Pag on Games

These days, the top 3 things I look for in a design are: is the concept Fun, Grokkable and Distinctive? Everything else is just gravy.

Texas Hold ‘em Poker is a brilliant game. Those who dismiss it as just gambling are missing the incredible brilliance and depth behind it. You’re not really playing cards, you’re playing your opponents — the cards just add the randomness to make bluffing possible. Bluffing elevates a mere game of chance to a game of subtle psychology and manipulation.

I admit that I don’t play much actual poker — it’s an expensive hobby. That’s why I’d like to see more games use bluffing as a part of gameplay. Very few video games involve any bluffing at all. I’m guessing that’s because computers aren’t that good at handling lying.

Indeed, letting players bluff means letting them lie — whether with words or with actions. If a poker player places a big bet on a poor hand, he’s prentending to have good cards, which is essentially a lie. A game that’s good for bluffing will give high rewards for successfully lying, but harsh penalties for getting caught.

A bluffing game will also give partial information to other players. The cards common to all players in Hold ‘em give hints about what other players might have. This information helps guess why a player bets the way he does, but it’s also a good way to manipulate other players. In a bluffing game, information reduces randomness — too little information given away transforms the game in a game of chance, too much and there’s no room left to bluff. The perfect balance depends on the game.

Bluffing is the next big feature in gaming, especially with social party games, believe me. I wouldn’t lie to you, now would I?

The traditional way to finish a game is to put a big boss fight at the end. This isn’t really appropriate for a lot of games — it makes no sense to end a stealth game or a puzzle-heavy game with a big battle.

Here are 5 ways to end a game without a big fight — I’m sure you can think of more:

1.  End with a big puzzle with randomly changing conditions that the player must constantly adapt to
2. Put time pressure on normally slower paced gameplay — end with a race or a timer to reach an objective
3. Instead of fighting the boss, have the player create an elaborate trap to dispatch him — make the player feel clever rather than powerful
4. End with a major dilemma: “Be good or evil?”, “Capture the criminal or save your girlfriend?”, “Keep on your initial side, or join the rebels you were originally fighting?”…
5. Give the player a single hit point: he must play perfectly to succeed

In design, it’s easy to know what you don’t want once it’s made — to point out what’s wrong with a feature once it’s implemented. The real skill is knowing what you really want before it’s made — so it doesn’t have much wrong the first time it’s implemented.

A few years ago I watched a French vampire movie in the “so bad it’s good” category: Requiem pour un Vampire (Requiem for a Vampire). In it there’s a scene where a character walks slowly through a very large room to light a torch and back, in one single take. This is a 2 minutes long take showing just one character walking. It’s such a pointless long take it can’t but leave you puzzled as to why it’s in the movie — good movies are edited to get rid of those boring moments.

A lot of games are much worse than that when it comes to walking dead time. In most RPG, you’ve got to walk long distances to do anything, even if there’s nothing interesting to do while you’re walking. You spend a lot of time walking from shop to shop in Diablo, even though there’s absolutely nothing interesting happening between those shops, for example. It’s just dead time.

Zelda tries to make the time moving from dungeon to dungeon more fun by adding filler: random monsters to fight, ghosts to capture, fences to jump over and so on. It’s filler, but at least it’s somewhat fun.

Other solutions exist. Most games keep your character running at all time, which reduces time spent moving around, but it also makes the game feel somewhat silly (I find it hard to take seriously characters who are constantly jogging, even when there’s no rush). A better solution is to let characters warp at any time to known locations — the game just skips the walking part. Mass Effect does it by having taxis you can take in some locations.

In any case, the best solution is to just skip dead time. Just avoid boring bits that don’t make the game progress in a meaningful way.

Call of Duty 4 is a really well designed game. The one thing I admire most about it is that the whole game makes sense. Where most games take shortcuts with logic — why can you open any locked container in Mass Effect by playing a short game of Simon Says? — CoD4 stays grounded in reality for the whole thing. The whole experience is consistent.

I believe that’s an important next step for games: making sense. Gamers are used to the inconsistency of game, but non players are often put off my the abstraction of games. The closer a game behaves to what the player expects, the less has to be explained to play. The purpose of a machine gun is obvious, whereas the purpose of an alien gun in a sci-fi shooter needs more explanation. Very little context is needed for the action in CoD4 because the action is close to something players already know (soldiers in the Middle East).

“Making sense” doesn’t mean that the game has to be realistic. A very stylish game can be consistent, credible and close to the reality the audience is familiar with. What’s important is that things behave in a believable way, in a way that fits logically with the game world. The logic of CoD4 is not the same as the logic of a Looney Tunes cartoon, yet Bugs Bunny acts in a way that fits perfectly well with his cartoon world.

So ask yourself: how can you make your game more logical and consistent? How can you remove the abstractions that might put gamers off?

When I start a single-player game, almost all of the time all I want to do is get to the point where I can start a new game or where I can continue my previously staved game. Why do most games put so many obstacles in the way of doing that?

First you’ve got a bunch of splash screens — the publisher, the licensor, the developer, the engine developer, the legalese, the sound technology and what have you — then you’re faced with the utterly pointless “Press Start” screen, then the main menu where you choose “Load”, then the menu to select where you want to load (in the case of the Xbox 360) and then the menu to select the save game you want to load (even if there’s a single one). After a minute or two of this pointlessness, you can finally play.

Is all of this really needed? Can’t a single initial splash screen show all the appropriate logos while the game is loading, only to jump directly into the game afterward? Maybe the “Press Start” screen would actually be useful if the action started immediately after pressing start. It’s a small thing, but it would put fewer obstacles between the player and his entertainment.

Yesterday I talked about why some games don’t need a constantly rising difficulty level. But if difficulty doesn’t keep rising throughout the game, it’s really important to choose the right difficulty level. Too hard and players just give up, too easy and they breeze through it without the sense of achievement of beating the game.

You can’t really trust players to choose the difficulty level by themselves because they don’t know what difficulty is appropriate for them until they’ve played the game. The best solution is to adapt the challenge level to the player’s skill automatically. Here are a few ways to achieve this:

• The Algorithmic Approach
  The most sophisticated way to have dynamic difficulty is to analyze how well the player is doing and tweak the difficulty based on this. In a shooter you could analyze how much damage the player inflicts and receives, how often he dies and so on. Max Payne used this approach pretty successfully. It can be tricky to do properly, potentially requiring a lot of development time to tweak and tune for some types of games. Some games lend themselves to this approach though: racing games often give a speed boost to cars lagging behind the player and a handicap to cars ahead — simple, but effective. The advantage of this method is that you don’t need extra content some players may miss.
• Open Selection
  The Mario 64 approach: you let players choose which challenge to face. For this method to work you must give the player a wide selection of challenges and let him cherry-pick which one to try (like selecting which star to get in Mario). Individual challenges can be harder than those in a strictly linear game because players won’t get stuck at a specific level they can’t beat. The problem with this approach is that you need content that some players will never see — a problem if your development budget is tight. You also can’t quite control the player’s experience as much as in a linear game.
• Optional Goals and Side Quests
  If you want to keep players on a linear path, you can give them optional objectives to achieve along the way. The player must find the Amulet of Whatsitsname to progress in the game, but they can go look for the princess’ brooch she lost in the swamps if they feel like it. Optional side quests like this can be more challenging than the main path because they won’t block the player from progressing. More skilled players can try them while unskilled players will just walk on. Note that side quests don’t have to be explicit: a challenging side path to reach a powerful weapon in a FPS doesn’t need a cutscene and explanation to be an optional goal for players.

The typical way to design game is to ramp up the difficulty progressively: the game starts easy and becomes progressively harder until the end of the game. But is that the best approach?

For some games it is. Some games test your skills and constantly push you to your limits to force you to get better. The games that gain the most from constantly increasing difficulty are those focused on the mastery of a simple skill. Guitar Hero would get boring if the level of challenge stayed the same throughout, for example.

Richer, denser games don’t need a constantly increasing difficulty nearly as much because what keeps the game fresh is the renewed content of the game, not the increased difficulty. In Mass Effect, for example, I found the last part of the game easier than many earlier parts — but that didn’t make it any less enjoyable. A cinematic game doesn’t need increasing difficulty to keep players interested, it’s the cinematic aspect that’s interesting — it can get more intense without being particularly more difficult.

It’s a bit counter-intuitive, but it seems casual games gain more from a constantly increasing difficulty level than typical hardcore games. Tetris has a much clearer increase in difficulty than Gears of War.

Richard Garfield is the game designers who created trading card games — he’s the mind behind Magic: the Gathering and many other traditional games. A few years ago he had a monthly column about game design in the magazine The Duelist. Ten of those articles are now online, and they’re worth the read. You can find them here.