Category: Game Design

Danc at Lost Garden posted Creating a system of game play notation, which attempts to create a notation to document the game play of any game. Lost Garden has had previous posts that strongly emphasize the importance of regularly occurring rewards for the player’s actions. The description of the notation seems to be geared towards such designs.

It starts with a history of musical notation. Once it was possible to record music on paper with accuracy, it was easier to communicate the music to others. Also, it was easier to identify and fix bad compositions. You could analyze a composition on paper rather than require the music to be played over and over again. It also allowed more complex and sophisticated music to be created. I think it is like the idea that the human brain can only handle so much at once, but if you were to write down your thoughts, you could free up your mind for higher-level thinking.

Danc argues that game design language is currently in the same situation that music was before the invention of the musical staff. The idea of a language for game design isn’t new, and some attempts at providing a vocabulary exist, but I don’t know of anyone who has tried to codify it as extensively as the description at Lost Garden.

I think one of the coolest parts is the application of business information visualization to game design. Danc refers to it as making complex game data “glance-able”. The science behind it is that the human eye can take it huge amounts of data at once. Present someone a paragraph of text, and it might take some time to read and understand. Present that same person with a bar graph, and they can instantly tell you that one bar is bigger than another and by how much.

My favorite quote:

What we do get is the ability to describe a game using well defined terminology. Instead of saying “This is boring”, you can point to a period of 5 second in buzz graph with no rewards and identify the events leading to that situation.

Can we get that precise? It would be amazing if we could; however, some people would argue that game design involves much more art than science. The idea of codifying game design might be similar to “An Introduction to Poetry” from Dead Poets Society: “I give American McGee’s Alice a 42 but I can’t dance to it.” Rather than help with improving game design it would actually result in a bunch of games that look and feel exactly the same.

I personally think that it won’t be the case. For one, without such notation the game industry has already been accused of stagnating. It can’t hurt to form a common language. Once you can identify the chords, you can learn to put them together in different combinations to make your own great music. Once we can speak in a standard way about game design, whether with Danc’s notation or the 400 Project, we can piece the different parts together to make great games.

William Willing came up with a list of some of the basics of game design. He provided a few links to other articles on the various entries and game design in general, and I can’t wait to read what he has to say about learning curves.

Cliffski juxtaposes two theories about the direction new games should be developed.

On the one hand, technology is getting more complex. Everyone uses computers, everyone watches involving television shows, everyone has a cell phone that has more computing power than the first computers did. Why shouldn’t games also become more complex to keep up?

On the other hand, information overload is very real. People don’t understand that “their Microsoft” isn’t broken. There are too many channels to surf. Too many websites to look at. Life has become overwhelming, and games should become a safe haven. Make them simple, and people will enjoy them more. It isn’t fun if it feels like work just trying to get the game to start.

Cliffski leaves it at that, but I guess that’s where we’re expected to come in and talk about it. Diabolical!

Steven Johnson, author of “Everything Bad is Good For You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter” would argue that the Sleeper Curve is at work. Popular entertainment is requiring more and more brains to “get it”. He compares classic shows such as Dragnet with 21 Jump Street, and he demonstrates how today’s shows, even “reality” shows, are just more complex. Dragnet was easy to watch. One event led to another. Everything was sequential. People would say the obvious as an aid to the audience. While watching it today might bring back some sense of nostalgia for some, you’ll quite frankly get frustrated at the simplicity of it. They hit you over the head with plot points and dialogue.

Today, even the “dumbed down” shows have more complexity than the brightest shows of the past. You just need to think more to understand television today.

Similarly, I think, with video games. A child today is able to work with a complex piece of equipment such as an XBox controller as if it was an extension of his/her body. Children look at older games with disgust. They make fun of Pong and Super Mario Bros. My cousin laughs at me for loving Pac-man instead of some new racing game that’s all the rage.

But what about people who don’t play video games? There is a learning curve involved, and for some games, that curve is incredibly steep. Casual games are meant to be simple to play, and it would be easy to say, “Complex games for those who can handle it, and casual for the rest”. But are these people relegated to playing casual games exclusively?

I don’t know how to play poker, but I don’t want to play Go Fish or solitaire all my life either. Won’t military history buffs want to play accurate war games? Games like Uncommon Valor, as great as they might be, might not be appropriate because they are just so darn complex! I bought this game thinking that it would be like Koei’s PTO II, which I had bought for the SNES. It turned out that it was incredibly detailed, and focused on a very specific part of the Pacific Theater of Operations. I tried to play a few turns, but it was hard to tell if I was doing anything important. Oh, to have hours a day to play games again…

So while you can focus on making a game complex to keep up with the Sleeper Curve or making it simple to provide relaxation for the mind, I’d have to argue that some people might not appreciate the idea that you need to “dumb down” games for them. Sure, there are some people who will say, “I don’t want to think!” but other people WANT to be challenged. They don’t want to passively have fun. They want to be involved in the fun!

So I think I won’t be as quick to complain if someone takes an old game and remakes it with “more weapons ” and “better AI” anymore. It seems to be a natural step to take something and add complexity to it. Those kinds of games might not be all succesful (Tetrisphere comes to mind), but I don’t believe there is any law that dooms them all to fail.

But adding complexity doesn’t necessarily mean making it impossible to play. People figured out how to drive cars. Automatics were added to make it easier, but you don’t see labels like “casual driver” being thrown at those who use them. I think you can add complexity and the requisite brain power to play a game while simultaneously providing the player with the means to easily “get it”. You can also do so without upsetting the veteran game player who doesn’t need any hand holding. It’s a balance, and it might be tough to achieve, but hey, that’s what helps a great game appeal to such a wide audience, right?

On the way home last night, I thought, “What if you can make a game that looks and feels buggy, but was purposely made to seem that way? A game that is fun because it seems buggy, but in reality it isn’t?”

It sounds weird. Or at least I think it sounds weird. I don’t know of anyone purposely making a game seem buggy, but if you do I would love to know about it. Software, and video games are no exception, is generally hard to keep bug-free. There is the idea that every program has a bug in it. It’s hard to completely and comprehensively debug a program. But that’s besides the point.

I’m talking about making a game where the “glitches” and “hiccups” are purposely created. You are walking down an alley, and a ninja comes out of nowhere. Except he seems to flicker and splits into two images of the same character. You know, like the Mouser bug in Super Mario Bros 2 (which is apparently not documented on the Interweb?). It was still one guy, and you only had to hit one guy to defeat him, but it had a bug where it move back and forth fairly quickly. Well what if you made the bug funny? Like, the ninja’s split image made faces at you, or looked like a clown?

Or how about that same ninja being able to run through walls? Or if you could run through walls? You know, when you’re temporarily invulnerable because you just got hit. What if it lets you walk through walls? Or what if you jumped at a wall and got stuck on the side of it, allowing you to climb up? I’ve survived pits in the original Super Mario Bros. or Bionic Commando because of bugs that allowed me to stand next to a wall without falling. Wouldn’t it be interesting if they were purposefully placed into a game?

It would make the gameplay interesting because part of the fun is figuring out what weird thing you could do next. What inconsistency would you be able to leverage to progress through the game? Would you be able to use water to put out a fire but find that the water itself burns because, you know, “fire burns everything”? Could you use that? What if you could punch a firepit? Or swim both in the water and in the air? What if you could kill your ally, but your ally comes back for a cut-scene? Original War had a bug similar to this one. Generally people in your army talked, and an image of the person speaking would appear. Once in a great while, the image and/or the voice would not match the person who should be speaking. So what if your ally returned, bloodied and bitter, but due to obligations in the game, HAD to come back to make a speech?

So maybe it isn’t necessarily a “buggy” feel so much as a “this-is-not-the-universe-you-think-it-should-be” kind of game. The point would be that reasonable expectations are thrown out in favor of surprising the player with odd behavior and unexpected reactions. It might be tough to develop such a game. After all, keeping track of real bugs, the difference between actual results and expectated results, would be a chore. But it would also be different enough that it might confuse players more than anything. Who would find it fun? I know I like to explore the boundaries of a game. I once jumped over the flagpole in Super Mario Bros. I’ve fallen off the edge of the screen in Super Mario World while spinning. Side note: are Nintendo games that much more buggy, or is it just me? B-)

NOTE: If you are somehow reading this post without the comments, I would strongly suggest you read them, too. Some good discussion is coming out of this post, and you’ll miss it!

Even while I continue to work on Oracle’s Eye, I am looking forward to working on my next game project. Since OE took so much longer to develop than I expected, I can imagine that something similar will happen with my next project. I’ve also mentioned that I want to create a game for the next Independent Games Festival. I want to make sure that I dedicate enough time to that project, so I might as well get a jump on designing it instead of postponing it.

I’ve set a deadline by the end of December to get a basic idea of what kind of game I want to make. Of course, I’d like to be able to come up with more than just “it’s got spaceships and explosions and stuff!” I’ve realized that game design is a complete discipline in and of itself. You can’t design games just because you’ve played a lot of them when you were younger, just like you can’t be a high school educator simply because you went to high school and “know all about it”. While hacking it out is great for getting things accomplished quickly, it is also hard to know what it is you will end up with by the end. Also, I’d rather avoid potential game design pitfalls if I can help it. While reinventing the wheel is good for learning how it works, I wouldn’t mind reading about how other people might have messed it up before getting it right. I’ll mess up enough as it is. I’m all for taking risks instead of stagnating with what is safe, but I don’t have to ignore potentially helpful experiences that other people have been thoughtful enough to document for me. B-)

And so I decided to look up game design. I went to GameDev.net first and checked out the Game Design articles since I remember going there years ago. HOLY. COW. I don’t remember having access to that many articles on the subject! Maybe I just appreciate how important the topic is these days. Maybe there really has been that many new articles produced in the past couple of years. There are definitely a number of new game design books.

And I definitely have a lot more reading to do.

Roads Gone Wild is an article about making roads safer by removing traffic signals and signs. I found it through Brian Marick’s agile development blog.

Roads have historically been built with the assumption that cars and pedestrians don’t mix. Seems like a sound assumption, right? No one really questioned it. Road signs were used to enforce driving patterns. For example, blinking red lights and stop signs require drivers to stop at an intersection. Also, streets and people were segregated, and so people felt safer walking in certain areas but not in others.

Traffic congestion is the result, but it was assumed that wider roads would alleviate the problem. Studies are showing that this is not the case and will only make matters worse.

There is a new trend to reduce the number of signs on roads. Instead of placing stop signs at intersections, an island can be placed in the center, and the drivers can navigate around it safely. I presume it is because drivers are much more engaged and don’t just space out while driving through. Whatever the case is, the big idea is that the physical features of the street, the architecture, can dictate traffic much better than traffic signals can.

The bonus side effect is that pedestrians and cyclists feel safer near major roadways. Businesses get attracted to these new markets, and now you have transportation mixed with local development. Previously, transportation and storefronts didn’t mix so it required a lot more space and therefore money.

So basically, good architecture influences behavior better than arbitrary rules. The requirement of a road sign can be an admission of the road designer’s failure to make a better road. Stop signs shouldn’t be necessary because a road can be architected to require people to stop in the first place.

It’s a cool idea, and I wonder how it applies to games. I’ve seen games that present a level layout that requires the use of a special item. For instance, in Super Mario World one of the first levels that allows you to collect the feather to give Mario the ability to fly also has a coin bonus area that requires you to fly to collect the coins. There doesn’t need to be a sign or clue. Players see a feather, see a ramp next to the incredibly tall pipe, and figure out that they need to run up the pipe and start flying to collect the coins. Similarly, in Wind Waker, when you get the leaf, it gives you the ability to blast a puff of air. When you see the rotating fans in a dungeon’s room, you know you can use the leaf here. There is no need for a sign or message to let you know what to do.

I think that most games do a good job of making level layouts intuitive, but I know that some games have placed markers or signs to guide the player. In reality, they probably weren’t necessary if the level was designed better. Obviously some markers are necessary for immersion, such as wooden signposts in a fantasy RPG. Others are used as optional tutorials, such as the signs in Super Mario 64. But some might be used to make up for deficiencies in the game itself.

If anything, it should give a game designer some pause if he/she realizes that a marker is getting added to compensate for a bad design. Provide hints to the gamer instead of rules. Cracks in a wall indicate a possible cave to explore. A player should be able to place a bomb or smash through. On the other hand, if the game requires the player to set some “I-know-about-the-hidden-cave” variable before a bomb will be effective or the cracks in the wall visible, that’s just bad and arbitrary.