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

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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.

A Critique of Video Games

To say that there’s a debate on whether or not video games are art is rather disingenuous. There are those who feel that video games are not, but I think it’s been demonstrated that they don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. The very question of “Are video games art” doesn’t make sense. One doesn’t ask if drawings or film are art, these things are a medium through which art can be expressed. Anything can be a medium through which art is expressed, but that doesn’t mean that everything created using that medium is art. I doubt that Mr. Ebert would deny film being a viable medium for art, but he’s not exactly advocating the artistic merits of American Pie either.

And so we could discuss what the qualifications are for artwork, but I could make an entire blog devoted to that. The reality of the situation is that those types of decisions are made by consensus of the art critic community. We currently have a lot of game reviewers, who are paid money to play games and essentially tell the world if those games are worth paying for. This is only a valuable service only insofar as you can trust the integrity and opinions of those reviewers. Likewise, this service could be performed by a community, but is only useful insofar as you can trust the opinions of that community (and if the community is primarily composed of the idiots you find on XBL making various homophobic references, I don’t have a whole lot of faith in that). This is, however, not the same thing as evaluating the esprit of the game, as a work. And this is an area where things get a little fuzzy.

I’ve written before about the separation between an action which is highly addictive, and an action which is personally satisfying. These things are metabolically separate functions within humans. Unfortunately, they are often confused, and this is evidenced by a lack of clear distinction in this concept within the language (i.e. A game is simply “fun”). Case in point: N’Gai Croal chooses desktop tower defense in Slate’s Gaming Club game of the year.

Is obsession a valid selection criterion? I’d say so. It’s certainly one that I apply to other art forms. Whether I’m thinking about my favorite song, album, movie, TV show, novel, or play, I generally pick the one that I’ve responded to the strongest, the one that I can’t stop thinking about.

- N’Gai Croal

We don’t have accepted vocabulary that marks the difference between an experience that stays with you after you leave it because of the profound implications it has (For a film example, Memento) or because the experience was psychologically addictive (Spiderman 2). My point is, you can do both (The Matrix, the first one anyway).

Popularly, Jonathan Blow has seized upon this idea and seems to have emerged as the apologist for the concept. Unfortunately, I don’t feel many people seem to understand what he’s saying. In the same Slate Gaming Club article, Seth Schiesel talks about how Blow hates on Bioshock because it pretends to be an emergent Sandbox, when really it’s a constructed reality. I don’t really think that’s the point. While Blow does seem to prefer the Will Wright-esque emergent concepts that arise from atomic game rules, that’s only because of the satisfying experience it can provide. What he is essentially saying is that most games feed upon artificial scheduled rewards - the drug pathways, in my lingo - while very few provide a meaningful take-away.

What Blow is really asking is this: If we are going to make meaningful art, what is the mechanism that video games afford art that are not done through film, painting, poetry, or music? In his mind that mechanism is the structure of gameplay; the rules of the created world, and the exploration of those rules, should be the source of a certain profound satisfaction. I would call this a ludological art fundamentalist viewpoint. Certainly I can’t think of better contender for what the core of that experience would be, but I would take a more moderate viewpoint. Much as film is a unique medium from stage theatre, to say that the essence of the art in film is only in the cinematographer is disingenuous as well. Much of what makes a truly great film overlaps what makes a great play. So it is with video games.

Blow criticizes Bioshock for creating a non-authentic satisfaction. He argues that Bioshock’s marketing makes the claim that the game is about morality and choice, but this is not evidenced in the gameplay constructs (because your choice is irrelevant). I would say that Bioshock’s marketing as a game about choice is really quite brilliant. The game is not about choice, but rather the illusion of choice (Would you kindly agree with me). The fact that rescuing or saving the little sisters makes little difference in the stable state reinforces this concept, and it does it through gameplay.

Beyond that, I think the game is also a very powerful exploration of Objectivism, and one gets to literally explore the implications of that philosophy. Instead of through narrative and watching it occur, as one experiences in Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, Bioshock literally allows you to explore the aftermath of an environment which had adopted that philosophy, through the use of audio diaries and your experiences with the characters in the game. Those are not strictly ludological concepts, but are borrowed from film, which is perhaps why Blow doesn’t account for them. That Bioshock is able to do this, and at the same time make it relatively straightforward to bypass if you’re interested solely in entertainment shows that this game is a shining star of entertainment and art fused together. No, it’s not perfect, but art rarely is.

I don’t think that many people have explored the dynamic of using the gameplay, devoid of artificial rewards, as this satisfying experience, and that may be why it’s difficult to discuss it. I also think that adopting only the use of gameplay would make a game far more sterile than it could otherwise be. There are parallels between film and video games, and while it is ultimately to our detriment to make games that are trying to be films, ignoring the lessons learned in that medium serves no purpose either.

That said, I think Blow has gone somewhat overboard (which would make sense, considering this fundamentalist position). People who are interested in meaningful, authentically satisfying material will seek it out, and if it’s not available in the medium of video games, it is available in other fashions. Most people are not interested in being enlightened, and seek only entertainment. Having the entire industry produce nothing but games designed to be fine art will only result in the abandonment of the medium, for that exact reason. How many of the novels sold every year are truly profound? How many pieces of cinema leave concepts that dance in your mind as you drift off to sleep?

Daniel Radosh may be hungry for real food, but the rest of the world is clamoring for whatever cheap drugs they can find. This is not new, nor is it a sign of the times. This behavior is endemic of our species, and frankly I suspect it is a requirement for a stable society that most people not be interested in that which is profound. Ultimately most people will continue to make that which is entertaining, and occasionally a visionary will create a profoundly meaningful game. Those games will appeal to a much smaller set of people, and typically have much smaller budgets (would Citizen Kane have been even better if it had a $200 million dollar budget?). That doesn’t mean that AAA titles should not continue to push the boundaries of what is possible to make in video games, to explore the possibility space of what can be done with games, but I don’t think we need to get really whipped up about whether or not our games are art.

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

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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.

Downtime

My blog is currently hosted with Wordpress.com

While it provides some nice features, it also puts in a lot of restrictions.  I can no longer tolerate these restrictions, and as such I’ll be rolling my own Wordpress offsite.  The practical upshot of this is Ghostrazor may be unavailable between now and Sunday.

When I’m back, I’ll put up a post on an exclusive Will Wright lecture.

Will Wright and Brian Eno

Whilst I was working down in California this summer, I had the opportunity to see a facinating talk/conversation between Will Wright and Brian Eno. This talk, hosted by the Long Now Foundation, was one of those times in your life where much of what they say haunted your mind on the train-ride home, and you would spend days thinking about it. Certainly an interesting experience. And now, due to the magic of the internet and FORA.tv, you too can share in that pleasure.

Enjoy,

View Will Wright and Brian Eno on FORA.tv