What Games Are

The Win Imperative [TechCrunch]

This week on TechCrunch I wrote about one of the common themes of What Games Are: the precept that all games are played to win. Using this theme as a basis my latest article talks about the role of rewards in games and how reward by itself is often boring without the spark of a win to guide it. 

As usual, you can read more here.

Choose Fairness Over Balance [Game Design]

 

If a game feels unfair then few players want to play it.

What players see happening in the game and how they interpret it can often be at odds with what the game maker knows goes on under the hood. Fairness is subjective: a game is only fair if its players believe it to be so. To the player it really doesn't matter how the game engine does what it does, whether it's actually balanced or full of hacks that break balance in their favour. They only know what they see and what they think they see. That can be very hard for the maker to understand. 

Designing for fairness sounds like a simple principle, but because it's about feelings rather than facts it's actually very complicated. Particularly for multiplayer games.

Everything You'll Ever Need To Know About Gamification [TechCrunch]

As I wrote a while ago, gamification is much simpler than some folks would like it to be. It's also balder in its practise than in its ambitions. My most recent post on TechCrunch continues in this vein and offers some simple rules and how-to to puncture the myths and be pragmatic. By all means gamify. Just don't lose your head in the clouds while doing so. 

Read the full article here.

Nobody Loves A Beggar [Marketing Stories]

 

For most studios the big problem these days is discoverability. When they make their game, get into the market and try to make sales, they discover that they are just one in a sea of many. They're not on the front page of the App Store, not being reviewed and not attracting fans. Nobody tweets about their game or likes their Facebook page.

So they try every kind of tactic they can think of to get precious eyeballs and clicks. For example: I receive a lot of automated newsletters, tweets, press releases and emails from game makers' publicists. Some even offer me money to write about their game. Similarly, many gaming websites are falling down with automated advertisements begging me to click, to play and to tell my friends.

What they are doing is begging for a response, like Shelley Levine in Glengarry Glen Ross. They need the exposure but the best tactic they can think of is using brute force to achieve it. If they can snag us, they hope, some of us will convert to customers and love them. But nobody loves a beggar. 

When Narrative Turns Creepy [Tomb Raider]

I'm never on the side of censorship, but that does not mean that I have no sense of taste. It's the difference between saying that some forms of self-expression should not be, versus saying that I personally find something crass, tacky or offensive. So in that vein the issue of violent content at this year's E3 is one of personal taste for me: It puts me off wanting to buy some of those games. 

However there's one game whose whole pitch is actually disturbing me. I'm not talking about the typically desensitising headshot shenanigans of yet another shooter, nor the roustabout splashing bloodiness of a God of War. I'm not even thinking of the somewhat more personal-yet-understandable tone of the forthcoming 'Last of Us', which while heavy still feels appropriate. 

No, I'm talking about the new Tomb Raider.

Pilots, Not Heroes [Players]

Consider the player as 'pilot' rather than 'hero'. Pilot means machine operator, she who drives the car, manipulates the crane or remote controls the quadrocopter. Her doll is a device, a conduit for action, an extension of their own hand. And as a pilot sometimes this means dangerous or pressured situations. Piloting is therefore immersive.

Sometimes pilots do amazing things like land a plane in the Hudson. This we call 'heroic', but we need to careful about equivocating that kind of hero with a dramatic hero. Dramatic heroes are complex, motivated, a part of the story to which they belong and inextricably bound by the inevitability of its plot. This may be the intent of your narrative, to make the player feel this way, but you don't really get to do that.

You get to present the situation, the storysense, the doll and the rules and encourage them to believe in its reality. Some players will play in the spirit of the game, others will play it literally. They always do they so on their own terms and that's outside your sphere of influence. It's the creative constant of 'self', one of six that bind all games. The player is only ever herself, not the person you might wish her to be.

Most Players Are Unreliable [Fundamentals]

There’s a very simple reason why the deep multiplayer experience of the future that many designers dream for never comes to pass. It’s the same reason why Draw Something has lost millions of users. It’s also why turn-based games usually only have niche appeal. It’s because players are unreliable, flaky, forgetful and selfishly motivated.

Any kind of game that relies on players to interact with one another exposes itself to this issue. The player who forgets to take her turn, the player who realise she’s hit a loss point and decides she doesn’t want to play any more, or the player who uses play as a conduit for inappropriate behaviour has a disproportionate effect on the experience of everyone else.

The games that successfully navigate this issue do so by keeping the format of the game short and allowing for substitution. Perhaps Left 4 Dead does it best, swapping players for characters at a moment’s notice so that at least your game can continue even if your partner disconnects.

Player unreliability is why meta-games fail where single player games succeed, why pen and paper roleplaying games find it hard to gain mass audience while World of Warcraft draws millions upon millions. It is simply easier to motivate a player to play if she knows that her game will always be waiting for her. No kind of game is more frequently thaumatic than a single player game, if only because you can drown out the rest of the world and its Xbox Live chatter.

This is why single player games remain the most important innovation of the videogame age.

Equivocitis [Terminology Wars]

Some people argue that every kind of interactive software experience should be called a 'game'. For some, it's a statement of inclusiveness as a way to explain why games are brilliant. For others, it's about being part of a marketing story about games, for visibility. Mostly it's about pushing boundaries and escaping limits, but the thing is: All eventually fall victim to equivocitis.

Like Douglas Adams's joke about Man proving that black equals white (only to be killed at the next zebra crossing), equivocitis is the disease of bending definitions and words to connect the unconnected or gather the un-gatherable. It’s using equivocation to prove a point, inferring single-case exceptions to bridge ideas and ‘prove’ to the reader that the thing you believe might be real is actually so.

We need to inoculate ourselves against this plague because it’s the main reason why the debate over games, their status as an art and their future goes nowhere.

The Four Lenses of Game Making

For years it’s been apparent that interpreting games and their makers through the opposed lenses of gameplay or story is inadequate. Such a one-dimensional spectrum breeds false oppositions (fun-or-art?) while either ignoring many games that don’t fit or reinterpreting them so they fit badly. The spectrum is too reductive and, while it is easy to summarise, it leaves out too much context.

Rather than talking about games in terms of two lenses, I use four (potentially five, but I’ll come back to that). Each represents a common set of assumptions and predispositions that I often see in makers, and there are correlations between them which makes for an interesting (though perhaps deceptively symmetric) diagram.

This post is long, but I’d like to take you through each in turn. I think you’ll find it useful.

Why Must Orcs Die? [Signifiers]

Orcs Must Die is a great indie game in which, as the title says, you kill a lot of orcs. Buy it, play it, it’s well worth it. But why must it be orcs that die?

Why not someone else for a change?