Achievements: mechanics or aesthetics?
Trying to help kick off discussion on this thread: Game Design Round Table 2. Most of this is old hat if you’ve read my thoughts on achievements before.
is this offensive or empowering? (edit) Tom Cross calls it: offensive
I get in a lot of arguments about achievements, because I like them and I work with a lot of idealists/purists. From a design perspective, achievement structures are typically intangible, superlative, and exploitative—that is, they create game goals not based on good design or good play per se. They also don’t fit neatly in any work ethic or modus—for instance, where would one cram them into the MDA method? Are they really a mechanic, or are they simply an aesthetic after-effect? The distinction seems to be in whether they affect gameplay for a majority of players (or at all). I would argue that this is what lends them design legitimacy, as well as opening them up to be a double-edged sword in the designer’s toolbox.
Let’s start with achievements that simply note player progress through explicit in-game goals. Achievements that mark one’s progress through a game are helpful both for developing gamer cred and for general stats-tracking. It’s a good thing to have a uniform system in place by which to tell how many of your players have completed a certain percentage of your game, right? As a researcher and blogger, I find it very helpful to follow the Gamertags of my colleagues: if they write about a game, and I don’t think their argument is solid, then the first thing I check is whether they’ve actually beaten it (this is by no means an deal-closer, but it helps understand how much of the game their argument is based upon).
That said, can we really claim that an achievement marking level progression or percentage of hidden widgets collected (following Petrie’s example, which I totally agree with) is a design choice? Progression is already a game goal in itself (for most games), and collectibles usually already carry their own in-game reward (if they don’t, shame on the developer—you’ve just artificially extended your game and not thanked your player for allowing you to get away with it). These are cases where the achievements are entirely an aesthetic effect. They may motivate more players to collect or complete, but your game should already be good enough to encourage that behavior in the first place. A game like Oblivion is rare in that every single achievement in the game marks advancement in a faction or the main quest (it was a launch title, I believe, so no surprise); I didn’t pay attention to these things popping onto my screen while I was playing the game, because it was good enough to encourage play without them.
Moving onto functionally superior achievements now, my two favorite 360 games (achievement-wise) are Mass Effect and The Orange Box. Mass Effect did something really novel early on in the console’s life: it provided in-game stats bonuses based on certain achievements, and these bonuses worked on a meta-level that persisted over multiple playthroughs (and in the case of some, such as the experience boost for reaching level 50, building on each other). These achievements vary from marking game progress and completion, tallying kills with specific weapons and against specific types of enemies, rewarding unique in-game actions such as making love or saving a teammate’s life, and for skill-based play such as beating the game on harder difficulties or playing tactically (measured in the damage ratio between your shields and your health). Some of these are not explicit game goals: for instance, an Adept (magic user) can only effectively use a pistol at first; however, after playing as a Soldier and getting a number of kills with a shotgun, an achievement unlocks that allows you to roll an Adept with the ability to effectively use a shotgun. I was more impressed with this achievement system than I was with the rest of the game’s design, to be honest.
The Orange Box is wonderful for numerous reasons (as you all know). Its achievement system isn’t as mechanically refined as Mass Effect‘s; however, it shines in encouraging multiple play styles that the player might not think of themselves. One asks the player to complete Ravenholm using only the gravity gun, which the level has clearly been designed for. The level designers clearly weren’t allowed to take all other weapons away from the player, but they literally littered the ground and walls with sawblades and other nasties to throw at headcrab zombies. It’s not something I would’ve thought to do without encouragement from the achievement system, and it was really thrilling/enlightening to play through the space in that way. There was another one that rewarded you for carrying a garden gnome all the way through Episode 2 (I believe), which was a huge bloody pain but immensely rewarding at the end—the experience could be likened to trying to carry a baby through a battlefield… in a car without a second seat. There are other examples—little touches, like killing certain enemies by feeding them exploding barrels or hitting cops with a crane—but these are the most prominent in my mind.
Finally, as to Trent’s initial and most pressing question: even good achievement structures can be double-edged swords. My third favorite 360 game, achievement-wise, is Halo 3. I loved unlocking armor pieces to customize my avatar with (although I wish they had more-than-aesthetic affects on gameplay)—I was the only person I knew with the Security gear for a really long time, huge nerd cred. As he shares in his anecdote, though, the multiplayer achievements encourage farming and cheating. Bungie has gone through phases where they crack down on this behavior, but in the early days of the game or after a new expansion it’s hard to find a match where half the players aren’t trying to boost in some way. I’ve never played a public Grifball match where one of the eight players didn’t start asking if they could farm for a Killionaire and end up team-killing out of anger. Following Petrie’s comments on Mega Man 9, I prefer in-game MP challenge systems such as CoD4‘s; these allow designers to craft elaborate achievement structures without giving players the incentive to boost just to show off their global Gamerscore to others. I think multiplayer global achievements are possible, but they need to be designed around aspects of play that can’t be easily exploited (win x# matches with x class or weapon, for instance, might work).
I’ll share one last anecdote about the communities that have built up around achievements. There are websites like Achieve 360 and 360 Achievements that basically encourage sharing of game knowledge and cooperative exploration of new games. There’s a downside to this: many people are just there to learn how to cheat, boost, or get an achievement in the easiest way possible. But the work ethic that has arisen out of these communities can approach the amazing—I’ve seen achievement guides with video and photograph accompaniment that rival those produced by companies such as Brady Games. Completionists are an interesting population to study, because they’re kind of like non-professional beta testers—taken in sum, they know everything there is to know about most games (after a few weeks of release).
Again, this is a double-edged sword. When I started becoming interested in achievements, I would check guides just to make sure there weren’t any that I could miss during a particularly long playthrough. This led me to spoil a lot of games for myself, and eventually I had to stop caring about them. As somebody particularly prone to grind addiction, coin-drop, whatever, achievement structures always have the potential to be exploitative, which is why I’m really excited that Trent is kicking off a discussion of how to design them well. Thanks for reading.
Bar Games
My girlfriend, Sarah, beat me at pool. This is a picture of her showing off what I call her “Zelda ear”:
We were sitting outside at a bar in Athens, called the Max Canada, and it started raining. I don’t like sitting inside bars. Usually, either it’s too loud because of people shouting at each other or too loud because the bartender is blaring their favorite awful music. The back of the Max Canada, where the games are, is relatively quiet. Back here your options are: the Softcore Porn Match game, Ms. Pac-Man and Galaga (a dollar per play), Frogger and Tapper (25 cents), CarnEvil (25 cents per life), Guns ‘n’ Roses pinball, darts, and pool. I wanted to play Ms. Pac-Man, but I wasn’t going to shell out a dollar for it.
I’m not good at pool. Either I hit the cue ball too hard or I whiff it trying to be subtle. When I try to figure out the geometry of a complex bank shot, I end up missing by a mile. Sarah isn’t good at pool either. I generally had better aim then she did, but I scratched almost every time I got a pocket. She ended up beating me with one ball left on the table, with a beautiful 45-degree trick shot that I didn’t think she’d be able to pull off. After she sank the eight ball, I said: “That’s the first and last time you’ll ever beat me at a game.” I’m a sore loser.
Relishing her victory, Sarah commanded me to tell everybody on Twitter that she beat me. Sarah detests blogging. She has a two-year old Twitter account with 10 updates on it, a Tumblr she only uses for school projects, and absolutely no patience for my stories about arguing with L.B. Jeffries or the eviscerating women of the Iris Network. I told her I’d one-up her demand, dedicating an entire blog post to her. The inspiration for this was Krystian Majewski’s post on what he called “Girlfriend Games.” I don’t quite know if this is the wording I want to use for my post, because I don’t really see Sarah so much as “my girlfriend, who sometimes plays games” but rather “someone who I’m in love with, who is interested in games in theory but hates them in practice.” This post isn’t just about the games I’ve played with her, but also a short discussion of her experience taking a game design class this past semester (which, despite my goading, she refuses to write about).
My videogame addiction has always been a major obstacle to my relationships with both friends and girlfriends. In the case of friends, I can usually surround myself with a healthy mix of gamers and non-gamers; however, I’ve never dated a gamer before. Past girlfriends have treated my love of games with an undue level of acid. Compare these two statements:
Ivy: “I would never stay with you for a long time if you kept smoking.”
Caroline: “I’ll dump you if you start playing World of Warcraft.”
Of course, these were two very different women talking about two very different bad habits of mine. But their treatments of the two roughly equate—both smoking, which might eventually kill me, and gaming, which I would eventually go on to study for a living, were deal-breakers. In both cases I treated the ultimata as challenges. I kept smoking while dating Ivy, washing myself and rinsing with Listerine constantly to hide the smell from her. And I started playing World of Warcraft toward the end of my relationship with Caroline, waiting until she fell asleep each night to sneak out of bed and spend six hours in Azeroth (apparently this a fairly common phenomenon). A number of similar experiences eventually led me to the conclusion, early in the summer of last year, that I needed to date a gamer if I wanted to be happy.
It was a bad summer. Female gamers are uncommon even on the Internet, let alone in a liberal arts university town such as Athens, Georgia (this is the South, mind you). Even once you find a female who shares your passion for gaming, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll be compatible in any other way (when you’re an ultra-leftist, atheist-determinist Jew with degrees in philosophy and film studies). Finally, there’s the fact that most eligible gamer girls already have boyfriends who are a lot cooler than I. My ridiculous determination to date a gamer led me through two horribly unsuccessful courtships.
I tried writing about these for a few days, but couldn’t come up with anything that didn’t sound completely stupid or offensive. If you want to talk about these hilarious misadventures with me, you’ll have to come to Atlanta, get me drunk, and play videogames with me. One was a girl who could play the main theme of Bubble Bobble on a Casio… from memory. The other girl manipulates boys on World of Warcraft by sex chatting four of them simultaneously (on different channels) during raids… I’m still really good friends with the Casio-toter.
The circumstances leading up to my dating Sarah are, again, not-safe-for-blog. She’s not a gamer—I learned my lesson. What she is is tolerant, and she also happens to know as much about film as I do (and quite a bit more about music). Sarah is the first person I’ve dated who never once told me that I was spending too much time playing games, who asked me not to play them around her, who questioned my desire to study them in graduate school. But she also never once volunteered to play them with me (and I was fine with that), which led me to be rather surprised and confused when she told me that she’d be taking a game design class last semester.
She never really explained why she decided to take the class—whether it was to understand what it was I was doing all day, to expand her media repertoire, to decide whether she thought games were a legitimate art form, to help decide on a possible career path—and really, I don’t mind not understanding. Apparently there were multiple students in the class who admitted to not playing games or enjoying them much. That’s a strange phenomenon for me to relate to: I like film and games more than books and music, so my course of study seems obvious to me. The idea of denying myself what I actually enjoy experiencing in order to expand my general knowledge of the world is strange to me, because I’m a somewhat firm believer in specialization and expertise—we have the Internet (and libraries) for general knowledge and record-keeping.
When Sarah told me she’d be taking the game design class, I got unduly excited. I bought the textbooks she’d be reading, started stalking her future professor (Casey O’Donnell, who I’m rather decent friends with now), and demanded that she submit to an insane regimen of games history lessons at my despotic hands. This didn’t go so well. I had just received Namco’s latest “virtual arcade” disc, and one night we (I) decided to sit down and spend an hour on each game—passing the controller back and forth with each death. I couldn’t get her to focus on any of the games (Galaga, Xevious, Dig Dug, Pole Position) except for Ms. Pac-Man (and that’s not even a Namco game, strictly speaking—see Crazy Otto).
On all the other games, she tried passing every time it was her turn. With Ms. Pac-Man, she wouldn’t let me have the controller! She cursed when a ghost caught up to her, she cursed when the fruit ran away from her, she cursed when she couldn’t nab all four ghosts after ingesting a power-up. Eventually we put the virtual arcade away. I asked Sarah about this months later. She told me that she didn’t like the way Ms. Pac-Man made her feel: she looked coin-drop straight in the eye, denying it access to her heart and mind.
Through the course of the semester we played a decent smattering of other games together. First she wanted to try Geometry Wars, because she loved the psychedelia of the thing; however, she got really angry at me when I started playing Space Giraffe in her apartment—she hated the pretentious sound effects and overbearing visualizations. Lacking any platforming experience, she didn’t have the patience for Braid. She wanted to write about Passage for her first paper, and I suggested that she compare it to The Graveyard. Her second paper was a cross-analysis of The Marriage and Facade. By far our favorite game to play together has been Castle Crashers (though she refuses to admit that Dan Paladin is the cutest thing in existence). We indie music and film snobs make good indie game snobs, as if that were a surprise to anyone. When Jason Rohrer came to visit Georgia Tech, she got permission from her professors to skip class and come listen. I can only imagine how those conversations went: “You want to go to a lecture by who? He makes what?”
Unfortunately, Sarah won’t let me read her papers or post them here. Maybe if we all write expressive pleas in the comments section she’ll oblige us with some choice bits of non-gamer analysis and wisdom. Here’s one reason why I think she’s not comfortable with my reading them (and let this be a lesson to you all): some dickbag in her class berated her, asking why she, a girl, was trying to learn game design. Apparently the other girl who had registered for the class dropped out early on in the semester. Sarah didn’t want to tell her professor about this semi-harassment, so (of course) I did. This is reminiscent of a recent post by Tracey John, musing about the fact that male gamers crave female gaming partners but often resort to creepery or verbal abuse when interacting with them in-game. Any similar experiences from my (probably non-existent) female readers would be much appreciated!
This post started out as kind of a dare from Sarah to admit that I’d lost at pool, and it’s actually been a great exercise in recounting our relationship thus far and reminding myself why I like her so much.
Filmic Connections, the Dead & the Needing-to-be-Shot
Responding to this post by my man LB Jeffries; re-posting here so I’ll remember it.
Only two arguments with this. First: “And yet in a video game it is ourselves we care about. It is our own character or the person we are playing with whom we connect first.”
That isn’t a distinguishing characteristic, and it isn’t necessarily true, either. Ebert is wrong to say it’s “the people” that are important in film. Most films ask you to identify with a single protagonist and stick with them despite their actions. The body count metaphor for success you use is echoed exactly in Falling Down with Michael Douglas, and any number of spaghetti westerns. The unique thing isn’t that these same systems aren’t represented, but that you can force the player to confront their own actions (physically, as they hold the controller) rather than the actions of somebody else who they’ve only identified with mentally/emotionally. My thinking here probably has something to do with the fact that my favorite games and films are the ones that attempt to manipulate your identification with the protagonist.
Second: it never struck me until today that Steve Gaynor’s description of the immersion model is basically the summary of how to create travelogue cinema verite documentary films. I suppose this isn’t so much an argument with either you or him, but perhaps something we should study if we hope to achieve this wonderful Promised Land where AI doesn’t totally suck and do and say the same stupid things with every playthrough. Certainly the illusion of spontaneity is there if you’re willing to bite, but game AI still usually follows the rules of “if the player can’t tell it’s stupid, make it stupid to save cycle counts.” We need to get to a stage where we’re willing to give up narrative continuity and a few really great textures to waste processing power on AI that’s disruptive and therefore enlightening.
Also, Celia Pearce and Henry Jenkins came up with the idea of game design as narrative architecture a really, really long time ago. It’s a shame to attribute it to anyone else.
Finally, this article is a really great summary of the pieces you’re covering, but I don’t think any of these pieces are attacking the questions we need to answer (with the exception of positing procedural rhetoric as our analogue for editing, which I think is an important connection). For instance, how are all the psychoanalytic connections we’ve made in film over the past 40 years altered by games? We could write for a lifetime just analyzing these differences (there are quite a number of feminist game theorists doing just that, but these ideas have yet to enter popular writing).
You mention Mirror’s Edge, right? So the other day this incoming 1st year is talking to me about the male gaze in Mirror’s Edge and Portal. And I ask, but the game camera and the cameras watching the female protagonists are different. How do you address the fact that Glados is female? How is the first-person camera acting different following the fact that we are identifying explicitly as female? Do we necessarily sexualize/objectify a female protagonist if she’s in third-person camera, or only when the creators want us to (ie Lara Croft’s muddy bottom in Underworld)? So here’s a short conversation in which Laura Mulvey’s idea of visual pleasure in the cinema is completely destroyed by the examples of two games. These are the filmic connections that are important to distinguish between and analyze.
Cut scenes and linearity in games have been dying for awhile. Time to put some bullets into the kneecaps of other cinematic tropes we’ve carried over.
EDIT: I’m actually working on killing one cinematic trope next semester: the idea of a continuity of space established by Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lev Kuleshov in early Soviet Montage film and then carried over directly into the shifting frames of Adventure and Zelda. Not going to tell you how I’m going to do it; gotta figure out how to program it first, then I’ll show you!
1st Night With PS3
Tonight was my first night fooling around with my new PS3. There have been some ups and some downs.
First thing I did was download Home and get my avatar worked out. He looks nothing like me. One hours of work, and he looks less like me than my 360 avatar. Uncanny Valley or somesuch nonsense. Or the customization options are no good. Walking around the town square outside my personal apartment place, I found some people dancing and saying “Got DamMit” over and over again. It looked like a good time. No tea bagging and butt humping to be found, which was a relief after the Penny Arcade comic. They also show movies, which I knew in the back of my head but had been ignoring. I might conceivably get into Home if I meet anyone in real life or playing PS3 games that use it. Doubt I’ll spend money pimping my crib out, though.
As to the hardware itself, I love how quietly it runs. The controller is wonderful (I kind of like how slow the analog sticks rotate), and the fact that it comes with a charger (unlike my 360 ones) was a huge plus. Still no need for batteries in my apartment! Some downs: it only comes with analog cables. After a year of reading about how the PS3 was so much better than the 360 because it came with everything you needed, I was a bit nonplussed about this. Currently I’m waiting for a 30 buck set of HDMI cables to come in the mail, and the display looks kind of like stretched out shit. Another downside: no headset for talking online. Luckily, I bought a USB headset to play WoW a year ago, and since the PS3 is basically a computer it picked up the signal right away and I spent a good 5 minutes modifying my voice (neat feature, Sony).
I didn’t buy any disc games (hard to find sales, and I don’t pay 60 dollars for 6-month old games), so I hit up the Playstation Network Store. The UI is a bit disgusting, but I guess it’s easier to find things than it is on the 360. Only downside? Since the definition on my TV is so low, I didn’t see the blatant “PSP game” next to some of the titles I dropped in my cart. So now I have PSP copies of Everyday Shooter and Echochrome. Which would be awesome if I owned a PSP. Kinda wished downloading one version unlocked both, but it was my fault for buying in a frenzy. It’s just that I’ve wanted PS3 indies for over a year now!
So what did I buy? I picked up Flower, Echochrome, PixelJunk Monsters, PixelJunk Eden, Noby Noby Boy, Everyday Shooter, Linger in Shadows, and the Super Stardust HD bundle. Really freaking excited about every single one. So far I’ve only ventured into Eden and Everyday Shooter. Going to take it slow with these and play them interspersed with some JRPGs on the 360. Also going to save Flower for when the HDMI cables come in. If I can bear the excitement. That’s probably all I’m buying for now, except for a second controller and Little Big Planet when my girlfriend finishes her semester (she’s wanted to play it since I first showed her one of the knit SackBoys last year). Because she’s an indie music snob, since dating me she has become an indie game snob. I think she’ll end up getting a lot more into the PS3 than the 360. Who knows?
Trophies are daunting. Unlike the 360, where I get a tangible number of points, I don’t think I care too much about these. Since most of the games I got are “art games,” I don’t think I’m going to ruin the experience by even looking at the Trophy list. I guess you get a “level” based on the Trophies you accrue, but since I’m not going to double up on games I can play on the 360, I don’t see my score ever getting that high. I did pick up a PSN ID for the blog, which took a goddamn arm and a leg. I had to create an EU PSN account, then another account on a site that created gamercards that weren’t god-awful long. Kind of annoying to deal with all that, but now I have a cute SackBoy-themed banner to go under my 360 card!
One last downside to the PS3 is the lack of people I know who own one. My friend’s list has two pending requests going, and those are the only people I know with a PS3. On top of that, they don’t really own that many games for it. So online play with people I know is kind of out of the question. A few of these downloadable indies have multiplayer support, but I don’t really know if I want to have sublime experiences with strangers. Finally, I’m on the patch and I’ve only smoked 3 cigarettes today. Here’s to hoping videogames and the love of a good woman can keep me off the damn things in the weeks to come!
I bought a PS3
And I got a little job until Wednesday so I won’t be posting much. I’ll tell you how the PS3 works out on Wednesday. Already Pixel Junking and EveryDay Shooting. I don’t think I even want a retail game. Too spensive. We’ll see.
Our Amps Go To Eleven
I don’t have the time right now to give this a full treatment, and I don’t have a napkin to scribble this on… but I’m feeling a manifesto coming on. I’ve been writing and researching about TWEWY for the past few days, and one thing that struck me is how different the game plays based on how you stack your difficulty (there are two different sliders for this!). I also remember that when I was writing about Left 4 Dead I felt the need to make it clear that I was analyzing the game from the perspective of someone playing on Expert. I feel that, often, the only way to fully experience the level of balance and design that has gone into making a game is to play it through on the hardest difficulty you can manage. Charles Pratt recently reflected on what playing Gears of War 2 on Hardcore has made him realize: that the cover mechanic is superfluous (perhaps on every difficulty except Insane).
One of the problems with the hardcore/casual dichotomy is that it’s colonizing: that is to say, there are gamers who identified as hardcore way before we started making this distinction. Hardcore in the traditional sense refers explicitly to players who play games on the hardest difficulty, often quitting the game and starting a new playthrough if they die. L.B. Jeffries and I recently talked to a bartender in Savannah for about two hours on the subject of his hardcore playing of Diablo II. Now, I’m not saying everybody needs to play as a true hardcore gamer in order to appreciate the level of complexity in games, but I do think there should be a little more of a “put up or shut up” attitude in academic, personal, and journalistic reviews of games. The example Pratt sets is, well, exemplary: every traditional review of a game should list the difficulty that one played on (as well as the time it took and how long the average play session lasted).
Remember when Stephen Totilo got totally destroyed by Soulja Boi, to the point where he could barely beat the young rapper in games he hadn’t even played before? I see way too much of this at school, where I easily “out-gamer” a lot of my colleagues. Here’s the manifesto I’m declaring for all my fellow academic and Brainy gamers, it is rather short (I must admit): Play It On Hard.
P.S. Please tell me if somebody has already written on these topics (how difficulty sliders influence how one writes and thinks about a game, besides Juul’s recent paper that I need to get to reading soon). Also, anybody wanna try to take me in Halo 3?
Best Buy Vultures
This morning my girlfriend was trying to wake me with butterbagles for like three hours. I’d stayed up the night before beating Doom for the first time, so I was a bit under the weather. I don’t have much to say about Doom, except that it was a lot easier to play now and on a console than it was for me as a ten year old struggling with learning how to use a keyboard and mouse. I really liked how there were a ridiculous amount of enemies hiding behind walls that would open up behind me in ambush. I kinda wish this sort of ridiculous crap still happened in shooters, because it works against the kind of calculator/dominator play style I’m cursed with. Also, back when I played it as a kid there was only one episode available (do you guys remember a little thing called Shareware?). Now there are four, and the you-can’t-jump-but-you-can-sprint-over-shit mechanic is pushed to the limits in the fourth and most difficult.
Anyhow, on my girlfriend’s final attempt to wake me up I suddenly realized that the Best Buy clearance sale was on and jumped to my feet. I rushed over to Little Five to see if anything was still in stock. Unfortunately, the bargain hunters had already picked the place clean. I managed to find one copy of Kane’s Wrath hidden behind a stack of Supreme Commander, and then I realized that there were some clearance items in the drawers underneath the shelving that contained one last gem: Infinite Undiscovery. I haven’t played a JRPG in a while, so playing through this decidedly decent game is much more enjoyable than it should be. I love that going into my inventory menu leaves me open to surprise attacks (like in Dead Space), and the first hour is quite brilliant. Basically, you’re this conscientious objector and the game’s first two acts have you constantly running away from an ogre. Then you get to carry a sick girl through a field while a dragon shoots copious amounts of fireballs at you. As an achievement whore, I have to plus one the game for giving me bonus experience points for getting achievements. All-in-all a decent weekend of gaming. Back to writing!
Jason Rohrer Against the Academicians
Yeah bitches that’s a Saint Augustine reference.
Here’s a teaser for my upcoming post on Jason Rohrer’s visit to GaTech:
“Cory Arcangel is not a game designer.”
“Andy Warhol is not a filmmaker.”
Me likey Jason Rohrer.
Stone Librande & Galactic Adventures
(spoiler alert: don’t read this if you’re planning on attending Stone’s lecture… I give away all his secrets)
Stone Librande visited my program last Friday to share some words of wisdom on game design (and the job of a game designer), as well as to show off a beta of Spore: Galactic Adventures. Stone was an exceedingly eloquent and friendly guy. I’d spent the morning preparing some snarky comments to make about Spore, but his disarming charm and humility made me quickly shape up and realize that he was somebody whose words I should actually listen to.
Stone got into game design from a past career in programming and an ongoing hobby of creating board games for his friends and family to play. One of the first slides he showed were these cute “board games” he made as a kid because his parents wouldn’t let him see PG-13 movies. His sister’s boyfriend would come home and tell him what happened in the movies, and he’d make a game out of it.
He started off the presentation with a controversial claim: if you want to be a game designer, you should be equally happy working on projects such as Spore, Braid, Disney Princesses, Ponyz, match-3 games, and board games. Of course, there’s a lot to be said for this sentiment: most of the time, unless you strike out as an indie and take on a significant amount of debt to fund your first (or second, or third) project, you’ve got to earn your chops in the industry working on projects you might hate. Andrew Stern worked on the AI in Babyz and Petz before teaming up with Mateas for Facade… and there are cool board games, like Catan and Twilight Imperium… right?
His main lesson was that if you’re meant to be a game designer – if it’s your core desire and joy – you’ll be able to work on a variety of different projects and understand how they all contribute to your understanding of how games and gamers work. Apparently the Spore team hired a designer who had worked on Ponyz, because he could articulate what he learned about design from working on the project.
My main takeaway from Stone’s presentation was the fact that iterative design is alive and well at some companies. We read plenty of pieces by Eric Zimmerman and Tracy Fullerton advocating the importance of iteration and playtesting, but the lack of case studies on their part (usually confined to small indie, serious, or academic artifacts) leaves one asking “but is this how the industry actually works?” At Maxis it certainly does. I remember reading an article by Chaim Gingold (one of our program’s graduates, and a Spore designer) that described numerous early prototypes of Spore built into other Maxis games. Stone used a paper prototype to help the team behind the Civilization stage of Spore balance the tank/airplane/ship units, and he constructed this sweet wood block game called NanoBots to figure out how the Cell stage would work.
Stone also worked on an early build of Diablo 3, and while working at Blizzard he attempted to create a Magic-style card game based on Warcraft 3. Every day he would tweak the cards a bit and bring a new stack for people to play with during lunch. After a week or so he realized that nobody was taking the Troll Berserker cards, so he decided to tweak their stats a bit. People started using the Berserker cards in their decks. Somebody alerted the Warcraft 3 dev team to this fact, and when they looked at their data they saw that nobody was using Troll Berserkers on Battle.net either. That week, a patch went out balancing the damage on the unit. For Stone, and for everybody in the room, this showed the value of paper prototyping and iterative design. The Warcraft 3 team had literally millions of data points to work with, but they couldn’t see the glaring fact that one of their core ranged units was underpowered… until someone made a hobby-level card game during lunch!
He also worked as a design lead (I might be wrong about the “lead” part) on The Simpsons Game. This part of the lecture was a lesson in level/world design. While designing the game, they had access to every episode of the Simpsons. Even with all this information, they couldn’t figure out exactly what Springfield looked like from an objective point-of-view. There were some fan-made maps that attempted to lay out the geography and compile exactly what happened at each location, but there were some glaring errors and blind spots in them. Then they found one episode with a tiny, super-rough sketch of the town, and they went from there. One thing they noticed was that in almost every exterior shot of the town in the show, one has a clear view of the power plant far in the background. They designed their map around this fact.
Their workflow worked thus: they cut out pieces of cardboard and placed them on a table. Every day when the team came in to work, they had to pass the table to get to their cubicles. Over the course of a few weeks, the sum effort of hundreds of tiny tweaks gave them a decent 3D layout of the map. Then they made some sketches in Illustrator (Stone tried pioneering a method of using shadows to display height, which did and didn’t work) and sent it off to the 3D team. Using the Illustrator file, Stone laid out all the hidden Duff bottles for the game and color-coded them based on difficulty. Having these maps helped the team coordinate their activites. All the design documentation was kept on a Wiki so that people could edit it as they came up with improvements. Seeing what went into the design of the game made me want to play it right away (and you can get it on Newegg.com for $10 new right now).
Librande brought five copies of Galactic Adventures, and we broke up into groups to design a mission in it using the Mission Creator. Stone was excited to see what a bunch of game design graduate students would do with the tool set. The package is incredibly robust. You can basically create up to eight independent Acts within each mission, and each Act can have numerous objectives (all of which you script yourself). You can tweak the stats, behaviors, and dialogue on every unit you place. There was also a team devoted solely to creating environmental effects for the Creator: by far the coolest effect was a Star Wars-style red-and-blue laser battle that you can criss-cross your level with. Terraforming planets is incredibly satisfying, and the architectural options are top-notch. I hadn’t played Spore for awhile, and the bank of community-generated creatures has grown so immense that you can basically find anything you want with a little searching.
I’m not going to lie to you, though: the level creator, and the scripting tool, are not really created for people who already know how to code/make their own games. Just as with any user-gen game (such as LittleBigPlanet), experienced designers are going to want to do things that the tool just can’t handle. Your captain avatar can’t ride vehicles (something we wanted to do for our little Spore remake of Lord of the Rings), and you can’t design cut scenes to link acts. The AI is good at appearing to know what it’s doing, but it’s still kind of buggy and sluggish (maybe this will be improved in the QA phase). But for both casual and core gamers ages 4-110, there are multiple levels of detail that one can go into, develop, and enjoy. I could definitely see using it to prototype missions for other projects.
Let this be a lesson to other game companies: during the time between beta and gold, when your QA people and programmers are busy fixing bugs in your game… send your designers around to educate and share their knowledge! You’ll get better recruits in the long run, and giving workaday industry folks some face-time does wonders for your company’s image in the eyes of students and the general public.
Arcade Week
Played three games this week, outside the number of games about the “mundane” that Ian has us playing for class (one of which was an alpha? beta? of the unreleased Today I Die, which was a joy).
I bought Just Cause for nine dollars at GameStop, because I’d recently been thinking about guerrilla warfare following a number of armed robberies and bicycle thefts on our campus. The game borders on the terrible, but there is quite a bit to be said for how close the developers came toward accurately modeling a guerrilla campaign. The idea of striking small villages and military outposts is spot on. I liked how your men would run out of the woods to assault the police blockades. They even have a few ambush missions (a staple of the guerrilla); however, they exaggerate the martial abilities of the protagonist a bit too much for my liking–sure Che was on the line with his men, but single-handedly ambushing a convoy is a bit of a stretch. The other glaring problems are the number of helicopters the guerrilla fighters have at their disposal, the city assault missions (unrealistic until very late in a regime change), and the fact that helicopters will routinely drop vehicles for you with large UNITED STATES emblems emblazoned upon them.
In any case, the game is worth playing at its current price-point just for the grappling hook and parachute pack, which lead to a ridiculous variety of implausible yet highly satisfying aeronautical stunts (I beat the final, and “hardest,” mission by leaping out of a speeding boat onto a helicopter, flying it under a SAM firing solution to destroy the general’s tank, jumping out just as a missile struck it, opening my parachute, firing a grapple onto another passing helicopter, and then flying it to safety).
I also finally picked up Alien Hominid HD for this week’s reduced price of 5 dollars on XBLA. Not nearly as exquisite as Castle Crashers, but it is educative to see how Dan Paladin’s artistic abilities have developed in three short years. After playing Super Contra religiously a month back, the “ultra-hardcore” difficulty of the game didn’t get to me as much as it should have.
After playing through AH and nabbing some side achievements, I bought the new Dishwasher Samurai game. I didn’t actually want the game for itself, but I’m counting it as my tithe for the week toward supporting indie game development. In a GDC interview, the sole developer of the game came off as kind of a douche-bag. He made up for it with the game though. Don’t listen to any reviews that compare the game to Alien Hominid. You know those 2D adaptations of Portal and Mirror’s Edge? This game is essentially a 2D remediation of Ninja Gaiden 2. Nasty combos, a bunch of actually useful and unique weapons to use, copious amounts of gore, and slick combat/finisher animations (grab a dude’s hand, pull his own gun up to his mouth, blow his brains out). It felt a bit off spending more money on this than I did on AH, but I’ll forgive myself after I’ve plummed it for all its hack-and-slash value. This is another one of those “ultra hardcore” games that isn’t nearly as difficult as everybody lets on. I mean, in AH you died in two hits. In this game, you can take quite a punishing; then, when you’re about to die, you kill a few zombies and they spit out enough health to bring you back into the green.
This is probably the closest you’ll ever get to traditional games journalism out of me. Enjoy it while it lasts. I’ve got two books in the works, on top of my thesis (which is basically another book in the making). Working with Bobby Schweizer and a mystery co-author on one, and Cinque Hicks on another (our project over the course of the next two years or so). Gotta build that resume for Ph.D. programs, yo.
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