Games From the Ground Up: Introduction

(In this series, I plan on writing a series of short posts about what I believe to be the basic features and motivations of videogames. Why do we play? Why are we looked down upon by many for playing? I’m going to try from the ground up to describe my theories of the basics of gaming. I look forward to hearing your reactions and discussing these topics further.)

When you play a game and enjoy it, you are allowing yourself to be fooled. You let the game hook itself into those basic parts of what makes you human. Games are pattern-recognition porn, pretty/shiny pictures, and reward addiction mechanisms.

Games draw you in with interesting metaphors. For the typical gamer market (18-30 year-old males), this usually involves war in some form. The metaphor drags you into a set of game mechanics that the tool-maker/tool-user in you inherently finds appealing. You quickly feel your way around this new world through whatever interface available to you much the way a newborn feels out the confines of his new body and the world around her. This innocent, real consequance-free learning is rarely afforded to adults and older children, so you immediately immerse yourself in the opportunity to indulge in pretense and leave real-world cares at the door.

Games work well when they allow you to fully buy into a self-contained system that seems meaningless on the outside. Most play in children is mimicry of the future roles they'll take on as adults. The pretense of play dissolves as the child grows older and actually has to engage in the behaviors they've been play-acting. Likewise, adults view playing most games, be they video or otherwise, as childish activities--playacting for behaviors that appear, on the surface, to be useless.

But we live in a world of useless. Most gamers live in a world of relative luxury where survival is nigh guaranteed. Entertainment, instead of being a marginal aspect of life, has graduated to a state of constant presence. Even when at work, many people spend much of their time seeking or reading about entertainment on the internet. Instead of watching television, reading, looking at pictures of your friend’s cat farm on facebook or otherwise “uselessly” passing your time, you play games instead. The interactive medium allows you to do so many interesting things that you wouldn’t be able to do otherwise, so why not engage with it?

In order to keep the player hooked into a closed system of pretense, games use the feedback loops of tool development and learning. Games are tricks—they hijack parts of your brain that commonly were applied for other survival-related purposes but now sit underused most of the time.

Next: Pattern recognition porn.

Torchlight

I played Torchlight for six or seven hours before I realized that the game is nothing but polish. The graphics are reasonable and consistant, the sound is good enough, the gameplay is quite smooth and appealing, but when scrutinized the mechanics are subpar. The problem I have with Torchlight isn’t that it is derivative; my problem is that the individual game systems are middle-of-the-road, uninteresting, and do little to cover the flawed reward-chain it is at its heart.

Action RPGs are interesting to me because they combine loot and character advancement along with a progression of different enemies with odd abilities that cause you to vary your tactics. I do not play action RPGs to be intellectual stimulated, but keeping these systems interesting for as long as possible lies at the core of the action RPG experience. The combat itself is often trivial—the real game lies in picking between loot and getting that little shot of dopamine when you find an awesome item or acquire that next game-changing ability.

Loot

Torchlight’s loot system was boring. Few items, if any, had unique and interesting effects on gameplay. Items presented a bland optimization problem instead of leading to interesting decisions where the player has to choose between two very appealing, distinct mechanics to harness. These kinds of decisions are what made Diablo II such a great game in the genre. A chance of casting Frozen Orb weighed against life leach and improved attack speed is a much more interesting decision than +20 fire damage vs. +15 Ice damage and +5 Poison damage. Torchlight does allow items to carry spell effects, but the game’s abilities are generally as uninteresting and lack innovation as well.

Advancement

The character advancement system was boring. Skill trees are small compared to Diablo II. A disproportionate number of skills are passive or are reskinned buffed versions of other skills.

Tactics

You could play well using trivial strategies that were no fun. As a summoner, you should have no trouble butchering your way through the game unless you play at a high difficulty. You don’t even have to worry about mana much, because you can simply dual wield wands and do constant, credible damage to augment the punishment your pets provide.

What makes an action RPG exciting for me are abilities that I have to choose between depending on the situation. The decision has to be non-trivial. If I’m doing no more than maintaining some summons and shift-rich clicking to cast wand spells, the game rapidly bores me. If an action RPG can’t pace loot and advancement along with enemy power, it has failed at a basic level and there’s little reason to continue playing it.

In Summary

There was just enough polish that the game didn’t immediately give offense to my game design sensibilities.

Torchlight was an ego-tickling reward treadmill that gave just enough stimulation to players to keep them blithely clicking and button mashing their way to inevitable victory. A game doesn’t need to be hard to avoid this fate, but it does have to present the player with a variety of interesting decisions, not just the same kinds of decisions with bigger numbers attached to them.

Chokepoint Hell: A Strategy Game Staple

Everyone loves chokepoints! They vastly simplify the decision-making in an RTS and often lead to epic-looking battles. The average player who does not want to micro and does not want to think gobbles up chokepoint maps. Most players want to expend no more than this meager amount of effort so every strategy game that makes any mainstream attempt will include a chokepoint-hell map.

These are not good maps. They severely limit strategic possibilities with ground units. This is worse in Company of Heroes than in RUSE, and matters even less in Supreme Commander games, because of the availability of air transport for ground units. The more units you can transport with ease, the less the layout of the terrain matters, so the restriction of available land routes has less of a constricting effect on the shape of the strategic space on the map.

To some extent, simplicity is preferable over complexity—but only if the complexity provides false difficulty. It’s preferable to have 10 units per faction and have 8 be viable than to have 50 per faction and have 9 viable. In the former case, the number of viable combinations of units is only slightly smaller than in the latter case, but the player is forced to trudge through a lot more information to decide which of the fifty unit types he wants to build, whereas when most of the units are viable the player has to wade through much less noise to develop sound strategies.

Chokepoint-hell maps do not simplify to eliminate false difficulty; they dumb-down gameplay and limit depth. This is fine if you’re designing maps for the early stages of a campaign, but in competitive play these maps are simply inferior.

 

On the left: “Vire River” from Company of Heroes.

On the right: “Above the River” from RUSE. (h/t BattleStrats)

A Look at FFXIV

I've spent some time with FF14 in its open beta over the last week. The game is very reminiscent of FFXI in that it isn't going to hold your hand through anything, and I am perfectly OK with that if that is type of game SE is pitching. But they are hyping this casual-friendly, non-punishing, happy-go-lucky MMORPG where everyone gets their nose wiped and bad times are a thing of the past. Whoever approaches FF14 with that predisposition is going to experience something completely disjoint from their expectations.

UI and Controls

The most significant and show-stopping issues with the game deal with the interface and controls. It is as if they pinned up a keyboard sketch and bound functions to whatever keys the dart happened to land on. As of this writing, there is no way to officially remap keys. The controls were so obstructive that my first few sessions were only 10 minutes long, and I had to log off in frustration.

In FFXI I could play without the mouse because I used the numpad for movement, menus, targeting, and confirming actions; the arrow keys for camera and item selection; and used my left hand to perform skills with alt/ctrl+#. SE decided to keep the familiar numpad binds, but not the arrow key camera controls. So I need to use IJKL or the mouse to control the camera. A WASD/mouse scheme would work well except that the mouse is rendered on a software layer and thus is unresponsive to the point of unusability. I've been getting by with using a full keyboard setup: movement with numpad, camera with IJKL when I need to.

Some of the FFXI slash commands are in FF14 except for their shorthand aliases. E.g. instead of /cm p to change default chat to party, I must type out /chatmode party. I did not discover a PM reply shortkey or slash command; only after I type out the character name in a /tell does ctrl+r auto-populate a reply for me. These are just minor annoyances.

Combat

The basic resource in combat is Stamina which operates exactly like WoW's Rogue Energy mechanic or Global Agenda's combat: each ability depletes some amount of Stamina, but Stamina refills fairly quickly. There is no auto-attack. Prior to realizing that I had another skill at my disposal, I was simply hitting '1' over and over again, and cried with boredom, "This is it?"

With the aid of my friend (and the audience around the Aetheryte Crystal I pissed off by bitching about the game in spacial chat), I found out that jobs get new skillz every even level. And in fact once a player completes the intro scene (and subsequently hits Lv.2), they should have at least 2 skills. This makes combat slightly more interesting (although as a Gladiator, my Lv.2 skill requires MP; and MP doesn't refill unless you return to the Crystal...).

Explaining to players that they have new skills and how to find/equip them are obviously not priorities at SE. I leveled several jobs to around Rank 4 before I even realized that I acquired new abilities. In the Abilities menu, there should be a drop down box on the right. It defaults to nothing (which is completely moronic); if you select a weapon from the list, then equippable skills will be shown.

Where to find abilities in FFXIV's GUI

Upon hitting Lv.6 I got a skill that required only Stamina and TP, so this actually did add choice during fighting. The skill was also AOE, and since we were duoing mobs without a problem I started to engage and pull them near each other in order to make things go a bit quicker.

My two-player party was out in the field just killing mobs without any real guidance. Guild Leves (AKA quests) will not fill up a complete play session unless that session is very short. Expect to kill mobs without a quest prompt telling you to do so.

I'm not entirely sure how the mob relative strength gauging works. We were primarily killing blue-con mobs, but we tried to fight a blue monkey once and got killed quickly. Also, like its predecessor, FF14 doesn't indicate what mobs aggro (and perhaps how they aggro).

The first time I died, my body lay on the ground for 5 minutes while I awaited a GUI popup with some options. None such message was displayed, and I eventually found a "Return" option in the main menu. This teleported me back to the Aetheryte Crystal.

I found the death penalty to be contradictory. Returning to the Crystal waypoint debuffs the character with "Weakness". This status effect reduces its HP, MP, and Stamina regeneration rate. So the player is pretty much just waiting around for this to wear off before setting out again. For an MMORPG that is supposed to be catering to the casual crowd I find this mechanic to be defective. Displacing the player is already a loss of time; why make them wait around even further?

Crafting

I didn't experience all the Disciplines of the Land (AKA Gathering jobs) first-hand, but I am willing to bet they all operate the same way.

Gathering professions can equip some skills that help players find resource nodes, giving distance in "yalms" and a compass direction. One ability even provides a sprint buff if the player is far away from the closest node.

Nodes aren't "claimed" as they are in WoW. Anyone nearby or late to the show can walk up and start gathering from the same node. Each player get a personalized Attempt count. Once a player runs out of Attempts, she's gotta move on. The node itself seems to have a global Attempt counter and will deplete eventually if enough people gather from it.

The act of gathering is a simple pattern matching hot-cold guessing game. Players get 3 or 4 guesses along a meter. An indicator moves back and forth along the meter and hitting Confirm places the guess. The game responds with text clues indicating if the guess is way off, going in the wrong direction, close, or very close. If a very close message is presented, guessing the same location again seems to still produce an item. It is possible to guess correctly on the first try.

This gets old fast.

Before the minigame starts, the gatherer indicate "where" they would like to gather. It is a height meter indicating, for example, the depth at which you want to fish. I have a hunch that it skews the probabilities of receiving certain items. I seem to find Copper Ore near the top of the meter, while I often strike Tin when mining near the bottom.

Synthesis in FF14 is very similar to that in FFXI, except there are some additional options. The familiar 8-cell grid for materials is present, and players still have to discover recipes.

The UI is extremely slow; a single synth took 5 mins. The game even froze for 2 seconds (looked like blocking network i/o to me) each time the materials grid was displayed.

I have a feeling all the crafting professions are very tightly coupled. So players are expected either to level multiple Disciple of the Hand jobs (lol), or to pay out the nose for refined materials. And with no Auction House, things might get a bit frustrating. I didn't get past rank 1 Armorer and cannot fathom how someone could level a Crafter primarily.

Conclusion

When information was first breaking about some of the systems in FF14, I feared it would fall flat on its face. But now I see that it does carry on the FFXI legacy, and all those players will enjoy it very much.

However, I don't understand how seasoned and AAA game developers can completely neglect UI and controls. A game is its interface. A sluggish or cumbersome UI just makes the game unplayable, and FF14's UI will delay my purchase until it is remedied. (I am told that the game plays like a dream with a controller, but when a PC title launches 6 months before its console version, the PC controls better be just as intuitive.)

I'm willing to bet that the instruction manual goes through a lot of the basics (like how to equip skills and to accept defeat). It would be nice to have in-game guidance, especially in a post-WoW MMORPG--pop-ups, tutorials, some form of assistance on how to use the UI. But once again those are GUI concerns, and that department doesn't seem to exist at SE.

Vision and Direction

Players are bad at far-mode game design decision-making. People, in general, are bad at far-mode thinking. People live in the here and now, and they don't want to think too much. They may know that they aren't happy, but they can only take almost-random guesses at why. Most people do not care enough to figure out what is wrong. They just know something is wrong and someone should make it better. When they try to articulate what is wrong, they run into a twofold problem: first, they actually do not know what is wrong; and second, they couldn't communicate well enough to convey the problem effectively if they knew the problem.

Would you blame people for not thinking? Thinking gets you into a situation like mine: I'm at a point where I feel like game design is borderline a hopeless endeavor and that we are doing no more than flailing around in semantic mud by talking about it as if we know anything. If I didn't think about games, I wouldn't be here. I could enjoy whatever I happen to enjoy, write love notes on the forums, and leave the blogging to more qualified meddling mages than myself.

People who are smart, thoughtful, and good at reasoning have trouble deciding what is wrong with complex interconnected systems like games. Taste can wash out reasoning about games easily, leaving a designer feeling like there is no anchoring point for making decisions. Without a logical framework from which to make decisions, a game designer would be no better than some guy off the street. You can only get so far by thinking really hard about fun--or even just thinking really hard about what you, in particular, find fun.

People tend to reason through emotion, not through logic--and I am also guilty of this, as is everyone made of biological matter that I've ever talked with. This means that we'll prefer that game mechanics and interfaces work a certain way, and this preference will have no backing in logic. We'll dig for reasons, but in the end the reasons aren't the source of our preference, they're just an attempt at post-hoc justification. Whatever mechanic or interface will simply feel right to us. It's hard to have valuable discussion about such matters, but we desperately try.

The odds are stacked against meaningful and useful discussion. When a designer sets out to create a system and tune it, he's set adrift in a rolling sea where waves of subjectivity splash incessantly at every odd angle and nothing remains as it was for long enough to be appraised and understood. In this environment, designers are left reaching desperately for some kind of raft, some surface that remains stable in the roiling undulations.

What can a designer do to make something of this intractable situation?

One possible solution is to rely on other people to validate the big picture. Unfortunately, other people just won't get what you're trying to do. If you don't have some kind of idea of why you're making a game, then don't make a game. If you do have such an idea, the advice of arbitrary other people will uniformly be useless if not damaging. Asking the right people for advice, though, can greatly help, provided they understand your vision (not a safe assumption under the best of conditions).

The solution isn't to drift aimlessly in the eddies of popular opinion, clearly, because there is no direction there.

Direction comes from establishing some theory and then trying to test it. To make a great game, you need a (mostly) unified and consistent vision of the boundaries of the game systems and some relatively particular idea of what you're trying to accomplish. Some players can help on small matters, like fine-tuning and balancing within existing frameworks (though players' feedback will almost always be garbage), but when designing the basic concepts of how a game will work, there's no substitute for vision.

Even if parts of the game fail, a designer with vision has something to fall back on: they can ammend their theory to account for the failure, or simply come to the realization that a core idea just does not work and move on. Following popular opinion, the designer will simply get lost and have to thrash about if something larger fails because he has no framework within which to make a profound, solid judgment of what has actually happened. "My source was wrong," is all he can say, "and now we need to come up with something else to try." At this point, you might as well be designing your game by adding random features and sticking them together as quickly and easily as possible.

Even a "follow the leader" mentality fails without vision. You can't choose the right mechanics to copy if you don't have a reasoned way to pick mechanics. Picking at random will only get you so far in game design because games are not collections of independently operating mechanics and their metaphors, but are instead systems of highly dependent systems of mechanics whose results are often greater than the sum of their parts.

Without vision, the chances of success greatly decline, the value of success declines (because you chose at random and cannot reproduce success through reapplying reasoning), and the value of failures is almost nothing (because the only alternative to choosing certain random elements is to choose certain other random elements). So when someone asks me why a dev isn't doing what the players want, I respond "maybe they know what they are doing". And if the devs are thrashing about and demonstrating there's no vision guiding them, I know it's time to abandon ship.

Woeful Post of Doom: "Selling Out" Edition

MMORPGs are games that should require and thrive on a large number of concurrent players. In order to keep players logged in, the game needs to go one of two routes: Massive numbers that ensure that the servers seem busy even if everyone plays only 15 minutes a day; or requiring existing hardcore players to play the game for long stretches in order to the get the kind of rewards that hardcore gamers love.

Clearly the casual market is the easiest market into which to grow an MMORPG playerbase. Being casual-friendly is not far from "going mainstream" and "selling out", though. Casuals are generally non-gamers--in order to appeal to them, game designers need to assume less and less knowledge is at the disposal of a new player.

A designer can take two paths here. The hard and "right" path: he can do his best to design the game well by keeping mechanics simple but deep and by designing interfaces that are easy to learn but powerful. The other path--the "easy" one--involves stringing together the cheapest, most addictive proven gameplay mechanics on the market and wrapping them up in an inoffensive and relatable shell, replete with social tie-ins and micro-transaction money sinks.

Casual players will not have developed tastes in gaming. Cheap tricks can keep naive players entertained for a surprisingly long time. The number of naive players is so high that even if a naive player gets bored of a cheap hook within a few days or a month, there are enough naive players around to cycle through the system that there won't be much of an issue making more sales and keeping servers busy.

Regressive design preys on the naive casual gamer. We see this with the retro game resurgence--new generations of players are growing up in a world where their first game experience is in a 3D, multi-ten-million-dollar blockbuster game like Halo, Modern Warfare 2, or Mass Effect; game mechanics ancient, tired, and overdone in the eyes of experienced older gamers are novelties to the younger generation. They will play these games and give a market for the regressive and inferior. Of course some games can do justice to the old ideas, but most--as is the case in almost every arena--such games are crap.

Recycling the same tricks in better wrapping seems to make plenty of money. This is disheartening to me as someone who cares about games and enjoys seeing game design evolve towards radical new directions.

MMORPG design is falling into the same degenerative pattern that players of MMORPGs fall victim to: always taking the path of least resistance at the cost of long-term fun and success. It's worse in MMORPGs than it is in other genres, though, because the cost of putting an MMORPG together and running it dwarf the same kinds of costs for other games. And players have come to expect ridiculous amounts of polish and content from each new MMORPG. Expectations are in the wrong directions and far outreach almost every single development team's capabilities.

Where do we go from here?

To players: I'd suggest leaving the MMORPG scene and finding better games to entertain you. Or just stick to a polished and successful game like World of Warcraft or Lord of the Rings Online or enjoy a niche game that suits you like EVE, Darkfall, or A Tale in the Desert. Give games with alternate payment models (not F2P or P2P) a shot--like Guild Wars 2 (are there others?). Don't waste your time and money playing games that seek to exploit you instead of provide you with consistent fun.

To developers: Ditch the approaches where success will cost you upwards of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Make smaller, well-crafted games. Try new things on the cheap. Try different business models: don't fall into the micro-transaction conflict of interests and don't try to charge subscriptions which encourage artificial content extension. Or maybe just give up on MMORPGs all together and try to branch out into a different kind of MMO that may have a better market at the moment.

Immersion and Realism

Realism is one specific path towards immersion. It's neither a necessary condition of immersion, nor is a game's level of realism at all correlated with how immersive an experience it can provide. Realism is nothing more than a game's resemblance to real life. Real life has an open, impossible to fully articulate (as far as we've been able to, anyway) set of rules, while games have their own sets that are generally self-contained, fully-definable, and self-sufficient. When we're immersed in a game world, it's not because it is real, though strong realism can aid in immersion; we become immersed because we buy into the systems and metaphors of the game. This buy-in requires that the systems and metaphors be smooth to our mental touch. Awkward metaphors, obvious technical issues, and broken game systems can open gaps in the closed system and force us out of buy-in. Other activities outside of the game itself can also hinder buy-in, too, like a crying child, feeling ill, a headache, or just being in a bad mood. When immersed, you and the game are communicating smoothly. Any break in that communication or unwillingness on either side to communicate has a significant chance of breaking immersion.

Game design is communicating interesting problems to the player and then giving him the tools to communicate back solutions that the game then somehow tests and gives feedback on. Game mechanics are communicated through metaphors that reference fantastical or conceivably real objects through the simulacra of sprites, models, textures, and sound. The most obvious way to communicate with a player is to use a "language", or set of metaphors, that they already know: such a language is how-the-real-world-generally-works. This is a shortcut to immersion. Of course no game is truly realistic, but we don't mind that because the exceptions to realism in an immersive game are generally mechanically and metaphorically consistent and make the gameplay better. Games that don't aim to be realistic still use the real world as a basis for the metaphors that pull the player into the game. Realism isn't necessary for immersion, but the game does need to provide the player with ways to relate to the game world.

All games have a base level of likeness to the real world. Realism beyond this point has no correlation to the game's ability to provide an immersive experience.