It’s official!  I’m writing a book about my philosophy on game design.  Very exciting!  As such, for the next couple of months I won’t be writing as much for Dinofarm Games‘ blog, except for short tidbits about the development of Auro: The Golden Prince.

Just to keep you guys up to date on what’s going on…

• Auro is going well.  We’re implementing skills and are pretty much wrapping up the visual conceptualization phase.
• We’re also working on the fourth class for 100 Rogues, the Dinoman Bruiser.  He should be available sometime in January.
• I know for a fact Blake has a couple new ART BARN ideas in mind, so look out for those.

And hey, if you or anyone you know would be interested in writing a column for our blog, let us know.  We’d love to have another writer or two.

I bet we can all name more than one person who we know that used to play video games a lot years ago, but doesn’t so much, if at all, anymore.  If you’re like me, you know people like this, and you also know people who really want to still be playing games, but simply aren’t satisfied with nearly anything they’re seeing come out.

Some people take to the argument “well, I’m getting too old for video games”.  I find this argument to make absolutely no sense whatsoever.  There’s a Cracked article called “5 Ways to Tell You’re Getting Too Old for Videogames” (I wrote about it previously here).  In it, the author goes ahead and makes completely valid complaints about problems with modern digital games.  But then he goes and says that this is just because we’re “too old”, and that’s the real reason.  Given that the shit he’s complaining about is stuff that would bother anyone above the age of 25, that’s kind of a load of crap, since the current average age of a gamer is 37 – the AVERAGE age.

The author of the Cracked article could have fixed it by saying “you’re too old for most mainstream videogames”, and that would have been completely true.  But instead he decided to write off video games completely as, basically, only being for the very young.  This is yet another example of what I call “game shame” in our culture showing itself, as no one would ever say, or accept someone else saying such a statement about music or film or anything else.

Games are great for any age – but a lot of us have to do some extra legwork in this day and age to find ones that are acceptable for adults.  A regular reader will know that boardgames are one place I’m going with this, but bear with me. read more »

Games are about mastery.  However, if you’re able to actually ever achieve that – if you ever truly master the game, then the game is broken.  The game effectively ceases to exist and becomes a solved puzzle.

A great game knows how to elegantly present its many paths that all may lead to mastery.  It dangles these possible paths above your head;  it lets you know that they exist and suggests that if you attempt it in just the right way, you may find it.  Sometimes, the most fun thing about a game is stepping away from it and wondering, or discussing with friends, the many possibilities that come to mind.

While we’re playing, we want to find it!  But in the same way that you’ll never reach zero by halving, a good game lets us inch closer and closer to it, without ever actually reaching it.

The Randomness Threshold

Many designers use randomness to make sure their game is not solvable, as well as to add an element of surprise to the play.  This is something to be very, very careful with though.  There’s a threshold that you should not pass with randomness in your games.

Obviously, having a game be completely random (like Candyland for instance) means that the game no longer even involves any meaningful decision making, and to me that means it’s not even a game anymore.  But, there are plenty of examples of games that are strategic, yet still have a lot of randomness in them.  Most card games are this way, as they involve drawing cards.

The card game Dominion is extremely popular deck-building game that, after a few plays, certainly seems like a game that would meet my standards.  It has a flexible system that allows for lots of different strategies.  However, the game is highly random.  Each turn, you draw five cards into your hand from a deck you’re creating, and these five cards dictate what you can do.  Defenders of the game rightfully point out that you can minimize randomness by use of cards that remove the less-useful cards from your deck.  This is true, however not all games of Dominion involve such cards (you play with different cards each session).  Furthermore, if what they are saying is true, then they have pointed out a dominant strategy.  Knowing what the dominant strategy is for the game, of course, destroys that feeling of open imagination that the game could offer.

So in the case of Dominion, the strategy-tease is undermined by the randomness of the game.

read more »

I grew up on video games.  When I was three, I got an Atari 2600.  When I was six, I was participating in Galaga and Defender tournaments (I’ve still got the medals to prove it).  I can section off the years of my life by what game I was playing – there were the Super Mario Kart years, the Doom years,  the Ultima Online years, the Warcraft III years, and most recently the Team Fortress 2 years (with some overlap, of course).

Video games are so dominant in our culture – now being a larger industry than film or music.  So for someone like myself, someone who was extremely into video games, it was easy to feel like games simply are video games.  There is nothing outside of video games.  Sure, there are sports and other stuff, but they’re not really games, they’re their own thing.  Games are digital – that’s how it can feel being a child of the 1970s-1990s.

But about a few years ago, I met some people who told me about a few very different kinds of games.  The process, now that I look back on it, was somewhat gradual.  I was introduced to Ascii games like Roguelikes and other more abstract interactive software like Dwarf Fortress.  Indie games, MUDs, and old japanese-only Famicom or Super Famicom games.  And then I started hearing about boardgames (that’s right – I passed up the opportunity to  b l o w   y o u r   m i n d  by making that last sentence its own paragraph).

On my old blog, I wrote a post called “Holy Crap!  Boardgames!” about one year ago.  It was a celebration of the realization that boardgames, unlike video games, tend to really have their act together.  Of course, they have their own slew of problems, but generally, people who play designer boardgames understand the concept that games are about gameplay;  that games should be able to be won and lost;  that games should be interesting to play.  There are a lot of reasons for that which I get into in the article, but suffice it to say that in the last 15 years or so, boardgames have had a much better track record than video games.   While video games are still on a downward slope that they’ve been on since roughly 1990, boardgames have actually been experiencing a kind of Renaissance at the same time.

Combo Breaker

I think it’s hard for people like me to make this jump.  We grew up being told, and believing, that it was stuff like graphics technology, setting, story, or just the sheer amount of content that made a game great.  I find that most of us who have figured out consciously that all of that was nothing more than marketing propaganda still have a difficult time accepting and internalizing it.  On a subconscious level, we are still wanting the wrong things (this could have been its own paragraph, too;  but I resisted, and so can you, other bloggers!).

So I have this friend named Jarvis.  He likes games, and is a super smart guy who totally agrees with my philosophy about games.  He knows that games are about making interesting decisions.  He knows that modern games only function by exploiting this framework of deception that the industry has built in our generation.  And yet, he inexplicably keeps going back to them.

Recently, he was looking on the Xbox Live store to see what’s new.  I was with him, and we were looking through things.  We looked for awhile, read some descriptions, looked at screenshots.  Unsurprisingly, nothing looked very interesting… remakes, sequels, re-releases, and the like.

Innovation

Somewhat recently, I had obtained a new card game Innovation, and I had only played it a couple times.  He knew I was anxious to give it a shot, and he had been saying for awhile that he’d definitely play it but, for various reasons, “now” never seemed to be the time.  Well, here we were, sitting on the couch, looking for a new game to play.  Seemed like a good opportunity, so I of course proposed, “hey, would you want to check out Innovation?”

“Nah, I don’t feel like learning a bunch of new rules”, Jarvis replied.

But… that’s what a “new game” is!  A bunch of new rules!

If you don’t have to learn a bunch of rules, then it means you already know the rules.  If you already know the rules, then how is it a new game?  It has new textures?  A new story?  If you don’t want to learn a bunch of new rules, then you don’t want to play a new game.  Perhaps you feel you want to play a game that is a clone of another game you’ve already played (a game that has the same rules as another game), but I would ask, is that in fact what you really want?

Doom

I remember when the original Doom came out.  I was primarily a console gamer at the time – I had a computer, but really didn’t play many games on it, other than my own little QBasic creations and stuff like SkiFree.  Doom came out, and friends told me “you control where you aim with the mouse”.  This seemed completely bizarre to me at the time.  I had never played a first-person shooter before, let alone one where you control the game with the mouse.  It seemed bizarre, and it required a serious learning curve before I could really do anything cool in the game.

The point is, this was a situation that required some patience on my part in order to get into the game.  I could have easily said “eh, screw it.  I don’t feel like learning the rules of this game”.  And if I had done that, I would have missed out on Doom, which led to Doom deathmatch, which led to Quake deathmatch, and most recently, Team Fortress 2.  Sure, I could have entered the FPS arena at any of those stages, but no matter what stage I did, it would have required my willingness to have a little patience.
The Internal Conflict

The issue is that many people are like my friend Jarvis in that they are conflicted about what it is they actually want.  They know what games are.  They know that they would have to learn some new rules in order to play a sincerely new game.  They know that “what the game is made out of” doesn’t matter.  They know that all the graphics technology crap is utter bullshit.  Yet, they are so tethered by their upbringing – their brainwashing -  in the world of digital games, that many games just won’t get the chance.

Gamers with this kind of “video game poisoning” will have trouble giving a chance to any game that doesn’t meet the following criteria:

• Is very similar in gameplay to games they’ve already played for thousands of hours (comfort)
• Is displayed on a TV or computer screen (more harsh forms of this would reject anything that isn’t HD)
• Is newer than 1 year old (more harsh forms of this would be 4 or 5 months)
• Costs money to get access to (more harsh form:  costs $60)
  

These are the attributes that we were told to value as little kids, and it has stuck with us ever since, even as fully grown intellectual adults.

At the end of the day, I think we have to ask ourselves “what do I really want from games?”  Do you want games that are like the games you already played?  Do you want minor tweaks on old games?  I think that all gamers, whether they know it or not, are looking for new experiences;  new game-spaces to explore.  We want a game that will capture and open our imagination and make our brains work in a new way.  Many of us are smart enough to realize that this is, in fact, what we want.  More of us need to realize that the aforementioned video-game poisoning is holding us back from this.

Life is short – don’t settle for the same old stuff.  Take chances on something new.  Have a little patience, and you will be rewarded.  If you don’t, you could miss out on what could be your next Doom!  At this point, we’ve gotten so used to clones upon clones upon clones in video games, that the idea of something that’s really, seriously new can just paralyze us with fear.

Now get your ass over to this page and learn how to play go.

This is another great example of how bad we are, in the digital-game world, at talking about games.

Often times I’ll get into a discussion about a particular game.  I’ll mention that I consider one weakness of the game to be that something – some feature – is over-powered.  And in return, I hear the same response over and over again:

“Well, just don’t use it, then.”

Okay, sure.  I can just not use that over-powered thing.  But then what I have done is I’ve created a new rule.  A pretty significant new rule, too – I’ve chosen to effectively remove the most powerful thing in the game.  If a game is a set of rules, and you change what that rule-set is, then what you really end up with is another game.  Sure, it has the same assets and probably plays mostly the same – but it is a different game.

This means you cannot use this argument to defend your favorite games.  I am saying, “I don’t like this ruleset called Super Pigeon Blaster 5000“, and you are saying “then change the ruleset”.  Sure, I can change the ruleset, but then it will no longer be Super Pigeon Blaster 5000 anymore.

Whether through “mods”, “house rules”, or “variants” – whenever you are changing the rules of the game, you are changing what the game is.  Anything can be modified into a good game – you can “mod” a roll of toilet paper into a good game.  That doesn’t mean that a roll of toilet paper is a good game.

Games are about finding the optimal move

Games are systems which allow us to practice mastery.  The best games allow you to seek mastery for a lifetime, but never find it.  You cannot ask players to seek “a little bit mastery”.  You cannot tell them, “do good, but not… too good”, like Dash at the end of the film The Incredibles.  All you can do is what I described above:  set new rules which now draw the new line for what mastery is.  But again, once you do that, you’ve changed the game.

Below are a few examples of some games and various forms of this argument:

• Skyrim:  “If you think using quicksave is too powerful, then don’t use it.”  (Granted that this is a problem with almost every single player game, but that’s not an excuse.  It’s still the most over-powered weapon ever wielded.)
• Counter-Strike:  “Yeah, the AWP is too powerful, but just play on ‘no-AWP’ servers”.
• Super Mario World:  “If you think using the cape to fly over entire levels is too powerful, then don’t get the feather / use its power”.

Somewhere, down there, is a platformer level

The main thing I want everyone to take from this article is that none of the above are defenses for these games.  If I say “Counter Strike is good except I deduct some points for the overpowered AWP”, it is not a counter-argument to tell me to not use the AWP.  That’s what’s really funny about this “defense”, is that when you give it, you are actually agreeing with me.  You are saying yes, the game does indeed have that flaw, and suggesting that I play, again, a different game.

It’s also worth mentioning that most of the time, when you just rip one rule out of a game without changing anything else, it causes problems.  Skyrim (and almost any RPG) is designed with save-scumming in mind.  If you don’t use it, not only are you not playing the same game as was designed by Bethesda, but it actually may be a completely broken experience.  A game ruleset is like a machine.  If you just rip one cog out, the whole thing will likely break down.

Finally, I leave you with this question:  if we’re charging players with the responsibility of balancing our games, then why do we even bother trying to balance games at all?  If anything’s too powerful, we can simply trust that players will house-rule it out, right?  Obviously, this is not what I believe, and I hope that other game designers are not thinking this way.  Designers need to take pride in your work and trust that you have the ability to create a ruleset that couldn’t easily be improved by some random dude who happens to be paying for server fees.