Carabiners for the Learning Curve

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.

Exclusive: Will Wright on Emergent Game Design (Part 2)

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.

Exclusive: Will Wright on Emergent Game Design (Part 1)

This is a multi-part post.  Jump to:

Part 2

One of the lovely things about working for Microsoft is that really cool people show up from time to time. Last week Microsoft Research brought Will Wright in to talk about Emergence, Dynamics, and Design. Unfortunately the talk is Microsoft internal, so I can’t post the slides or any video clips. I did however obtain Will’s permission to write whatever I like about his talk and to use “head shots” from the video, so without further ado…

There was an article put on Gamasutra a few weeks ago on Design Cognition, and on the concept of bottom-up vs. top-down design cognition. While Gilliard and Rafael are trying to touch on things on the meta-design level - how we think about game design - it’s interesting to note that few are the number of games actually produced in a bottom up manner. While the example of Doom is cognitively bottom up in the sense that the entire game exists as an exhibition for the features, I highly doubt it was actually designed in a bottom-up manner.

In fact, I doubt there are very many games designed in a bottom-up manner, Will Wright really being the only designer that comes to mind who does this on a regular basis. Will’s design philosophy stems greatly from emergence - a concept he claimed to learn primarily from playing Go, playing with cellular automata, and ants. This really struck a chord with me, being something of an Evolutionary Biology fan myself.

The concept behind emergence is that by creating some very simple rules and letting them interact with each other, you can get very complex pheonmena to emerge from this.

Ants are an excellent example of this, and much of the first half of Will’s talk focused on some of the particulars of the way ants behave, and how each individual ant obeys very stupid, simple rules, but these rules cause the colony as a whole to act in an intelligent manner. An example of this Will used was that ant larva need to be fed different things at different stages of their growth. To do this efficiently, they need to be sorted. Sorting is a rather advanced concept, but an emergent sorting algorithm occurs in ant colonies by the following mechanism. At the different stages, larva produce a different smell. When an ant comes upon a larvae, if the smell it emits is different than the surrounding area, the ant will pick the larva up. The ant will then wander around essentially randomly until it comes upon an area that smells the same as that larvae, where it will drop it. This simple rule applied across each individual ant in the colony will result in the larva being sorted into like piles.

This is just one example of an emergent phenomenon of several he gave (and if you’re interested in more, you should certainly read up on the fascinating little creatures). The question then is how does this come into play in game design. If you view a game as a possibility space, the act of playing the game is centered on the exploration of this space. Once the space has been explored to the extent the player is willing to spend their time on, they will burn-out on the game and cease to play. It has been incumbent upon designers over time to enlarge the possibility space as much as possible while retaining a high quality experience. This drive for high quality content has ballooned development budgets and staff requirements by orders of magnitude over the last several years causing relatively little increase in the size of that possibility space, and in many cases a shrinkage. Will views what I’ll refer to as Emergent Design as a method for creating extremely large possibility spaces without a comparable development cost.

The major problem with emergence is that it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to design for with any accuracy. The designer brings to bear several game mechanics and allows them to interact in various ways. For example, in conway’s game of life, there are only four rules:

1. Any cell with less than 2 neighbours alive dies
2. Any cell with more than 3 neighbours alive dies
3. Any living cell with 2 or 3 neighbours stays alive
4. Any dead cell with exactly 3 neighbours comes to life

From just looking at these rulesets, it’s nearly impossible to tell whether this game will be fun, what the emergent strategies or phenomena will be, or anything else about it. It behooves us to find a mechanism to determine this. In nature, successful genes are those that are able to maintain their existence in a competitive environment. There are no rules that apply to genetics to determine fitness, no fitness function. The only way to determine fitness in life is by allowing it to occur.

The hard part then becomes what the best way is to go about doing this. Upon asking him about this, Will said there were two key components: Smart Interns, and creating many prototypes. The interns create and playtest many, many prototypes in the possibility space of the games they could make. When making Spore, approximately 200 prototypes were made, 60% of which were complete garbage.

Even if it’s not possible to determine the end result in an emergent system, throwing darts at the wall randomly is not an incredibly efficient system. In his many years of experience, Will has noticed certain patterns that he’s adapted into a toolkit to refine the ’search space’ of possible games he wants to make, thus making the likelihood of any given prototype revealing fun gameplay more likely. I’ll share some of these insights in part two.

Nothing is true, everything is permitted

I finished playing Assassin’s Creed last night at about 4 am, and I feel decidedly lukewarm about the whole thing.

Marketing

I’ve been waiting for this game for what seems like forever. From the first moment I saw the game, I thought to myself that this was going to be a game that was truely groundbreaking. Taking the lessons Ubisoft learned with Splinter Cell and spinning them off into some wild combination of Hitman and Prince of Persia. You know the feeling you get when you see a commercial for a comedy, and it’s really funny, but when you go to watch the movie, you find out that every single funny moment in the movie was in the commercial, thus making the movie not only rarely good to begin with, but now even those moments are ruined for you?

Ubisoft could have done that, but they didn’t. Superb marketing, Grape job. Big A+ Sticker

Parkour

The whole Parkour thing is awesome. The sandbox thing was very appropriate for this game and the sheer ability to climb up nearly everything was done in an exemplary fashion. Unlike say, Spiderman, who can climb up pretty much any surface, Altair needs handholds - but can make handholds out of pretty much anything. What this means is that when he’s climbing, he’s climbing the way a real human climbs. The walls aren’t just a big sheet of chain-link fence that game be translated across. I can’t imagine how much time they must of spent on this, but it’s really, really awesome, and I don’t think I’m going to be able to deal with stealth games that don’t allow you to do this ever again. The freerunning is also awesome, and it’s a lot of fun to try to lose guards chasing you by doing your thing. The weird part about this is that it doesn’t seem to just be your thing… guards in full armor are almost as manuverable as you are. This kind of takes the wind out of my sails as a bad-ass assassin, but cool nonetheless. The major complaint I would have with the freerunning is the controls. When you’re trying to jump towards a pole, if the direction you’re aiming with an analog stick is more than about 5 degrees off, Altair decides that what you really wanted to do was jump four stories down to the ground. The section of the game in the docks is especially annoying due to this problem, as instead of nearly killing yourself from a four storey drop, you land in the water 2 feet below you and drown. What kind of asshole can scale massive buildings, is a Parkour master, and can’t fucking swim?

Social Stealth

I was really excited about this idea. The idea that you’re hidden when you’re doing things that are socially acceptable is really neat, I just would have liked to see it explored more. There are exactly four ways to hide from the guards - You can hide in these weird little huts that are on the roof and stand out like an eyesore (how do the guards not poke their head in?). You can hide in a pile of hay. You can sit down on a bench and blend in with other people, or you can fall in with some wander scholars. Now, I would note that only two of the above are actually social stealth conditions. The other two are real, I’m hiding somewhere you can’t see me conditions. Scholars appear so rarely and benches hard to pick out that I almost always ended up in a pile of hay or the hut anyway. To make any significant distance (because the cities are massive, you have to freerun like a mofo. While people comment about this, it doesn’t seem to actually bother anyone - other than the guards I inevitably end up throwing off the roof. You’re either sword out in the streets, or just walking along doing nothing in particular. I suppose when Ubisoft said they were doing this big social stealth thing I expected it to be a little more elaborate.

Fighting and AI

Some of the reviews for this game make complaints about the AI. If that’s your opinion… wow, you’re retarded. In my view, the AI is very REALISTIC, which is kind of the whole point of AI in the first place. Yeah, the guards on the roofs don’t immediately kill you for being on the roof. You know those ladders that are everywhere, that would indicate to me that theoretically citizens can get up here too. Ever been in a building at night when you’re not supposed to be there? Does the security guard draw and open fire the second he sees you?

Let’s look at some examples of good AI. Contrary to what you might think, climbing up the side of a building onto a rooftop rarely buys you an escape right away from the guards. Because they follow you up the side of the building. If it’s too hard for them, they’ve usually found another route anyway, so you’re still not out of the woods. If you get somewhere they really can’t get to, they start throwing rocks at you to knock you down.

The fighting system is awesome. Unlike many games which are a huge festival of hack and slash, Altair fights the way a skilled swordsman should fight when outnumbered. Likewise the enemies don’t swing at you all at once, but look for opportunities to break your guard. The sheer number of animations (all of which are beautiful) are astounding.

Now the problem with this is that it’s way, way too easy. Altair can take a ridiculous number of hits, while each soldier, even the ones who are generally on a similar level to Altair are getting their throats slashed and stomachs impaled. In an earlier preview of the game it was indicated that Altair was not supposed to be a tank who could take lots of damage. These fights are in fact easy enough that it’s generally simpler to kill all the guards after you instead of run and hide from them.

This is a bad design decision. The two main pillars for this game are social stealth and freerunning. The latter is usually a means to break the line of sight with your persuers so you can do the former. Allowing Altair to get into massive brawls in which he sweeps the floor is completely at odds with this model.

Story

I’m not even going to discuss it, other than to say it’s terrific, one of the most intricate and crafted plots seen in a video game yet. My only real gripe is that Altair starts the game as an arrogant jerk, and as he progresses becomes more and more wise and lucid… by killing people?  Nevertheless, they’ve got some cool order-vs-chaos-nothing-is-black-or-white stuff going on, so points for that.

Overall Gameplay

Okay, I’ve sung my praises. I had to make myself finish this game, and I largely did so because Penny-Arcade told me I had to. This game had so much potential, and the things they did right were really innovative and well polished. Unfortunately, the rest of the game is just paste around these mechanics. Here is an outline of how the entire game will go:

1. Get mission from boss, go to appropriate city
2. Find Assassin’s Bureau, go talk to dude in there.
3. Spend the next 45 minutes climbing up to the top of the 12 or so towers in area, some of which seem to be replicas of each other
4. Spend the next 45 minutes doing exciting investigation activities such as “Sitting on a bench and targeting that guy”, “Walking behind someone and pushing a button”, or the classic favorite “Finding 20 flags in 3 minutes”. What is up with that, why do these assassin’s keep losing their flags all over hell’s half acre and requiring that they be cleaned up in less than 3 minutes?
5. Find every single citizen being mugged and save them. They will utter one of 3 or 4 lines of dialog. There are somewhere between 6 and 15 of these guys in every mission.
6. Go back to the Assassin’s Bureau, get authorization to kill
7. Wander over to your target, listen to him talk for a while, use ’social stealth’ (read: scholars) to get near him and shove a knife in his back
8. Run away, or just kill every guard you see

The information you obtain in the investigations is rarely useful, and extremely tedious. You’ll be bored of doing it before the end of the first mission. Tidbits like “Hey, there’s some scholars nearby that you can probably use to get close” are really inane. What’s really disappointing though is that there’s very little differentiation between the scenarios for killing the target. One has to make the comparison to Hitman at this point. In Hitman, every single kill is a unique experience, the whole level exists to provide many different ways to execute the hit, some of which are better than others. In Assassin’s Creed, you basically just have to run up and kill the guy (since you’re going to alert the guards anyway), and the ’stealthy’ solution is almost always hiding with some scholars to get close and then kill him, and otherwise involves jumping down off a wall behind the guy.

Overall I’m disappointed with the title. Ubisoft clearly made some very costly investments into getting the engine for the fighting and parkour down well. This game was not really a safe bet, they’re doing some new and unique things here. I feel bad that they did take a unique take at the stealth action genre but completely fouled up the execution on the gameplay part of things. And really the crux of it is that it’s a game, and the gameplay should be more important than anything else. Everything but the gameplay experience is absolutely top knotch in Assassin’s Creed, and perhaps for the second one they can take the engine they’ve built and build an assassination experience that is not a tedious chore. Major points for unique ways of killing or approaching each individual target.

Unreliable Narrators

I love a good plot twist.  Unfortunately, most of the plot twists used incessantly in media today are not what one would call good.

The best plot twist is one that is implemented by leaving dangling threads in the plot and tying them into the twist later on.  The condition on this is that if the reader/player/viewer can guess the plot twist in advance – or is even aware that a plot twist exists – it can substantially dampen the plot experience.  The fun in the plot twist is in having all your assumptions shaken apart, being completely blind-sided.  If the individual suspects foul, they will begin concentrating on trying to detect the problem instead of experiencing your work.  Additionally, the twist needs to make sense and provide an eventual resolution to the plot.  This is where many ongoing TV shows fail – plot twists should exist by providing a plausible and coherent chain events that change in perspective because of new knowledge imparted to the audience.  Well designed twists occur by torquing the perspective of the audience, not the events of the plot.  This is where shows like LOST fail.  It’s difficult to construct an elaborate plot and continually shift the perspective of the viewer around in a way that provides a coherent narrative the entire time.  While it’s fine to answer questions with more questions, and some point you need to indicate to your audience that you know where you’re going with this and that it will all be resolved eventually.  Heroes does a much better job at this by keeping the arcs manageable – and writing out the entire outline ahead of time.

There is a powerful technique for creating an effective plot twist called “Unreliable narration”.  While it has been in use in books and film for decades, it has made very little traction in the realm of video games.  The underlying premise of the technique is that the player assumes what the narrator is telling him to be true and correct.  At some point in the plot, you can force the twist in plot perspective by revealing that the narrator (who is often the protagonist) has not been giving an accurate depiction of events, for whatever reason.  I can think of only three games that have used the technique in this way (one of which is the metal gear solid series, which is so convoluted I’ll avoid it entirely).  Out of respect for people who may not have played these games, if you want to avoid spoilers you’ll stop reading here.  The first game is Final Fantasy VII, one of the most successful RPGs of all time.  Cloud Strife appears initially as former member of an elite group of military called SOLDIER.  Much of the plot in the first half of the game contains flashbacks to Cloud’s past, but these stories are dotted with memory gaps that make the story inconsistent.  Later in the game Cloud regains his memory and much of the earlier story is shown to be false.  A second and more recent example would by Bioshock.  In an extremely brilliant move by Ken Levine’s team, the narrator, a gentleman named Atlas who guides the character through the first two thirds of the game is shown to be using mind control on the player based on the keyword “Would you kindly”.  The reason it’s clever is because the player has to perform these actions to progress in the game anyway, and the keyword is very well masked in the dialog.  The ‘big reveal’ in the middle of the game shows that many of the events leading up to that point, comments left in audio diaries and such, completely turn about the assumptions the player has made about himself up to that point.  Atlas is shown to be con-artist who has been using the player via the above mechanism for his own ends.  In true con-artist fashion, Atlas uses social engineering techniques to establish a bond with the player, thus allowing the delivery of foreshadowing while at the same time minimizing the likelihood that he will be suspected as being an unreliable narrator.

If anything is clear from the above assessment, it should be that writing an unreliable narrator well is extremely difficult.  Even in literature, it’s not a technique that is well-executed often.  Nevertheless, some of my favorite movies use this technique to great effect – The Usual Suspects, Lucky Number Slevin, and Memento.  I’d like a more coherant breakdown of the tools for making effective use of the technique, and to see those tools used to improve the generally dismal state of Videogame plots.  Suprises are cool.

As a more wonky alternative, I think it would be interesting to play a game where the player was made aware that the avatar was actively lying to them and had to work around it as an obstacle by forcing them into logical contradictions or social situations where the truth would come out.  There’s a mechanic, would it be possible to build a game around that?

More Gaming Crack

In the previous post I discussed the fact that addiction and enjoyment are not the same thing, and I cited several games who have the addiction (if not also the enjoyment) down square.  What I did not talk about is how exactly you go about making that happen.

Casinos have boiled one technique down to a fine art: high payout at rare intervals.  Now it’s not simply enough to randomly dole out a large reward on an arbitrary basis.  Players need to understand why they’re getting this reward, even if there’s a lot of randomness to it, it must be as a direct result of an action they took.  The reward happens to also provide a fun element, but much as Crack is is much more addictive than its more expensive counterpart Cocaine.  Because the high is so intense, and so short-lived, it triggers an extreme desire to repeat activities that led to the high in the first place.

Examples:

• Any form of Gambling, Poker, Blackjack, Slots causes you to win big only occasionally, which keeps you playing another hand or pulling the lever one more time, just in case you get lucky again.
• Match 3 games implement this by having a normal scenario be the matching of three items causing a chain of new blocks to drop.  Occasionally the blocks that drop will cause a further match, and a cascade effect may occur giving the player massive point multipliers.  This is random to a certain extent because the player is unaware of what blocks will drop next.
• Diablo/World of Warcraft acts through rare item drops.  Players will do a raid dungeon over and over again on the pure hope that an extremely powerful and rare item will drop that they may be able to obtain.  Even if a usable item does drop, there is not a guarantee that the individual player will be the one to roll for it.
• Crack Cocaine works by releasing massive amounts of Dopamine into the brain.  This high only lasts a short time, and repeated hits will not achieve the same level of euphoria as the first round did.
• In experiments with mice, a mouse will spend proporionally more time pushing a button which dispenses food at random intervals than with a button that dispenses food at regular intervals (say every ten pushes of the button).  This effect is so pronounced that a mouse will spend the majority of their life tapping away at the button given the opportunity.  If the reward is of higher value than food (a non-narcotic drug), the effect magnifies).

Good vs Addictive

Here’s a fun experiment that you can all do at home.  Get a small rodent and a degree in Neurophysiology.  Then pop the rodent’s head open and put a few cuts on the ventromedial hypothalmus.  If you haven’t botched the job and killed the poor thing, what you will discover is that the rodent will binge and binge, continually eating whatever food is available, regardless of how full it gets. 

There are other similar experiments you can do such as getting your younger siblings addicted to cocaine, but they all illustrate a rather fundamental neurological principal: Craving something and enjoying something are not the same thing, they are related, but more or less independant, in so far as anything is in that mush of cerebral goo upstairs.

The reason I bring this up is that it has ramifications for games.  While not necessarly as direct as chemical or physical intervention, it is possible to trigger the same pathways that twitchy crack addicts get to live with every day in a more mild manner using behavioral stimuli.  What drug dealers and Daniel Cook have figured out is that it is extremely profitable to do so, if you can get the formula right.  Where Danc and I disagree is that I don’t think all games are drugs, only the ones who have the addiction tricks down proper. 

There are companies who specialize in this unique blend of addiction.  Blizzard has a strong history of getting this right with games like Diablo and its larger, more voractious soul-sucking older brother World of Warcraft.  Blizzard is, in fact, so good at this, that the only thing that seems to limit their ability to create maniacly addictive games is the amount of time they have to develop them - not something most can say.  Casual Gaming generally falls into this category as well.  The more popular games in this genre such as the oft quoted Bejeweled are not a particularly thrilling experience.  Nobody is deriving actual pleasure from playing Solitaire.  People play these games because they kill time and they’re innovative only in the sense that they’ve got the addcition formula down to a fine art, a formula which can be easily cloned from clone to dreary clone.

Blizzard is in a relatively unique position of making games which are highly addictive and at the same time very enjoyable to play.  Most game designers are generally aiming for the latter.  From a business perspective, there’s not much real advantage to aiming for the addiction formula if you’re selling premium retail games - by the time they’re addicted they’ve already purchased the title.  In cases where you have an opportunity to give them the first hit for free - and to tell them to come back to get more - the addiction is key to the survival of the business model. 

This doesn’t mean you have an excuse for making shitty games.  An enjoyable and addictive game is always going to win out over an addictive game, all other things being equal.  It’s notable that companies like Infinite Interactive have attempted to take the highly successful match 3 formula and inject it with some real enjoyment by adding RPG elements (and somehow making gamer crack all the more potent at the same time).

The point I’m rambling slowly towards here is that games that are popular are not the same that games that are good.  The philosophy that large groups of people can’t be wrong has never been even remotely true, and it’s certainly not here.  If casual games are going to be a hallmark industry in the future, we need to start seeing more of an approach that takes both of these into consideration.

My name is Angus, and I’m an Achievement Whore

1. Achievement Points
2. ???
3. Profits!!! 

Apparently the EEDAR has figured out that acheivements points are good.  This has been apparent to basically anyone who owns a 360 since the dawn of time, but it’s nice to see in an official looking report.  The report says that Metacritic scores go way up on titles which have a large number of achievement points, as well as a larger variety.  Games which have online achievement points generate 50% more income than those who do not.  Furthermore, a user will prefer to buy a title on platform which as acheivement points (I know I do, if it’s on the 360, I get it on the 360).  A more interesting finding is that if you have achievement points which include a viral marketing component, or some type of content creation, profit is on average 50% higher.

An acheivement is a very powerful reward scheme, because unlike gameplay mechanisms, you can only unlock it once, and that’s it, forever.  Each point is also unique, they are not generic rewards such as extra lives.  What this means is you remember rewards you get, especially if the mechanism in which you got it was particularly offbeat and unique (e.g. hitting the guard with the can he tells you to pick up in Half-Life 2, or taking a picture of Spencer Cohen’s body in Bioshock).  Furthermore the points themselves extent their reach in the other direction as well, by demonstrating your glorious victories to your friends through Xbox live (which cleverly has badges which sync to the system available for facebook and blogs).

Update: A clever assertion by Raph Koster:

Well, yeah. I’m one of the people who went out there and said, “Single-player gaming is doomed,” and I actually used that phrase. An Xbox Live Achievement is a soul-bound item, and Gamerpoints are experience points, and BioShock is a one-man instance dungeon in the Xbox Live MMO. That is the direction that single-player gaming is going, frankly.

Having a larger variety of interactive tasks therefore incentivizes your players to keep exploriIng the world you’ve crafted.  Strategic use of an achievement can introduce a player to an entirely new area of exploration that they may not have considered.  A player will start by picking the low hanging fruit when they try your game, and indeed it’s good to have some early hand-outs, but the fruit is sweet, and as long as you don’t make it impossible to get more of them (I’m looking at you Burnout), they will keep coming back for more.  Eventually they turn into freakish, bizarre creatures like myself, who will stay up to all hours of the morning, killing peasants over and over again because I need more Minions to squeeze 10 more little fetid GP out of your game with my clammy, blistered hands, cackling to the moonlight as I go.  By the way, as a general rule, do not make achievement points which require hours of repetitive action, it isn’t fun, and actually detracts from an otherwise highly entertaining game.

What this means is that the rewards structure of achievement points, while in a sense existing ‘outside the magic circle’, in effect has impact on the game itself, and should therefore be considered as part of the design, not merely an afterthought (as it seems to be in many titles).  So to all you developers out there, do a good job, hire Tim Schaefer to plan your Achievement strategy if you must, but give it serious consideration.  If anyone needs me, I’ll be trying to nail the rest of the gold medals on Portal.

Tarot

When most people think of SPORE, they think of the character builder.  This is something which instantly jumps to mind, putting the power of Maya in the hands of the multitudes.  When I think of SPORE (and I suspect anyone who works in the industry), I think of procedural interaction.  There is some concern that many of the best and brightest new talent are being pulled into the vortex of Will Wright’s project, and that they will remain forever guarded within the boundaries of EA, shackled to a project which will be ultimately anti-climatic from a sales perspective.  I must admit, considering the continual delays SPORE has being enduring, much of the excitement it once evoked has somewhat worn away.

What I would like to see is the tools that make the procedural interaction of player-generated content possible be made available to the public, although I know coming from EA this is probably a pipe-dream.  Perhaps if sales are not what they would like them to be, EA would at least consider licensing the technology out.  To me, SPORE is a tech-demo (an impressive one) of that technology, and I think they’ve done a disservice to themselves by announcing it so far before it was released (and giving away much of the structure of the gameplay as well).  I feel like I’ve seen the game played in demos so many times now that it’s not fresh and exciting.  What I do think is exciting is the possibilities for the technology if it ever gets out into the world.

I’ve been playing the wonderful GROW series of games by Japanese Game Designer ON.  In these Flash-based games, the player chooses from a list of items (shapes, objects, elements) and places them into a world.  The longer each item exists on the world (in terms of turns), the more that item will grow.  The trick is that elements also interact with each other, sometimes in a positive, and sometimes in a negative way.  The purpose of the game is to place the items in such an order that they all grow to their maximum potential.  What is interesting about it is that significantly different things may occur to a given item depending on the presence and state of other objects at any given time.  While GROW is, I’m relatively sure, scripted with case statements, I wonder about the possibilities for the procedural technology behind SPORE if mixed up with Mr. ON.

Which brings me to an idea I tentatively refer to as Tarot.  Tarot Cards have long enchanted me (from a symbolic, not divinitory standpoint).  I suspect the presence of such items as Tarot cards, tea leaf reading, the I Ching, etc. in nearly every culture since the dawn of time speaks to a certain presence of the desire for symbolic interpretation in humanity.  This suggests to me that the symbols present in these mediums represent what Daniel Dennett would refer to as a “Good Trick”, although I’m not sure I understand exactly what the trick is.  What I do understand, however, is that Good Tricks can be exploited if you know how to hook into them.  Games are a fundamental part of the human condition for this precise reason, as they exploit evolutionary responses which have become prevelant everywhere in our species.

Tarot Cards are a method by which some game designers create free-association in order to generate story.  What Tarot would do is combine near ubiquitous symbols such as those found in Tarot or Jungian Psychology, and allow the player to apply them in a more direct way.  At the beginning of the game, the player would choose cards from a Tarot-like deck, either at random or by choice, and a game experience would then be proceedurally generated from those choices.  Content would have to be built in such a way that it was aware of possible interactions with other content, depending on the role it was to play.  Gameplay would still be built in a structured way,  so that the game would always be, say, an RPG, but the particulars would change with every game.  The challenge would be in building it in such a way that the particulars were always compelling, or even better, that one game would build on another.  It would be imporant that the game was not always the same, with the roles substituted, but the presence of one card versus another would radically shift an element of the game world.  The most correct selection of type of world would seem to be an open format, such as Oblivion, only more tightly constrained.  Elements of the game world would persist from story to story, but be gilded or tainted by the choice of cards in the initial sequence.

An additional difficulty would by in marketing this work.  Even if one could create proceedurally generated and compelling gameplay, it would be difficult to know what marketing approach would be best, other than perhaps the standard Peter Molyneux technique of “This is the best RPG ever made”.  Diverging too strongly from an established medium is generally not a good sales technique, but then if a medium is truely to be an artform, sometimes you need to put that on the back burner.

Identifying with a Blank Face

I finished the fight last night (after losing 2 hours of progress by not saving).  My friend Reed made a comment about the way I was speaking whilst playing Halo 3.  You see, all of the commentary I was making about the game was in the first person.  I was saving humanity, not Master Chief.  In a sense, I was master chief.  This is a technique video games can employ to create a strong narrative in ways that film and literature never can. 

When you watch a movie or read a book (other than a choose-your-own adventure, which I’m not counting), you’re being told a story about someone else.  This doesn’t mean it can’t be a great story, but it’s still a story about someone else.  Even so, if you look at many of your favorite books and films, you will find that you probably identify rather strongly with at least some of the major characters.  You may not realize you do, but on some level, those characters you like you probably unconciously see as a kind of alter-ego of yourself, based on character traits of that persona.  The more strongly you identify with a character, the stronger your emotional connection will be to the work. 

Unlike in film and literature, protagonists in games can be very vaguely defined.  Creating a vague definition of a protagonist is a tricky thing.  If done well, the player will project their own thoughts and feelings into the void of your protagonists character.  If done poorly, the player will fail to identify with your hero at all, and as a result feel no emotional attachment to the situation the character is in, and therefore the narrative of your game. 

There are two major ways in which video games can create vague character definitions.  The first is to not show the player what the character looks like.  Master Chief has a helmet on, at no point do you ever see his face.  Jack from Bioshock is not obscured in any way, but because the game is always shot from the perspective of jack, and all the mirrors in Rapture are conveniently broken, you never see what he looks like.  This goes a long way to helping the player identify with the protagonist (because if you could see his face, he would look like you!).

The second method is to limit or completely curtail the protagonist’s dialog.  There is a long history of silent protagonists in video games with rich plots for this reason.  Examples include Link from The Legend of Zelda, Gordon Freeman in Half-Life, Jack in Bioshock, Chrono in Chronotrigger, Ness from Earthbound, and Cloud Strife from Final Fantasy VII.  The technique is not as simple as abstaining from dialogue, as identification requires traits to create an emotional connection.  The trick to this technique is to use the other supporting characters to suggest a variety of traits the hero may possess (without spamming the entire continuum of character traits).  If done well, the player will latch on to those which suit his fancy and ignore the rest.

Creating a vague character is not the only way to get players to identify with your protagonist, but it is a way that works for a broad spectrum of people.  Idenification with the protagonist does not ensure the game will be loved either, but it does help to bring about a strong emotional reaction.  If the character you identify with suddenly starts acting in a way inconsistent with your views, or if the work as a whole doesn’t meet your standards, you will probably hate it - but at least you have strong opinions one way or another.  On the other hand, it’s difficult to love the narritive in a game if you don’t identify with the main character.

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