About that great idea you have .....

I work with a lot of gamers. Literally hundreds of gamers, most of which have dreams of making it big in the industry. Many, if not most, of these young wide eyed gamers want to be game designers. This interests me greatly. I ask them why they want to be a designer, or what their opinions on design elements are, and the majority of them don't have concrete answers. The most common response is "I love games", or "I have great ideas".  This leads me to believe that they don't fully understand the role of a designer, or that they haven't thoroughly researched the position. This is understandable to a degree, the term "designer" has taken on hundreds of definitions and no two design roles are identical.

Further dialogue with these potential designers yields the comment "I can't draw and don't know how to program, but I can totally be a designer!" as if design is the easy job to fall into. Or they have "A great idea", and are convinced that their vision is going to revolutionize gaming. Noble as their intentions are, I believe this approach in mindset is flawed at best. Design, like any other area of study, requires and iterative mindset. We have to learn to crawl before we can run. With this in mind, I urge all of you aspiring designers out there to pull away from making the next revolution in design. Spend some time playing old games and dissecting their design. What works? What doesn't? It's just as important to understand the failures of previous work than the successes. While few things in life are guarantees, I can tell you that your vision of "the next big thing" will fail miserably if you don't understand the basic principals of game design.

Gaming is a huge industry, there are literally millions of people out there playing games. Most of which have some idea of what they like, and what could be better. Yet very few of them take the time to understand exactly what elements failed in a game, or what succeeded. Anyone can say "I like this" but can you fully articulate what you liked, why it was successful, and how you could improve that success further? Then do the same with what you didn't like and discuss those failures? Being and effective game designer requires a keen eye for detail, and empathetic mind that understands the "what, why, and how" of gamers. It also requires a huge amount of collaboration, get the idea of being the sole designer out of your head asap. Even the big famous designers would be liars if they took all the credit for themselves.

Most of the aspiring designers out there, if ever given the shot, will make it into the industry in an entry-level position or with a smaller company. In these positions it's a far more effective use of your time to design strong and effective elements, than to design new ideas with a high risk. There are many lead designers out there who have a proven record of success, let them be the vision, and you be the student. Work with your teams and other designers to learn from their experience. This concept sounds dull to many I'm sure, but the Sistine chapel wasn't Michelangelo's first painting.

I'm not trying to invalidate anyone's ideas or concepts. Keep a journal of these things, a good idea never expires. But let's be realistic about the industry. It's not likely that anyone will get a job as a designer and be told to make their own ideas and concepts off the bat. Stay grounded, start with the foundations, and be the best at what you do. Work your way to the top then bust out that journal you've been keeping over the years. Once you're at the top of the totem pole, you'll have the tools, the content, and the team to make the vision reality.

That idea may make a great game, and is a wonderful dream to keep someone sated. But the idea doesn't make you a great designer. While the experience and the act of working towards that dream can.

Motivating Design

After spending some time on TED.com I've been intrigued by the concepts and ideas of defining human motivation.

This video in particular by Dan Pink (embedded below, go watch it now.) he talks about motivation and how to get the most of your employees. In addition to being an excellent speaker, the topics he covers are very interesting to me and relate to game design.



He introduces The Candle Problem developed by Carl Duncker and the concept of Functual Fixedness, then introduces an incentive into the equation. The results are not what most people would expect. They found that when giving people a problem requiring creative thinking, any form of incentive produced negative results. Compared to the positive results of the same problem without incentives. While performance based on non-creative problems, incentives work great. This boils down to extrinsic motivators vs intrinsic motivators and their relations to creative vs routine work. The simple conclusion of the video and the experiments is that rewards narrows focus.

While the study, topic, or intent has nothing to do with gaming directly. I feel that the concepts can be applied, especially in the MMO world. Anytime a problem or a path is set in front of a player we, as designers, are asking them to provide us with a solution. We've given them the problem and we are asking them to resolve it. By no means is a player forced to resolve anything. It's a video game, the player can turn it off at any time, they have the option of just getting up and walking away. Of course, we don't want that. We want players to rise to the challenge and to enjoy the process, such is the art of design.

Now, with the perspective that we are giving the players problems to resolve, we have to next look into how we are going to incentivize the resolutions, which ties back into the statement on motivation. Many of the problems we assign to players are so minor that we often don't even realize we are asking something of them, or they don't realize that they are being given a choice. This is wonderful in most situations, as the purpose of a game isn't to 'bog us down with choices' but to 'enjoy an experience'. In order to help players to enjoy their experience, we need to correctly identify their motivations and try to mold those and control them into the desired pace and purpose.

Extrinsic motivation is the easy part. Taking in the lessons from Dan Pink, this type of motivation can actually increase results when it comes to non-creative problem solving. "Shoot the clown 100 times and get a reward" would be an example where an extrinsic motivator would give us drastically better results. This can be seen with grinding in the MMO world. With these mindless repetative tasks, giving us "shinies!" is an easy solution.

Intrinsic motivation, on the other hand, is much more difficult. Luckily, Mr. Pink again gives us some information that help us to build and nurture intrinsic motivation. He briefly touches on the topics of Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose, as the three pillars of intrinsic motivation. In order to fully understand this, we're going to have to look at each one of these individually.

We'll start with Autonomy. This can be defined as being independent or self-governed, using the straight dictionary definition, anyone can argue that as a person they are Autonomous. Within the world of games though, characters are often designed to NOT be autonomous. This seems logical, as the social dynamic is one of the key draws to an MMO environment. So in the gaming world (or at least the MMO world) the question becomes "How do we build autonomy and still require social interaction?" The answer here is accountability. Even in a group, each character has to feel attached to their own roles. They have to feel autonomous within that role. I have to know that, as a healer, these are my responsibilities and I am accountable for those. Every person needs to feel that they are in charge of their own situation at all times. I have to know that I am capable of completing my task, and that every single tool needed is provided for me. Autonomy is one of the easier pillars to design for. Why? Because the game is typically designed around this without people actually thinking about it. Would you design a mechanic into a game that was impossible for a player? Surely not. The simple desire to not punish our players forces us to design with Autonomy in mind.

Pillar number two is Mastery. The ability to have expert knowledge or skill at your chose task. My peers have argued that the ability to achieve mastery is always present to all players and is something that's to be left fully in the players' hands and not something that we should design for. I disagree. I think that players should always feel that they have the tools and information to obtain mastery available to them. Due to be constantly surrounded by hardcore gamers (and being somewhat hardcore myself) the idea of going to a website for strategies or spreadsheets doesn't seem odd at all. While it's wonderful that the community has banded together to provide these resources to itself, it also limits these resources to a small number of players. In order to provide players a path to mastery, we have to give players access to information and a way to use that information. Practice makes perfect, we've all heard the age old saying, and it rings true now as much as ever. Players have to be given a way to practice, a way to develop mastery without breaking the immersion or flooding over into the real world. We have to facilitate and nurture growth if we ever want a player to obtain mastery. Information + implementation = mastery. You see a lot of this in fighting games, with full moves lists, practice modes, and challenges, all of which are designed to give players an avenue to explore and achieve mastery. While we can't force everyone to explore this route, more players will if the path is right there in front of them, rather than them having to go out and seek the path out first.

Purpose, the third pillar. Here's the kicker. A sense of purpose is often times a motivator on it's own. Purpose is the reason you are doing what you are doing. In games, this can be the story, the group, the raid, anything that connects us to something larger than our lonesome. Games have tried everything in the book to attach with the player, to give them a feeling of purpose. This is also such a unique niche from person to person. If you actually break it down, it seems a herculean task. How can I make a person really connect with pixels? This is heavily dependent on the audience you are appealing to. People who play fighting games religously probably don't need a lot of story to get them into the game. These players feed on competition, their purpose IS the mastery and using that mastery to triumph over another player. Compare this to your typical action adventure gamers, these players are often interested in the story itself. They want a main character that they can relate to, someone that they can see some semblance of themselves in. Taking this character (that they relate to) and going on fantastic adventures and completing impossible tasks gives them a sense of purpose because they feel intimately attached to their characters. Next we see social gamers. The people who play because all of their friends play. These people need to have the tools available to them to allow them to really connect with other players and to get their "social fix" from the game. Of course, the world isn't limited to these three classifications of players, what's important here is that we define who we are designing for, then we can flesh out the purpose and design with that in mind. If the purpose is meaningful to your players, they will embrace it lovingly.

Perseverance

I just want to share a link to a short story today : http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/522/entrylevel_video_game_.php

It's the story of an amateur designer who landed a design job right out of college. There's some good advice on page 3 for anyone who's interested in pursuing Game Design.

Perseverance is key.

Nash Equilibrium and the art of Yomi

I've been playing a lot of Fighting Games lately. See we have a Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter cabinet at work. A few people who work on my team here have been into this game for awhile and pushing me to try it out. Being a good gamer, I of course wanted to experience this game that I've never played before. This game isn't new, nor revolutionary by an means. It simply addresses the issues with previous games, and makes things a bit more flashy. It's an iterative game without a doubt, but it's a solid fighter and a good amount of fun to play with co-workers when you get a break. This progresses for a couple weeks of casual and fun play and me losing every single match against these Street Fighter adepts.

After a few weeks of playing, I decide that I'm tired of losing and that I'm going to start playing the game a bit more seriously. Of course, my muscle memory improved, and execution becomes easier and easier with practice. And things just started to make more sense. After a couple of months playing the same characters, with the same people, we've started to see the effects of a building Nash Equilibrium within our world of constants. (I say "starting to see the effects of", because the true act of achieving this equilibrium across the board at a single game could take years) Now, this is a very loose definition, technically, if we really wanted to get into it, we could say that choosing the same character every time was destroying the equilibrium, thus we are actually worlds away from it. While that could be a compelling argument and a great topic to converse on, it would draw this post out far, far too long to keep anyone's attention. (I fear it's already far, far too long as is)

Back on point! What the heck is Nash Equilibrium? Put as simply as I can, Nash Equilibrium is the state at which all parties involved are making the best possible choices, while taking into account the other players simultaneous decisions. It's when you know your opponent/teammate so well, that you know exactly what they are going to do. And they know what you are going to do. It's that level of teamwork you see that causes cooperative players to work together in perfect harmony without a peep to one another, or the two world champion tournament fighters who don't dare get overly aggressive because they know exactly what tricks the opponent has up their sleeves. When any two people are playing on the exact same level because they know the level of the opponent, the equilibrium kicks in. 

With competitive games like Fighters, the equilibrium is the factor that makes these matches less appealing to audiences. If you've ever seen any fighting game tournament footage, you've undoubtedly seen the "projectile fights" that happen. While these encounters aren't thrilling for the audience, being in that position knowing what you've got, and what they've got can be pretty tense. The equilibrium doesn't allow you to get flashy or risky, it keeps you grounded, safe, and smart. These concepts are something that need to be taken heavily into account when pursuing any form of competitive design. (Ha, you didn't think I'd loop this back into design huh?)

So how does this factor into other games? Let's take WoW for example (surprise!) Are players in these situations making decisions based on what other players are doing? Of course they are. Anywhere that decisions affect other people, and their decisions affect you, there's potential for this equilibrium to be achieved. These concepts can work in both directions, competitive play, and cooperative play. 

Keeping the equilibrium in minds, a major factor to consider in design is randomness. Developing a level of equilibrium when every ability has random properties can be very difficult. This effectively blows out the number of possible scenarios and makes attempting to predict what's next, and operate within those constraints, infinitely more difficult. This is designing against the equilibrium. But is this a better option than designing for the equilibrium? 

Depending on the type of play you are going for, these seemingly minor choice can result in major impact on the players. Let's look at cooperative play, it can be advantageous for a designer to favor and work towards players obtaining equilibrium. The simplest face value method of facilitating this is through total transparency of information. A player can't learn to work in harmony with others if one doesn't know what the other people are doing. You can see this first hand with the modding community in WoW. There are countless mods out there that help you keep dibs on what everyone is doing, especially in how it pertains to your specific role. Take damage meters for example, one of the most commonly used mods in the game. At surface value, this mod is simply a ranking system where people can say "Oh, I'm number 1". Moving beyond "damage done" functionality, this mod can help to create the equilibrium by giving players full disclosure about your fellow raiders. I know that I don't need to worry about debuff X because Player B always keeps it applied. This allows me to intelligently make a decision based Player B's decisions, thus letting me do more to maximize my role, and in turn help the whole; thus moving one step closer to equilibrium. Once each player is at the same level of equilibrium the group gains the ability to function simultaneously as a group and as an individual. Each and every player in an effective group must be fully and wholly confident in each and every member of the group. This equilibrium needs to be achievement to ensure consistent and effective victory. "He will win whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout all its ranks. " ~Sun Tzu - The Art of War.

Working against the equilibrium in cooperative play is, put simply, making it harder to work together. This is very rarely a favorable option, and is typically frustrating for players. Think about running a dungeon in WoW with a group, and not being able to see anyone else's heath/mana bars. Eventually, people would learn to operate within the bounds of the game. It would require massive amounts of practice, but in time people would develop "a feel" for how hard certain bosses hit, and they would learn to watch the game more intently to keep track of what's going on so they can react. This would drastically slow down Nash, but would it make the game more enjoyable? Would it make better players? Would players want to play it? I doubt all three of those questions. I think playing too heavily against Nash in cooperative play will result in player frustration, and a learning curve far too high for people to tolerate. Of course, I'm speaking in an MMO capacity. As there are many different types of games, fighting Nash could result in beautiful play in different genres.  

Now let's look at competitive play. In competitive play, I feel like this equilibrium can have a drastic effect on the fun and the "skill based nature" of these situations. The second one player fully understands another player, and is able to figure them out, the competition against the system is gone, leaving nothing but pure competition between two people. If I know exactly what you are capable of doing, then I have full ability to challenge that correctly. Providing you know the same amount of information about me, the equilibrium is in affect. While knowing the capabilities is great, know exactly what I will pick is called "Yomi" (The ability to predict, correctly, what an opponent will do). These two concepts work very heavily in tandem to produce a very high level of competitive play. It's much like chess, players are often told to "think 3 steps ahead." Looking at past chess champions, it's quite common to hear of players doing seemingly random or crazy moves just to throw their opponent off. To shatter the opponents yomi and keep their dominance on the other player. Once players are no longer playing against the system in any way, they enter equilibrium and yomi becomes the name of the game.

This is often addressed during game development by including a level of randomness into abilities/encounters/etc. Randomness allows player to prepare for some situations, but not all. Turning your Equilibrium into a branching tree of options, rather than a linear path. While Yomi comes heavily in to play in these situations, any unpredictable behaviour makes achiving equilibrium with your opponent infinitely more difficult. Things with "sometimes" or "occasionally" affects to them force players to keep guessing, rather than calculating. The objective here is to continually reset the equilibrium, thus not allowing play to get too predictable. This, of course, can be argued that play itself should be *totally* predictable and that the responsibility of maintaining or modifying the equilibrium is up to the players involved.

This ties back into the original question concerning competitive play. Do we design for or against Nash in these types of play? I feel it hinges heavily on your goal of competetive play. Is your goal to really give the players a medium where they are evenly matched and the game itself is simply a vessel to allow two players to engage in civil combat? Then you want to design for Nash and allow the players to play each other un-hindered in an environment free of randomness or unpredictable behavior. Or do you want players to be allowed to compete, but still be playing against the game simultaneously? Depending on the scenario, it must be defined if the players are playing against eachoter, or if they are simultaneously playing against the game as well.

Despite which type of play experience you are attempting to create, it's something to keep in mind. I think the art of it all is in defining what type of play are you really interested in creating. Both cooperative and competitive play can work for or against the equilibrium. Total transparency of play allows the player to build their equilibrium by careful observation and study of others, be it opponents or team mates. Inversely, the shrouding of information, can hinder the development of the equilibrium.

Is this sad?

I have a full time job at a game company. As well as a Bachelors Degree in Game Design.

Is it sad that I just thought about going back to school part time *SOLELY* so I could have a shot at getting a design internship at Blizzard?

Ebb and Flow

Anyone who knows me, knows that my passions are in encounter design. Anyone who's had one, just one, white knuckle moment while playing a game knows exactly what I'm talking about. That rush, where you can feel your blood pulsing through your body, you're so tense as you approach that kill with your army of friends behind you. It's pretty incredible, it's a similar rush to what athletes experience, only with way less effort. I want to be able to deliver that moment to people, even if I can only do it once. Knowing that I was able to give that experience to other people is a feeling I can't describe.

This is, unfortunately, not something that designers can deliver with every encounter in the game. Let's be realistic, if every single moment of a game put you on the edge of your seat, it wouldn't take long before that became stale, and you needed to one up that to scoot back forward on your seat. There are games that have done great jobs of putting players on the edge of their seat a lot, but you simply can't do it all the time. Shadow of the colossus comes to mind. The encounters in that game were epic. Really Epic. But a huge part of the game was spent just running around. It's a very karmic concept, that if you make the whole experience intense, it ceases to be intense and becomes the norm. So how can we control these situations for our consumers? How can we keep the highs really high, but keep the lows still high enough that they don't hurt the game?

Controlling the pacing is something that I feel many designers overlook. While it's important to view the whole package as one large event, you've got to make sure that each of those events are meaningful. You can't have a low point, if there's no reason to have a low point. Of course, the inverse is also true. I see so many games that market to the high adrenaline craziness fall flat on their faces for exactly this reason. Sure racing at a billion miles per hour in space is awesome at first, but after doing that for 3 hours, it gets kind of old. If your selling a game with that alone, expect only people with severe ADD and Alzheimers to enjoy it.

There's even further reasoning behind this logic. Player fatigue is a real thing that happens. Games take effort to play. I'm not saying that it's equivalent to playing sports, but effort is exerted none the less. If you pack your game with too many challenging puzzles, players will get tired of them. If everything in the game goes a mile a minute, players will get tired of that. It's a fine line to tread between boredom and frustration. You can peak and dip into each of those categories lightly (slow times dip into boredom, and high moments peak into frustration), but you can't allow your game to spend long enough in either area that a player is overwhelmed by that feeling.

You've got to balance it. We've got to inject meaning into those 'low points' so that they turn from low points, into 'less-exciting but meaningful points'. People are happy with low impact, low adrenaline moments providing they are working towards something bigger. This is something you see a lot of in console rpgs. How many times have you gone back and intentionally spent time leveling up and went back to the easy, light play of overworld creatures, just so you'd be prepared for that next boss? Or Gran Turismo, how much time have you spent in the garage tweaking your engine for that perfect race? How much time have you spent farming money to buy that epic mount?

Slow gameplay isn't bad, as long as it's meaningful. In fact, I feel that the slow gameplay is equally important as the big epic moments. It's the build up, it's the act of working towards something bigger and better. While that culmination of effort is an incredible feeling, all the time spent farming is where personal connections flourish. Who would have cared that Aerith died if you didn't have the past 20 hours of play getting to know her? Would that victory over Ragnaros really mean as much if you didn't spent oodles of time gearing up for it? How epic would you feel killing arthas if anyone who just hit 80 can prance in there and take him out?

It's gotta make sense!

So today, I was leveling yet another character in World of Warcraft. If you haven't leveled a second or even a third character, I advise you do. If you go through it and pay attention to what's going on around you, it's incredible. You can visibly see the improvement and growth of the designers through the game. Go through it again, look at the characters. Look at the gear, the monsters, the environments, the quests, anything and everything. Then compare that to the content we are being delivered now, it's really night and day.

With early vanilla wow, it feels somewhat haphazard. A lot of the what you see only makes sense because, well, because it is. The quests lines don't exactly feel like they are all tying into something bigger, the monster abilities are fairly similar across the board and the zones themselves feel very repetitive. I remember going from westfall to red ridge and feeling like I was in the same place. This makes sense if you take into account the real world as a whole, places that are adjacent to each other are likely going to be fairly similar. But that doesn't make for thrilling gameplay. Same thing goes with Thousand needles into Tanaris, it just felt like going from one desert to the other, then you get a nice break in un'goro and back to the desert in silithus. Even into the raid game, why are we killing this big ass fire demon guy? oh yeah, cause he's a big fire guy with purples in his pockets. Roger.

Luckily, blizzard is ever growning. You can see that things become more and more sensible as vanilla progresses. The opening of the gates of Ahn'Qiraj were incredible. I remember farming non-stop as a deputy for my guildie to open that gate. And when we did, I felt like a million bucks. I knew what I was doing, and why I was doing it. I think this is why I remember that as my most fond moments in vanilla wow. Once naxxramas loomed over Easter plaguelands, everyone in the world knew exactly why the argent dawn was ramping up. We didn't all know why Naxxramas was there, but we knew that we were fighting against it. This is the feeling that we didn't get from Molten Core or from Blackwing lair.

Then came outlands. A huge jump in the quality of zones here. Outlands really was fresh and new from Azeroth. Being that it's a completely new planet, the designers are freed from the shackles of the old world. I remember the first time I saw Netherstorm, I was blown away. Outlands succeeded wildly in the feeling of fresh and invigorating visuals, the zones were all very unique, from the landscapes to the creatures to the abilities they used. Each zone felt like a self contained world of their own. This also led to, what I feel is, the failure of the story.

I'm a big fan of story, I want to feel like what I'm doing, I'm doing for a reason. I want my work to be moving me forward to something bigger, something more meaningful. Outlands didn't feel this way at all to me. Late shadowmoon valley started to push in the right direction, but only took you part way. Again, the raid game brought something together, but also pulled a few apart. I don't know anyone who could tell me why we were storming karazhan. Or why gruul had to be killed, other than he's a big ass guy with purples in his pocket. Black temple moved into the right direction, with the intertwining storylines with shadowmoon valley, but it didn't get good until Quel'Danas. There were some wonderful strides with the introduction of Isle of Quel'Danas, of course, it was a small island that was covered almost fully by the raid instance. Though I never felt like there was any question as to why we were here, why we were doing the quests to break into sunwell, it just seemed to make sense there. Overall though, I didn't feel like there was a sense of a larger purpose in outlands. Yeah, we're killing the burning legion, cause they are bad. OK?

Finally, we get to northrend. From the moment you step off the boat, you know where this is going. Arthas. I love the northrend questing model. You get intimately involved with arthas from the get-go. I don't recall ever asking "why am i doing this" in northrend. I knew that I was doing this, to get closer to arthas. I was helping out the red dragonflight cause malygos went crazy. I always felt like I had a sense of direction, and a sense of reason. Even most of the monsters made sense, Vrykul are under arthas control, and theres no question with any undead. Even look at Scholozar, the reason WHY is clear as day in this zone. Why? because arthas' army is coming over the damn mountain! I think this feeling stems in large as to the feeling that we are not the aggressors in Northrend. In vanilla, i felt like I was attacking other people to take their stuff, no other reason. In Northrend, I feel like my hand is very much forced. Arthas is stirring up the pot, we are trying to save it. This contributes heavily to my understanding of the story, what's going on, and why I'm doing it.

Of course, even northrend isn't perfect. There were a few moments here and there where I had to ask some questions. Mostly with the npcs. Do you remember the "raven lords"? What the hell are these? Have you seen any ravens in northrend? I don't understand these mobs, they make no sense to me. Apparently, there's tons of ravens in northrend, they are just all under the control of shadow priests. Or the Brunhildar area. I thought this area was initially cool, then on my second play through I said "So... there's a village full of chicks.. and they never leave the village.. None over here, none over there, all right in this one spot!" I don't know about you, but I don't know any woman who would be ok with that.

Of course, one could argue that I'm getting into a "nitpicky" area here. But isn't that the idea? I'm not saying that Northrend, and wrath as a whole isn't incredible. What I'm saying is that if I had these thoughts, then someone else did too. The state of the MMO has come so far, and blizzard has set the bar so high, that I can't wait to see what's next! If cataclysm has half of the improvements in design, story telling, npcs, and features that the previous expansion have had, then we are in for a real treat.

I for one, can't freakin wait for it.

*edit: So a few friends mentioned to me that they felt like this was a 'bashing on wow' post, I didn't intend for that. This simply supposed to be my observations from going through the multiple expansions. Jeesh, don't be so touchy, I bet the devs look back at their work and say "wow, wtf man. We can do so much better."