Daria. Who would have thought that your cutting remarks would be so poignant a decade later.
…
I think I was going to talk about something but I just can’t recall what that …
Oh, right: Good news everyone! I’ve found a new source of thoughtful game criticism in video form called “Errant Signal”. The latest of which is the following:
He also has a blog called, you guessed it, Errant Signal where he expands upon his thoughts on game design, it’s context and the overall state of the videogame industry.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed by my praise, but I love what this guy is doing. Every piece of criticism he elaborates on is well thought out and spot on. Well …. most of the time. When analyzing Half-Life he made the point that changing gears every two hours was “bad” for some reason. I mean, how is that bad at all? It lets the player breathe after every exhausting action sequence and on top of that, it serves to change things up so the player doesn’t get bored.
You go from shooting, to puzzles, to driving sections to more shooting to big action set pieces to more puzzles and so on. You could make the argument that the game should be shorter and more compact but that’s an entirely different criticism, because these constant changes were not designed with the intent of making the game longer. They’re there for pacing purposes (That’s a link to an Extra Credits video. If you don’t know what Extra Credits is, shame on you! Go watch every single video they made. NOW!).
Anyway, besides that little tidbit, I really appreciate what this guy is doing.
Finding ones own creative voice is, as you might imagine, quite a difficult task. In all of the years I’ve been writing for this blog I’ve delved into very different subject matter every single month. Some topics always come up and it’s only now that it occurred to me that I should sit down and think about what drives me as a game designer.
Because at the end of the day, the games that I like to make and the games that I like to play are two different subjects. It’s not that they don’t have anything in common, of course, so I think that’s a good place to start since it’s always been clear to me what I like as a game player:
The thrill of the chase, the gracefulness of the movement of my character, the unexpected responses to my actions, the consequences to my seemingly unimportant actions, the feeling that the game world is alive, the atmosphere, that feeling of not having deciphered all of the rules yet (which can be used beautifully in horror games), stepping outside the explicit or implicit rules by my own volition (“cheating” you might say) and the excitement when a rule is broken exactly once by the game itself and for reasons that not only make sense but also carry a meaning behind them. There are other examples naturally, but the ones I mentioned are the most significant.
Oh, also: Numbers going up and random rewards, or in other words: I like RPGs. Yes, I know, but I can’t help it when those tactics are used well.
On the other hand I have a very clear idea of what I don’t like: Noninteractive sections that have no other purpose than to serve as masturbatory material for the art/story department (that includes exposition for more than 30 seconds, watching someone do really cool stuff that was impossible inside the rules of the game, and a load of other things), a system of rules that rewards luck over any other player aspect (skill, decision-making, hours spent, etc), chores with no other purpose than to waste my time, DIAS (Do It Again Stupid), rules that sabotage the game’s strongest points and excessive hand-holding at the cost of exploration (the latest nintendo games…) and this other thing and that one and and and…. and a motherload of other stuff that I shouldn’t even mention for the sake of brevity.
Well, all I need to do now is distill all of that into the barest essentials.
…
You know, erhm … it’s … it’s complicated.
I’ve written and rewritten this time and time again, going into minute detail then replacing it all with a few simple bullet points that ended up being entire paragraphs unto themselves. Going from obvious generalizations to my personal quirks, I just can’t analyze this stuff without going overboard. Nothing just clicks. I want to find what identifies me as a game designer, but I don’t know how.
Mmmhhh. I think I’m overanalyzing this. Let me try a simpler approach: I’ll start with only one sentence and then expand from that concept without bursting it all out at once.
…
How about this:
I like to build well constructed systems of rules that can/should be broken either by the game designer or by the player.
Heh, that’s a good start but I don’t like the focus on rule-breaking. Let’s try something else:
I’m interested in building systems of rules that permit players to experience unexpected, sometimes unscripted and yet always interesting moments.
Now we’re getting somewhere. Expanding it a bit more we get:
I like to build systems of rules that:
Permit the player to experience unexpected, sometimes unscripted and yet always interesting moments.
Are built to resonate with the context and viceversa. Neither being more important than the other.
Respond to a consistent logic both inside and outside the context.
Yes! That’s about it in a nutshell. Though I suspect that most of you don’t have a complete idea of what exactly I’m talking about in those bullet-points. If that’s the case, then let me refer you to a post I did back in March titled “My favorite moment, deconstructed“*. That moment is very special for all the reasons I already explained in that post, but now that I’ve narrowed down what drives me as a designer I can say that I also like that moment precisely because it’s the type of moment I would love to design and build myself. It resonates with me both as a player and as a designer.
To be specific, that moment is both unexpected and interesting, built to resonate with the context (the shopkeeper warns the player not to steal and his face seems quite … let’s say evil.) and on top of that, it follows an internal logic hinted at the player by the delay in which the shopkeeper tracks the position of Link.
It’s … it’s perfect.
And precisely that kind of moments is what I want to have in my own games.
Also, this other game called LSD seems to be a good source of ideas (and nightmare fuel) that explore the “unexpected, unscripted yet interesting” moments:
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*That’s one of the best posts I’ve ever written, though I don’t want to think what that says about me as a writer …
If you’ve ever been interested in how to improve educational methods, please have a read here. It’s a news story about a teacher that devised a way to compel his students to learn the latin language and love it.
[Warning: Rant incoming]
I don’t know how effective it’s going to be, but immediately it sounds better than the 12 years of schoolwork and half-assed lessons I’ve had to go through to “learn” english. If you’re so inclined, see for yourself how awkward were my posts here 3 years ago. Then think about the fact that each one of those required a minimum of three hours of editing (which were mostly attributed to weird sentence structures and misspellings).
I’ve been quite busy in the past few months due to an unprecedented load of work being dropped in my lap by my teachers in the form of what I assume can be called “assignments”.
So, given my lack of precious time, please excuse me while I offload my condensed thoughts here:
Motion control is in a transition phase and that’s the reason why so many people are disenchanted with it. It lacks the tactile feedback that is necessary for it to work in more broad terms. The only things that really work right now are the ones that don’t need this tactile feedback: Mainly throwing, dancing and shooting.
Sword fights don’t quite work because when a sword clashes inside the game, it bounces, but the player doesn’t register this interaction in the same way. Sparks may fly, a clashing sound may play and the controller may rumble, but that isn’t enough, the swing of the player’s arm needs to stop as it does inside the game…. and that is impossible right now with the technology available.
The same goes for the feeling of “fingers over glass” that touchscreens are recognized for.
As it turns out, I’m still susceptible to be trapped by basic collectible mechanics if the game underneath is good enough. Even if the reward is as vapid and uninteresting as artwork and/or trophies.
I think I’m the only member of society that actively wants a Zelda game that isn’t completely linear. For me, an open world gated with artificial obstacles only serves to undermine the sense of wonder and adventure. Once the gates have been removed then what’s left to explore?
Ray-casting is rapidly nearing interactive speeds which might mean that in a generation or two we’ll see very impressive graphics, especially in the lighting department.
Box2D is not nearly as complete as I was hoping for, which kind of delayed a tech demo I’ve started to build.
Flash continues to fail to support the disabling of the context menu, which continues to enrage me.
It’s the first time that I’m writting you, so forgive me if I seem blunt, but would you kindly get rid of the f*cking context menu for the flash player? It’s the single most annoying thing about your applet. Nobody else does anything remotely similar to that, not javascript, not java, not unity and especially not html5, your strongest competition in the coming years. I’m asking this for your own sake.
Since you are soon to be releasing a new version of Flash with a new focus on games, I’m inclined to believe that you’ll let developers use the f*cking right mouse button. I mean, you’re showing videos of Unreal Tournament 3 working inside flash! You’d have to be f*cking insane not to give developers the option to disable the context menu, right?
RIGHT?
I know that your flash technology used to be all about animation, and that’s why at first it seemed harmless to have a context menu. I mean, hey, there’s no interactivity with the applet itself so it seemed like a good idea. I know. That was 14 years ago. Things have changed and you might have noticed that developers now want to use the right mouse button for things other than displaying a f*cking context menu. We’ve even gone to the extremes of hacking around your applet, even if said hacks are never compatible with every browser out there (I’m looking at you Opera). We’re willing to loose some of our audience just to give our players a better experience and more intuitive control.
As it turns out, education is not such a simple subject.
I was naive. Hell, I still am in many respects, but I’m here to address some of the gaping holes in this post.
My primary error while proposing a new grading system was that I didn’t know or was blissfully unaware of the fundamental difference between actually learning and just doing busywork. Because at the end of the day, the important thing is that the student has learned something. If the student spent 3/4 of the year studying or just a couple of weeks in total shouldn’t be of importance. We shouldn’t treat these students differently if both have retained the same amount of knowledge.
In the current education system, no matter where in the world you live in, trite busywork is what separates an excellent grade from an average one. And that’s because busywork is easily quantifiable. An “A” means the student did all of the busywork while a “B” means the student did only 85% of it.
Sometimes you can pass a class by just doing what the teacher says without ever absorbing any actual knowledge. Or in other words, you know that “2+2 = 4″ and “2+3 = 5″ but you don’t know what to do when confronted with a “2+3+2″ operation.
Doing busywork doesn’t always translate into knowledge or a lesson learned or any understanding of any kind. Taking a test on the other hand … does evaluate actual knowledge to some extent. (That is, if its done well, but I’m not getting into that topic for now). So, actual knowledge is only quantifiable through tests.
The problem most of the time is, as I’ve said in the past, that tests don’t reward knowledge, they just punish mistakes. On top of that, tests only evaluate knowledge during the couple of hours that they last. After that, the student is free to forget all about the subject he just spent the last 2 or more days studying. Unless there’s another similar test in the future, of course.
But all of this is just a problem of written tests.
If the test is just a conversation between the teacher and the student, then these problems vanish. No longer are mistakes directly punished and there’s a more direct correlation between what the teacher sees the student knows and what the student actually knows.
There are still three problems to this approach though:
The obvious one is that the teacher can’t evaluate 100 students in a day. Hell, I’d be surprised if he could do that in under a week. So: the efficiency of an oral test is deplorable, since it has been traded for effectiveness.
How do you assign a grade in an oral exam? The teacher has to *gasp* actually judge how much the student knows.
On the other hand, this approach means the teacher is depending on the ability of the student to communicate on the fly, to talk. Some people have an extreme difficulty to do this effectively, so they always prefer written tests because they can spend as much time as they want to try and build each sentence.
I used to be one of those people. In fact, I was like that through all of my schooling life. It wasn’t until I reached the university level of education that I started to improve. But that wouldn’t have been the case if at least someone had cared about my communication skills at an earlier point in my life. And you know what? In retrospective, having regular oral exams would have helped me get over this problem.
Grading is also a problem for teachers that don’t want to engage students directly. These kinds of teachers could just grab a regular conversation and turn it into the equivalent of a written exam where a single mistake is enough to lower the grade. The solution: Get. Better. Teachers. Teachers that care about what they’re teaching and most of all, that care about the students themselves.
So now we’re only left with one major issue as to how to improve testing procedures: Efficiency.
…
Yeah, there’s no getting around that. There’s a trade-off that can’t be broken, at least not until we invent a chatbot intelligent enough to do the testing.
…
Well, since we are talking only in theory, we could say that the teacher’s job should be to test and teach at the same time. That the classrooms should have at most 20 students and perhaps more than one teacher. That the teaching process be 30% exposition and 70% conversation.
And maybe while we are at it, we should stop world hunger, give an interesting and fulfilling job to everyone and cure cancer. I’m very aware that what I’m proposing is far from possible in most parts of the world. However, I would settle for something like this:
The ladies and gentlemen that are responsible for how our education systems work, would you please give a f*ck?
As the casual genre grows larger with each passing year, I’ve come to develop a certain distaste and at the same time respect for most of the games in the genre. Some attempts at capturing the market are just lazy “me too” games that do nothing more than poisoning the well, but I’m talking about the good games under the casual umbrella.
To get into specifics, I’m gonna be talking about games such as Angry Birds, Peggle, Plants vs Zombies, Bejeweled, Zuma, Canabalt, Pong* and many others I can’t recall at the moment. I respect these games because I can clearly see why they are/were successful, what was their respective designer’s intent and above all else, what kind of person would play games like this. Namely: Everyone. That is, everyone but people like me.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve liked most of these games at one point or another, but with repeated playthroughs I grew increasingly dissatisfied. They’re all great for what they are, but I can’t shake the feeling that they don’t satiate my hunger for play. They seem to avoid all of the core reasons why I play games in the first place.
I always thought I knew why I don’t like these games. They throw out rewards like candy for accomplishments such as “choosing the right angle to throw something”. It’s cheap. It’s meaningless. It’s crass. They have absolutely no soul to speak of. They don’t have anything to say other than “You’re awesome!”.
But you know what? That’s not what bothers me. Hell, Mario fits that criteria almost perfectly and that has never bothered me in the slightest.
It’s only recently that it dawned on me the real reason: All of these games at the very least have limited input and at the very worst don’t require a player in the first place. They play themselves.
And that’s incredibly frustrating to me.
I can’t help but feel that I should be more in control of what’s happening in the screen. I want to be able to do more, I want to be able to do what I can in other very similar games. I want to be able to guide my birds mid-flight, I want to tell the game to throw the ball with a specific amount of force, I want to tell my plants when to start firing, I want to move my jewels around even if they don’t create a match, I want to move around the board, I want to decelerate at will and finally I want to move around horizontally as well.
I feel that the limited input is restraining my freedom of expression.
In retrospect I realize that this is obvious, but it bears to be stated: These games were not made for people like me. But then, what is the audience of these games exactly? My guess is that they don’t want to control too many things at once. These people are content to have minimal input, even if that means that the game practically plays itself.
In other words, these people have not played many games and/or have no interest in them as anything other than a time-killing diversion.
Simple games with simple control-schemes, simple to explore mechanics with simple options and simple strategies. Basically, shallow gameplay.
It feels great to finally realize why I don’t like these games.
…
But there’s one particularly popular game that is still stuck in my mind: Bejeweled.
It’s restrictions are so astounding that I can’t help but feel like the designers had a very specific audience in mind. An audience that doesn’t like choice, because they get flustered and start feeling as if they’re playing the game wrong. These people are happy to be given the least amount of options possible, even if there’s absolutely no challenge to the decisions they’re left with. Everything they might choose is a correct answer. Everything is a positive feedback loop. The game literally plays itself, it just waits for some player input to continue.
I suppose it’s harmless, but I can’t help to feel a very creepy vibe from that game.
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*Pong is going to be an exception to most generalizations I make in this post, but I feel like that’s a product of its age more than of its design.
Education is not a topic I think about very regularly, but when I do … I feel compelled to talk about it and the problems behind the current system. Luckily for me, Sir Ken Robinson does an excellent job at that in the following videos. Mainly, he speaks about education and the various adverse effects it has on creativity, the sense of self-worth and the understanding of intelligence.
These are two of his TED talks, the first one is from 2007:
And the second is from 2010:
After watching both videos I realize I’m quite lucky. I liked mathematics since I was very little and so the heavy focus on mathematical thinking didn’t hurt me in any way. I didn’t feel suffocated. What I did find boring, unsatisfying and a complete waste of time was the history classes. Mostly because the teaching methods and the subjects involved were so boring, uninvolving and downright depressing that I just couldn’t bear the thought of studying this garbage at home. Or paying attention in class for that matter. Decorating the chair with a faulty liquid paper was a more involving and interesting experience.
In retrospect, my main problem was that I really suck at memorizing things literally. I have to decompose them, I have to understand what they mean and link everything within the web of knowledge that’s inside my brain. I have no use for dates if I don’t have a context for them. I can remember them for an exam but they won’t stay with me after a few days.
1945, the end WWII? Yeah, I didn’t memorize that number until I learned all the context surrounding it. And you know what’s the worst part? I actually learned more about WWII from Wikipedia, National Geographic and the History Channel than from school.
Let me repeat that: I learned more in a few hours of television than years of history classes.
Oh, and that whole thing about making children afraid of being wrong? And that every question has only one answer? That’s absolutely true. I was terrified every single time the English teacher assigned us students with creating a short story. A STORY? About what? How should I start? What if it’s wrong? I can’t come up with anything… Why do I have only have an hour to pour my creative juices onto the page? but what if I’m not finished by then? Should I just end it and be done with it?
They spent years and years kicking the creativity out of our skulls and NOW they want us to engage in something creative?
Frankly, I didn’t find my creative side until I left school.
I didn’t even know I had a creative side before then.
I’ve already talked about my newly discovered dislike for a certain gaming news blog that starts with a “K” and ends with “otaku”, so I thought it would be fitting to also talk about my love for the gaming blog Destructoid.
There’s no roundabout way of saying it, so let’s take the bull by the horns: A gigantic part of Destructoid is Jim Sterling. A man capable of the stupidest jokes you’ll ever see on the internet, at least at face value. His comedy is very hit or miss but there’s always a reasoning behind it. An infamously bad example of his shocking humor would be the time he … well, just go here and take a look at the comments if you don’t dare to play the video. Low-brow? Of course it is, just as low-brow as the source material. You can’t say that the game wasn’t intended for what Mr Sterling did.
But that’s not why I love most of his stuff, especially in recent years. What fascinates me is that even though he’s the reviews editor for the site, his commitment to express his own opinion as unfiltered as possible is unparalleled. If he loves something, he’ll let you know in a heart-beat. If he hates something, he’ll rip it apart. No matter what game it is, no matter what company is behind that game and no matter it’s metacritic score.
Excuse my language, but what he does takes some balls.
Now, having said all of that, my love for the site wouldn’t be as strong if it weren’t for their Community Blogs and how they promote the very best of them to the front page. For example, I recently read this essay on why motion controls shouldn’t be used for 1:1 movement. It exposes a fundamental flaw with these types of controls, using simple terms and even illustrations to help an average reader understand. On top of that the author even makes a few suggestions on how to improve the current systems used for hand to hand combat.
There’s an air of honesty and intelligent discourse around the site that I just find quite appealing.
Dialog seems to be a topic I haven’t touched in quite a while*, and reading other people’s thoughts on the matter (like this one from Line Hollis) has sparked my interest again on the subject.
Then again, the lack of creativity and innovation we see in dialog mechanics is as inviting to a game designer as is a blank canvas to a painter. I can’t help but dream of more non-conventional ways to portray dialog every time I encounter a new annoyance with the established systems … which is why I’m kind of surprised I haven’t touched the subject for so long. I guess my overall lack of actual gaming could explain such an ocurrence.
Anyway, that’s enough faffing about, let’s get down to business:
Imagine if a dialog system wasn’t based on what is actually said, but instead based on the intention. To achieve something like that, my mind inmediately found a compromise: Use descriptions of what is being said instead of the lines themselves.
Such a system could use a traditional tree-based structure, but that’s boring, so let’s shoot for something more ambitious: Let’s use a directed graph structure. It’s a higher level of complexity, but we can afford it since the change to a descriptive dialog form has freed our need to keep track of the bulk of the data exchanged in conversation. For example, I don’t need to keep track of names unless it’s relevant to the conversation.
To complement this approach we could add a shout/declaration mechanic that would work somewhat like the gestures in Fable 2: The player does an action that more than one NPC can receive, interpret and then give feedback on. In other words, the player would have the ability to map certain topics of dialog to the shout/declare key. Upon pressing such a key, whoever is near and is able to listen can react to the player’s declaration.
Let me give you an example to make things clearer: The player character just robbed a knight to give the stolen treasures to the poor. The player maps this topic to the shout key and starts using it in the middle of a town. A crowd might gather, people might cheer and the guards may try to split the player character’s head open. Fun!
Since we would be using a directed graph structure, that means we could have options that are always available, like insults, compliments and even specific phrases such as “I’m the king of the leprechauns, bow before my greatness or die by my magic pickaxe”. Yeah, that phrase wasn’t exactly a description, because after all, not everything needs to be in a description format. Rules are meant to be broken, especially in videogames.
Now, going back to the conversations themselves, I’m very aware that the success of such a system depends profoundly on how it’s executed. And even then, it may even be impossible to construct in the first place. Well, that may be the case if we are talking about a huge RPG with thousands of unique NPCs. Of course, attempting such a thing would be suicidal, so something a little smaller needs to be built first.
There are many things that can be done in order to make this system viable, but the key to it all is in the descriptive nature of it. For example, you could use minigames to represent parts of a conversation. You would choose the option to talk about a certain subject and then a minigame would play out where the player is basically a detective trying to find if there’s any information that the NPC is not sharing.
The joy of dialog mechanically speaking is one of exploration, so why wouldn’t a classic exploration-based game work for something like this? A mini-metroidvania would be perfect if you ask me. Knowledge would be represented as the space in the map and the platforming elements would represent the arguments and logic. Lies would be illusions, outright refusal to talk about something would be an invisble wall. Furthermore, the ability to question and to detect lies could be represented as the different abilities of the platforming protagonist.
The directed graph structure doesn’t even need to be all that complicated, it depends on the execution and the intention of the designer.
I don’t know. I’m obviously biased, but I think a dialog system like this could work really well. Especially if there’s a certain variety between conversations. After all, the system has a decent amount of flexibility on paper.
