Pag on Games

There’s been a lot of talk about emergence in the last few years, but it always seems to be about FPS similar to Deus Ex and Bioshock. Emergence isn’t limited to immersive shooters; it can deepen the experience of many games.

An emergent system is one in which complex behaviors emerge from a set of simple rules. They exist everywhere, not just in games. For example, individual ants are very unintelligent creatures that follow very simple instincts. Yet, when you look at an ant’s nest, the million ants in it act in a remarkably organized way. That’s because the simple instincts the ants follow interact together in very complex ways that make the nest behave in a much smarter way than any individual.

Emergent games are those that use a limited number of rules that interact together to create very deep gameplay. Chess has only a few different pieces and very simple rules, yet you can play your whole life and still find new strategies. It shows the advantages of making emergent games:

• Depth: Chess gains a lot of depth from very simple rules.
• Consistency: You can anticipate what’s going to happen at all time in chess, everything behave in a consistent way. Most video games aren’t that predictable: you throw a fireball at a tree and it doesn’t catch fire, the boss fights play very differently from the rest of the game, etc.
• Empowerment: Chess doesn’t have one solution, players have the power to choose their own approach. Most games are created with only one solution for each obstacle and players can’t figure out their own approach.

The best way to make a game emergent is to make everything in it apply to the whole game rather than just some situations. Take the hook shot in Legend of Zelda: you can attach it to specific locations to climb up, but it doesn’t work anywhere else. On the opposite, Thief: the Dark Project gives you rope arrows that you can shoot at anything wooden to climb the attached rope. The rope arrows are much more interesting than the hook shot because they’re useful anywhere there’s wood in sight; they allow you to find paths to your objective that even the game’s designers had never thought of.

Your approach should be to create problematic situations and to give players a variety of tools to solve those problems rather than creating puzzles that have only one specific solution. Players will find themselves really clever if they find their own solutions. One of the pleasures of Bioshock was combining powers together: you throw a fireball at an enemy who jumps in water to extinguish the fire, then throw lightning in the water to electrocute the enemy. This only works because Bioshock’s rules apply to the whole game in a consistent way.

One of the big fears I hear about emergence — especially from producers worried about their budget — is that it increases the number of things to test. If players can devise their own solutions to problems, you’ve got to make sure none of them make the game crash. It’s much easier if there’s only one solution.

That’s true, but it’s not the whole truth. One advantage of emergent gameplay is that the game behaves more consistently too, which simplifies debugging. Moreover, if a solution to a puzzle causes a bug, you can remove that solution without breaking the puzzle itself since many solutions exist. So while emergence is probably not going to reduce your QA needs, it’s not as bad as it may seem at first.

The number one reason to make games more emergent is to make them more interactive and believable. It’s a lot more fun to play when the limit to what you can do is your imagination, rather than the artificial restrictions put in place by the game developers.

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)

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.

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.

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.

The Nintendo DS is dominating sales charts. For months it has been at the top of consoles sales world-wide, far ahead of any console of the new generation. Nintendo announced last October that it sold 50 million copies of the two-screen wonder. With a huge install-base and low development cost, it’s a great platform for publishers to focus on.

But they don’t. Publishers outside of Japan don’t seem to care whatsoever about the number 1 console on sales today. According to Game Rankings, there isn’t a single game in the top 20 best reviewed DS games that was released by a non-Japanese publisher. In fact Nintendo has published 16 out of the top 20 titles. There isn’t a single non-Japanese title that breaks the 85% average score.

Why is this? I can’t understand it. A great DS game with good production value and good marketing could be a huge hit — just look at the success of Phantom Hourglass. But North American publishers keep on making mediocre licensed games built with the lowest budget possible. A typical DS game has a budget around 1 million dollars, while the next-gen Spiderman 3 game cost more than 35 million to make. You could make a dozen AAA DS games (with a 3 million dollar budget) for the price of one multi-platform console title — and the DS has sold more than the Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii combined.

This seems like an obvious missed opportunity. What am I missing here? Why aren’t North American publishers caring about the number 1 console on the market?

A couple of time each month, somebody sends me an email: “I’ve got a great game idea, what can I do with it?” I’m happy to answer questions, but I figure a lot of people wonder the same things without emailing me - or anybody else - about it. That’s why I’ve decided to write these answers to common questions.

I’ve got a great game idea! Can I send it to a publisher or a game studio so they’ll make a game out of it? I’m confident it’s going to be a big hit!

Sadly, no. Barring the occasional contest, I don’t know of any studio or publisher who accepts outside game ideas for development. Believe me when I say I wish it were different, but that’s the reality of things. Other people won’t make your game for you, no matter how good you think your idea is.

I’m serious about this and I’m willing to work hard to make this game a reality. Isn’t there a way to create this game?

While publishers and studios won’t just take an outside game idea, it’s still possible to make your idea - but it’s going to be tough. Obviously, the bigger the game the harder it will be to make. If your idea is for a variant of Tetris, it should be fairly easy to make, if your idea is for a MMORPG in the real world like Grand Theft Auto (only bigger) it’s going to be very hard. Somehow, most people seem to have ideas that fit into the latter category.

The two basic approaches to transforming your idea into something concrete are:

• Join an existing team and convince them to work on your project
• Make it yourself

How do I join an existing team?

You need to get a job working there. The higher up you are in the hierarchy and the closer you are to the production of new projects, the more likely you’ll be able to get them to accept your game concept. A studio’s creative director has more chance to see his ideas created than the human resources intern.

Obviously, if you have no experience in the gaming industry, you’re not likely to get a job at the top echelons. The exception might be if you have professional experience in management - many studios are willing to hire managers from other industries, especially from other entertainment fields (TV, movies, etc.) or from software development firms. If you don’t have that kind of experience, you’ll have to get a “regular” job and work your way up.

Getting a job in games development is beyond the scope of this FAQ, but there’s plenty of information on the subject. I recommend you go take a look at the IGDA FAQ.

Ok, I’ve joined a team. How do I convince them to take on my project?

That’s the tricky part, and there’s no silver bullet. Try to see first if the company is interested in creating original games. A lot of studios only make games as requested by publishers (e.g. games based on movies and such) so convincing them to take a chance with a different approach is going to be tougher.

Many studios have a process to submit ideas internally. You can try submitting your idea this way and follow up to make sure it’s not forgotten. You’ll probably have to work hard to convince people that your idea is good - it might be obvious for you, but it’s not obvious for others.

How do I convince people that my idea is great?

The best approach is to show rather than tell. Show them a prototype of your game and they’re likely to believe it’s good than if you just talk about it. Games must be played to be enjoyed, so a playable prototype will speak much louder than words. You can make a prototype in many ways, from actually coding it (Flash makes that fairly easy) to making a boardgame version of your concept. Use your imagination - the more concrete your concept becomes, the more convincing it will be.

I’d rather create the game myself rather than join an existing team. How do I do that?

The best approach depends on the scope of the project you’re making. If you’re making a simple, casual game then it’s not too hard. Just a few people can make a small game fairly quickly. An experienced programmer and an artist can make a professional quality puzzle game in just a few months. The scope of those projects is small enough that they can be done part time, so you can keep your day job while your work on your game.

My idea is for a bigger game than that - it’s for a top of the line, triple-A console title. How can I make that?

Modern day games have budgets in the tens of millions of dollars and require large teams working full-time for years. Unless you’re rich, you can’t make that by yourself. The typical approach is to get a publisher to finance development. To convince a publisher, you’ll need an impressive prototype of the game.

The prototype for a project of intermediate scope (say a Nintendo DS title) can probably be done in a similar way to making a casual game: by assembling a small team and working on it in your spare time. The prototype for a large project can be a fairly big project in itself, bigger than what you could possibly do in your spare time (some prototypes have a million dollar budget).

Once you have your prototype, you can show it to publishers and hopefully one will pick it up. This is far from certain, however, especially if this is your studio’s first project. Publishers are wary of giving millions of dollars to a studio who hasn’t proven they’ll do anything good with those millions.

This doesn’t seem easy. Isn’t there another way to get to the point where I can create my own game ideas?

Most studios don’t start by making big original titles. What they do is start small and save profits until they’ve got enough money to finance the creation of a prototype to shop around publishers. This means you don’t get to work on your own creation for a while, but it’s safer.

How do I start a small studio?

What you can do is make small games with just a few people and expand as your income grows. Good types of games to create this way include:

• Downloadable casual games: This market is booming right now and you can create your own game ideas rather than work on a license. Competition is increasing, and so are budgets, so it might be harder to create a competitive game.
• Mobile games: The field hasn’t grown as quickly as analyst thought it would and there’s stiff competition, but the games are very small so there’s still space for a start-up team. In fact, I know of a small team of students who were recently able to find a publisher for the mobile game they’d been developing in their spare time. Most games are created from specific requests by publishers, though.
• Advergames: They’re games created to advertise products. They’re mostly web-based games that companies put on their website. The field seems to be doing really well right now, with demand from companies outstripping offer from studios, based from what I hear from a friend in the field. Working on a game based on Cheetohs may not seem exciting, but the companies usually leave you lots of creative space about what to do from a gameplay standpoint.
• Indie games: Downloadable games from independent developers are gaining in popularity. If you can find a good niche, you can get a devoted fanbase. The games are small, but you have full creative control. Becoming profitable might be more difficult than with other approaches though.

Overall, the safest approach is to do the games that somebody with money is willing to pay you to do (mobile games or advergames). You save some of the profit from those projects to invest in slightly bigger projects that give you a larger part of the profits (casual and indie games) and keep growing until you have the money, manpower and contacts to make a prototype of the big game you’ve always wanted to make and pitch it to a publisher.

Is that approach really safe?

It’s about as safe as starting any new company, which is to say “not at all”. Most start-ups fail, so you should be aware of the risk. That’s why starting by working in your spare time is a good idea: if it fails, you still have your regular job to fall back to. That said, it’s certainly possible to succeed and to do very well.

Can I get funding from other sources?

Of course. Just like any company, you can get funding from just about anyone willing to give you money: the 3 F (Family, Friends and Fools), governmental programs, venture capitalists, etc. There are plenty of books on entrepreneurship that can help you with this better than I ever could.

How can I protect my idea?

Copyright is your best protection, since it prevents other people from copying the expression of your idea. It doesn’t protect the idea itself, however, so somebody could clone your game concept by changing some aspects of it and there’s nothing you could do about it.

Patents may be usable in theory - I think the rules for Monopoly have been patented for example - but nobody does that. It’s a very complicated and expensive process and it’s not certain it actually works legally. Most people in the industry see very negatively the idea of patenting gameplay, so trying to patent your game might hinder you more than it might help.

Trademarks only cover brands, so they could only be used to cover the name of your game. Since the publisher is likely to change the name of your game before it goes on sale, it’s not worth registering the trademark for an unreleased game.

I personally believe that most people with game ideas worry too much about protecting them. It’s hard enough to convince somebody that a game is good enough to invest money in it, without putting legal hurdles in your way. You’re better to tell about your idea to everyone you meet than to try hide it under a veil of secrecy. People willing to invest in your game have very little to win and a lot to lose if they decide to steal your concept, so they’re unlikely to do it.

I’ve got more questions, what can I do?

Ask them in the comments below, so everyone can see the answer.

The Escapist recently published a hilarious video review of Bioshock, shining some light on the flaws of this mucho-hyped game. Would you kindly take a look at it, it’s worth it.

Bioshock is the best game I’ve played in a long time, but it’s also quite a bit over-hyped. No game is perfect and this video points out the game’s few problems. In fact, Bioshock isn’t leaps and bounds over other games, it’s just a bit better – other games have had good stories and emergent gameplay – but that bit counts for a lot.

Let’s say you want to buy a game and you have the choice between game A and game B. According to internet buzz, game A is pretty good, but game B is a bit better. Which game will you buy? Barring any other factor, you’re going to buy game B – why buy the inferior alternative, even if it’s still pretty good? If you were to buy both, which game would you talk most about? Game B, of course – why recommend the inferior game?

You’re not the only one making those decisions, millions of players do. If millions of players decide to play game B instead of game A, and recommend game B over game A – even if they’re almost, but not quite, of the same level of quality – that’s a huge difference in popularity and sales number.

That’s what’s happening to Bioshock: a small increase in quality has an exponential effect on sales and buzz. Making a game 10% better does much more than increasing sales by 10%. That’s why “good enough” isn’t good enough – settling for mediocrity has a huge impact on a game’s popularity. And who wouldn’t prefer working on games everybody’s talking about?

Like a lot of people, the success of Nintendo’s Wii surprised me. I thought it was an interesting new technology, to be sure, but that the hype was overblown: the wiimote didn’t really enable fundamentally new gameplay, and so the Wii would fail to become a Revolution. I don’t think I was wrong with this assessment — beyond gimmicky mini-games, the wiimote hasn’t been used for anything that couldn’t be done with a regular controller — but I was wrong about the system’s success.

The Wii’s success isn’t due so much because of its controller, but because it’s the first console for casual gamers. Casual games are booming right now on PC, on mobile and on the DS — and now on the Wii.

I think a few lessons from casual games could apply to all games, even the most hardcore ones:

• People have no tolerance for tutorials and reading instructions. Learning the rules of a game is boring, people just want to play. As a rule of thumb, I’d say if people have to read more than 4 sentences (with accompanying pictures) before they can start playing and have fun, the tutorial is too long. Many, many games fail miserably at this (including some of mine).
• Story doesn’t really matter. After years of designers trying to make games more cinematic and with deeper stories, the hot new console sells on the back of a modernized version of Pong. There’s obviously a place for story-based games, but the need for a story isn’t nearly as universal as some would have you believe.
• Realism doesn’t really matter. Likewise, games have become better and better at simulating reality over the years — yet Wii Tennis features schematic characters without arms, the position of whom you don’t even control. There’s a place for immersive simulations, but abstract games are fine for a lot of people.
• Most games’ themes don’t resonate with adult audiences. Most casual games have very down to earth themes: sports, serving in a restaurant, etc. Aliens invading the earth and fantastic tales of wizards and dragons are great for geeks and teenagers, but don’t have much impact with mainstream audiences. Fantasy and sci-fi movies, TV shows and novels aren’t nearly as popular as ones based in reality — why would it be different for games?
• Price matters more than graphics. While I’m sure casual gamers would prefer games with good graphics than poor ones (why wouldn’t they?), price seems to have more sway. The Wii is the cheapest new console and casual PC games are much cheaper than regular ones. People who don’t put gaming as one of their priorities don’t want to spend a lot on it — makes sense.
• Don’t underestimate bowling. One of the most popular games for cellphone is a bowling title, same for the Wii. Who knew people loved bowling so much?

The thing casual games have for them is approachability, but they often sacrifice depth for it. I think the key for the future will be to create games that marry the approachability of casual games with the depth of hardcore games. I think it’s possible, but it’s difficult — it’s much easier to focus on one or the other.

Game design documents are almost universally terribly boring to read — a paradox considering they’re describing something fun. That’s because they describe every part of the game in a lot of details, just like software specs, and software specs are boring.

What we need is to describe the experience we want to create, rather than the piece of software that will create that experience. It occurred to me that the best way to do this would be to write design docs in the form of a walkthrough of the game: describing everything in the game as the player sees and feels them, introducing new gameplay elements at the same pace and order the player encounters them. A bit like movie screenplays: they tell the story and it’s for the movie-making team to determine how to make that story on paper into a movie on a screen.

That approach would make for a much more readable design doc, so members of the team would be more likely to read it (something that happens too rarely with traditional design docs). It would also be easier to get a feel of the game to see if it has the potential to be fun, and some problems with approachability and pace could be resolved before production even starts.

On the other hand, the document would be harder to refer to — if you’re looking for the behavior of one specific enemy, there wouldn’t be an easy-to-find section called “enemies” to refer to. That means more work for planning and separating all the tasks to be done. A separate reference document could be useful for this. It wouldn’t be made to be read from start to finish, but it would contain all the technical elements that are needed in a format that’s easy to refer to. Writing the design as walkthrough would also be harder for non-linear games — how could you cover Civilization entirely that way? — bu that wouldn’t be an issue for most games.

That approach would be a radical change from the established approach: as far as I know, nobody writes design docs in that way. I think the potential for higher quality of design outweighs the cons, so I’d have to try it out to see if it’s still the case in practice. Any thoughts?