design
The 10 Games You Should Have Played
by Ben on Jun.17, 2011, under design
This is a belated response to Brian’s post (which is a response to Adam’s post).I’m going to speak as a designer rather than a gamer, and list some titles which I think teach us something about game design rather than necessarily being the best gaming experiences available. Yet I accept they are biased towards my favourite games, as you might expect.
In no particular order:
1. Football Manager (2005, 2006, etc). This is an almost entirely abstract sports game. Unlike 99.9% of games, it’s mostly text based, so you’re immersed in the same way as when you read a book. The graphics don’t try and depict reality so there is never an opportunity for the visual failings to jolt you out of the experience. Nor is there an explicit narrative – instead, the game has you tells your own story through your experience of the simulation. Apart from the obvious stark reminder that immersion does not necessarily flow from graphical fidelity, it also shows that not all strategy games need to revolve around geography, whether abstract (Chess) or simulated (eg. Command and Conquer). Most strategy games do rely heavily on some sort of positional play or topology so this is an interesting example of breaking free of that pattern.
2. Ultima VII . This is my favourite RPG of all time, and perhaps my favourite game of all time. There’s a large world, rich with detail, exuding a sense of believability that eludes most games today despite almost 20 years of technological advancement. The plot is interesting, the writing good, the lore engrossing. Oblivion is shallow by comparison. But Ultima VII also teaches us things through its mistakes and idiosyncracies: for example, the unusual viewpoint and control system frustrated many from an early stage, as did the click-and-hope combat system which resulted in the unnecessary death of many a companion – yet the latter was refined (to some success) half a decade later in Baldur’s Gate.
3. Thief: The Dark Project. I think a lot about how games do not ‘need’ story, or simulation: but for me this game has a perfect blend of story and simulation on top of the core gameplay. There are several valuable game design lessons that Thief demonstrates: how fuzziness and uncertainty in the AI changes the way a player has to act, how a game can encourage you to attempt to recover from failure instead of reloading, how audio can be an integral part of a game rather than just polish, etc. I think a lot of players don’t like it because it’s hard to get used to the very different type of influence you have on the world compared to other first person games – treating it like a shooter will get you killed. Similarly, the story aspect in Thief is quite hit or miss for a lot of people, anecdotally because they just want to sneak around, not fight zombies. These issues could explain the sales figures being disappointing for such a critically-acclaimed title, and possibly demonstrate the importants of setting your audience’s expectations when pitching a game, because being the best stealth game on the market is no good if all your players are disappointed by it being heavily story-based, and vice versa.
4. Deus Ex. Again, I love the story in this game – and it wouldn’t work without it – but this is essentially a game about making decisions. Most games with a strong narrative don’t let you make any meaningful choices via the gameplay, but this one does. One mission in particular has quite a different purpose depending on a dilemma you face in a previous mission. And many encounters later in the game depend on actions you took earlier on – not just dialogue choices, but actual game actions. Thus the story vs. gameplay issue no longer seems like a zero-sum problem, as it is often portrayed. Sure, Deus Ex doesn’t deliver on the ability to choose as much as it could, especially later in the game, but that’s a churlish complaint given how much more it does than most games. Perhaps then it’s notable more for showing what could be possible than for what it actually did. Who will take this to the next level?
5. Doom (2). Our home PC at the time wasn’t up to playing Doom but when we finally got a 486 (SX, 33MHz. 4MB Ram I think?) I got hold of this sequel to the seminal first person shooter. Back then, it was as if the sort of game we used to dream would be made was finally possible – a world in 3D that you could move through in real time, and plenty of demon-based action to boot. It’s a shame that I don’t think I’ll ever have such a horizon-expanding moment at a computer ever again. But looking back we can still see that the game was more than just its revolutionary graphics: the maps in particular were amazingly crafted, complex despite never using more than 3 door keys, appearing fully 3D despite being essentially limited to 2D with height values, and making the FPSes of today seem trivial. Sadly, this seems to be what the players want, given the strangely common notion of recoiling at the idea of getting lost during what should have been an exploration game. Doom was also one of the last games to have entirely 2D opponents, which allowed you to face a wide range of different-sized encounters. Future games, needing many polygons for each character, had to cut back on the number of foes that could attack you at once, compromising the experience in the process.
6. Diku MUD. MUDs were the first games I played where the world that kept going when I stopped playing, with people from around the world continuing to adventure in my absence. As with Football Manager the immersion comes from the text rather than the graphics (and there was no sound to speak of anyway), and these games showed the first major use of user generated content in conjunction with the internet as a way to efficiently distribute it. All this meant that the pipe-dream of virtual worlds might come true. And yet, while many of the systems still live on – in particular, games like World of Warcraft are still talked about as having DIKU mechanics – much of the potential of early MUDs has gone sadly untapped, as the potential for meeting new people and adventuring with them got shunted aside in favour of providing something akin to a single-player game with the piracy-averting benefits of providing software as a service. Most MMOs today have a distinctly different feel to early MUDs, with few people interacting in a more than cursory manner with people they didn’t already know before joining the game. There are parallels here with the way that the more open Facepartys and MySpaces of the world gave way to the essentially closed system Facebook, where the mass market, rather than enjoying the new freedoms and opportunities available, sought only to interact with existing social circles and fought against any attempt to expand them.
7. Elite. This is another poster-child for procedural generation – how else could you fit 8 galaxies in under 64 kilobytes of memory? On the surface the actual gameplay is quite simplistic – travel from one planet to another, trading goods, and buying new equipment – but the beauty came from the infinite combinations that the content provided so effortlessly. You could always be on the lookout for another planet with more favourable prices either for buying or selling, or perhaps somewhere a little bit less lucrative but with a stronger government and thus less risk of being attacked by space pirates. But while this might have got boring on its own, the well-paced goals such as being able to upgrade your ship in various ways kept you going back. This is evidence that, with the right systems in place, procedurally generated content can be enough to keep a player entertained.
8. Magic: The Gathering. I only have a small amount of experience with the computer game but I played the card game for several years and so will speak about that. MtG demonstrates the way in which a game can be played on several levels: the game itself, where you pit your cards against an opponent’s cards, or the meta game of constructing a deck of cards with which to play your next match, or even the level above that of trading for cards in order to make one or many decks. Few games can boast such depth for their players before they even start the first turn. MtG is also an interesting example because it was one of the first ongoing games where players continued to get stronger as time went on. Although the power curve levels off due to the nature of the game (eg. with larger decks of cards being less predictable, and thus adding a new card inevitably means giving up an old card), there was still a significant amount of power creep, with various cards making older ones completely obsolete, some expansions being deemed overpowered (which is natural, given that underpowered expansions would fail commercially), and so on. The various game types that limit a player to certain expansions perhaps hint at how MMOs could address the elder game aspect, deprecating parts of the game to keep things fresh for those who choose to keep up.
9. Civilization. Sid Meier’s strategy classic perhaps demonstrates best how a game can thrive when there are many well-balanced but ultimately minor mechanics all contributing towards a whole. Most games fixate on a couple of core features, such as choosing a weapon and pointing it, or optimising a few certain stats, but Civilization gave you many different levers to pull and no right answers. Do I build a Granary or a Temple to make the most of this city? Should we study Mathematics to build catapults or Map-Making to build Triremes? Build on the coast to get a port or inland to improve farming prospects? Attack my militaristic neighbour to avoid a future invasion, or save those resources for now in the hope that war never comes? Sid Meier is claimed to have said that “a good game is a series of interesting choices” and Civilization bombards you with small yet interesting choices at every step, making each playthrough different to the last. As with Football Manager, you’re given many variables to tweak, each with consequences, and as a result you form your own narrative through the unique dilemmas that you face.
10. Pen-and-paper tabletop roleplaying. The typical system here is Dungeons and Dragons, although I’d argue that this is perhaps not the best choice. However, the actual system you use is generally irrelevant. The key here is that the game is partly improvised by a human controller in a way that computers are still unable to adequately emulate. Starting with a small amount of source material – eg. a map, a list of non-player characters, and a rough plot outline – the players can choose how to approach the tasks ahead, and the gamesmaster can extrapolate from his or her written content to accommodate the wishes of the players. From there, the players may present even more creative approaches, and the two sides work half collaboratively, half competitively, to create a shared experience for all, without the need for expensive content. As with some of the text based games above, the players are immersed by their imagination rather than by visuals and this is compelling in its own way. This is in stark contrast to how computer games have evolved, generally relying on very detailed content created before the game, with the result being that the game duration is reduced and the player’s scope for choice is also significantly reduced. Arguably this direction is unsustainable as the costs of content creation grow. Either way, it’s surely not an optimal development because we already have great experiences that are short, linear, and involve few choices, known as movies – games should ideally tap into a different type of fun. Can we ever replicate the benefits of pen-and-paper roleplaying on the computer? I think we can, and the project I’m currently working on is one of several steps in that direction, which I hope to talk about in the future.
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The importance of abstraction
by Ben on May.24, 2011, under design
(Long time, no post. I could start by explaining and making excuses, but no – let’s get down to business.)
From the late 90s to the present day, many commercial games have been focused on some sort of realism – graphical photorealism, real-world physics, etc. Certainly when you look at the man-hours spent on most game software you’ll see far more of it invested in features that further the simulation aspects: eg. the creation of life-like environments and characters, and life-like movement of the characters through that environment. The game is almost a token gesture on top, usually just a set of simple goals with a basic scoring system to provide some sort of obvious incentive to chase those goals.
Gamification is a common buzzword these days, typically referring to how businesses can benefit from making interactions with their products more game-like, and so they have looked to the games industry for pointers on this. The interesting thing is that the assumption has been that this would be about seeing how games are made and then extracting game-like properties from them, but in fact it might be more accurate to say that what we call games developers have really just been ‘gamifying’ themselves in the first place: rather than making games with simulation aspects, they are often in the business of writing simulations with a healthy dose of gamification.
We know that a ‘game’ does not have to involve simulation at all – there are plenty of definitions on Wikipedia, each differing, but none implying that a game intrinsically has to model the real or a fictitious world in any way. So why has the games industry adopted this position of writing playable simulations? I think there are a mixture of reasons for this, some good, some bad. I’ll return to the good reasons in a future blog entry, but for now I’m more interested in the bad reasons, which I feel have taken precedence and given us an entire industry of games that aren’t really games any more.
Firstly, many players – and, it would seem, game publishers and some developers – seem to feel that a game can’t be enjoyed unless it reaches some sort of contemporary presentational standard. To many people, good graphics makes a good game. To be fair, a lot of players do have trouble enjoying older games and some modern independent games because they find the graphics primitive and distracting. But I would argue this is mostly cultural: we’ve been sold the mantra of “better looking games are better games” because it helps sell new hardware and software, and I think in part we’ve bought that line because there is a truth to it – newer games do play better, for most people. But this is arguably because improvements in game design have run in parallel with improvements in game technology, and we mistake correlation for causation. The design improvements we’ve seen over the years can apply equally or more so to games that don’t look as realistic as many modern ones do, and thankfully some indie developers are showing us just that.
There’s also an argument regarding the interface, that worse graphics make a game’s visuals harder to understand, and to a degree that does hold true, but it’s hard to argue that even games 15 years old looked so bad that you couldn’t adequately work out what was going on. Children can enjoy blocky graphics and unrealistic iconic representations so I don’t find the interface argument compelling.
Secondly, I think many developers actively want to make things more real. Partly this is because game development is often driven by programmers who are interested primarily in technology and who like to push that technology in new ways. Perhaps the majority of coders I’ve known fall at one extreme or other of an interesting dichotomy – they either want to write interesting features themselves from the bottom up, or they want to play with 3rd party software and libraries to implement those features quickly. But either way they are playing their own ‘development game’ which is more about the technology’s intrinsic properties and not so much about what the technology is to be used for. Programmers get bogged down in optimising code that already runs fast enough or switching to a new and shinier 3D engine because those challenges are often more interesting to them than shipping a finished game. Perhaps that’s why they’re programmers and not managers!
However I think the other side of the coin is that most programmers – and, I would sadly argue, designers too – don’t really know how to improve the abstract thing that is ‘game play’. There are many who’d love to create better stories, emotions, AI, and so on, but don’t have the knowledge or skills to do so, which means they resort to making the improvements in areas they do understand. You can throw more polygons at a 3D mesh to make it look better, but you can’t just throw more materials at a rock/paper/scissors conflict model and expect to magically have a better game. You can make a game run more smoothly or make it more colourful-looking or write one of those amazing everything-is-brown-or-grey-so-it-must-be-a-gritty-game shaders because these are techniques we know about (and saw at SIGGRAPH 15 years ago), but there isn’t much resembling a science for designing the abstract game features, or at least not one that is well-known and accepted. Even some of the better-known designers such as Daniel Cook and Raph Koster seem to consider their work to be more about casting an enlightened eye over trial-and-error, relying on play-testers to tell them what is fun. While nobody would seriously argue that you don’t need some sort of play-testing – just like graphics programming requires the programmer to actually look at what is being rendered – it seems a bit defeatist to assume that it’s not theoretically possible for a knowledgeable enough designer to be able to create a compelling game experience without needing to have others try it first. In particular I can’t agree with the suggestion that emotions, experiences, and personality in games “cannot be systematically engineered no matter how many design articles anyone reads“. I can’t imagine making such a claim about film, or books. It seems even more invalid for games, where the player is a participant: so if we’re not there yet, we just have more work to do, more knowledge to acquire.
I think we can get back on the right path to that by returning to those older and purer games, the ones from decades ago that delivered interesting gameplay to us long before they could attempt to deliver a world that looked like our own, when all the graphics and sounds were necessarily iconic and symbolic. Rather than trying to look and act like real life, they attempted to capture the essence of what games had previously been – sets of abstract rules, represented somewhat arbitrarily, but in such a way that they could be played with. Chess, poker, soccer, Scrabble, all involve real humans in the real world but who are acting on artificial tokens and according to artificial rules. The contests may be played out physically or mentally, numerically, linguistically, or spatially, but essentially they’re all abstract.
This should immediately show us that moving away from simulation is not just about picking a different aesthetic for your game’s visuals as a replacement for photorealism, but about realising that a game does not have to attempt to directly model or simulate any aspect of real or imagined life to be an enjoyable activity. It should instead be sufficient to create some representation of it that lends itself readily to interesting play. Minecraft’s world of blocks is not just a graphical simplification, nor even just an aesthetic choice, but is an abstract representation of the world, simplified to make it easier to reason about and to build with.
We can go further, and say that this creative use of abstraction isn’t limited to symbolising the physics of the world (where physics in this context includes the visible and audible aspects), but can symbolise the interactions within it – the narratives, the emotions, the events. For example, look at combat in a game like Oblivion, where the game simulates a continuous 3D space in which fighting and exploring are seamlessly interwoven, just as in real life. Unfortunately, the limitations of the artificial intelligence means that most fights can be won simply by jumping onto a ledge and shooting your hapless assailant from above. Compare this with the approach taken in the Final Fantasy series (or, of course, any number of traditional CRPGs and JRPGs) which switch to an explicit combat mode, mostly isolated from the main world, with completely different actions and constraints to create a more compelling tactical experience. The part of me that loves exploring an open and consistent world much prefers the former, but there’s no denying that the gameplay is simply better in the latter. Oblivion prioritised the simulation over the game, meaning the simulation flaws become game flaws, revealing the ‘uncanny valley’ in interactive form. Final Fantasy tells you that combat in this world is resolved in a separate space, and once you accept that, you can enjoy the rest of the game undistracted. In such a way, the more abstract form can paradoxically be the more immersive one, because it immediately tells you to engage in suspension of disbelief. You enter the experience already accepting the unrealistic elements – a realism ‘sunk cost’ of sorts – and thus they don’t detract from the game.
Similarly, when a similar phenomenon to the Oblivion problem occurs in Minecraft, eg. a monster being stuck below you while you shoot it, the experience seems less jarring. Minecraft doesn’t try as hard to pretend that it’s a real world and so your immersion isn’t as readily broken by such a problem. Embracing abstraction buys you that extra suspension of disbelief. No-one minds that Chess queens are more powerful than history would suggest. And nobody complains that Monopoly is unrealistic because of the lack of cities built in a square ring.
Combat encounters are just one example. While Oblivion’s fighting attempts to be simulatory, its conversation mini-game is purely abstract and could have worked well had more effort been put into it. Research in RTS and 4X games is often handled with a very abstract interface, for reasons of necessity, but there is surely scope for interesting choices to be made at that level. And obviously some games are almost entirely based on abstract models, such as turn-based strategy games such as Civilization or management games like Transport Tycoon or Football Manager. On the surface they are still simulating something, but in simplified and discrete terms that can be easily reasoned about, both for the designer and for the player.
Other art forms, possibly because they have intrinsic limitations that can’t be solved with better hardware, have long since stopped worrying about trying to make the media more realistic. Painters and sculptors happily create works that are symbolic representations or even caricatures of what they are depicting, rather than just trying to be scale models. Writers commit entire stories to ink printed upon thin slices of wood without worrying that the reader can only possibly enjoy this story if they see it visually and audibly, because we know readers can see beyond the fact that they’re staring at text and allow their imaginations to create the world for them. Are game players not capable of that? Or perhaps we as game developers just don’t have as much respect for our players as other artists have for their audience?
For too long computer games have tried to be interactive films, acting as if we have to simulate some sort of realistic space in order for the game to be fun. I’d argue it’s time to get back in touch with the origins of games and embrace the make-believe and abstract aspects that embody what is unique to games, the ability to play with a set of rules and explore the interactions between them. By weaning players off the ‘playable Hollywood’ model and back onto a purer sense of ‘computerised games’ we can both broaden the appeal of games and garner more respect for the medium.
