Ghost Razor

Aside from my Achievement addiction, I have a profound love of Magic: The Gathering.  Over the years I have abandoned the game, stayed away for several years, and then come back to it, each time harder than before.  The last time I seriously got into playing Magic was during the Odyssey block, back in 2001.  I played reasonably seriously, going to tournaments occasionally and spending hundreds of dollars on pieces of cardboard.  Just before I began University, I gave up the game, and I haven’t played it since.  Most of my friends at the time sold their collections and bailed out for good, perhaps keeping a couple of really well built decks for posterity.

Last week, a bunch of us got together and decided to do a booster draft - a game where everyone buys three $4.00 packs of 15 cards, and the cards are cycled around in a systematic way so that it’s possible to build a functional (although not very good) deck with a small investment, and play using only those cards.  This has had much the same effect as a bunch of coke addicts deciding to do a line for old time’s sake.  The game is so addictive that with that one brief exposure, most of us are considering getting back into the game, and building real decks once again.

Scott Lynch, in his extremely excellent The Lies of Locke Lamora describes a scene he calls The Shifting Revel.  In order to defray tempers and choke off any uprising before it can gain traction, the Duke of Camor underwrites a giant festival which takes place at regular intervals in the local bay.  It’s called the shifting revel because the festival takes place in the form of hundreds of boats - those of the attendees and local merchants - who lash themselves together in the bay.  The attendance changes from revel to revel, as does the specifics of the entertainment - but there are always keystone features which remain the same and give the revel a grounding.

Magic is a Shifting Revel, and I think this is one of the reasons it’s both so addictive, and that it’s remained so popular over the years when nearly every other collectible card game has sputtered and failed.  There is no specific strategy in Magic that is predominant - there are several major strategies, none of which is better than any other in general.  The game is simple enough that the basics can be grasped in ten minutes, but complex enough that the building of a good deck requires knowledge of statistics.  There are endless combinations of cards that can put together to make a deck, and no two players will use even the same deck in exactly the same way.  The game is very well balanced, but this isn’t what makes it a shifting revel.

Most people who play magic at the tournament level play with what is referred to as “Standard Edition” rules.  Essentially standard play limits the cards you’re allowed to use to the two most recently released blocks of cards, each block containing three sets.  New sets are introduced every roughly 2 to 3 months.  The effect this has on gameplay is profound.  With any given set of cards, in a matter of weeks, tournament play solidifies around several ‘types’ of decks, based around the cards that are legal in the last two blocks.  Each type of deck will revolve around a particular strategy for winning and involve several major strategic cards from these blocks.

The trick is that every time a new block is begun, an old block of cards will no longer be legal in standard tournaments.   This typically has the effect of crippling all deck ‘types’ that are currently used in tournaments - and the scene shifts.  New deck types emerge as players explore the possible combinations of cards from what is left, along with the new cards being slowly filtered in every two months as the new sets emerge - in fact, as each of the new sets in the block emerge, new possibilities emerge as well.  These possibilities are not as severe as the shakeup when a block rotates out of use, but are enough that a fury of new deck styles must be explored.

The business potential of this strategy is huge.  Games are fundamentally about exploring a possibility space, and when that space has been explored to its limit, the game ceases to be interesting.  In Magic this possibility space is expanded at a rate that gives people time to master the space, but not long enough that it becomes uninteresting, and then is grown.  On a yearly basis (or so) the entire space is turned upside down, things you used to know no longer apply, and there are new details to take into account.  This is a shifting revel, and it allows the old to become new again, and again and again.

This is much to the profit of Wizards of the Coast, who have managed to create a game so popular that many pieces of cardboard sell for 500% of the price of a booster pack in the secondary market - some particularly useful cards can go for many times that.  That’s a lot of money for a card that won’t be legal in standard play two years from now.  The thing I find particularly interesting about this is that it hasn’t been done in online play (other than in the online version of MTG of course) for any other game that I know of.

Digital Distribution systems provide a very smooth way of rolling this out.  Any game that contained the addictive hooks of MTG and based around shifting revel - potentially fueled by micro-transactions - that rotated on appropriate basis in line with the exploration curve of the possibility space…  Well my friend, that would a license to print money.  Systems like Xbox Live provide even further hooks such as Achievements (Imagine getting badges for beating someone using only direct damage, by milling their library to depletion, by using only creatures, for using a particular combination of cards, etc.), and if it was done well, might even outstrip the fanfare that Wizards of the Coast has been raking in for nearly the past two decades.  This would allow for a game that is not only highly addictive, but extremely interesting ludologically as well.  In any given year, MTG is recognizable enough as MTG - there are certain rules that never change - but the dynamics of the gameplay are totally different, if you’re willing to pay the price to keep up.  There are very few games that evolve so organically over such a long period of time, and I think it’s time we had another one.

Tags: Design, Developers, Game Ideas by Morphix
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From a critical standpoint, Metacritic is about objective as things are likely to get. My own research uses Metacritic, and most of the industry looks to it for the “official” critical score. Steam embeds the Metacritic score right in the interface, and Microsoft announced yesterday that a low Metascore will be one of the trigger points for having your game de-listed from XBLA.

That said, the critical score isn’t the be-all and end-all of life. Gamasutra ran an opinion piece by former Eidos president Keith Boesky to that effect earlier today. Boesky’s main point is that critical success is not indicative of commercial success. It becomes intrinsically dangerous to pivot your entire business model on the critical reviews of your products.

If you look at a publisher like EA, they produce games that are commercially viable, even lucrative, but consistently receive mediocre reviews from critics. EA has published only three of the top 20 games on the 360, and is the developer on none of them. Additionally, of the hundreds of games EA has published since the release of the Xbox 360, only a handful have a Metacritic score above 80 for that system. EA’s new CEO, John Riccitiello has taken this to heart, having several times publicly stated that EA will be concentrating their efforts on producing newer, higher critical quality games than have been seen in recent years. That said, Riccitiello has also been quoted as saying that “You don’t cash MetaCritic, you cash cheques.”

There’s certainly a balance to be struck between the realities of business, and trying to create a game that tickles the critics. At the end of the day, I think that all of this concern is smoke and mirrors for the developer. All a developer can really do is try to create an amazing experience, to push the envelope of what’s possible with a technology, and to manipulate a player in new and interesting ways. If you can work your craft well enough, and on a scale that will appeal to a broad enough group of people, both the critical acclaim and commercial success will come. Understanding how to do that is where the mastery comes into play.

Tags: Design, Industry by Morphix
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In my self-imposed hermitdom, I’ve been playing a lot of Browser Games as a change of pace and essentially as a time-eater.  In particular the titles I’ve paid most attention to are Ikariam, Travian, and more recently Wild Guns.  Ikariam and Travian are conceptually what you would get if you made a casual version of Civilization, built it as a browser game, and made it a lot shittier.  Wild Guns is made by the same company as Ikariam, and it looks like they saw Travian, stole the gameplay and business models, and put a wild west theme on it.

A number of years ago I spent a lot of time playing browser games like Archmage, and while the production quality seems to have increased somewhat, the game play is not significantly better.

Gameplay works like this:  Resources exist, and they are given to you as a function of infrastructure you have built over long swaths of time (like, hours).  The purpose of this is to make you log on every day or several times a day, over weeks and weeks to maintain your kingdom.  You use these resources to build further infrastructure, which in turn either generates more resources, or allows you to build a stronger military.  You are then encouraged to attack other players using this military.

For me, this is where the game starts to fall apart.  As there is essentially an indomitable amount of players in the game, you can’t hope to destroy them all.  The only reward for attacking others is further resources, but the amount of resources you raid are almost certainly less than the resources it took to create the military you lost during the raid.  There is no endgame, only an endless series of skirmishes, which are in themselves, unsatisfying.

Archmage happens to be an exception, in that if you manage to survive long enough, and become powerful enough, you can cast a spell which destroys the world, thus ending the game until the server is reset.  You gain a certain amount of recognition for doing this.  Nevertheless, any task that requires occasional maintenance has potential for addiction (see Tamagotchi), and I remain a willing slave, to a certain extent, until I finish the tech tree and will the inevitably get bored.

What irritates me more than the lack of solid javascript-based strategy games (Facebook is full of inane stunts in this manner) is the business model these games operate under.  The business model itself serves no purpose other than to undermine the very foundations of the game they’ve delivered, however sloppily.

Ikariam, Travian, and Wild Guns all use the same principles:  The game is free to play, nothing is restricted, and no ads are served.  However, there are premium services you can buy for a micro-payment.  The first form of these is an increase in the rate at which you generate resources.  Essentially you can pay the company to gain a direct competitive edge.  The reason this is horrendous is because it complete destroys game balance by giving players that are willing to pay a substantial advantage over those who are not willing to pay.  You then have the choice to shell out a few dollars for more resources per hour (but only for a week, after which point you need to pay again!), or you can get slaughtered by those who will.  From a design standpoint, this is exceptionally poor.

Even worse than this however, is the “Premium Account” bonus.  If you give these companies an amount of money which is roughly equivelant to bumping up the production of every resource in the game, they give you access to a better user interface.  They have developed a user interface which is better than the default one:  it provides you with a build queue so that you don’t need to log in every time something finishes building to start the next build, gives you more detailed information about combat, a better layout with details about when your stockpiles will be full, what time you’ll be able to build something at current rates of production, etc.  The company has built these things, but they withhold them from you unless you pay them.  Even if you pay them, you only get them for a week, and then you have to pay them again.  Jon Crowley was appalled, so you know it’s a bad move.

Three Rings has a much better handle on it (although I suppose their games aren’t strictly in-browser).  In Puzzle Pirates, for example, payment confers the ability to captain a ship, as well as earn vanity items (e.g. clothing, furniture, etc.).  This allows the hardcore to be hardcore without upsetting the balance for the non-paying crowd.  In any case, any casual browser game needs to support itself on a small percentage of their entire user base actually paying money to play.  GameForge AG nearly went bankrupt last year, Puzzle Pirates has 3 million pirate accounts.  You tell me which business model is working better.

Tags: Design, Indie, Online by Morphix
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Chris Jones and Aaron Conners?

Backup.  Today’s Zero Punctuation regarding Zack and Wiki features references to several old adventure games (Yahtzee himself being a designer of some very emotive ones).  Among these are two piece of box art that are probably unfamiliar to most people:  Under a Killing Moon and The Pandora Directive.

These two games are are the 3rd and 4th installments in what is generally referred to as the Tex Murphy adventure series.  You play a cynical middle-aged Private Investigator set in post WW3 San Francisco.  The first two games (Mean Streets and Martian Memorandum) are controlled in a reasonably standard side view that we have come to expect of adventure games, with the addition of a flight simulator-esque interface to travel from place to place.  Mean Streets in fact was originally designed as a flight simulator with some adventure elements added in, although the reverse ended up being the result.

The three latter games (Under a Killing Moon, The Pandora Directive, and Overseer) all use live character actors, and most of the game takes place in a first person view of a mostly photo-realistic environment which is accomplished by projecting photographs onto 2D meshes.  These adventure games were hilariously funny, intuitive, and kept you playing until the very end.  The interface was extremely ambitious for the time (Moon came on 4 CDs in 1994, Pandora came on 6, and Overseer on 5 plus an alternate version on DVD, the first game I ever saw do this).  Nevertheless, the game suffered from a variety of mostly technical issues, and were being made during the twilight of adventure game popularity.  Sales were, one can assume, not exemplary.

A year after Overseer was released, the Utah based Studio - Access Software - was acquired by, wouldn’t you know it, my company, Microsoft!  Microsoft was, I assume, primarily interested in Access software’s more lucrative property in Links Golf, because the Tex Murphy series was never heard from again.  This is particularly unfortunate because Overseer ends in a cliff-hanger.  In 2004 Microsoft sold Access Software, now known as Indie Built, to Take Two Interactive, and it became part of the 2K Sports brand, again emphasizing the golf label over the now defunct Tex Murphy series.  Indie Built created a snowboarding game for the launch of the 360, and was then closed by Take Two in 2006, with no public reasons given for the closure.

Chris Jones and Aaron Conners were the designer and writer, respectively, for this phenomenal series, with Jones playing the titular Tex Murphy.  Aaron Conners also made novel versions of Under a Killing Moon and Pandora Directive, which are pretty good for pulp fiction.

Both Chris and Aaron moved with the acquisition to Microsoft to work on projects there, primarily on the Links series and the Amped snowboarding series.  Aaron seems to have moved to 2K Sports following the second sale, and worked under the 2K label until Indie Built was closed.  He has subsequently left the software industry entirely, and has started a contracting company called WordPlay LLC.

Chris on the other hand appears to have left around the same time Indie Built was sold to Take Two, becoming a partner in an new company called TRUGOLF that makes life-sized golf simulators for what I can only assume to be the “I have a vacation house in the Hampton’s” crowd (One can assume that Chris Jones really, really likes Golf).  Both he and Conners still live in Salt Lake City, Utah.
So what’s to become of Tex? Well, Tex has a sizable following over at James LeMosy’s Unofficial Tex Murphy Site.  Last month Aaron Conners left a note on the forums saying that he and Chris have a new game they’d like to make, and are actively searching for a publisher.  If that goes well, they’ll try to use it as a shoe-horn to make the final chapter of the Tex Murphy series, in some capacity.  The story is finished, apparently, and waiting to be told.  It’s been 10 years since we last heard from Tex Murphy, hopefully it won’t be another 10 before he finishes his tale.

If you’ve been negligent, you should try to get your hands on a copy of Under a Killing Moon and The Pandora Directive.  If you copy the contents of the CDs into folders on your hard-drive, you can get DosBox to mount them as separate CD-ROMs, and you can avoid the interruptions you would have encountered at the time of having to switch CDs constantly because the games natively support putting each CD in it’s own CD drive (if you for some reason had 4 CD-ROMs in your PC in 1994).  There’s a lot to learn - both good and bad - in terms of game design from these games, and the writing is extremely rich in both.  I would highly recommend the investiture.

Tags: Design, Developers, Industry by Morphix
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I’ve recently introduced my girlfriend to a little game called Civilization 4. Having sunk countless hours into both it and its predeccesors over the years, I’d put the game down in favor of more recent fare. While the game is not really new, I’ve been thinking more about design than I was when I first picked it up, so I thought I’d walk through some of the thoughts I’ve had in the last couple of weeks.

Civ4 has what you might consider to be a rather steep learning curve. There are a lot of concepts to grasp: How combat works, the rules governing production, finances, research, health, and culture, trading, exploration, terrain effects, religion, corporations, great people, resources; The list continues on and on. This list of concepts adds a significant level of complexity to the game.

Sid Meier once defined fun as ‘a series of interesting choices’, and that’s reflected greatly in his most famous series of games.  While the strategic complexity of Civilization 4 is high, the game is broken down piecemeal into a series of reasonably intuitive choices.  When your turn begins, the game will cycle through all the cities that need attention because whatever they were building has completed, and it will ask you what the city should build next (while recommending some of the best choices for that particular city’s current conditions).  Once that’s done with, the game cycles through all the units you control that are awaiting orders, the scope of which are reasonably straightforward, move to a different location, or perform an action, or even simply ‘automate my activity’.  If you’ve finished researching a new technology, the game will ask you what technology you want to work on next, or show you the tree that demonstrates what the impacts of each choice will be.

This series of simple, but interesting decisions form an emergent gameplay which is highly sophisticated.  When you add in the dynamics of interacting with other players, the result is a highly entertaining game.  This is why the Civilization series is a GOOD game, but not why it is addictive.  Those roots lie in a fundamental result of these simple choices.

Anyone who’s played a Civ game is certainly aware of the “One More Turn” phenomena.   These games are impossible to put down.  There’s no clock in the game, because time is piecemeal, so by the time you manage to exert some form of self-control, you look up from your computer, bleary-eyed, and find that it’s now 3:45am and you’ve just been game-locked for the past 6 hours.  I loved Bioshock and Portal, but they don’t give me the itch the way Civilization does, because those games don’t have a pound of pure psychological crack built into their framework.

The key to the addiction in Civ is I believe delayed gratification.  As I’ve discussed before, addiction comes from giving the player food-pellets (which are rewards of some kind) at frequent, but not regular, intervals.  There is something about the irregularity of the pellet reception that triggers certain psychological mechanisms that rhythmic reward does not.  In Civ there are several types of rewards going on, and there are a myriad of factors that go into the determination of the time between requesting the reward (beginning the production process) and the reception of said reward.

Because you have several cities, each producing something to bequeathed at a later time all at once, your subconscious brain is not able to grasp a pattern behind the frequency of reward, even though you can clearly see how many turns it will be until you get a pellet.  This is compounded by the fact that you have a lot of things to do each turn, so there is a significant amount of time that occurs (usually minutes) between movements of the clock forward.  The amount of real-time that occurs between turns is not consistent however, which again adds to the irregularity of the pattern.

Every time something completes, you can literally feel a small jolt of excitement, at which point, like a drug addict who’s becoming resistant to his favorite hit, you immediately request your next jolt, but you’ve got to wait for it.  Not too long mind you, just a few turns, but with so many of these activities going on at once, you’re going to get another hit in just one more turn, until it’s 3:45am and your cat is yelling at you to get out of his chair so he can go to bed.

Tags: Design by Morphix
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Destructoid has a good article up about the problems those of us who are colorblind or color-impaired (like me!) have with videogames. To discuss this a little further, approximately 10% of the male population suffers from some degree of color impairment. The article’s author seems to be significantly more colorblind than I am, as he can’t tell the difference between the red and green on Big Daddies in Bioshock. Neither of us, however, can see the boat in this picture (I’m told there’s a boat here).

I’ve never found my colorblindness to be so significant that it ever impaired my ability to play videogames, but I’m certainly on the less severe end of the scale.

There have been noises in the industry about taking accessibility into consideration when designing a game, which I think is terrific, although of course there are always trade-offs in doing so. In the realm of color-blindness however, the solution to this problem is nearly always to never use color as the sole indicator of anything in the game. This is not only often reasonably easy to do, it’s also sound design practice to aid those who are not color-impaired as well. It’s nice to see that Peggle has gone to the trouble to design an entire mode around the colorblind, but it would have been reasonably simple to simply add symbols into the design of the blocks in the first place.

Tags: Design by Morphix
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As previously mentioned, I went on vacation last week, and apparently the world does not stop while I’m laying on the beach.

Big news of the last week.  Apparently it was GDC or something.  I wasn’t there, so if you want juicy GDC goodness, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

Microsoft

• Microsoft, in a new initiative called Dreamspark is making much of its developer software free to students.  This software includes Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server, XNA Game Studio, XNA Creator’s Club Subscription, and Expression Studio.  That should be plenty of tools for would be game developers to muck about in.  Details are here.
• Microsoft is dropping support for HD-DVD with the discontinuation of the add-on for the Xbox 360.  All remaining units are being cleared at firesale for $50.  I would not be surprised if there was a Blu-ray add-on in the future.
• Microsoft announced during the GDC 2008 Keynote a new service, the so-called Xbox Live Community Games.  Under this service, users can build a game using XNA Game Studio, and then upload it directly to a community portal where the game is democratically reviewed.  The reviewing process is intended to look for infringing or objectionable material.  The best of these games get automatically uploaded to Xbox Live for the masses to enjoy.  No specifics on pricing, or if the developer is getting kickbacks (as one would assume they would if Microsoft is collecting on their work).

Sony
On the Sony side of things, Phil Harrison, one of the founding members of Sony Computer Entertainment, and the president of SCE Worldwide Studios, has submitted his resignation.  Changes in leadership often come with widespread changes across the board, but it depends on the size and momentum of the company in question, and Sony is rather largeish, so I would not anticipate a massive change in the direction of their games.

Australia

Australia is talking about finally getting a new rating that will allow more mature titles to be sold there.  Unfortunately, I doubt this will alleviate the massive delays they usually incur before North American/Japanese release, and release to the land down under.

Electronic Arts

EA is offering to buy Take Two!  I would suggest in reaction to the recent Activision/Vivendi merger, EA is looking to add some more meat to its already colossal frame.  EA’s new CEO John Riccitiello has mentioned that he’s extremely unhappy with the scores EA’s games have been getting of late, so there might be some incentive to own some games that are critically acclaimed (which might have fueled the recent acquisition of Bioware as well).  Take Two is brimming with talent, including the developers of the Grand Theft Auto series (Rockstar), Bioshock (2K Games), and Civilization (Firaxis).  While EA’s initial bid is a bit lower than Take Two is looking for, most analysts are expecting this deal to go through eventually at some price point.

On a side note, Take Two is the current owner of one of my favorite IPs of all time, the Tex Murphy series.  This series was created by Access Software (later renamed to Indie Built) in the 90s.  Microsoft acquired them for the Links Golf series, and then sold the company to Take-Two who then shut it down.  While a revival is not likely at EA, it’s marginally more likely than at the parent who shut them down in the first place.

EA has a habit of killing great teams by using simple business math.  If you have everyone using the same tools and processes, costs are lower.  Unfortunately, this slows down and breaks the dynamic that produced the great team in the first place.  This is something you can do with teams that are having trouble realizing their full potential, perhaps due to infrastructural problems, but when you acquire a really solid team, it’s important that you just leave them alone to do their thing.  Riccitiello seems to be aware of this, so perhaps Take Two’s properties are not going to join the legacies of Westwood, Bullfrog, and Origin.

Havok

Havok is free, to which I say, OMGWTFBBQ.  Well, okay, it’s only free on the PC, but as of May 2008, you at home will be able to download your very own copy of Havok Complete (which includes the Physics and Animation packages).  This is a non-commercial license, but it allows hobbyists to get their hands dirty with the most widely used physics engine in the PC gaming space, which is good for companies looking to hire people who know Havok already.  This theoretically lays some groundwork for Havok’s more specialized products for behavioral animation, deformable solids, and cloth rendering.

And that’s all that happened this week, I’ll be posting on a more semi-regular basis now.

Tags: Conferences, Design, Developers, Industry, Platform, Publishing, Releases by Morphix
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Summer 2008. Want.

If LucasArts is telling me that this is what a talented team can create when several highly specialized engines are integrated, then I will tell you that you’re looking at the future of development. Despite my earlier criticism of Assassin’s Creed, they had a similar philosophy in that the gameplay should be inherently fun. Assassin’s Creed did that in spades, the problem was that they beat the same mechanics until they lay raw and bloodied on the floor, and I lost interest in doing the same tasks over and over again. Hopefully The Force Unleashed will do a better job of wrapping more into the game than throwing people around like dolls. If they do, this game will set a new bar for action developers.

A natural consequence of this is that engine developers will begin to create standard interfaces to which they will conform. This will enhance the interoperability of these engines, and make it far less expensive and difficult to get the effects you’re seeing in the video below.

Tags: Artwork, Design, Programming, Releases by Morphix
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During the holidays I got involved in a little game called Rock Band with some of my buddies. I’m not usually one for rhythm games, but I thought I’d see what the fuss was about.

Six and a half hours later, I have blisters on my index finger from the drum sticks and my eyeballs are so bloodshot I can barely see straight. This process was repeated on nearly a nightly basis until it was time to return for one last round of schooling. My buddies are eagerly awaiting my schedule to lighten up a bit so that I can come home for a weekend and jam with them some more.

There’s something really energizing about playing a game that makes you feel like a rock star, and I would say that Rock Band is a genuinely excellent title. Part of what makes it an excellent title though, is that it’s HARD.

Unlike most difficult games, Rock Band evens out the playing field off the bat. It doesn’t matter how good a gamer you are, playing the drums or strumming on the guitar is a totally different experience than mashing on a controller. This means that my friends who might occasionally look at a video game once every couple of months are no worse off than I who live on my computer. If the game was easy, I suspect it would be a lot less fun. Part of what makes it entertaining is the challenge of rocking out a really difficult song.

So here’s the trick. If the game isn’t going to be fun without a really steep learning curve, how do you prevent people from just giving up? The curve is easy enough at first that someone who never plays video games can play the first few songs on easy without getting frustrated, but things get difficult quickly. I would suggest that Rock Band has implemented just such a system, I’m not even sure if they did it intentionally, but that system is one of scheduled rewards.

As previously discussed, scheduled rewards are any system of ‘fake’ or pointless gifts to the player that don’t actually improve the quality of their gaming experience, but act upon psychological hooks to keep the player captivated. Examples in Rock Band would be points, stars, money, fans, and unlockable clothing and instruments. Much of the multiplayer world tour experience involves playing songs well enough to earn ‘fans’. Earning enough fans will allow you to play for special items (such as a tour bus, roadies, a PR team, etc.). These special items serve no purpose other than opening new venues where you can play to earn more fans. The system is essentially purposeless, much like grinding an RPG, each incremental improvement simply allows you to do more of the same.

The difference in Rock Band is that the playing of instruments and singing is arguably a skill. The only way to improve at the skill is to continue playing progressively more difficult songs. By using a horde of scheduled rewards, Rock Band addicts players into sticking with it, ‘just to unlock the next venue’, or ‘just for one more set’. This addicting property offsets the disadvantages of having a steep learning curve - namely that players will become frustrated and give up.  While scheduled rewards do have the rather banal benefit of creating games that are often profitable, if not innovative, this would give them a genuine purpose in the design arsenal - as a counterweight for steep difficulty.

Tags: Design by Morphix
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This is a multi-part post.  Jump to:

Part 1

In a previous post, I discussed a lecture recently given at Microsoft by famed Game Designer, Will Wright. The topic of this lecture was Emergence and Game Design. The first part of this post discussed what emergence is, how it relates to Game Design, and the problems it solves. It also discussed some of the problems it creates, specifically that it’s impossible to predict a priori whether a game will be interesting based on the basic mechanics which form it. It would be useful, nonetheless, to be able to discern particular areas of mechanics which tend to work well together to compose a whole game. That toolkit is the subject of this post.

Will’s toolkit draw many parallels to the concept of game grammar, advocated by such industry tycoons as Raph Koster. There are three independent groups which any given game rule-set will derive from. These sets, called Topologies, Dynamics, and Paradigms roughly correspond to the linguistic concepts of nouns, verbs, and grammar rules. Each of these groups is further broken down into specific techniques. Any game system will draw on a mix of techniques from all three systems, but there is no express order in which the groups must be explored.

Topologies

The first of these, Topologies, is the noun analog. Topologies represent the framework upon which the rules act, and create structure for the game environment. Interestingly, Will considers game communities to be part of topologies. A good example is the advancement progression in most games. Some games have a very linear progression, as you advance through levels and are led from one place to the next (e.g. Gears of War). Others are gated - the possibility space branches outward after each gate, only to collapse to a single node at the next (e.g. Mass Effect).

There are three outlined techniques within Topologies, from most rigid to most flexible: Agents, Networks, and Layers. Agents represent particular objects and beings which perform actions, or have actions performed upon them. In Sim City, individual buildings would be considered agents. Nearly all games make use of agents in some form.

The second, networks, represents the framework that defines interactions between agents. These linkages may be spacial (Buildings can be connected by roads), temporal (an action by one agent causes an event in another), functional (companion cubes can be placed on buttons), or relational (forests and gold mines are resource providers).

The last topology, Layers, is a technique whereby several layers of agent-network graphs can be laid upon each other to create a different facet of the same game. Battle for Middle Earth’s War of the Ring mode is a good example of this, as one game is placed on top of another game, and the outcomes of each affect the other. Different views on information (such as seeing the amount of crime in your city), or statically linked layers of graphs (In Sim City, electrical system, water system and road system) would fall under this as well.

Topologies are the most straightforward of the three concepts, and a similar concept is covered in nearly all books on game design. The next concept, dynamics, brings these simple structures to life. Dynamics will be covered in part 3.

Tags: Design, Developers by Morphix
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