If you are looking for a designer/producer/TF2 spy, here’s my card:

No, really, that’s my card. If you see me in person, I’ll dig one out of my wallet for you.

Meanwhile, I’ve got a lot of time to work on my prototypes and writing! Door closing, window opening, cliches inflating.

Darius has a great post on why students looking to get into the industry should blog and I whole-heartedly agree. Even though the archives here don’t go back that far, I’ve been continually blogging since college. (My first was hard coded and sloppy so I couldn’t figure out how to shift the posts when I joined WordPress and so they have been lost to the ages and archive.org. Moral: Use WordPress.)

An anonymous blog still gets you the benefit of writing, interacting with readers and stresses the critical thinking parts of the old noggin’ but it doesn’t allow you to make closer relationships with people, it can’t help you get a job and it is less likely someone will take an anonymous blogger seriously. Why? If he won’t put his/her name behind it, how do I know it isn’t a professional shill or troll? It’s so easy to lob hand grenades on the web. It’s much harder to criticize in a way that you would criticize if that person was right in front of you, face-to-face. I have very little respect for anonymous bloggers, but I can see why people would want that safety blanket. Hell, if the guy from WikiLeaks isn’t anonymous, what the hell are you afraid of?

Back to blogging. If you want to start, you have to commit to post regular, interesting content and you have to commit to doing a little bit of self-promotion until people actually start reading regularly enough that if you say something catchy enough that it gets linked somewhere. These are the hard parts, especially before you are not in the industry and cannot connect news items to personal experience.

There’s only one other thing I want to add because Darius’ post is sufficient. There is a non-zero chance you will get flak for having a blog with any sort of opinion on it. I had two separate instances when I was at EA where a manager pressured me to remove a blog post. I did in both cases because my job was more important even though I said nothing in the posts that was unfair, represented the company poorly or was a thing I would not say in person. A certain vice president has a Google alert on his name and I guess he spends time reading blogs that mention him and making sure the bloggers aren’t EA employees, so he put in a call to my EP saying WTF. (The post wasn’t about him. It was about tuning, but I used a quote of his and attributed it.) I still believe what I said, that it certainly wasn’t unfair (history has proven me correct) and thought it was a useful point to make for making design decisions, but in retrospect I probably should have kept my digital yap shut.

If you are not comfortable with feeling some fraidy-cat with managerial powers breathing down your neck, then censor yourself to never say anything that could be taken as a criticism by anyone. I, unfortunately, cannot do that. I’m a very speak-my-mind type. People came up to me at work and said essentially “Nice knowing you” after my Mario post because they thought it was critical of my employer and that I’d be fired. It wasn’t meant to be critical of my employer at all (fool me once) but to the whole industry, myself included. Nothing happened, of course, but cowards like that will try to make your life harder if you try to make any interesting statements. Roll with it.

I’ve met so many interesting people thanks to Twitter and this blog and I hope every other aspiring game developer can have the success I’ve had with the practice.

Two years later, we are mopping up the disasterous Superman Returns handheld games and I’m assigned an opportunity: we need a Game Boy SKU for Superman. It needs to be done in four months (!) and it only has the budget for two devs and an artist. Pitch me something. So there I was, a complete greenhorn pitching a concept. While the end result was low-risk, we did go forward with my idea and it made it to store shelves, completely unnoticed since the GBA was in its death throes at the time and the other SKUs were so disappointing that only one review of the game was ever posted on Metacritic (and I think the reviewer didn’t play the game, only read the back of the box – I digress. For it’s resources, I’m proud of it.) So there I was, as far down as you could go on the seniority totem pole, but still pitching projects. At least I had practice.

From there, I’d have more chances. Every designer who is trying ends up pitching features, but I ended up pitching whole titles – first in the Design Forums we had set up at EA as an extravocational endeavor and then later as part of a new IP group. I certainly wouldn’t have thought that four years prior the things I started to learn in Prof. Schell’s exercise would put me in charge of proposing ways to spend more than a million dollars.

This past week I was at Gen Con in Indianapolis trying to gain some interest from board game publishers on some things I’ve been working on in my spare time. The stakes couldn’t have been much lower, yet here was this same tension in my chest that I first had when I was pitching the game in Schell’s class (which, btw, was essentially Crackdown two years before it would be announced. Not that the premise is that original, but it was a fun coincidence.)

There are some general lessons that I’d like to share from my experience that maybe can help someone out there the next time they have to sell an idea:

1) Agreement
In Malcolm Gladwell’s book-everyone-carries-around-at-the-airport Blink, he speaks about one of the fundamental rules of improv comedy, that of agreement:

“One of the most important of the rules that makes improv possible, for examplem us the idea of agreement, the notion that a very simple way to create a story – or humor – is to have characters accept everything that happens to them. … Bad improvisers block action, often with a high degree of skill. Good improvizers develop action.”

Pitching is a lot like improvization. You are trying to tell a story, but you don’t know where that story will end up. If you have a prototype in front of you, then you have some basis of what the final product will be, but every single gap has to be filled in the mind of the audience. Agreeing with the audience’s perception of reality means that they will understand the gaps a lot better than if you are constantly stopping them to try to shoehorn them into your predefined view.

Back to Schell’s class for one last time. I performed what I would call an Critical Fail as the CEO of my imaginary company, so much so that Jesse would recall the story to his class the following year (I was his TA at that time). My game took place on a moon base. One of the members of the board asked if you would have to change the architecture of the buildings since the moon has low gravity. Eager to deflate a problem of having to explain odd architecure, I said: “No, it has artifical gravity generators so it is just like Earth.” Whoops. The questioner had visions of doing awesome jumps in low-gravity shooting space-mafia in slo-mo displays. Now the setting was nothing like he was interested in and he was pretty much set to be bored for the rest of it. There wasn’t even a good reason for me to say that. I just thought I was being decisive.

In future meetings, I learned to agree – to roll with the punches. In the end, whatever game you make will be wholly unlike whatever your vision was for it during the pitch. So why stick to your guns at the cost of alienating your audience? Agree with them and you can adapt. Their ideas will often be pretty good. If you deny them here, then you are hurting yourself. Sometimes they won’t be. But if they aren’t, they will likely be ironed out by the end.

There really is no reason to deny anything unless it fundamentally changes what you are presenting. I am not saying that if you present a shoot-em-up and someone asks if it is a kart racer that you agree. What I am saying is that you entertain all possibilities as to what the idea could be. The truth is you really don’t know what the idea will be either, but you want to convince someone to let you ride it to the end.

The best purveyors of this technique can make the audience believe that his ideas are actually the audience’s. That is really the pinnacle of the agreement principle.

2) Audience and Focus
You absolutely need to know who your audience is and what they want. Every presentation book tells you this because it is the God’s honest truth. Very few presenters take this to heart which is why you get presentations that are sixty slides of text and no central theme. The presenters don’t like sitting through those kinds of presentations either but they have no idea to whom they are presenting or what they want to hear so they figure if they say everything, eventually they will hit something valuable.

Hogwash. Who has time for that?

Unfortunately, I failed that test at Gen Con this past week at the first publisher I showed to because I was so focused on polishing the little bits that I didn’t realize what he cared about was the big picture. He wanted a strong theme and an original mechanic. I focused on cleverly interlocking mechanics to create a fine balance. Of course that is needed in a game, but not until later. I was like the guy presenting the sixty text slides. I didn’t tell him what he wanted to hear. Two minutes in, we started talking about why the theme didn’t work. We never got to the gameplay dynamics, which I thought were the most important. Only designers care about dynamics.

I knew the theme wasn’t strong. But look at all the other games that don’t have a strong theme: Ticket to Ride, Dominion, Puerto Rico. Some of the best games in history don’t have a strong or consistent theme. They all have strong mechanics. But that’s irrelevent because my audience was looking for something with a strong and consistant theme. Not being prepared to talk about that sunk my battleship.

It would be like pitching a fantasy MMO at EA Sports. There was a guy back at Tiburon in our design forum that had a really clever idea for an adventure game about possessing statues. How do you think that pitch went with execs? It is hard enough to get people to buy into ideas. Don’t make it harder on yourself by sending a message the audience isn’t equipped to hear.

A subpoint to this is to have a focus. The concept of the elevator pitch has been around for quite some time. To paraphrase Blink again, people make their decisions about you VERY quickly. Thus, front-load your pitch with whatever makes your idea stand out. Start with “Roll Through the Ages is essentially Civilization meets Yahtzee“. I imagine that was the opening of Matt Leacock’s pitch if there was one. Blam. The pitch both sums up the idea and is compelling on face. Civilization is extremely complex. Yahtzee is incredibly casual. How will his idea meld the two? If the audience “gets” the idea by that point they are hooked and will listen to the rest of what you have to say, building and tweaking their mental models of it along the way. If not, then they will have to work to create their mental models and who likes to work? Plus, theirs will be different, much different, than the one you want to create in their minds.

The one problem with having a focus is that you necessarily have to exclude possible ideas, which feels counter to the concept of agreement. It is not. It is only a method to create the mental model in your audience closest to your own to work with to minimize the amount of agreement you have to do explicitly. It really is the most important thing you can do for your presentation.

3) Learning
When designers hear feedback the inner voice starts talking really loudly. Either it starts saying: “Oh yeah, that’s good feedback but that would affect the healing rate of such and such or I’d have to change this system to do this thing” or it is “This guy has no idea what he is talking about. Look at his tie and how stupid it is.” The problem with both of these things is that while your brain is subvocalizing, you aren’t listening to additional feedback. Listen now. Process later.

Most pitches will fail. A pitch is a total waste of time if you do not understand why it failed.

Friends and acquaintances don’t give you too much worthwhile feedback. Everything is tainted by the fact that they know you and generally want you to succeed or just want to make suggestions. The best feedback comes from strangers or folks disinterested in your future and those are generally the folks that are your pitch audience. If you can convince someone who doesn’t care to care, then your idea is probably ready to fly from the nest.

People who don’t listen during these kinds of feedback sessions generally don’t get any better and generally keep making the same mistakes while thinking they are the best designers in the world and that nobody appreciates their genius.

Ask yourself: is the point of the pitch to sell an idea or to sell yourself? Boards and publishers aren’t interested in you, they are interested in possible project ideas. If you want someone to tell you what a good job you do and how creative or smart you are, your mother is probably a better audience.

I’m bringing the Airport game I blogged about recently to show to publishers and also quickly adapted a design I had shelved in 2009 after randomly coming upon a novel theme and scoring mechanism for the whole thing. It’s tenatively called New York Minute. I rudely threw that together with Gloriana’s help and so I’m bringing two well-tested (I got a lot of reps with NYM in its previous incarnation. It’s a pretty good game that lacked a theme and felt a little arbitrary. It was surprisingly easy to fix.) games to the show and hope to get some useful feedback from the publishing folk.

When I come back, I’ll post a full recap of the goodies of GenCon and then I’ll be back to my regular posting schedule. I’ll leave you with a link to a very hyped new blog that posts the tired and I thought defeated argument that you can divide price by hours and get some sort of enjoyment metric, as if enjoyment was measured in hours and not something more flighty like utils. These articles are inevitably written by college kids or people who generally have the time to fully appreciate 100+ hour titles where people with demanding jobs or kids or a life really appreciate getting a full experience in a digestible amount of time, even if that makes the price/hour metric all outta wack.

In short: you click on a cow to get points. Why do you need points? Well… you can compare with your friends! And you can buy cutely named Mooney to get different cow types!

I was talking to my fiancee yesterday who is a huge user of all these social game doodads and she was distressed that her dog in Farmville had ran away because she wasn’t there to click on it or feed it or whatever you do in that game these days. Cow Clicker is very lax in that particular interpretation of the “Social” Dogma. If you don’t click your cow, nothing bad happens to you, which is one of the key psychological footholds of the genre. You don’t lose anything and you don’t let your friends down. It’s the sense of obligation, of slavery to these mindless activities that makes me find Facebook games so insidious, especially after having worked on one. Not only are your friends not human beings but resources, but conversely you are a cog in their machine. It’s surprising for me to say that Cow Clicker isn’t insidious enough. Maybe that is the point? Maybe because we expect it to be more insidious that just shows how miserable the state of affairs truly is?

Cow Clicker is more interesting satire than, say, Progress Quest simply because instead of making a statement that looks like the antecedent (as in the latter), it attempts to fully emulate its target and strip it down enough that its internals show but not so bare that it fails to emulate the same mechanics and dynamics.

Whatever this school of design is that eschews the fuck-the-users mentality, it needs a name and a little badge that I can put on my profile and level up.

The reason Power Planets works so well where loads of civ building games have failed is simply because it has a theme that is strong, but isn’t heavy-handed. You are free to muck up the world in the pursuit of luchre and the game makes little moral objection to the choice with the exception of animation of coughing and dying residents. It doesn’t lead you down a path of eco-righteousness – it lets you decide what that is through the mechanics.

For instance, I wanted to research to get Universities because they provide a lot of points per hour. But to do so, I needed a good chunk of money. So I built some fume-spewing Upgraded Factories powered by cheap, abundant and dirty as sin coal power. Completely within the so-called “Magic Circle”, I justified this – yeah, it is dirty and all, but it’s for the greater good. I need the Universities.

Renewable resources are hopelessly underpowered until you get the research to unlock more futuristic technologies. But the only way to unlock those technologies is to have a lot of money and the only way to have a lot of money is to essentially build a lot of polluting buildings. The parallel lessons to real situations, while neccessarily simplistic, are striking.

But the clever twist in Power Planets that makes it unlike every other building sim out there is that you hand off your planet to someone else every two days and receive a stranger’s. How many times in polluting will you look at your coal reserves, see 40 hours of coal remaining and know that it is someone else’s problem, plunging ahead not worrying about the future?

One building you can create is a Monument that houses your Facebook picture. Future caretakers of that world cannot remove or move the monument and it takes up a valuable space on the planet. Putting it on a useful resource or in a valuable power plant’s range is the ultimate in narcissism, but the game makes no value judgment on its own.

In a genre full of contrived mechanics (Why can I only click my cow every six hours? “Well, because we want you to come back” doesn’t fit any theme but manipulation), Power Planets strives as simple, fun and full of meaning.

It highlights what I’ve known to be a problem with my process for some time now and that is the unfortunate necessity of having the same people playtest your games. Since you can’t take them out back and format their brains to see everything as a blank slate, they are forced to compare a new version with an old version. If the new version fixes problems with the old version, then the fixes must be good, right? Well, no, not exactly, because those fixes might make no sense to someone coming into the game raw.

There are problems in Airport Rush with the alignment of theme and mechanics. While I am no slave to theme – Why are there n identical San Juans in Puerto Rico? Why can only one type of good fit on a ship? Why in Ticket to Ride do you need special colors of track? What do the tickets represent? And so on – there is much to be said about congruency insofar as it helps people understand the rules and mechanics. If people are distracted by incongruent rules, then I should work to fix it. Some incongruencies will remain (to the chagrin of nitpicky designers), but I was looking for feedback, not orders.

It’s actually been a long time since I’ve received feedback that was in the form of: “Why did you do things this way?” “Because such and such.” “Oh, I see. I think that’s too slow. Wouldn’t such and other such be better?” It’s refreshing.

This short post is to tell you about a gem of a game I played through on Thursday. It is Telltale’s pilot of Nelson Tethers: Puzzle Agent. If you like the Professor Layton games, then Puzzle Agent is familiar. It is a point-and-click adventure game sans inventory management, where the challenges come from brain teasers, logic puzzles and riddles that are interspersed with the story.

The pilot was great, but leaves on a bit of a To Be Continued note, so I’d be very sad if folks didn’t scoop it up in enough quantity to merit a whole season. I felt that the puzzles were more fair than in the latest Layton game (in that, some puzzles could be interpreted in multiple ways leading to incorrect correct answers). But the real draw here is the ridiculous writing and voice acting. I’ve found the voice acting in the Sam and Max games (of what I have played, at least) to be a bit monotonous. Plus there is a wonderful surprise that breaks the veil of puzzle and story that I will leave for you to discover.

Let’s say you have a menu select gesture where you have to wave your hand and hold it up for a second. If I have a n step-depth menu tree and it takes two seconds to select with a gesture versus 6 frames to select via button press, it is likely to take 10*n longer to get anywhere I want to go using gestures versus the old button system. If your menu tree takes six steps like a “Play Now” game of Madden, then you’ve increased my time to get into the game by ninefold, not to mention any additional interpretation time or false interpretations.

I can use a gesture to open a car door in Forza. Great. Why do I want to do that? To show off the technology or for increased enjoyment?

How about button presses versus gestural gameplay? We’ve seen this on the Wii already. Shaking the sword in Twilight Princess was inferior than the button presses used in the Gamecube version. Shaking to spin in Madden/NCAA Wii was vastly inferior to the button presses on its next-gen brethren. But aiming via tilting the Wiimote with our bow in the aforementioned Twilight Princess or using the MotionPlus to putt in Tiger Wii were much better applications of new tech. The tech is not good or bad, but applications of the tech can be.

Let’s learn from our mistakes. Gestural methods can create new outlets for gameplay. You can’t do EA Active with button presses and it was a creative success. If Kinect creates new gameplay methods, like it seems to in Dance Central, then the tech is being used appropriately.

There’s some great stuff being produced, just don’t let the tech tail wag the gameplay/usability dog.

The other players weren’t as entertained as I.

The book is essentially a collection of essays, one of which was published in The New Yorker and which I complained about last year upon reading it for being too gee-whiz. His chapter on Braid falls for the same sort of fetishism, but the Far Cry 2 chapter which interviews Clint Hocking is surprisingly adroit at addressing what was unique about the underrated title.

If the thesis of the book is “Why Games Matter”, then it is only touched upon in a very meta way. Indeed, the quality of the prose in the book is vivid. If game reviews read like this, I’d be more apt to actually read them. A better subtitle might have been, “Why Games Are Trying to Matter”, because the pathetic swings at trying to rationalize his addiction leaves a sorry-feeling miasma over the whole book. But I don’t think the book was for me. It was for non-gamers. So perhaps I am unqualified to take his book as a softcore polemic towards the Eberts of the world.

I’m being hard on it.The book is entertaining at times and I found myself highlighting all over the early chapters for its more general insights.

Here, on my arch-nemesis, tutorials:

It would be hard to imagine a formal convention more inherently bizarre than the video-game tutorial. Imagine that, every time you open a novel, you are forced to suffer through a chapter in which the characters do nothing but talk to one another about the physical mechanics of how one goes about reading a book.

On Resident Evil and utterly stupid stories:

[It] helped to create an unnecessary hostility between the greatness of a game and the sophistication of things such as narrative, dialogue, dramatic motivation and characterization [...] But most gamers do not care because they have been trained by game designers not to care.

On quantity of detail not being the definition of story:

For many gamers [...] and game designers, story is largely a matter of accumulation. The more explanation there is, the thought appears to go, the more story has been generated. This would be a profound misunderstanding of story for any form of narrative art, but it has hobbled the otherwise creative achievement of any number of games.

When the author tries to dig deeper and find some interconnecting bonds, he fails. Perhaps the author is too ashamed of his addiction that he is desperately trying to attach meaning to it in oblique ways. Overall, the work is entertaining despite not really addressing a core thesis in a meaningful way.

Some very successful games are like this – putting the gameplay cart before the story horse. Do you think that Rockstar started with the idea of the plight of an eastern European immigrant learning to adapt with a foreign culture? Or did they start with mechanics: a living city, carjacking, police chases, helicopter rides, etc. and add the story later? It isn’t pejorative to say a game’s development starts with mechanics – it is simply a different development strategy.

In Alan Wake the story is front and center – so much that the game’s “episodes” add punctuation points to gameplay setting up “cliffhangers” at key story points. This is interesting. Cliffhangers make sense in television. The story in television dramas has to fit in a predefined time block and it cannot be guaranteed that the viewer will return for the next episode. So they leave with a question that must be answered in the hopes that the viewer will come back. Games like Alan Wake don’t have that limitation. The consumer has already bought the disc. There is no predefined episode length. They can play right through.

But the cliffhangers serve an important psychological goal – or at least they did in my case. Despite it being a device used specifically to draw player attention, it is where I stopped playing. Was this a mental cue that I picked up from years of watching television? Perhaps. But these episode breaks served as a cue to portion out the experience evenly. Many reviews that complain about the “sameness” of the gameplay may have rushed through and ignored these natural stopping points. Throughout the day after playing it, I’d wonder about the cliffhangers and come back with a renewed interest and drive to continue.

Back to the issue of story preceding gameplay. The gameplay is repetitive. But this serves the story in the same way the repetitive gameplay serves the story in Half-Life 2. Alan has a particular problem he is facing and for him to swap genres or wildly increase the breadth of mechanics in order to increase the breadth of gameplay (as happens in GTA, RPGs, etc.) would be putting gameplay before story.

You play as the plumber Mario and your goal is to save the beautiful Princess from the evil Koopa menace. Only Alan Wake isn’t as sacchrine. Mario is a New York writer. The Princess is your nyctophobic prize. The Taken are just as ill-defined as the Koopa Troopas. But it is a maturation on the same beats.

Some have complained that the game doesn’t follow the same horror tropes and is thus less scary. But these tropes apply in different ways to games that are story then gameplay versus games (like Resident Evil) that are heavily gameplay then story.

Additionally, the game is self-described as “thriller” not “horror”. Horror is meant to scare, first and foremost where thriller is meant to cause anxiety. So the string cues that let the player know that Taken are coming actually help the cause. They aren’t meant to be scary surprises – they are meant to make the player say “Oh shit, what now?” Alan Wake succeeds in spades.

Many words have been spent comparing Alan Wake to Heavy Rain and the comparisons are apt. Both are story-first, gameplay second. Both are console-exclusives that spent a considerable time in gestation in European development studios. While I enjoyed both a great deal, I believe that Alan Wake provides a better game experience.

When you play a game you make mental models to explain a number of highly strange things. For instance, let’s say I am playing Team Fortress 2. I need to explain that making a certain movement with my finger will cause my character to shoot a grenade. I need to explain what my target is by seeing it on screen and making a judgment that it is a “bad guy”. I need to explain that my “avatar” needs to move to the “control point” to win. I need to explain that a movement with my thumb translates to movement of my avatar. I need to explain that these things together will help me achieve my goal, which is standing on the control point.

The point I am trying to illustrate is that we have a lot of abstraction in something that we consider very familiar. Heavy Rain changes those abstractions. In order to open up a drawer, I have to make an odd swirly motion with my thumb. Why am I opening it? Uh, well, I’m not sure, but there is an icon on the screen telling me so. Where Heavy Rain fumbles is that the abstractions aren’t congruent with what we’ve expected. That is fine in of itself – every innovative game has, by definition, messed with our models of how things work. But when your entire presentation scraps the conventions, you have a lot of explaining to do – not literally, of course – but to the models we create internally. I have no problem moving a stick to walk my character to a car in Grand Theft Auto IV, pressing Triangle to carjack and then pressing R2 to accelerate away. It melds with our models and isn’t that strange. To do the same thing in Heavy Rain requires moving your character in a unique way, interacting with the door handle in a unique way, and driving automatically without input from the player. Our models are all frazzled!

Alan Wake, however, sprinkles its innovations amongst things that confirm our mental models. To say “it controls like an action game” is to say that it conforms to our models of the mechanics and dynamics of an action game. But does it really play as an action game? Not really. I’ll leave it to the reader to list all of the ways action games are vastly different than Alan Wake.

Let me thwart the straw man response that would assume that I am saying that breaking mental models is bad. Indeed, it is the only thing that provides us any growth. But look back at Alone in the Dark (the old one) for example. Games before that generally looked at player characters from the side or from above or from a subjective viewpoint. This game changed the mental model by making the camera a third-person observer. But we can answer the question ‘why’. The designers did this because it could create generally creepy moments. The payoff for breaking this model was a new presentation of emotion (fear) that helped further the game’s themes. There are numerous examples of changes that are just for the sake of change that do not further the games themes and these are less compelling and thus harder sells.

So here are two games that choose to eschew the common gameplay-then-story development process. Both are essentially “on rails”. Both are excellent games. But one breaks down nearly all of the common mental models for players. The other keeps you on edge by mixing the comfortable with the new. The new here is integrated with a way that dovetails with the game’s themes. Neither is essentially “right”, but I think this explanation is, for me, why one was more enjoyable than the other. I’m interested in hearing others’ opinions.

The point of the presentation is “Here’s what UX designers can learn from game designers”, but I think moreso it can be “Here’s what game designers can be reminded from a UX designer perspective on game design.”

I have issues with Koster’s analysis, so his quoting him makes me cringe a bit but it is otherwise fantastic. I’m posting it so I remember to go back and read the related Slideshare presentations at the end.

The essence of the festival is a mix of ARGs and impromptu sports. The above picture is me playing the awfully named “OMMRPG” which should really be called “Laser Football”. The idea is that each team has one laser pointer and a number of players with mirrors and must direct the laser to a “goal” while avoiding the other team’s defenders. It is wildly chaotic and actually works without a lot of rules. I stealthily hid behind an “official” and scored three times before the opposing team caught on and I was marked for the rest of the game. Once you are marked, there is little you can do to score, which is a weakness of the game (in basketball or soccer you can out-finesse someone to shake off a defender, in this, due to the precision required of angling a mirror, it is less possible). After I was sufficiently frustrated by a defender, I passed off my mirror to another player. I think more organization would lead to these kinds of strategies – passing mirrors to confuse defenders. I was surprised at how well the game worked.

There were a number of games that took place over the entire weekend. One was hosted by Scvngr. Since they have no vowels, you know they are Web 2.0. You download the Scvngr app for Android or iPhone and you are led on a photo scavenger hunt around town. It is the perfect melding of an old game with new technology and if AT&T’s network wasn’t such balls, it would have been very clever and smooth. Scvngr allows you to set up your own scavenger hunts for others. They are partnering with museums and such to offer these sort of ludically-guided tours (I just made that phrase up, sorry).

You can see on the above picture a bandanna tied to my leg that says “Human”. It was part of another of the whole-weekend games called simply Humans vs. Zombies. It is essentially Massively Multiplayer Thematic Tag. One player starts out as Subject Zero and by tagging humans (those with bandannas on their arms or legs) can turn hapless humans into flesh-eating zombies (indicated by bandannas worn on the head). Humans can stun zombies by hitting them with socks or nerf guns at which point they must wear their bandanna around their neck and cannot tag for ten minutes.

Gloriana and I were on our way to an event on Saturday morning when we saw a Zombie across the street in the direction we were headed. I paused and we made eye contact, yet he smiled and continued walking away from us. Were we safe? Was it a trap? I peeked around the corner. No Zombie there. But by then it was too late. The Zombie was hiding behind a trash can. I was taken, but Gloriana survived by spiking me and the attacker with socks.

My attacker (left) and the decoy (right).

Now, this led to an uncomfortable situation. I was a shambling shell of humanity while Glo was still pure. Nonetheless, she felt like she had a hand on the situation. She set her phone to go off in ten-minute intervals. When it would ring, she would instantly spike me with a sock. Hmph. I felt like in the last scene of Shaun of the Dead where Ed is chained to the shed and can only play Timesplitters instead of eating flesh.

Glo was protected in safe zones like the park (the game was suspended if you were in the park playing another game, in a business or crossing a street). Also helpful was the overprepared Nerf-based militia that patrolled Park Slope looking for zeds to shoot. Not pictured above is the guy who had a bandoleer of socks and a belt of Nerf cartridges.

But as in the precautionary zombie movies, a split second of indecision can upend an entire life. I was on the phone talking to a friend who were we going to meet for the day. While Glo thought I was distracted, she crossed the threshold of the park and was no longer in a safe zone. I tagged her “undead” and she was upset! Geeze, you would have thought that I did something bad like forget her birthday – I only converted her to a mindless automaton of insatiable hunger!

We continued on with the games. “Field Crumpets” was a lively variation on field hockey that was just wacky enough to be novel. We participated in a horde event where we Zombies milled about trying to trap helpless humans (we won!). And we also took great efforts to complete the SCVNGR hunt. We used props for extra effect. The prompt was to hug a tree in Prospect Park. Instead, I prosposed to one:

It said no.

Our pictures were pretty good (Glo is a creative photographer) and in the end thanks in part to our funny pictures, we won the SCVNGR hunt! Our prize? A new 3G iPad! Whoa! Supposedly, they are ordering it today and it will be in the mail.

If it doesn’t show up, I know a horde of flesh-rending abominations that I can send to the SCVNGR headquarters.

]]> http://www.hiwiller.com/2010/06/07/come-out-and-play-2010/feed/ 2 http://www.hiwiller.com/2010/06/07/come-out-and-play-2010/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/hiwiller/~3/tmIh4F3t_es/ http://www.hiwiller.com/2010/06/04/the-sky-isnt-falling/#comments Fri, 04 Jun 2010 21:50:26 +0000 Zack http://www.hiwiller.com/?p=569 So players are jumping off of the “social” game bandwagon at lightning speeds and everyone is flailing around wildly asking why.

Look at the chart here and you will notice a few things:

1) Older games are generally declining faster than newer games. This tells us that users are growing tired of the same old formulas. This isn’t unique for “social” games. Look at the numbers of people still playing Project Gotham Racing 4 or some other “core” game. People just tire eventually. Remember when everyone was playing Snood? This bodes poorly for copycat games. Where once people couldn’t get enough farming, restauranteuring, etc., the platform will have to branch out to new genres (not just new themes!) to continue growing. This isn’t a shock – it is expected. Did you really think more people would be playing Farmville in 2011? 2012? 2020? At some point the genre had to peak or level off.

2) But newer games are also losing steam. Treasure Isle, for instance, is down half a million users. This could be for a number of reasons. One is that Facebook has had a lot of negative publicity lately with regards to privacy. Users could simply be not logging on or shedding the platform across the board. Some loss must be attributed to this, but there’s little forward-looking devs can do about that.

Some blame the across-the-board losses on the removed ability to spam via notifications. If these newer games are designed on the same models where one has to be reminded to play, then they will suffer the same user burnout as in (1). Since these games do have some bits that are new coats of paint, they should weather the storm for longer.

3) The gross data tells us nothing about whether the users leaving were the lookie-loo free players or the folks spending cash on virtual tchotchkes. If it is the former, is it really such a blow to Facebook developers? The data behind this will clearly be held close to the individual developers’ chests.

4) Older games that aren’t declining as much are games where you don’t have to be nagged or pressured to play them – they are generally fun in of themselves. Texas Hold’em and Bejeweled Blitz are the examples here. The novelty of “I’m playing a game with friends on Facebook” is wearing off. Now the games actually have to have some fun mechanics to stick, which sucks because it is a lot harder…

Of course, it is just easier to whine and complain that we can’t spam notifications anymore.

• I completed Alan Wake over the weekend and I am surprised that everyone isn’t finding it as wholly compelling as I did. It has a clever battle mechanic, fantastic presentation and gripping story, not to mention fantastic score and soundtrack.I then dug into Red Dead Redemption. Now, it is my own damn fault because I generally avoid previews but I didn’t realize that when people said it was “Grand Theft Auto” in the west that they were being literal. These are the same mechanics that you played in Grand Theft Auto 3, Bully, Grand Theft Auto 4, and so on and so on. Literally, there was a mission that had me steal a horse and then watch my minimap as deputies raced after me. I had to be outside their zone of awareness while a meter ticked down and then they forgot about me. Sigh. I was looking for my horse’s radio controls but couldn’t find them.

  Now, I am being biased because I hate the controls, hate the reticule, hate the World’s Slowest Poker Game, hate the bugs, hate that you can’t often tell who is firing at you or where they are, hate the stupid same missions I was playing five years ago, hate the “hold A to experience mission” gameplay and so on. But since the frustrations are raw and in my face, it is hard to acknowledge that there are a lot of great things in the game. There are!

  Hold on. A comment on that last item. I have a great deal of skepticism towards open world games for one reason: much of the gameplay time by percentage tends to be taken up by traveling from gameplay event to gameplay event. In Wind Waker, you spent a lot of time sailing from point to point. In GTA, driving. In Far Cry 2, more driving. In most open world RPGs, walking. In Red Dead, you spend a lot of time simply holding down the A button to follow an NPC that will talk to you on the way to some mission. These mechanics are not substitutes for compelling gameplay.

  These are tasks that we do in order to fulfill a larger purpose. Some games get this right: Sly Cooper 2 (condensed world full of interesting decisions), Oblivion (density of discoverable points in travel along with very easy quick-travel), Silent Hill 1 (Very directed open world for the most part), Burnout Paradise (they made great pains to make the actual travel to events fun).  Red Dead puts band-aids on the wound: coach taxis, campsites, etc, but they do not really fix the problem. Had Alan Wake been “open world” (it could have been very easily!) it would have suffered from the same remarkable sameness of gameplay, paced poorly and frustratingly extended.

  Back to what works. The formula for Grand Theft Auto is to make a world and then fill it with stuff rather than to first design stuff and put it in a world that fits said stuff. To this degree, they do a great job. You can do everything from pistols at dawn to liar’s dice to cattle ropin’ and hell, you can even pick flowers. They sure get quantity right. The fact is that there are many types of players (Bartle provides one definition, but it is far more branching). It is hard to create experiences that satisfy everyone. So if you cast a wide net, you can hope that everyone can find something that they enjoy. I, for instance, find the Treasure Hunting quest line very interesting and fun. It comes at the expense of making sure that all these mechanics are usable. Some mechanics give you no chance to learn them (poker cheating) and others simply feel like they were checked off a list as “done” and forgotten (horseshoes).

  So maybe that is where the 95 Metacrtic comes from in a game full of nervous-twitch inducing issues. The production was clearly difficult, as evidenced by the EA-spouse-esque leaks. So that a game that could come out to such rapturous reviews is emblematic of a team that put their hearts, souls and bodies into creating something that people enjoy. Kudos to that. The San Diego team has my utmost respect.

Me: Do these battles take a while?
Coworker: Depends on your skill mostly. Some can take 15 minutes. Some can take 45 minutes.
Me: (pauses) So how can you tell how close you are to the end? Do you know how well you are doing?
Coworker: You are the first person to ask like that. Everyone else asks “where is his health bar?”

In a game that has a lot of bars and stats and UI detritus on the screen, I am actually surprised that they have the restraint to withhold a monster health bar:

Positive feedback loops in games are mechanics that reinforce the success or failure of the player and make future successes/failures more probable. This can be seen in numerous games, especially in RPGs. The cliche often used to explain positive feedback loops is “the rich get richer”. Having money is often a prerequisite to gaining more money: you need capital to start a business,  so the ones making money are the ones already rich. And so on.

But let’s take an example from board games first. In Risk, players control armies trying to take over the world. They do so by battling other armies. When players win battles and control entire continents, they receive additional armies every turn – this in turn “feeds back” into the simple result that having more armies makes you more likely to win battles. So not only does winning a battle give a direct advantage (the opponent has fewer units) but you also feed back that victory into gaining more units, which should ensure further victories.

Continent bonuses.

Quake II faces positive feedback loops. The relevant mechanic is that when you die, you restart with guns that are not as good as the ones that can be picked up on the battlefield. The player with the first kill then has an inherent advantage – he will have better weapons than the newly respawned player and will be more likely to kill him again, given equal skill.

Professional baseball in America has a somewhat muted positive feedback loop. There are no salary caps in baseball, so teams can spend as much money as they have to procure the best players. The best players (one would think) lead to the best success on the field. Success on the field leads to more money as people bid up tickets and buy merchandise. That money can then be fed into buying even better players.

The Facebook game Mafia Wars originally had a pretty severe positive feedback problem. Players could buy properties that were constantly earning rents. Players could dump all of their money into buying “Mega-Casinos” which in turn gave a lot of additional money in rents, for which players could buy additional “Mega-Casinos”. After my first burst of playing the game, I quit. I came back three months later and had hundreds of billions of dollars, enough to buy any object in the game (that could be bought with in-game money, that is).

Sweet, delicious, infinity monies.

Positive feedback isn’t always bad. For one, it helps direct player actions. Players want to become richer, more powerful, &c., so giving them rewards for succeeding makes sense. It also breaks stalemates. Consider a game like the card game War. In it, the player with the highest card value wins. It is entirely random, so on average, each player should win 50% of the time. Series of War games will always be in stalemate. No previous game affects the current game. But if you added a positive feedback loop that changed that, the game could progress towards an end state. Say that players get to turn over an additional card if they won the last hand. This gives the winning player an advantage, that should cause a positive feedback loop leading to an end-game state where one player has dominance over the other and can be concluded the winner. I’m not saying that will make War fun (Lord knows), but it can end the damn thing.

When I was assigned to NCAA Football 08, there was a positive reinforcement system being implemented called “DPR” – dynamic player ratings. The idea was to implement the most straightforward of positive reinforcements. Player events that were tied to random die rolls were affected by ability ratings (a player with 90 catching ability would catch more often than a player with 89 catching rating), as a player succeeded during the course of a single game, his ratings would be temporarily boosted, causing more successes.  Player ratings converged to either essential perfection or complete inadequacy. That system had to be tweaked the entire cycle, the smallest change could spiral out of control creating perfect passers or punters that couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn. In the end, it was tuned down to look significant, but the probabilities affected were only slightly nudged. The essential nature of the positive feedback dynamic was never addressed.

This problem is endemic to many sports games as “stat boosts” seem to be the only reward structure worth pursuing.

Negative feedback loops in games are mechanics that cause to hinder succeeding players from further success or failing players from further failures. The classic example is Mario Kart.

Mario Kart is a racing game where players have weapons that they can use to speed themselves up or hinder the progress of their opponents. In a later installment, Nintendo added the Blue Shell weapon. The Blue Shell is the ultimate negative feedback loop. It homes in and destroys the player in first place no matter where they are on the map. There is nothing the first place player can do to avoid this. The blue shell is almost inevitable – there is almost one in every race. It is always on the mind of the player in first. Succeeding players are punished – no one wants to be too far ahead of the pack because the blue shell will knock them back. Instead, it encourages a dynamic where players want to be in second place until the final parts of the race – safe from blue shells but also close enough to take the lead by the finish.

Simply the most well-understood negative reinforcement mechanic in games.

Negative feedback is dangerous because it sends mixed signals. We direct our players to succeed – win the race, kill the bad guys &c., but at the same time our negative feedback mechanics do not agree with our stated intent.

Some racing games suffer from this problem. Since most racing games are more interesting when you are jockeying for position with other cars, if you do too well and leave the pack behind, the AI will cheat and make the opponents go supernaturally fast to catch up with player to encourage more nail-biting racing. This punishes the player for succeeding, which goes against all the other mechanics in many of these games which are tailored to encourage the player to race well. Players are almost unanimously against this technique – do a search in racing game reviews for “rubber-band AI” and you will see what I mean. Designers here are faced with a conundrum – have no “rubber banding” and let good players race off into the distance, effectively racing time trails, or have the AI cheat to make the race more exciting.

Even relatively simple games can use negative feedback. In the trivia game Buzz, the player in first place never gets to select the trivia category. The player selecting should naturally try to pick something that she knows that the leader doesn’t and thus this should serve as negative reinforcement.

Positive feedback loops are naturally occurring for a simple reason: players direct themselves towards actions that make them stronger. They buy swords in RPGs that let them kill bigger creatures that drop better loot that allow them to buy even better swords. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but it can cause problems. Negative feedback loops are much harder to come by because they can be simply contradictory and non-intuitive. We guide players to help them succeed and then behind the scenes sabotage them with negative feedback so that succeeding is bad. We spend more time figuring out solutions to positive feedback situations than negative because positive loops cause more problems:

• Interest curves. Even single player games can fall victim to this. What if the player spends all his time trying to level up instead of exploring all the great content we have for him? What if the drops he gets from such leveling up make the rest of the game too easy? How can we reward the player with one hand and take it away with the other such that he keeps progressing through the game?
• Problems of balance. Multiplayer games need to use positive feedback sparingly. If the entire game is decided by the time the first winning move enters the positive feedback loop (like the first kill in Quake II above), then why play the rest of the game? The loser will be continually beaten by the first winner, and without hope of winning himself, probably won’t be having much fun.
• Endgame problems. World of Warcraft has a problem. Players get stronger and stronger, but there is a finite amount of content they can offer. Eventually, you have to reach the strongest sword in the game. At that point, players cannot be directed to kill bigger bad guys for the purpose of better drops that have better stats. The designers there have to deal with the problem of “what to give the player that has everything”. Naturally, they’ve done a good job as they have a healthy base of players at the maximum level, but this problem only exists because of the positive feedback loops in the main gameplay.

Disgaea took a different approach to this. They simply scale up the numbers for weapons and monsters to ridiculous levels, encouraging an ever-moving treadmill of progression-escalation. World of Warcraft does not have this luxury because they have to deal with players of uneven levels cooperating in the same area. It is hard enough to do that for a Level 80 and a Level 70, let alone a Level 200 and a Level 70.

One technique to fix positive feedback getting out of control is to decouple what the reward affects and what the tasks require. Farmville and other “social” games are all about walking up a treadmill to get the next doo-dad. But the doo-dads in these games generally aren’t things that help the player succeed. Often they are cosmetic or tangential. For instance, while the harvester in Farmville allows the player to harvest in less clicks, it doesn’t make the plants grow faster. The reward is reinforcing the click-to-harvest mechanic and not the XP-gaining growth mechanic. Thus, players can lust over the harvester and harvest like silly without breaking the game. This is a fine technique and one that I recommend, but it isn’t perfect because the player has to want a reward of something other than what will give him more power to achieve. Thus it can only be applied in some situations.

When I was working on the multiplayer for Superman Returns DS, we started by drafting a pretty clever multiplayer board game where players attempted to take control of the city of Metropolis. Quickly, we fell into problems of positive feedback loops – players who controlled more of the city could move around the city easier and thus could get the bonuses that helped the players towards victory. We could have gimped it by removing the positive feedback from ease of movement around territory you control, but we chose a different method. We added a negative feedback mechanic- taking over an opponents areas gains someone more territory than taking over neutral areas. I don’t remember if this stayed in the final version or not, but since no one actually played the multiplayer of Superman Returns, even though it was far and away the best part, I’ll just make that claim and leave it at that.

There are no pictures of multiplayer SMR on the Internet.

This is often the best solution if the positive reinforcement is knocking the game out of balance and you cannot simply remove the offending mechanic – pair positive reinforcements with negative ones.

RPGs do this: When you level up, monsters also become tougher. So you get stronger, but your enemies do as well, likely at the same rate. Your power increase is positive feedback. Your enemy’s increase is negative feedback. This would be noticeable to players if put that explicitly, so what we do is allow the player to really beat up on some lower-level thugs after powering-up to get them feeling more invincible before throwing their ass in front of newly souped-up baddies.

But this has to be carefully balanced. In Morrowind, players could choose to level up and if they did so, stronger baddies would appear instantly, rolled from a different table. When I first played it, I stayed as a level Suck player for as long as I could, simply because the quest items I found were positively reinforcing and leveling up was a net-negative reinforcement that was under my control. Certainly, it was not what the designers intended but I’m sure many players chose that path.

“Fixing” positive feedback doesn’t even have to really fix the problem, only the appearance of a problem. Consider our Major League Baseball example above. The National Football League saw that positive feedback problem and added negative reinforcements – salary caps (limits on how much a team can spend on personnel) and reverse draft selection (the worst team gets to choose first the best players coming out of the collegiate system.) It is generally seen as more fair. In baseball, the top four teams (Yankees, Dodgers, Cardinals, Giants) combine for 50% (53/105) of all world championships. In football, the four winningest Super Bowl teams (Steelers, Cowboys, 49ers, Patriots) combine for 43% (19/44) of all Super Bowls. While football is widely considered to be more egalitarian, the statistical difference is slight.

EDIT: And I almost forgot to mention one of the most clever negative reinforcements in all of the games I’ve experienced. In Dominion, the act of buying victory points and putting them into your deck de facto makes your deck weaker since victory cards are empty draws. This means that you are always stuck with the decision of making an efficiency advantage at the cost of points versus a points advantage at the cost of efficiency.

Eventually, you will find yourself in a nuthouse. The doctor there introduces you to the patients and one of them “makes videogames” and is a poorly veiled avatar of some Remedy employee since he is obsessed with being scary.

Come back later after the tour and the game developer will be ranting, quite poignantly to this observer,  about his publisher. How that got through MS’ fun censors I’ll never know, but it was absolutely brilliant, along with some fun play-on-words for those who were caught in the Max Payne bullet-time-a-thon of the 2000s.

It’s a fantastic game, but why did it take four years again?

The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell	I’ve read a handful of game design books. The worst are genre analyzers. They say: “this is an RTS. Here are the conventions of an RTS.” Some are way more lofty: “This is what a game is. Here are the boundaries of a game.” I didn’t find either approach very helpful. This book is a distillation of Prof. Schell’s class on Game Design that he teaches at the ETC at Carnegie Mellon University. I was lucky enough to be both a student of his (I took the class for easy elective credit and it turned me into a game designer) and the following year, his teaching assistant. The method is unique (to me at least): “Here are my experiences as a game designer and here are the tools I use and have used to look at game design and career decisions.” It is thoroughly more useful to someone actually doing game design and it makes for a more entertaining read. It isn’t one unified theory for games and doesn’t try to be – although the advice is useful especially for those designing non-digital or non-traditional games. As such, something may come along and usurp Prof. Schell’s book in the future as a more holistic Grand Theory of Game Design. Maybe such a thing will never exist. But until it does, I will count this as the prima game design book that everyone who calls him/herself a designer or anyone who wants to should give a read.
Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds	We game designers make presentations. Our job in professional game development is to sell ideas – to artists, programmers, producers, the press, but most importantly – to the folks that hold the purse strings and either make the go-no go decisions or directly influence those who do. And most of the time, these presentations are done with the dreadnought of Powerpoint. Even mentioning the P word triggers a narcoleptic response, not because our ideas are bad but because we’ve sat through so many presentations where some simple techniques of design and delivery could have elevated the same ideas from sleep-inducing the enthralling. Presentation Zen is a book about getting rid of “slideuments” and delivering a message. If I could give one book to every person in the game industry to study and know, it would be this. There’s a double-edged sword here. People are so conditioned in the awful techniques of how Powerpoint is currently used that trying to be more engaging can actually frighten and confuse particularly entrenched minds. After reading this, I was to give a presentation to a group of senior staff at EA on a new concept. When I gave it to my boss to review before the presentation, he tore into me. I paraphrase: “What’s with all the full screen images? Where is the text? Why aren’t there captions to these diagrams?” “Because I am going to be talking about them. That’s why I’ll be standing up there presenting.” “No one is going to listen to you, they are just going to read what’s on the screen.” “That’s precisely why there aren’t words on this slide.” “No, change it. That’s not what they want.” “Then why give a presentation? We can send them a document with all the information and save everyone the time of getting together for a meeting.” “Because we have a meeting scheduled.” So it may not be the easiest of transitions for some, but I damn well guarantee that your presentations will be better if you take the lessons from this book.
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte	This goes hand-in-hand with Presentation Zen but is a little more broad. The subject matter is fully explained in the title, so there is little to say about the contents. Tufte’s focus on packing the largest amount of information in the smallest amount of ink has its uses in UI design in particular, but I used to keep a copy on my desk solely to gaze at by accident and remind me of simplicity in data presentation. If that is all you get out of this, then it will be worth it, but deeper reading will present all sorts of lessons on presenting to your players. After all, every element of your game will need to be presented to your players and 95% of that will be done in a visual way. I’ll leave the aural and tactile feedback methods for another expert.
The Game Design Reader by Various	A lot of folks pick Salen and Zimmerman’s Rules of Play as a seminal work. I find it very interesting as an academic pursuit, but found it sorely lacking in practicality. Their companion volume, however, has hundreds of pages of precious gems from a wide variety of authors. Marc LeBlanc, Richard Garfield and Richard Bartle are worth admission alone, but I could site a half-dozen other “great reads” in addition. The organization of the texts itself feels a bit slapdash and the material contributed by Salen and Zimmerman reaches back into more academic territory, but overall there are too many interesting articles to avoid placing this on the essential bookshelf.
Brain Rules by John Medina	Yes, it is pop psychology, but the book was practically written for game designers. Games are about decisions and this book is about how the brain makes decisions. For instance, Chapter 4 is all about what we pay attention to and what we ignore. Great for level design! How about teaching mechanics? There are great chapters on the brain’s short term and long term memory processes and the limitations thereof. How about pacing? Medina says the brain can churn for about ten minutes before needing some sort of rest.
Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud	I’m violating my own list here because I don’t actually have this on my bookshelf. I read it back in college but I remember it being pretty encompassing when it comes to the visual medium – the domain of video games. It is so omnipresent on game designer lists that I have to include it. I’m resolved to picking it up again. Like Tufte’s book above, this is all about using images to convey information. We ask players to make decisions based on the information that we present to them – it is what a game is. We need to present these images in the most elegant and understandable ways. McCloud is consistently cited by game designers when it comes to these issues.

Other game industry people, what else should I add to the list?