Rough Sea Games

Greg Costikyan is an idealistic game designer and critic who has been trying¹ to foster innovation in computer games since 2000. Back in 1994 he wrote a famous² game design theory essay: I Have No Words & I Must Design, with which I mostly agree… but I’m going to take a bit of it out of context and pick on it anyway. Here’s the quote:

If the game has more than one ‘resource,’ decisions suddenly become more complex[...] If I declare against the Valois, Edward Plantagenet will grant me the Duchy of Gascony, but the Pope may excommunicate me, imperilling my immortal soul.

These are not just complex decisions; these are interesting ones. Interesting decisions make for interesting games.

The resources in question have to have a game role; if ‘your immortal soul’ has no meaning, neither does excommunication[...]. Ultimately, ‘managing resources’ means managing game elements in pursuit of your goal. A ‘resource’ that has no game role has nothing to contribute to success or failure, and is ultimately void.

Costikyan is 100% right that dilemmas are interesting, but are the only interesting dilemmas game-mechanical? Well, when it comes to the current state of computer games, yes. “Hard core” players separate the game’s mechanics (e.g. the way the chess pieces move) from its “colour” (the pieces’ shapes and names) very quickly, and ignore the latter. But does it have to be this way? I say no! There are other ways to play. In a game that engages the player’s emotions — in particular a role-playing game in its true sense, in which the player strongly identifies with the character she controls – “colour” can dominate game-mechanics in the subjective play experience. Emotionally loaded decisions are interesting even if they do not affect your progress towards a goal — in fact, especially if they don’t: if the cowboy in the white hat accepted the reward for killing the bandits, he’d be a mercenary, not a hero³. Moral decisions become especially interesting if being virtuous actually makes the game harder.

The emotional impact of decisions increases if the game world reacts to them. For example, the quartermaster in Deus Ex reacts disapprovingly if the player decides to massacre all enemies in the first mission, although that is a game mechanically acceptable victory. Such reactions require a light touch to avoid becoming puerile and a lot of cleverness to avoid being very expensive (since the game developers must determine what behaviours they want to measure, how to measure them, and how to make the world react to them), but even in rudimentary form they are hugely rewarding for some players.

¹ And so far, alas, failing. In 2000, he hoped cell phone games, being cheap to make, were going to become a fountain of creativity. In fact, because potential players just see lists of titles (rather than demos or even a box blurb), licensing tie-ins or massive marketing are even more essential than in the “classic” games industry.
² “Famous” in a tiny niche of game design snobs, anyway.
³ Mercenary attitudes can be emotionally involving too, of course, but if they have no hidden heart, they get dull fast.

Popularity: 59% [?]

It’s always impressive, right after E3, to consider all the games that I could (or will) buy this year. The graphics and environment get more and more realistic, the heroes cooler and cooler. So shouldn’t that indescribable excitement — the release day fever, the “just can’t wait” trembling — have hit right about now? Well, it should have, but…

The developments of recent years provoke in me, an active gamer for a quarter century, the opposite feeling. The ever-increasing pressure to add unique selling points, better graphics, physics, etc. has decreased the willingness of the developers (or rather the publishers) to explore new directions, and in the end, they mostly produce interchangeable pablum.

Back when blocky pixels and abstract forms invited us to fill their gaps with our own stories; when we waited for minutes in a submarine off Gibraltar for the sun to set; when, after endlessly repeated runs through a level, we finally found the hidden key and with it an indescribable joy, games were primarily sparks for our imagination. Today they simply fulfill our expectations. We used to buy the key to a new world; today, a consumable product.

Today’s gamer has been squeezed into a mold of expectations. He expects games to work in certain ways; any deviations must be carefully explained in advance. Confronting the player with a task that he must solve by his own efforts, without hand-holding, is no longer allowed. Recognizing the patterns and mastering new skills was part of the attraction of earlier games. These days, games have degenerated to pure entertainment. They no longer challenge, they simply divert. This parallels the development of films, which have gone from providing a topic of conversation for post-show socializing to grabbing our attention with ninety minutes of bombast that are immediately forgotten.

Whether lack of design imagination will eventually lead games to follow another film industry trend, namely remakes, remains to be seen. Regardless, throwing away the chance to create high-quality games will certainly confirm a widespread and long-held gamer prejudice: anybody can design a game!

Popularity: 25% [?]

Using a vocabulary of only 25 words, I have written a simple random generator that generates disturbingly plausible computer game names. Here are some samples:

• Eternal Shadow
• Shattered Empires
• Star Masters
• Blood Knight
• Silent Commander
• World of Eternal Blood
• Hero of the Shattered Throne
• Silent Worlds
• Knights of Legend
• Blood Empire
• Star Wars
• Dawn Commanders
• Time Ninja
• Lost Swords
• Stellar Throne
• Heroes of Legend
• Forgotten Realm
• Time of the Unknown Master
• Legend of Legendary Legends

Except for the last one¹, these could easily be real titles — and not of embarrassing B-list products, either. What does this tell game developers? It tells us that game settings choose to live in a ghetto. It tells us that what we consider mainstream is  a sideline in other media. It reminds us that the “niche market” isn’t casual gamers, but ourselves.

…

Or maybe I’m reading too much into this and really just wanted an excuse to write that name generator.

…

Anyone up for a game of Time Ninja?

¹ Actually, since there is a real game called “Divine Divinity”, “Legend of Legendary Legends” should get greenlighted no problem.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Teachers often feel that books are better for children than film or television, because books “exercise the imagination” whereas visual media do the work for you. Similarly, I used to think that playing games was morally superior to reading or watching, since players interact actively with a game rather than passively absorbing a static work¹. They “exercise” problem solving skills, analytic creativity, and hand-eye coordination… but most importantly, they create a sense of agency! They teach you that you can make a difference — write your own story, rather than accepting the canon.

Actually, the reverse is true: The pseudo-agency that games cultivate is false and dangerous, weakening creativity and dissipating drive that could be turned to better ends.

As I mentioned in my last post, games offer an easy sense of accomplishment. They are deliberately balanced: the best are challenging enough that they require you to focus intently, but not so hard that you become frustrated. This creates flow, which feels good and makes time fly. The real world, on the other hand, doesn’t care if we’re bored or if we fail. Clearly, if the pursuit of pleasure (or selling games) is your only goal, games are superior to life: you insert your quarter and get your quantum of happiness.

There is a school of thought, however, that says that pleasure isn’t a sufficient end in itself, or at least that pleasure pursued for its own sake tends not to satisfy in the long run. Ludic accomplishments are to real accomplishments as junk food is to real food: tasty, bite sized, but hard on the stomach in large quantities².  I think most gamers are familiar with the nausea that wells up through the surface layer of fun and satisfaction derived from playing Civilization or Starcraft for three days straight. And the sense of free agency that games provide is illusory, not just because the player is constrained by a designer’s rules, but because the results of her actions are confined to the game and hence meaningless.

If we had no games, our natural ambition would eventually accumulate until it forced us to do something worthwhile, or at least difficult. Games allow us to siphon off that energy harmlessly… and uselessly. Modern children may not have a choice, but if you’re an adult, you should be writing your story on the pages of the world.

¹ Note to lit crit people: please don’t kill me! I know the reader creates the text! I’m just pretending otherwise for rhetorical purposes.

² Note to chess masters and professional athletes: please don’t kill me! I know that your skills are profound and valuable! I’m just pretending otherwise for rhetorical purposes.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Almost all computer games with “role-playing elements”¹ force the player to spend a lot of time on boring, non-challenging, repetitive tasks. These tasks, called grind, translate play time into in-game power. Often, they are disguised as something vaguely heroic — killing ten orcs, for example — but sometimes, especially in online multiplayer games, designers seem determined to rub new players’ faces in the fact that they are worthless nothings by sending them off to collect ten balls of lint instead. In either case, the question is “why deliberately include grind?”

The advantages for the game developers are clear:

1. Grind slows content consumption.  You can have a pretty small world and still write “50 hours of excitement”  on the package if the player has to spend ten hours in each new region walking back and forth between the lint orchards and the marketplace.²

2. In an online game whose income is based on advertising or monthly subscriptions, grind ties player success to developer income. The more powerful a player wants to become, the longer she must play — and hence, the more money she generates for the developers.

Why do the players accept this?

For one thing, grind often comes packaged in fancy visuals and perhaps a new world to explore, so it doesn’t feel like work until the novely wears off. But there’s more to it:

3. Steady progress is seductive. In real life, achievement involves hard work and often risk. Computer games offer an easy sense of accomplishment; their challenges are designed to be overcome. Grind distills this:  if you put in the time, you are guaranteed the reward, which is the way we’re taught as children that life is supposed to work.

4. Competition motivates. If there’s a chart somewhere that says that I’m better than you, I get a satisfying feeling of superiority, even if the chart only measures our respective willingness to have our time wasted.

5. People will put up with a lot of crap to feel cool. Games with grind are often designed so that increasing power means prettier equipment, fancier special effects, etc. This also explains the humiliating newbie lint-quests: increasing the coolness gap between new and experienced players increases the incentive to level up.

So grind is tempting… but it has dangers:

• Grind at the beginning of a game, before a player becomes hooked, can cause her to stop playing before “getting to the good stuff”. And if there is no “good stuff”, those who do stick it out will be very disappointed.
• Grind consumes bandwidth and server resources for online games, and these cost money, so it actually reduces profits for games with a flat monthly fee.
• Grind plagues the game designer’s conscience — or should.

Is it possible to get the good parts of grind without the bad?

I’m not sure, but I’m doing my best in our game. My approach is two-pronged:

a) Grind is optional. Our game can be played, even at a high level, in a few minutes a day. However, to satisfy those who crave grind, or who simply would like to invest more of their time, there will be special, grind-based tasks and rankings that interact only weakly with the core gameplay

b) Grind isn’t too boring. I don’t think it’s possible to make grind really interesting, because interest arises either through challenge (which would void benefit 3) or appealing content (which contradicts 1). Still, there’s a world of difference between an entertaining mini-game and just clicking a button repeatedly.

I don’t want to bore my players unless they insist. Time will tell if I can avoid it.

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¹  Unfortunately, “role-playing” in the context of computer games just means “you have a game token or tokens that becomes more powerful the longer it is used”. (back)

² And if you’re willing to  lie about the “excitement” part. (back)

Popularity: 7% [?]