Pag on Games

There are 3 big factors behind the development of every video game: the quality of the game, how large and complicated it is, and the development budget in both time and money. Common wisdom is that you must be willing to compromise on at least one of those factors if your game is ever to ship.

• Triple-A games aim to be big and good. That’s why they’re often delayed: they’re big games and they must be of high quality, so the budget expands when it looks those objectives can’t be reached.
• Indie games aim to be good and cheap. That’s why they’re often very short, they focus on one type of gameplay and they feature simple graphics: the budget simply isn’t there to create anything more ambitious.
• Licensed games aim to be big and cheap. That’s why they often get poor reviews: budgets are set in stone and the games are large to fit the license (multiple playable characters, multiple gameplay modes, etc.). The only thing that can move in case of problems is the quality.

It’s better to make the choice of what you’re willing to compromise on at the start of the project. If you try to make a game that’s good, big and cheap, you’re headed for trouble. Either the game will get canned or you’ll be forced to make a compromise you weren’t prepared to make.

What do you do if you want to get out of the stereotypical projects above — say, by making a good licensed game? You need to be able to compromise on another factor instead. In this case, you could try to make a very small and focused game, or you could try to get the publisher to be flexible with the budget when quality targets aren’t reached. None of those is easy, but hey, if they were then everybody would be doing it.

Hugh MacLeod talks a lot about social objects on his blog — he strongly believes they’re the future of marketing. Social objects are objects that people gather socially around or talk about. If you’re bringing your new iPhone to your friends and showing it to them, it serves as a social object; if you geek out with friends by chatting about Lord of the Rings, LotR is the social object. You can read more details on the whole thing here.

The relevance of social objects to marketing is obvious: if people keep interacting socially around what you’re selling, you’ll be getting great word of mouth. Even if you don’t care about marketing — you should, but that’s a post for another day — making games that are social objects is really interesting. Wouldn’t you want to have communities of people interacting together because of your creation?

Multiplayer games are prime social objects: they bring people around them and whole social networks are created by fans of those games. Lots of people play World of Warcraft mainly to do something with their friends, for example. Xbox Live is a huge social network with some people making lots of friends, not unlike Facebook or MySpace. Party games like Guitar Hero and Wii Sports are other good examples.

Single Player games are not as easy to turn into social objects. How do you create social interactions around games that are played alone? Some games did it:

• Pokémon: The game is single player, but it encourages players to trade with their friends. Kids in schoolyards everywhere huddled up together to trade their cartoony monsters to “catch them all”.
• Donkey Kong Country: This SNES platformer had over 100 secret areas — they were hidden everywhere and the game encouraged you to find them all. That’s hard to do alone, but if you teamed up with a few of your friends you could figure it out much quicker — instant social object.
• The hardware demo games: Those games were perfect to demonstrate the awesome power of your new computer or new console: Doom, Unreal and Gears of War are all good example of those games.  Even if you play the game in single player, you’re still interacting with your friends when you show them the graphics.

The key to turn a single player game into a social object is to put something to share in it, be it tradeable items, secrets, awesome graphics or something else. If there’s something worth sharing in your games, players will get together and soon enough you’ll have communities appearing around your game.

Here’s an interesting talk by J.J. Abrams, creator of Lost and the upcoming Cloverfield, where he talks about the importance of mystery in entertainment and his experience working on various projects. (It’s about 20 minutes long)

Here’s an interesting quote by Bill Gates, from a recent interview, in which he describes how he’s never fully satisfied with Microsoft products:

There are always the features that I wanted to get in, or the things that I wish were a little more polished. The people who are good in these companies are really sort of ridiculously demanding people. They have to sort of know when to back off so that thing can eventually ship.

I think it applies to game designers as well: you need to be a perfectionist, but know when to let things go and get the game on store shelves.

Thelo wrote a very long and thoughtful comment to my post “Who Likes Being Punished” earlier this week. It made me realize that I wasn’t very clear in my post, so I’ll answer this comment directly here.

Thelo said:

Since games are fundamentally about choices and interactivity, we’re bound to have in-game actions that lead to consequences that are less desirable than others - so any player choice that results in the less desirable option could be seen as a punishment.

He’s quite right: the difference between punishment and reward is shades of gray, not black & white. Saying that games should have no punishment whatsoever means that it should be all rewards all the time, and I disagree with that for obvious reasons.

To clarify my previous statement, instead of “avoid punishing players” it could be “avoid making players feel punished” or even “minimize punishment”. Some examples of games that did it right:

• Lego Star Wars: One of the least punishing games ever, dying has very little adverse consequences, yet it’s fun. I’m not saying all games should go that far, but it’s an interesting avenue for some games.
• Halo: The very regular checkpoints of the single player campaign reduce punishment while keeping the challenge intact. Even if you die, you won’t have to replay more than a minute of gameplay. The recharging shield also avoids punishing you throughout a level because of one tough fight early on.
• Sid Meier’s Gettysburg: In this RTS, failing a mission doesn’t end the game and force you to restart, you just go to a different battle than if you’d won. The overall result of the war depends on how successful you were in all battles, but you’re never stopped because of a difficult battle.
• Project Gotham Racing 4: The season mode is played day by day and if you fail one race then you just move on to the next day of the season with a slightly poorer overall ranking.
• Mario 64: You must find only a fraction of all stars to finish the game. If you can’t get one in particular, you just ignore it and find another one, you don’t get punished for it.

Basically, I think it’s fine if the player feels that the bad things that happen are the direct result of his actions. If it feels like the game developers are slapping the player in the face for his failure, that’s bad.

A lot of games have a very black and white separation between success and failure: either you die or you’re the hero who single-handedly saved the world — there’s nothing in-between. I think many games could gain by having different levels of success. Instead of having bad players downright fail, you let them finish the game with a poorer ending and you reward players with a great ending, with a few different levels in-between, for example.

Multiplayer is another place where some amount of punishment is unavoidable: if somebody wins, then somebody loses. That’s a problem: I’ve tried quite a few multiplayer games and abandoned them after getting my ass kicked repeatedly. Too much punishment, not enough rewards. It’s a hard problem to solve, but I think the matching system of Xbox Live is a good approach. It matches similarly skilled players together and avoids multiplayer becoming only the realm of the hardcore players.

To get results that are out of the ordinary, you must act out of the ordinary. If you do the same things as everybody else, you’ll get the same results as everybody else and you’ll be condemned to mediocrity. That’s why geniuses are eccentric: if they acted and thought like everyone they’d get the results everyone get.

The challenge is getting extraordinarily good results and not extraordinarily bad results. That’s why being average is so popular: it’s safe.

Nobody likes being punished, so it’s amazing how hard some game designers work at punishing the audience of the entertainment they’re building. I’ve heard plenty of designers argue about how to punish players for making mistakes in their games, as if those players didn’t feel bad enough as it is for having made mistakes.

Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja, a DS Rogue-like RPG I played over the holidays, would be great fun if it weren’t designed by sadistic developers hellbent on punishing you for the smallest mistake. In Izuna, death is punished by throwing you out of the dungeon, losing all of your equipment. Killed by the boss on the 10th floor? Too bad, you have to replay the whole thing, with none of the equipment you picked up. Sure, a few masochistic hardcore players may get a kick out of the challenge, but most people just end up frustrated.

Sure, Izuna is an extreme example, but plenty of games punish players harshly for mistakes. How many games force you to replay the same 10 minutes of gameplay repeatedly until you’re able to get through a challenging spot? How many racing games condemn you to the last place if you hit a wall a bit too hard in the middle of a race?

Don’t do it. The temptation to punish players is hard to resist, but players don’t need to be punished by their entertainment. Instead, consider simply withholding rewards from the player: give a special reward for players who do really well rather than punishing those who do badly. The bad players already hate themselves for being bad, don’t add to their frustration.

While no one could accuse Hollywood of being unwilling to create sequels to their hit movies, their efforts are nothing compared to game publishers. You rarely see movie titles ending with a number larger than 3 these days, whereas it’s practically the norm in gaming. This isn’t because movie makers are more creative than game developers, but simply because game sequels have more financial success than movie sequels. There are two main reasons for this.

The first reason is that movies have to reinvent themselves with each sequel. You can’t have the same story in a new location with slightly different enemies; a movie must have a new story for each sequel. A different story brings the risk that it will be worse than the previous one, leading to a poorer movie.

Games on the other hand can get away with repeating the same gameplay — even the same story — multiple time in a row. How many times will Link rescue a captive Zelda by finding a sword, a bow and a boomerang along the way? The risks of ruining the magic behind a succesful game is much lower if all you do is create a few new levels.

The second reason is that a movie’s sequel often costs just as much to make as the original. New sets must be built, actors must be paid, special effects must be prepared, etc. To be profitable a movie sequel must be just as popular as the original.

Game sequels often cost less to make than the first in the series: characters are already modeled, enemy AI is already implemented and tuned, the engine is already up and running, etc. Making a sequel to an unprofitable game can actually bring the franchise to profitability, whereas making a sequel to an unprofitable movie is just spending good money after bad.

So that’s why we have so many game sequels: they’re easier and more profitable to make than movie sequels. However, sequels are generally more of the same and cannot really expand the audience for video games. That’s why original games are so important to transform video gaming into a truly mainstream media.

Everybody I know is really busy, nobody has a lot of free time, sadly, between work and family. Then why are most games made for people with over 10 hours of free time? That made sense when most gamers were bored teenagers, but those teenagers have grown up and now have more responsibilities and less free time.

Why not make 3-4 hours long games and sell them for $20? They’re the same bang for buck as 9-12 hours long game for $60 — don’t kid yourself, 60 hour games haven’t been the norm for years — and they’d be closer to most people’s “impulse-buy” price. Used games would be less attractive at that price too.

I’ve been thinking about bowling lately: why is that “sport” so popular in video game form? Whenever there’s some news about older gamers playing on the Wii, they’re playing Wii Bowling. Bowling has been near the top of the most downloaded cellphone games lists for years. It’s not like real bowling is the hottest activity around.

Another peculiar trait of casual gamers is that they like games that aren’t considered “real games”: Brain Age and other training games, Sudoku and other puzzle games. Some casual players can play for more than 20 hours each week, yet if you ask them they don’t consider themselves “gamers”. Why is that?

I think it’s because video games aren’t yet perceived as socially acceptable by a lot of people. A friend of mine had to listen to a lecture by his aunt during the holidays on how she’d never play any game because they’re “just for kids”. Bowling, on the other hand, is an adult activity. Brain training is exercise for the brain, so that’s a convenient excuse to play those games. Puzzles are just like the crosswords you find in newspaper so that’s acceptable for adults to play too.

Those casual games are more socially acceptable for adults to play, so more adults are willing to try them. The Wii Fit board is another game disguised as something more serious — self-conscious players can buy it to enjoy themselves but save face by claiming it’s just for exercise.

That’s something to consider when making games for non-gamers: make them something other non-gamers won’t find immature.