Game design is simple
raphkoster.com
raphkoster.com
His writing is often SO full of ideas that I can't absorb an entire piece in one sitting. It's like a 12 course tasting menu. The neat thing with his writing is that, despite what he says here about all 12 pieces being important together, you can often just pick an isolated bit and chew on it for a while, and still learn something.
(Presumably return to the other 11 courses later; they'll still be fresh.)
1: https://www.raphkoster.com/2007/09/18/metaplace/, or this demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZiB_JcRH_s, or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaplace
Was it resilient to the, uh, many, many well-documented problems that the genre pushes players/itself into?
---
[1] There's a lot of ideas in this space that sound interesting on paper to nerds bikeshedding, but often fall flat in actual implementation. I'm curious as to what were the ones that worked.
SWG set out to be something like Dwarf Fortress in terms of depth to the worlds physics; for example, gunsmiths could tinker on all parts of a gun and maybe get a lucky roll to unlock +N more damage or -N recoil. Same with land vehicles and bioengineered animals, droids. Parameters to noodle all the way down. Some under user control, others random to foster sense of a chaotic physical world.
As the in game object economy was entirely propped up by crafters this fostered economic PVP.
Lucasarts of 2000-2003, when the game was developed, did not understand MMO, and 3D games take much longer than 2D adventure games and shoved it out the door 2 years too early.
It also suffered from 90s OOP heavy software development patterns. Devs had difficulty managing it and updating over the years.
Ultimately it failed at being a Star Wars game. PVE was just "kill a nest of bugs" and failed to leverage storylines and characters. Players with nothing else to do ended up ruling the economy or whatever. Could have made them compete against Star Wars power brokers, IMO. Jabba sabotaged your factory, or something. Once a player was kitted out they had nothing to do.
Some have spent the last 10+ years implementing a server emulator, various tools and mods. An emulator built around the original release is here: https://github.com/swgemu
I tinker on a modded private server now and then. Initially added in random world events, to generate things to go do and replacing odd design decisions like mission terminals with NPC models to talk to in that seedy back alley, to foster more in world RP vibe.
When WOW launched SWG was redesigned to play more like that. Typical MBA "copy paste what they are doing" project management.
It truly was ahead of its time, I don't think any one game has come close to implementing such a rewarding group of systems and economy in an MMORPG, except maybe EVE but that is a very different game and admittedly I did not find EVE fun.
The most exciting systems to me had very little to do with combat, but especially as it pertains to this article, also couldn't be as rewarding without it. It was all the player run economies, homsteads, towns and cities, player shops, craftsman and markets. The fact that materials mined had quality which impacted item stats, on and on.
To get good gear, you had to know a guy who made it, they had to know a guy who'd mined good quality minerals, and that person may have found the minerals through another player who had prospected it.
It made sense to be part of a player city, so you could put your house in a known market area for people to visit.
It all mattered because people needed the equipment to go do the quests, and so it was a really symbiotic set of systems that made crafting and economy matter.
The fact that player towns just emerged was really cool.
It was such a shame the space expansion was so ... flat. Neither space nor ground had a storyline to follow, but space wasn't an open world, and had no real element of choice in skill paths.
Would love to strip from my private server, NPC generation as-is as implementation is static and does not allow dynamic responses. Replace it with modern agents to connect like players and train them to build out the world like players can.
Also started a project to make a new client using video and segmentation, gen AI to recreate initial game engine entities as Godot scenes to have full control.
Too little time for either, initial code has sat untouched for years.
That sounds fascinating, I've been working in godot for a few projects now. I'd be interested to know how you would integrate the Godot scenes into the current engine, or if it would be an entirely new client.
Godot is a pain given my workflow is pretty cli heavy though. Since I last touched that project I looked into switching to Wicked Engine. Just include C/C++ headers rather than Godot.
But job got interesting (am an EE in hardware development land) and I have to spend free time diving into AI model architecture to keep up. Both SWG projects have sat idle for 10-12 months now. shrug
I can't figure out if the open world game was fun enough just on its own that an open space game would've been chef's kiss, or if it did need some kind of story telling too. It's too long ago to remember well enough, for me.
I think you meant Star Wars Galaxies, which was definitely ahead of its time and few MMORPGS have replicated its sandbox MMORPG since.
https://tynansylvester.com/book/
Haven't read it yet myself.
This is oversimplifying, most designers fall into a bucket of mixed styles; but the point is, no "book" will be perfect for all. Same as with software engineering, graphic design, etc.
If you are a game designer, please take this with a grain of salt.
Fun does not equal repeated challenges. And let me also reject the implicit notion that stories are entertainment but not, academically speaking, fun.
The article gives useful theoretical tools for understanding and critiquing such shallow games, actually. Its examples are drawn from many genres, and it's thoughtful and insightful about many kinds and aspects of games.
The comment you call out with your question is indeed a low-effort and low-quality dismissal. I struggle to describe it without being more insulting than that.
It's kind of hard to stay equipped without salvaging though.
Stories are obviously fun, otherwise no-one would read books, but a story that you interact with meaningfully, that you can change significantly, really hard to do well.
Like every game where you can do good thing or bad thing, and the game punishes you for doing bad thing. It's really hard to write a compelling story where a nasty piece of shit still somehow saves the Fantasy Kingdom from the Prophesised Doom and becomes the hero.
I honestly cant't think of any good examples where game mechanics and stories interacted in a way that gave you significant agency while still being fun. I'd love to be given contra-examples though.
I think of the Mass Effect games and their attempts at this, "Oh you were only 92% Paragon, so now we're at the end, _this_ crew-member has to die for some reason, if only you'd known that 30 hours of gameplay ago when you punched that grifter in the Citadel!"
Or one I still bear a massive, MASSIVE grudge against, Fable III, where if you didn't massively grind for resources before the bit you thought was the end-game - where you fought and defeated the evil oppressive king, you found yourself making ridiculously stupid binary decisions like "Should this multi-storey building be used as an orphanage? Or as a whore-house?" That's literally one of the decisions you had to make. Oh, and the game made sure to tell you "Btw, because you didn't grind enough, if you choose the way that earns less money, EVERY ONE DIES BECAUSE YOU WANTED TO HELP THE ORPHANS."
It was an interesting attempt, to be sure, a brave experiment but I resented the game so much for the heel turn it pulled - "Actually, the evil oppressive money grubbing king you overthrew was RIGHT! Now you have to do what he was doing! Mwahahaha! Irony!"
Worst of all, it never let me make nuanced choices - why can't it be orphans downstairs, sex workers upstairs, and during the daytime, I pay the sex-workers to look after the orphans? Nope, it was either "look after the innocent children" or "four floors of whores". Complete with animations of crying children if you chose sex-workers. Or crying sex-workers if you chose the children. Once again, not kidding.
Once you knew the heel-turn twist, you could game it massively beforehand, one of the best strategies was to buy properties, become an incredibly oppressive landlord by demanding extortionate rents, so when it came time for the "orphans/whores" decisions, you had so much money you could could choose the good path and everyone declared you a saint.
But I felt so disrespected by the game that I didn't even bother.
That's the problem - good stories need direction towards a satisfying end, and it's really hard to give a player agency in a good narrative, and so I felt railroaded into comically absurd black/white choices.
Honestly, I think the only games that have ever done the good/evil choices in a story well were the Knights of The Old Republic series, but once again, it stopped being so much fun when I had to keep on being evil because I'd chosen evil stuff prior.
Can't I just be evil today, and maybe a bit nice tomorrow? After all, the best villains are the mercurial ones.
I think the main problem with Fable or Mass Effect was that the game wants to converge to one of a few endings, but definitely for ME there's a bajillion decisions you can make until you get there.
I don't know if you can get rid of this "definite" ending thing per se; some games say they have X amount of endings, but again, I can't really name any. It's probably more gratifying to have more self-contained sub-stories where the decisions made e.g. an hour ago have an effect on the progression and outcome, but not too much longer than that. You should have the choice as a player to switch from e.g. "good" to "evil" partway through your playthrough. References back to previous quests and their outcomes are nice but shouldn't be as heavy as "your one choice made 30 hours ago affect the ending of the game in a significant and irreversible way"
Choices occasionally feel fairly binary good/evil, but more often all choices have their pros & cons, and it's more about story and narrative in making my decisions.
Rimworld and The Sims. Both are procedural story writers.
> I felt railroaded into comically absurd black/white choices
I agree: All these AAA titles essentially are movies where you get tons of "agency" in choices which are irrelevant to the story, but the main plot is hard scripted into a few predetermined paths.
Until we have full generative AI as game engine the only alternative remains the procedural approach mentioned in the beginning.
Perhaps that Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (that's what the hpmor at the end means) is such an appallingly written piece of... I hesitate to use the word literature... that you wanted to demonstrate how not to write?
> Dopamine can release for 'richly interpretable' situations
Ok, and? I mean, Oh, right. The dopamine. The dopamine for gamers, the dopamine chosen especially to entertain gamers, gamers' dopamine. That dopamine?
The science on this evolves pretty regularly, but dopamine specifically currently seems to be tied most strongly to prediction processes matching what actually ends up happening, and therefore curiosity, etc.
The "richly interpretable" bit comes from Biederman & Vessel's research on it; for our purposes here we can basically summarize it as "easily predictable situations versus more complex ones result in different dopamine responses."
From the neuropsych side, this is very related to Predictive Processing; Deterding has a good article on that here. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9363017/ It also has a wealth of links that can lead you deeper into the subject.
As far as "OK and?" it comes down to this:
- make games that people can predict easily, and it'll be less fun in the "hard fun" sense
- and that is true of stories too!
- and that doesn't mean there aren't other sorts of enjoyment (which are covered in several images and links there) -- and as it happens, those are mappable to particular endorphins too!
- So it's not that game designers should try using endorphins as a tool, but rather that there's a wealth of science in a half-dozen different fields that backs up what this article is saying.
Bottom line: "dopamine" isn't a useful tool. Knowing those four types of fun and what elicits them absolutely is. Knowing they really do map to specific human sensations is. And following some links deeper into the topic will lead you very specific techniques you can use to elicit these different reactions predictably.
Others are very obvious though; MMORPGs are the obvious answer and they often don't even have an interesting story or reward to go with the grind, because the reward is a gamble. Ubisoft games are another example, ever since the first Assassin's Creed their games have generally been the same formula of an overworld with a lot of repeated but sameish "quests". The Division series combines the two with randomized, chance based loot. (...coincidentally I'm playing that one right now).
But yeah, the "repeated challenges" thing is best left to that particular class of games. Some people realy enjoy it though.
For Assassin's Creed, it was so repetitive even within the same game (the first one) I couldn't even finish it once I noticed the grind. It drove me nuts.
A lot of games then followed that pattern (e.g. Shadow of Mordor, Mad Max, and I'm sure countless others -- I just mention the ones I tried). I find some of their mechanics interesting but once the grind kicks in (which is fairly soon, since these sandbox games are all grind-based) I despair and abandon them.
They feel like repetitive work rather than entertaining to me.
But hear this: Papers, Please, a game that is literally a bureaucracy simulator, engages me in a way Assassin's Creed never could. I wonder why! (Random guess: I think it's because PP, for all its repetitiveness, feels like a small game, while Assassin's Creed and its like feel like endless games you could spend your life within... and I have better things to do with my life).
In the case of the first Assassin’s Creed, I’d argue that the “toy” (running around, climbing buildings, challenging yourself to seamless parkour runs, stabbing guards etc.) is a lot of fun, but to progress the game forces you to do those fun things in a series of very rigid, repetitive, arbitrary challenges that can be difficult without adding anything new, and which block the story progression behind a checklist.
Papers Please has simple mechanics, but makes the player balance a lot of different factors while offering a steady stream of surprises and new situations to consider.
There’s an element of personal preference too, of course.
But repeated challenges does not equal grind. Grind typically means repeating already mastered challenges over and over.
For instance, I think that puzzles are ok in Mass Effect, but the many mini-games in Final Fantasy 7 are borderline annoying.
The answer on inferring relationships between flavors of fun, and good colalteral fun activities, is in number 11. :D
But let's simplify this. What are your favorite games, and in what way do they sidestep having any repeated challenges? Do they have one single challenge, after which the game is over? Is that fun?
Sure, RPGs tend to have "repeated" battles or harvesting. Racing has repeated laps. FPS have repeatedly finding someone else to shoot. Coding simulators like Factorio have you repeatedly add automation, and repeatedly replace them with better automation. Platformers have you repeatedly move through platforms.
This is all illustrated and explained in the article, though.
2. This article also does not say that fun equals repeated challenges. The closest thing in there is that fun is about prediction. Even the definition of "mastery" that the article sets forth is pretty explicitly about every type of cognitive challenge you meet in life.
3. This article does not imply that stories cannot be fun. In fact, I specifically pointed out that stories that you are unsure where they are going, and stories with more interpretability are more likely to be fun that predictable ones. If you follow the links in the article, you will see
4. I don't exclusively work in the MMORPG space. I have worked in tabletop, puzzle, trivia, casual, and single-player RPGs.
What a great phrase to describe an aspect of game design to strive for.
https://www.raphkoster.com/2015/06/29/game-design-ux-design/
This one talk is the reason why all of my small game projects feature copious amounts of screenshake. :)
A bit of juice is fine and necessary, but the moment your juice starts to look like interactive gameplay, but isn't, it went way to far and just becomes noise. I rather have some less spectacular debris I can interact with, then just a particle system filling the screen with non-interactive nonsense.
TotalBiscuit was ranting about it ages ago[1]. 2kliksphilip also has numerous videos[2] on the lack of interactive physics in modern games.
But games come out that break the mold of AAA style over substance, and sometimes they are great. Games like Stardew Valley or Valheim or Factorio had very small teams, and rudimentary graphics, and yet offered up countless hours of addictive gameplay.
What are some other examples of breakout hits?
> Bottom line: the more uncertainty, indeterminacy, ambiguity in your game, the more depth it will have.
Sure, starting from 0%, adding uncertainty adds depth. But the player needs to maintain some influence over that uncertainty. If you crank the uncertainty up too 100% then its pure random which isn't deep or fun.
I've noticed a similar more-is-better trend in a few sequels I've played, where the first game had say 5 mechanics which were fun. Then the sequel has 10 mechanics, and because 10 is more than 5 it therefore must be more fun. But it ends up being too much shit to juggle and less fun as a result.
More isn't always better
I don't mind complexity, some of my favorite games are ridiculously complex (Dwarf Fortress), but the complexity needs to pay for itself.
I’m not as sophisticated as the average Dwarf Fortress player, but an emergent quality of that game that I’ve admired from afar has been how you can ignore various mechanics and you’re rewarded with an interesting ride.
It’s dynamic enough that by pulling various gameplay “levers” you can get wildly different outcomes (and thus value through replayability), but things will sort of run themselves (for better or worse) if you forget about them. So you’re half writing your own story, half discovering it as it writes itself.
Unless they're an integral feature of the game (like in Minecraft), they always feel slapped on to me.
E.g. slight variations in inputs should produce a slight but ideally meaningful variation in output, so the outcome of pressing keys is both reliable as well as an open space for further mastery.
It's also important that you can trace and understand what happened in retrospect. Just missing because of a 5% chance isn't fun. Missing because you didn't consider wind direction and the movement of an object between you and the target on the other hand is perfectly grokkable.
An extreme example of more-is-better are games like EU4, where just understanding how trade works, is more complicated than most entire games, and that's just a single subsystem. You can ignore it, but mastering it can be satisfying. Or frustrating.
In that sense of the word, it's not only about random things, but also things like "will I click at just the right time to head-shot that enemy?" or "I will checkmate the next turn unless my opponent thinks of some clever move that I don't?"). And the theory is that once you run out of uncertain things there is no more a game, as the player know how it will end and there is nothing more that can fail or anything unexpected that can happen. Basically like reading the end of a book you have already read before, so you know exactly what will happen.
And depth from a game design pov is also not necessarily strictly positive. Make the game too deep and there is, as you say, pure random. You could keep adding rules to chess to make it 100% impossible for any human to remotely guess what kind of move to make, and that's when you added so much uncertainty that it became too deep.
In Theory of Fun, I phrased this as "everything has patterns, but if you are not equipped to see the pattern, it becomes noise, and therefore boring."
But it's the same underlying point.
There are a lot of AAA games out there that very clearly seem like the developers wish they were directing a movie instead. Sure, there’s loads of cutscenes to show off some cool visuals. But then they seem to think “ok well we need to actually let the player play now”, but it’s still basically a cutscene, but with extra steps: cyberpunk 2077 had this part where you press a button repeatedly to make your character crawl along the floor and the take their pills. It’s just a cutscene, but where you essentially advance frames by pressing the X button.
Then there’s quick time events, which are essentially “we have a cutscene we want you to watch, but you can die if you don’t press a random button at a random time”, and they call it a game.
If it’s not that, it’s breaks in play where they take control away from you to show you some cool thing, utterly taking you out of the experience for something that is purely visual. I usually shout “can I play now? Is it my turn?” at the screen when this happens.
But I digress… I essentially hate games nowadays because this or similar experience seems to dominate the very definition of AAA games at this point. None of them respect your time, and they seem to think “this is just like a movie” is a form of praise, when it’s exactly the opposite of why I play games.
But like AAA has never been an adjective that meant good or fun. Just that the budget is big.
Cut scenese are an opportunity for a change of pace and to tell the story in a different way. Or as a way to emphasize a game action. When you get a touchdown in Tecmo Bowl, you have a little cut scene which is nice (but gets repetitive). The cut scenes in a Katamari game give you some sort of connection to the world, but you can always skip them.
I think I've managed to skip most big budget games for most of my gaming life. That's fine, lots of other customers for those, I'll stick to the games I like.
- a camera flight go give an overview of the map
- show the location of the final boss
- hint at future missions
- provide a clue for solving the puzzle
- etc.
I just picked up Prodeus, if you like games like old Doom and Quake you’ll probably love it.
Also, From Software games (Dark Souls, Elden Ring, Sekiro, Armored Core) are basically all gameplay. Cutscenes are kept to a minimum and gameplay is is tight AF
So you have Legend of Zelda games where pretty much all puzzles are so simple you can instantly tell what the solution is the very moment you see them, ie. downright retarded with few rare exceptions. This also applies to difficulty, etc.
As a result, AAA games can only be appretiated or enjoyed for not much else but production values. The soundtrack, the setpieces, the massive worlds and how much money must have gone into it, etc.
Interestingly, Elden Ring (2022) is AAA but very difficult, though not because of the puzzles. Perhaps puzzles test more for IQ (which can't be changed) than for gaming skill.
Taking agency away from the player is usually a bad thing, so its not something you want to do when the player has other goals to work on. They are a fine tool to break up the action and games are also about the story and world building so expositional sections are a natural thing.
Its important to not mess with the game pacing, though.
After a heavy boss fight where the player doesn't even know what their next goal is anyway? Perfectly fine time for some exposition.
Running past an NPC on the way to do something? That's a horrible time to whip around the camera and tell the player something.
AAAs have huge momentum so you'll often see plot points and exposition that needs to be shoehorned in to fix some writing issue or what have you. Of course, you also just have game directors making bad decisions.
This is not exactly a new phenomenon. The final cutscene in Metal Gear Solid 4 (2008) is 71 minutes long (Guinness world record). The total cutscenes add up to around 9 hours according to a Reddit user. Maybe more games are doing this now compared to 15 years ago, but I wouldn't bet on it.
- proper games ("play"): if you remove all the lore, cinematics, dialogs, etc the gameplay can stand on its own and the user find it fun. (ex: Elden ring, Pokemon. you can play a cut-scenes ripped version in a language you don't understand and still enjoy both, chess and other abstract games are the extreme end of this category)
- interactive DVD menus ("media arts"): it's a movie but sometimes you get to interact with it. in this category you have also have visual novels with branching trees/DAGs. they are more than a movie but still ultimately the most important test: they can't stand alone without the story/lore.
I enjoy both, but I wish games and steam pages were more front and center about which camp they are in the beginning before I even buy them.
my ultimate sin is games that think they are in category 1 who give you unskippable cut scenes.
Two things to consider regarding cut scenes. First, sometimes they are mandated by the game story writers and backed up by artists wanting to show off. Second, and more importantly from a game developer's perspective, they are a useful tool for hiding scene loading I/O such that the customer experience does not notice a nontrivial delay.
How is that possibly an excuse? It reads like you’re agreeing with me. I could give a shit less about the feelings of some artist that wants to “show off” to me when they’re getting in the way of me enjoying the maybe 20 minutes of time I have to try and play a game between other obligations.
Games like those seem to be designed for teenagers who have hours or even days on end to sink into a game. I’m a 40+ year old dad with negative time on my hands. The gaming industry has basically left me behind.
Yes. In general it's because they're made by a different team, with different incentives, working to a different schedule.
They're often made using an earlier version of the game lore and story. Due to the massive effort required to make changes and render frames, they often don't match up with late-breaking changes made by the game team.
But sometimes you get lucky and the cinematics team excels. I worked with Blizzard's cinematics team in the '90s, and those spectacular folks produced an amazing body of work.
I don't think it's a modern thing, I tried playing the original Kingdom Hearts on my PS/2 but gave up because there are so many mandatory videos that are unskippable during combat. Not going back as far, Bayonetta series has a ton of quicktime sequences, that I hate, have to beat an enemy, die to due slow reflexes and unexpected quicktime event, repeat and hopefully get the timing right on button press which is sharp contrast to the otherwise fluid combat in Bayonetta.
There was also at one point in ancient history a very big deal to have cinematics integrate seamlessly into gameplay, using the same engine for both, instead of prerecorded video sequences. So then games did that just as a point of pride, and having the cinematics in game engine it possible for non specialists to add (or storyboard and leaving final result to specialists) cinematics into a game's flow.
I played that in my teens, and 30 years later, I can still remember the name of the peaceful agricultural planet that had blimps as their main form of transportation - Bex.
Why? Because the cutscene played and I was like "Wow, look at this place, this is nothing like New Detroit".
And it didn't make you (IIRC) watch the cutscenes. Every. Damn. Time you landed thereafter.
The thing about cutscenes, as with most aspects of AAA games, is that they test well in their target market. Cutscenes aren’t exactly cheap to make, especially if acted. They wouldn’t do them if they weren’t popular.
But it’s perfectly fine that you, like many (and me), don’t like cutscenes. Embrace that and accept that perhaps those games aren’t for you, because there is so much choice out there that that you will certainly be able to find things more to your tastes.
What exactly is the right way to tell a good story though a game? The only other ways I've seen are:
1) Text boxes or Bethesda-style dialogue trees
2) Dark-souls style slow-drip storytelling.
Although they can both work, I don't think I prefer either one over cutscenes. (1) especially is more like something I'll forgive rather than like because I know cutscenes are difficult for smaller teams and limiting for games that emphasize player choice.
It's one of the reasons I liked Baldurs Gate 3 so much -- suddenly the cinematic cutscenes don't feel like a tradeoff for sacrificing choice.
But they are also not gameplay, obviously.
https://www.raphkoster.com/2012/01/20/narrative-is-not-a-gam... https://www.raphkoster.com/2012/01/26/narrative-isnt-usually...
...and maybe https://www.raphkoster.com/2013/03/13/why-are-qtes-so-popula... since you dislike QTE's. :)
But that doesn’t explain games where as soon as you start it up for the first time, there’s a minimum of 20 minutes of (often unskippable) cutscenes before you can even control a character. Or cutscenes at the beginning of a level/mission where you kinda have to watch it to know what’s going on at all, but they’re like 10 minutes long, so you’re gonna be there a while. Sometimes even those ones are unskippable. I remember playing Jedi Fallen Order and I just left the couch and cleaned the kitchen for a while because I could not have given a shit less about the story they were pushing on me, and I came down and it was still going.
Games need to respect my time. You turn the NES on, press start, and there’s Mario on the left side of the screen. You’re playing now. You turn on Forza Horizon 6 or whatever and it’s 20 minutes before you can control a car, at minimum. And that’s a fucking racing game, with no story I would ever possibly give a shit about.
I honestly wonder if this is done to reduce returns. Steam, for example has a <2hrs policy.
Put 30+ minutes of cut scene in, 60 minutes of intro/tutorial, and you’re past 2 hours of game launched time before discovering the game itself just isn’t fun for you (too predictable? Grindy? Too easy? Too hard?)
But you don't like those sorts of problems as much (or don't want them in that moment). Which is fine. No game works for everyone the same way.
(There is also an offhand remark in the article about gamemakers being failed moviemakers... ;) )
Well, welcome to planet Earth then, the ultimate game environment.
> Put another way — every single paragraph in this essay could be a book.
But the images ARE from the many many presentations I have given on game design, which can be found here: https://www.raphkoster.com/games/presentations/
Many of the links are to those presentations, and many of them are deep dives on single sentences in the article.
Simple != easy
Simple != obvious
Simple != intuitive
Simple != easy to understand
Elegant == Simple
Simple != elegantIs that formally defined and widely accepted? If not, I don’t think your argument holds because almost nothing is simple based on what you said.
“Simple” is obviously subjective and context-dependent, but I don’t agree with that.
Getting a bowl of cereal is simple, yet still composed of several simple steps.
> Simple means not complex
Don't forget that words are overloaded so they only mean things in context. Words are both simple and complex because of this.
As an example: the rules to the game of life are simple. The outcomes are complex. The rules cannot even be decomposed further, making them first principles of that universe.
> means not composed of even simpler parts
This relationship of "simple yet complex" is quite common. We could say the same thing about chaotic functions like the double pendulum. It is both simple and complex.
I mean... yeah kind of obvs. Very "rest of the owl".
2. For arbitrary n x m boards, Candy Crush (and Bejeweled, it's predecessor), has been shown to be NP-complete. That means as a general class of problem, it's officially hard. This is why I said that "A lot of very good problems seem stupidly simple, but have depths to them." If you look at some of the ones I examine in this talk: https://www.raphkoster.com/games/presentations/games-are-mat... you'll see they are often what seems very simple!
Adding more stuff in general may very well make something harder to play, but it has more to do with how many of the added things are simultaneously visible. We can go back to the old 7+/-2 rules of thumb on that one.
Candy Crush is Hard in a math sense. So are Battleship, Minesweeper, Pipes, Othello... they are all easy to play. They are fun because they are Hard in a math sense.
Dark Souls is not hard in a math sense, meaning it is not formally complex. It is hard to play mostly because it is a reaction and timing game that presents very difficult challenges, and the ambiguity comes from mastering signals and reactions.
Civilization is complicated, and almost certainly Hard in a math sense. But it has solid onboarding and is not that hard to play.
Dwarf Fortress is complex AND complicated, and has no onboarding, and a ton of stuff in it, and is both Hard and hard. DF is built out of a ton of separate Hard game atoms.
I'm having some trouble parsing this sentence. Does he mean that "player has fun if their predictions lead to progress"?
For intelligence for example you could have a PID controller where there is automatic tuning which would fit the definition of learning and application. But I don't think we'd call it intelligent outside of marketing copy.
I do like that meta observation though that not only do people get better at prediction through learning they can also get better at the rate at which they improve their predictions.
You seem to be assuming I have a reductive definition of game, when the definition given in the article is basically "anything people choose to play." See https://www.raphkoster.com/2013/04/16/playing-with-game/ which is linked in there.
I strongly disagree with lumping "intelligence" into the question though, so I am with you on that.
Fun, among other things = remaining in the tight channel of flow, where your skills get challenged without ever reaching a point of frustration. Too little challenge = boredom.
Skills improve as they get challenged, i.e. when our prediction and pattern matching system receive enough feedback to improve upon our previous actions to get a more optimal outcome.
So, fun is (among other things) getting better at doing something, and as we get better, what was once a challenge turns easier, so a fun game needs to have a well-tuned difficulty progression to keep in pace with your improving skills.
That doesn't mean that it has to be bad or destructive! Fun is a positive thing, and most game designers I've met from across the industry are in it because they just want to make people have fun.
Dopamine release is a bit of a curio, really. You don't make design decisions based on optimising dopamine release; there's no way of doing that. But it's interesting to know the physiological reasons why people think that things are fun, and it's useful evidence when building a framework such as Raph's.
If you think about it from this perspective than it certainly makes sense to add elements of randomness with intermittent reinforcement (e.g. slot machine) to any game or quick rewards and exponential progression (e.g. Cookie Clicker). Meanwhile you have games like Shenzhen.io which have a PDF that you need to go through to solve programming puzzles and no hints. What part of human psychology is being exploited here outside of progression from solving the puzzle which you would naturally always have?
Or even look at Shenmue. While every game at the time was a platformer where you collected things, Shenmue made you take on a partime job doing fork lifting, yet it is a cult classic. Did they use a framework to make that decision? Doesn't seem like it when it defied all game design at the time.
This and the other scenarios you mention are deliberately created to make the player have fun. They are all engineered to manipulate the player’s emotions, the intention is to trigger dopamine and other neurological reactions. As I said, that doesn’t have to be a bad thing!
You don’t have to think about it in terms of chemical reactions, but artificially creating fun is the goal, if you boil it down.
You do get that dopamine hit when you achieve a goal in Shenzen.io, or even a self-directed goal in Shenmue, whether the designers thought that way or not.
As Raph Koster says, fun is linked to progression and learning.
Progression applies to self directed goals too (you’re setting yourself a series of minor goals when driving the forklift in Shenmue).
Ironically, motivation theory tells us that the intrinsic fun of doing undirected chores in Shenmue or mastering facts about the systems in Shenzen.io is stronger than the onslaught of mostly extrinsic rewards generated by Cookie Clicker. You had less fun playing that game, that’s one of many reasons why.
That isn't to say there isn't any logic to the design of great games but also something much more intuitive to their design decisions that doesn't follow known principals or science.
A framework like this does, however, help you make better artistic choices. It helps to identify why something isn’t having the impact you thought it should and gives you some insight on how to fix it. It also helps you to deconstruct other works and understand why they do or do not work.
which leads to
https://www.raphkoster.com/2014/01/15/a-vision-exercise/
and its critique counterpart:
https://www.raphkoster.com/2014/01/06/how-i-analyze-a-game/
and crucially, the observation in here that you can start with either end -- the experience you want or the systems -- but you gotta make them meet in the middle.
These days, game design is generally taught as "decide on your experience, and fit systems into that." But I favor being open to starting from either end, and also in general think that focusing so strongly on the experience has a LOT of dev pitfalls:"
https://www.raphkoster.com/games/presentations/rules-of-the-...
Lastly -- starting at this end is just as artistic as starting from a chord progression, a cool synth sound, a color palette, or a piece of wood with interesting grain. Just as with any other craft-centric view on things, it's fine to start at a formal or an experiential end -- both are artistic.
FWIW, I have an MFA. :)
https://youtu.be/56ENqlUST9U "What is fun? Let's overthink it!" by Indie Game Clinic
It's not a matter of "simple vs. easy". If you have to write many words to list your ideas and you state each idea is deep and connected to all the other ideas, the thing you are talking about is not simple.
This is an amazing article. I work on game design and I think this could work as a map of the terrain.
Almost every other domain has its specialized language: SQL, Julia, even HTML/CSS/JS.. but game developers still have to trundle on with general purpose languages invented 500 years ago by people who had nothing to do with games.
Game development can be generalized to algorithms and languages targeted to specific processors and architectures because it's a subset of programming and computer science. You can't have a DSL for design because the domain is the human mind. The design of a game like Undertale has absolutely nothing to do with the language used to develop it.
Unless you're talking about things like modelling and UV unwrapping and the like, but even then I don't see what benefit a separate language would provide.
Gameplay and game mechanics are fairly different from making other types of programs. Things like stats, buffs/debuffs, conditions, and their dependencies on each other.
It's all sort of a vague middle ground between typed vs untyped, static vs dynamic, inheritance vs composition, sequential vs asynchronous, and other oddities that make it distinct from other domains.
> You can't have a DSL for design because the domain is the human mind. The design of a game like Undertale has absolutely nothing to do with the language used to develop it.
But what if coding could correspond almost 1:1 to the design?
I've been attempting some of it here: https://github.com/InvadingOctopus/comedot
with stuff like abstracting the idea of "Actions" that could be anything from a verb like "Look at" in a text-based adventure, to clicking on spells/weapons buttons in a turn-based strategy game, or a Dash move in a platformer etc.
Fantasizing about elevating those concepts to being core keywords in a hypothetical language is my equivalent of counting sheep to fall asleep :)
See, SQL for example don't care about the hardware or the internals of the database it runs on, why couldn't we have something like that for gameplay?
Honorable mentions might go to PICO-8's flavor of Lua (C-like but clearly designed to create a specific type of game and have a specific developer experience) and Excel (used for developing & balancing game mechanics, but usually replaced in the final product).
That is referencing the "game grammar" effort undertaken by myself, Dan Cook, Stephane Bura, Joris Dormans, and many others. It is very specifically about arriving at a notation system for gameplay logic.
The original talk from 2005 is here: https://www.raphkoster.com/games/presentations/a-grammar-of-...
The principles in this talk went on to be used by the field of computational modeling of games, AI game generators, and also used in training AI game players.
Look how exciting mystery is and how boring well known things are, but ironically there's a lot more to, say, the theory of gravity that if contextualized differently would be exciting and deeply interesting that 'unknowns' like the mystery of some cult or whatever can't even come close to, but in the end, there's something inside of us that wants to read about that cult. I make sure to self-aware of this and do deep dives into the boring 'known' world and push back on the sensationalism and such I'm so drawn to.
There's a lot of things about our real world, that if told by an alien race, would make us sound like ethereal wizards.
"They convinced the sand itself to think for them, guided the power of Sol to move them, and spoke to eachother through the very fabric of energy that moves invisibly through us all"
Similar to that, there's a bunch of magic/fantasy storytelling that can kind of pull me out of disbelief, because I can't help but think "yeah we have that, it's electricity" or "witches are just pharamacists without good research"
And it's kind of weird, but I preferred the old-style questing (many repeated quests and perhaps less streamlined experience) compared to what came afterwards.
In Cataclysm they tried to improve the quest experience, add more variety, but somehow the game lost a bit of its magic - at least from my point of view.