Pag on Games

There’s a fascinating read on Paul Graham’s website about how to find and do work that you actually like for a living, rather than just work because you have to. You can read this very insightful essay here.

To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We’ve got it down to four words: “Do what you love.” But it’s not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated.

The very idea is foreign to what most of us learn as kids. When I was a kid, it seemed as if work and fun were opposites by definition. Life had two states: some of the time adults were making you do things, and that was called work; the rest of the time you could do what you wanted, and that was called playing. Occasionally the things adults made you do were fun, just as, occasionally, playing wasn’t—for example, if you fell and hurt yourself. But except for these few anomalous cases, work was pretty much defined as not-fun.

Somebody at work asked me today for a list of good book recommendations for game designers, so I figured I’d put the list here to help as many people as possible. All of these books have taught me important things about design or have helped my work even though they’re not directly about games development.

Creativity and Innovation

• A Whack on the Side of the Head by Roger von Oech: a classic book on how to be more creative
• The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelley: How IDEO, a leading industrial design firm, keeps innovative and creative

Project Management

• Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering by Robert L. Glass: Quick overviews of lots of interesting topics on software development — nothing really in-depth, but you’ll get a lot of information in few pages
• Peopleware by Tom DeMarco and Timethy Lister: A classic on project management. The only management book I’ve read 3 times — it’s that good.
• Patton on Leadership by Alan Axelrod: Leadership methods based on General Patton’s approach to leading his troops

Interface Design

• The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman: Essential tips on creating interfaces that are easy to use
•  Emotional Design by Donad A. Norman: Going beyond interfaces that are easy to use, how do you make people have an emotional reaction to your design?

Writing Well

• The Elements of Style by William Strunk jr. and E.B. White: A small book with a ton of tips on improving your writing.
• Creating Unforgettable Characters by Linda Seger: How to create believable and interesting characters for any kind of fiction.
• Story by Robert McKee: Learn how to be a great screenwriter

Communication

• Presenting to Win by Jerry Weissman: How to make great presentations. A must-read for anyone presenting at GDC.
• How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie: It’s a classic for a reason. It does what it says on the tin.

Marketing

• Made to Stick by Chip Heath & Dan Heath: Learn what makes ideas stick in people’s mind.
• Positioning by Al Ries and Jack Trout: Essentials of modern marketing
• The Anatomy of Buzz by Emanuel Rosen: How to create word-of-mouth marketing
• The Tipping Point by Malcom Gladwell: More on word-of-mouth marketing and the effect of social networks on the popularity and impact of things.

PC Gaming hasn’t been doing so hot the last few years, especially for traditional games sold at retail. Here are a few causes for this and some thoughts on avoiding those pitfalls.

• Piracy: That’s a huge factor. Sales of PC games have fallen faster than the number of actual players. It’s easier than ever to find pirated copies of games on P2P. I believe DRM and other rights restriction systems are pointless and only annoy legitimate users. There’s a number of better solutions:
  • Games as Service: Give the game away but sell the experience. Subscription games like World of Warcraft and the Korean model of free games with extras at a cost both avoid piracy very well.
  • Advertising-supported games: It works for TV, why not games?
  • Pay what you Play: Some “real world” games like Warhammer and Magic: the Gathering only make players pay for what they play — you don’t need all the Warhammer figures or Magic cards to play. Casual gamers pay a few dollars, hardcore players pay a lot. This model hasn’t been used much in video games, but I think it has potential if done well.
• Complexity: PCs have become a commodity. Hobbyists aren’t the only ones to buy them anymore and most “ordinary” folks can’t tell the difference between an Intel Core 2 Duo and an AMD Phenom, between a Radeon HD 2900 and a GeForce 9800. Making games that run fine on a 500$ computer or a cheap laptop is more important than ever. Games that only run on the latest generation of hardware are shooting themselves in the foot. That does mean focusing less on fancy graphics and finding another way to distinguish your game from the lot.
• Cost: Cheap PCs are more expensive than consoles — you’re not getting much of a gaming PC for the price of a PS3. This brings us back to the previous point: target lower-end PCs because that’s what a lot of people have.

So that’s for the problems. PCs do have a number of strengths over consoles for gaming:

• Openness: There are no gate keepers for PC games. You don’t have to please Nintendo, Sony or even Microsoft. That means space for edgier content, but also lower distribution costs because there are fewer middle-men.
• Unparalled Connectivity: Only the PC has full access to the internet, with no restrictions at all. There’s a lot of experimentation that can be done that wouldn’t work on console manufacturers’ limited networks.
• Unique Input Devices: The mouse and keyboard allow many things that consoles just suck at (and vice-versa). I’ve yet to see a RTS that’s easy to play on consoles for example.

I’ve been playing a lot of GTA IV recently — that’s why I missed last week’s update — and what really stands out for me is that the game doesn’t feel unfocused even though it has many different types of gameplay. A lot of games with that much stuff to do feel disjointed: one time you’re driving and another time you’re shooting, but it feels like two separate games slapped together. GTA feels very consistent throughout.

I believe this is because each of GTA gameplays is a different dimension of the same core focus. The focus is to be a gangster in New York City, and everything else flows from that. Driving, shooting and handling relationships are different parts of being a gangster, so it all feels very consistent.

Each of those dimensions of gameplay combines to make an experience that’s richer than each dimension individually. Combining driving and shooting makes the whole larger than the sum of those two parts because the intersection of those two aspects creates new gameplay: killing enemies by driving over them, shooting enemies in cars, shooting while driving, etc. Because they’re two dimensions of the same core gameplay, their effect multiplies instead of simply adding up.

A counter-example to this multiplicative effect would be Mario Party. Mario Party has a lot of different types of gameplay — dozens of mini-games are available. But each mini-game is separate from the others, so each new mini-game just adds to the total of gameplay, it doesn’t combine with anything else. Each mini-game is a separate game entirely, it’s not another dimension of the same core gameplay.

You could remove a bunch of mini-games from Mario Party with very little impact on the game. Remove driving or shooting from GTA however and you’ve changed the game entirely.

Exploring one core concept with multiple dimensions of gameplay makes for a richer experience. Each part combines with the others to create a very large amount of possibilities for players. A lot of games follow this approach: Assassin’s Creed (stealth, acrobatics and combat), Gran Turismo (racing and car tuning), Civilization (strategy, diplomacy, expansion), etc.

Focusing on a single dimension of gameplay is easier however, as it lets you focus all of your energy on one thing. Guitar Hero does one single thing but does it very well, so does Ikaruga. Casual gamers like this type of game because it’s easier to approach. Fewer dimensions reduces complexity but also the richness of the game.

The most important thing is to know what the focus of your game is. Slapping together a bunch of types of gameplay doesn’t make a game good. Each part of the game — whether it has one dimension or many — should stem from a clear core experience.

Clay Shirky has a transcript of an interesting talk he gave about the over-abundance of free time people now have because of modern technology and how it’s wasted on watching sitcoms.  This surplus of cognitive capacity is slowly being redirected toward more productive activities. Instead of being a passive audience, some people now spend time editing Wikipedia or organizing guilds in World of Warcraft rather than watching TV.

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. […]

And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we’re talking about. It’s so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let’s say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That’s about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I think that’s going to be a big deal. Don’t you?

via Slashdot

I’ve played pen & paper role-playing games quite a bit in the past. Being a game master is great training for game design: you have to create an exciting and entertaining experience for your friends on a regular basis.

One thing a game master must do is create a lot of non-player characters. The challenge is to create memorable characters on a regular basis. After creating what must be a few hundred characters, I figured a few simple tricks. These tricks are useful whenever you’re creating new characters, whether they’re for a pen & paper RPG, a video game or even a novel.

The key to a memorable character is distinctiveness. The character must stand out from others — nobody remembers the average Joe. If your character is distinctive in multiple ways, that’s even better. I try to create characters that are distinctive in 3 different aspects:

• Appearance: The character should be obviously different by simply looking at her. This is particularly important for characters that are not actually seen, only described — like in a novel. A character with a peculiar haircut might be good enough for a movie or a comic book, but it would probably be hard to describe memorably in a novel.
• Actions: The character should act in ways that are different from the norm. This can take the form of special abilities (like a superpower or a peculiar weapon the character always uses) or the way the character acts (a weird way of speaking or is she’s paranoid, for example).
• Background: The character’s past should be interesting, to somehow hook into whatever you’re creating. A character could be an orphan, or have trained with a secretive order of ninjas for example (or both, like Bruce Wayne).

Let’s take Captain Jack Sparrow as an example of a memorable character. He has a distinctive appearance, what with the thick black eye-liner, the dreadlocks and the bandanna, he most definitely acts in a memorable way, thanks to Johnny Depp’s wonderful acting, and he has a distinctive past, having been the captain of a mutinous pirate crew turned undead.

Another good example is Darth Vader. Vader’s apperance is definitely unique, with his black outfit that doesn’t show a single inch of skin. His mastery of the force gives him unique abilities that make his actions distinctive. As for his past, it’s interesting enough that it spawned a whole trilogy of hit movies.

Of course these guidelines aren’t the most subtle thing in the world, so they’re probably not ideal for stories with very realistic characters. The broad strokes these guidelines create are very good at creating memorable larger than life characters however, and that’s a type of character that’s useful in a lot of games.

Gamasutra has an interesting opinion piece on why talented people end up making poor games, especially when it comes to licensed games:

Specifically I’ve been thinking recently about why good people make bad games. It’s amazing to me that I can go and speak with someone working on a movie licensed title, and they’ll be full of legitimate enthusiasm, real ideas, and almost convince me - OK, this time they’re going to get it right.

Then the game comes out, releasing day and date with the movie, with under a year of development time, and totally flops critically.

What’s depressing about this scenario is that nobody wonders why. Everybody on the team already knows! The schedule was too short, the demands from the licensor were unreasonable, and the project wasn’t well managed.

Some of the comments at the bottom of the page are very insightful:

The environment is not conducive to risk-taking:
A lot of developers feel that because the industry (especially the console industry) is such a stratified and approvals-ridden space that there is not much room for creativity. The average would-be game developer these days has to put a lot of muscle and reputation behind an idea to get it approved the 47 required times by different parties and still have it see the light of day.

Personally, I believe it’s often because quality is at the bottom of the list of priorities for the developer, the publisher and the licensor. Releasing on time is more important than making a good game because missing, say, the release of the licensed movie would cost a lot of sales. Not going over the budget is a higher priority because the name of the license is seen as influencing sales more than reviews. Putting a good bullet-point on the back of the box is a higher priority because more people read the back of the box than read reviews. I’ve heard of all of this from many people working at many companies. It’s hard to make a quality game when the people with the most power over the project see quality as a “nice to have”.

Still, there are ways to make quality licensed games. The best approach I’ve found is to find a fun and simple core gameplay and focus on it, removing everything that’s not essential to the game. Making a simpler, smaller game results in a better title at the end because you had the time to do it properly. You’re better with a few good features than a lot of half-finished features.

Tutorials suck. Nobody likes learning the rules of a game before playing it. That’s one of the reasons casual games are so popular: shallow learning curve. Yet players must learn how to play your game.

The best approach I’ve seen is the way Bioshock does it (Half-Life 2 is similar and really good too). The game starts slowly, setting ambiance without too much action. You just move around, exploring the world of the game. The important thing is that it makes you do the basic actions in the game — moving, looking around, activating stuff, using a weapon, etc. — in a slower paced, safe environment while you’re exploring. It only prompts help if it detects that you’re stuck.

What’s brilliant is that it makes you discover the rules of the game by yourself rather than explain them to you. This is both more fun and more memorable than being taught everything in a rigid way. You’re more likely to remember something you figured out by yourself than something you’re told.

Removing visible tutorials applies to more game types than just first-person shooters. You just need to open the game with a safe environment where players can experiment with the game. You put a few basic puzzles requiring the use of the game’s basic skills and you’re set. The key is to trust players will figure out the way to play the game themselves — and if your interface is intuitive enough, they will. If they don’t, then you can give gentle tips that help them along without interrupting their experience.

So it’s been about 3 months since I’ve started updating 5 times a week. While it was a fun challenge and I learned a lot doing it, it has also taken quite a lot of time to write all of this. Doing the daily updates didn’t bring the boost in visits I hoped it would, but it has taken a toll on my personal life.

So I’ll be slowing down a bit, updating less often. I plan on updating the site every Monday still, so I’m not abandoning the  site at all. This will also likely improve the quality of my posts, since I won’t have to find something worth writing about each day.

See ya next Monday!

Have you ever wondered why a popular game like the original Phoenix Wright was so hard to find in stores? MTV has an interesting article on the business behind how many copies of each game get made.

“The sales life cycle of a product is shrinking,” said Svensson. If a game undersells its first month at retail, it’s finished at retail. Often, though, it’s quicker: if a game underperforms its first week, it is more than likely “dead on arrival.”