social graph is still seen as a tool for viral marketing and not an honest gameplay opportunity. I want to know why social games and ARGs don’t have a million times more cross-pollenation. I want to know why social games don’t try to introduce people to new ideas, teach them new skills, or even guide them to discover things about each other. I want to know why social games go so far out of their way to limit your interaction, literally down to “clicks per day”. I want to know why social games are content with the fantasy of labor[3] and why they don’t encourage their audiences to aspire to more. And most of all, I want to know why social games aren’t actually fucking social.
I was a major skeptic of social games going in, and this year’s GDC didn’t really change that. However, I did return with a a better understanding of (if not agreement with) the arguments in favor of social games and (I think?) an improved ability to articulate myself on this topic.
One thing that became clear to me — and in retrospect it should perhaps have been obvious — is that there really are designers in the social games space who are not happy with the modern social game, and who are very passionate about moving that form away from its present failings and into a future where social games do much better both at being “social” and at being “games”. As Brenda Brathwaite said, “I have seen the strip miners and their entry into games… They are not one of us, nor are they from us.” And while I haven’t yet seen these designers’ labors bear fruit — at least not in the sense of moving social games in the direction I personally would like to see them go — it is at least comforting to me to know that there are people within the space who are as critical of it as the rest of us.
[1] Ryan Henson Creighton was not actually on the rant panel, but earned his five minutes of fame anyway by cleverly exploiting the makeshift, audience-oriented social game conducted alongside the rants. He wrote up a great piece about it here.
[2] A transcript of Brenda Brathwaite’s impassioned rant about game industry solidarity can be found here.
[3] The “fantasy of labor” was actually the subject of a GDC talk I did not attend, but which was written up by Darius Kazemi here.
Yesterday was a pretty packed day, hence the late writeup. The first two sessions of the day were both related to user experience research. Things kicked off bright and early with Veronica Zammitto from EA.
She opened with a basic overview of the user research field. It’s all about finding out what’s going on in players’ minds while they’re playing the game, and there are two broad categories of techniques for doing this. Qualitative techniques include interviews, focus groups, “think-aloud” play sessions (where the player simply says everything he thinks while playing), and surveys. If you’ve ever conducted or participated in any kind of playtest, you’ve almost certainly encountered one or more of these. These are subjective techniques, and they answer the question, “Why did the player do that?”
Quantitative techniques, on the other hand, gather objective, continuous data which answers the question, “What did the player do?” These techniques operate at a much deeper level than simply observing recorded playtest footage: they include biometrics, eye tracking, telemetry, and so on. These quantitative techniques were Veronica’s focus for the session, and she discussed them in the context of two EA case studies: user research on NBA Live 10 and on NHL 11.
Eye tracking data for NBA Live 10 indicated that a certain type of players were frequently looking at the teams’ coaches standing on the sidelines. This was curious behavior, since the coaches have no function: they’re there simply because you expect to see them. Veronica hypothesized that these players were looking to authority figures for feedback and/or suggestions about gameplay, the roles a coach would traditionally fulfill in the real-world sport. While this hypothesis was apparently not acted upon in NBA Live 10, her suggestion was to answer this data by giving the coaches a gameplay role in line with what players apparently expected.
Telemetry – the recording and visualizing of game events – indicated that most shots and passes were taking place in the bottom half of the court. Why would players do this? Veronica hypothesized that the angle of the camera was the driver for this behavior: players didn’t want their view of their active player and/or the ball to be obstructed by other players or objects in the foreground. The telemetry data made clear the effect a camera angle can have on gameplay.
It also exposed another issue: the telemetry for shots taken by the AI showed two very concentrated spots on the court, where the AI was taking shots from precisely the same two positions a disproportionate amount of the time. This seems to indicate an AI bug. (It’s unclear whether this was addressed for the final product.)
On NHL 11, Veronica used eye-tracking to determine which UI elements were receiving the player’s attention and which were ignored. She found that a staggering 75% of UI displays were never even looked at. She also found that when players did focus on something, they tended to do so for less than one second, making clear just how little time game developers have to communicate vital information to players.
(FYI I took photos of a ton of slides, because this session was awesome non-stop data porn, but as I’m about to leave the conference I’m not in a great wifi situation, so I’ll have to post those later.)
The second talk was by Mike Ambinder of Valve, who extended the user research theme into more experimental applications. His theory is that incorporating biofeedback directly into gameplay will create more immersive, dynamic, and calibrated user experiences. Some possible applications of these technologies include:
- Analyzing your own biofeedback data after a game
- Adaptive experiences and dynamic difficulty
- Identifying optimal patterns of engagement and arousal
- Using emotional state as gameplay input (e.g. a lie-detector test)
- Matchmaking based on physical/emotional profile
- In competitive games, revealing players’ biometrics to spectators in real time
- Multiplayer mechanics (saving a panicking teammate, etc.)
- Playtesting (of course)
Mike has conducted several experiments at Valve, incorporating biofeedback into gameplay in these ways. The first one he showed us modified Left 4 Dead 2′s AI director. Normally, the director adjusts intensity based on a single “estimated arousal” value: this number is raised by traumatic events (such as spotting an enemy or getting shot) and decays slowly over time. For the experiment, Mike used a technique called Galvanic Skin Response, which measures the electrical conductivity of the skin to indicate emotional arousal (conductivity increases when players become stressed, for example). He fed the GSR data into the AI director in place of the “estimated arousal”.
He demoed a video of a play session with the GSR data overlaid. We watched as the player’s stress level, as indicated by the GSR monitor, started low and spiked when he was ambushed. Toward the end of the video he was attacked by a tank and the GSR levels went off the charts, much to the audience’s amusement. Mike found the experiment a success: players reported increased enjoyment and challenge from the GSR-driven AI director than from the original one.
In Alien Swarm, Mike tried a different experiment. He set up a game goal to kill 100 enemies in four minutes, but tied increasing GSR levels to speeding up the timer. Thus, the optimal strategy is to stay as calm as possible, which keeps the timer slow and gives you more time to achieve your goal.
Unfortunately this experiment created a frustrating feedback loop. When players became stressed, the timer sped up. Seeing the timer going faster made players more stressed, and the whole system pretty much blew up. Players did recognize that this was a qualitatively different experience than the “regular” game, and appreciated that, but there’s still a long way to go before this experiment yields viable gameplay results.
For Portal 2, Mike hooked up eye tracking to the movement of the crosshair, allowing players to aim the portal gun simply by looking at a surface, while still controlling their movement with WASD. Watching the video of this was a little weird, as the crosshair was jumping all over the screen in unpredictable ways, but users reported that this felt very natural (and of course the crosshair movement would make perfect sense if your own gaze was controlling it). This was a successful experiment, but as Mike noted, consumer-grade eye tracking setups are still a long way off.
Finally, Mike tried exposing GSR levels to players’ opponents in a multiplayer game. Either he didn’t mention which game, or I just missed it… but in any case, players unanimously found it extremely satisfying to watch their opponents’ GSR levels spike when subjected to stress. This was a very successful experiment, although it didn’t change gameplay significantly.
My primary takeaway from these talks is that user research is an awesome field which can greatly aid game designers in crafting more compelling and broadly-appealing experiences. That said, user research does get very close to “metrics”, which these days are often associated with the shadier aspects of social games development, and I think there’s an interesting comparison to be made there, which I’ll explore after GDC when I write up this year’s social games panels and my thoughts thereon.
Well… I’m back in San Francisco for my second GDC, which commences tomorrow. I’m attending on an All-Access Pass this year, meaning I’ll get to hit all the tutorials and summits I missed last year, and spend five days immersed in game industry awesomeness instead of just three. In particular, I’m looking forward to spending a lot of time at the AI Summit and the Indie Games Summit, as well as a whole day of sessions hosted by Unity.
I’ll be doing detailed write-ups again this year; it remains to be seen which of my innocuous comments/rants will randomly attract press attention like my little side-rant from last year’s awards show. In case you missed it: I ranted a little about Zynga’s VP denigrating the IGF during his acceptance speech for FarmVille’s “Social Game of the Year” win. I’m *still* getting interview requests about that, a full year later!
I was far from the only one critical of social games at last year’s GDC: the whole sector was met with pretty widespread disdain. Well this year GDC has organized a panel called “Social Game Developers Rant Back”, and you can absolutely bet on my attendance. I’ll be *very* interested to hear what they have to say!
By the way: did you know Zynga has *billboards* now? What even the fuck.
Fail-Deadly is a game which revels in war and destruction, and to be perfectly honest that fact has actually bothered me since shortly after I first submitted it for Ludum Dare. I mean, you come into this thing with the express goal of perpetuating as much death as possible before raining nuclear armageddon on the lot. Conceptually, that’s completely depraved and I feel awkward for having made a game that’s putting that out there.
I’ve recently been working on a significant update to the game (I’ll post more about that soon), and it occurred to me that I could tweak this whole thing in the direction of satire.
A big chunk of the American political community seems obsessed with war and violence. These are the guys with deep ties to defense contractors, the guys who have us flying drone strikes over half of the Middle East, the guys whose plan to balance the budget involves cutting everything except defense spending. This obsession with making war is comical in its absurdity… so what if that’s what Fail-Deadly is about? It’s the guys who have hard-ons for guns and bombs and Jack Bauer fantasies gleefully escalating their war games all the way to their inevitable nuclear conclusion.
I’m thinking about ways to express that idea without being preachy or turning Fail-Deadly into a “serious” game. The Ludum Dare version benefitted by not taking itself too seriously: it was allowed to be fun for fun’s sake, and I definitely intend to preserve that. That’s why I think a biting satire can work: it’s still mechanically sound, reveling in its escalating violence, but now also making a caricature out of our gleeful relationship with that violence.
What do you think?
I’ve been real busy lately and am thus very, very late to the party on this one, but fellow game designer, colleague, and all-around swell guy Matthew Gallant and his indie associates (collectively called No Fun Games) certainly deserve recognition for their excellent one-button RTS Pax Britannica.
From their site:
Pax Britannica is a one-button real-time strategy game by No Fun Games. Up to four players battle it out underwater, struggling to be the last one standing!
Holding down the button spins the needle on the radial menu in the middle of the player’s factory ship. The needle will only travel as far as the player’s current resources allow. Resources (gold? seaweed? who knows!) accumulate over time.
It seems almost too simple to be strategic, but this design effectively distills the RTS concepts of resource management and unit deployment into a tightly-focused package. One-button interfaces are fascinating studies in game design constraints, and Pax Britannica is far more effective than most that I’ve played. And of course, it helps that the game looks great and is accompanied by a swell soundtrack.
Pax Britannica recently made #3 on Bytejacker’s Free Indie of the Year Awards 2010 as well, bested only by Devil’s Tuning Fork and the excellent Super Crate Box… worthy adversaries to say the least. That means you should go play it. It’s available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, and it’s free, so you really have no excuse.
Margaret Robertson’s Gamasutra feature about her experience with Minecraft is basically amazing. It’s not just her excellent prose, which took me back so vividly to my own first experience with the game. It’s her deconstruction of the design principles that make Minecraft work, presented with such clarity as to make me feel like a bit of an idiot for spending as much cognitive energy as I did trying to tease out why the game is so damn compelling, and not arriving at much of a satisfactory answer of my own at all.
Forgive me for cribbing so liberally, but here is the crux of it:
It could be overwhelming, but the dependency structure within the game assures that it’s not. I need wood to make a crafting table, I need a table to make a pick, I need a pick to get stone, I need stone to get coal. The tech tree becomes the mission structure, as I seek out each thing to get the next, each a manageable, discrete task.
And each task I complete levels me up, not by adding a number to my profile, but by changing what I have in my pockets. You are what you carry. Your tools, armor, and supplies are what let you accomplish more and die less. When death does come, you lose everything you carry — often permanently — and revert to the helpless state in which you arrived in the game.
Chests — which store the resources you’ve amassed — therefore become save points. How many you make and where you put them starts to become a natural, player-controlled difficulty modifier. It’s a system which allows Minecraft to avoid the monotony which many RPGs fall prey to, where your progress in the world is cancelled out by the world leveling up to match your increased power.
In Minecraft, the threat the world poses stays largely static, but your own level fluctuates up and down as you gain and lose possessions. It means I’m as likely to encounter that desperate frisson of my first frightening night ten hours in as ten minutes in.
All these design decisions enforce play imperatives which take you through the first few hours of play. It means that when the sandbox possibilities do start to open up — of building and exploring (I’m told it would take six years of real time to walk around a full Minecraft world) you are deeply embedded into the world. You have a skill-set, a sense of ownership and belonging, which fuel you through the challenge of free, creative play. And that’s crucial, because free, creative play is actually quite a grueling prospect, full of the pain and effort of making and losing.
It’s the compulsion of exploration and acquisition, of problem-solving and pattern optimization. It’s the strategy of survival, tapped into our ancient hunter-gatherer instincts. It’s a self-sustained ecosystem and you’re not in control of it, you’re part of it.
But while Margaret did an excellent job describing what Minecraft is, I think what resonated most with me was her explanation of what Minecraft is not. And this, in my view, is even more important:
I hunker back in the dark, trying to get away from the noise but afraid of losing my bearings in the blackness. It’s a long time since I’ve met this in a game: the unknown. No tutorial has told me how to handle this threat. No preview has shown me concept art of it. No genre convention can give me my bearings. It could be anything out there. It could do anything. All I can do is cower in my ramshackle mausoleum and wait for light.
For years, the trend in commercial game design has been toward ever more-directed play. We’ve added more tutorials, more informative cutscenes, more NPCs to give orders and point the way. We’ve developed an entire out-of-world symbology to highlight and explain quest-givers, scripted triggers, collectibles, and QTEs. We’ve developed systems to let you skip the hard parts or let the game play them for you. We’ve refined the first 15 minutes of gameplay into a science so universal that it’s become comically predictable.
We’ve done all of this in the name of making games more accessible to a wider audience. And that’s fine, but in so doing we’ve increasingly neglected a very useful game design tool: the threat — and the promise — of the unknown.
Of course, we didn’t pursue accessibility without reason. There’s a lot of games I’m awfully nostalgic about, and I want to point to them and say, “Look! Undirected play! And it was so amazing!” But the truth is, in most cases my first experience with the game sucked. I didn’t know what to do or where to go, and I only figured it out through the sheer perseverance of a young kid who was an entire afternoon to burn and only one game to burn it on. Case in point: a while back, the original Final Fantasy was released for the iPhone. That’s a game I’m crazy nostalgic about, and haven’t played since I was maybe ten years old. Playing it now, with the perspective of a) an adult, and b) a professional game designer, I’m shocked to discover how little it really tells you, and how bad that is. There are things I remember from playing it before, and I find myself realizing that if I didn’t have those memories, I would be completely lost in this game today. And as a) an adult, and b) a professional game designer, I no longer have entire afternoons to burn on sheer perseverance.
So that’s an anecdote, but it’s part of the reason why the accessibility of today’s games was, seemingly, a valid thing to pursue. But Margaret’s observation still resonates:
It’s a long time since I’ve met this in a game: the unknown.
And that begs the question: how do we recapture the appeal of the unknown without stepping back into a past where most games frankly didn’t make any goddamn sense? To put a finer point on it: how do we entice an adult, with adult responsibilities and an adult’s harried schedule, to explore the unknown and gradually unearth its secrets, instead of rejecting it as something they just don’t have time for?
Margaret touched on this:
But you’ve arrived [in Minecraft] because you’ve seen screenshots and heard stories. You know extraordinary buildings and contraptions are possible, and closing the gap between those fantasies, and the reality of your powerless arrival in the game is what guides your progress through those first hours. It’s fear, uncertainty and doubt elevated to design principles.
In the case of Minecraft, the unknown isn’t simply some all-encompassing reality: instead, it lies precisely between your first steps into the world and the realization of those extraordinary things that enticed you to pick up the game in the first place. It’s the promise of the unknown that makes the threat of the unknown both exciting and bearable.
What would that look like for contemporary triple-A games, then? We’ve cribbed a lot of techniques from film in the last several years, and most games seem to have brought along film’s methods for telling stories and building worlds as well. However, I would submit that films exist to tell stories, while games exist so you can explore them. Sure, you’re thinking of BioShock right now, but exploring stories goes beyond just embedding passive narrative in the world. You start by exploring yourself: who am I, what can I do, and how can I do it? Then you explore your surroundings: where am I, and who and what else is here? And finally, you explore what is in my estimation the most important tool in the game design toolchest, consequence: what will I do, and what will happen as a result of me doing it?
Many modern games have a bad habit of telling you the solution before you’ve had a chance to tackle the problem. Need to traverse a room filled with booby traps? The scripted camera that just told you that also showed you the correct path to take, the locations of all the switches, and the exit that serves as your final objective. Need to take down a boss by attacking a specific weak point? Your ever-present NPC guide probably told you what weapon to use and where to shoot it as soon as you walked in the door. In the name of accessibility we have robbed players of exploration and consequence.
Minecraft doesn’t tell you what to do, it just puts you in a world and starts threatening you and lets you figure out how you’re going to deal with that. And the fact that it does that, instead of telling you up front everything that’s going to happen and all the right ways to respond, makes it infinitely more compelling because now you’re having your experience, not somebody else’s (read: the game designer’s) that you’re just tagging along for.
To be fair, Minecraft does all but require a thorough reading of the wiki before you start playing. But on the flip-side, the game is still very much in-development. It is my fervent hope that when Minecraft is “done” it will open with only the barest of necessities of information: how to move around, how to harvest your first bunch of wood (resource acquisition being a core interaction), and some tooltips to identify (but not necessarily explain) all the icons in your inventory. Leave the discovery of the world’s wonders and secrets, resources and dangers to the player. Don’t tell: explore.
Much to my shock and awe, Fail-Deadly appears to have taken first place in Ludum Dare 18!
I felt pretty good about this game, but even so my hope was just for it to place better than Conquistador (which finished Ludum Dare 17 at #34). I was optimistic about Fail-Deadly’s chances of making the top 20, but I never in my wildest dreams thought it could take first… especially not with awesome stuff like Metagun in the running!
I’m blown away, and frankly rather humbled. Sincere thanks to everyone who played my silly little game and found it worthy of your praise: you’ve all just made my year. <3