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.

Design Concepts

A few days ago, Gamasutra put out the eight edition of the annual classic, Bad Designer, No Twinkie.

There is much that is good in that article, and a quick perusal will have you nodding your head at half the games you’ve played.  I particularly like the segment on Failure to provide short-term goals.  This particular problem is one which has caused much frustration in and about my person, and has been the single cause of my inability to complete several games.  Part of a game is guiding the player through an experience - Not spoon feeding it to her - but some direction is expected.  There are games (mostly orbiting the celestial entity that is Will Wright) which set out specifically to allow the player as much freedom and to deny specific goals at all.  This is a somewhat different matter, as the gripes entailed by the above refer specifically to scenarios under which a specific goal exists, but the goal is not adequately presented to the player.  Nevertheless, it’s a dangerous game to play (although one Will plays very well), because there is a difference between allowing the player to define their own goals, and providing no direction on goals whatsoever.   This is something I’ve wondered about with Spore (Remember Spore?).  I’ve just watched the video from the 2007 Leipzig Game Conference, and the game certainly looks more visually polished than it did a year ago, but there’s no new magical reveals on content or gameplay.  Spore is an interesting beast because it’s less a game and more a toy.  The difference between the two really are that toys are something you play with, to explore the possibility space of your imagination.  Even so, this possibility space is limited by the structure of the software, and if no hints or direction are given as to the ways in which you can explore that space, one can get frustrated easily (not that I anticipate that will happen in this case).

I’m not sure I entirely agree with the argument for Amnesia though.  This can, if done properly and occasionally be a powerful technique (a film example would be in Memento, a game example would be Bioforge), but it needs to be the focus of the work, and it’s difficult to pull off.  This is at odds with the number of games which employ the technique.

Eight years of Twinkie Denial can be found at Ernest Adams’ No Twinkie Database.

Of gears and valves

I came up with a neat game mechanic that I thought would work well in a First-person shooter. This mechanic would would in any setting of a FPS, but the one I had in mind was a Steampunk game. I think the Steampunk genre is under-served in todays marketplace. Many people are perhaps not aware of the genre, while at the same time I think there’s an intrinsic appeal to the whole Steampunk concept. My intuition on this is fueled by the popularity of works such as LXG, Van Helsing, and even such oddities as Steampunk Starwars which recently drew the attention of notable bloggers on Boing Boing and Wired’s Table of Malcontents.

In most FPSs, there are a series of various weapons you can aquire. Typically there are pistols, and shotguns, and machine guns, some type of rocket launcher, etc. Defining these as known weapons makes the artists life easy, as well as the game designer, as the tools the player has at hand are always known within a certain range, and levels can be planned accordingly. What I propose is to instead of finding weapons, find parts, and build your weapons. You might find, for example, some type of stock, which would have slots you could put other parts into (a mundane example would be a barrel, some type of ammunition container, and a trigger mechanism). The parts you use to build the weapon would result in different properties, range, damage, etc. The individual pieces would have to be animated by an artist, and programmatically joined on the fly. One might also have special parts which are rare or hard to find, or have different types of technologies which might give bonuses when interfaced together, or penalties when interfaced with alternate types. Another mechanism which might be interesting is to have the parts wear out, so that the player is not continually using one weapon, but is forced to rebuild and try different tactics (I’m not sure whether this would be fun or not though).

In a Steampunk setting, this could result in all manner of strange, steam-powered, gear whirring weapons and systems. A System Shock type game could be reborn, but in a Difference Engine-like world with characters such as Charles Babbage and Lord Byron. I think a game thus designed could be very beautiful, and a lot of fun to play. The mechanism itself though would easily work in a futuristic or modern setting as well.

Things to do in the future perhaps.

Update: I told you so!

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