And that is basically the problem of all matchmaking systems. Everybody wants to win more than half of his games, but that simply isn't possible. Either you switch to a PvE system in which the computer doesn't mind losing, or you accept that the optimum outcome of a perfect matchmaking system is a 50:50 win chance. The only game I know that comes close to this perfect equilibrium is World of Tanks, and lots of players complain that their win chance isn't higher than 50% in that game.

I believe that behaviour design (sometimes called persuasive design) has significant potential to help improve gamification strategy design to influence task behaviours. I need to say from the outset that this notion is still new and emerging and somewhat contraversial and this post will be the first of many as I explore this exciting space. 

Here are two tools I've been using lately to better understand the functionality of my game designs.  The first is the loop, a structure that should be very familiar to those who have looked into skill atoms.  The second is the arc.

What Games Are: A Primer is an evolving project to describe and define an accessible language of games, game makers, the games industry and the art that games are. Feedback is definitely appreciated, which you can submit here.

I’ve had nagging doubts because the MMO isn’t where I want it to be. It doesn’t feel quite “there.” You know the secret sauce that would take it from being a wacky EQ1-era game into its own unique thing? There’s not enough of that sauce.

If I was making this game the normal way you make games, what I would focus on now is combat innovation. I’ve got pretty typical classic MMO combat at the moment.

DM: "The stranger in the tavern tells you of a ruin full of treasures to the north of town. What do you do?"
Players: "We go south!"

One of the developments in modern MMORPGs was the idea that the player should always be on a quest, or several, so he would never be lost for ideas on where to go next. Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition introduced that idea into D&D rules, but most of the official adventures I've seem don't actually use the concept. That is probably because those adventures are very linear already, and if you have a dungeon full of monsters you don't really need a quest to tell players what to do.

Even though narratology was conceived as a transmedial endeavour from its very beginnings in Russian formalism and French structuralism, most of its more influential models have been – and continue to be – developed in the context of literary criticism and film studies. In contemporary media culture, however, the creation of storyworlds is not limited to literature and traditional feature films. Rather, emerging forms of multimodal and interactive narration, experiments with the distinction between fictional and nonfictional narrative, various forms of intermedial adaptation, and attempts at ‘transmedia storytelling’ create new ways of presenting narrative content, thereby calling attention to the affordances and limitations of different narrative media as well as to their potential for cooperation. The increased interest in the relation between media and narrative sparked by the development of digital technology and the recent proliferation of delivery techniques in the context of media convergence has reinforced the need for an interdisciplinary and transmedial narratology that studies storyworlds across media.

“If you can’t design a non-digital game from a digital game…you don’t truly understand the nuances of the pure design underneath the art and…programming.” -Brathwaite & Schreiber

While you may take any digital game that interests you, I recommend working with a simpler game we have already looked at (such as Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Space Invaders, and Centipede) and convert that to a board game. These games are simple and easy to understand.

This article primarily focuses on PvE combat in RPGs, though its methods can be applied to PvP or other types of games.

Role playing games have a tremendous amount of content, each piece with multiple parameters that define what they do in combat. Damage dealt by a sword, bonus granted by a skill, total health of a level 23 bandit, etc. It’s not too hard to tune content when you look at a single game zone or a fixed character level – you can playtest that area and tweak values until the game feels right. However, trying to tune values for a giant world with 100 levels of content and multiple classes is much more complicated. How do you choose values for RPG content without playtesting and brute force tuning every type of character at every level?

I recently attended a conference on social and mobile games (yeah, I know) and they talked a bit about cloning of games. Again. A few high-profile examples of cloning have brought this back into the spotlight. So, let's take a look at the business realities of cloning and how it affect small game companies.

I say "again" because I wrote about cloning a bit over a year ago. Since then, it's just continued to become a bigger issue in the game industry.

Last month I contracted what seemed to be a simple cold which progressed into a bronchial infection combined with asthma that knocked me out for three weeks.

It was really bad timing because around the same time, Raph Koster posted a blog bombshell when he said ‘Narrative is not a game mechanic’. A fair few commenters arose in support or ire. Posts flew about whether the meaning of narrative was too broad or limited, whether this was really about a limited formal view of games versus their possibilities, and so on. Exciting stuff, but I couldn’t really get into it.

I’m still recovering, but being ill has given me the chance to reflect and remember that there’s a reason that I don’t normally use the phrase ‘mechanics’. There's also a reason why I tend to dismiss broad narrativism. It’s because both of them are part of a pretend debate over correctness, and each – in their own way – is just circular flame-bait, an ever-burning meme that goes nowhere.

 
[This text, on the crucial aspects of virtual goods design, is an extract from the ninth chapter of Social Game Design: Monetization Methods and Mechanics, by Tim Fields (Certain Affinity) and Brandon Cotton (Portalarium). In the book, the two authors closely examine how social games function as a player-responsive business.]

Fake Estates

The very phrase "Virtual Goods" is something of a delightful contradiction. Anything "virtual," by definition, doesn't physically exist, and goods, at least when appearing within the context of the marketplace, are typically an article of trade.



For our purposes, though, virtual goods are real enough that they generate billions of dollars in revenue each year, and are so important to players that they can drive binge play sessions, provoke real-world fights, create (and destroy) marriages, and keep users spending money twenty-four hours a day, in almost every country in the world.

I wrote earlier today about how I was recently banned from the Diablo 3 Beta for making literally 11,000 gold per hour, as well as taking advantage of a secret strategy for obtaining materials. I assumed that this was the reason for the automatic ban, because there was no possible way for Blizzard to have conducted a "thorough investigation" since I had only played the beta for a few days. Today I received confirmation that my use of the tools Blizzard provides every player were considered exploitative of the Diablo 3 Beta economy. I have been asked to tell customer support about my ideas for making gold or real money BEFORE trying them in the retail version of the game.

I love stories. My chief hobby is reading. I was formally trained as a writer, not as a game designer (there wasn’t really any formal training for game design I got started, but that’s another story). I think most game stories are not very good. And I quite enjoy games with narrative threads pulling me through them. When I find a game with a good story, I frequently prefer to the story to the actual game! So please keep that in mind as you read: I love story.
Narrative in a game is not a mechanic. It’s a form of a feedback.

Boss fights are the linch pin of your entire combat experience, possibly your entire game, as one bad experience is all it takes to bring your game to a screeching halt. Something so important, so integral, demands effort and attention to detail, but for the majority of projects they are relegated to the very end. Why?

Sometimes you’re asked to design for the untestable scenario. For instance, design a system for 10,000 players to asynchrously interact in a persistent competitive world with progression mechanics that plays out over 3 months.

For years it’s been apparent that interpreting games and their makers through the opposed lenses of gameplay or story is inadequate. Such a one-dimensional spectrum breeds false oppositions (fun-or-art?) while either ignoring many games that don’t fit or reinterpreting them so they fit badly. The spectrum is too reductive and, while it is easy to summarise, it leaves out too much context

My previous articles were about system design at a conceptual level, focusing on goals and best practices for system designers. This article gives an example of how to put those principles into practice. To demonstrate, I’ll walk through the character stat systems for one of the games I did system design for: Dungeon Siege 2. I’ll describe how its systems work, why we set things up the way we did, and how we did the math to translate our goals into content.

Okay, after a little bit of basic background on class vs. skill based RPG systems yesterday, I’m going to talk about some of the advantages, disadvantages, and general design features of class-based RPGs

I started making game theory YouTube videos in September 2009 for three reasons. First, I was getting tired of people asking me what I do without being able to provide a quick answer; a simple link to a YouTube video of the prisoner's dilemma solved that. Second, if you searched "game theory" on YouTube at the time, what came up was by and large not game theory. And third, the one exception to that was Ben Polak's class at Yale. His class is good, but each lecture runs longer than an hour, which makes it inaccessible to people with passing interest and nearly impossible to use as a study aid. In contrast, my videos are short--all but one run under ten minutes.

Is a video game still a video game if there's no... video? Designer Adam Henriksson grabs that question by the horns with Pockit, a game console concept that has no graphics whatsoever. Instead, it's a Wii-like motion-sensing wand that "encourages everyone to be physical and have a reason to break norms," he writes. Rather than waving the wand around in front of a screen -- which is the only way you get to see what your wand is representing--the Pockit moves that aspect of the game experience into your own mind's eye. Whether you've configured the Pockit to be "running" a swordfighting game or something else, the point is that the players are focusing their attention on each other in real life, not virtualized avatars.

I recently attended a talk by a gamification proponent who presented a fragmented and ill structured theory on what gamification can bring to a product. He arrived at the right conclusions, but due to the long and winded road he took there. the audience was generally unwilling to accept the fine finale of his talk. In the end, he dismissed gamification as the surface-scratching marketing tool that it currently is, proposing a focus on “game thinking” instead. Because he failed to come up with a convincing definition of that phrase, I thought I should step in and deliver one. Mine is based on “design thinking”[1], a term popular in design theory. I’m quite familiar with design theory because it was the foundation of all our research at the university department I researched, taught and worked at before entering the exciting world of the games industry.

What can architecture teach us about game design?

In this article, I’ll look at architecture to see what elements can be incorporated into game design.  Architecture is a large field, and as a part of design there is already a lot of overlap with game design, so I’m going to focus on a style of architecture known as organic architecture.  This article of course can only scratch the surface of either organic architecture or architecture as a field, but will hopefully give a taste that will inspire further exploration.

In the continuing saga of one peron's mission to turn the d20 system into a classless system, we find ourselves with a question of balance. We've got a foundation laid, let's take the next steps toward our goal.

I promised some talk about balancing, but we have a few odds and ends first.

Ein Spiel braucht interaktive Momente, um seiner Definition gerecht zu werden. Die Erzeugung eines Spielsystems aber, eines Agierens in mathematischen Möglichkeiten also, ist eine sehr abstrakte Angelegenheit. Um die Einstiegshürden zu senken, die Befremdnis zu verringern und damit massenkompatibler zu werden, muss es sich an bekannte Medien anschmiegen und Gekanntes, Geschätztes und Verstandenes übernehmen. Was liegt da näher, als das Medium Film in das Computerspiel einzubauen. Leider verträgt sich die sekündlich getimte und perspektivisch eingeschränkte Form des Filmes nicht sonderlich gut mit dem auf Freiheit und interaktiver Errechnung scheinbar zufälliger Ereignisse getrimmten Wesen eines Spieles.

Bennett Foddy detailed the mechanics of addiction as it relates to game design to the audience at Develop Liverpool today. “For game developers, addictiveness is a design goal,” he said, before admitting that an addictive game isn’t necessarily bad. “But not everyone addicted to videogames is enjoying themselves, and lives can go awry,” he warned.

What are critical hits? How do they work? Typically there is some percent chance to crit which causes an attack to deal some percentage extra damage. Commons values are in the ranges 1-30% chance to crit and 35-300% extra damage. In an RPG this works as you’d expect. For each swing of the sword you roll the magic random number generator dice and check for a crit1.

Team Fortress 2 has an interesting crit system2. Guns have a 2% base chance to crit which temporarily increases as the player deals damage. Slow firing guns (shotgun) check for crit with each shot similar to an RPG sword. Rapid fire guns (uzi) check once per second and crit in two second bursts.

We live in a bold, new era in game monetization. A full-production desktop game that is free-to-play makes on the order of $37.5 million every year. Games companies that see less than 5% of their users ever spend a cent make almost $1 Billion a year in revenue. Entirely new ways of selling games are being devised every day. How should a game developer pick a monetization method in these crazy times? To help us understand what really drives consumers to open up their wallets for their favorite games, I suggest we look back to one of the progenitors of micro-transactions, Magic: The Gathering(MTG from here on out).At first glance, it would seem to be easy to answer the question “What is the monetization method of MTG?”  ”Simple,” you might say, “They sell packs of cards,” which is true of course, but there is a lot of nuance rolled up in those packs of cards.

The approach to game design in these articles is analytical and methodical. It’s best suited to games with a lot of content, like RPGs or strategy games. These articles are more about the hour-to-hour experience than the minute-to-minute experience, so they won’t apply to many types of games. My apologies if this material doesn’t directly translate to your work – I hope you can still find them valuable.

At the Games Developer's Conference GDC 2011, Raph gave a very good (if long) talk. And I especially liked the part where he talked about incomplete information as a game mechanic (the "Strategy guides" bookmark at the link above). He makes fun about the people who say that reading a strategy guide, for example for a World of Warcraft raid, "isn't really cheating. Because it doesn't really tell me how to play the game. I still have to tap the button in my synchronized swimming exercise at the right time." He then points out that incomplete information is an important game mechanic of many games, like Poker or Stratego. Or even Scrabble, where he cites the LA Times about an online Scrabble Cheat-o-Matic site which gets 120,000 page views a day since you can play Scrabble on Facebook.

Over the years, my job gave me the priviledge of meeting amazing people. People who had a deep impact on my career, on my knowledge, on my personalty, and on what I am as a whole.

That must be why I am so fond of stories about game development that focus on people. The technology keeps changing, but the motivation that drives it remains. The people who shaped one way or another what our industry looks like today are for me an endless source of inspiration and motivation.

So I decided to share with you a few books I recently read, both have the same focus on the people behind the technology rather than on the technology itself.

The gist of this article is the claim that Second Life failed because it doesn't fill a consumer need.  Brilliant -- welcome to 2007.  Actually, maybe 2003, since this is basically the same criticism that many of us had when Second Life launched (do we really need a Metaverse?) and the reason the more game-focused set of us always had a little trouble liking Second Life.  It seemed like a very cool tool that was not particularly fun to use.  Without a game mechanic that lended purpose to your presence on the platform, what Second Life offered seemed a lot like an avatar-populated uncurated 3-D art gallery.

As a bunch of “old-school” RPG fans hang out here, we’re accustomed to griping about how “dumbed down” RPGs have become over the years.

But it’s not just our favorite genre. As much as we complain about RPGs becoming first-person shooters, first-person shooters aren’t what they used to be, either.

To illustrate this point, this excellent video by kmooseman

I’ve been the latest victim of the Minecraft bug of late. I must admit this game is pretty amazing in its simplicity. It’s so very basic yet very addictive. I could totally see modern gamers passing it up because of the graphics or the playstyle, as I almost did myself. But the reality is that it is worth a try. I’ve learned a lot from the game, here’s just a few things

I don't mean to create an instructional reference like Jesse Schell’s game design lenses or The 400 Project. What I'm aiming for is less about function or theory and more about inspiration, the sort of thing that might trigger an idea or insight, or maybe not. Light enough that you can try whatever a card advises without thinking about it too much, or simply let it drift in your mind while you do other things. 

See if this sounds familiar to you:

To play the game, you put currency into the machine. You then pull the knob and wait for the result. When the result is presented, you are rewarded with a cacophony of exciting sounds, attention-grabbing images, and some form of currency. Often times, this winning helps you progress towards a larger goal. You also have the opportunity with each play to win a rare prize of significantly higher value than the value of the currency you contributed to play the game.

That’s a slot machine, right? Wrong. It’s the basic action loop of FarmVille.

Cow Clicker is a Facebook game about Facebook games. It's partly a satire, and partly a playable theory of today's social games, and partly an earnest example of that genre.
You get a cow. You can click on it. In six hours, you can click it again. Clicking earns you clicks. You can buy custom "premium" cows through micropayments (the Cow Clicker currency is called "mooney"), and you can buy your way out of the time delay by spending it. You can publish feed stories about clicking your cow, and you can click friends' cow clicks in their feed stories. Cow Clicker is Facebook games distilled to their essence.

The larger man spoke. He gestured while doing so. “You teach the player how to play the game in one minute. Within that one minute, you give them in-game money. You make them spend all of that money to buy an investment that will begin to earn them profit. They build a thing. It says: this thing will be finished in five minutes. Spend one premium currency unit to have it now. You happen to have one free premium currency unit. The game makes you use it now. Now you have a thing. Now it says to wait three minutes to collect from that thing. So they have a reason to stick around for three minutes. When those three minutes are up, you tell them to come back in a half an hour. You say, ‘You’re done for now. Come back in a half an hour.’ The phone sends them a push notification in a half an hour. Right here, you’re telling them to wait. You’re expressing to them the importance of patience. They’re never going to forget the way it feels to wait a half an hour after playing a game for one minute. They’re going to forget the second time they wait for a half an hour, and the third time, and they’ll then not forget the first time they have to wait for four hours, then twenty-four hours. This is why they’ll start to pay to Have Things Right Now.

Carnegie Mellon University Professor, Jesse Schell, dives into a world of game development which will emerge from the popular "Facebook Games" era.

The story most of you are talking about is story telling being told in text, cut scenes, voiceover, and machinima. None of that is a game, its other media squeezed in between what is a game. Games have emergent stories, or what I prefer to call drama. That's the thing that happens when you are the last counter terrorist trying to defuse the bomb in counterstrike. Quake, and Doom had drama, modern AAA games have Story telling.

Spielen ist Lernen – auch wenn es auf den ersten Blick schwerfällt, in dem über 350 Millionen mal heruntergeladenen Casual Game Angry Birds mehr als nur Zeitvertreib zu sehen. Und den suchen nicht wenige von uns:  Fast jeder zweite deutsche Internetnutzer besucht Online Gaming-Seiten. Knapp 40 Prozent der Smartphone Besitzer nutzen ihr Handy zum Spielen (comscore 2011). Kein Wunder, dass mehr und mehr darüber nachgedacht wird, den Gebrauch von Produkten oder Services für Nutzer mit Erfolgsfaktoren aus dem Spielesektor attraktiv und belohnend zu gestalten. Das Zauberwort heisst Gamification.

Needing the permission from 10 of your friends to keep playing is infuriating. But what if those friends not only had to come online and click on a link? What if to advance you'd need your friends to be online at the same time as you, doing the same activity in the same game as you for a continuous block of several hours? Then you'd be raiding in a MMORPG.

I have covered a lot of different topics about combat: How to design your enemies, how to design your combat encounters, how to define the gap, and the importance of depth and breadth. This covers a lot of ground, which is great, but it is high time we grasp for the slippery opponent that is fun. What makes Combat fun? Can we even answer a question so laden with meaning? Yes, I believe we can.

Combat is at its best when you provide the player with multiple valid Intentions and Action Sequences, and then constrain them through the situational context of their Goals, their Environment, and their Opponents.

Though there can be many answers to that question, perhaps the simplest answer is escapism.

No matter whats occurring in your life many people enjoy the ability to escape to somewhere else for a few minutes or an hour or two and just forget about real life for a bit.  Whether its scoring the winning goal in a football game or racing in an F1 car, shooting terrorists in a FPS or defending the realm against an evil wizard, that ability to skip to someone else is a compelling reason to spend time and money for most people.

When I was younger I cheated in every game. It started with the likes of Warcraft 2 and Duke Nukem 3D. I cheated because I was about 11 and wasn’t all that good at games. I liked to cheat because that way I was in control of the game. I could do whatever I wanted, mostly. I’d get really annoyed if a game didn’t have God Mode because I’d have to worry about using a code to restore health or armour. Now I rarely cheat at games, but cheating was a gateway into another form of play. Cheating got me accustomed to playing games wrong. Doing things the developers hadn’t intended. Playing games wrong gives you a different perspective on something you love. I present some of my favourite instances of games played wrong, with some musings about why it was so fun.

Although the study of digital games is steadily increasing, there has been little or no effort to develop a method for the qualitative, critical analysis of games as "texts" (broadly defined). This paper creates a template for such analyses by developing and explaining four areas that game researchers should consider when studying a game: Object Inventory, Interface Study, Interaction Map, and Gameplay Log. Through the use of an extended example (The Sims and three of its expansion packs: Livin' Large, House Party and Hot Date) as well as examples from different styles and genres of games, the case is made for employing these four areas or components as a (developing) methodology for the critical analysis of one or many digital games.

Games as learning tools are in my mind A LOT these days. And so it happens with this gamefi-learni-cation happening all around that the topic is in many peoples’ minds. A question that comes up when I have conversations around the topic (which happens pretty often) is what are effective strategies to design a game for learning. The obvious answer is that games for learning are first and foremost games and in order to make them you should take all the steps you would take to create a fun game. A rule of thumb I apply whenever I design a game for the classroom is to ask myself whether or not a kid would play this again outside of the school context, say at home with friends. If the answer to that question is NO - then it’s time to go back to the drawing board.

My talk was on building an application that rescued princesses. The goal was to give interaction designers some insight into how game design might be applied to the domain of more utilitarian applications. The talk was recorded and should be up sometime this week. When it appears online, I'll link to the video from this post.

Bernie Maddoff is in jail for the next 150 years. He misled investors with a Ponzi scheme, a scam in which you promise people a high return on investment, which you pay not with any real business, but with the money new investors give you. In real life, this is fraud, and if you are caught you will go to jail for it. In a game, for example if I offer you a dodgy deal for a street in Monopoly counting on the fact that you are bad with numbers, this is part of the game and I won't go to jail for it. It's just play money. But what of situations that are in between?

I’m a big fan of your work and reader of your blog. You probably don’t remember me but I briefly met you at GDC Online last year. I was looking for Dr. Richard Bartle, who I did find and conducted an interview with.
A few months ago I released the interview on my Youtube Partner account but forgot to mention to you that I had done so. I thought you might be interested in it.

When games mix they can create exciting new experiences, but many mixes just don’t work. Rather than being enhanced by their interaction, these games pull on each other, leaving the overall experience to be one of dysnergy, the opposite of synergy.

Perhaps the game design has forgotten the importance of the player’s role. Role is not a marketing issue. It is how players understand your game and why it's awesome

Syp chimes in on the SWTOR morality debate with a very optimistic comment: "Plus, wouldn’t it be really cool if BioWare makes these choices and stories so compelling that it tears people away from grinding light/darkside points to do what they want to do?" Yes, Syp, that would be really cool. But, from my personal experience with gamers and developers, that isn't going to happen.

A "perfect" story for me would be one in which good and evil are so perfectly balanced that my natural choices would end me up somewhere in the grey area of the morality spectrum. That is where I see most people in real life ending up if judged by a jedi system of beliefs. I certainly am no un-emotional jedi of pure goodness and control over mind and body.

Unless Bioware adds grey morality gear to the game, which isn't planned, and frankly unlikely, following a grey story will disqualify players from wearing any morality gear. And I expect there to be some very cool morality gear which you can only wear if you are at the extreme ends of the scale. 99 out of 100 gamers will thus go into "let's optimize the fun out of this" mode. They won't even *read* the possible responses to some moral dilemma. They'll just automatically chose the one which is marked as giving the right points for the cool gear they are after. And that is where the story-based MMORPG gameplay will utterly fail.

This was my talk delivered yesterday at Casual Connect Seattle — somewhat shorter than my usual, as it was a 25 minute slot. The topic was designing for games-as-a-service; a lot of folks are migrating from casual games into social games right now, and need to know more about what the design best practices are.
I ended up reaching back to the Laws of Online World Design and many other older materials both mine and of others, on the grounds that it was likely to be new and perhaps educational for many who have been doing fire-and-forget software in the casual space.
I am fairly sure that the conference will be posting video of the presentation — they normally do — so keep an eye out for that. In the meantime, here’s the deck in a few formats

Rivs from A High Latency Life might be best-known for his… erm… provocative pictures he likes to put up with each of his posts.  I gave him one of the most fun assignments I could think of: To pick the worst TV show to make an MMO from — and then speculate how he would make it work as a game.

When Syp asked me to write a post about the Worst TV show to make an MMO from, and how the mechanics would work. I thought long and hard, oh I thought of cartoons. Maybe a Carebear MMO, that would really empty out WoW, but the fact is I loved a lot of the older TV shows. How cool would a Thundercats MMO would be? This was going to be harder than I thought.

OK, so this basically gives me permission to ramble on a bit about how games evolve over time. Designers can stop reading now, there's nothing here you don't already know...

I suppose, as I'm stating the obvious, I should begin by pointing out that there are four kinds of changes that happen to games.

I am fascinated by economic theory. Time is the ultimate resource, and what are we, then, if not economists dealing in the exchange of fun for time and money. I find there are many parallels to game design, and the tools and theories they provide are a great comfort to me. So when my good friend told me to read Predictably Irrational, I pounced on that book like a hungry hungry hippo.

The book is about Behavioral Economics. A relatively new field in the study of economics, and it starts with the assumption that human beings are not as rational as traditional economics likes to think we are, and in fact, we are irrational to the point of being—wait for it—predictably irrational (herp). It goes on to detail several major points of irrationality, and then backs them up with field experiments that are almost as much fun to read about as they are edifying.

Of the myriad of topics, that ones that stuck with me the most were, no surprise, the ones that provided clear insight into common game design problems. The topics of relativity, the power of zero, the social verses market exchange, and the power of ethics and cheating all showed me new ways to think about common problems, and I’m sure there is even more insight just out of my minds eye, waiting to be tapped. But insight for insights sake is pointless, so it’s time to share my thoughts with you. Let’s start with how the value of things is not as simple as it appears…

Normally, if I was contracted to do an MMO design, I would almost entirely ignore the “world” and focus on “making the most fun game possible.” A common successful approach to making a fun game is to divide and conquer: first you make the game fun in tiny 30-to-60 second chunks. When you’re confident that the lowest-level thing you do in your game is fun to do over and over and over, then you step back and make a fifteen-minute “fun loop” (or some similar time window). Thus in WoW, killing a monster might take 30 seconds, but completing a quest takes 15 minutes. These are loops: you are rewarded for completing them and are then pushed toward doing the loop again.

This is a very effective way to make a highly directed game. I’ve used it before with success, and I will no doubt use it again in the future. I’m not knocking this method. But it’s not a good approach if you want the game to have more “world” in it.

Designing the boat level for Resistance 3 was an interesting challenge in many ways.  It’s a short traversal on-rails level (well, sort of on-rails) wedged between two high-action core-combat parts of a first person shooter.  Thus, our goal was for it to be a break in the pacing of the whole game that focused more on emotional and visual storytelling.  We needed to make sure that the whole level team was on the same page about the player experience we would be attempting to create when we started full production on the level.

GDC Vault – Social Mechanics for Social Games [SOGS Design] is a link that takes you to the GDC Vault where you can watch a full video of the presentation, with the slides side by side, for free.
Of course, you didn’t need that, right? Because you already paid to get access to the utterly awesome GDC Vault.
There are a couple more free talks released today as well, including the AI rant and an inside look at the Humble Indie Bundle. You can check out all the free talks here.

WoW Should Have Died

Let me put it another way: our industry’s “common sense” tells us that WoW should have flopped when it launched. It was the most expensive launch fiasco we’d ever seen!

Common sense says you don’t recover from mega-sized technical disasters. As evidence, we have a long slew of failed games before and after WoW, which we write off as “Oh, of course they failed, their launch was poor.” We still believe that getting the launch right is critically important to a AAA-level MMO’s success.

And start calling them Design Tools. Docs get appended, while Tools are put aside as needs change. Design docs are necessary, but their definition is both antiquated and inadequate to the task they provide. In fact, their task–as tools–is threefold, and it worries me that none of this was explained to me.
A game designers job goes through three major periods: figuring out what the hell you are making, getting the team on board with the initial idea, and then managing the vision as the game is redesigned (like, a lot – a LOT a lot); similarly, your documentation, as the project goes through these stages, serves three purposes: extrapolation, communication, and collation.

MMOs are games where you play combat primarily in the user interface rather than the game world.
I think this is best realised in the classic ‘standing in the fire’ error of new raiders: essentially people stand in the fire because it is an element of playing in the game world, where levelling-up has trained those players to instead play in the interface. Combat is in the cooldowns; you watch timers, health bars, debuff bars, and only when you get to raiding or the more ambitious small group dungeons do you need to start looking into the game world too, in order to step out of the fire, dodge the laser beam, jump over the furious shrew of ruin.

In 1960, Milton Bradley published »The Game of Life«: a capitalist wet dream of a board game, won by the lucky one who retired richest. Today, »gamification« vendors take Milton Bradley seriously. From losing weight to saving Africa, from watching TV to matching DNA sequences: there’s nothing that couldn’t be made more fun by adding points, badges, and other elements from video games. At least that’s the selling proposition.

I’ve always had a strong (though not exclusive) achiever streak in computer games (by both Jon Radoff and Richard Bartle‘s classifications). Course many early games were all about racking up the points in a bid to ascend to the glory of the High Score Table (and the resulting dilemma of whether to enter your actual initials to proclaim your great skill to the world, or a hilarious three-letter profanity. BUM, tee hee!) and you didn’t have much of a choice over being a completionist. You had to shoot all the titular Space Invaders, gobble all the pills in Pac-Man and knock out every brick to get Thro’ The Wall to progress to the next level (of more Invaders, pills or bricks).

Many players cannot help approaching a game as an optimization puzzle. What gives the most reward for the least risk? What strategy provides the highest chance – or even a guaranteed chance – of success? Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game.
Games, however, are so complex that it is difficult to anticipate exactly how players will optimize a game until after release, once thousands bang away at the game and share their ideas with each other online. Often, designers don’t even understand their own games until they finally see them in the wild.

Courtesy of former Origin programmer Bill Randolph, and thanks to the tireless efforts of Joe Garrity of the Origin Muesum, Ultima Aiera is pleased to present four documents — which have been broken out into over thirty images — which discuss some of the technical details of Ultima 6.
Specifically, the documents — all of which appear to be internal documents from Origin Systems — discuss the conversation syntax of the game and its technical implementation, the object design of the game, and the in-house map editor that Origin developers used to construct the Ultima 6 game world.

About a year ago an idea occurred to me (yes, it happens occasionally): wouldn’t it be great to make a game, and I mean a real AAA title, that was educational? That you could really learn something from? Of course we’ve all played games like Sim City and Civilization but one could argue that the potential learning involved there is more the means than the goal itself. And improved reflexes by playing first person shooters isn’t quite what I mean either.

It’s a sign of the times that when, a few years ago, I said “I design videogames” people would smile, nod and either look for something or someone else to talk to.  This does still happen at times but it’s now become more common for people to say “hey, that’s cool.  Bet it’s a fun job!”  I confirm that it is.  More recently still, and people have started to then go on and ask me exactly what it is that I do.  And that’s where I stumble a bit, because it’s not easy to quickly define.

Last month I had the privilege of presenting at the Games for Health Conference.[1] It was a big gathering of people that want to use games to positively change the world. However, most of attendees were from the the education or healthcare space. While everyone knew they were on to something powerful, there were also a lot of misconceptions on how gaming works as a motivator.

Being a good combat designer requires understanding the meaning and significance of both depth and breadth in your designs. To put it simply: depth is the Knowledge of How, and breadth is the Knowledge of Why. But what does this mean?

How do I perform that move? Why should I use this move? How come I need meter to do this move? How do I build meter? Why should I build meter?

Keybote by Jesse Schell about Game Caharcter Design at the Unity Unite 10 Conference

Games perpetually revolutionize computer use toward denser interaction with the human mind. To do that, they perpetually revolutionize themselves. Understanding the next frontiers of the genre is one way to understand where society is going.

In this talk Jesse Schell explores the social, cognitive, and technological trends in computer game design and use.

Jesse Schell is the CEO of Schell Games, the author of the authoritative text, The Art of Game Design: a book of lenses, and a Professor of Entertainment Technology at Carnegie Mellon, specializing in Game Design. At Walt Disney, he was Creative Director of the Imagineering VR Studio.

Some companies keep a playbook of product tips, tricks and trade secrets. Zynga has an internal playbook, for instance, that is a collection of “concepts, techniques, know-how and best practices for developing successful and distinctive social games”. Zynga’s playbook has entered the realm of legend and was even the subject of a lawsuit.

Sometimes called the “game mechanic” or the “30 seconds of fun,” the core loop is the series of actions the player will perform over and over again in the heart of gameplay. The core loop of Gears of War might be: 1) Encounter bad guys and take cover 2) Move to a good attack position 3) Kill the bad guys using a selection of your weapons 4) Re-arm and move on.


Everything else – vehicles in a shooter, dialogue in an RPG, cutscenes, minigames, QTE’s, set-pieces, traversing an empty environment, etc – it’s all pacing for the core loop. If any of these elements were solid enough to stand on their own, they would be their own genre. Sometimes they are, like vehicles in a driving game, but often they aren’t, like dialogue or QTE’s.

Aside from an ugly name, thinness of gameplay, sameness of ideas (rewards, levels, badges and points) and a lack of any strong examples of what it is supposed to be, what’s the most fundamental issue that gamification faces?

The basic idea of gamification is that a game can become integrated in life. Gamification proposes to embellish the real world with a layer of game-like things to do and earn, and in so doing enhance lives. So in a sense, gamification’s big idea is to regard life as some sort of infinite game.

The problem? Games are no fun unless they are finite.

Video games, we have been led to believe, are about wasting time. It is a misunderstanding that players and game makers have railed against for 40 years. While movies and television are endlessly analysed and debated in the mainstream media, games are characterised as troubling, irresponsible or banal, the fatuous byproducts of the digital revolution.

But a growing number of theorists and designers disagree. This is, after all, an entertainment medium that worldwide makes $50bn a year, a medium in which an estimated one third of UK adults indulge. An emerging school of thought, drawing on cognitive science, psychology and sociology, suggests that our growing love of video games may actually have important things to tell us about our intrinsic desires and motivations.

This is the world of Bioshock Infinite, a game that was demoed for the press at a pre-E3 event in Los Angeles by Ken Levine, the game's creative director and cofounder of Irrational Games. It's not just that the game looked good—it looked amazing—it's the subtext and commentary the game provides under its exterior that drive the game just as much as the weapons and setting.

Monsters and monster stories suit the culture that creates them. You can see this pretty easily by looking at the ancient monsters that ancient cultures created.