Recently I was chatting with some friends about the role of 'theme' in game design. Theme, in this discussion, was the setting of the game, be it fantasy, sci-fi, military, etc. At first blush, the typical game designer's use of theme appears a bit primitive.
Limited range compared to the wide variety of themes in movies or books. Games recycle a half dozen major themes or in some cases invent their own surrealist themes that make little sense outside the context of the game. Books, despite being grouped into narrow genres, have explored many thousands of powerful, evocative settings. You have books about bored European manuscript editors exploring the bizarre world of the pseudo occult and you have books set inside the mind of a quadriplegic. The disparity in variety is intriguing.
Crudely applied. Theme is applied in broad strokes at the beginning of many games, but almost always plays second fiddle to interesting game mechanics. Goombas are mushrooms, but this matters little beyond the fact that they are squat, match the scale of the world and can be squashed. If a novelist lazily integrated a character into their book's theme the way that game developer do on a regular basis they would never be published.
The result is that theme is often seen as an interchangable 'skin' that can be applied after the fact to a set of working game mechanics. The task is typically left to marketers to round up a popular license so that it can be painted onto the latest hot collection of game mechanics. This attitude towards theme affects the very fabric of game development.
And yet, something interesting occurs when we work this way. Very few licensed games turn into major long term franchises. They often feel incomplete and the pieces ill matched. On the other hand, seminal 'grown from scratch' games like Bejeweled, Mario, Quake, GTA or Sims end up doing amazingly well. Despite their surreal and often disjointed themes, they are surprisingly fun. In these titles, the theme of the game mechanics and the theme evolved hand-in-hand, often undergoing major switches half way through before settling into a successful partnership.
The Sims was a game about architecture that morphed into a game about playing dollhouse.
Grand Theft Auto was a cops and robbers chase game where you were the cop. It evolved into a game about being a free roaming criminal.
Quake was an Aztec style world where you tossed about a giant Thor-like hammer. It evolved into a nameless soldier battling against the mutants in a series of brown dungeons.
Bioshock was originally about Nazi's on an island.
If you start to dig into how game generate 'fun', many of these thematic transformations are, if not inveitable, certainly commonplace. It turns out that most game designers are not complete idiots when it comes to integrating theme and setting into their game designs. Designers aren't ignoring theme. They are simply using theme in a manner appropriate to the medium in which they work.
Some logic behind the madness If you look at games as being about exploratory learning, they tend to teach the player a series of skills. First the player learns basic skills (how to press a button) and overtime assemble a scaffold of skills that lets them engage in more complex scenarios like 'save the princess'. Each moment of learning gives a burst of pleasure.
These basic skills are utilized over and over again. If the player fails to learn them, the rest of the game is lost on them. Games reward involvement, yet there is a high cost the player must pay in terms of initial learning necessary to become involved.
"Theme" from this perspective, is shorthand for a collection of preexisting mental tools, skills and mental models. I think of it as a tool chest of chunked behaviors that the designer can rely upon to smooth out the initial learning curve.
The theme you select directly influences how you present your initial skills to the user. By saying "Pirates", I turn on a particular schema in the player's brain and a network of possible behaviors and likely outcomes instantaneously lights up. If they see a pirate with an impressive sword facing a small soldier, the goal of fighting the enemy is self evident. With a small visual cue, I've eliminated minutes of painful initial learning.
There is a fascinating moment in the sequence of exploratory learning where players say to themselves "Oh, I recognize and have mastered this situation already, so let me demonstrate my excellence." Because of the triggering of the theme, the challenge appears possible and attainable. If on the other hand, I had substituted the pirates with gray blob A and orange blob B, the player might be quite confused and not even bother to pick up the controller.
Why so few themes? To a certain degree this perspective on games explains the limited number of themes used in games compared to books or movies. A book uses theme as a hook to get people interested in plot and character dynamics. There are lots of potential hooks and the more unique they are, the more intrigued the reader is to find out more. This encourages a proliferation of fascinating settings.
On the other hand, a good theme in a game is one that triggers a number of clear mental models that are applicable to the game mechanics at hand. If you push too far outside the experience zone of potential players, you make them feel inadequate.
It also suggests that occasionally a literary theme simply is not needed. Sometimes it is better to just tell the player, "Hey, it is a game and like any game you've played, we'll educate you as you go." The same triggering of appropriate schema occurs. If it is enough to grease the wheels of learning, then our mission as a game designer is accomplished.
"Skinning" game designs is a bad practice When you look at game design from the 'games as learning' perspective, the idea of creating an slap-on aesthetic skin for a set of game mechanics starts to break down. In the best games, mechanics and theme evolve in lockstep over the course of the many iterations. If a mechanic isn't working, you have a couple choices. You can adjust the rules or you can adjust the feedback that the player receives. The two act in concert to produce the player's learning experience.
A good portion of the time, it makes sense to adjust the feedback side of the equation. What if people don't understand that the pirate is their character? Maybe it makes sense to make the pirate wear a right red outfit and the enemy a bit more evil looking. When you do so, the theme of the game shifts ever so slightly. Over hundreds (or thousands) of tweaks, a theme for the game might emerge that is quite different than what you originally envisioned. This is often the case for the best game in the history of our industry.
In fact, the final theme may be semi-incoherent if you attempt to analyze it as a literary work. However, that doesn't matter because it provides the moment-by-moment scaffolding of feedback that helps the player learn their way through the game. As long as the game is fun and delivers value to the customer we can often toss the literary definition of theme out the window.
In fact, you start getting into trouble when you make the theme so rigidly defined that you can't adjust the feedback for specific game mechanics. What if you are dealing with a license where the pirate isn't allowed to wear a red outfit? That design option, which may have been the best one available, is taken off the table. The hundreds of little trade offs that occur when theme coherence wins and gameplay loses diminishes the effectiveness of the game.
So you can't just 'skin' a set of game mechanics. When you do makes the attempt, a well executed iterative process of game design will often result in a game that is quite different than its source material. A poorly executed process results in a game that plays poorly.
Conclusion There are a couple lessons here.
The most effective game themes exist primarily to facilitate the learning process for the player. This may be a traditional narrative theme, but it doesn't need to be.
Theme evolves in lock step with the rules of the game over a process of many iterations. You might as well plan for it. Early on develop vertical slices of your game. This will help you converge on working combinations of theme and rules. As you go allow for iteration on production assets.
Locking in your theme too early and too rigidly can stunt the exploration of more effective feedback systems. A bit of flexibility often yields better gameplay.
Gamasutra was kind enough to post the report our group produced this year at Project Horseshoe. If you are interested in a brief glimpse into the thoughts of veteran game designers, it is worth a read. The topic our group chose was roughly related to 'story in games'. However, it became quite clear that the group was more interested in discussing how games are able to support powerful new experiences.
Story, in the traditional sense, was reduced into a rather small and telling role. The best stories, we concluded, are the ones told by each player as they share their amazing gaming experience with friends and family. In this game-centric view of media, "story" is but the afterglow, a processing step in our understanding of past grand events. Games are about causing the birth of the primary event, that glorious moment where the player actually experiences those grand events first hand.
And what is game design? Game design is the process of building devious systems that are fully aware of human foibles, quirks and desires. These systems click and whir with manipulative intent. The best ones encourage human beings to reach out and experience, of their own free will, something new, meaningful and real. Game design as a distinctly unique and powerful tool set I got the glimpse that designers are finally coming to terms with games as their own unique creative medium. I'm not quite sure how to put this into words, so bear with me. :-) The examples we discuss passionately were from games, not movies, theater or books. The language and metaphors were distinctly born from the theories of play and human psychology. Folks were discussing how to build the next world changing work of art in a rich, detailed vocabulary that despite borrowing liberally from other fields, was distinctly unique to games. In fact, there was little talk of cut scenes or protagonists or narrative in general.
The group quickly bypassed such dorm room topics as a waste of our limited time. It would have been as useless as a gathering of early Jazz musicians debating how the aesthetics of Shakespearean plays might advance their new art. Drawing such parallels might certainly be academically intriguing, but it has turned out to be generally orthogonal to the task at hand of making great games.
I've always believed that the real philosophy, language and tools of understanding and building great games will comes from messy development trenches, not the ivory towers or posh hills of Hollywood. Artists, whose lives crumble or soar based off the success of their vision, have far more incentive to push for new techniques that work. The language of games grows like slang in the ghetto, rough, occasionally incoherent to outsiders, but still immensely evocative and effective. When such a language makes the leap to the mainstream, the world changes.
There exists a powerful group within the gaming world that actively seeks to stamp out innovation unless it falls along the prescribed lines of their rigid and conservative doctrine. Who are these people? They are every developer, gamer and publisher who promotes the ideal that a good game must have a story.
Raised on fine stories from the golden years of novel writing and movie production, story snobs see games as just another opportunity to tell great tales. Poor David Jaffe fell victim to the bitter wrath of the snobs recently when he talked about how developing story based games isn’t all that exciting. It was an honest comment that makes a lot of sense if you’ve ever experienced the joy of tweaking a surprisingly interesting interactive system versus the slog of polishing a series of plot points.
It is really very simple. Not all games need stories. Treat story as one of many available marvelous ingredients that can improve your game, not as a necessity. The logic of the Story Snobs
I like games with stories!
There aren’t as many great games with stories as there are books and movies with great stories.
It is therefore the fault of [the developer, publisher, etc] because they are not filling my needs.
As an advocate, I must passionately protect and promote any game with a story as the ideal.
Anyone who suggests games without stories are reasonable should be crushed. After all, it is a zero sum game here. Any resources spent on promoting non-game stories are resources that could have been spent on 10 more dialog trees.
The root of this unfortunate attitude is a classic tale of old media infiltrating and co-opting a new media. There are three players:
The fanboys
The movie and book industry wannabes
The publishers
The Fanboys There exist millions of fan boys who had great experiences with old adventure titles and Japanese-style RPGs such as Final Fantasy. These story rich titles were some of the first cross over genres that encouraged people not typically interested in games to pick them up and try them out. If you are a conservative media consumer used to movies, Final Fantasy is an easy dish to consume. You have to watch a few cut scenes, play a little bit of game and watch a few more cut scenes.
However, many of these new game players never moved onto new genres. Just like a good number of Brain Training new customers never try racing games, there are millions who started playing games with the adventure game genre and stopped when that market faltered. There are millions that to this day still play mostly Japanese-style RPGs.
For this demographic, the artificially sweetened formula of “Lots of plot with a dash of interactive bits” defines their total vision of gaming. As conservative media consumers, when game falls outside their nearly religious preferences they don’t merely accept and forgive. Instead, they are inclined to drag it behind their truck through the proverbial forums of Texas. “A game without a story? Impossible.”
Despite the copious evidence to the contrary.
The movie and book industry wannabes I had a great conversation with an animator at GDC. He’s an industry veteran and works primarily on cut scenes. He confided to me that his true dream was to work on CG for movies. He read all the movie trade magazines and avidly sucked up their tips and techniques. He was in the game business because it was kind of similar and he could get a job there.
I’ve had roughly this same conversation with a remarkable number of developers. The game industry is filled with writers who want to author the next great novel, designers who want to direct the next great movie and artists who would be perfectly happy doing character design for a Saturday morning cartoon. Even if they aren’t actively trying to use the game industry as a stepping stone, many of their core values are informed by older, existing media such as movies or novels.
These cultural transfers from big established media industries have a huge impact on the type of games that are made. First, their general grasp of how interactive systems are built is quite weak. They couldn’t design a set of valid game mechanics if they tried. More importantly the passion for interactivity amongst many of the developers in the game industry is unexpectedly low. When you talk about making a sexy Blizzard-style rendered intro, eyes light up with respect and admiration. This is their dream. When you talk about emergent gameplay in a title like GTA, you’ll get blank stares. It just isn’t their passion.
If you have the skills to make movies, everything looks like a movie. There are a thousand decisions made during game development that are the creative choices of the developers involved. If your labor force is trained to build and steeped in the culture, and aesthetic of linear media, guess what most games will end up looking like? That’s right. Linear media with chunk of half assed or cloned interactivity thrown in for good measure.
I got a chance to read a game design document for a now published title. It read like a movie script. Except they had little production notes like “And now the character fights a red monster”. Interactivity in games should be more than just a production note.
But it never will be when large portions of our industry’s workforce worships the values of linear media over the unique charms of interactive gaming.
Publishers I can’t blame the business folks too much. They have their creative people telling them that stories are critical. They got violently passionate customers telling them that stories are the most important thing ever. So they do what sheeple do and green light mostly story-based projects.
Consequences The vast majority of the budgets in modern games goes towards art, video, dialog and other plot related expenses. The development teams are further stocked with Hollywood refuse, which only increases their story-centric biases. Game mechanics work is generally given less development time, resources or room for experimentation.
Since the production risk of story-based games is lower, publisher tend to green light them more often. The developers don’t know how to replicate the complex playground games that do become hits. The market ends up being flooded with dozens of story-based games and only a few games that focus on interactivity as the primary driver of value. So we train more players to expect story-based games and we train or import more developers that know how to only make story-based games.
The industry becomes more and more weighted towards producing games with stories. You end up with a feedback cycle that reinforces the required presence of story elements in most games. If everyone wants story, how can it be wrong?
As various folks have commented, Tetris would never be published today. The current requirement that most games must have stories is a filter that prevents the creation and publishing of what are potentially the crown jewels of the gaming industry.
There are lots of great games that don’t require a story. Focusing our effort on only creating games with story substantially limits our creative exploration of the media and limits the types of games that we, as game developers, are encouraged to create.
Stories are not required to make great games. Before you think I’m a story hater, let me disabuse you of the notion. I like stories. I’m playing a darling little RPG right now called Aveyond that is quite plot heavy. Delightful stuff that simply would not work without the inclusion of a story.
Even as a story lover, however, the existence of the story fiends infiltrating every level of gaming irks me. They assume that stories are always a good thing. People are not thinking critically about whether or not their game needs story elements.
It is perfectly possible to have a great game whose plot elements fit on a postcard. Populous, Mario 64, Quake, Lumines, Bomberman, Guitar Hero, Counterstrike and hundreds of other titles succeed wildly as great gaming titles and yet all of them lack story beyond a rough setting. They don’t feed the player periodic plot points that extend a narrative. They don’t have characters with extensive histories that evolve and grow emotionally through a series of descriptive cut scenes. They don’t have fixed events that are described by a godly author as a way of informing the player about actions beyond the capabilities of the gaming system to simulate. And they rock none the less.
In fact, the one thing that prevents the game industry from turning into Hollywood with occasional button pushing to advance the plot is the fact that a lot of people purchase certain hits that shockingly have little evidence of tradition plot. Sports game and racing games consistently make a profit. Nintendogs and Brain Training came out of the blue and rocked Japan. Tetris made the Gameboy a success. All these smash hits have no plot and lots of interactivity.
So there is obviously a more complex tale to be told here. There exists a wide swath of games that can be successful without having a story. Just as there also exists a wide number of games that can benefit from having a story.
When players and developers simply assume that their games need stories because they have been blinded by their subconscious cultural biases, they fail to dig into the guts of why stories matter to games. When you say “Wouldn’t it be nice to have another cut scene because I like cut scenes,” you typically aren’t asking the hard question “What does this cut scene actually bring to the gaming experience as a whole?”
Story is a game design ingredient, not an end in and of itself. Story has a purpose in game development. It is a ingredient. It has little inherent value by itself. Its primary value is how it contributes to the entire player experience. You are selling a game, not a movie or a novel. You need to design the whole game as a complete experience.
To use a bizarre analogy, making games is a lot like cooking. You may really like bleu cheese. I do. I once found a fabulous recipe for bleu cheese lasagna. The recipe called for a few crumbles of bleu cheese, but the store only sold large hunks. I thought to myself “I like bleu cheese a lot. Why waste all this cheese…I’ll just throw it all in!”
Woops.
All the bleu cheese went in along with some expensive spices and other goodies. The result was a giant slab of goo that tasted intensely of bleu cheese. You couldn’t taste the spices, the sauce or the noodle. I ate it for two weeks straight and never ate bleu cheese again for months. I would have been better off just nibbling on the chunk of bleu cheese.
I added something in that I liked by itself, but I didn’t have a clue about how it would interact with or benefit the other elements in my dish. The same goes for gaming elements like story. What do they add to the game? If you end up with a game that is barely different from a movie, why not just make the movie in the first place?
What is a story to a game? Let’s take a look at the role story plays in game development.
First off, it is worth defining story. Story is a series of linear narrative elements in the fashion of novels and movies from ages past. This is a very traditional definition that I’m confident does a disservice to many of the wacky interactive fiction attempts being concocted by mad geniuses around the world. It also happens to be the one that is most descriptive of the use of story in modern video games.
In most games story elements are used as rewards for player actions. The player does something and they get a little dose of plot. Typically plot points fall into one of three categories.
Enabling reward: These rewards help the player advance through the game further. Examples include the conversations in Half Life 4 that let you know that the main generator is down and needs a fadangle to fix it.
Red herring reward: These are rewards that the player instinctually pays attention to as potentially important, but in reality they are just tossed in there to help build a fantasy world. The player, not being able to distinguish between what clues are pertinent to the game world, laps the red herrings up and experiences the same sort of pleasure they would gain from an Enabling reward. Examples include descriptions of a Dark Past Foozle that once caused a huge cataclysm. It never affects the actual game, but players latch onto it and try to make sense of it none the less.
Visceral reward: These rewards trick our sensory system into thinking something interesting is happening. Example include big bloody fight scenes, spooky scenes that cause us to think we are in immediate danger even though we are actually sitting in a comfy chair in a posh apartment on the west side.
The model we are using here assumes that gamers are constantly trying to grok the gaming world in order to interact with it in a more meaningful manner. The primary bursts of pleasure come from activation of learning systems in the brain. There are secondary burst of sensation that come from false sensory input that activates various fight or flight mechanisms. It is a simple model, but it generally works and is a far better starting place than designing by feel alone.
When should story be used in a game? So a story element is just a reward. It isn’t the only type of reward. It is one of many types of rewards. You could put in a cut scene when a big boss creature is destroyed, or you could let the player discover a new sword token that enables them to chop down the vines that have been blocking progress through the earlier jungle levels. Both might cost the same amount of development time and both are valid rewards that make the player feel great.
Instead of asking “how should I implement story in this game?” instead ask the question “What type of rewards best fit the game experience?”
Story-based rewards have several very distinctive characteristics that can influence your decision.
Triggers for specific types of emotions: The biggest benefit of story-based rewards is that you can use them to trigger social emotions such as sadness, humor or sympathy. These are typically difficult to trigger using algorithmic rewards, but are relatively easy to create using common narrative techniques and patterns.
Low initial production cost: With a line of text, you can hint at complex system that you never need to build. For example: “The tattered scroll describes the ancient history of Yendor where giant lavender airwhales ruled the skies” hints at a tantalizing other world that the game developer will never need to build. The cost? A few minutes of writing in a commonly available word processor. In general, a simple plot point can be created and polished at a much lower cost than what it takes to create an interactive reward.
Rapidly escalating costs as realism increases: As you attempt to increase visceral aspect of your story, production costs increase dramatically. Realism costs money in the form of expensive tools, talent and time.
Low execution risk: The risk of a story-based reward failing to be completed is very low. The production techniques for text, images, sounds and video are well understood and highly reproducible. If new technology is kept to a minimum, the use of story-based rewards is highly unlikely to delay the shipment of your game.
High burn out: Most story rewards have very low variability. When you see them once, you’ve sucked out 99% of their value. When you see them again, players get much less buzz. Repeated often enough and they become downright irritating. Imagine if you were forced to watch the main intro animation when you start up a game. It rapidly loses its appeal.
Limited economies of scale: With high burn out come very limited economies of scale. Every time you want a new reward, you need to custom craft a new one. The cost of generating new reward increases linearly with the number of rewards. More algorithmic systems, on the other hand, tend to have a higher initial cost but can be reused over and over again. Imagine having to come up with a unique and enticing story element every time the player killed a monster. It is much cheaper in the long run to simply give the player a few points or a health pack. Also note that the cost of a small increase in realism is multiplied across all the story rewards in your game. This gets expensive quicly.
Changes are expensive: Exploring variations on story elements is expensive. Often the plot points need to be rebuilt from scratch. If you are dealing with text, this isn’t so bad. If you are dealing with $50,000 cutscenes, it can be quite painful. Contrast this to more algorithmic system were changing drop percentages on rare items may be as simple as tweaking a single number and seeing what happens.
There are some folks out there who claim that stories work poorly with games. This has some root of truth. If you focus only on the quality of the story, you’ll find that your gameplay elements will appear to constantly interrupt and slow down the flow of the story compared to say your favorite movie. It can be difficult to built dramatic tension in a typical manner when the player is constantly jumping about, pressing buttons and performing other mechanical actions.
However, story can still be used as a vital element to the game. It can add an emotional richness to the reward system that is difficult and expensive to achieve using algorithmic techniques. Story must always serve the greater good of the game.
Conclusion To return to our cooking metaphor, I find story to be much like a fine wine. When you pour a glass of gloriously rich merlot, you’ll discover all sorts of delicate nuances that are simply impossible to find anywhere else. Yet, that same glass of wine can also be used to cook some wonderful dishes. A nice lobster bisque wouldn’t be complete without a dash of wine to accent the flavor. Stories in games are really the equivalent of cooking wine, an essential and useful ingredient for many popular genres.
On the other hand, there are lots great dishes that you can cook without using any wine at all, just like there are some great games you can build that don’t use story. If game design is anything like cooking, there is an entire universe of game designs that work perfectly well without any story elements.
If you are yourself a story snob (I was for many years), you need to ask yourself “Am I in this business primarily to build a great game or am I in it to craft a great story?”
Pick your passion. If you really want to make movies, go for it. Move to LA, buy a video camera and get started! For those who choose to remain in the game industry, we’ve got a unique and wonderful medium that deserves to be explored and expanded as a powerful expressive force in its own right. Learn from old school linear media, but never be bound by its constraints. Use it as one ingredient in your dish only if you want a dash of story flavor.
Don’t be a story snob and assume blindly that your game needs a story. Players buy games for the total experience and you should choose the appropriate reward system that best fits the experience that you are attempting to craft.
Take care Danc.
References
How the story fiends filter great games “I believe if Tetris were presented today, here is what the producer would be told: Go back give me more levels give me better graphics give me cinematics and you re probably going to need a movie license to sell that idea to the public. The producer would go away dejected. Today, Tetris might never be made.” Satoru Iwata, GDC 2006 Keynote http://www.thegamechair.com/2006/03/24/gdc-2006-nintendo-president-satoru-iwatas-keynote/
Burn out: When you create story elements as rewards, you experience the same reward over and over again as you play test the title. This leads to burn out on those rewards.
“And the thing is, once you have the IDEA, your fun- as a designer- is really over. If you are working in the single player action-adventure genre, and are fortunate enough to be working with a team that can execute the crap out of what you think is an amazing idea, you don’t get much out of actually seeing your idea executed. You get a little, sure. You get the little tinglies and such. It’s a neat moment to see your idea brought to life. But you already saw the idea, already experienced the amazing moment...but it was in your head months ago. Now it’s just a slog to execute the damn thing so OTHERS- the PLAYERS- can enjoy what you’ve already finished enjoying.” http://davidjaffe.typepad.com/jaffes_game_design/2006/07/changes.html
I was flipping through my copy of EGM with my fiancé just the other day. It was a rather embarrassing tour through the current gaming culture. In the first few pages, we perused the standard mixture of guns and ultra violence. “Look,” I pointed, “there’s Lara’s bum festooned with some charming grenade accessories. And check out those flying WW2 chaps on page 10. They certainly do bounce about when consumed in a massive fireball.”
Finally, we happened about a vivid image of a violated female corpse with a bloody bullet hole gaping in her forehead. Ah, the delightfully rank odor of publicly condoned misogyny. Apparently this is a great way to sell games. It is rare that you see such crude advertising images in movie, books or even comics, a market that supports far more extreme depictions of ultra violence. Yet they are commonplace in game advertising. It has always perplexed me.
The immediate response is to blame the marketing departments. Obviously, they are bastards. Yet, in the broader scheme of business, marketing is mostly a mercenary that attempts to convey a product’s value proposition to a potential customer. At its core, game advertising merely reflects and promotes the value that is exchanged between product developers and their customers.
So let’s turn this question of shock advertising around. What value proposition are mainstream games promising to customers that inspire our advertising to look like this drek?
Visceral Feedback To find the answer we need to go back to the basics. Games at their heart are about feedback cycles in which the player performs an action and the game provides either a reward or a punishment. The potency of your feedback system has a major impact on the addictiveness of your game play. Thus feedback systems are one of the most heavily developed areas in the majority of game titles. Early in the history of games, developers realized that the emotional impact of the game’s feedback can be easily magnified by using visually rich and shocking imagery. The introduction of faked ‘dangerous’ stimuli makes your reptile brain react in a physical manner is not so different than the thrills of a rollercoaster ride. You are never in any danger, but critical portions of your brain react as if you are. The brain evolved to deal with real threats, not 3D video cards pumping out super realistic explosions complete with force feedback. The flow of blood in your brain changes, your heartbeat increases and the excitement builds. The game play goes from interesting to thrilling. I call this ‘visceral feedback.’
Visceral stimulus enhances existing reward systems in games. For example, it is easily arguable that the fatalities of Mortal Combat improved the actual game experience. The thrill of finally ripping out your opponent’s spine kick starts your adrenaline and wakes up your brain. For another example of visceral feedback, check out this simple yet effective Flash game at http://www.winterrowd.com/maze.swf. The use of sound is particularly nicely done.
The core value proposition of games? Visceral feedback is a very popular technique with both customers and game developers.
With customers, several very public blockbuster success stories such as GTA, Doom and Quake suggest that “Visceral feedback means better games”. The link is questionable, but still the theory has become accepted as The Way of Things. Experienced gamers, indoctrinated into the gaming culture accept and promote the benefit of visceral rewards. They historically have put their money into better graphics and more extreme settings whenever the opportunity arises. Better visceral feedback has become a key indication of game quality, despite the general lack of real world correlation.
The business side of game development also appears to support the use of visceral feedback. This makes the most sense in light of modern game design’s attempt to constantly reduce and mitigate short term risk.
Generally visceral feedback relies on the production of new assets, not the creation of new game play systems. Asset production is a well studied and highly reliable activity that is unlikely to introduce schedule slippage.
The advances in hardware mean that taking advantage of new hardware allows designers to easily pump out a new title with the same mechanics and updated graphics. They merely increase the impact of the risk / reward systems and hope that this will give them a competitive advantage in the market place. By targeting R&D only at technology and not in the areas of game mechanics or business models, companies also reduce short term risk. Why bother creating a unique competitive advantage when you can recycle one?
Naturally, these two sides of the coin feed upon one another. Over many years, these patterns have led many in the industry to make the implicit assumption that the ultimate value proposition of games is to “provide players with visceral experiences.”
Marketing’s response If you boil a game’s core value proposition down to “providing visceral experiences” then the job of marketing is to promise increasingly powerful visceral experiences. Marketing people aren’t being obnoxious. They are simply doing their job based off the assumed benefits of gaming and assumed desires of the gaming population.
Unfortunately, game marketers are also encouraged to over promise a game’s visceral rewards due to the bizarre structure of our retail channel. We live in a “Buy and then Try” environment. The promise of an intense experience is often more cost effective at creating sales than actually developing a real experience. A photorealistic box illustration costs much less than a photorealistic game environment. Yet arguably the box and perhaps a few screenshots are more effective at driving sales. This is not a recent trend. The advertising of 2600 titles such as Combat are direct forefathers of the visuals used to promote modern games.
Shock advertising comes into play when someone always increases the viciousness of their ads in an attempt to compete in a market where the emotional rawness of your product is a major selling factor. Customers have two reactions. They can either leave gaming behind in disgust or they can learn to ignore the shock ads. Over time, the shock ads have increased in potency in order to reach an increasingly jaded, distrustful and hardcore audience.
Of course, non-gamers see gaming ads as well. They assume that the highly prevalent shock ads display the true nature of gaming. There are massive generation issues at work here, but gaming ads are structured in a way that deliberately and intentionally provokes an intense negative response from outsiders. A gamer would retort, “They are meant to be shocking, duh.”
The problems with visceral feedback The response of marketing reveals a deeper issue. Basing a game on visceral feedback is a remarkably shallow value proposition for your customers. Visceral rewards might seem exciting for the customer and easy to create for the developer, but they have some longer term issues.
The burn out rate on visceral rewards is very high. Sure, each fatality in Mortal Combat was rather cool the first few times you saw it, but after a while you begin thinking of them more strategically. A fatality rapidly turns into an abstract demonstration of skill and finesse. This deeper appreciation of the game mechanics can often be serviced using reward mechanisms that are much less expensive to produce. Players quickly stop experiencing the visceral nature of the reward.
Since value diminishes quickly, customers get little value for their money. Where a game like chess might last a lifetime, most games that rely on visceral rewards last mere hours. The gamer value per dollar is perceived as quite low. The more desperate gamers with money to spare burn through multiple games. This artificially buoys the industry. The less desperate (or less well heeled) will often give up on gaming completely due to the lack of value that it provides.
From a business perspective, visceral rewards are also one of the least effective.
Rapidly diminishing return on investment: Past a certain level of quality, customers have difficulty telling the difference between ‘good visuals’ and ‘great visuals’. Developers can quickly find themselves spending substantial amounts of money with no obvious return on their investment.
Poor competitive insulation: Great graphics and other visceral rewards are one of the easiest elements to add to a title and the most difficult to maintain leadership in over time. Any publisher can hire a bevy of talented artists and pump out gloriously sexy movies. Because the cost of entry is so low, it is easy for others to do the same. Competition drives down profit. Ironically, short term risk mitigation development strategies result in long term market instability.
To summarize, games that rely primarily on visceral rewards end up causing several issues:
They provide poor value to customers. Long term this lack of value often alienates customers.
They are a poor business practice that seriously increases the competitive risks for your company and the industry.
As a side effect, they encourage increasingly demented ads that strive to promote a shallow value proposition. This helps alienate both marginal customers and the world at large.
You are responsible for shock advertising If you develop a game that is ‘the same, but more intense’, you are directly responsible for the miserable and degrading ads that it spawns. You set forth a shallow value proposition in your product that the marketoids promote to the best of their ability.
You are also responsible in part for the vitriol flung at the game industry by an offended moral majority. I’m all for freedom of speech, but when the vast majority of content in a medium is radically out of step with other popular forms of media, there is something questionable going on. It would be the rough equivalent of the entire movie industry only producing porn. When you produce a shallow product that feeds on the subconscious base instincts of your customers, you should expect to get a bit of well deserved flak tossed your way.
Alternative approaches There are alternatives and they start with adjusting the core value proposition of your game. It turns out that visceral rewards are only one technique for increasing the emotional impact of feedback systems in games. Here are several alternative feedback techniques which are highly effective, lower cost and have much lower burnout rates. For example:
Real world rewards: Rewards that tie into real world goals of the customer. Examples include money in gambling games or the promise of better mental capabilities in the DS Brain Training titles.
Social rewards: Reward that leverage or help build social networks. Examples include prestige-based feedback in a title like Counterstrike’s leader board or Guild housing in an MMO.
Nested rewards: The nesting of carefully balanced feedback systems that augment and encourage the continual learning of new strategies. An example includes the turn structure in Civilization in which various building schedules encourage the player to continue for ‘one more turn.”
Possible paths towards better advertising In order to have more positive advertising messages, you need to create games that have a positive benefit for your customers.
Stop relying on visceral rewards as your game’s primary selling point. Use visceral rewards sparingly in your designs. You may lose a few hormonal teenage ‘hard core’ gamers who have bought into an empty gaming culture, but that is okay. There are better things you can do with your mad skillz than virtually stimulating their tender amygdala with sensory overload.
Focus on alternative feedback systems such as real world rewards or social rewards. You’ll actually be providing substantial, positive benefits to your customers and the smart marketing people will build their campaigns around this concept.
Encourage ‘Try before you buy’ distribution methods. The current retail channel encourages and promotes the status quo of both game design and advertising. The best marketing is to provide authentic, high value experiences to your customer and then leverage of word of mouth and other viral or grassroots techniques. When you encourage user trial of your product, you are no longer hiding behind the veil of questionable box shots, previews and magazine ads. Instead, you are establishing an honest, experience-based connection with your customer. The rapidly growing markets of casual gaming and MMO games follow this sales model very successfully.
Conclusion Many in our close knit industry are always willing to defend the excesses of visceral feedback as art. But I wonder if the situation isn’t the exact opposite. Art to me is the act of creating great and wondrous things that communicate the breadth of the human condition.
When I look at many games and the sorry advertisements that reflect back their pitiful value, I see people mechanically spewing out “more for the sake of more.” A game that only offers perfectly modeled bullet paths or the ability to murder beautiful women is a waste of talent and a blight upon our industry. I say this not because I’m morally opposed to such content, but because it doesn’t accomplish anything worthy for the customer, the industry or our industry’s wonderful developers.
Make something worthwhile. The game ads, though never perfect, will improve in direct response to the value of what you create. Perhaps, many years from now, I’ll be able to flip through EGM with my fiancé and not feel like such a dolt. :-)
How I stopped worrying about ludology and learned to love game plots
Introduction This is part 12 of an ongoing game design document written as a blog. Be sure to catch up on previous posts. In the last installment, we talked about creating a component bible for all our art assets. Ah, game design 101 is over! This time we'll have a bit of fun looking at the concept of story and how it really fits into a game from a mechanics perspective.
Drama matters Combat is the resolution system that determines what happens when a ship moves onto a planet. This is the most exciting element of the game for the player. The attacker is the protagonist and the defender is the antagonist. A long history of building, scrapping together resources and journeying across a dangerous landscape give each character depth and meaning. Two ships enter, one leaves.
In terms of pure mechanics, the combat code will calculate a resolution based off the properties of the two ships. The statistical engine does its thing and an answer pops out. Everything else is merely drama.
But drama matters and here’s why. Plot: A theoretical underpinning I’ve participated in the debate about whether story or game play is more important to a game. Inevitably there is the Final Fantasy addict mumbling to themselves in the corner, “It’s not a real game unless it has a story. Like FFVII”.
Being a bit bored by the whole discussion, I got my hands dirty and broke apart a bunch of popular games to see how plot was used to enhance the psychological effect of the game. Pretty much every successful title had the same pattern:
Perform an action.
Give the player a dose of story.
Player is emotionally stimulated and wants to find out more.
Now this maps very nicely onto the risk / reward sequences I’ve been using to document various actions within the game. The actions are our verbs and the doses of story are our rewards.
Why we should use plot as a reward mechanism Stories have some rather unique characteristics as a reward mechanism.
Plot is great emotional reward: Plot is one of the few rewards available to game designers that can tweak a wide range of player emotions. Surely it is nice picking up a coin and seeing a pretty sparkle. But this provides a limited emotional response compared to a plot reward like “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”
Individual elements of a story have a high burn out rate: For example the plot element, “He fell in love with her” can be quite powerful in the appropriate context. But having the next plot reward say the same exact thing is simply annoying, good evidence of burnout. “He fell in love with her.” See…annoying.
Hand crafting stories is expensive: Writing an extensive plot is rather expensive if your game contains hundred of reward moments. It is often not cost effective to use unique elements of plot as a reward for a frequently occurring risk / reward sequence. This expense is why many older games reserve plot only for end of the level rewards. Games that attempt to use plot more frequently (KOTOR and Half Life come to mind) suffer from larger budgets.
Archetypal stories have a lower burnout rate: How many times can you watch an archetypal “Hero’s Journey” before getting burned out? Hundreds, perhaps thousands of times?
Algorithmically Generated Micro Stories I can’t afford to write or animate a unique bit of plot each time someone takes over a planet, but it would be nice to leverage a bit of the emotional zing.
However, instead of writing a static story, we are going to create a system for algorithmically generating micro story. A micro story has all the elements of a static plot and packs a surprising emotion wallop. However, in terms of work, it is a very thin contextual layer on top of our heavy investment in game mechanics.
The techniques are straightforward:
Leverage the existing game systems
Add contextual elements that provide the narrative slant to player actions
Add meta-game mechanics that reinforce the emotional rewards and penalties of the micro story.
One of the best examples of a micro story that I’ve seen is in Strange Adventures in Infinite Space. The designer, Rich Carlson writes “The main idea at the time was to make a very quick-playing game that still felt sort of like watching a couple of seasons of your favorite space adventure series (except that you'd actually fight the space battles)”
Great idea. Let's borrow it for Space Crack. :-)
The Space Opera Space Crack is a miniature space opera.
Imagine a massive character driven drama set against the backdrop of intergalactic war. Young pilots emerge from their home worlds, ready to defend the mother world from imminent alien invasion. One heroic captain, Captain Jack “Planet Killer” McDaddy works his ways up through the ranks. His skills (and his kick ass vessel of massive destruction) are all that stand against complete alien domination of the universe.
This is a Horatio Alger story of a rag tag band of saviors and the turmultuous trials and tribulations that define their epic tale. We've got war, lust, love, deceit, betrayal and sun-shattering explosions. Complete with extra cheese.
The elements of the micro story To pull this off I have to complete the following items:
Define the characters: Who are this characters and what is their history? Is there a protagonist? An antagonist?
Define the conflict: What is the source of character conflict? Are there alliances? What actions stoke the combat?
Illustrate the conflict climax and resolution: How do the character’s meet and resolve their conflict?
Characters: Space Captains! Ships make poor central characters. But a space frigate piloted by the Captain Jack “Master Blaster” McDaddy perks up my ears. We add a simple system for classifying stacks by giving each stack of ships a name.
Rank: Ships start out as Peons and slowly grow to become God Admirals
First Name: Randomly selected from a list. Both male and female. This is a space opera after all.
Nickname: Ships that complete certain tasks get nicknames. Special power ups are associated with each nickname.
Last name: Randomly selected from a list (perhaps players can add their own)
These names are built up over a period of time. You are the grand strategic ruler of your world and don’t have time to worry about the peons in your army. You might learn the last name of a character after his second or third battle. He might get a first name when his ship reaches a certain size. Finally, he’ll prove himself in some dust up and be given a nick name. If stacks are merged, the stronger captain name is always kept.
The idea here is a well equipped stack is more than just a potent game token. It is portrayed as a character. The fact that the player has invested time and thought into keeping this particular ship alive gives each mature Space Captain character emotional significance.
The other player is doing the same with his top ships. This leads to natural protagonist and antagonist relationships. For each player, his Captains are obviously Luke and the enemy who keeps eating your planets is obviously Darth Vader.
This is a fun design idea. Don’t spend time creating a character that strives to be interesting. Watch what the player does and decorate as characters those tokens that matter to them.
Conflict: It's a fricking war out there Conflict is easy since we are building a war game. Your captains are the good guys and the other captains are the bad guys. Rather straight forward, really. We can add a bit more emotional impact to this situation with some meta-mechanics.
Meta Mechanics: Enemies and Lovers In essence, we can add emotional variety to the story line with small bonus quests. If a particular ship completes a task, they get a bonus. Some example quests include
Rivalry: Your top Captain must defeat the top enemy Captain for a bonus.
Save my family: Keep a planet under your control or else the powerful captain from that planet gets a penalty when his family is turned enslaved in the enemy Thorium mines.
Rescue: If a captain’s family world has been captured, he can get a bonus if he personally regains the planet.
Lovers: A captain that emerges from the same planet as an existing captain may be classified as a lover. Both captains get a bonus. If one captain in the pair dies, the other captain gets a large penalty. If the ships are merged, the bonus goes away. There can be different degrees of love, ranging from childhood friend to brotherhood to full on romantic love. These relationship bonuses stack.
Lover’s Vendetta: If a bereaved captain defeats their lover’s killer they get a bonus.
Secret mission: A planet deep within enemy territory has a secret technology. The ship that conquers the planet gets a bonus.
Quest locations can be easily shown as blinking on screen icons whenever a ship is selected. The player really doesn’t have to pay much attention to keeping track of everything since they can easily mouse over items to get an update.
Quests acts as additional risk reward sequences that operate on a slightly longer time scale than our core game mechanic.
Action: Complete the quest goal
Reward: Gain the quest reward. More importantly, gain an emotional reward for helping your character play out his very human desires.
Failure: Lose the quest reward. More importantly, be emotionally punished for killing a character or denying them their personal dreams.
This all may seem melodramatic (and it is), but the truth of the matter is that players will end up identifying with their ships if you build the correct contextual structures. You don’t need a lot of structure to make people really care for those valiant little Captains who are going out and saving the universe.
Final resolution Ultimately, your game must end. Either your ships are vanquished or you are triumphant. The structure of the game is that there is always one final battle in which the last major captain is defeated. The rivalry mechanics will tie into some interesting end of game "conflict accelerators" that I'll be unveiling to make this a literally earth shattering event. The game is over and the credits roll.
In the end, every player ends up with a list of their heroes. These are the brave leaders who fought and will go down in history. Their names are recorded in a data-base and if the player plays again, perhaps some of their favorite heroes will emerge anew.
Conclusion To summarize, I’m finally starting the process of adding context to my game tokens. No longer do we have generic ships and planet. Now if someone asks me what Space Crack is all about, I can say with a completely straight face. "It is an epic space opera set in the midst of intergalactic war. It stars Captain Jack "Alien Duster" McDaddy. He is one hot sexy hero. With a big ship."
This is so much better than coughing and whispering "I'm making a turn-based space strategy game that will involve a 'Go'-like token capturing system." And just in case anyone asks I am indeed painting a 50's style space pin-up girl as a Space Crack promotional poster. Barbarella has nothing on my moon booted femme fatale. (Ray will blush.)
Notice what I’m not doing:
I’m not adding new graphics, elaborate cut scenes or animation.
I’m not writing extensive static plotlines.
I’m not designing static characters with extensive histories.
Instead I’m focusing on the game mechanics, meta-game mechanics, and shallowly contextualized tokens.
I’m focusing on new meta-game mechanics like the quests.
Where I add extra content like the naming system, it has an informational element to it that gives the player feedback.
I use contextual clues to turn abstract rewards into emotional rewards.
Again, the reason I do this is because of the constraints of the design. Micro-story mechanics offer lots of replay at low marginal costs. This design makes the conscious effort to build a reusable system instead of investing piecemeal in low cost, high burnout rewards like plot.
Future directions Adding a setting and the start of a plot does wonders for fleshing out a relatively simple game system. The archetypal setting ensures that we'll have an endless stream of ideas for upgrades, random events, and captain quests. Already my brain is buzzing with ideas for long lost civilizations, alien saucers, evil Admirals, captured nova princesses, grudges from the Space Academy, alien trysts and more.
This site is about art and game design. You'll find galleries of my latest illustrations. Also, I have extensive ramblings on a wide variety of game design topics.
Why people read this site
"[...] probably the most interesting article I've ever read." Tycho from Penny Arcade on the Nintendo Innovation Strategy article
I've been a game designer, pixel artist, painter, tools designer, product manager and marketing guy. I got my first job while in college working on a shooter called Tyrian at a little company called Epic Megagames. These days, I'm designing games deep in the forests of the North West.
I remain, to this day, not a chickadee plucker. Despite the rumors.
Recently I was chatting with some friends about the role of 'theme' in game design. Theme, in this discussion, was the setting of the game, be it fantasy, sci-fi, military, etc. At first blush, the typical game designer's use of theme appears a bit primitive.
