Justin Achilli -- Blog

Blizzard Design Principles

2010-03-15T20:21:39Z

Picture is unrelated. Move along, citizen.Last week at GDC, Blizzard's Rob Pardo discussed some of the Blizzard design philosophy for WoW. You can find the presentation here.

If you follow this blog, you'll find some reference to the concepts we've talked about before. In particular, you'll find reference to the myth of "too powerful" and the surprisingly contentious issue of taking control away from players.

I'll have a more substantial update later this week, gentle readers, but for now I thought it'd be fruitful to point out that our discussions are things that have considerations throughout the gaming hobby.

Design Via Play

2010-03-10T20:46:06Z

When I attended the Art History of Games several weeks ago, the keynote put forth the question of what it meant to view games as an art form. To my surprise, five responses down the list came the idea of whether or not a game is complete without play. Does a game need players to be a game?

Part of both design and play is deciding what you want the game to yield. You're picking an identity for the experience.I believe – strongly, to the point of fist-fightery – that it does. The tree falling in the forest and all that.

However, with any game, the moment a player actually plays it, the experience becomes uniquely theirs. Intellectual property, code, graphics, art, rules phrasings, etc. may all still belong to the publisher or developer, but the experience of play is singular and belongs to the player or community of players, whatever the size of that community, whether it’s two people at a chess board or eleven million in an MMO.

Steering that experience is an exercise in design. While the original designer certainly (well… hopefully) had a specific goal or experience in mind, once the game has left his hands, his input on it is minimal, and probably nil. Unless the players specifically seek him out to make some sort of arbitration or additional input, the game session belongs to and is inevitably shaped by the player. A designer definitely needs to be informing his own decisions by playing his own game.

This, effectively, makes each player a designer. Certainly, it makes her a participant (or potentially an audience, depending on whether or not you view a given game as art), but when she makes decisions that shape the flow of the game, she’s designing. She's making a consideration of preference and she's seeking to replicate the experience of that preference.

Design and play crafts an experience. The players' result is more important than the original design and circumstance. All the initial design provides is the springboard.Roleplayers and wargamers engage in design all the time, whether in scenario construction, worldbuilding, army construction, character creation, or monster-making, they’re designing. They may not be designing an entire ruleset, but they’re creating a unique combination of game features and functions intended to interact with other player entities and the game environment itself. Deckbuilding is design. House-ruling and kitbashing are obviously design. You don't have to be refining "what is a hunter?" into Hunter: The Vigil or writing a mash note to what you love about Masquerade to be a designer. Almost any play will do.

The practice extends even to video games, even if the player never touches the code. The idea of character creation and advancement – that’s experiential design, shaping how the player again chooses to interact with the environment and the community. Writing a mod or add-on, for those technically adept enough to do says, states explicitly, “I want to play the game like this.” It’s one of the things I really admire about World of Warcraft and Valve: They actually look at how people are using and modding their games and they adapt the most popular or interesting of those into the actual body of “official” game code.

That’s not to say all design is good design. The parlance of “broken” rules and “nerfed features” (if they’re true statements) show that any rule, whether professionally designed or assembled by the end user, can present a play experience that is detrimental to some players even if it’s all the steez for one player. There’s a fine but distinct line separating punishing a player and challenging a player.

The other day on Facebook, a writer friend who worked on Vampire material back in the time of Masquerade dropped me a line asking a rules question about an out-of-print bit of material. Here’s part of the exchange.

The beauty of it is, they’re both right. The rule as written is right for the game experience in which the players have decided it best suits them, and the houserule for the large-scale LARP group is also right for its experience -- at least for the time being, which the players-as-designers can overturn if it no longer suits them.

To me, this is one of the most amazing aspects of games as a medium: the great democratization of ideal and design. Without players, a game isn’t a game – and a game that denies the ability of players to use the game in a way that entertains them may soon become not a game for lack of play. Design isn’t an ivory tower, it’s a participatory process at all levels that is forever vital so long as the game is in play. It's a little like play itself in that regard....

You'll Do Nothing and Like It

2010-03-04T16:46:09Z

The PC is stunned and cannot take any action, until the event timer expires and he may resume autoattacking as normal.

I think it's bad game design to tell a player, "You can't play." That's common sense, I would hope, but I've seen a variety of effects of the stunned-state variety that render the character powerless to take action. World of Warcraft has a stunned condition like this, and last I played it, Lord of the Rings Online had it, too.

The goal of being able to stun a character is obvious. It's a good combat tactic that suggests the character is overwhelmed, surprised, crippled, or what have you to such a degree that, for a short time, he has a reduced capacity to perform. It can be combat-related (as it is in most cases) or it can be some other special effect, such as being gripped by fear or ravaged by some exotic toxin. The situations they're aiming to simulate -- those are cool. But the non-system of "just sit there" is just short of criminal.

That's the key: a reduced capacity to perform. Give the player a penalty to actions. Reduce his available options. Whatever you do, for the love of God, let the player continue to participate.

In most cases, the first time I encounter a stun that renders me completely unable to take any actions, I think hardware malfunction if it's a video game. Thereafter, when I understand that it's a game feature (in someone's mind, I suppose), it just becomes frustrating. In a tabletop game that dictates I can take no action, I check Facebook on my iPhone.

I'm willing to suspend active participation during, say, exposition, or during a dramatic moment when my character is bound and captured and powerlessness is part of the tone being set. But a one-and-a-half second "nothing works! LOL" situation while leetle stars doodle-do around my head? Blow it out your ear. Or worse, at the tabletop, when multiple real-time minutes might elapse between my actions and my only participation is to sit there checking iPhone Facebook? That's not game design, that's do anything except play the game design. What possible motivation could exist for telling me I can't play when I'm already playing?

Requiescat In Pace

2010-03-02T17:30:38Z

I think I dated this girl once.A great many stories revolve around defeating and killing the Big Bad Foe, which isn't exactly a revelation. I've been thinking about ways to revisit this hoary old plot point, and one of the avenues I'm exploring is not new and clever ways to kill Big Bad, but to make sure Big Bad stays dead. In fact, I don't even know that the killing is necessary in and of itself. I can probably keep that story element as a piece of history, given certain assumptions, so I'm obviously after a different sort of challenge.

Historically, separating an individual's head from his body served to accomplish this at least part way. Superstitions aside, most of these were cases of wanting to keep an individual's followers from rallying to a martyred leader, as with William Wallace or Vlad Tepes, but some occult aspects are sometimes associated with the act, as with John the Baptist. (And I suppose Vlad Tepes can probably fit here, too.)

What I'm really look for is a quest-type storyline that's more preventative than overtly empowering. The protagonists don't necessarily receive the grail at the end of the quest, they manage to stave off the occurance of some horrible thing. This is, of course, the bailiwick of many Cthulhu tales, the culmination of which is buying the world a little extra time before "the stars are right" again, but also has precedent in other fantasy fiction, as in "The Hour of the Dragon," in which Conan's ultimate foe is a long-dead sorcerer of Acheron raised from the dead by a faction of jealous conspirators. The reward for success is continued wellbeing, at least for the time, and makes a refreshing break from the standard model of task resolution equals item upgrade.

What about you? Have you used "And stay dead!" in any of your games or writing endeavors?

This Hunger for Reality

2010-02-25T00:44:49Z

A presentation by Jesse Schell at this year's DICE event. It gets a little crazy in the last eight minutes or so, but 1) it's fascinating otherwise and 2) it'll probably happen that way anyway.

Wii Games - E3 2010 - Guitar Hero 5

All that said, there's a degree of this that's inherent to the human condition. When something feels pleasurable, we're inclined to do it, which is why, biologically, we're inclined to eat, void our waste, and procreate. Turning "mere achievements" into something that reinforces good practices is an interesting way of encouraging them. The scary implication to this, however, is that it sounds like corporate advertising is going to be the entity that decides what "good practices" are.

Loss as a Positive Characteristic

2010-02-22T18:39:24Z

I've been peeking around at a few freebie games scattered across the web and found one that manages to strike a resonant chord with me: Elegia by John Higgins of Relative Entropy Games. It's a retro-clone, as are so fashionable among the tenured tabletop gamers these days, and it's built to support a specific style of tabletop-videogame hybrid, the 8-bit quest RPG. With that in mind, it's got an absolutely brilliant approach to creating the proper world feel on p. 34:

The world is suffused with a vague, quiet, mostly unspoken sense of lamentation. Nobody knows why this is so, because most of the world’s true history has been forgotten.

I love games with this feel, particularly because they appeal strongly to my sense of nostalgia. In fact, I'm particularly enamored of this specific phrasing. The rest of the paragraph dwells a bit too much for my tastes on Tolkien's mythology and how Elegia doesn't hit those notes, but the core is there.

In particular, I like the sense of innocence that slowly spalls away from the characters in the elegiac worlds often found in vintage video games. It's part bildungsroman, but that's not its only element. Indeed, that tragic loss of innocence as the adventuring characters slowly discover more of their cruel, monstrous worlds and attempt to make them right is very compelling. Their quaint, localized worldview is forced to mature in a bittersweet trek into the world. Dungeons that have lurked perilously close to their homes turn into a globe-spanning adventure to thwart the evil machinations of creatures initially far more powerful than they, and the only way to achieve their goals is to "grow up," sonner than they had planned and possibly in opposition to their simple, idyllic prequel lives.

To that end, Higgins' game has a perfect name, suggesting that loss and emphasizing it in its worldbuilding section, which is admirably brief and poignant.

Special bonus points to Elegia for reducing the encumbrance rules to a coarse-grained "stone" measurement, which lets you get on with the elegia and doesn't make you fine-tune how many pounds of rope your character has in his backpack.

Go get Elegia. It's free to download, and if you dig it, tip your hat by buying a print copy.

Guest Lecture: The Ethics of Exploration

2010-02-17T21:58:34Z

I've had the opportunity to attend a couple of interesting events over the past few weeks that have given me some good food for thought. While much of the craft of game design is introspective, outside influences are critical not only for verisimilitude in games, but to prevent the medium from becoming hopelessly exclusionary. Nobody wants a game that you have to already play games to enjoy. (Well, some people want that, but they're not usually the sorts of people who are fun to actually play games with -- they're the extreme lifestylers who want to hole up in their hobby and use it as an identity with which to insulate themselves from the rest of the world.) I even use this as interview criteria: I always ask in interviews what other interests the candidate has besides gaming and if they answer, "Really, gaming is it," they get a big ol' thumbs-down from me.

Digression notwithstanding, one of the presentations I attended was the Ethics of Exploration, given by the vatican's astronomer, Br. Guy Consolmagno.

The presentation itself covered a lot of ground and I took from it some expanded thinking horizons. In terms of history, everyone remembers Galileo... but can you name the pope who brought him to trial? Galileo's story resonates with people because it's essentially human to wonder what's out there. Asking the question satisfies a "hunger in the soul," which is why we remember Galileo instead of those who condemned him and their comparative small-sightedness.

Much of what I pulled from the Ethics of Exploration was content related, stuff to construct games about or questions to ask in games rather than systems with which to create new games. A few of the topics that excited me here were:

Gah. Who to root for in the clash of good vs. good?A "conflict among goods": The goods in this case are things that are good, as opposed to products or resources. We often speak of having to choose between the lesser of two evils, but how often must we choose from among multiple outcomes that are all positive? So many of today's games feature dark and dystopian game settings. So many others offer the "Jesus or Hitler?" paradigm, purporting to offer moral choice but really offering pick-extreme-good-or-extreme-bad gameplay paths. Wouldn't it be refreshing to be able to pick an outcome from among a variety of things that are awesome? My mind immediately springs to a golden age sci-fi tale or a mythic idyll, but those are only my immediate responses.

Ethically obtained specimens: Is it ethical for a scientist to conduct research for the greater good on a speciment knowingly obtained under illegal or morally (or ethically) wrong circumstances? This is the classic "misunderstood scientist" trope, but it has plenty of mileage left in it as the thrust of a game story. The player might be obtaining the specimen, or he might be part of the group that plans to perform the research.

1) Discover meteor. 2) ??? 3) Profit!The ethics of economy: About once a year, a meteor of approximately one-kilometer size passes near enough to the earth, well, to be a meteor. Extrapolating from samples, a one-kilometer meteor would be worth tens of trillions of dollars in salable value. So let's say some entity -- a government, a commercial concern, a scrappy bunch of players -- invests in a sound method of grabbing this meteor (itself probably tens of billions of dollars in cost) and manages to pluck it out of the sky. Let's say this happens in the middle of nowhere. How would the local economy of that nowhere respond to suddenly having tens of trillions of dollars worth of inflation dumped into it?

Subverting the purpose of playing a game: Ultimately, Brother Consolmagno stated, to refuse to make a choice will always be a mistake. I don't know how to wring a playable facet from this, since a game is a series of choices with consequences, but there's something about the refusal to take action in a given situation that has story potential. Perhaps an authority in the story refuses to take action until swayed toward a course by the players, who must accumulate enough information to choose intelligently (or perhaps control the information influx to suit the course of action they want).

Oh, it was Pope Urban VIII who tried Galileo, by the way. In a bit of cosmic justice, his villa is now the location of the Vatican Observatory.

Leave It Out

2010-02-14T02:04:58Z

I just wanted to play with the blocks! Now I feel like I'm not doing what I'm supposed to be doing if I don't make some use of everything.Don't.

I'm serious, don't.

Rare is the game to which the solution is "put more stuff in it."

Your game may need better design, you may need to spend more time on your designs, but you definitely don't need more stuff in your game (particularly if you need better design or more time spent on your designs...).

Scope is precious in games design. Indeed, most games — if not all, I'll go ahead and say it — should have reined in their scope before they went to press or shipped gold.

For most designers, this is antithetical thinking. Whether hubris, inexperience, or unmitigated love of the genre, they want to make one enormous game that is all things to everyone, with a feature set that keeps players coming back year after year, level after level, to plumb another facet of their grail-game, to master another aspect of their unending mine of entertainment.

It's no coincidence that the solitary resource that a game can demand of its audience — time — is a precious commodity for designers, too. All of your ideas simply won't fit into your design by your launch or print time. Those ideas may or may not even have any place in the greater game you're designing, so taking time away from the features that do fit is doing them a disservice. (Brenda Brathwaite has an article about the time constraints of design, while we're talking about it.)

A simpler feature is easier to understand and easier to use. The fewer restrictions you place on a function, the broader its application it is and the more creatively players will find a way to use it.

The Bejeweled minigame in Lineage II both breaks immersion and distracts players from each other.In video games, overdesign sometimes results in feature bloat. The extraneous feature feels tacked on, or it's hard to find a thematic fit for the feature in the game in question. The Bejeweled-type minigame in Lineage II, for example — what's it doing there? It's a time waster, sure, and a great casual game... but time I'm spending playing the minigame is time I'm not spending forming and exploring relationships with other people, which is the entire point of MMOs. TetraMaster, likewise, feels out of place in the Final Fantasy games, because it's something outside the world. It's a fine side game, and putting Final Fantasy flourishes on it adds a bit of recognition and fun, but the idea of killing monsters and having them drop cards of themselves is boggling.

In tabletop games, overdesign sometimes manifests as "supplement-itis." It's a bit more of a problem at the tabletop, too, because every user doesn't just patch his client to ensure version compatibility with the other players. If I'm playing D&D and I don't have the book that defines swift actions, I might not be playing with rules that work the same way yours do. If we're playing Vampire: The Requiem and I have the rules for a bloodline that you've never seen before, we're going to have a game experience that loses something in the disparity. The benefit of tabletop games is that they have a living, creatively thinking arbiter running things, but what if she doesn't have all the supplements herself? And of course, these are gross examples, and wholly subjective. As well, they're games published by publishing companies whose business is selling books, not making sure your game is consistent.

Ultimately, when you're making a game for play on a computer or around a tabletop, you need to ask yourself, "Does my game need this?" If your answer is no or, worse, you find yourself trying to convince yourself that, yes, your game does need this, it's best to leave it on the cutting room floor.

As a coda to the merit of leaving things out, remember the beauty of broad strokes. If you leave something out or undetailed, the thing that occupies that space in your players' imagination is always going to be richer and more evocative than what you ultimately show them. Remember the man behind the curtain in Oz? As well, something that's not predetermined can be used in a creative new way, meaning you'll have the joy of seeing emergent gameplay happen and seeing the way playing your game lets the players synthesize their experiences into something of their own communal creation.

What I'm Playing: Feb '10

2010-02-10T17:48:12Z

In the course of developing a tabletop RPG and transitioning from doing that to being part of the design team for an MMO, it's a fact of the matter and a job requirement that I play a lot of games. I'm not necessarily playing all of the next big things, however. I'm playing things that I find interesting. I'm playing things that have little bits I can learn from or assimilate, things that are object lessons in features I'm working on, or proofs of concept for high-minded ideas.

Doodle Bomb: A fun little physics game for the iPhone. I like the way they pair achievements with each level. I also like the DIY look of the game, which is sort of an object lesson that games (or their parts) are the creations of the people behind them.

Assassin's Creed 2: The only triple-A I'm playing right now, and this has a lot going for it. I like the sandbox of improving the villa, the improvements in gameplay from the first one, the customization options, the way the world lore is presented, and even (mostly) the control scheme. Oh, and that the memory-regression aspect now enhances the play rather than getting in its way.

Canabalt: Another nifty indie, this one with an implied world that I find really interesting (what the hell is going on? Oh, things are really bad.), and gameplay that's exciting and kinetic without being seizure-inducing.

EVE Online: Duh. The ultimate virtual world, even if saying so suggests a bias.

Button Men: A fun tabletop quickie converted to a compelling portable version I can play by myself. I said "play by myself," you pervs.

Final Fantasy Crystal Defenders: It's a spreadsheet with a Final Fantasy skin on it. Sold. A testament to the power of brand, with a nod to the old-school origins of the property.

Lady Blackbird: A coming session with an all-female player group is on the schedule. The rules-light construction and setting sold me on trying to convince my wife to give this a shot, so we'll see where it goes.

Savage Worlds: The engine here felt like the best match for a three-story arc set in a homebrew world that i've been putting together. It might also host my Thatcher-era zombiefest if I want to turn up the cinematics a notch higher than World of Darkness handles well.

Farmville: This has definitely been one that's more research than entertainment, and I'm about done spending time with it. I'd posit that this is a toy more than a game, but I really like the way it encourages people to interact with one another. It makes a clever use of the only resource a player has that really matters (time) by rewarding them with in-game benefits for helping out their friends, and that's a great way to foster return visits and community.

What are you playing? What have you learned from it, enjoyed, or thought, "that's a damn fine feature, and one that I'd like to put my own spin on"?

Presenting Information: Lore in Context

2010-02-04T16:12:35Z

Tragically, you're still some kind of time-traveling sci-fi memory regression experiment instead of an actual historical agent provocateur.In Assassin's Creed 2, occasional information updates in your game lore library. You press a button that takes you out of play and into the info-dump screen...

...and it works.

This is one of the precise things I railed about Dragon Age doing, and yet it works in Assassin's Creed 2.

I'm not sure why. I've been thinking about it and the strongest reasoning I've been able to come up with is that it feels like part of what I should be doing. In AC2, I'm an assassin, so I'm supposed to be gathering information and compiling intelligence on my location, my allies, and my marks. In the context of AC2 gameplay, gathering information feels like something the character should be doing. In the context of Dragon Age, it feels like something the player might want to do.