I just realized this week that the team for Half-Life 2 mod Dystopia has released version 1, the first full release of the mod (as opposed to the earlier “demo” releases). With it comes over twice the number of official maps, a new weapon for each class, and some very interesting improvements to cyberspace hacking. There’s one change in particular that struck me as a great example of good game design that I’d like to look at, but I’ll explain my way there first.
Author Archives: joshg
Keeping co-operation interesting
I received the excellent Lord of the Rings board game this past Christmas, and it’s an interesting experience in co-operative play. (Also, a lot of fun.)
In the game, each player takes the role of one of the hobbits who attempt to bring the One Ring to Mordor to destroy it. You each have individual resources (cards, shields, and other tokens) and can be individually knocked out of the game if the Eye of Sauron reaches you. However, winning is either all or no one, and everyone must work together and strategize collectively to defeat the game. (There is a competitive variation, but it’s mostly just a way to keep individual scores while still working together to win.)
The game is pretty well-balanced, and certainly isn’t a guaranteed win. I’ve only had a chance to play it about six or seven times, but so far it seems that every time I play, the group loses the first play through and then wins the next time if they play again together.
What first drew me to this game (which, yeah, I hinted strongly for at Christmas time) was the idea of co-operative play. There aren’t very many games, board or otherwise, which are both strongly social but non-competitive. While I enjoy competitive game play in general, I tend to be really sensitive to situations where someone who is strongly competitive is taking the game “too seriously” and people are getting tense. I like my games played well, played to win, but taken lightly!
Ironically, playing Lord of the Rings together with friends can still lead to the frustrated tension of losing! There is a significant random element in the game’s progression created through the drawing of shuffled tiles. Roughly half of the tiles are Evil, with varying negative consequences, and the other half are positive tiles. The problem is, drawing an Evil tile of any kind requires that you keep drawing more tiles until you get a good one. This can result in a scenario turning very sour in the span of a single turn, and the chain effect of negative luck leaves you feeling immobilized and sometimes frustrated.
Whether the game is still mathematically balanced or not (and I actually suspect it is), the feeling of losing to a force outside of your control in a highly strategic, time-consuming game can be a bit maddening. I think this, in fact, was intentional – you really do get the sense of being pitted against a truly malevolent force with little chance of success, even if your chances are well balanced.
In fact, I think it’s exactly this sense that the game itself is a difficult and somewhat cruel puzzle that makes it work so well as a co-operative game. The game’s mechanics are fairly complex, with many different resources and movement tracks playing against each other in a way that works well with the game’s story metaphor while also providing layers of strategic elements to sort through. At first, it seems a bit overwhelming; but I think the game would fall flat if it were too straight-forward.
Is complexity required for a co-operative game to achieve a strategic sort of challenging fun? Competitive games can rely on the complexity of the opponent to create challenge within incredibly simple rules (see, for example, Go). But when the opponent is the rules themselves, is it possible for the rules to be both simple and challenging?
Office supplies board games
Okay, so I left that teaser post here over a month ago, and haven’t followed up. Truth is, I’m currently working from home, so actually experimenting with office supplies and getting people to test out a game idea in such an environment is basically impossible.
So I thought, if I’m going to let the idea die, why not let it go out with a plea for help on ye old intertubes? (That is to say, I thought I’d post what I had thought of thus far here, and let anyone who stumbles across it contribute ideas or test things out.)
Idea #1: Spreadsheet Wargame
So my thought here was, board games involve pieces of paper or cardboard with funny squares on them that we move little objects around on, and spreadsheets are papers with funny squares on them. Two plus two equals seven and BAM there’s got to be something funny there!
I had gotten so far as to envision playing a sort of mini-wargame waged over a spreadsheet-defined terrain, using whatever spreadsheets your company happens to make use of, of course, not a custom-designed one. Numbers on the page were to be treated like height maps, with large numbers being tall hills and negative numbers being deadly valleys.
Pros: translates the office data into something entirely different, but meaningful within the newly imagined game context. Plus, you can each use a paper clip as a ‘combatant’ token and go “POW I SHOT YOU” on your lunch break! (Or “ZAP I ZAPPED YOU” if going with, say, a Tron-like sci-fi theme where you are playing the part of digital avatars battling over the rugged data terrain!)
Cons: no one really wants to calculate real line of sight across varying hills and stuff, which probably means drastically simplifying the rules for handling terrain, which means that the spreadsheet itself starts to become less important.
Variation: Maybe the numbers on the page could be some sort of resources that you have to collect, as well as obstacles that affect movement? In this case, maybe the “combat” would amount to stunning or knocking back your opponent, instead of the violent theme. (Or you could keep the “POW I SHOT YOU”, if that makes you and your office mates laugh.)
Comment, please! Even if you just read this and think, “Hey, that sounds like fun”, that would be incentive for me to actually write up proper rules, which I could post up here and let people experiment with.
Quick update, a funny game design blog, and a teaser!
I still have some mental time budgeted towards game design, but not as much as I had expected to. But I have a bit of extra time again, and I want to throw some entertaining ideas around on this blog in the near future. First, the funny link.
Bernie DeKoven, a New Games guy who more recently wrote Junkyard Sports and writes often about new ways to have fun in his funlog, has uncovered a dark truth: his book is actually a secret training manual for our dark, inevitable post-apocalyptic future! Take part in the underground movement to prepare for nuclear-winter fun at his new (who knows how permanent) blog, Post-Apocalympics!
As for me, my last couple of forays into employment had me deeply entrenched in the Land of the Cubicle. When I got bored (and being most likely a case of undiagnosed ADD, it happened a lot), I might drift by the supply cabinet or what have you and poke around for interesting pens or clips or sticky notes to toy with. But inevitably this leads nowhere – it’s solitary, unstructured play, which can only last so long before you either bore yourself, or let on to those around you that you’re certifiably nuts.
The solution? Lure other people into the mix, and add some rules! I’m fleshing out some rules for a couple of games that can be played solely with things found in abundance around the office. The goal is for these to be quick, playable over a 15 minute coffee break, and definitely for two or more players (offices have enough solitaire play already).
So hang onto a few of those paper clips, index cards, and maybe even document printouts, they might need to be filed away under ‘G’ for game materials.
New Digital Games
quickie dump of something I rambled about on ifMUD earlier- if anyone wants links to anything I'm talking about, toss up a comment and I'll dig for them.
I'm reading through The New Games Book, which I picked up used last week or so. I'm glad I picked it up, for a few reasons. It's a good history lesson on where a whole bunch of group games that I've played growing up came from, for one. Plus there are a bunch of new ones in here that I hadn't heard of, which could be useful when doing kids stuff at church.
Also, it's interesting to get a better picture of what the New Games thing was about, compared to the idea you get when reading second-hand bits from Rules of Play and another paper I found online.
The second-hand things I'd seen were very keen on the cooperative and community aspects, as well as the idea that everyone can innovate and create new things. But the original movement seems to have been very focused on awareness of the physical self and physical environment. I think it'd be great to incorporate more of that in digital games, but it didn't seem to be emphasized by others who were looking at New Games for inspiration. eg. It seems to me that PacManhatten would be a closer analogy to a digital New Game than, say, Second Life.
So yeah, it would've been easy to miss a big part of the original idea, based on what I had seen as filtered through other people's take on the movement.
An accomplishment!
I finished reading through Rules of Play yesterday. No, I'm not done posting here though, as I'm going to spend some time reviewing the last two major sections to take some notes. (For all you high school students out there – no, "reading it" does not really count as studying.) And hopefully even after that is done, I'll be actively pursuing the practice of game design enough so that I can share some thoughts here semi-regularly.
I breezed through the last few chapters a bit quickly, but I'm not sure how much time I'd spend reviewing them. (Games as Open Culture, Games as Cultural Resistance, Games as Cultural Environment) They were good, but I think they felt less new to me as I've already been spending a lot of time digging into how games relate and interact with culture. Plus, let's be honest, I wanted to be able to say I had read the whole thing, so I was speed-reading like a madman.
The last chapter felt a bit deeper, dealing with games that blur the "magic circle" that defines a game's existence and boundaries. Having played ARGs like The Beast (which they use as an example), it was pretty familiar ground, but it was still an interesting analysis.
I definitely think it's valuable to frame games in the context of culture, during design as well as afterwards. Just the word "culture" itself is useful, as it doesn't come with nearly as much undefinable baggage as "art" while still conveying some of that sense of creative relevance. Whether you think games have a message or not (and they do), or whether you think they express something about ourselves (as I believe them to), a game you create is inescapably contributing something to the culture we live in.
What do you want to add to your culture? Laughter, enjoyment, escape, hard questions, the satisfaction of achievement? Reinforced stereotypes, or broken and discarded ones? A place for our nightmares, or for our highest dreams, to come to life? Dark, gritty angst, or colorful, bouncy joy? Fear, love, anger, friendship?
Rolling dice
I was playing Risk at Conquer Club a few weeks ago, and quickly found myself feeling annoyed at the experience. At first it felt like the interface was just wrong, and I tried analyzing it from a UI design perspective, but ultimately that just didn't hold up. In terms of giving the user control and being highly responsive, the interface efficiently handles rolling dice, calculating how many armies from each side were lost, and showing you the results immediately on refreshing the page.
What I finally realized was that the dice rolls just didn't feel right. It has nothing to do with the actual math; the system is sound, using highly random source data used to generate dice rolls. But the experience of the player changes dramatically when the process of manually comparing dice rolls is automated and reported instantly. In fact, "dramatically" is exactly the word, as what was lost was the narrative and dramatic tension created by the space of time between rolling the dice and knowing the outcome. Those numbers used along the way meant something to me when I played.
A quick example: say I attack your one army with two of mine, and I roll two fives and you roll a six. I will look at my dice and interpret it as, "My armies were strong, but the defender was unstoppable!" Then I try attacking from the other side with another two armies, and roll a two and a one, with the defender rolling a three. I look down, shaking my head thinking, "Arg, my armies totally missed their chance! Those slackers!" Often that sort of interpretation even becomes part of the social enjoyment of the game, complaining bitterly out loud when the dice rolls are low and cheering when my defenders stave off a high attack roll with an even higher defense.
At Conquer Club, that entire level of representation is ignored. Sure, they display the dice rolls, but to be honest when the interface is that efficient, you tend to just look at the final results. Take the example above: the exact same mathematical scenario would've been reduced to:
*click* "Rats, I lost an army there. Let's try from the other side…" *click* "Drat, not again, another loss!"
Essentially the layers of mathematical meaning are quickly reduced to a binary win / loss, with the subtleties of the intermediate steps and their representational meanings being ignored.
Now, this is anecdotal, and maybe some of the web game's users play through slowly enough to appreciate the dice rolls. But I'm not really trying to pick on Conquer Club so much as I'm noticing it as a design consideration. It's interesting to note that the results themselves aren't the only thing that will affect your players' play experience – it's how they perceive those results, and how they came about.
Intro
Brief intro: I've begun a study of game design, beginning with the excellent Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals by Salen and Zimmerman. To augment the reading and thinking, I need a place to dump thoughts and ideas that come up as I'm processing all of this goodness. I already had this empty blog sitting here after setting up a named WordPress account for posting to my more specific blog, faithgames, so here goes.
I'll probably stick with categorizing posts using the pattern established in Rules of Play's schemas: Rules, Play, and Culture. The categories are expanding sets: Rules focuses on just the rules, Play expands the view to the player's experience, and Culture looks at how the game relates beyond the game.
josh g.'s notes 