This is a followup to this post: Complexity vs. Randomness - if you haven’t read that yet, read it first.

—–

So, one of the strangest things I’ve found working in the game industry is that a lot of people don’t really know what designers actually *do*. Hell, even a lot of designers I’ve worked with haven’t ever had a reason to put it into words. In some cases, designers create levels, in some cases, they design systems, but at a higher level, there are a couple major phases that game designers will have to work through in the course of building any game.

Today, I’ll tell you what I thought it was in 2007. In the following post, I’ll tell you why all that has changed in the last two years. But it’s good to start somewhere, so we’ll start here:

Unfortunately, this image was meant to be in a Keynote presentation - so only parts of it appear at any one time. When you see it all at once, it may be a little difficult to understand at first. I call this “The Designer’s Treadmill”. You can call it whatever you like.

The basic jist of it is that you have four major phases in the creation of a videogame:

• Creation of a Pitch
• Preproduction
• Production
• “The Endgame”

You also have four major things that designers will have to concentrate on:

• The Concept
• The Core Cycle
• Progression
• Balance

For each of those phases, you and your team must:

• Conceptualize
• Document
• Iterate
• Test

The idea for the graphic is this - when you create a pitch for a game, you’re trying to come up with something interesting that will grab someone’s attention. An idea that you think can be developed into something fun. Your primary focus during the Pitch phase is the high Concept (which is why they’re aligned on the wheel). You should also keep the Core Cycle in mind, because that’s what you’ll be doing next.

In the process of developing your pitch, you must come up with ideas - you must conceptualize the overall concept of the game. Then, you must document it. This is both for you, so that you’re forced to write things down and make those ideas concrete, and it’s for everyone else, so that everyone knows what you’re talking about. I can’t stress *how* important documentation is enough.

Without having things down in writing, it’s very easy to make exceptions to the rules you’re trying to create. Writing them down means that you can read through the rules, and say, “Hm. This is how the system’s supposed to work - it either accounts for this situation you’ve described, or it doesn’t.” If you handwave your problems away by BSing answers, you will get screwed by yourself. Every time. No exceptions. Write it down. And when you see that things don’t work, fix them here. You’ll still make your fair share of mistakes, but this part of the process will kill a lot of really big stuff that’s easy to miss when you’re only talking about an idea.

Once you’ve written a document, iterate on it. Show it to people. Have them give you feedback. If you can’t take honest feedback, you shouldn’t be a game designer. It sucks - you’ll often have your lovely ideas torn apart. You’ll have worked on things for days, maybe weeks, maybe years, and in ten seconds, someone will bring up something that you missed, or they’ll subjectively hate it. Take it all in. Sometimes you’ll stand your ground, but a lot of the time, this is where your ideas will get much, much stronger by absorbing the input.

Once you’ve iterated, test. Give the pitch to someone. Watch how they react. Take notes. Then do the whole cycle again until you’re happy with the results. If you get it done in one iteration, you’re not being ambitious enough.

The next step, then, is preproduction. Actually, let’s make that the next post, because there’s a lot to say about prepro, and why a lot of people spend a lot of time answering really, really stupid questions.

This is a followup to this post: Core Cycle. If you haven’t read that yet, read it first.

—-

One of the most important lessons I learned working on the Sims was this: If you can’t communicate it to the player, it might as well be random.

As a new designer, I was excited about developing the most complex, deep system I could imagine. For The Sims 2 on consoles, I’d created a food creation system that had pages of stats that controlled all manner of possible results.

After working on designing the system for a week, I finally showed the lead designer the spec for the system. It had everything! Endless depth! A huge variety of possible results! Little subtle details could affect the outcome in radical ways!

“Simpler.” That was basically the advice I got for how to make the system better.

I was annoyed. The system was flexible, elegant, and deep! Beautifully designed! I mocked the whole thing up in Excel, so that using a simple drop-down list, players could choose from a variety of ingredients and cook them in a variety of ways to achieve a huge variety of results. I’d build the whole system, and show them that it worked!

Huge failure. I mocked up the thing, had one of our in-house testers mess around with it for an hour or two, and the result was clear as day. He had no idea how changing the inputs changed the result. I knew - I knew that a Meat with a Protein stat of +40 instead of +10 would change the result, but there wasn’t any reasonable way to communicate that to anyone - particularly when there were five other stats also changing the results simultaneously.

In the end, the solution was to radically simplify the system. Fewer stats on each ingredient. Each powerup was controlled by a single stat, and triggered at the same threshold for every item. It wasn’t as complex, but it was a thousand times more understandable.

Now, a player would (for the most part) understand that the goal was to pick ingredients that had specific high stats, combine them, and you could get something that would produce a specific power-up effect. Ingredients’ stats were clearly communicated to the player, and the power-up effects had their own visual indicators, and were clearly labeled on the end results. From my perspective, it was almost painfully simple.

The key, though, was that people understood it - they knew how to make repeatable, predictable results, and were willing to “explore” the system because every possible combination produced a useful result.

Players want to be able to understand what is going on. If you get shot in a game, you don’t want to die because you’d contracted pneumonia two weeks before. You want to die because you got shot. This means that the next time, if you don’t want to die, you can avoid being shot - there is a clear causal relationship between the action and the response.

What players want in most cases, is control, or the ability to learn. They want their actions to have consequence, and their decisions to be based on “perfect” information. If X happens, Y will happen. You can make the system relatively complex, as long as players feel that it’s ultimately predictable - like they *could* understand it given the right circumstances, even if they don’t understand it yet.

There is a threshold, however, where a system is either so complex that it’s completely unpredictable, or where a system’s inner workings are communicated so badly to the player that the result seems random - in which case, no causal relationship can be formed, and the result can’t help a player form new decisions. The end result is both frustrating and useless. Not good.

As a designer, you have to go back to the basic razor: “A game is when a user is presented with a compelling choice that allows him or her to make an informed decision that has consequence.”

Randomness means that any decision point associated with that randomness can’t be informed - because it’s… well, random. This makes the player’s involvement with the game essentially meaningless. No information matters. No choices matter, and there’s no consequence that you have any control over.

Again, it comes down to three things - consistency, communication, and consequence. To form causal relationships, the game’s systems need to be consistent. Not “predictable,” where the player understands them so completely that they can predict the result with 100% accuracy - that’s boring. But they have to establish a set of rules, and then communicate them clearly to the player.

And every step of that is helped when your system is simpler.

Next: The Four Stages of Grief.

This is a followup to this blog entry: What Is a Game, Anyway?

If you haven’t read that already, check it out first.

—

Probably the single most important piece of useful game design advice I got many years ago was this: “Figure out what your player is doing most of the time, and make that fun.” It’s not a bad metric for figuring out when a game is good, and when a game is bad.

For instance, two examples:

• Gears of War (Xbox 360): Most of the time, the player is moving and shooting. Moving and shooting are fun because there’s constant pressure applied to the player by their opponents, they’re extremely vulnerable when they move out of cover, shooting is critical to mitigating that vulnerability, and the Locust are evil bastards who should die.
• Final Fantasy X (PS2): Most of the time, the player is walking from place to place, watching cutscenes, or fighting. While in the walking sections, a red dot tells you where to go. The environments are pretty but ultimately lifeless, rendering the walking sections uninteresting. Cutscenes are pretty, and there is lots of story, but this part is entirely noninteractive, and the story doesn’t actually really inform my action, because the walking sections are entirely linear, and I have no influence over the story. Combat is interesting because there are strategic decisions to be made, the consequence of making a good or bad choice is obvious, and I’m informed enough to know how to go about making those choices.

Where Gears of War has a tight integration of its mechanics and narrative, and keeps the player engaged during the actions they’re performing the vast majority of the time, Final Fantasy X takes two of its three most time-consuming sections and makes them as interesting as watching paint dry. (Please direct hate mail to the comments section - I know I’m in the minority re: FFX, but I stand by my utter hatred of the title.)

Sure, there are items to be found, but the items are, by and large, unusable in the walking sections of the game. There are sometimes minor conversations to be had that shed additional light on the story, but without the ability to actually affect the story, they’re flavor without substance.
The distinction is that Gears of War has a well-integrated Core Cycle of mechanics, and Final Fantasy X does not.

The Core Cycle is essentially the logical loop that a player performs repeatedly throughout the game. In the Sims, for instance, the core cycle is as follows:

• Earn Money -> Buy stuff -> Fulfill Motives -> Build Skill -> Gain Friends ->  Get Promoted -> Go to Work -> (repeat)

If you haven’t played the Sims, let me go into a little more detail:
A player earns money by working. They use the money to buy new objects for their Sim to use. By using objects, Sims can fulfill motives, such as happiness or hygiene. If they can keep their motives fulfilled, they have some free time to build skills. Skills, such as artistic acumen or physical fitness, can help you build friendships, and do better at your job. Skills and the number of friends a Sim has are gates to getting promoted. If a player earns a promotion, they get paid more, and can repeat the cycle again.

One trip through the cycle takes an experienced player about 15 minutes. This means that for an experienced player, the game evolves slightly every 15 minutes. The player’s earned some new objects, which can be used to fulfill motives in different ways. While the core mechanics of the game haven’t fundamentally changed, they’re kept fresh by continually introducing new content, and evolving the way the player progresses through the Core Cycle.
To take something totally different, Halo’s Core Cycle is as follows:

• Enter a room -> Assess targets -> Kill targets -> Acquire weapons -> (repeat)

A player enters an area. They look at the environment, assess the enemies in the immediate area, and formulate a plan of attack. They then execute that attack, fighting against a reactive AI. As they kill enemies, the enemies drop weapons that the player can pick up. Because each weapon contains a limited amount of ammunition, the player is encouraged to swap out weapons often. Because each weapon has unique strengths and weaknesses, players must play out the next iteration of the Core Cycle differently. Periodically, players will acquire new and more powerful weapons, which keep the Core Cycle evolving throughout the game.

In contrast, Lair, for the Playstation 3, had a different Core Cycle:

• Enter a level -> Assess targets -> Kill targets -> Earn Carnage -> (repeat)

Superficially, the cycle seems similar to Halo’s. The player flew a dragon that could kill enemies in a variety of ways, through fireballs, melee attacks, or an assortment of other similar attacks. Functionally, almost all the attacks were available to the player from the start of the game, except a limited number of “Combo attacks” that could be used during melee combat that were earned by acquiring Carnage points.

Over the course of the game, the acquisition of those combo moves was the only mechanical progression that the player encountered. Additionally, because Fireballs were incredibly overpowered, players could easily kill anything with the game by using the dragon’s default fireball attack. This meant that as the Core Cycle repeated, even if the player earned Carnage and unlocked new melee combos, they still would attack with the same default fireball.

Every repetition of the Core Cycle was identical. Sure, the superficial details might change, but it was the functional equivalent of playing through the entire Halo campaign with only the pistol. The Core Cycle had no sense of progression or evolution, and settled into mind-numbing repetition quickly.

This is why Progression, while more of a distinction between a good game and a lousy one, is so critical to the core mechanics of the game. Every decision point has to feed into the Core Cycle, and if the Cycle doesn’t evolve every few trips through the loop, people will simply lose interest and stop playing. Once that happens, nothing else matters anyway.

Next? Complexity vs. Randomness (or, Why Your Deep, Elegant, Beautiful System Sucks)

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In a recent article in Edge Magazine, N’Gai Croal (previously Newsweek’s videogame writer) bemoans the lack of agency in the No Russian mission in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. In case you haven’t played the game, spoilers follow - it’s impossible to describe the mission without ruining its twists, so consider yourself warned.

A summary of the mission can be found here.

It’s a disturbing mission. In my playthrough, I didn’t shoot any civilians myself. I wanted to play as “heroically” as possible - so I did fire, but above the civilians’ heads - not that it made much of a difference to them. This was uncomfortable. The game renders the scene of carnage in a convincing way - the civilians struggle to survive, and there are a number of them that are gunned down trying to help others escape. It’s gutwrenching. Later in the mission, fighting the riot police, it became so hard to stay alive that I did fire on them, killing several, though as few as I could. Deciding to pull the trigger was agonizing. Fighting through, and finally escaping was a tangible, visceral relief - and the moment when Makarov shoots you, and you realize that you’ve been set up is shocking.

Not only did you go through a torturous experience, not only was there nothing you could do to actively stop it, but you did this voluntarily - and more - for nothing. Worse than nothing - your presence provides the impetus for the beginning of World War 3.

N’Gai Croal’s assertion is that the fact that “No Russian” is a relentlessly linear, scripted level makes it weaker is, I believe, mistaken. He proposes a solution where Makarov is not on the scene - and you can stop the Russians, but eventually become the fall guy anyway, allowing players to behave “heroically” while still maintaining the required elements of the plot. I think he misses the point.

“No Russian” is about knowing that what you’re doing is reprehensible, but doing it anyway, becuase the alternative, in your character’s eyes, is even worse. The setup is clear - Makarov is an absolutely vital target. You can’t kill him in game, because your character, Pfc. Allen, would never kill him. You can shoot the other terrorists, but it creates a fail state where Allen has blown his cover - again, something that Allen is explicitly not supposed to do.

The game forces you, through the limited actions you can take, to inhabit someone who has made an explicit choice to not behave “heroically” - to let the civilians die - perhaps even assist in their slaughter - in pursuit of what he believes is a greater goal. One that is worth the deaths of those people. I found that an immensely powerful experience, because I’m the kind of guy who would have tried to stop the terrorists. The issue, though, is that the way this is set up, Allen is a character who has made a decision that goes beyond the immediate horror you’re presented with - he understands that to achieve what he considers ultimate “good” the immediate bad is worthwhile.

In games, if I was given the option to “do good,” I would have done it - because it’s extremely rare in games for players to have to look beyond the immediate - to look at things in a larger perspective. In Croal’s setup, I would have “done the right thing,” then lost, and it would feel cheap and meaningless - a game forcing a lose state because it needs you to lose. Because I was forced to essentially “suck it up” - to have played through the level in the shoes of someone who has chosen to pursue this larger goal at the cost of something monstrous and horrible, it made me play as someone who’s inhabited a vastly different moral space than my own - and as a player, it’s forced me to inhabit that character - to accept, perhaps, that getting to Makarov was worth this much.

And then, in the end, not only does it strip me of that awful success, it doubly turns me into the villain - the fall guy for the full-scale invasion of the US by Russia. In the end, you do both the thing that is reprehensible, and twisting the knife, you’re also the lynchpin in the thing that was even worse. And your character, Pfc. Allen - dies knowing that this is what’s happened. It’s utterly heartbreaking.

Agency, in this case - the ability of a player to write their own character through action in-game - weakens the point. This is a really unusual thing for me to say, because I’d say that games are almost entirely about choice - but this is one case where restricting the player’s choices to the choices the character would have made really adds something immensely powerful to the experience. And letting me be the shortsighted hero, rather than one who’d taken the larger view, would have utterly destroyed the point of the whole thing.

–

There is a bit of a side note that goes along with this, which may be really, really weird for some people. Ico is one of my favorite games ever. I had been looking forward to Shadow of the Colossus for years. And yet I’ve never finished it. A quarter of the way into the game, I got such an overwhelming feeling that what I was doing was *wrong*, I couldn’t bring myself to keep playing the game.

And yet, I feel like that’s part of the experience - and what makes it one of the most successful games I’ve ever seen. Because they forced me to question whether what I was doing was worth it - not only in the context of the game, but in the context of my actions, as a player. That they created an experience that was so disturbing to me that I couldn’t keep playing… hell, if that’s not a powerful piece of narrative, I don’t know what is.

So, as a followup to the thing I posted the other day about what a game designer does, it’s helpful to answer a more fundamental question: What *is* a game?

This is one of those things that gets bounced around a lot, because it’s one of those things, like “What is art?” that there’s not a really iron-clad and definite single answer to.

That said, it’s not like a lot of people haven’t taken a stab at answering it.

What do *you* think a game is? Is it something with points? That you play on a screen? Does it have a story? Does it have a goal? An end? Do you use a controller? Is there conflict, or challenge? Competition? There are certain aspects of gaming that people take for granted, but in the end, the best a lot of people can manage is, “I know it when I see it.” Or more appropriately, “I know it when I play it.”

Of course, a lot of professional game designers have spent a little more time trying to refine their definitions.

Chris Crawford’s view on what a game is can be found here. It’s a bit of a read, but worthwhile.

Eric Zimmerman and Katie Saleen define a game as follows: “a system of artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome.”

Some people have paraphrased Sid Meier, creator of landmark games like Civilization, as saying that a game is a “series of interesting choices.”

They’re all good ways of thinking about the game, but just as any artist comes to their own definition of what art is, I think all game designers build an understanding of what, in their experience, a game actually is.

For me, I’m going to post something here I wrote at the end of ‘08. I was thinking about writing a book on game design, and this was one of the first bits I wrote.

—–

Let’s start with the easy question. If this is “A Practical Guide to Designing Videogames” (the working title of the book I was writing), what is a videogame? Ask a dozen people, and you’ll get a dozen different answers. Pretty much everyone will agree that video is somehow involved, though you might be stymied by something like Real Sound, a videogame that came out around 2000 that had no graphics, and was only sound. There’s a whole genre of “sound novels” in Japan, and they’re widely considered to be videogames, simply because they’re played on videogame consoles.

So the easiest, most obvious part of the definition - the “video” in the title - can’t even be relied upon to form part of the basic definition. Graphics, surely, are a part of *most* games, right? Sure. Same goes for audio. And a controller - some way to interface with the thing is critical. Does it need a story? Fans of Final Fantasy would argue that it’s critical, while fans of Tetris would probably raise the point that Tetris has no built-in story.

There are such a wide variety of games out there that it’s hard to find a good definition of what a game is. What are the similarities between Madden, Gears of War, Civilization, Grim Fandango, the Sims, Tetris, Rock Band, and Zork? There are a huge number of arguments you could make, and for each of those arguments, there are a small handful of exceptions. A definition of what a game is has to include those things.

Heck, why even limit ourselves to videogames? Why not include other things, like card games or board games? Or games in general, like wrestling, or cops and robbers? There have been dozens, if not hundreds of attempts to define what a videogame is over the years, and most of those discussions have been totally fruitless. So I’ll just cut to the chase:

A game is when a user is presented with a compelling choice that allows him or her to make an informed decision that has consequence.

I hear you asking yourself, “That’s it?” Yeah. That’s it. There’s nothing in there directly relating to story or character or shooting or graphics or controllers or epicness or saving the world or preteen androgynous adolescents or anthropomorphic cats or anything of the sort. However, that doesn’t mean they’re not in there. The definition has three key words:

• Compelling
• Informed
• Consequence

Heck, you could probably reduce the definition to only those three words, and you’d have at least a passable definition for what a game is. Still, since that’s pretty reductionist, let’s take another stab at it.

The basic gist of it is pretty simple. The thing that separates games from all other media is interactivity. That means that the player has the ability to interact with the game. That, in itself, isn’t enough. If, for instance, I’m watching a movie and it pauses itself, and requires that I unpause it to continue - that’s not a game. That’s just annoying.

The issue with interactivity isn’t simply the base interaction - it’s that the interaction has to have some sort of consequence. But again, if I unpause the movie, that’s a consequence - the movie continues to play. Fine - so the interaction has to have some sort of meaning. You have to have a choice, with consequence.

Okay, well, let’s take the same argument. I’m watching a movie. Halfway through, a screen pops up and says “Choice A or Choice B?” and that’s it. Nothing else. How do I make that decision? Normally, when faced with the choice between two options, you weigh the options to see which might have a better outcome. What is the risk involved with picking one over the other? What is the reward? Without any information as to what Choice A or Choice B is, there’s simply no *point* in selecting one over the other. The decision is totally arbitrary, and my personal interaction with it is meaningless - I might as well be an Eenie Meenie Miney Moe-bot. That’s not a game.

So the choice has to have consequence, but there has to be some ability to understand how to make the choice. The player has to be empowered to make an informed decision. Great. So let’s say the movie presents me with a character, Bob, and I can decide whether he takes a job at the box factory, or the paper mill. The movie’s informed me that Bob is a bland, boring guy or no particular consequence. He’s got no love for either boxes or paper, and he’ll be pretty much happy at either one, though maybe a little more creatively fulfilled in one job, and a little more financially stable in the other.

Whoop-de-doo.

Part of the problem is that on top of having the choice and understanding the consequence, the player has to actually give a damn about the choice they’re making. If two beasts are bearing down on me - a chihuahua and an angry grizzly bear, and I have only one bullet to try and stop one, I care because if I pick wrong, the bear will eat me for lunch. I’m informed by the physical stature of the beasts, the choice is compelling because really, it’s either the bear or the harmless teacup-dog and I only have a limited time to make the selection, and the consequence is life or death.

So creating compelling situations where players make informed choices, and those informed choices have meaningful consequence is what makes up a game? The game exists in the continual risk-reward balancing act in the player’s mind. You’ve given them the playground, the game is letting them churn through the possibilities.

To expand a bit on those keywords, though:

• Compelling: Narrative, Risk
• Informed: Presentation, Systematic Consistency
• Consequence: Progression, Reward

How do you make something compelling? Seems like a black art, really. Mechanically, a lot of what makes a decision compelling is the balance between risk and reward. The part that makes the choice compelling is setting the stakes - putting something valuable on the line. The narrative aspect is where story elements come in, because the things that you risk need to have some value. There can be mechanical value to those things - you might wager credits, or in-game objects - but in many games, your choices are balanced on narrative mechanics - do I risk my life to save the world? How far am I willing to go to save a character who means something to me?

In a game like Tetris, compulsion is built entirely on risk - do I wait for the long block to get a Tetris, or do I place another shape to clear some lines now? In a game like the old Lucasarts adventures, where death was impossible, the compulsion was built entirely on the narrative - the desire for progression. Those games had almost no way to even incur risk at all! Most games balance the two - the risks you take have both mechanical and narrative value - your teammates’ lives in squad-based shooters, for instance.

Information is nominally pretty straightforward. If you want to inform a player about the decisions they’re faced with, there are a pretty wide variety of ways to do it.

You are in an open field west of a big white house with a boarded front door.

There is a small mailbox here.

Those lines should be instantly familiar to anyone who played the original Zork. Text is a pretty clear way to inform the player of the parameters of the decision they have to make. Graphics, too. The simple image of an angry bear and a chihuahua is probably enough to communicate to you the risks involved if you make a decision a particular way. So by “presentation,” I suppose what I really mean is some combination of graphics or text. The visual content of a piece in Tetris, combined with the gaps in the placed pieces - that’s enough to inform a player what they should or shouldn’t do.

The second piece in that puzzle is Systematic Consistency. Taking the Bear-Chihuahua example again, the information the player’s given are that the potential targets are a bear - a large beast known for mauling humans, and a Chihuahua, a tiny, maybe yappy, but mostly harmless dog. If one were to take the Monty Python approach, perhaps the bear is a friendly kind animal, and the little dog is a psychotic killing machine, but that undermines the consistency of the imagery in the real world, and prevents the player from making an informed decision! Sure, sometimes upending someone’s expectations can have good results, but you do so at the risk of breaking the mechanics of the game.

For the bear-Chihuahua example, for instance, if you wanted to keep the integrity of the informed decision, you might spatter the little dog in blood, and have scraps of human flesh hanging from its rabid jaws. And the bear might be in a tutu. That way, rather than upending the player’s expectations in a way that’s unexpected and frustrating, players will see that there were clues, they just had to look past their initial gut reaction.

Consequence is pretty straightforward. Something should happen when the decision is made. If you shoot the bear, the Chihuahua comes up and licks your face happily. If you shoot the Chihuahua, the bear eats you. That’s a pretty straightforward reward. It’s immediate, provides clear feedback on the player’s actions, and can be clearly causally linked to what the player did.

The second part of Consequence is the idea of progression. This is a little more nebulous, because it’s more on the dividing line between good games and bad games, rather than games or not games. Sure, you could repeat the same mechanics, over and over and over again. You could, in some bizarre iteration of Halo, have players enter the same room, encounter the same enemies with the same behaviors, and fight them with the same weapons. Over and over again. You could probably make a strong argument that that’s exactly what happened in the Library levels in the middle of Halo 1 - it was still a game, but it wasn’t interesting or fun, and failed to engage people.

Progression really is about keeping people engaged. Games aren’t progressions of an infinite variety of mechanics. Most games - card, real-world, or video - are about a very small set of contained mechanics, repeated over and over again. There’s a discussion to be had here that games are intentionally a smaller subset of all possible interactions, because originally, games were training mechanisms that allowed people to practice small chunks of real world interactions in a relatively safe environment until they were mastered.

But modern games are constrained more by practical considerations - developing an experience based on a limited set of interactions is possible, while developing an infinitely variable set of interactions is not. Most games are a handful of mechanics that evolve over the course of the game. If the game’s about fighting, you fight more or stronger enemies, you learn new techniques, and in addition to building your personal skills, your character grows in skill and magnifies your ability to succeed.
The fact that the game changes over time is really important, because it ensures that the player is constantly surprised, challenged, and that complete mastery takes a long time. Boredom sets in quickly with repetition - without progression, people will lose interest quickly.

The reason that Progression is contained within the definition of a game isn’t because it’s really critical to defining what a game is, but because I have no interest in talking about bad games, and Progression is absolute vital to the next topic, the Core Cycle.

——

So, that was one chapter, more or less. The Core Cycle’s a pretty simple concept. If people are interested, I can post that, as well.

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A new Pre App review site has hit the web, and one of their first targets is Word Ace! It’s a great, super-through writeup! Go check it out, and show the site some love! It’s PreAppTastic!