re: Ebert & “games as art” - forgive me if this is a bit disjointed - I’m trying out a weird argument, one I’ve only thought of in fits and starts in the past.

The critical failing in most of the discussion as to whether games are art or not is that they’re approaching games as though they’re a medium unto themselves. But if you look at games over the course of the last oh, what, four decades, you see a really wide variety of experiences.

You’ve got interactive fiction, MUDs, adventure games, video-based games, FPS’s, strategy games of all kinds, blah blah blah. It’s an incredibly diverse batch of things, and classifying them all as a single medium is a strange argument to make.

Zork is like a choose-your-own adventure book. In many ways, there’s *no* difference between the two, except the density and variety of choices that you’re given. Same goes with things like Night Trap - you could pretty easily make that into a DVD-style thing, where it’s an “interactive movie” and not a game. The only difference, again, is the density and breadth of choices that you’re given.

A while back, I came up with my own personal definition of what a game is:

“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 think there are things about that definition that can be refined - but it’s been a good functional definition for me. Now, let’s take a really, really reductionist look at the definition.

Let’s say a movie is playing on my TV. I watch five minutes of the movie, think it sucks, and then turn it off.

Fits the definition of a game. But is it? Something about it feels wrong. The choice should be rewarded, or incentivized in some way - but it is - I have the free time back that I would have otherwise spent watching the movie.

So if you take that as the absurdly reductionist view of what a game is, then the only difference between a movie and a game is… the density and breadth of possible choices.

You could say the same about a book vs. Zork.

So what is a “game,” then? I’d argue that games aren’t a medium, they’re a *method*. A method for making things more engaging. For creating & rewarding interactivity. Videogames are videogames because the technology makes that process easy, in a relative sense - but you could do the same in a wide variety of ways.

Perhaps there’s something to changing the definition to include computer-mediated interactivity, rather than just any interactivity (though the TV would fill the role of the computer in the above example, right?)…

But in any case, then, you don’t define *methods* as art or not art. You could say that Zork is art as much as any other book, or Gears of War is art as much as any other movie - they just accommodate more choice. And I don’t believe that broadening the level of choice indicates a lapse of authorial control, because clearly, the developers create the level of choice that the player experiences.

So are games art? I suggest it doesn’t even matter. If you think books are art, games are art. If you think movies are art, games are art… and so on, and so on.

With the latest round of updates, we’ve added a handful of new features to the Ace games!

• Leaderboards - curious who’s winning giant piles of chips? Look no further than our in-game leaderboards. Check ‘em out while you’re waiting for the next hand to start, and see where you stand!
• Multi-Rating - You used to be able to give an awesome player a thumbs-up, to let other people know you liked playing with them. That was great, but you only got to say “Good job!” once. Now you can rate players once every hour! So if you like playing with someone, send ‘em as many thumbs-ups as you can!
• Blasts - Now, if you achieve something really difficult - not your usual awards, but crazy-hard things, the whole community will know!

We hope these new features improve the game - we’ve gotten a bunch of feedback on them so far, and will be constantly working to improve them. Have you gotten a chance to check ‘em out? Drop us a line and let us know what you think!

Two days only, 4/16 and 4/17, all chip packages are worth DOUBLE chips! Woo! Go crazy!

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)

Now you can play Card Ace: Blackjack on your webOS phone! Got a Pre or a Pixi? Grab Card Ace: Blackjack - the first multiplayer online blackjack game for the Pre/Pixi!

I’d expound on it more, but it’s free - just go grab it and give it a shot! Play with your friends! Buy ‘em gifts! Try not to bust!

Most of all - have fun!

A fantastic video review of Word Ace, courtesy of preapptastic.com:

Like the video? Go check out their other reviews at http://www.preapptastic.com

So, it’ll take a couple hours for things to propagate through Apple’s servers, but Card Ace: Blackjack is now available on iTunes! It’ll be available shortly (hopefully) on webOS as well!

Card Ace: Blackjack continues the social multiplayer card games that we’ve been building with Word Ace & Card Ace. You can play with up to four other players any time, anywhere!

As with normal Blackjack, you play against the dealer, but with Card Ace, you can hang out and chat with your friends while you play. Mock them for hitting on 18, or gasp in amazement when they actually get the 3 they’re looking for!

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Card Ace: Blackjack - available on the App Store any second now!

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.