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2d100 Words in Praise of Randomness

There’s a reason that, for ages, dice have been intrinsically associated with games. It probably has to do with weird fertility rites of ancient Celts, but the important thing is that games thrive on randomness. Whether it’s shuffled cards, rolled dice, or procedurally-generated computerized orcs lining up to be killed, games cry out for the unexpected.

Some might say that too much randomness in a game is a bad thing. To those people I say: You’re right. But that’s not the point of this post.

Without randomness, gameplay becomes a pattern to be repeated until mastered. I loved Super Mario Brothers, but I would have loved it more if I wasn’t able to simply memorize every level. Throw in some random goombas where they weren’t before, and I’d be surprised and delighted. Instead, I’m running, jumping and tossing fireballs with my brain switched off.

Randomness helps level the playing field between players of different skill levels. Yes, you’ve been playing Magic: the Gathering for so long, your first deck is old enough to drink in most states. And yes, I’ve just cracked my first starter deck this morning. But if you don’t draw the right cards out of your randomized deck, this noob still has a chance to beat you.

On a related note, randomness lets players take chances. No, you probably shouldn’t charge that machine gun nest with your sword-wielding Hobbit. (Who brings a Hobbit to a gunfight anyway?) But you can still try, and if the dice roll your way–if you get lucky–you might end up with a Hobbit behind enemy lines holding a captured M-60.

But the best thing that randomness does for games is help create stories.

Rolling a natural 20 when your Dwarven fighter needed it most? Drawing the King you needed to finish that winning hand? Stumbling onto a dragon while running from giants in Skyrim? These are the incidents we remember–the stories that we tell–and they are all blessings of randomness.

This, more that anything else, is why I love a healthy level of randomness in any game I play or design. There’s a place for chess and the like, with their pure, beard-stroking strategy. It’s a good place. A fine place. It’s just a place without many memorable moments.

If you have any tales of randomness to share, please leave 3d20 words on the topic in the comments.

A Tale of Two Viralities

Tadg Kelly recently talked about “The Two Viralities” on his site. He pointed out that true virality, evangelism, comes from players loving a game enough to talk about. The other, a “false virality,” is just obligation — if you want to play the game, you have to drag your friends into it too.

In the past few weeks, I’ve been on the receiving end of both types of virality in social games.

For about a week straight, my Twitter feed was hopping with people singing the praises of Panda Poet. They called it clever, fiendish, and addictive. (When did “addictive” turn into a virtue?) They didn’t need to do this. Panda Poet lets you invite your friends to play, but doesn’t require you to do so in order to progress. So when a link to the game floated across my desk, I took a risk and hit it, if only to see what the buzz was about. (Turns out the Twitter-folks knew what they were talking about. This game is good.)

Meanwhile, in Facebook land, the all-seeing ticker next to my page started telling me that my social-gaming friends were being pulled into a new game. I cringed, just a little bit, because I knew what was coming. Sure enough, I started getting invites from those friends for that game. Not because it was a great game that they thought I would like to play, but because they’d hit the limit of how much they could play without be forced to go viral.

I think there’s a couple lessons here: one obvious and one not-so obvious.

The Lesson Which is Obvious: Obligatory virality wears out its welcome. Back in the day, I’d click any invitation to any Facebook game. “Cool! My old high school buddy wants me to join his mafia! I like mafias! I vaguely remember this guy! Let’s play!” Today? I gaze suspiciously upon all such invites, and am not above asking the sender, “Is this game any good?”

The Not So Obvious Lesson: Good games that don’t require virality should still make it easy for a fan to go viral. I like Panda Poet. I want to spread it to my friends. (I’m doing so now.) But there’s no Facebook connect button, no Google+ “+1″ button, no easy way for me to shout to my various social networks, “Hey, this is a cool game!” Yes, you can invite friends via e-mail (and I have) but without the ability to broadcast your evangelism, the message might get lost.

Are there other lessons? Probably. And I’d love to have you share them with us below.

Demanding Madness

It’s been a while since I’ve done any shameless self-promotion here. That’s not due to any new-found shame in self-promotion, I assure you, but rather a general lack of items to promote. (Not that I’m not working on stuff, it’s just that most of it’s still under wraps.)

One item that has emerged, wet and blinking, from beneath the wraps of secrecy, is The Silver Tablet, a new adventure I designed for Fantasy Flight’s Cthulhu-themed Mansions of Madness horror boardgame. Here’s part of what I wrote about it for FFG’s website:

One of the things I love most about Mansions of Madness is how the clues and dangers of a single story can be combined in different ways to create entirely new adventures every time you play. (Yes, there are screams from the cellar, but are those the screams of a monster’s victims–like last time–or the final syllables of a summoning ritual performed in an alien language?) When given the opportunity to write a new story for Mansions of Madness, this was the aspect of the game I grabbed onto. I enjoyed the challenge of developing multiple adventures all with the same setup, whose differences were slowly revealed–like the horrible secrets of a Lovecraft story–over the course of play.

You can read the rest of my designer notes here, where you can also order a copy for yourself and six or seven of your closest friends. (See? Still shameless in my self-promotion.)

Lemme tell ya about my character

Yes, yes, we all know I’m crazy about player stories in games. They increase engagement, virality, and other social gaming buzzwords I’m not going to bother listing here. But I’ve been thinking about tabletop RPGs this week and how, even more than video games, they are all about player stories.

After an RPG session, what do you have? Achievements on your account? A high score on a leaderboard? A sackful of virtual coins to spend on virtual gear? Nope. You can’t even go back and play it again. All you have is your story. And even if you played through a pre-gen module, it’s still a unique, personal story that only you and the others at the table can tell.

It was these stories that got me in RPGs in the first place. As a kid in grade school and middle school, I had a friend who was big into D&D and Marvel Superheroes. He’d come to school with these amazing tales of his adventures: how he fought a dragon, or beat up a bad guy by throwing a car into his face. Awesome! It was these stories that made me want to play.

Today, countless RPG players are doing the same thing on hundreds of blogs and message boards across the Internet. Sometimes it’s a brief anecdote. Sometimes, it’s a full “actual play” record of a game. And now with services such as Obsidian Portal, it’s easier than ever to share full accounts of whole campaigns and browse the stories of other players. I’ve spent hours reading through other peoples’ game write-ups, and you know what? For almost every one of them… I wanted to play that game.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Stories are powerful selling tools. Let’s use these tools to sell the games we love.

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.

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.)

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!

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!