Pag on Games

I liked Mass Effect, but one thing that annoyed me were the over-balanced items you found. You’d find a level 7 upgrade for your weapon that would increase damage by a whooping 2% over the level 6 upgrade. I guess once in a while an enemy would require one less bullet to kill. Big deal.

I think that came from MMORPGs, which need to be very finely tuned to avoid unbalanced gameplay that would affect millions of simultaneous players. That might be fine for multiplayer games, but for single player games you need everything to feel different rather than just be technically different mathematically.

If, in a game, you offered two weapons to players with no mathematical description of their stats, one a huge sword that does awesome fire effects and the other a small sword with no special effects but which deals 10% more damage, I bet the vast majority of players would take the big flaming sword. The small sword may technically be superior, but the big sword feels superior and that’s what matters most when making the choice.

Good feedback is very, very important in making a good game. If all you give players are incremental improvements that aren’t readily perceivable, they won’t feel like they’re getting better stuff even if they are. Putting enough difference between upgrades — both mechanically and in the feel of the upgrade — makes for much better rewards.

A lot of games are boring and bland, with nothing really cool or original in them. With all the money behind modern games, you’d think games lacking that little extra something that makes a game stand out would be canceled so the budget can be better spent.  Why isn’t it the case?

Here’s a short list of the people who can veto any idea in a typical licensed game:

1. The designer of the game
2. The studio’s producer of the game
3. The owner of the studio making it
4. The producer responsible for the game at the publisher
5. The higher management of the publisher
6. The producer responsible for the game at the licensor
7. The higher management of the licensor

Optimistically, that’s 7 people who can say “No” to anything going in the game — realistically it’s probably more than that.

By definition, creative ideas are unproven. How likely do you think it is for an unproven idea to survive through 7 levels of approval? Most games are bland because only safe, boring, proven idea can get through this process. Truly creative stuff must usually short-circuit this process to get made.

There’s an interesting article on the Magic: the Gathering website by Mark Rosewater, lead designer of the game. Talking about the upcoming set of cards, he discusses the importance of balancing game mechanics that make the game feel cool (form) and mechanics that make the game play well (function):

 If all the mechanics sit in the middle straddling function and form, the set will suffer. It will neither play as tight nor feel as evocative as it needs to. Both extremes play an important role in design and thus each needs to have cards at its beck and call. This means that designers have to understand the role that each mechanic fills.

You can read the whole thing here.

Sometimes I feel like I’ve stumbled into an alternate universe. When I was a teenager, admitting to liking computers was social suicide, now fancy computers are created specifically for fashion-conscious women. Going on a BBS was the height of nerdity, now all the cool kids use Facebook. Computers were big beige boxes that cost the price of a used car, now the tiny EEE PC costs a few hundreds.

PCs have become a cheap commodity. They’re not really exciting anymore, you buy one to browse the web and hope you won’t have to buy another one for as long as possible. Price is what matters for most  people, not performance.

Buying a 500$ video card doesn’t make much sense when the rest of the computer costs less than that. The enthusiasts who are willing to get an expensive PC to put that card in are also technologically knowledgeable enough to pirate games — and chances are they will if they want to save the money to buy their next PC.

As PCs become an inexpensive commodity, it makes less and less sense to target the most powerful computers on the market. Indeed, casual games are booming while hardcore games have a hard time becoming hits.

PCs will still be good platforms to put games on, but I expect they’ll get fewer high-performance games in the future. The most successful PC games will make creative use of the PC’s unparalleled network access and openness.

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.

Most designers think of “Marketing” as a dirty word. They think a game’s success is just a matter of how much money is spent on marketing, as if marketing didn’t require skill, just cash. I think marketing is a very powerful tool for designers to understand and use. And marketing requires a lot of skill, not just cash — some games haven’t made enough money to just cover their advertising budget.

Do you want to create popular games? Marketing is, essentially, the art of making things popular. Quality isn’t enough — it sure wasn’t enough for Psychonauts and Beyond Good and Evil. Studying marketing will help you understand why some good games fail on the market while some bad games succeed. That way you have more chances of making good games that sell.

A large part of marketing is communicating ideas in a compelling way. This is an essential skill for game designers: whenever you try to convince someone that your ideas are good (something designers do on a daily basis), you’re basically marketing your ideas, whether you realize it or not. Might as well learn how to do it properly.

So, why do I care so much about marketing? Because it lets me make games that are more popular and it helps me communicate ideas more effectively. More surprisingly, some of the biggest insights I’ve had on game design came from reading about marketing — what makes a game cool isn’t that different from what makes anything else cool.

You may have noticed that the site has been down for a large part of the weekend and it’s not exactly working at full speed as I’m writing this. It seems my host has had major power problems, frying a large number of their servers. I had a post scheduled for today, which was eventually posted as scheduled, but the site is working very slowly at the moment so it would be a pain to make a regular update. Hopefully things will return to normal very soon — apologies for the problems.