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

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

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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.

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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.