Mark Kollasch's Incomparable Game-Making Weblog

Philosophical Game Design

2008-05-17T01:09:00.000-07:00

An advisory: this is a really pretentious one.

Philosophy is one of the most applicable fields. It might not have much practical use, but as the history of ways of thinking it represents something relevant to any intellectual endeavor. Let's talk about how one might use philosophy to make a game.

You might select a specific idea from the corpus of philosophy, and construct a new mechanic (or variation on an existing mechanic) which summarizes the concept. It's been done already, too. Most obviously, any combat-heavy RPG is a decent example of a Hegelian dialectic: the player faces a series of roughly symmetrical challenges between his avatar and another one; after each one, the avatar changes in a manner based on the conflict, and proceeds to the next. Turn it around backwards and you've got Warning Forever; make it multiplayer and you've got a single-elimination tournament. If you explicitly set out to make a game with that philosophy, however, you'll come up with something that pays very close attention to what happens in the challenge, or even combine some attributes of the vanquished avatar into the victorious, rather than genericizing everything into EXP and learning.

To make a game in favor of determinism, construct a low-chaos system in which all player actions lead to the same conclusion; to make a game opposed to it, do the opposite. Pascal's Wager, where the option on which the player bets determines the reward for betting correctly, can easily be modified to represent a gambling game. Peter Molyneux and the good folks at Bioware have already caught onto this idea by attempting to find models of ethics that can function in a game, to varying degrees of success.

Narrative-driven games can employ the techniques that authors have been employing for centuries to advocate any argument under the sun. It's intuitive, though the bolder the idea, the more skill needed from the writer (so the more jack-of-all-tradey among us might want to tread carefully).

I mentioned earlier that games have themes. A philosophically-designed game is one that is intended from the beginning to contain a specific and lofty theme. Since before Socrates, philosophers have constructed hypothetical, highly improbable settings which simplify a new, complex idea. Since these settings rely on a specific set of rules, it's fairly straightforward to use games as a continuation of the practice, with the added option that the audience may learn the idea by exploring it, rather than having it explained to them.

Classical Computer Science

2008-05-12T20:32:00.000-07:00

It occurred to me, of late, that there is some considerable overlap between concepts in modern computer science and classical philosophy, in particular the ontological models of ancient Greek philosophers. There is a fairly obvious relationship between class inheritance and Aristotelian taxonomy. The abstract data type is nothing if not a practical example of Plato's concept of ideals (and, although this is more likely to be a coincidence, Plato regarded ideals as the ultimate truth, while in Lisp-derived languages and others, all types inherit from T or True).

And never you mind that any programming language is a formalized system of symbolic logic built upon a set of axioms. You already know that Zeno and Euclid invented those. Mathematical similarities don't count; there's nothing particularly insightful in pointing out that Pythagoras suggested everything could be represented numerically. There are plenty of other pertinent examples. Thales' explanation of change and substance (the fundamental substance of a thing remains the same although its attributes change) is preserved in mutable objects; Democritus' description of the atom is closely related to the discrete mathematics upon which all computer science relies; when Empodocles proposed the four classical elements, he was in fact suggesting the first-order primitives of the universe.

Naïve, low-detail models of the physical world are another common element in classical writing, with pre-Galilean science being what it was. The Greeks maintained such viewpoints because they made intuitive sense and were not subjected to particular scrutiny; modern software engineers do so by stripping away all the data not important to their current undertaking, for purposes of specialization and optimization. Even so, there is noteworthy similarity between classical physics and computing idioms. Of particularly striking interest is classical optics: the notion that vision and light is based on plain rays, rather than the modern model of photons and whatnot. A supposed debate among early students of optics was whether vision functioned by casting rays from the eyes to the objects being seen, or light sources casting rays which entered the eyes. Need I even point out the parallel to different ray tracing methods? In that light (ha!), John Carmack's fascinating work of late rather portrays him as a modern-day... I'm not entirely certain there is a suitable historic analogy for what he's doing right now, but it's nevertheless exciting.

Presumably, all of this mimicry of classical philosophy emerged unintentionally. People perhaps followed a similar thought process to the ancient sages, or, having been exposed at some point to the logical structure of their teachings, repeated them unawares. What might happen if we were to deliberately combine structured classical philosophy and computer science? What about other, later types of philosophy that build upon them? There are millennia of profound thought in human history, attempting to identify the true nature of the world. Since software simulation can present a model of the world which does not need to be accurate, so long as it is mathematically consistent, adopting their efforts to our craft may well introduce equally profound new models with distinct advantages, so that a little knowledge of history may elevate our craft beyond even what our own luminaries and sages have done.

Open for business

2008-05-12T18:15:00.000-07:00

Well, I had some issues with my host. Didn't have time to resolve it, since I was all of a sudden quite busy with school. It shouldn't happen again, though.

I'm going to be using this place to showcase some of what I've been working on, just as soon as I bring it to a presentable state.

We now return to your regularly scheduled programming.

Music to my ears

2008-03-10T17:45:00.000-07:00

Chris Dahlen has made a startlingly good point about games, video games especially, being like music. In a particularly apt comparison, he mentions the importance of technical expertise, subtle emotional effects, and the thrill of listening or playing that games and music have in common, not to mention the spectacular successes that result when the two media are combined. It is a remarkable insight and I hope everybody who's even a little bit important in games takes it to heart. But I disagree with his conclusion about the synergy between games and story. He's right that a game need not have a story any more than a song does, and to expect one is silly. But I think it is worth mentioning that the conjunction of music and storytelling is a prehistoric practice.

The clearest demonstration of this is in the form of the ballad: a narrative poem set to music. A simple, iconic story that resonates with some fundamental component of human nature can remain in the public consciousness for decades, or longer if special effort is taken to preserve it. A well-developed and catchy melody, exemplifying an emotion, has a similar lifespan. The only ones that last longer are those that are really good. If the two are combined, however, they'll last a lot longer, with less effort, even if neither is as masterful. Music being inherently emotional, the tune helps to reinforce the emotional theme of the story. Stories being inherently memorable, the narrative helps to form a mnemonic for the melody. The final effect is that by using these two media in a complementary fashion, the threshold of artistic immortality is lowered considerably.

Music and story have been combined to great effect in other ways. The one that is most applicable to the field of video games in particular is the opera. Opera has been regarded for some time as the single art form which most thoroughly showcases the extremes of human emotion. Their stories and music alike are awash with pathos, and typically focus on love so deep that any real person would be lucky (or unlucky!) to experience, concluding with perfect happiness or ultimate despair. Operatic narratives are rarely more than a straightforward (if occasionally convoluted) love story, and the most memorable music is always found in the dances, overtures, and arias, when the story is not developing. But, especially to a connoisseur of the high arts, the combined effect is breathtaking.

Operas and folk ballads alike have been suppressed by various tyrants throughout the ages, because the power of music to inspire and compel in conjunction with stories is known well. Powerful ideas - perhaps not subtle ideas, but powerful ones - can be made at home in music, although it's quite true that these songs tend to be about something, whereas music and story can both exist in isolation as a testament to their creators' talent. If the combination of music and narrative possesses such potential, and music is comparable to games, then surely there is room for a powerful combination of games and narrative.

However, it's not enough to simply say that it can happen. As game creators we already believe that games can do anything. We need direction. And that direction, I believe, can be found by an examination of how, specifically, musically narrative media is complemented by its components.

Music is an inherently emotional medium. This seems to be a genetic trait shared by all humans, even if disagreements abound as to which music in particular kindles the intended emotions and which just annoys the listener with its droning, grating noise. The stories which have most benefited from attachment to music are, thus, the very highly emotional ones: epics, tragedies, classical comedies, inspiring tales of heroism and love and great deeds, stories that awaken us to the breadth of the human heart, cause us to empathize with the protagonists, and otherwise inspire strong feeling.

A game, on the other hand, is not an inherently emotional medium. Our primal connection with games is not as an emotional device, and emotional exuberance of any sort than intense concentration or Zen-like disconnection tend to be detrimental to our connection with the game or our performance therein. A number of conclusions might be drawn from this: it is, perhaps, an intellectual medium (in that a game engages the intellect), or a systemic medium (in that a game is a representation of a system), or an educational medium (in that a game teaches us something beyond its own scope).

Not only the stories told by games, but also the way in which they are told, need to be told with consideration to the fundamental nature of the medium of games. Thus far, video games have indeed remained closest to film, which, as a descendant of the combination of theater and opera, tends to be either emotional or philosophical in its narrative, and this sort of narrative may not be appropriate for games. I do not think that further meditation on my part will be of much use to answering this question; instead, we should look to games which have attempted different types of story, as well as make more games with that particular intention, and examine which are effective.

The 2010 Device

2008-02-24T19:55:00.000-07:00

The big buzzword at GDC was "democratization." Or "democratisation" if you speak the Queen's English. Although a buzzword, this is a fairly big idea, and it seemed to me that everybody who was talking about it (even if they didn't realize they were talking about it) had a different idea about how to approach it. Microsoft, with XNA, approached it from the distribution angle: making it easier for game makers to publish. Raph Koster and Rod Humble, among others whom I regrettably was unable to see, had not merely ideas about bringing development to people like your grandma, but technology for making it happen. And it seemed like everybody had a success story about how customization abilities and social network integration boosted their games' critical and commercial reception.

The lesson to learn from this is simple: people have a voracious appetite for games. They can no longer be satisfied merely with what professionals and auteurs provide, if they could ever be satisfied in this way in the first place. In order for games to survive in the era of YouTube they need to have the variety and accessibility of YouTube; in order for games to survive in the era of Facebook they need to have the connectivity and extensibility of Facebook. And we'll need the organizational power of a Google or Amazon to sort through it all.

All right, so anybody who was at the Conference last week knows it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that out, nor to perceive the gears that are already in motion to realize that scenario. By the time the next GDC rolls around we can see how it worked out. I'm looking further into the future, to the GDC after that. The year 2010.

Incidentally, Ray Kurzweil, in his keynote address, had an interesting thing to say about the technology that we'd have to work with in 2010.

The innate advantages that we game developers (I hesitate to use the term "professional," but the ones with more claim to the title than Joe User will after he's learned the tools from The Sims Carnival) possess are these:

A more thorough understanding of the artistic nature of games
The knowledge to games for people with widely different tastes than ourselves
The ability to create and deploy larger-scale technologies which more fully make use of our target platforms and the Internet
The resources to fill our game with huge amounts of deliberately constructed content, customized for our purpose
A stronger position from which to negotiate the distribution and monetization of our handiwork

Come 2010, we will need to have learned how to make the most of these advantages. Television, here, is the medium which we should study: many television studios are adapting, and many are failing to adapt, to the rise of YouTube. The challenges and opportunities facing them will be the same as the ones facing us, except for one point: because we are creating the new paradigm of amateur game development, we have no need to view it as a threat. And we must be careful not to let it become a threat, by playing to our strengths and helping the amateurs play to theirs.

Once grandma can do it, we will find it impossible to make money by repackaging Space Invaders. Somehow I can't make myself believe that this is a bad thing.

Now let's consider the new opportunities that 2010 will bring us. Extrapolating from current trends, we can conclude that all games will include robust integration with social networking, and that virtually all communication will include the ability to make a game out of it (even if only to the extent that, as Elonka Dunin claimed in her 20-minute panel, Wikipedia editorship is a game). Everybody will be connected to the Internet by default and they will be able to find their location using GPS. Wherever a person goes they will have a Web browser or an equivalent thereto. Techniques for finding new material will use a variety of metrics based on our history, our friends, our friends' histories, popularity, tagging, reputation systems, and who-knows-what-else. Snobs like me will still be having a hard time, but this is normal.

Let's take this a little bit further. Ray Kurzweil maintains that 2010 will see the marketability of a single kind of handheld device which combines all of those features with an augmented reality display and hopefully a better input scheme than a cell phone. Maybe it will be gestural, maybe it will read brainwaves, maybe it'll be based on voice or eye movements. Such a machine, which I will call the 2010 Device because I'm terrible at naming things, raises many questions.

Many people will start off with the question, Will the 2010 Device be open to development? If cell phones are any indication - and I certainly hope that cell phones are never used as a model for anything ever again - then the answer will be No. But the Web will always be open to development, so we see that this device must have totally unfettered access to the Web.

If you're a developer - not even a game developer - then before 2010 rolls around you will probably need to ask yourself, What kind of product could I make for the 2010 Device? What cool new things can exist on a machine that makes "online" the default state of a human being?

Well, don't look at me. I'm still a student. My ideas aren't even half-baked yet. However, it's clear that this is a question which needs to be answered with great force. I think that the future of games may depend on what we do with the 2010 Device.

Let's look at the mistakes surrounding cellular phones. When these little nuisances started to gain the ability to do things more interesting than tell time and make phone calls, what did the game developers do with them? We populated them with the most strenuous things that their tiny CPUs could handle, which started off meaning Arkanoid and Tetris. And we stopped there. And people got it into their heads that cell phone owners didn't really want anything that couldn't be found in a superior form ten or twenty years ago in an arcade.

There's a number of reasons why development halted there and let that stagnant mindset take over. Perhaps the notoriously short-sighted service providers decided that once they had the same games that everybody else did, no further developments were required. Perhaps we game developers were just distracted by our beloved magnum opuses on PCs and consoles. Perhaps we simply gave the people what they wanted, and most people couldn't really imagine the possibilities.

Whatever the reason, duplicating the arcade on a cell phone did the cell phone an injustice. Here we have a handheld, ubiquitous device with a long battery life and which is optimized for satellite connectivity. The game development community, by and large, failed to make games that could take advantage of the fact that the cell phone was a communication device - in short, they failed to make games that could communicate.

People now are realizing that this is a mistake, but it's hard to overcome people's expectations of the device. People expect cell phones to give them isolated arcade games, so there's no demand for anything more, and so it's hard, from a business standpoint, to get them made. Cell phones are locked down tighter than any other consumer technology on earth, so it's impossible for independent developers to buck this trend. If these two factors also apply to the 2010 Device, we may not have another chance to make beautiful games for everybody.

Let's not sit around and wait for the decision to be made for us.

If we have completed designs, completed programs, completed servers, ready to be deployed when the first 2010 Devices start being available, then right from the very beginning we will be able to say "This is what it means to play a game now." The examples that we set will determine the boundaries which the platform's controllers - if indeed there are any, which I hope is not the case - must allow games to explore.

This means that all of the new ideas that we establish for 2009 - taking full advantage of social connectivity and the natural creativity of players - need to be in a form that can be carried over to 2010. This means that we must make sure that no capability of the future technology is put to waste. This means that everything we make needs to be in a form that people will love. It is within our power to determine whether people's most-used technology, and the device with which they connect to the Internet, will be more like a PC or more like a cell phone.

It will be our turn again soon. Let's make sure we play well.

GDC is over

2008-02-22T23:12:00.000-07:00

And what a conference it was. My first time, don't you know. I think that I have learned a lot from what I have seen there. I intend to write an overblown and pretentious manifesto about one of the patterns that I observed, regarding what we game makers - not just designers, but programmers, artists, writers, support engineers, marketers, the whole chain - can do to ensure that the future is great.

Ostensibly, "democratization" was the big theme/buzzword for the entire gathering, but I perceived another major trend: everything that is big and promising and exciting has to do with magnifying user participation. I feel like I finally, completely understand what Raph Koster was talking about two years ago.

Up, Up, and Away

2008-02-15T12:20:00.000-07:00

I'm off to GDC first thing in the morning tomorrow. Yeah, that will put me there rather early. I'm sure to be busy playing the ol' conference-going game, but I'll see if I can find time while I'm there to comment on the neat things I'm sure run into. In either case, you can expect impressions eventually (for values of "eventually" less than two weeks from the present).

Legal Games

2008-02-14T18:35:00.000-07:00

A legal game is a game in which players change the rules while the game is in progress, virtually or completely without limit, and frequently as the main act of the game. There are two major ones to speak of: Calvinball, which is typically expressed as a chaotic physical sport, and Nomic, which, over time, tends to resemble a fictional government.

Legal games are extremely difficult to analyze from a game design perspective (though this may change as the craft matures), because more than just the state is constantly changing. Or because the state and the rules are one and the same. Or because there is no state, only rules. There is only one constant in a legal game, and that same thing is the thing that makes it a game: everybody is assumed to be trying to win.

Legal games present a unique challenge for players, by calling upon them to be designers. They face the difficulty of attempting to make a rule which is fair and interesting and brings them closer to victory and will be accepted by the other players. Balancing points two and three is the most difficult part, as in many games, the challenge - the very thing that keeps them away from victory - is the most interesting part. This dichotomy is the same one that all game designers face, so a study of what strategies are effective and enjoyable in legal games constitutes a valuable study for us.

It is worth noting that games seem to touch on every field - in addition to mechanical skills and knowledge that can come from a variety of sources, there are strong links between game design and education, philosophy, the arts, psychology, mathematics, and, as demonstrated most thoroughly by this sort of game but which any game with rules exemplifies, law. This is why people with diverse backgrounds often make effective game designers.

Video Games are Special

2008-02-13T19:34:00.000-07:00

The video game is a recent invention, and as a medium it shows much potential. By combining the superior mechanical options inherent in computerized games with cinema-like multimedia effects, limited forms of artificial intelligence, and even some tactile components similar to toys, it has defined a new space for entertainment, which it has explored with a youthful, if at times cynically marketing-driven, vigor. By allowing the computer to act as a surrogate game master, a video game earns several advantages over a game not using a computer and a media interface:

Interactions between game elements may be made much more complex without requiring tedious calculation from participants, enabling the use of intuitive yet mathematically or logically rigorous mechanical components such as physics.
High- (or even low-)detail multimedia interfaces allow information to be conveyed to or withheld from the player in a greater variety of ways, often faster, subtler, and more satisfying.
Rewards not related to the victory condition may be used to more strongly reinforce certain behaviors, or to create and incentivize experiences outside of game-oriented interaction.
The narrative component of a game may use more sophisticated techniques to establish themes, which creates the possibility of subtler and more interesting narrative metaphors.
Internet connectivity, possible only through a computer, magnifies the ease with which numerous players can be gathered and organized, and the flow of information between them manipulated.

The fact that video games are far and away the most versatile method for combining tenets of games with established concepts of entertainment means that they also have far and away the most potential for entertainment of any game medium. Limitations on the convenience of computer hardware are an obstacle that nothing short of the technological singularity can overcome, meaning that certain aesthetic, athletic, and social niches are inaccessible to video games. However, the space opened up by this technology is so vast that for the foreseeable future, virtually all of the richest and most inventive developments in games will appear in that form (even in spite of their makers' collective tendency to behave at times a bit too much like Hollywood for their own good).

Strategies for Game Narratives

2008-02-12T17:40:00.000-07:00

Here are a few examples of the ways that game narratives can be constructed. They are not mutually exclusive.

Game as Narrator: The events of the game are the literal events of the story, with leeway given to accommodate the player's competence (if, for example, a part of the game must be repeated altogether, not just revisited, the previous attempt is dismissed as inaccurate). In this strategy, players' actions in the past must be acknowledged by the state of the game.
Game as Reader: The events of the narrative are set in stone, and the events of the game take place as a loose imagining of how the unspoken details may have been the same. This is similar to the Game as Storyteller strategy, except that the players' actions may be disregarded by the narrative, the state, or both if they contradict the narrative.
Player as Author: The major direction (rather than the minute details) of the narrative are determined in response to the players' actions.
Game as Author: The narrative is determined as a consequence of the interaction of game mechanics with each other, in a manner perhaps influenced but not controlled by player actions.
Player as Character: Player controls or directly influences the actions of a single entity in the narrative, and all other entities are beyond that player's control.
Player as Narrator: Player controls the context in which several narrative entities interact, but may not directly control the actions of any.

Narratives

2008-02-12T17:21:00.000-07:00

Any game with a metaphor creates a narrative, as the changing state of the game represents change over the relationship between its metaphoric components. A designer who takes this a step further, and creates a specific story which is told by playing a game, rather than merely a scenario described by it, is employing a narrative metaphor. Storytelling conventions such as plot, characterization, theme, mood, et cetera can be used to improve the entertainment value of a game and to more distinctly establish its own theme.

A game master is often useful to heighten the dramatic impact of a game's narrative, since storytelling often employs characters' limited knowledge, and the presentation of this narrative can be further enhanced by the use of a computer for multimedia effects.

There are two widely practiced ways for a narrative to be a part of a game, and they are by no means mutually exclusive. The first is by creating a different scenario for each event in the story, typically represented as a challenge, and allowing the player to progress through the story by winning each scenario sequentially. The second is by establishing more open-ended, toy-like scenarios, in which the player's actions toward winning the scenario take the form of a story "written" by the player. The first approach may be called linear, while the second may be called interactive.

The essential elements of a narratively-driven game are largely the same as those of a narrative: some acting force with certain abilities, or a character; a motivation for that character; an obstacle which limits the character's choices, or conflict; and events transpiring which alter the situation, or plot.

The most common solution for corresponding the elements of stories and games is to give each player a role, or a single character with known motivation, the fulfillment of which creates a story by interacting with the other game elements. These elements are organized into patterns which require the role to overcome them, and the amount of influence which the player possesses over the specific method used to overcome them roughly corresponds to the extent to which the game's narrative is linear or interactive.

There are, naturally, other approaches. Games have been made in which the players are less characters and more narrators, and the characters and plot are the game elements with which players interact. Since a game is fundamentally the manipulation of a system, any way that a story can be written is grounds for the structure of a game.

What Players Want

2008-02-11T12:47:00.000-07:00

Obviously, all players want to win in general terms, and, if the game is being played recreationally, most want to have a good time in the process. However, just as not all players have the same idea of a good time, not all players will agree from the beginning just what it means to win.

Each game has its own victory condition, but for a player, winning does not necessarily have anything to do with victory. It can be much more subjective. A player enters a game with a goal, however subjective and nebulous, and pursues victory as a part of obtaining that goal. Most commonly, the victory condition is there to give players the motivation to play in a way that tests a certain set of skills. For example, rock-paper-scissors is not a game intended to test your ability to fight. As a consequence, the inventor of rock-paper-scissors did not construct the rules so that punching your opponent in the face is a victory condition. Very few players, as a result, are motivated to punch their rock-paper-scissors opponents in the face, which is why this rarely occurs.

Sometimes, though, a player brings his own motivation, to the shock and misery of unsuspecting faces everywhere. It's a very difficult problem. As a game designer, you control players by defining victory and establishing interesting constraints for achieving it. What can you do about players who don't want to win?

It goes without saying that there will always be a certain portion of players who will not be motivated by victory. They have their lives, their little frustrations, and so on, and it's not your place to force them to behave. Additionally, some games can be enhanced, or even based entirely around, finding interesting ways to indulge players' unique goals. Neither of these are appropriate for you to attempt to curtail in your game. Instead, it is better to focus on what turns normal players away from the desire for victory in a normal game.

First and most obvious is boredom, the Ultimate Evil of game design. Boredom manifests itself differently for different players, but insufficient engagement and insufficient understanding of the rules are the general causes. A player who is bored just wants something to happen, even if it means losing. Incorrect motivation is just one of the many reasons why boredom is the enemy.

In team-based competitive situations, especially where players may be playing with strangers, and even more especially where players can be anonymous or play in front of an audience, players are sometimes motivated not to win but to feel powerful or heroic. They will not play strategically, instead doing specific actions that are glamorous but ineffective. Oftentimes they will also deliberately turn on teammates, either nursing a grudge or just in a random act of rudeness. The solution to this situation can be approached mechanically or metaphorically. Mechanical solutions involve penalizing behavior not conducive to the team, making it difficult for the prima donna to successfully act independently, or by providing additional metrics for success that individuals cannot earn effectively. This can be difficult, however, because if the would-be hero were intelligent enough to notice, or care, that his antics are causing himself and his team to lose, he probably wouldn't be acting in that way in the first place. The metaphorical approach heavily emphasizes team-related iconography and scenarios, essentially propaganda, to put players in a cooperative state of mind where they will be more likely to perform effectively. There is a definite art to this approach.

The more that games are played online, the more that the next type of non-winning-motivated player will become important. The griefer, a player who goes out of his way to make the game worse for other players, occasionally demonstrating commendable resourcefulness and cleverness in his methods, is a player which most game designers want to discourage from existing in their games. To the griefer, a game represents a field of opportunities for hilarious pranks. Thus, one deters a griefer with the same strategies used to deter a practical joker: either a policy of swift and harsh retribution (which can give you a reputation for strictness, which is not fun), or a social environment which views the practice as immature (which is harder to foster the more inclusive or popular your game), or a community which remains unfazed by their antics (which can lead to an out-of-control arms race as griefers try harder and harder to aggrieve other players), or a culture of well-manneredness (and as soon as anybody discovers how to reliably create one of these, please let me know).

You can't put an end to all external motivation, but as a designer, a certain degree of responsibility for the phenomenon falls to you.

Game Masters and Referees

2008-02-11T11:57:00.000-07:00

Certain games are so complex or have sufficient room for uncertainty that the players themselves cannot be relied upon to accurately and fairly enforce the rules. In such cases, a non-participant is added for this purpose. This is a referee.

The presence of a non-participant with knowledge of the game state creates an obvious new opportunity: parts of the game state which are unknown to all players, and whose very existence is unknown to all players. An entity managing unknown information and the interactions between game elements is a game master.

The difference between a game master and a referee is best understood in terms of knowledge: a game master knows things that the players don't, whereas a referee does not. Both of them enforce rules and adjudicate disagreements, both of them are considered to have authority over the state of the game which supersedes even the written rules, and both of them have a shared purpose of ensuring fairness and maintaining a structured flow of the game.

Because of the greater complexity of a game master's task, and the greater authority he carries as a result, a game master has substantial power to influence a game creatively, taking the role of an assistant game designer.

A computer is an excellent referee and can perform some of a game master's tasks very efficiently. Tasks requiring any degree of creativity or subjectivity are obviously best left to humans, however.

When designing your game, consider thoroughly how necessary independent rules verification is. For a computer game, this may not be an issue, as "independent rules verification" may also be considered "software." Certain genres of game consider it a privilege, rather than a chore, to be a game master (most notably the tabletop role-playing game, whence the term originates), whereas this is rarely true for a referee. If any part of the game state is to be acted upon by players who do not know its state, then a game master may be necessary. A highly structured game may require an unbiased third-party of either sort to ensure that the players do not trip over each others' attempts to play, and perhaps inadvertently ruin the game by revealing sensitive information to each other.

Since being a game master or referee is sometimes a chore, it may be best to hand off specific elements of this person's responsibilities to various players, for example, by christening one Monopoly player the "banker." This practice is ripe for extension into game mechanics of its own. Games based around the management of game-managing tasks already exist, and carried to their natural conclusion they become what is called a "legal game," a subject for a later post.

The relationship between all the participants of a game is a matter that a game designer must consider fully, and not all participants are players.

Mechanics Follow Metaphor?

2008-02-06T12:33:00.000-07:00

Recently I discussed the challenge of ensuring that a game's metaphor reinforces its mechanics. An easy way of ensuring that this is true is by selecting a metaphor first and modeling it mechanically. This approach may be called simulation. While selecting the metaphor first may be a useful source of inspiration, that is not simulation, strictly speaking.

Certain considerations must be taken when using a simulative approach to game design. Simulation tends to be typically computationally expensive, which is prohibitive when not using a computer. It can be difficult, at times, to present information about the state of a simulation in a manner befitting a game (that is, clear and unambiguous, except where it needs to be obscure or unknown). Certain simulations' unique behavior comes from their subtleties, and inaccurate modeling may completely invalidate them, unless you so simplify them that it becomes pointless to call them a simulation any longer.

These technical and logistical risks are great, but they are negligible next to the psychological risk. If you are making a game out of a simulation, the process you simulate must be worthwhile as a game. Simulations proper have myriad uses throughout business, education, and science - but how many of them are really entertaining? However you define fun, a game has to have it. A person wouldn't play a game if they could get the exact same kind of fun from real life. This is why a game needs to differ from a person's real life in some significant way - and why it is so dangerous to make an accurate simulation that is also worthwhile as a game.

The real value of a simulation-game, I propose, is as a provider of vicarious experiences, be they of somebody else's mundanity or of a fantastic but internally consistent setting. The player of a simulation-game seeks novelty, which is a kind of fun. The difference between a simulation-game and a purer game with an exotic setting is that the simulation-game tells the user what it's like in lots of little ways, whereas the game proper asks the player to fill in the experience with his imagination. It's a blurry continuum, but the accuracy and detail of the presentation is the axis along which it is measured.

Matching Metaphor and Mechanics

2008-02-04T09:25:00.000-07:00

As I discussed previously, the metaphor and mechanics of a game combine in various parts to produce a theme. The point of metaphor, you will recall, is to relate the mechanics to players in a more familiar manner. What happens to the theme of a game, then, when the metaphor and the mechanics are contradictory? At the minimum, it would be misleading - one might imagine a game about pirates in which sharing is a better strategy than plundering - whereas at worst it makes the game difficult to learn, because there are no shortcuts or mnemonics for remembering the rules. Soren Johnson recently remarked on a board game series which suffers from this problem.

It is a fairly simple thing to find congruence between metaphor and mechanics in a broad sense - simply find a real-world scenario that works according to rules similar to those which govern the game, or, if no such scenario exists, or it is unusable for any reason, invent one (which goes a long way to explain the proliferation of science fiction and fantasy in games, in comparison to other media). However, there may still be problems. Even a slight discrepancy between metaphor and mechanics can be jarring, at times - but, at other times, for different players, the discrepancy can be written off as a necessary concession to the mechanics. If you include a scenario which functions exactly like the game, then you more than likely have something so far removed from reality that it might as well be a decontextualized description of the mechanics.

Finding a scenario to relate your rules to the player is a difficult balance. In some situations, the scenario will be too much of a stretch. In others, the mechanics will too closely follow from the scenario, including the boring or tedious parts from which people play games to escape. Your scenario may be so outlandish that it fails to capture players' imaginations, or it may be so mundane that it does not excite them. But before all of this, the most important thing is making sure that metaphor and mechanics match.

Rock-Paper-Scissors: an Analysis

2008-01-24T10:08:00.000-07:00

It's the simplest game in the world, or at least the simplest competition. It goes by many names across the world. I will analyze it according to the concepts that I have presented earlier.

Number of players: two, competitively.

Symmetry: perfectly symmetrical, balanced.

Timescale: simultaneous.

Information: imperfect, inductive.

Mechanics: two players choose from one of three throws, and simultaneously reveal them with an unambiguous gesture. Each gesture draws against itself, defeats one, and is defeated by the other. Each throw results either in a draw, or in a win for one player and a loss for the other.

Metaphor: varies by culture, local flavor, or player eccentricity, but is commonly explained: rock blunts scissors; scissors cut paper; paper covers rock.

Theme: a full thematic interpretation of this game is beyond the scope of this article. It may be summarized as "Nothing is appropriate for every situation" or "All things have strengths and weaknesses," though more philosophical players may examine it in far greater depth.

Rock-paper-scissors is a very pure example of a certain game archetype, which is why "cyclical" balance of the type that it displays is often called "rock-paper-scissors balance" when employed in other games.

Now, consider this: a game as simple and basic as rock-paper-scissors has all these concepts associated with it. Since RPS represents the bare minimum necessary to be a competitive game, an analysis of this sort (though I wouldn't dare claim that my criteria are definitive, complete, or even any good) represents the bare minimum that a designer needs to understand about his game. Understanding your game's relation to rock-paper-scissors is like an engineer understanding a bicycle's relation to the lever.

Modes of Play

2008-01-16T15:30:00.000-07:00

A single game can usually only be played in a handful of ways, but it has many to choose from. Here I intend to enumerate some of the more common considerations.

Number of players: this is not merely a count of the number of people involved. The organization of them can have great impact on the act of play.

Solitaire: a single player pursues a goal.
Competitive: several players autonomously pursue goals mutually exclusive with those of other players.
Cooperative: several players coordinate to pursue a shared goal.
Team: two or more groups of several players cooperate with each other in competition with the other groups.
Diplomatic: players or groups pursue goals which may be shared or mutually exclusive, and must choose individually whether to cooperate or compete.
Massive: large numbers of players apply one of the above, and events in several concurrent games are capable of affecting each other indirectly.

Symmetry: the options available to a player from the beginning have a considerable effect on the dynamics of the game. Symmetry is a matter of degree, not of kind.

Symmetrical: all participants begin under identical or virtually identical conditions.
Balanced: participants begin with starting conditions which are considered equally likely to win.
Asymmetric: participants begin with unlike conditions.
Handicapped: participants' starting conditions are altered to compensate for skill differences between them.

Timescale: the limitations placed upon when the players may influence the game state. These are largely subjective, and others have been experimented with, but principally it is a question of the relationship between the player's decision to act and that act affecting the game, to say nothing of the possibility of other players, or the game, responding to the intention rather than the act.

Real-time: players influence the game state at any time the rules do not forbid it.
Turn-limited: only one player may influence the game at a given time.
Asynchronous: players announce their intentions to influence the game at various times, but they are applied simultaneously.
Simultaneous: players affect the game at the same time.

Information: what players know or are capable of knowing about each other and about the state of the game.

Perfect: players are aware of the entire game state at all times.
Imperfect: players are aware of only certain parts of the game state, but they know of what they are not aware.
Paranoid: players are aware that the knowledge of the game state given to them is inaccurate, but they do not know in what way.
Knowable: players are not aware of the entire game state, but they are capable of discovering any given part.
Unknowable: players are not aware of the entire game state, and parts of it are totally beyond their ability to know.
Deductive: players can logically conclude the nature of parts of the game state which the game has not explicitly told them.
Inductive: players must predict unknown parts of the game state without logical certainty.

Metaphor, Mechanics, and Theme

2008-01-14T09:02:00.000-07:00

There are many ways to divide a game, and one of them is into a mechanical component, a metaphorical component, and a thematic component. Some games' metaphorical components are basically transparent, and so tenuous that they are essentially to be ignored, but all games have them.

The mechanical component of a game are just the rules, stripped of any context and reduced to their mathematical roots. In the game of chess, the mechanics are the starting layout of the pieces, their respective movement and capture ability, the special cases regarding the possibility of a certain piece's capture, and the way that the players take turns.

It is difficult to even describe chess without using metaphor, as "move" and "capture" are both terms best explained by the metaphor. This is because a game's metaphorical component is the part that relates the rules of the game to the player in terms of concepts they already understand. The opposing sides of a chess game are depicted as warring armies or nations, with each piece given a rank and an appearance roughly relating to its power. This is especially apparent in the pawn and the king: "pawn" denotes expendability and straightforwardness, whereas the word "king" denotes importance, suggesting its role as the ultimate goal of the game. "Capture" is a term drawn from the assertion that the opposite sides are at war, and the limitations on the pieces' movement throughout the board is best understood by thinking of them as men that cannot walk through each other (except the knight - which can "jump" over them - another metaphor).

A game without mechanics would be a daydream, or the sort of things that children play when they aren't playing anything in particular - and even then the players are not free of such things as the basic laws of physics, or their inviolate precepts about the universe. A game without metaphor would be inconceivable, as humans use metaphor to comprehend everything, but my guess is that the closest that exists is a card game, since the original symbolism of the fifty-two card deck has mostly passed from us, or a modern sport.

That leaves the thematic component. A game's theme might best be described as the assertions the game makes about the world. Like the same term applied to literature, it can be nebulous at times, and is most apparent when the metaphor is very strong. Since games are used for learning, a common theme of a game is that strategies successful in the game will also be successful in life - at least in situations that resemble the game's metaphor. In an abstract game such as go, the player is invited to substitute his own metaphor, in a rather distinctively eastern manner.

What is the theme of chess? Since it's unlikely that the player will ever be waging a totally symmetrical war in which both opponents have perfect knowledge of the battle, its metaphor is obviously not the source of its theme. Rather, its themes relate to the strategic choices a chess player may make: an opponent can be manipulated with threats and traps; an advantage is worth at least as much a resource; you must anticipate the results of your actions. Not all games are so richly conceived, but any ancient children's game is certain to contain layers of practical lessons; such games have been used since prehistory to teach real lessons for physical and social survival. The thematic component of a game is, in fact, what allows games to be used to teach.

The modern video game tends to contain a rather generic or all-purpose set of mechanics for presenting either a (frequently cinematic) story, or a series of puzzles and challenges. In the former case, the metaphor is the storyline and the theme are its narrative themes; in the latter, the metaphor is the explanation provided for the functions of all the components (avatar included), and the theme is found in the problem-solving strategies that are most successful (which most likely have to do with heuristics or lateral thinking).

The capacity of a game to contain a theme is what elevates it, in my mind, to the status of art.

Why you are here

2008-01-01T16:51:00.000-07:00

My name is Mark Kollasch and I think about games. A lot. Video games are prominent in this, because they're flashy and exciting and that's where the money is, but there are many other kinds of game that I haven't forgotten about. Board games. Social games. Sports. Gambling in all its forms. Little xkcd-esque games that you play in your mind because you can't help yourself. I think about games because I play them, and I play games so that I can think about them afterward.

Lots of people seem to be thinking about games as of late. Some of them are establishing a working vocabulary so that we people who think about games can tell each other about it. Some of them are comparing notes and helping their fellow professionals to improve. Some are just looking for ways to pass the time, whereas with others, there's simply no telling how much they'll accomplish in the end.

It is my intention, through the use of this blog, to join this emerging sphere of discourse. In the future (or, to those of you browsing the archives, the present) you should expect to see my observations, ranging from trivial to comprehensive, on the design of specific games or games in general; my comments on the process of developing and programming video games; and, on occasion, my impressions of certain games from the perspective of a player.

Like so many other things, I will think of writing in this place as an in-development game in its own right. As a student, I expect that the rules will become clearer as I become more familiar with it. However, at least one thing is certain: if you are reading this now, that means I am winning.