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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

I was recently given the opportunity to join the BigDoor team and a few of their clients up in a beautiful cabin in the evergreen forests of Washington to do a jam session on gamification.  *Thanks Keith, Jeff and team!*

Leading the session was co-founder of ShuffleBrain Amy Jo Kim, who has been gamifying systems before there was even a term for it.  Remember eBay seller ratings?  Yup, it incorporated game elements and she was a part of that.  Rock Band, The Sims, Bejewelled 2?  Uhh... yeah, she helped in the design of those games too.  She is an awesome speaker and I highly recommend you go to one of her talks if you have a chance.

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.

Why are players playing your game?  What motivations did you inspire in them?  Are they the motivations you wanted?

In just a few short years we’ve seen reward systems in games evolve beyond measure — from what was once a simple quest for points to a whirlpool of reward systems…what’s a designer to do?  Take a deeper look at your game, and look at what rewards you’re giving the player — and more importantly, why you’re giving them.  Adding a reward system to your game can often feel like a wild stab in the dark, which is why so many games have turned to the shotgun approach — throw everything in and hope that one catches the players.  Even worse, you could throw a reward system into your game without even understanding what motivations it gives your players.  We can do better than this.  Let’s take a look the reward systems, reasons behind the rewards then talk about how to use them effectively.

"Gamification efforts have come under criticism from many in the games industry for being shallow..."
Yes, you got that part right.
"-- that is, lacking the narrative quality of games made with a pure entertainment motive."
I don't think you understand the criticism, then, if you think "shallow" simply refers to "less narrative quality".

Generally speaking, there are two ways to start designing a game. The first is to start with visuals. You create a world, a series of possible dynamics that might come out of that world, and you have a sense of back story. You tend to describe the world in terms of place, character or storysense, and paint a picture of an experience to inspire your team.

The second is to start with actions. You start with what the player will do, how he will do it, how the game will control and what the camera will do. You tend to think in terms of rules, efficiency and flow and treat the aesthetic components as something that will come along later.

The games industry often uses visually oriented design to sell its ideas, but action oriented design is usually superior for making great games. So why does the visual persist?

In her new book, Reality Is Broken, Jane McGonigal argues that the rules, rewards and feedback offered by modern videogames can be used to make the world a happier and more productive place. We sit down with her to learn more.

As promised in the talk itself, here are the slides for the talk I just gave on “Social Mechanics for Social Games” — an updated version of the talk I gave back at GDC Austin.

Brace yourselves, readers, this week's column is going to be another adventure in pitching hypothetical new game concepts that I have no time to make myself and don't expect anyone else to attempt either. This is one I've been thinking about for a while and for which the aftermath of my DC Universe Online review will serve decently enough as a vehicle, because it concerns RPGs, or at least, RPG elements.

Gamification is a new vocabulary word lately, and there’s even a summit about it. What is the definition of gamification? The word gamification is used to describe companies integrating game mechanics into their non-gaming product or service to drive user engagement. These companies are “gamifying” their products and services by adding light game mechanics on top of them.

What does that actually look like? While the term is relatively new, the tactics aren’t and have already been in play for quite some time. Here are some examples of gamification in action.

I’ve been quite surprised by how well-received my previous post on gamification has been. As a long-time geek who played role-playing games in her youth, I’m all about a good game, and love that companies are taking hold of these theories and putting them to use in attracting and retaining customers.

I’ve seen a number of great posts recently about gamification and wanted to highlight a few of them here.

The Game Prodigy strives to provide game design articles and discussion that are immediately practical to readers. We believe that a game design resource should be as useful to game designers as a programming how-to is to an engineer, or a style guide is to an artist. Game design discussion should be useful, concrete, and understandable.

Game Design in itself, not game programming, not project management, but just deciding what to build, is a difficult problem in itself. There are common problems in game design that have been solved, and designers should have access to those solutions from other games and developers instead of having to retrace the same steps.

For this reason, at The Game Prodigy we focus less on theory and more on results. We look at case studies of successful designs and see how we can use them in our own games. We discuss the merits of different designs and what platforms they are appropriate for. We avoid talking about designs in a vacuum, instead saying, “This design was used in this context and produced this result.”

When you are a game designer, you become more attuend to this phenomena, but it is all around us. In games, we really notice it. In fact, a talented journalist once reviewed kudos by saying “it’s just watching numbers go up, but sometimes, that’s all you need”. (or words to that effect.)

The exercise was to take typical calendar events (a day of four events was provided as an example) and turn them into a game. The notion that this is possible comes from Danc’s post about Ribbon Hero on Lost Garden, where he writes:
If an activity can be learned…
If the player’s performance can be measured…
If the player can be rewarded or punished in a timely fashion…
Then any activity that meets these criteria can be turned into a game.
Each pair of designers was to apply the following game mechanics to their calendar schedule: points, levels, quests, feedback and inventory. As no concern was to be given for the interface itself, wireflows were used to illustrate the mechanics in use.

Ga*mi*fi*ca*tion = integrating game dynamics into a digital platform, service, community, content or campaign, in order to engage individuals while simultaneously driving meaningful value for doing business (read: monetization).

Every individual is hungry for reward, status, achievement, competition and self-expression. Gamification uses proven techniques to satisfy each individual's needs & desires and to engage each individual with personal relevant transmedia experiences (content, communities, brands, services or other valued solutions).

In this manuscript we propose that Challenge-avoiders, also referred to as Impression Managers, are a
heretofore ignored but commonly occurring player type. We consider whether and how eight very
different modern games accommodate Explorers, Challenge-seekers, and Challenge-avoiders and discuss
implications for entertainment and learning game design

Humans are naturally competitive. (We do call it the ‘human race’, after all!) We like validation of our place in the world. When society provides independent measures of our success, we can contextualize our personal achievements.

A lot of people tend to believe that the only important thing in a game is "fun". There are several problems with this, perhaps the most important being there is more to an experience than fun: self-improvement, information, understanding, and various other good things can come from an experience like watching a movie or playing a game. The hyperfocus on fun means that a lot of other important aspects might get overlooked.

Let's look at some of the problems with finding fun in a game.

I make fun of systems designers a lot because I am one. I wear a lot of hats, and I actually love to code, but deep down, it’s all about the game systems.

People who think like me are really useful to have on your MMO team. They won’t just dig into the guts of your game, they will revel in the guts of your game, sorting them this way and that, modeling them in myriad ways. This will, generally, result in a better product.

But they won’t ever come to the producer and say, “Okay! The balancing is all finished!” Trust me: that will never happen.

Presentation about interaction design with a focus on game mechanics

The only strange thing about this talking wolf is the high quality of its conversation. “I could shoot you, you know,” I threaten the wolf, having already established that my daughter might still be alive inside its belly. That wasn’t picked from a dialogue menu; I typed it in. Without missing a beat, the wolf responds, “I’m afraid you’ll have to.” Sentient characters and interactive dialogue have been common this entire play session. Impressed? The game’s responses are driven by game designer Jason Rohrer.

Cactus may get away with abusing his players just for fun, but he's well recognised enough to be invited to talk at the GDC. I for one can't afford even to momentarily bore or annoy my audience, because they'll drop me like a hot coal and move on to something else. It's not like there's any shortage of free alternatives for them to try (none of my games are on that list - ledsen). You don't get any favours when nobody's heard of you (not that any of my games actually are any good).

I don't want to be all negative though, so how about something constructive? Let's have a look at "how not to make your game abusive", so as to preserve the universal balance of... the universe? To do so we'll be exploring three problems which can contribute to making your game particularly annoying: repetition, randomness and incoherence.

I am supposed to talk about the relationship of aesthetics and metrics in social game design next week (at Games Convention Online in Leipzig, Germany), so I'm trying to figure out what 'aesthetics' could mean in the context of social games, especially Facebook ones. I've gone through a number of takes on aesthetics in both game design and game studies literature, and now I am in the process of trying to distill something sensible and practical out of it. By practical I mean something that could give function as high-level design drivers or principles in actual social game projects. 

The Boardgamers of Greater Akron Design and Prototype (BoGA DaP) Committee helps non-digital game designer’s develop quality prototype board games by the sharing of design information and providing playtest opportunities. BoGA is a flexible, open and largely self-organizing group committed to high quality games.

As long as there have been video games, there have been ways to cheat in them. They range from harmless codes that change the weather in Red Dead Redemption to serious hacks that make your aim perfect in Counter-strike. There are different layers of the severity as well; while wallhacking will get you a VAC ban on Steam, it’s likely that no one is going to care if you turn on The Sims 3 and give everyone in your town some free Simoleons.

As examined in Part I, a game’s meaning springs from its mechanics and not necessarily from its theme, especially if the two are in conflict. Such a dissonance can leave players feeling lost, perhaps even cheated. Thus, designers should strive to keep the two in harmony. At the very least, they should not be fighting each other.

Firstly, this week's rant is about the arrogance of games who think their own linear, often noninteractive story is more important than the experience I wish to have with the game mechanics. I make an "all games should do X" statement, which is kind of risky and presumptuous, but I stand by it.