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Winners Without Losers, Games Without End

A few weeks ago, I wrote of the glory and beauty of victory conditions and how, if your game doesn’t have them, it’s not really a game: it’s a toy.

I wrote it. I believed. And I still believe it. And yet today, I want to look at games without true victory conditions that are nevertheless considered by many (including myself) to be true games.

The Obligatory List of Examples

Tabletop RPGs are the ultimate examples of these games. For decades, the idea that these games “have no losers and cannot be won” has been part of the whole RPG ethos. (It’s also part of what makes them hard to explain to Aunt June, who still thinks they’re a gateway to satanism. “A lack of victory conditions is the devil’s playground!”) You can complete your adventure, or your character can die trying, but the game is never over.

MMORPGs follow the same philosophy. You might get your character to max level (“I win?”) but the game goes on.

The Sims, anyone? More than RPGs, these games have been accused of being toys rather than proper games, but I think they stand up to that accusation as well as World of Warcraft does, for reasons I’ll get into below.

Minecraft has also been accused of toyhood not only for its lack of end game, but its lack of any directed game play at all. At least The Sims gives the player some direction via its characters’ aspirations. In Minecraft, the most direction you get is, “Try not to get blown up or eaten.”

Many Facebook games have no obvious victory conditions. You harvest your crop, feed your fish, collect your rent — but at what point do you win? Even in this new wave of strategy games, there is no true winning or losing, just the constant struggle. (There are exceptions, of course: Bejewelled Blitz and its brethren, trivia games, and other short-session puzzles and arcade games that can be won or lost in 60 seconds. No one’s challenging their game-hood.)

So are these not games? They’re commonly thought of as such, but without victory conditions, are we all just fooling ourselves?

No

No, they’re all games. They even have victory conditions. But unlike “normal” games (especially those played on the tabletop with boards, cards, and dice), they don’t have game-ending victory conditions.

Win or lose, the game goes on.

Within a game, there are smaller “game units,” which I’ll call “sessions.” In an RPG, a session might be an adventure into a dungeon. In an MMO, it’s a quest or quest-chain. In a Facebook game, it could also be a quest, or it might be simply the gameplay you have until you run out of game energy.

Each session has its victory conditions: Kill the dragon. Reach level 10. Get that magic shiny horse.

A session can also be defined by its victory conditions. This is especially true if the player can set his own victory conditions. In The Sims, for example, if you want to build an expansion to your sims’ house, all the game play leading up to that point could be considered its own session. Ditto for Minecraft. Whether your goal is to build a castle, craft a suit of armor, or fully explore a new cave system, all the play leading you towards that goal is its own session.

A game session continues until you achieve victory. You kill the dragon, get the mount, build that expansion, or explore every inch of a Minecraft cave.

You’ve done it! You’ve won the session!

But the game goes on.

And on and on and on…

I stand by my original statement: Games need victory conditions to be more than a toy.

But achieving those conditions need not end the game. It only ends the session. And there’s always another session right around the corner.

If you have any thoughts or questions – or a better term for “session” – I’d love to hear them in the comments.

World of Conflict

How can something be utterly fascinating and yet boring? When there’s no drama, no suspense; when there’s no conflict.

I’ve seen my share of nature documentaries. (“Look, kids! Lemurs!”) I’ve yet to see one that’s just a recitation of facts and figure, presented in conjunction with supporting images on the screen. (“The lemur is found on three continents. It can kill with its eyes. It eats the following insects: ants, beetles, cockroaches…”)

Instead, it’s always a story. It’s always the same story (baby animal survives predators and other hardships to grow into an adult and have its own adorable animal babies), but it’s a story all the same.

Most importantly, it’s a story with conflict:

Lemur versus cannibal siblings!
Lemur versus hard winter!
Lemur versus potential mates who just need some time to find themselves, thanks anyway for trying!
Lemur versus lemur-eating pterodactyls!

My point is this: Facts without conflict can engage you on an abstract, intellectual level. But inject some drama into those facts, and now they engage you on the visceral, emotional level as well.

Without conflict, you know. With conflict, you care.

This matters a lot when it comes to world-building.

Whether for fiction or games, if you’re building a new world, that world should engage the audience on an emotional level. You’re not just describing the setting, you’re selling it. If you want the audience to buy into your world for an extended period of time, you need them to care about it. There needs to be conflict.

I’m preaching to myself here, folks.

I love world-building. I enjoy putting twists on familiar tropes, piecing together the elements in a way that makes logical sense yet is something we haven’t seen before. (“The elves live in a vast network of underground caves that they carved out with their own acidic saliva! Now I’ll write up a dozen elven rituals based around acid spit!”)

But too often, when I’m done, what I have is fascinating, but boring. Guided by my words, the reader could fit in very well with the acid elves (for example)… but he wouldn’t want to. Because there’s no conflict. Because the world is boring.

And that, brothers and sisters, is why we have second drafts.

Now the elves are split into factions, and squabble over acid-spit religious differences. They compete for space and food in the caverns with the acid-dwarves, who claim the underground as their ancestral right. A sub-group of elves is born without acid glands and prefer to live on the surface. They’re rejected as traitors by most but secretly worshiped by others.

Now it might be exciting to hang out with these guys. Now I want to roll up an acid-elf character, or read about the adventures of an acid-elf zealot. Now there’s drama.

Now it’s not boring any more.

Have tips to make world-building more exciting? Share them in the comments, and we’ll all be a bit wiser.

Think of the Children!

A lot of ink has been spilled, both virtual and physical, over the recent Supreme Court ruling on video games. Specifically, the court overturned the California law that would make it illegal to sell violent video games to minors. That ink has been spilled by better writers than I, but I’d like to take this chance to drop a few more dribbles for readers who don’t keep up with such news. (Waves to the family.)

I’ve seen a couple headlines on this story that suggested the Court has no problem with kids playing overly-violent video games, or that it’s wrong to try and control what kids play. That’s not the case.

What the Supreme Court said with its ruling is that video games get the same First Amendment protections enjoyed by books and films. The government (in this, the state of California) can’t arbitrarily decided that this media is its own category, some misbegotten half-breed consumer product that needs to be regulated like tobacco or alcohol.

It said, in essence, that video games are art.

Not all art is suitable for children. Some art will offend. But it’s all protected as free speech.

Sorry, Californian parents. You can’t count on the government and Walmart clerks to do your job for you. It’s up to you to monitor what your kids are playing and — this is hard, I know — tell them “no” when you don’t approve.

Here’s a handy guide: Every video game has a rating on its packaging, from E (for everyone, the gaming equivalent to a “G” movie) to AO (adults only, same as “X,” and no, they don’t make many of these). Look at the ratings on the games in your house. Do you want your kids playing that? If not, don’t let them.

I’m not being snarky, by the way. I’m serious. As both a parent and guy who makes games, it’s important to me that parents be part of their kids’ entertainment choices.

Are you the parents of a gamer? What are you thoughts?

The D&D Code

Last night, I rolled up my first Dungeons and Dragons character in over a decade. I never played third edition (not sure how that happened), and haven’t made a character for second edition since… Well, maybe it was one of Bobo’s games in Bloomington, in which I was playing a vampire-hunting Ranger. (My memories of those times are hazy, but rose-colored, and feature using a ballista a shoot a message bearer at 100 yards.)

Okay, I didn’t “roll” anything. My friend Steve walked me through the character creation process on his laptop, using WotC’s online character tool. No dice – not even virtual ones – were rolled. With the software taking us step-by-step through the process, and Steve explaining some of the more technical details of the mechanics (“Shift means you can move without provoking opportunity actions.”) it was relatively painless.

I was a little surprised to see that most of my character sheet was filled with character powers. You get powers for leveling up (it’s a 6th level character), powers for feats, powers for equipment. But then I remembered: Third edition was the same way. (No, I never played it, but I read a lot of it.) Classes were always giving you special abilities as you leveled up. A class was pretty much *defined* by the abilities it gave you.

Come to think of it, wasn’t second ed like that too? Lots of unique special abilities, divided up by class? (Seriously, I don’t remember. Wasn’t it like that?)

So the big difference is that the powers are now codified to heck and back. All timing questions are answered. All interaction questions are answered. And all the powers’ core systems work the same as the core systems of the game. (One of my biggest pet peeves with early D&D editions is abilities with unique systems. Grrrr.)

Codification seems to be a good thing. So why does it bother me somewhere in my old-school gamer gut?

I don’t know. But I’m sure I’ll still have fun, so long as I don’t stop to analyze every little thing with my game-designer monocle on. (Mental note: Leave the monocle at home.)

Skies? Falling. Expectations? Rising.

My wife and I were in the movie theater when a commercial (I’m sorry, I mean “exclusive preview”) for TNT’s new show, Falling Skies, came on. It’s about post-apocalyptic survivors fighting a guerrilla war against the invading aliens that all but wiped out humanity. I whispered to my wife, “This could only appeal more to me if it also had Batman.”

I love a good alien invasion story. I love post-apocalyptic settings. I love rag-tag bands of rebels fighting against an overwhelming force. Falling Skies promised all of that (though not Batman) and, in last night’s premiere, followed through on that promise with a delivery of action, drama, and better-than-average special effects.

Oh, it’s no Battlestar Galactica or Firefly. But it could get there. It’s already started touching some of the same philosophical issues as BSG, such as the division of civilians and military in the time of war, and I expect there will be plenty more before they’re done.

I’ll be watching it again next week. And if you like this sort of thing, I’d recommend that you check it out too.

Clarity by Design

Sit down, son. It’s time we had a talk about where video games come from. You see, when a designer loves a game idea very much (or is paid a sufficient amount of money – that’s a talk for another time), he encapsulates that idea in what’s known a game design document, or GDD.

The purpose of a GDD is to serve as a single, concrete reference for the game. Ideally, each person who’s working on the game would be assigned his own personal copy of the game designer, who’s kept on a leash and fed Twinkies, in order to explain every element of the game as it comes up. But since we don’t have that kind of cloning technology yet (and some states have outlawed Twinkie-slaves), those people have to rely on the GDD instead.

The key to writing a good GDD is clarity. The enemies of clarity are ambiguity, tequila, and a compound audience.

Ambiguity

Never assume the reader knows what you’re talking about. You know the old saying, “If you assume, you waste everyone’s time and will likely get throat-punched by your producer.”

Sure, when I wrote, “The player chooses the red monkey,” I knew I meant that the player selects the “Simian Gladiators” from the drop-down menu, then scrolls through the options until he finds the red monkey, selects it, and then clicks the button marked, “MONKEY FIGHT!” — but the poor programmer tasked with coding the thing might have his own ideas about how it’s supposed to work. Maybe they’re good ideas. Maybe they lead directly to the creation of SkyNet. Do you want to leave that sort of thing to chance? Of course not.

Define everything. List each step in the process. And if you value your non-throat-punched state, make sure you never confuse your definitions.

Tequila

You might think that drinking leads to clarity, but that’s just the booze talking, and it does not have your best interests at heart. It is, in fact, a poison. It’s trying to kill you. Even worse, it’s trying to get you punched in the throat and fired. Save the drinking for when you’re working on your novel — that’s when it turns you into a freaking literary genius.

Compound Audience

Know your audience. If you’re writing a GDD as part of a pitch for the executives considering which investment for third quarter will pay off better — your game or a new Lexus — you’d better write that thing aimed squarely at their coal-black hearts. Focus on why it’s an awesome game with huge profit potential.

Or if you’re writing for a licensor, describe how the game celebrates and embraces the property, while celebrating and embracing expanded markets with deeper pockets. And if you’re writing for programmers, you can skip the squishy “This part of the game is awesome!” bits and jump straight into the technical nitty-gritty.

The problem comes in when you have multiple audiences. Yes, it’s a technical document for the programmers, but the artists need some love too. So do the licensors, and execs who still can’t get that Lexus off their minds. Trying to serve all these masters, as Tadhg Kelly points out, results in an “amorphous, unwieldy and poorly written document.” So what to do?

I recommend sidebars. Maybe they’re literal sidebars if your software supports it; maybe they’re just asides scattered throughout the main text. Maybe they’re even their own files, if you’re following the “lots of tiny files instead one giant file” GDD philosophy.

For example, if you’re writing about the different classes of monkeys and the types weapons they can carry, you may include a sidebar for the artist with weapon references and suggestions on how to make the monkeys visually distinct from one another. Another sidebar might be pointed at the marketing guys, detailing how the inclusion of monkeys has been shown to add 10 percent to any game’s Metacritic score. You might even include a sidebar for future designers (including yourself, since your memory is only so long) explaining how and why you chose these monkeys and weapons.

The benefit of sidebars is that it compartmentalized the information. An artist looking for monkey-gun reference doesn’t have to read through a whole Berlin wall of text; he can skim for art sidebars. And the exec who doesn’t care about the technical specifications can just read the part that tells him how awesome the game is, and how when it’s done he’ll be able to buy two Lexi.

To this end, consider color-coding the sidebars too. It’s even easier to skim for what’s relevant if you have an additional visual cue.

Of course, these are just my thoughts from my experiences. If you have your own tips on GDD clarity, I’d love to hear them!

This Eight is Super, These Games are Hungry

As a rule, I don’t do reviews on this blog. I figure that since negative reviews are a lot more entertaining to read and write, I’d probably just end up churning out churlish snark, which (a) isn’t really fair to the media creators, and (b) gets a little old for the readers. So really, I’m not being lazy by avoiding reviews. I’m doing everyone a favor. You’re all welcome!

I do, however, provide recommendations. If I play, read, see, or hear something cool, I’ll pass it along. (So my Shark post was actually a recommendation to go read some good REH Conan, not a review of the book. Honest.)

This week, I’d like to recommend the movie Super 8. It sets out to capture of the feel of a 1980s Spielberg movie, and does so beautifully. The kids are great protagonists on par with those from The Goonies, E.T., or Stand By Me. The alien gives the movie the same sense of creepy wonder you get from Poltergeist or Close Encounters. And the dialog was authentic, funny, and very well performed.

I would also like to recommend Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. I’ve been hearing about this book (and its two sequels) for a while now, but finally got a chance to read it, via audiobook CD, while driving around the country with my wife. If you haven’t heard of it, the gist of the book is this: in the crappy future, kids are forced to fight to the death for the entertainment of their evil overlords. Our hero is one of those kids.

The book is smart. The author does a great job of seamlessly integrating just enough exposition to keep you going, while holding back enough to keep you curious. She also makes her characters smart. More than once, when the book provided a problem and my wife or I thought of a clever, not-so-obvious solution (like gamers often do), within a page, the characters had thought of it too. Like I said, smart.

How about you? See any good movies lately? Read any good books?

RIP Buddy, the Minecraft Dog

I like dogs. Not enough to own one (when they breed one that uses a litterbox, I’ll consider it), but I love the idea of the faithful, shaggy-haired companion who greets me with a joyful bark, plays with the kids in the backyard, and protects the house by shooting bees out of its mouth.

So I was pleased to hear when Notch added dogs to Minecraft. Okay, not dogs exactly. They’re wolves, but if you feed one of them bones (which you get from killing skeletons, of course), there’s a chance it becomes domesticated. Hearts appear above its head, and a red collar appears around its neck.

It’s a wolf with a collar. That barks when it sees you. That, my friends, is a dog.

I was tickled when I domesticated my first wolf. He followed me around, and I fed him pork. He kept me company while I worked on my bridge over the river project – though that might have been because he couldn’t navigate the stairs to get down. I began to regard the creature as “he” and definitely a dog. I didn’t name him, but whenever I talked to him (don’t judge me!), I referred to him as “buddy.” So I guess that was his name.

The bridge was finally done. I strode down the far side onto the newly-claimed island, Buddy at my side, and despaired at how thickly forested it was. A skeleton or zombie could spend all day in the shade of all those trees, and a creeper could be lurking around any one of the dozens of trunks. I pulled out my axe with a sigh and got to work, but the sun was setting and I really just wanted to be finished.

And then I remembered the flint and steel in my inventory. Why chop down a forest when you can burn it down?

Foosh! The first tree went up. Foosh! Foosh! Two more. I smiled at the thought of watching the forest burn through the night: me and my dog, safe on the bridge, the virtual heat from the flames on our faces as the fire licks up at the sky.

“Come on, Buddy,” I said to the computer screen as I looked around for my red-collared companion.

I didn’t see him, but did hear his yelp of pain.

Was he… No… He’s not…

But he was. On fire. Standing under the burning trees, his fur in flames, yelping and whining as his hit points burned away.

I considered trying to put the fire out. But hitting him (which is how you put fires out) would only hurt him further. Could I shove him into the water? Maybe. But there were trees between here and the river, burning trees, and –

Buddy gave one last yelp, then vanished in a puff of smoke.

“Stupid dog,” I muttered.

I put up a sign at the foot of the bridge, dedicating it as a memorial to a dog too stupid to not go into the fire.

I think I’m done domesticating Minecraft wolves for now. It’s a great mechanic, but I just can’t take the drama.

Feedback and Fun

Over the long Memorial Day weekend, I was blessed with an opportunity to hang out with relatives I don’t often see, visit a bunch of touristy hot spots with them, and relax in a sizable hotel pool.

In preparation for said pool time, we picked up a $3 “jumbo beach ball” from the K-Mart across the street. I didn’t realize just how “jumbo” it truly was until my brother-in-law huffed and puffed himself into a light-headed stupor inflating the thing. The ball was large enough to comfortably fit three kindergartners inside it (though I don’t know how you’d get them through the air hole), and was by far the biggest toy in the hotel pool.

When you’ve got a toy that big, you can’t just keep it for yourself. If it takes up as much space in the pool as any three swimmers, you’ve got to share it with the rest of the pool people. And so we turned half the pool into an impromptu game of “hit the ball towards someone,” and everyone who played enjoyed it.

Was it a proper game, with victory conditions and everything? No, of course not. But was it fun? Yes, yes it was.

As a game designer, I often obsess over fun. A game can be clever, interesting, or even challenging without actually being fun.

Leaving the pool, I wondered what it was about hitting the ball around with a bunch of strangers that made it so much fun. I realized it was the surprising feedback.

Feedback is Tasty!

I’d hit the ball towards some watery tourist. Would he hit it back? If so, would he smack it up in the air like a volleyball? Or skim it across the water at my nephew? No, it didn’t matter for the sake of winning the game, but how I would react was based on how this stranger would react. But I was doing something, and waiting for the feedback without knowing exactly what it would be. And that moment of feedback — when the stranger grabbed the ball and tossed it playfully to the deep end — that was fun.

This reminded me of some (okay, most) Facebook games I’ve played in which I note the simple joy with which I click some object. Click! Boom! A shower of coins! An explosion! Angels sing! And sometimes, a rare object appears that helps me complete a collection.

It’s a simple sound and light show, yes. I get that. And yet… God help me, it’s fun to click the thing. There’s feedback, and occasionally a surprise. It’s like popping bubble wrap in my browser.

In tabletop games, you can get the same simple joy just from drawing a card. There’s a pleasant tactile feedback from the action, and hey — surprise! — you’ve got some new card to affect your strategies.

Moments of feedback and surprise are moments of fun.

So if you want your game to be fun, it should be stuffed full of these moments, right? Not necessarily.

Until it Turns Bland

These kinds of cheap thrills suffer from diminishing returns. The more you have, the less fun they are. They wear out; you get bored.

Tossing the beach ball around was fun for maybe an hour. I wouldn’t want to do it all day. Playing “click the thing” on Facebook is okay for the three minutes it takes to use up all my energy, but I wouldn’t buy the game for Xbox. And drawing cards is great, but actually playing them is better.

Moments of fun are important, but you can’t build a game out of them. They simply don’t engage the player at a deep enough level. They work best in small doses, such as when introducing a new player to the game, or when rewarding a experienced player for deeper engagement (“Thanks for taking your turn. Here, have a card from the Action Deck. It smells like chocolate.”).

Find the moments of feedback and fun in your game. Capitalize on them. But make sure there’s more to the game than just those moments, or risk boring your players with empty bubble wrap.

The Victorious Condition of your Victory Conditions

Pop quiz, hot shot! What do you call a tabletop game without victory conditions? (Wait for all the smart alecs in the back of the room to shout, “A LARP!” and “my marriage!”) Those are all very entertaining answers, but the one I’m looking for is… a toy.

Toys are great. But without rules for victory, they aren’t games. They’re just… well, toys. And a finely-crafted victory condition can separate a good game from a great one.

Victory conditions must be clear.

Gain 20 victory points. Destroy your opponent’s 20 health. Empty your hand of cards. Be the first to get all your monkeys out of the flaming wreckage.

Some games require multiple victory conditions. Most don’t. If testing shows that you need to add a rule saying “You lose if you run out of cards” or “You win if your monkeys are the only ones unburned,” that’s fine — but start simple. The same thing goes for overly complicated victory conditions (“You win by have the most coconuts at the end of turn 7, or the largest ape at the beginning of the round, or by catching the Gold Snitch”). Only make it complicated if you have to — and even then, see if there’s something else you can simplify instead.

A path to victory must be obvious.

When I choose the Plumber at the beginning of the round, I get a victory point — and need 20 to win. If I attack with my creature and you can’t block, I inflict its damage — and need to inflict 20 to win. When I roll a die, that’s how many spaces I can move my monkey towards safety.

The trick is to make the path obvious, but easy for players to barricade. I can choose the Carpenter, who kills the Plumber. I can play a creature to block your attacker. I can move my monkey so you have no choice but to move yours into the oil slick back into the flames. A game should look simple to win, but not actually be that simple.

There must be multiple paths to victory.

This is different than having multiple victory conditions. I might have a dozen ways of getting victory points, but the single victory condition remains: get 20 to win. This also goes hand-in-hand with the obvious path to victory; the obvious path is usually not the most efficient one, but it’s the easiest to recognize and understand. It gets you into the game. Once you’re playing, you’ll see the other paths and understand how they might be better — but by that point, you’re actually playing the game, and haven’t been scared off by arcane rules of victory

And so on…

I didn’t think I had so much to say on the tiny little subject of victory conditions. Who knew? But have I said it all? Surely not! Jump into the comments and let me know your favorite victory conditions, or the ones that you hate, or any tips you have for their creation. And remember:

Don’t let your monkey go up in flames!