My Severe Doubt

I’ve been suffering from severe doubt with regards to the value of my game design thoughts. A friend whose opinion I value on this matter continually subjects my thoughts to a kind of opposition that makes me doubt the validity of putting them on paper at all. Am I writing no more than a collection of misguided justifications for my own taste and perspective? Am I only an elitist clinging to what little foothold in the sheer cliff face of subjectivity that will allow me to raise my head above the press of all the other pundits and gamers?

I feel trapped between a will to further refine my thoughts and the knowledge that these thoughts may just be insubstantial and baseless. My doubts are only worsened because I cannot tell if my thoughts are actually baseless. I’m tempted to throw up my hands in despair after long conversations about fundamental topics in game design and how I approach its analysis. Perhaps I am no more than a thrashing lunatic—perhaps my mental faculties delude me into thinking that there is some significant systematic epistemology to game design at the very edge of my perception so, like a schizophrenic person, I continually shift my eyes to find the thing has disappeared, only to reappear once again barely out of my view a few seconds later.

“Fun” taunts me. Flitting before me, seemingly within my reach. I can nearly contain it in a theory only to see it has left merely one of its parts trapped in the confines of my thought, the rest of it still flutters, free. It slides through my fingers when I try to clap my hands together over it. I try to use logic to present ways to judge game design decisions, but the measuring stick is not logic, but fun. Logic can tell us if a game is designed consistently and if it follows some greater vision as evidenced by the patterns it exhibits when played and analyzed, but logic itself doesn’t capture the goal of game design, which is to generate fun.

Now that I’ve revealed my struggle to you, I wish to make clear a few points about my writing here so that you can better understand my intentions and why I communicate in the peculiar way I do.

A few things you should understand:

• If experts of game design exist, I am not one of them and may never be. I claim no expertise. I think about game design every day and try to do so productively. This separates me from many game designers who practice professionally, I am told. Does this qualify me to have an opinion? Not entirely. But I feel that expressing my opinion here for others to read, enjoy, and argue against is better than keeping these opinions unexplored and unexpressed.
• I’m just making stuff up here. I post my thoughts on game design. I express them not because I am in touch with some hidden truth to which others are blind. I write because I think, and thoughts unexpressed—especially those thoughts refined with some rigor—do nothing. There is no use in understanding and knowledge if it cannot be somehow conveyed. This is currently the primary way I can convey my limited understanding of game design. I’m working on games at the moment, but they are not close to release and may not be for some time. My only means of expression is this: the written word, written in the hopes that the small waves it generates among its readers will ignite some significant discussion, discovery, and ultimately better games.
• I don’t have evidence to show you—I write based on my experience, analysis, and thought experiments. All of the work on game design I’ve ever read (that I can remember) contributes parts to each of the pieces I post here. All of the conversations I’ve had with friends and colleagues—each contributes. I base my thoughts on my own limited experience playing the games I find fun and a few that I do not enjoy but played to experiment. I do not approach game design as a scientist, but as a philosopher. If I make verifiable claims that I do not myself verify, I will gladly lean in the direction any significant evidence for or against my claim would sway me.
• I don’t write here because I’ve found the truth. This brings to mind an aphorism I believe to carry some valuable insight: “He who claims to have found the truth has definitely not.” I may write as if I have found the truth, but I only do so because to fill my writing with disclaimers would make each post an exercise in extracting meaning from apologies instead of directly absorbing meaning. I don’t wish to cloud my writing further than my meager communication and thinking skills so far have clouded it, so I write persuasively with a bold tone. If I am wrong, I hope that the tone makes my mistakes obvious and encourages others to challenge me. If I am right, it serves well at convincing others of my case.
• I am exploring. Because I am on a journey to find theories that allow myself and others to better design games, I write in an exploratory fashion. I try on new ideas through posting them on this blog and gauging reactions. I’ve learned significantly from this practice, and I will continue to do it. I hope that you can join me in this exploration—try to argue, in the comments, with the intention of exchanging information and ideas, not with the intention to show your superiority to me or to others in the conversation.

Now that I have written these disclaimers, I feel more comfortable proceeding. I hope that you will keep them in mind as you read my posts here.

Global Agenda’s Playerbase Stratification Problem

The root problem in Global Agenda’s design is that it pulls its playerbase in too many different directions.

If a skill-based game is good, it doesn’t need to have a lot of conventional content. Counterstrike didn’t have PvE and leveling. Starcraft doesn’t need fifteen modes of play. Themepark MMORPGs tack on many features and endless content because they rely on content to keep their players entertained. Themeparks don’t benefit from sufficiency skill tests and active skill ranking on a broad scale as serious RTS and TBS games inevitably do—themepark gameplay is oriented towards experiencing an event with friends, not towards ranking and measuring your skill. Global Agenda’s player vs. player shooter gameplay (not only the explicit “PvP” mode, but AvA as well), the focus of the game and the very core of the game, naturally establishes skill orientation between players. There is no other gameplay except for PvE missions which reward teams for completing them in a sufficient time with at most a certain number of deaths. Though slightly more experience- and content-oriented, PvE is also a sufficiency skill test.

Global Agenda strives with one half of its being to be a skill-focused game, and with the other half to be a content-focused game. Though games are not zero-sum compromises between skill- and content-focus, creating a skill-based game with high quantities of traditional content limits the amount of work that can be done on game balance—you can usually either work on lots of content or you can create very balanced content, not both. The skill and content tug-of-war forces players of two distinct kinds to coexist in the same game: those who are content-driven (generally MMORPG players) and those who are skill-driven (generally FPS players). There’s clearly friction here in the game’s design.

Global Agenda’s “PvP” mode relies on a matchmaking system. You queue your character (perhaps with a team of three other players at most) and the matchmaker attempts to put you in a game on a random mode and random map where each side has a 50% chance of victory. In order to do this with any degree of reliability, the matchmaker needs a baseline number of players at each skill level. But since Global Agenda is partially content-oriented, a playerbase that would barely be sufficient to keep the matchmaking for PvP supplied with players now is stretched through 7 different game modes.

• Player vs. Player
• Player vs. Environment
  • Low Security
  • Medium Security
  • High Security
  • Maximum Security
  • Double Agent
• Agency vs. Agency (Conquest)

The game usually doesn’t have more than 4,000 concurrent players. Demand between these modes is not equal, though, so the problem isn’t as bad as it may initially look. Regardless, all of the other modes constantly distracting players still starves the PvP matchmaker of player diversity at all times but maybe one or two of the peak hours when most players are online. There will be two or three modes that receive the majority of the attention, and the rest will be starved.

Global Agenda has woven the player-availability problem from themepark MMORPGs into a skill-based game where more players are needed in certain modes to ensure reasonable matchmaking. As the game builds in more game modes (and we’ve been promised some kind of excuse for an open-world “zone”), this problem will get worse. The developers don’t seem to be aware of this issue—they need to pay attention because there’s no guarantee that adding more high-level game modes will draw enough players to keep all the other queues for PvE and PvP moving at a reasonable pace, let alone allowing enough players queuing for the matchmaker to do a good job. If players are subjected to long waits and too many lopsided matches, they’ll leave Global Agenda for better games; I’ve already seen hundreds of posts on the forums about matchmaking driving people out of PvP and complaints about how the matchmaker is “broken”, and the problem will only get worse from here.

Beware of Second-Order Effects

Games are basically glorified math problems with metaphors partially covering the numbers and fancy symbols. The best games are usually interesting and engaging metaphors plastered over difficult math problems.

Unfortunately, game designers are a bit less apt at math than programmers. Being both a programmer and a wannabe designer, I approach game design from equal parts design and math. I’m no mathematician, but I have a toolbox of mathematical concepts that I use to better understand game design.

Many games fail to accomplish a semblance of balance because designers add mechanics and reward systems without a view of the broader math those mechanics will force their will upon. One such concept often missed: Second-order effects. Whereas a player’s superior skill has an additive impact on their effectiveness (a first-order effect), complex and over-rambunctious reward systems can multiply that bonus of skill into an insurmountable obstacle for less-skilled players.

The “Slippery Slope” of Success in Strategy Games

Imagine two players of measurably uneven skill at a certain strategy game. If they were to play against one another in this game, let’s say it’s a competitive turn-based strategy game whose result is based entirely on skill, the more skillful player would increase his advantage every turn. Every single turn the less skillful player would be losing by a wider margin than the turn before. The less skillful player can never win such a game and will lose the game each time by a predictably wide margin that has compounded each turn into a massive deficit. This is the nature of skill: this process of compounding advantage/disadvantage cannot be altered but by adding elements of chance and asymmetry to the game.

In reality, a player’s pure skill doesn’t directly map to a higher advantage turn-over-turn. The dynamics of a strategy game usually mitigate skill differences in the early-game (the first four moves in chess, for example) because there are fewer possible moves and those moves are usually somewhat obvious to even an advanced beginner. In most western strategy games, the number of possible moves explodes as the game progresses, peaking at some point in the mid-game, then tapering off due to fewer pieces being on the board, or the board position becoming more and more determinate as more pieces are places and static positions grow. A noticeable exception to this pattern is Go, which moves from a completely empty to a mostly full board throughout the game—leading to a continual restriction of possible moves and possible good moves.

As the game progresses and the strategy space widens, the player who can better distinguish successful strategies from unsuccessful ones will win. This discrimination between strategies is the essence of skill—players who are more skillful are better at discriminating between strategies that might, to a lesser player, seem to have the same utility.

At each point of decision, the more skillful player will choose a better strategy. The more viable strategies to discriminate between, the more of an effect skill will have. At each decision point, the better player compounds his advantage, while the less player sees the game slowly slipping away. The worse player can never make up ground.

(Humans do not behave uniformly, though, and skill is not static. We need to play against others in order to determine there skill, and players behave with different skill at different times. Playing a strategy game doesn’t degenerate as quickly or regularly as a describe here, because I’m describing ideal conditions—human flaws add much appeal to strategy games where otherwise such games would be repeated drubbings of less-skilled players.)

Skill => Success => Reward => Less Skill Required?

Designers love to reward displays of skill with game mechanical perks. Kill enough goblins and you’ll level up! You played well, so now the game is going to become easier. This kind of design is surprisingly dangerous if you want to design a game of skill and not a timesink or casual game. But it’s so intuitive—it rewards you for doing something well, which will make you want to continue to play. Using positive feedback to reinforce the actions in games that you want players to keep doing—this seems like a completely reasonable thought process.

Here we see a second-order effect. Certain mechanics multiply the player’s effectiveness beyond the normal turn-over-turn addition caused by outplaying an opponent.

Rewards can cause second-order effects that ruin the balance in games of skill; A second-order effect that quickly make matches unwinnable for the less skilled side by multiplying the effectiveness of the more skilled player, increasing his advantage by leaps and bounds as the match progresses. In lopsided and poorly-designed reward systems, actions at the beginning of the game are multiplied and lead to surprisingly enormous benefits later in the game, instead of actions at the beginning of the game leading intuitively to equally important actions later in the game.

I approach games of skill that involve vertical character advancement and gear collection with intense suspicion because I’m aware of how easily second-order effects can skew the players’ apparent skill levels and sap the fun out of what could otherwise be a strategically interesting game. Most of the time, game designers appear oblivious to what they are doing when they add rewards. They tack on external reward structures to make their games more addictive, but in the process they’re punishing new players who are necessarily less-skilled by giving a multiplicative bonus to the effectiveness of veteran, higher-skill players.

When designing a competitive skill-based games, reward structures need to be looked at with the utmost suspicion. They have a tendency to compound in broken ways—ways that quickly transform a game that would otherwise have numerous viable strategies into a one-dimensional, strategically uninteresting race for the first imbalanced reward.

Leaving Themepark MMORPGs Behind

After last year’s extensive MMO trialing, I’ve come to a few conclusions about what I want out of games at this point in my life. This may not generalize to other people, but it may be an instructive thing to share for those that follow this blog and want to know the origin of much of my game design thought.

The Same Patterns that Lead to the Same Patterns

You can easily define a number of mechanic patterns in MMORPGs. These go largely unchallenged and effectively provide a framework for games in the genre.

1. Persistent intrinsic semi-permanent character advancement.
2. Loot advancement.
3. Your play session is only a window into a game world that continues persisting before you’ve logged and and after you log off. (I’m not saying “persistent world” here because “changes” to a themepark game’s world don’t persist for more than one character.)
4. The game is based on the player controlling one character at a time.
5. The player is an adventurer who kills a variety of creatures for various reasons (quests) to gain experience used to advance.
6. The player can combine materials harvested from nodes or looted from enemies to craft items.
7. Players organize into game-facilitated groups and guilds to defeat stronger enemies.

Most of the games I played were nothing more than a collection of minor variations in the implementation of those patterns. (And some of those implementations were outright failures.) Very few moved away from this: Atlantica Online makes you control a party instead of just one character and DDO instanced everything and focused on small-group content—two examples of more significant variations.

These patterns bore me. I’ve seen them done so many times. Playing MMOs turned into a process akin to painting rooms in a house. Each room is different in shape and size, some may even have a special feature that needs particular attention for the painting to turn out appealing, but after you’ve painted one or two rooms, you get the point and the rest of the rooms are just minor variations on putting paint on walls and avoiding putting it elsewhere.

You can find such basic patterns in any genre of any medium, of course, but in MMORPGs there seems to be nothing interesting beyond the specific implementations of these patterns. The PvE centeredness of themepark MMORPGs primarily relies on player time investment to gate content and character progress. Since there’s very little one can do in a themepark MMO to set themselves apart in terms of skill—there’s little competition among MMORPG players aside from in the top 10% or less of players who play competitive PvP and raid at the highest end—I will end up playing the game to see how the genre-specific patterns unfold. And when these patterns unfold, the result is boredom.

What Themepark MMOs Show About their Players

(I try not to treat negatively people who play games in different ways than me. I understand that not all players have the same goals when they game. Fun isn’t uniform from day to day, person to person. Even if everyone did have the same goals and fun was uniform, taste accounts for significant variance in what games people play. I hope that the following section is not too negative about themepark MMO players—I intend it to be an explanation of how I feel about the games and not a indictment of other people who play and enjoy them.)

I’ve given up on themepark MMOs (and many sandbox MMOs, as well) due to their direct time-investment focus. When I think about where I’ll be after playing a game for a few months, I’d like to be able to say that I differentiated myself from others through my skillful play and strategic thinking. MMORPGs require a significant time investment before you can get to a point where skillful play and strategic aspects show their faces in any way that would let me distinguish myself from most players. I’d be throwing time into an MMORPG and getting nothing back but the same standard rewards everyone gets for investing time.

Through playing a themepark MMORPG, I think that I would be labeling my free time as a throw-away. Why should I bother playing a game where I’m just one of a huge crowd of other players, unable to differentiate myself in a game-significant way? It communicates nothing about me to others; there are plenty of other significantly more interesting games that could communicate more about me as a player and person. I cannot avoid the thought that the game acts as a medium through which I communicate about myself to others and to myself. I could choose to ignore this communication and just play whatever game tickles me (and themepark MMOs are expert at tickling), but I don’t because ignoring a signal will not make it go away.

These thoughts of signaling through game playing do not occur to most people—and if they did, I doubt whoever thought about it would mind it much. It matters to me, though, so I’ve moved away from MMORPGs to other multiplayer games that act as a more dynamic communication medium.

Global Agenda: Decidedly Flimsy

You can easily to get caught up in playing the game and forget that it has no story (though it pretends occasionally to), involves an arbitrary vertical advancement timesink, has "loot" that is unappetizing, has a funky auto-matching system that is a crapshoot in general (even though I'm sure it is pretty good for what it is), mediocre level design, and uninspired PvP and PvE modes. The game is fairly generic and uninviting unless you actually want to play Global Agenda because you've heard specifically about the few good parts.

"If you ignore the gaping holes in this sweater, it's actually quite a nice article of clothing!"

GA is a tactical third-person shooter, but at night when no one is around it dresses up as an MMO. Sometimes, in fits of extreme fantasy, it fancies itself as a real MMORPG.

But this is nonsense. Whenever you get into a match, it’s clear the game is a shooter. It’s skill-based, relatively fast-paced, and tactical. HiRez would need to severely alter the game to make it a recognizable MMORPG—it’s never going to happen, and if it does it would alienate most of the players who play it now.

Regardless of how much HiRez and the game’s fans trumpet how the game is some kind of MMORPG/FPS hybrid, don’t be fooled. This game plays like a shooter, not an MMORPG. Tacking on character advancement doesn't magically make the game an RPG, let alone an MMORPG. Adding crafting and naming a cooperative mode “PvE'” doesn’t convince any but those who very much want to be convinced.

GA is a game trapped between two worlds. Overall the game is "blah". The individual aspects of the game don’t cohere well, the interface isn't particularly good, and I generally get a directionless feeling from the game's design--or perhaps its the feeling that there are too many directions and nothing is taken far enough. Is the game an MMO, or a competitive FPS? Is it supposed to be some kind of RPG? I don’t know—all I know is that when I play a match, I have fun playing a tacitcal third-person shooter.

I find playing in individual matches is fun, but everything on a wider scale is “meh”. The game is less than the sum of its parts. The difference between subscription-free play and the Conquest mode style that you pay to play is too awkward—Conquest isn’t particularly fulfilling, but it’s the only place you can play with a full organized team of players instead of being stuck in a group of 4 queuing to be thrown into pick-up groups of ten players.

I hope HiRez can move the game forward, though. I'm enjoying this skeleton of what a future GA should be.

Gameplay is not Grinding

When players discuss grinding in MMOs, someone inevitably brings up this argument:

Guess what you do in every video game created? The same thing over and over and over and over etc.
FPSs? Shoot everyone who isn’t with you.
RPGs? Level up and kill big bad monster to get super duper helmet of the bear.
RTSs? Kill the enemy.
Platformer? Jump n' duck to the end.

(Source)

Grinding is more than "doing the same thing over and over". If you continue the process of reducing games to basic physical actions then calling those actions "grinds", you should go down to the level of "computer games are just repeatedly pressing buttons and moving a mouse--they're not worth playing". By that same logic, communication is just moving your body in certain ways, so it's not worth doing.

The reason we play games isn't that the actions of doing so are inherently "special" in some way--we play games because they organize those normal actions into something more, something that has meaning to us. By removing the meaning through reducing games to "grinding keypresses", you completely miss the point of playing games.

The substantial error in logic made in this reduction-based argument that suggests “grinding” is indistinct from playing a game: it claims that if A’s parts are the same as some of B’s parts, those two things are the same. In truth, If you can reduce two things in a certain way so that one thing’s elements are a subset of the other’s, you do not establish a relationship of equivalence. A chair isn’t a wooden leg. A table isn’t a wooden surface. Further, tables and chairs are different, though they both have legs. Desks and floors are different, but they both have a horizontal surface. Two objects or concepts cannot be treated as equivalent if there is relevant difference between them; there’s clearly a relevant difference between playing a game normally and grinding, though grinding can occur while playing a game.

Games are more than pressing buttons on a computer and pleasant lights and sounds emerging from the machine in response. Games are defined by the mental process of play, which leads to physical interactions with the environment. Without play, we cannot differentiate games from other arbitrary sets of rules and goals. Trying to break down games into a series of physical events misses what actually makes a game what it is: the fact that people are playing it, and that the game has meaning to them through their play.

So grinding is not simply pressing buttons repeatedly—we can break down any computer game into pressing buttons repeatedly. Grinding is when the mental process of play breaks down because it became separated from the game’s meaning. It’s similar to when a word sounds wrong and seems to lose its meaning after you say it a hundred times in a row. Grinds separate the meaning from the gameplay by the sheer force of repetition. Since game design is focused on cultivating meaning, game designers should wish to prevent game systems from devolving into grinds.

“Character” Advancement in Games of Skill

First, Global Agenda institutes an annoying leveling treadmill that turns an otherwise very fun tactical shooter into a timesink and unnecessarily punishes new players in a game where skill deficits are already a huge issue. Now Command and Conquer 4 is committing the same sin in the RTS genre. (Read Bilsybub’s impressions.)

Rewarding people for playing a game longer when the game consists of repeatedly playing matches that are supposedly skill-based? This accomplishes a few things, none of them are particularly good for players or game balance.

1. Punishing newbies.
2. Supplementing the power increase of player skill improvement, leading to a further advantage to players who should be better at the game anyway.
3. Introducing a timesink that the player cannot get around.

Learning to play the game is enough of a timesink—why augment that with an advancement system that is guaranteed to progress slower than your pace of learning? It will only handicap newbies and make their matches less fun.

The people who really benefits from this nonsense? Whoever sells the game. Now you must play for 20 hours in order to even have access to a competitive set of abilities, units, weapons, or whatever.

Gating aspects of a competitive game of skill may prove to be a profitable business decision, but it’s a painful game design decision and can only erode player patience among competitive players. This takes the most soul-sucking part of themepark MMOs and shoves it into games that could not be further from the themepark design philosophy. These games will probably see much financial success because of the addictive quality of vertical character growth—this pattern will spread to more and more titles and continue to bother me and other supporters of skill-based games.

Now the same business vs game design conflict that has brutalized the design of themepark MMOs has come to roost in skill-based games. The future seems to be turning a skill-based game into an MMO by adding some “impact” PvP and vertical growth timesinks. This is bad for skill-based game design—but who cares about game design? Everyone’s in it to make money who has enough money to make such a game, so we’ll see this frustrating trend continue.