How Designers Engineer Luck Into Video Games (2017)

I was curious about what rule they violated -- it comes up in part 5:

"The first is Sony’s first viewing of Crash in person. Kelly Flock was the first Sony employee to see Crash live [ Andy NOTE: running, not on videotape ]. He was sent, I think, to see if our videotape was faked!

Kelly is a smart guy, and a good game critic, but he had a lot more to worry about than just gameplay. For example, whether Crash was physically good for the hardware!

Andy had given Kelly a rough idea of how we were getting so much detail through the system: spooling. Kelly asked Andy if he understood correctly that any move forward or backward in a level entailed loading in new data, a CD “hit.” Andy proudly stated that indeed it did. Kelly asked how many of these CD hits Andy thought a gamer that finished Crash would have. Andy did some thinking and off the top of his head said “Roughly 120,000.” Kelly became very silent for a moment and then quietly mumbled “the PlayStation CD drive is ‘rated’ for 70,000.”

Kelly thought some more and said “let’s not mention that to anyone” and went back to get Sony on board with Crash."

That's one of the finest and most entertaining "post mortem's" (it didn't die, though so what's that called?) I've ever read.

There's something in it for everyone who enjoys programming, video games, or technical papers.

My favorite four takeaways from the development story are:

1) The mechanic I spoke of above where the game tries to dumb things down for less skilled players.

2) The fact that Crash Bandicoot was originally designed as the flagship game and mascot character and ultimately Sony messed up in terms of making Crash into the Sony Playstation mascot as Mario or Sonic were to the Nintendo and Sega consoles / companies respectively.

Naughty Dog aimed for that as they saw an opening for it and, I think, absolutely nailed that aspect of creating an iconic and lovable character but Sony seemed gun shy about it. I could see, with hindsight, how Naughty Dog could have developed Crash further as a character and branched out in terms of making all sorts of Crash branded games of various genres in the future instead of the few platformers that we got (although they were all well above average).

3) The fact that pit falls, unbreakable boxes, and other in-level obstacles / item boxes weren't just there by chance. The Sony Playstation could not handle too many enemies on screen so the level designers worked hard to craft levels that would ensure enemies would fall into pits or be blocked by boxes from entering into an area that would ultimately crash the game / console from having too many polygons on screen.

4) The fact that Naughty Dog was thought to have "special secret hardware codes" given to them by Sony because comparatively Crash Bandicoot was performing and looking a few levels above anything else other Sony Playstation developers were capable of creating. The team wrote all sorts of specialized tools and programs to help refactor polygons, smart load levels, and ensure that the team was able to have great looking graphics and models on screen that were as close as possible to squeezing out everything the hardware could handle (see item 3 above) and this caused other developer teams to question Naughty Dog and Sony's relationship behind the scenes.

I’d prefer documenting the actual behavior/rules. In the Civ example, if the 3rd try always succeeds, display 100%. If the archer vs helicopter attack doesn’t make sense, show 0%. I’m a big boy, I can take the truth. If the monsters run slower when you’re not looking at them, find some sensible way in the story to explain it. Maybe your eyes feed their rage and give them powers when you look at them.

Giving the player an artificial boost when he’s behind is like giving 4 outs to the losing baseball team.

> I'd argue that the drawn out deaths of those MMOs shows how creatively bankrupt the MMO market is - people aren't leaving for new MMOs, they're staying with old ones till they get bored, because there's nothing better out there.

Indeed. I like MMOs, but there's just nothing up my alley at this point and I'm waiting for the revival of a 15 year old game (WoW Classic) or the spiritual successor of an even older game (Pantheon).

That's one way to see it, and it's certainly not unreasonable to see it that way.

But looking at it another perspective, you can also argue that making MMOs with persistent worlds that can only be supported by subscription has become so risky of an investment that nobody is willing to experiment with drastically new paradigms/mechanics because historically an overwhelming majority of those who tried have failed, which could be what led to the creatively bankrupt landscape we have today.

It's impossible to know which perspective is more accurate because it's clearly a chicken-or-egg situation. But one thing that we can observe today is that practically (or maybe actually?) nobody even tries to make MMOs with subscriptions anymore, and new MMOs today end up defaulting to freemium (and all the morally bankrupt behavior that the model leads to), whatever the reason for that might be, and I think that's a shame.

I think we're considering very different categories, and I probably should have been more specific, sorry. I was thinking about "gamification" in products whose primary focus is not education - in the worst form of what I'm talking about, it substitutes for help or documentation.

Hip fire bullet spread isn't random?

I don't think there is a meaningful distinction between board games and video games in terms of gameplay. Many board games have been turned into video games. Battletech and Warhammer have both tabletop and computer implementations. Civilization is just a complex board game. Diplomacy is more often played by email or through a web app than it is played tabletop, so it might as well be considered a video game. Magic: The Gathering has been turned into a video game as well, with microtransactions and matchmaking and everything you would expect. Hearthstone is a MtG clone that never even had a physical incarnation: it is nothing but a video game.

Chess is a good example of a game with perfect information for both sides. There's a variant of chess that was popular for training military officers in the 19th century called Kriegspiel that has Fog of War. It is played with 3 boards and a moderator. Each player has a board with only their pieces, and the moderator sees both sides. Players tell the moderator their move, who figures out the result. This is precisely the sort of thing for which we now use computers when playing strategy games of all kinds.

The fundamental principle of randomness, in a Bayesian sense, is that it represents a lack of information. There are two ways in which randomness can be used in games. It can be used to set up the initial conditions for the game, such as with procedural generation; or it can be used directly as part of the conflict resolution mechanism. When it is used in the latter sense, such as by having your success determined by die roll, it creates an illusion of hidden information, but it's hollow. In the case of a game like Kriegspiel or Diplomacy, there is an actual state that can be probed through clever gameplay, and probabilistic reasoning enhances your ability to do that. But when the state doesn't exist, and you model the result of missing information with a die roll, all you have to work with is the law of large numbers. When there is no hidden state about which to make inferences, it can make a game feel shallow.

Here's another example: Starcraft. If you are playing 1v1 on a 4 player map, there is some randomness in spawn positions, but ignoring that, the game is very deterministic. Units deal a specific amount of damage, pathfinding works a particular way, there's no randomness in chance to hit, or movement speed, or construction time. But there is a huge amount of hidden information because of Fog of War. At a high level of play, players may see very indirect hints of what the other player is doing, and by knowing how long it takes to build everything, they can figure out what the opponent is doing, with precision.

"If he has 8 marines at 3 minutes, he must have built early Barracks and he's not teching! I better prepare for an early attack." I don't remember the exact timings anymore but there are a lot of tells like this. A lot of the strategy of that game revolves around scouting and denying information, and making attacks at an ideal timing where the opponent has sunk the most resources into gaining an advantage (such as tech for more powerful units), but hasn't yet gained any benefit. I can't think of any randomness in Starcraft beyond the 4-position maps in 1v1, which players hate!

Instead, the main principles are hidden information, and dexterity. It is very difficult to control every unit precisely unless you have 400 actions per minute. Randomizing action resolution isn't important because it is physically impossible to play perfectly.