I guess I should post something to prove to the Internet that I am not quite dead yet. Perhaps you have noticed the recent flood of art-games, as they are sometimes called. Most of these games are made in a very retro, pixelated way, in the style of old 8-bit consoles. Most famous of these pixelated Picassoes is Jason Rohrer, and I will thus mention Passage as well as Gravitation, two of his great games. Now enter Duck Sim 2008, which can be played here.

Quack.

Okay, so bear with me for a moment: I have realised, in a rare burst of insanity/brilliance, that Duck Sim 2008 is in fact Dadaism. It is a form of anti-art, a sort of parody of art that highlights the pointless act of producing art in the first place. Duck Sim 2008 mimics the style of other art-games, yet the interaction that would create the artisitic message is non-existent. The only feedback for user interaction Duck Sim 2008 provides is purely cosmetic. As such, it is hardly a game, yet what are most games other than a screen that updates an image in response to some user input? Is its artistic value much different from that of most brain-dead shooters? However when all is said and done, it is just an innocent joke, but a mildly significant one for me.

Game require us to learn pretty curious things: how to time a jump precisely, whether to watch TV or study a book on cleaning, how to navigate a three-dimensional space by using teleportation, and so on. We would not learn these skills if we did not have a good reason to, or at least a perceived reason to. Some games do teach us valuable skills we can use in real life, but most games will be regarded by non-gamers and grumpy seniors as a “waste of time”. When playing however, it suddenly becomes vital information that some tubes are inhabited by fire-breathing plants, and then learning how to avoid these plants. Since many skills taught by games are too abstract or removed from reality to appear applicable in daily life, each time a player learns something, he needs some kind of motivation that gives the skills value, or the learning will not be regarded as fun.

The most common and obvious motivation for players is story. It seems all you have to do is place a princess at the far end of a level, and the player will happily overcome any obstacle, murder hundreds of innocent tortoises and learn the most intricate of boss patterns in order to reach her. But just providing the player with a long-term goal is often not enough; the player will never feel like he has progressed farther towards the princess if he has to beat level after level just to rescue anthropomorphic toadstools. Providing too many sub-goals is not ideal either. No matter how important someone tells you a skill is to learn, if you never find any concrete uses for a skill, the time it took to learn the skill is viewed as a waste (this is commonly known as Education). Story also hits a bump as a motivator when it is poorly executed; suddenly all skills the game teaches are worthless because the player does not want to achieve the end goal. Many open-world games also have issues with the story as a way to give value to their teachings, since many activities are far removed from the actual narrative. For example, in Fable 2 many skills learned have nothing to do with progressing the story in any way. The story tells you to avenge the guy who shot you out of a window (and save the world), yet you spend a strangely large amount of time buying property and working as a barman/barmaid. Now, if the forces of evil was defeated through barkeeping contests, it would have made sense for the player to spend her time learning that skill. The side-skills taught by can therefore feel meaningless if other factors cannot give them value.

Adding real human beings to the mix can act as a very good way to make sure players master a set of skills. Learning complex fighting combos becomes much more relevant when you can try them out on your friends. Co-operation can also be as good a reason to learn new skills, even though most MMO:s that require teamwork focus more on what skills the player character has, rather than what actual skills the player has learned. In many games with an active community, usually with a multi-player aspect, many gamers develop their proficiency with the game because it gives them social status outside of the game. The actions required to complete the games are perfected because they translate to power within a certain group of people, so even dancing on a large, flat d-pad is deemed a valuable skill. The sense of advancement and power this gives is also present in solitary single-player games, but in that context the reward is very much tied with the story and how characters in the world are in awe of your powers.

This brings me to the final way I have found to convince the player the subjects taught are valuable: each skill taught reveals parts of a finely tuned system of mechanics. The act of playing becomes rewarding in itself (one of the characteristics of Csíkszentmihályi’s concept of “flow”). More than a mere power fantasy, as the skill of the player increases, she begins to utilize the game objects in synergistic ways. Consider for example an chess player, who is capable of placing his pieces so as to protect other pieces. As his skills grow, he can construct complex defensive and offensive relationships between the pieces, even though the interaction of one piece alone is relatively simple. However, care must be taken each time the player acquires a new verb so it is well integrated into the game system, and is taught at an appropriate time. Take for example the multitude of objects that can be accumulated by slaying bosses in the Legend of Zelda series. A well thought-out item like the Hook Shot can work in a multitude of ways, both in combat and exploration. A level 2-type power bracelet, on the other hand, only allows Link to lift heavier objects and in effect working like a “key” to open new areas.

So from the four ways of creating perceived value of a skill: narrative, social standing, power fantasy and “system exploration”, the latter is the most challenging to create, but also can be the most powerful. Setting up a four-line clear in Tetris can be as thrilling as the most carefully coordinated cutscene (well, maybe). “System exploration” is also instrumental when constructing “art games” that rely mostly on the mechanics to convey a feeling or message.

Over the last week, I have read (too) many blog posts, studies, opinion pieces et cetera about narratives in video games. I figured that it would be nice if I actually wrote down my thoughts on the matter before a couple of days pass and I forget everything.

First off, what is the purpose of storytelling in video games? Some games, mostly arcade or casual games such as Tetris or Bejeweled, seem to manage just fine without them. I believe the main reason most larger games have a narrative is that it is easier to relate to human beings than to falling blocks. That does not mean an abstract game can’t convey a message or perhaps even emotions purely through mechanics. The pawns in Chess can be seen as the common man in a war, being sacrificed so that the officers can make the moves that will actually win the day. Their plight is of course ignored by most chess players since the soldier that meets his grim fate on the battlefield is in fact a piece of wood. Still, Chess would have been hard to interpret as a battle at all if the pieces were not named after important members of medieval society. By renaming of the pieces, Chess could represent almost any struggle between two sides where the majority is doomed to die for the greater good. The naming of the pieces in chess does give the game a rudimentary story, but this story is not there to evoke emotions in the players, it is there to tell the player that the King is darn important and the little horse-shaped thing can jump over other pieces. Thanks to the narrative (or rather the scenario/back story), objectives that would be overly complex if abstracted can be easier to understand and remembered. Imagine playing a game where you have to move A to B in order for C to defeat A so that D can be retrieved to E.

Even though the back story and naming (scenario) can help teaching the game to the player, the reason for more fleshed out narratives in games is to make the player relate to the world and believe in its characters and rules. A game that is light on narrative might have problems convincing the players that their playing time is valuable. Attaining a high numerical score when no one is around to congratulate or compete with you is often not seen as a worthwhile time investment (see Jason Rohrer’s Passage http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/passage/). Another example is the difference between Façade and The Marriage (http://www.rodvik.com/rodgames/marriage.html). While both deal with overcoming the challenges of marriage and are mostly non-linear, Façade does a better job at creating an involving story because it deals with human beings who are properly voice-acted. The player is more likely to care for the marriage of Trip and Grace rather than that of Mr and Mrs Coloured Square. It can however be worthy to note that players naturally construct stories about what they think will happen in the future, since thinking “narratively” comes naturally to them.

I will shamelessly mention Passage whenever there is the slightest reason to.

Now, a game with a fleshed-out narrative can be seen as progressing because of two things: Player action (Gameplay), or Narrator action (Narrative). Many games alternate back and forth by injecting cut scenes or dialogue in between gameplay sequences. If not done properly, the back-and-forth may frustrate the player, especially if the cut scene seems to have all the fun, deciding the outcome of all the defining events in the game. Another problem arises when the player’s actions and the narrative pull in different directions, and the narrator chooses “for” the player. These conflicts may prompt a designer to remove one of either parts to make the game progress fluidly. Removing gameplay is hard to do while retaining any common definition for what a game is, but the narrative could very well be cut. As long as the mechanics are engrossing enough, with ability to explore and understand the complex system of the design, the player will most likely enjoy herself. The problem of actually motivating the player to continue still remains though. Visual or other reward might urge the player on, but I think what really keeps players engaged in a non-narrative game is other people. Comparing scores and competing in a fighting or sports game can arouse intense emotions in a player. Sadly, the possibility to create more subtle and varied emotional response than fear or exhilaration is often much harder without a story.

If we choose to keep the narrative in the game, in order to achieve some kind of artistic ambition by triggering an emotional response to our game’s underlying message, we pretty much have to introduce a back story, and believable characters that are affected by the player’s actions or by the events of the narrative. This is much more tricky, but the end result can be much more rewarding than even the most adrenaline-inducing fighting game, and can perhaps be deemed more than entertainment and move into the realm of artsy-fartsy-ness.

Sometimes this game is more fun to analyse than to play.

The first problem to surmount is to make the story and gameplay pull in the same direction. This can be done in two ways: Either the story must influence the player’s actions, or the gameplay must affect the direction the narrative takes. The first option is the most common since it is significantly less complex. However, writing and pacing a linear story so that the player always feels like he does what he wants requires a lot of skill. Even though all decisions already has been made for the player, a good story will have to keep the player in the “now”, and not worry that the future has already been determined. I therefore consider it worse to spoil the ending of a game rather than a film, since the game relies on the illusion that the end is set by the player. HOW to write an immersive story, I will leave to someone more educated (or pretend I am, and write a later post about it).

When the player realises he is being lead through the game, she might want his actions to directly influence the story, and crave a game with a dynamic narrative. The poor scriptwriter for this game now has no control over the player’s choices, and must cover for every eventuality. The characters of a non-linear game are therefore often flatter that their linear counterparts, since they often do not know every decision the player has made in the past. Constructing dialogue from bits of variables is also very tricky. The solution is often then marrying non-linear with linear storytelling, by giving the player some control over how the story plays out, while keeping defining events out of the unpredictable player’s hands. This solution has a potential flaw however; suddenly the player has a multitude of choices sometimes, but when it really matters, he is utterly powerless. A recent example of this is Far Cry 2. Some important decisions are up to the player to make , but no matter how you choose the outcome is the same. If the goal is to portray the individuals lack of influence in a larger context, then I guess the players lack of power is justifiable. The player will however only be fooled a few of times, and then will know many of the choices presented to him are utterly meaningless.

The fact that there is a choice, no matter if it might be pointless, can still be useful in affecting the player. Evaluating the decision, and seeing all the possible outcomes as stories themselves can be quite powerful. Even if you cannot join the evil dude when he asks you, or leave your friend to die, you will still consider the results of this hypothetical decision, as long as you do not become frustrated because you realise the choice is irrelevant.

Half-Life 2 does an good job seguing between action and story.

The other problem that arises when you put a story into your game (or perhaps “with” your game, which would be better) is the jarring action of moving from no player control with events that truly change the way the story plays out to sequences with player control that are seemingly unimportant and forgettable to the story characters. If there was a book adaptation of your typical game, many action made by the player would be cut because they are not interesting enough, and most action films have more calm “story” parts and less action sequences than your average game. Inserting pieces of story into the gameplay/”action” portions of a game, akin to the phone calls in GTA4, does not make the gameplay more important to the overall story, but do make the transition between cut scene and gameplay less bumpy. Half-Life 2 does this the other way round: the player is allowed to move freely while the other characters converse. I could mention Quick Time Events, but I won’t.

Unless the player can influence the outcome of the narrative, it is hard to create a portion of a game that mixes gameplay and narrative. At best, the action sequences can serve as display of the emotions and thought of the character, by showing how they react to gameplay-like circumstances (usually stressful, but depends on genre). One solution that I would like to propose for this is to actually take time to construct a message or theme for your game, and let it be reflected in all parts of the game, gameplay as well as story. Great literature or film was not created so the audience or reader cared really much about the characters and cried when they died, but so that they actually would learn something or change them as human beings. I know it is pretentious to think like this, but I hope I will not be faulted for at least hoping that games can be engaging beyond primal emotions. I’d like to speak more in depth on this topic, but I seriously doubt any sane person has made it this far, so I better stop before we find out who would read even further.

The series of atrociously boring posts is finally over. While I can’t say the analysis was very in depth or interesting, it got me thinking and writing on quite a few different topics. Hopefully this arduous analysis will yield some interesting topics to discuss in future posts. In addition, it got me used to a regular (well, almost) blogging schedule. I can only hope I have not scared away a potential reader with my apparent obsession with Risk.

There actually was one element I had wanted to accentuate in my rendition of Risk: the balance of Now and Later. It is quite common in many other board games, such as Puerto Rico. In Puerto Rico, the goods produced by your Caribbean colony can be used either for victory points or gold to improve the colony(thus making it possible to produce more goods). If the player spends too long trying to improve the colony to accumulate victory points later, she will not have enough time to accumulate them before the game is over. In Risk, a similar balance must be maintained between attacking and defending. While attacking, a disproportionate amount of soldiers are lost compared to the defender. Yet it is often worth it for the Risk Card and increased territory. Still, if a player overextends her attack over multiple territories, the player’s current military strength will not be enough to defend the new territories. In regular Risk, the player almost certainly attacks too much if more than one territory is conquered, since no additional Risk Cards are awarded. If the player attacks fewer than one territory, she is also likely to suffer an disadvantage, since the Risk cards are very powerful in the early stages of the game. This is the most important reason Risk Cards should be removed, and compensate for the lack of incentives for attack with a combat system that favours the offensive player more.

The inclusion of fleets would also greatly benefit a player on the offensive, as any choke points on the edges of continents would become less significant. Naval warfare would also tie in well with the historical theme. The construction fleets would also be an interesting strategic choice, since the sea zones would yield no extra armies if a player conquers them. The fleets also urge the player to keep armies everywhere in her empire, which would really require new per-unit movement rules. The original Risk movement rules are simple and quite elegant in my opinion, but they are insufficient when dealing with both armies and fleets. As long as all movement is handled in the same turn though, it should still retain the rules simplicity requirements of a family game.

Another aspect that I thought Risk lacked was enough reasons for diplomacy. Since diplomacy is rules-free, it is easy to grasp as long as there are reasons to negotiate with other players.  Thus I wanted to make large empires less viable than middle-sized ones, making an alliance between two players stronger than a player fighting alone, even if that player had more territories and armies than the two opposing players combined. Limiting the movement capabilities, or having each player getting a base bonus (such as giving a base amount of cards or armies) would make alliances more viable.

I also wanted to restrict the playing time of Risk, especially the time where one or more players had been eliminated from the game. My first option was ending the game as soon as one player was defeated, but in the end I think I favour a variation on the Risk Mission Cards, where there often is no time to think about eliminating other players. The removal of a player’s Risk cards offered as a reward for an eliminating player and a new rule supporting struggling players defensively would also deter players from eliminating each other.

Another strategic decision I wanted to add was factory building. The player has the choice at the start of his turn to either build a new factory, or place one army or fleet at all factories he currently controls. This is of course another take on the Now versus Future balance, as you need factories to build armies, and you need armies to protect your factories. To make acquiring territory still interesting, my idea was limiting the amount of soldiers you could feed on a single continuous piece of your empire. This could create interesting invasions and naval blockades to starve out parts of an enemy empire. Still, like many other additions, such as a representation of great generals or important events of the eras, this could become hard for a novice player to handle. A scoring board with maximum versus current amount of armies and fleets might help, but perhaps it is best to have troop recruitment handled the old way for simplicity’s sake.

Lastly, I wanted to decrease downtime by shortening a players turn, as well as making battles shorter yet more interesting. I wanted to use a card-driven battle system, since it would be relatively simple, but the creation and balancing of the cards might be too arduous a task, so a faster, more strategic dice-based combat would be preferrable.

The reason I am so lazy with balancing cards and all those things is that I am currently planning on making this version of Risk a reality (preferrably on a computer), but we’ll see how far I’ll get with that.

Sometime 7 years ago, Lionhead Studios released Black and White. Black and White was an ambitious god game created by ambitious game creator Peter Molyneux. It was one of the first prominent games to tout a lack of user interface. The amount of “interface-less” games increased over the years, and two recent examples of this trend are Far Cry 2 and Dead Space. Far Cry 2 is a first person shooter released by Ubisoft set in a nameless war-torn African country, while Dead Space is a third person horror/sci-fi shooter developed by EA Redwood Shores. Both these games lack some or most parts of what could be called a traditional user interface.

A Dead Space screenshot without gore.

Naturally these games have a user interface;  the word “interface-less” is somewhat of a misnomer. What they really do lack (to some extent) is a Heads-Up Display (HUD). The HUD are all the little numbers surrounding the main action in the centre of the screen that tell you how much ammo, health and other variables the player character possesses. The HUD has been a staple in First Person Shooters since Wolfenstein 3D. Without a traditional interface (i.e. a HUD), all that information either has to be cut, or expressed in a different way. Some games, like Portal, can get by on a minimalistic interface, detailing only which of the two portals are open, and a crosshair to inform the player where a portal will be created if the gun is fired. For Portal, this information is more than enough, but more complex games need to give the player more information than can be conveyed simply by the camera’s current view of the world. In real life, we rarely have need for HUD:s since we traditionally have five senses, while in games we only have three (sight, hearing and some touch), and they are significantly duller than in real life.

So how can a HUD-less interface cope with the fact that it has to emulate real-world senses with fictional ones? Far Cry 2 does in fact feature two of the standard HUD features: Ammo and Health. The HUD also tells the player how many syringes (used to regain health) and grenades/molotov cocktails there are left. Compared to most FPS’s, that is a small HUD without any crosshair (although it can be enabled), and most of the HUD is actually hidden when it is deemed not necessary. Therefore, a lot of non-combat gameplay, such as travelling or exploring, has no HUD. The player has a “physical” map that can be pulled out, and all cars are fitted with a GPS for navigation. If the player character overexerts himself  sprinting or gasps for air after extensive swimming, the view will go blurry. Also, whenever the player is seriously damaged, the screen will flash red, and will become delirious from malaria from time to time. The interface can also tell the player from which direction she is attacked, by pointing out the direction with a bluish-reddish “wound” on the screen.

Dead Space goes one step further: All the HUD is displayed to the player character, and not the player herself. Sadly, I have not played Dead Space yet, so I can only regurgitate what I have learned from news articles and videos, so I will try to be brief. The player controls a space engineer Isaac navigating a space monster-infested spacecraft stranded in space. The game’s camera is placed just above (but a bit pulled back) the shoulder of Isaac, with a health bar slyly integrated into the back of the heroic space engineer’s suit.  The inventory system is a hologram projected by the suit in front of the player character, and the game does not pause while accessing it. The complete lack of a traditional interface is justified that the player will believe in the game world more if there are less unrealistic numbers at the edges of the screen.

Far Cry 2 includes a crash course in first aid

No matter how creative a designer is, it is much more challenging to create an intuitive “interface-less” interface than a traditional one.This could just be that the FPS HUD is almost twice as old as Black and White, and as such there is not enough experience of how to do it right. Still, even the most expertly crafted “realistic” interface has to struggle with the fact that some players will be frustrated when they cannot access the information they need. For example, the only way to see your health in Far Cry 2 once it is hidden is to reload your weapon. When the weapon is fully loaded, this is not a problem, but in other circumstances it could become a hassle, albeit a small one. This is why I feel that the push for a ” smaller” interface is not entirely worthwhile. The HUD is seldom obtrusive, and is the fastest way for the player to access information that can not be reflected in the game world. That is not to say that the HUD should be the only part of the user interface. By reflecting variables in the game world beyond health bars and numbers, the player can grasp at a glance what is going on. One great example is the way Civilization IV handles the display of buildings and Wonders in a city. While previous titles were content with representing these structures on a list in the city screen that could be opened, Civilization IV actually shows the structures on the world map as well. The list with buildings is still there though, but the world map can offer an indication of a city’s development at a glance. The game world also feels a lot more alive when the numbers get represented “physically”. The hero of Far Cry 2 has to pull out bullets or snap joints back into place to recover from severe damage. This makes the player character appear more present in the world and less like a camera floating around a set distance above ground. The game Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay by Starbreeze also features a very physically present character who can fist fight, snap necks and even has visible legs!

I think that while a true “interface-less” game can have a tendency to frustrate if there simply is too much information to convey, thinking without a traditonal interface can force a designer to reflect all variables into the game world. If you imagine that a game should be playable without any HUD or other interface, and then add more information simply for clarity, the game would benefit from the best of two worlds.

There is little to no connection to the historical setting of the game.”

(First, I thought I would make it clear that I sometimes try to make a distinction between theme and setting. The setting of “Crime and Punishment” is 19th century St Petersburg, the theme, as the title suggests, is crime and punishment. Thank you, English class book reports!)

I guess all I wanted to ask was why the little plastic men I move around the map are Napoleonic Era soldiers. It is of course completely understandable why the creators of Risk chose that time period. When the game was introduced in the 1950’s, choosing any of the World Wars to be represented in an apolitical family game was unthinkable. Going further back in time than the Enlightenment would also create problems with the credibility of the size of the warring empires.

I guess the point I am trying to make here is that the setting of the game would be ridiculously easy to replace. Throw out the cannons and horses and insert lasers, tanks, Roman legions, or whatever you see fit. Perhaps this can be seen as a successful design, as it opens for numerous Risk clones/variants who change the setting to Lord of the Rings or Science Fiction. The thing with these variants are that each one adds new elements to the game that make sense in the setting. This is quite unlike Monopoly, where buying and selling properties feels natural with the classic setting, while it feels very awkward when you bring in Star Wars or Pokémon (The list goes on…). This is usually because there are almost no attempts to change the rules to fit the setting, like the many Risk variants have. The question is of course why none of these variants had one rule that did not fit without a Napoleonic setting removed. The reason is quite simple: Risk has no such rule or element. Its simulated warfare is purposefully simplistic. There is really no faults in this per se, so I will use this post to come up with additions that could be added to any Napoleonic war game.

Focus on famous generals: Some editions of Risk incorporate generals in the rules, which is natural as many of the commanders of the time (Napoleon, Wellington, Nelson) are quite well known even to this day, even romanticized.

When mentioning Nelson, the inclusion of naval warfare becomes almost vital: The British did extraordinarily well in the war thanks to their naval superiority.

Colonial Disputes: The Napoleonic War was preceded by and a result of many colonial disputes and revolts in the colonial Empires of Europe. Perhaps adding a colonial system would capture the spirit of the era.

Birth of Democracies: The French and American revolutions had already happened, and many monarchies feared their people more than ever. “Deomcratic” nations often found themselves hindered or attacked by those who kept their kings and queens.

Nationalism: For the first time, regular people identified themselves as French or English. An abstracted version of nationalism could add benefits to nations who strive to nurture it.

I’m being naïve and disorganized, but at least I posted something this week.

Call me slow, but recently I realised how similar DICE’s Mirror’s Edge is to the 1998 German film “Lola Rennt” (“Run Lola Run” for English folks). Not only do they both feature running female leads, but the way the narrative is handled in Lola Rennt is somewhat similar to how gameplay is handled (or supposed to be handled) in Mirror’s Edge.

<!– @page { size: 21cm 29.7cm; margin: 2cm } P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm } –>First, an introduction of the two is perhaps required. Mirror’s Edge is a recently released game for the XBox 360 and the PlayStation 3. The game has attracted quite a bit attention for its simplistic art direction and the unconventional use of the first person perspective for a platformer game (Replace platformer with puzzle and it sounds an awful lot like Portal). The game only takes around six hours to complete, intending the player will replay the game to improve their level times (akin to a racing game).

Lola Rennt is a German movie about a woman who has to get her hands on a large sum of money and get it to her boyfriend who owes money to the mod. She only has about half an hour to get to her boyfriend with the money. The twist of the film is that this story is played three times, with the same starting scenario, but with wildly different outcomes depending on seemingly insignificant events such as Lola getting hindered or helped by various people.

So both Mirror’s Edge and Lola Rennt features an “iterative” sort of view on game play and story, respectively. Replaying a level over and over in order to beat it is of course no strange thing for a seasoned gamer, but how often is a level replayed so that later levels will be different (or compete in a meta-game such as the Mirror’s Edge leaderboards)? There are of course examples of this. The first two Thief games allowed you to steal valuables in one level, and use the money earned to buy better equipment for the next. Many role playing games, such as Baldur’s Gate, limits the ability to perform all quests based on what characters were killed or refused to speak with the character because of previous actions. Interactive stories that are popular in Japan, often focusing on wooing attractive ladies, allow for quite many endings compared to their playthrough length.

The problem with many games that offer at least some replayability is that the impacts of the choices a player makes are often rigid or binary. A huge commercial game that touts multiple endings turns out to base the ending movie clip shown on choices performed the last minutes of the game; choices that are obviously “good” or “bad”, and loading a save game a few minutes back allows the player to see all possible endings. There are few games that truly run their own little “worlds”, where most action prompt apparently non-scripted reactions. The reason is of course that it takes a lot of time to make a 20+ hour game with an engine that allows for myriads of emergent behaviours. Another problem is of course making the game so varied that the player actually wants to play through it all once more, and not being able to see all possible endings a couple of minutes away from a certain save point. But why do games really need to be more than 20 hours long? What about a game that can be “completed” in a few hours on a Friday evening?

In Valve’s Left4Dead, each game (presented as a film) only takes around an hour and a half, and each playthrough is different because of the AI Director randomizing things. Still, the ending is binary: Survival or Death, with the game allowing restarts if the survivors did not make it. This is very similar to the single player aspect of Mirror’s Edge: if you made it to the end of a level, the next level starts. A player who does not care for online leaderboards will only get the six hours out of the game. Almost all games are only concerned with whether you beat it or not, if you were not in time to save the princess, you have failed and will never see the drama unfold in a different way.

Some games are more about encouraging replayability over content than others. The genre that allows for the most open story-telling is in fact strategy and management games such as SimCity or Sid Meier’s Civilization. On a randomized map, with differing rival factions and multiple victory conditions, each game becomes a different story told to the player. Each Civilization player is sure to have their own stories of triumphs and failures. Another game worth mentioning is Façade, an interactive story where the player has to mediate between a husband and a wife having a fight, where them breaking up really is not a failure in itself.

The Interactive Story "Façade"

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The question I would like to ask is: “Will we ever see (commercial) video games, that are short, highly replayable, featuring a world where each choice is important and triggers a response?” Perhaps the technical hurdle will be too high for some, but there already are some crude precursors. If game developers can sacrifice game length for open-ended choices, it is more than possible. A video game where the goal is playing the game and interacting with a world, not beating it to see the ending clip, would be more than welcomed by me.

This week I will be super efficient and cover two topics (although I have already touched on dice rolling):

“The game is full of dice rolling.”

AND

“There is not that much to do while other players take their turns.”

http://www.hlcomic.com

Sitting around waiting hardly qualifies as fun, yet in many board games (and to a certain extent, some video games) it is absolutely required. If the game has a turn-based structure, like Risk, every player but one is left idle with usually nothing to do. In board games the term for the time spent waiting is “downtime”, while multiplayer video gamers might use the term “spawn time” or “round time”. There are two simple solution to reducing downtime: Reducing time spent “out” of the game, or giving the player something to do during downtime, in effect removing it. Extensive dice rolling is somewhat related to having long turn times, since a long battle takes a lot of time, while players not involved are only interested in the results.

So, in what way can we minimize downtime in Risk? The first step is to make the turns shorter. The fortification, or move phase is as short as it can be, and if a per-unit movement system is used instead, the fortification phase vanishes, and the whole turn is spent moving each army one step. This could take time if we were dealing with the quantities of armies of standard Risk, but this is remedied by simply lowering the amount of armies a player can build, via a population cap of sorts, and removing the ability to create armies with Risk Cards. By not allowing the player to move an army more than one territory, the attacks are much shorter, since each front only sees a few battles at most.

Still, with fewer armies, battles can be too long, especially for players not involved. Switching dice for cards would probably not significantly alter the length of a battle, but the amount of dice rolling would still need to be decreased. Also, a too short battle can seem like an anticlimax for the careful planning of a large campaign. The rounds featured in vanilla Risk would have to stay, since they make the battle feel more “epic” as well as allowing a losing player to retreat when they see the tables turn.

It seems how much we try to limit turn length, there is still a minimum turn length needed to allow for players to have some kind of impact on how the game unfolds. In Risk II, a computer version of Risk, a mode called SameTime Risk is introduced. In it, each player move their pieces on one, common turn, preceded by a phase where each player “writes down” what moves they will make. The orders are then carried out semi-simultaneously. While this may work for a computer game or a more “hard-core” board game like Diplomacy, it may not work as well for a more casual game like Risk.

Thus we must find some way to engage the player during other people’s turns, other than building tower of their game pieces. As mentioned in the diplomacy post, diplomacy makes people care about what happened at other players’ borders. In addition, by trying to focus on each player planning ahead, they will react to what happens on the board that might interfere with their strategy. The problem is if the strategy is to simplistic, the player can quickly invent and adapt strategies, and spend the rest time waiting to execute their plan. On the other hand, a necessitation for more complex strategies can leave some players in a state of indecisiveness, prolonging their turn.

Making the player feel interested in the game at all times is important, but will also prevent the player from taking a “break”, relaxing a bit and maybe talk with other players or fetching something to drink. The balance between requiring high intensity and allowing the player to “rest” is a difficult one, and hardly one that can be discussed in one post.

There will be NO Risk this week, dear (non-existent) readers. Instead, I heard about something esteemed “Gears Of War” designer CliffyB said about the lack of a demo for his hit sequel “Gears of War 2″:

“A beta is like hooking up with a girl just to say, ‘Yeah, I f*cked her’,” Gears of War 2 Lead Designer Cliff Bleszinski told GamePro “I know that sounds crude, but it’s the honest-to-God truth. Once you play a beta, you can check it off your list – you can say, ‘Yeah, I played it.’ Then you might not feel motivated to get that initial cherry popping from the proper, final game.”‘

Standing exposed in the open is a viable tactic.

I can understand that Cliff’s company Epic Games see no need for a demo for Gears of War 2, since the previous game was such a huge success. Making a demo requires time: time that could have been put into making the actual game better. What I am not sure about though, is if there are people out there with a check-list of all the games they should play (and all girls they should get intimate with), and once they have played the demo or beta they can check it off. Do these people also have a list of films they have seen based on the fact they saw a trailer? I can understand the gamers of today with minimal attention span would not want to replay the introductory sequence featured in the demo when they buy the game, but making save games from the demo compatible with the full product (in order to move seamlessly from demo to full product – does anyone remember shareware?) hardly is rocket science.

Without a demo, the consumer will buy a game they don’t know that much about. Continuing CliffyB’s brilliant analogy: if you see a girl (or boy) that you have heard is nice (and who has been receiving favourable reviews), would you get down on one knee and propose? (Assuming she would always accept provided you had sufficient money – this analogy really has been taken a little too far.) Reviews, previews, videos et cetera are often not enough, you usually want to feel how the game actually plays before investing your money in it. When a game is good, it has the side-effect that you want to play more, but at the end of the beta or demo, you are denied playing more. I have heard the voices of the Internet saying they just could not stop playing the demo for Mirror’s Edge, and that demo contains only one actual level! Those people are going to buy the game even if it does not score above the measly 9.0-mark (Everything below 9/10 is utter crap). Of course, if the game is bad, or if the game can not be appreciated on demo level (such as an open world game), spending time on a demo might not be the best idea.

If the prospective player has not been supplied with a demo for a PC game, another question may arise: “Will it run on my computer?”. This question, according to my highly unqualified reasoning, was the cause of many a pirated copies of Crysis. The gamer that is supposed to buy your game has no way to truly understand if the game will correspond to his tastes (or machine), especially if the game has some new, exciting ideas. Thus a hard-core PC gamer (and probably many console gamers as well) will pirate the game just to see if it is any fun. While these illegal downloads may not equate to actual loss of sales, why should the people who downloaded the full game and enjoyed it go to a store and buy the game?

I like demos, but that is mostly because I am a consumer who enjoys playing games that fit my tastes. I understand developers hate taking time away from their marvellous game everyone will love without getting to try first, but usually it is a good way to lure people into your addictive drug (or game).

(For the record, I am not at all interested in Gears of War; I do not even own an Xbox 360. I use Windows because I practically have to, but buying a Microsoft game console?)

“Diplomatic negotiations are few and very basic.”

Risk is a game of war, not peace, but there is some room for the fine art of diplomacy in the game. But since the purpose of the game is armed conflict, you can’t expect that any agreement made will last very long. A long term alliance between two players will provoke other players, and will nullify any benefits of the alliance. But what opportunities do exist for sly manipulation in Risk, and can we change the rules to encourage a little (temporary) teamwork?

In Risk, most negotiations are basically “friendly advice” on why a player should be spared, or how to attack someone else. Sometimes there are agreements to limit troop build up in areas where neither player wants to waste resources, but that is as complex the diplomacy gets. Adding diplomacy in a belligerent game may seem odd, but it will ensure that each player cares about what other players say and do during their turn, since they may be affected as well. Diplomacy can thus create a more dynamic distribution of power that is not solely governed by how many troops or territories a player has. Weaker players can band together, and when they grow to powerful, might turn on themselves.

It is however impossible to add any more diplomatic options to Risk, since players can create any agreement they can come up with (as long as they follow the rules). Instead it would be necessary to offer more incentives for diplomacy, as well as allowing for more ‘topics’ for players to discuss. Sadly, adding more topics would most likely only add more rules to learn as new elements are introduced, which goes against the image of Risk as a family game. This means that if I cannot add new rules, I have to replace or modify existing ones to more ‘diplomatically friendly’ ones.

Instead of forcing the behaviour I want players to have, some paths can be more more viable than others. Diplomacy needs to have a little more impact on the game’s outcome, so what can be done to gently tell the player that he does not need to fight with everyone? I believe the key is reinforcing the idea of a level playing field, by penalizing players with many territories. Since all players then are somewhat more balanced and missions and not world domination is the goal, diplomacy becomes a little more interesting. One option is to reward attacking a player on multiple fronts. This would force the player who is attacked by a number of players to balance the amount of troops to put on each front. If a new rule prohibited creation of new armies on the farther reaches of a players empire, it would make it even more tricky managing multiple fronts, since the troops sent this turn would have to match up to an as of yet unknown amount of attackers. This would make large empires somewhat unwieldy, and encourage players to maintain small empires from where they can strike out in order to complete missions. With smaller empires being more versatile, an alliance between two weaker nations may stand a chance against an enemy twice as large. Another way to achieve balance of power is adding a flat rate of armies to all players regardless of how many territories they have seized.

Diplomacy is the hardest element to design in Risk, since you are trying to manipulate players into making deals with each other. The only way to really see the effects on any of the ideas in this post (and to a lesser extent, all other posts) is a long period of playtesting, preferably with different types of people and personalities.