The power of choice

Being surrounded by hardcore gamers for 50ish hours a week is an interesting situation to be in. As someone who fancies design, this is a great asset to help shape my design perspective. Having this sort of direct path to gamer feedback from hundreds of simultaneous perspectives affords me opportunities to simply listen, compute, and learn. A common theme I've been hearing a lot lately, is that people want choices. Nobody wants to be mindlessly dragged along through a story while playing a game. If they did, they would go watch a movie.

This is one of the primary differences between modern games and movies. A player's interactivity with the narrative being told. I'm not saying that there aren't loads of amazing lessons we can learn from movies, I'm saying that in a gaming environment people don't just want to be told something, they want to be involved with it.

This statement doesn't necessarily mean that every game should have multiple endings or branching dialogue choices. It can be as simple a difficult encounter. If the player fails this encounter, the story ends in defeat. Here, the player had a choice, how to handle and interact with the encounter, and the story was changed based on their direct control. However, with save points and the ability to resume the story, this choice has minimal impact. The choice is there, but the choice has nearly no impact or meaning. While this is better than the zombie effect of mindlessly going through the motions, there are better solutions

When a choice carries with it the weight of meaning, it can do wonders to help engage a player. If a player knows that the decisions they are about to make has a genuine impact on the world, they now have the power to control the narrative.

While meaningful choice is good for engaging our players, overdoing it can be terribly taxing on a player. Think about playing a game where every single choice you made has the potential of locking you out of later content. It would be possible for players to back themselves so deeply into a corner, and exhaust all of your options, leaving you with a premature end to your journey. While this could appeal to some players, it would not be appetizing for general consumption.

So what do we do? This is one of those situations where the answer is something I hate to say out loud; it almost makes me feel dirty. But the simple truth is: we lie. We give the players perceived choice, an illusion that their choice is really important, but don't allow them to stray so far off the path that the narrative is damaged. We convince our players that the choice they are making really has weight, that it's important. Thus allows us to get our players mentally engaged and really feel that they are in control of their world. In reality, we've made sure that they are never outside of the safety of our nets.

Let's look at WoW (you knew it was going to happen.)  WoW gives players a huge number of choices to make at any given moment. It's an MMO, and there are hundreds of options open to every player at any time.  You can go do quests, you can go pvp, you can do a 5 man, you can raid, you can go farm, you can hang out and be social, etc, etc.  The actual number of choices available in WoW is staggering.  The question with WoW is: are these choices meaningful?

Choice beyond what to do with your time seems to have nary an impact on the world.  Probably the most meaningful choices within the game are made during character creation, during the distribution of talent points, and with the selection choices of gear, enchants and gems.  Sadly, the community itself has stripped much meaning from these talent build and gear choices, giving players the "one and only option" for optimal performance.  While I do believe WoW has some meaningful choices in its gameplay, I don't think it's enough. 

So where can we inject some choices into WoW, even if they are only perceived?  Looking at Cataclysm, it seems that this is the track the developers are on.  We've seen a number of posts on the forums where the designers really want to give players options, specifically with gearing, where there is no "one true answer", but multiple answers that yield equal but different results.  With the overhaul of the stats system and the ability to re-forge armor, I think they are on the right path here.

I can only hope that we see a continuation on this path as more information about the future of WoW is released. Quests would be a natural and logical place to include some player driven narrative. Why must I kill that quest NPC to complete this quest?  Why can't I hire a mercenary to do it for me, or slip some poison into his drink?  Where are my choices on how to tackle this objective?  I don't feel that every single quest should have multiple solutions for victory, but giving me a choice once in a while would be a welcome addition.  This is especially pertinent to those of us who have multiple high level characters and more gold than we know what to do with. I could opt to rush in weapons flying for my first play though, then pick the stealthier option my second time around. The third time through, I could go for one of the methods I'm familiar with, or simply drop coin to get the job done. Regardless of how, the quest got completed, and I had a real choice.

I'd also like to see some choice injected into group play and raiding.  By now, many of us have seen the Plagueworks in Icecrown Citadel.  Here is a perfect example to add some spice to a player's raiding experience. 

En route to the final boss of the wing, players are presented with two bosses to kill.  Both are required to open the door to the final boss of that wing.  I'd like to see a meaningful choice here where the raid group is given the option to kill only one of the bosses.  Y our choice would change a mechanic on the final boss.  Let's say that killing the Slime Boss causes the final boss not to spawn slimes.  Alternately, killing the Plague Boss causes the final boss not to drop plague on the ground.  Thus each raid to make a meaningful choice that exercises some control over the obstacles in their path. As the raid leader, I know my raid isn't the best at movement, and so we would want to kill the Slime Boss, allowing us to remain stationary during the final encounter.  Afterwards, if we want, we may open up the option to defeat the boss we were locked out of. This choice could be bolstered even further by the introduction of weekly quests.  Let's say my quest requires me to kill the Slime boss before the final boss, but my guild is better at the plague boss.  Now we have a choice.  Do we try an encounter that is harder for us in order to reap the extra rewards of the quest?  Or do we forgo the quest to ensure our timely victory through the wing?

Choice has the power to take me out of the narrative and give me control over my world. By giving me the ability to choose what happens in my world I am transformed into being part of the world, not a byproduct of it. Give me a compelling choice that has real impact deeper than "what color mount should I use?" Give me the opportunity to mess things up, without letting me break it. Give me an option later to fix any major damage I've caused. Make my choices unique and different from the exact same choices everyone else makes. Allow me to make the choices that forge my own story. Even if the choices are only illusionary, I still want the opportunity to make them. 

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?