Game Design » DarrellHardy.com

Keeping it Clean

You’ve got stories. You’ve got games. And in that sweet spot where the two overlap is where you’ll find me playing with model spaceships and plastic dinosaurs, making “pewpewpew” noises with my mouth, and carving out a niche creating awesome storyworlds.

My current such project is Karthador, the pulp science-fantasy roleplaying game I’m developing for Reality Blurs. While mashing story and game together, I came up with a fun, exciting element I wanted to include in the world. The problem was, as soon as I dug into the game mechanics of this thing, I started opening cans of worms like a coked-up cyborg with can-openers for hands, and found myself drowning in worms. Oh, they were mechanical worms — composed of skills, dice, and tiered arcane edges — but still. Drowning. In worms.

One rule I try to follow in both stories and game is “keep it clean.”

In a short story, every word counts. No waste. No extra sentences. Every element must work together and have a purpose. If it’s not pulling its weight, it gets cut. Do we really need a paragraph describing the old stone tower? If it’s not an important landmark, no. Just note that it’s “crumbling” and move on.

Likewise, a solid game design should use no more mechanics than necessary to achieve the desired effect, whether mechanical or aesthetic. Do we really need to bid our secondary resources in a blind auction to determine who goes first? If it’s not important who goes first, no. Just roll a die for it and move on.

Once I realized the mechanics just weren’t working, I took a step back and asked myself some questions:

What is the purpose of this element? “The purpose,” I answered myself, ignoring the odd looks from my wife, “is to provide story hooks for the players and plot devices for the GM.”

Can it achieve this purpose without game mechanics attached to it? “Well… Yeah, I guess so. It can still be a cool story thing without having its own system.”

Then cut the mechanic, but leave the element. “Hey, that’s not a question.”

Umm… Shut up. “No. You shut up.”

…and that’s why I don’t often participate in these external Socratic dialogs.

We’ve all heard of “killing our darlings” in fiction. Well, it’s true in game design too. Sometimes, the game sub-system you love the most is actually a worm, and you got to squash that thing before it drowns you.

Keep it clean. Your players may thank you for it.

Spectacle of Myself

Aristotle once asked his game design student, Abraham Lincoln, “If game-play is king, what then is the role of spectacle in the creation and play of games?” To which Lincoln replied, “I won’t be born for ages yet; why are you dragging me into this belabored introduction?”

Okay, Aristotle never wrote about game design. But he did write about spectacle. He called it out as a part of drama–but the least-important part. He said the audience could get just as much out of a play by merely reading it, regardless of the costumes, sets, and special effects (which consisted of a proto-Michael Bay standing off-stage shouting “Boom!” when the giant Greek robot exploded).

Games have spectacle too. Video games are full of the stuff, with their cut-scenes, eye-melting graphics, surround sound, and dramatic voice-overs. For games on the tabletop, the spectacle comes from the flashiness of the components: playing pieces, artwork on the box, or battery-stuffed doodads that light up or talk to you.

As in drama, it could be argued that this is the least-important part of a game. As long as you have your game mechanics and victory conditions, you don’t need gorgeous graphics (in a video game) or enormous boards covered in detailed plastic miniatures (in a board game).

Spectacle may not be essential to game play, but I’d say it definitely has a place in game design.

Spectacle as Reward

The most common role of spectacle in video games has traditionally been as a reward. Congrats on finishing that level! Here’s a sweet cut-scene with spaceships. Hey, you leveled up — here’s an explosion of numbers and a rumbling bass line to help you celebrate! You nailed the last peg in Peggle? Here’s some Ode to Joy and slow-motion rainbows for you!

We can use these rewards to encourage specific behaviors. If we want the player to explore the world in a video game, we can make sure that doing so rewards him with dramatic views of the environment. If we want to encourage pulling off that unlikely, but fun special move, the move should result in such a cavalcade of wonders, the player can’t wait to pull it off again.

Spectacle as Exposition

Story is also another element that’s not essential to a game, but can elevate a merely good game to something with deeper engagement and immersion. It’s no surprise that they often go hand-in-hand.

The best most recent example is the opening to SKYRIM. While you’re still playing the game (it’s not a cut-scene), your actions are limited to simply looking around, so there’s no actual game play going on. Instead, you’re treated to some dialog from other characters explaining where you are, who they are, and how you’re all about to be executed–and then the dragon attacks! It’s exciting, dramatic stuff, but it serves a purpose; it gives you all the background information you need to understand the context in which you’re playing the game.

Spectacle as Game Play

“Liar!” you may be shouting at your screen. “You said that spectacle had nothing to do with game play!” But that’s not technically true.

Technically, I said that spectacle is not essential to game play. That doesn’t mean you can’t integrate it into the game play. This is usually found in the form of a scripted event: You turn the corner and see a giant alien tripod stomp into view for the first time, a building explodes, or the game unleashes some other spectacular set-piece. No, you can’t control when the tripod appears, or stop the building from exploding, but you’re still in control. You’re still playing the game. The spectacle is simply part of that game play experience.

The Purpose of Spectacle

These are the main roles that spectacle can fill in video games. The purpose of these roles is to entertain the player in ways that he can’t be entertained by the game play alone. Game play appeals to the thoughtful, puzzle-solving, pattern-memorizing parts of our brains that like to be challenged. Spectacle speaks straight to the adolescent pyromaniac parts of our brains that love to watching things sparkle, dance, and blow up.

And as Abraham Lincoln once said, “Spectacle may not be essential, but it’s still awesome.”

What other spectacle roles did I miss? What did I miss out on regarding spectacle in tabletop games? Let me know in the comments, and let’s discuss!

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!