Mobile crap - daily login

This series of articles is a rant about mobile game design. It may extend to console and PC gaming, but I only talk about what I experienced through most games featured on the iPad app store in the past year or so.

Designers could invent new mechanics to improve the core gameplay, and thereby improve retention metrics in the long run. But they cheat: they invent new mechanics to immediately improve retention metrics, thereby ignoring or forgetting to improve the core gameplay.

Mobile games try to maximize various metrics: their number of daily and monthly active users (DAU and MAU), the average session length, and so on. To do so, they introduce game mechanics that encourage players to come back every day or play longer. In games like Clash of Clans or Farmville, the come-back mechanic is the core game loop, so it is not a problem. Waiting and coming back is what these games are about. But in traditional fighting, racing, or match-three games, the only reason why players would come back or play longer is because they like the fighting, racing, or match-three mechanics, not because they like waiting.

More and more games have been adding come-back mechanics on top of their core gameplay. In 2004, World of Warcraft started granting a rest XP bonus to players who do not login for a long time. Blizzard designers originally implemented the rest mechanic to prevent hardcore players to level up too quickly. Beta-testers hated it, so Blizzard made it a reward for casual players instead of a punishment for hardcore players. Nothing changed mathematically, but players prefer mechanics if they are framed as a reward.

More recently in mobile games, Plundernauts has been giving out a welcome-back reward for logging in. They also give out bounties which must be completed within 24 hours - an incentive to play at least a few battles during the day, most likely in one session. 24-hour bounties are great for metrics such as the average session length, but they do not make the game more fun in the long run.

Puzzle and Dragons gives two login bonuses: 1) a consecutive login bonus, with rewards increasing every consecutive day, and reset the day the player does not login, and 2) a cumulative login bonus, increasing every day the player logs in, and never reset. Also, there are 5 exclamation marks for 7 lines of text in the login bonus message. By abusing the exclamation mark they over-emphasize my login, and it looks very amateur.

And finally, mobile games such as Birzzle or Mother of Myths show a daily login calendar when the player logs in. Some calendars focus on the week (4x7 cells), others on the month (5x6 cells). The calendar resembles an Advent Calendar, except 1) nothing happens at the end, and 2) the calendar mechanic is not properly tied to the core gameplay (receive more and more gold, or increasingly better gifts). The only point of the calendar is to keep people logging in for the rewards, not to have more fun playing the game.

A lot of mobile games have mediocre and dull core gameplay. These games are often sugarcoated in happy-shiny graphics and habit-forming mechanics. None of those improve their core gameplay. These games remain shallow.

The loops of Diablo 3

In Vanilla D3 (D3 for short), players could buy or sell gear for in-game gold or real money at the auction house (AH). Players reported feeling frustrated: they drop legendary gear (yay!), but when they check the AH, they realize their legendary gear is actually average. So they buy amazing gear from the AH for cheap, roll over monsters they used to have so much trouble with, and become bored with the game quickly. Damion Schubert, a designer on SWTOR, echoed that the core loop of D2 was much stickier than D3's. So did players during a Reddit Q&A session with D3 designers. Personally, I started a year after the game launched, bought all my gear from the AH for little gold, never dropped any better gear, rarely managed to sell gear on the AH, and left after a month.

Blizzard removed the AH for the D3 expansion, Reaper of Souls (ROS), released in March 2014. The game feels better. Is it because the core game loop is back to what it was in D2?

Two core loops

At its core, Diablo (D2, D3, and ROS) has actually two intertwined core loops: the usual XP loop and the item-game loop. XP loop: kill monsters to accumulate XP to increase level to improve stats and skills to do more damage to kill harder monsters. Item-game loop: kill monsters to drop gear to improve stats and skills to do more damage to kill harder monsters.

To mix these two loops together, the Diablo designers decided that damage was dealt by skills, but increased by stats (e.g. each point of DEX increases damage by 1%) and gear (e.g. increase the damage of fire skills by 10%), especially weapons (which is why 40% of all drops are weapons or off-hand gear).

In D3, characters unlock skills every level until they reach 70. After level 70, characters gain Paragon levels. Each Paragon level gives 1 point to increase a stat. The real goal of Paragon levels is not better stats, but rather frustration control. The item-game loop triggers randomly and irregularly: a player could go for hours without dropping a better gear. The XP loop, on the other hand, is reliable and constantly increasing. In other words, the item-game is a roulette, while the XP loop a grind. While not super fun by themselves, combined they make the game more fun. Interestingly, Paragon levels were an afterthought, and only shipped 3 months after launch.

ROS and removing the AH

The XP loop did not change between Vanilla D3 and ROS, but the item loop did. In D3, the primary way to convert gold into items and vice-versa was the AH. But the AH went out of hand: powerful items were available for cheap, and a hyper-inflation boosted by a gold dupe bug made the economy collapse. In ROS, the AH was decommissioned and replaced by a beefed-up crafting system (crafting was insignificant in Vanilla D3).

As of patch 2.0.5, though, the gear available from crafting is mostly defensive or utility. The best gear is offensive, and dropped from monsters in high difficulty or found randomly in bounty rewards. Except for enchanting, crafting is pointless.

Clash of Clans - mechanics

Clash of Clans (CoC) is a mobile game for Android and iOS. It launched in August 2012, was the most lucrative iOS game of 2013. CoC was developed by SuperCell (SC), a Finnish game company founded in 2010. In April 2013, SC was generating 2.4 million dollars per day with only two games: CoC and Hay Day, a Farmville clone. In October 2013, a giant Japanese conglomerate bought half of SC's shares for 1.5 billion dollars.

I have played CoC actively from February to December 2013. I always played the game for free.

Resources

At the first glance, CoC is very much like Farmville: two resources, namely gold and elixir, are produced automatically over time. But resource production is perfectly done compared to Farmville: crops do not wither if they are not harvested on time. So it's always rewarding to come back and collect resources from the gold mines and collectors (mines, for short).

Building upgrades

Most buildings can be upgraded by spending one of the two resources. Gold is used to upgrade defensive buildings such as cannons or walls. Elixir is used to produce troops to attack other players, and to upgrade troop-related buildings such as barracks or army camps. Mines can also be upgraded to produce more resources per hour, but also to store more resources until they are collected. For example, a level-2 mine takes 2h30 to fill up, which may encourage new players to visit the game more often. But players quickly realize that they are wasting resources during the night or a day at school. So players want to upgrade their mines to level 5 because then they take 10 hours to fill up. But upgrading a mine to level 5 requires Town Hall level 3, which itself requires a significant amount of gold, usually obtained after several hours of play. And that is how players get hooked.

Player versus player

After 3-4 days, the core mechanics change progressively. The amount of resources produced by mines becomes negligible compared to the cost of building upgrades. The player realizes that to keep her upgrades going, she must steal resources from other players, or from the solo campaign missions. The solo missions can only be completed once, so PvP is unavoidable. At this point, I suspect most players to take a decision. Some decide PvP is not for them, so they stop playing. Of those who continue, a very small minority decide that the game is all about competing against other players. These players are called trophy hunters, since winning a battle rewards the player with trophies. A leader-board shows the 100 players with most trophies. Most trophy hunters spend real money to instantly max their buildings and troops. They eventually become regular buyers, the 2% whales spending $200 per week.

Farming

The remaining 98% who decide to keep playing focus on stealing resources from other players. The most dedicated of them are called farmers; they train cheap armies and ignore trophies as long as they loot resources. Farmers are very practical and calculating: should they build an army costing 5-50k elixir in 15 minutes, and loot 100k-500k of resources from another player, or wait for their mines to produce 5k of each resource in these 15 minutes? Their behavior is obvious: 1) turtling is a waste of time, 2) they login when their army is trained, and 3) they logout when they have attacked and do something else (like playing another game) while their troops are training.

Sinks

There are one elixir sink and two gold sinks. Elixir is sunk when the player trains expensive and powerful troops. Since farmers usually train fast and cheap troops, they often have more elixir than they can spend. The first gold sink is walls. Each of the 250 walls costs 8M gold to max out. The best farmers make 1M per hour, so we're talking about 2,000 hours of (sporadic) gameplay here. For someone playing 5 hours per weekday night and 20 hours during the weekend, walls take around 10 months. So walls are a humongous gold sink. The second gold sink lies in the match-making. When a player goes to attack, she is presented with another player's village. If there is too little loot, she can next for 200-1000 coins. Spending 50k gold in nexts to find a 200k-gold raid is very common. That second sink is very big too.

Pace of progression

To give an idea of the pace of progression, below are screenshots from my village from March to November 2013.

Player Experience Panel, Phillips 2010

Player Experience Panel, Phillips at GDC 2010.

(slides, mostly about FPS games)

Each dot represents the average number of days taken to complete a particular achievement. DLC achievements are farther because DLC were released later (not because they are harder or take more time to complete).

Box gameplay peaks when new DLC is released: new content does increase the number of people playing. However, later DLC packs do not peak as much as the first DLC pack.

Influence of gameplay on skill in Halo: Reach

Huang et al. Influence of Gameplay on Skill in Halo Reach, 2013

Data: 3m player data (entire population) for the first 7 months of Halo Reach, and 70 players in a survey. Mixed methods: use survey data to help explain the big dataset.

Most played mode is Team Slayer: from 3v3 to 5v5, one point per kill, first team to reach 50 kills. Match ends after 15 min.

Player skill metric: TrueSkill's mean μ. More frequent players have bigger μ drop at week 1, but their μ increases faster over the weeks.
The longer the break between two games, the bigger drop in skill. It takes 10 games (3h of gameplay) to regain the skill lost after a break of 1 month.
Most of the top 100 players use the DMR (same range as sniper rifle) and sniper rifle.

TERA's free-targetting combat: server-side

In the May 2012 issue of GD mag, Seungmo Koo, the server architect for TERA, wrote about how their studio implemented the server back-end for the game's free-targeting combat system. Some parts of the technical solution described in the article were unclear, or the problems were not obvious, so I filled the gaps by guessing their approach.

Basics

During fights, the player uses various kinds of attacks and skills. For the player, free-targeting means paying attention to the avatar's orientation and position. There is no monster selection like in WoW. Looking at actual gameplay footage, the combat feels more lively, but there is a lot of hit and run.

From a system perspective, free-targeting means the server does not know which enemy the avatar is targeting. Hence, the server has to detect if a skill's volume of effect collides with any of the monsters around the avatar. To ensure quick computation of the collision, the server runs at 60 FPS. These features are similar to traditional multiplayer FPS requirements, except that for security and simplicity, there is no lag compensation running on the client-side. All the computations happen on the server-side. However, for an MMO to reach a gameplay as responsive as an FPS, the client should be able to execute the player's actions immediately, account for lag, and eventually run some of the NPCs. TERA accounts for lag like an MMO: in PvE, NPCs are slow to give players time to react. In PvP, however, players with a lower ping to the server have an advantage.

Game design

Every creature in the game world is made of cylinders. A skill reaches its target when the skill's volume of effect collides with one of the target's cylinders. A skill's volume of effect can be a cylinder (e.g. usual AoE around a target or self), a portion of a cylinder (e.g. rotating attack using an axe), a portion of a cone (e.g. a frontal attack using a spear), and so on.

Since skills may last for some time, they are discretized in two to more than a dozen targeting times, and each targeting time is associated with a particular volume of effect. Each targeting time consists of two phases: a search (read) phase, and an update (write) phase. For instance, using a rotating attack, the avatar spins for 360 degrees in 300ms, inflicting damage during its turn. The first targeting time fires at 50ms: in the search phase, the server searches for a target standing in a particular volume in front of the avatar, and, in the update phase, inflicts that target 200 damage. The second targeting time fires at 100ms: the server searches for a target standing in another particular volume on the left of the avatar, and inflicts that target 100 damage. And so on for the remaining targeting times.

Multi-threading and performance

Task	Example
Timer	Damage over time or NPC AI movement scripts
Region update	Add/remove/update the position of a creature in a region
Creature update	Update HP, status, position of a creature

Each TERA server runs the whole world for approximately 6k concurrent players. The server has a few things to do in the main loop. First, it processes client packets, and generates timer, region, and/or creature tasks from them. That is when the search-for-target phase happens. Then, it executes scheduled timer tasks, which will likely themselves generate region and creature tasks. And finally, it executes region tasks. The update phase happens in the creature tasks, and also in the region task in case of creature movement, spawn, or death events.

To come up with their final design, the TERA engineers may have followed this train of thoughts:

• Problem: an 8-core server running Windows reaches 100% CPU with 3k players. How can this be improved?
• Solution: use asynchronous IO such as Window's IOCP. It automatically creates a task queue for client packets and a worker thread pool to process that packet queue in parallel.
• New problem: The threads spend too much time waiting for locks when trying to read or update region data (e.g. list of creatures in the region, or creature position).
• Solution: Avoid contention by replicating the world in each thread. No lock: the thread searches in its own version of the world.
• New search-phase problem: When executing a region task, the region data of a particular thread becomes inconsistent with other threads.
• Solution: The thread pushes the region tasks it generates into a queue shared between all threads, so that each thread processes all the region tasks. As an example, when an 8-core server receives a client movement packet, one thread processes it and generates (for instance) one region task from that packet. The thread pushes this region task to the end of the queue with an execution counter of 8. Each of the 8 threads processes the task queue at its own pace. When a thread processes a task, it decrements the task's counter. When the counter reaches 0, the thread deletes the task from the queue. Hence, the task mentioned above will be removed from the queue when all the threads have processed it.
• New update-phase problem: frequently updating a particular creature causes lock contention.
• Solution: The world replica of each thread stores creature pointers. When a thread processes a packet or a timer task that results in a creature update, it pushes the creature's function to run (e.g. Creature.receiveDamage), with particular arguments (e.g. 200) to that creature's task queue. If the creature task queue is currently being iterated over by another thread, then the current thread returns to what it was doing before (e.g. main loop). Otherwise, the current thread iterates over the creature's task queue. The queue starts with the task the thread just pushed, but other threads may push tasks to the queue while the current thread is processing its task. The current thread will process those extra tasks too, until the queue is empty. Then, the thread will go back to its main loop. Hence, creature tasks are executed asynchronously; getting a return value for the task execution requires the active object pattern.

The resulting high-level architecture is something like the following:

Questions

Seugmo replied to my original questions (see the comment below); here are some more!

• How much CPU is caused by packet processing? How much does the CPU increase when 1000 players gather together versus when players are homogeneously scattered?
• When lots of creatures gather in the same region, the search phase (happening on only one thread) may consume a lot of that thread's CPU. Could the search phase happen faster if the regions were smaller? Could it happen faster if the regions were using Binary Space Partitioning?

FPS, RTS, and fighting playstyles

Summaries of player types from gamerdna.com. Even though there is no scientific basis in those types, they show various types of gameplay and players to keep in mind when designing a game.

Multiplayer FPS playstyles

Support	sniper protecting critical places or healer/supplier.
Commander	strategist, guide.
Recon	strike when least expected. Crafty, fast, sneaky, behind enemy lines.
Shock Trooper	frontal attack

RTS playstyles

Rusher	fast, micromanagement, keyboard shortcuts, predict and counter-attack opponent
Strategist	thinker more than a doer, big picture, game knowledge
Turtle	build a fortress/maze. Max out the tech tree and prepare a big explosion to win.
Commander	playful curiosity over optimality.

Fighting playstyles

Tactician	thinking, mastering characters, out-maneuvering the opponent
Speed Demon	quick, keep out of harm's way
Brute	massive force
Loose Cannon	unpredictable, go with the flow, take advantage of openings

Bottom-up game design

Existing definitions

Adams defined bottom-up game design in 2004 as turning a simulation or a real-life mechanism into a game. It assumes that any process that is subtle or interesting to program is also going to be interesting to play with. If the simulation has too many variables, many of them end up being useless, and this results in possible dominant strategies and the game being dull.

Lopes and Kuhnen redefined bottom-up game design in 2007, as applying a particularly fun gameplay verb or mechanic, complementing it with the appropriate setting, content and story. Developers think first about the elementary game actions, called verbs, that the player can execute (move, attack, ...) and then about the aesthetics (fantasy universe, ...). Examples are games in the Doom series, which were built barely as excuses for the brutal, over-the-top shooting gameplay; the oppressing universe and mood simply fit well with the gameplay.

In 2010, Deleon focused more on the medium constraints with his definition: concept inspired by or chosen partly by its form of representation. For instance, Bubble Bobble is about shooting a ball into balls of similar color, and the little dragons or fruits are merely decorations. Same for Bejewelled. Bottom-up designed games also include games made for particular platforms with limited hardware (like Bogost's games for the Atari 2600).

More theory: ludemes

Ludeme was a term coined by Berloquin or Dawkins in the early 1970s, as a portmanteau of ludic meme, because a ludeme can be found in many (classes of) games. Ludemes are described by Parlett as conceptual elements of the game, most typically equivalent to its "rules" of play. For example, whereas the material piece shaped like a horse and designated "knight" is a component of the game, the distinctively skewed move of a knight is a ludeme of the class "rule of movement". But other types of ludemes also exist. For example, the name, referend and associated connotations of "knight" - those of a chivalric courtier - may be said to constitute a thematic ludeme.

At GDC 2005, Koster presented his vision of a grammar of gameplay, referring a lot to ludemes. For Koster, ludemes are atomic mechanics with at least 2 possible outcomes (e.g. moving a Checker piece to capture, prepare, or force the opponent to capture (which is actually a kind of preparation)), among which at least one is failure (even if failure only means closing some of the player's opportunity doors). Synonyms of ludemes are: verbs (Crawford), choices (Meier), or conflict. Each ludeme involves a UI action (e.g. pressing button). In terms of complexity, Chess is more complicated than Checkers because each of the 6 types of Chess pieces has its own movement and capture ludemes, while all Checker tokens have the same ludemes.

Bottom-up game design in practice

As Lopes and Kuhnen pointed out, designing games with a top-down approach is somewhat of a dark art when it's time for the designer to bridge the gap between the high-level concept (e.g. in terms of experience, emotions and feelings targeted to the player) and the routine tasks of the player (e.g. drawing a card, moving their avatar or attacking). Current game design textbooks such as Adams' Fundamentals or Schell's Book of Lenses, putting forward player-centricity, suggest a top-down approach by focusing on the experience the entire game should convey to the player.

But a player-centric bottom-up approach is also possible. I'm trying here to provide prescriptive rather than proscriptive steps. In the bottom-up process, the designer should ask the following questions:

• What are the elementary actions the player can do? (define the ludemes)
• How can these actions be fun? (feeling of latent power, fiero, schadenfreude, aesthetic pleasure, ...)
• What are the transitions between these actions? (for the ludeme "roll a dice", it is when the dice is rolling)
• How fun are the transitions? (surprise, feeling of progression)
• Sanity checks: how do the actions fit together as a whole? (pointing to shoot in FPS should not be followed by a dice roll, the intense mechanical ludemes of Doom should be matched with horror-aesthetics ludemes such as the lack of light, ...) Does the overall feel of the game match the feeling of all the elementary actions put together? (ludemes should add up, not negate each other)

This process is tentative, possibly flawed, and therefore feedback is most welcome.

21st Century Game Design - Part I

21st Century Game Design, by Chris Bateman and Richard Boon, 2005.

Part I - Games exist primarily to satisfy the needs of an audience

ch1 - Zen game design

Zen Buddhism can not be learned, it can only be experienced. There is no objective perspective on anything. Hence zen game design's tenets: game design reflects needs + there's no single method to design + there exist methods to game design. These methods are:

• first principles: what you want to do -> game world abstraction -> design -> implementation
• clone and tweak: most common method. existing design -> tweak -> implementation
• meta-rules: goal = provoking debate. meta-rules -> design -> implementation
• expressing technology: in teams without actual game designers. technology -> game implementation
• Frankenstein: art or technical materials -> design -> implementation
• story-driven: narrative -> design -> implementation

Participants in the game project: audience, publisher, producer, programmers, artists, marketing/PR, license holder. Example: saving for causal audience is vital; for hardcore audience, it should not break gameplay; for programmers, it's a technical detail; for producer, it's looking at how other games do it.

ch2 - Designing for the market

The commercial success for a medium clears the way for artistic expression, not the way around

A game design is successful when the target audience is satisfied. This justifies the need for an audience model. Existing models: simple distinction hardcore/casual, distinction by genre (but genres are too vague), EA's model, and ihobo's model.

Simple hardcore/casual distinction

hardcore	casual
plays lots of games	plays few games
game literate	game illiterate
plays for the challenge	plays to relax, kill time, and just for fun
segment can be polarized: many can buy the same title	hard to polarize, diverse and disparate

EA's model:

EA's model take-away: do not ignore hardcores because they are the ones pushing a game to broader segments. Corollary: no TV ads are needed if the game is not made for casuals.

iHobo's model:

Evangelist clusters = gaming press, mainstream press, and the 3 million of hardcores in the world. Target clusters = Testosterone (9M players worldwide), lifestyle (30M), and family (90M) gamers.

Design tools for market penetration (aka demographic game design):

• Looking for good gameplay (ie the game being performance-oriented, with stats, clear goals and victory conditions) vs good toyplay (unorganized). Hardcores are driven by gameplay, but lifestyle and family gamers are driven by both.
• Controls should remain accessible for casuals.
• The minimum play session length is usually expressed in terms of the duration of a level or the time between two save points. For casuals, it should be below 15 minutes, but hardcores do not mind core activities of a game taking at least an hour or two. Ex: a typical DotA match takes 45 to 60 minutes, whereas a (small size) Mine Sweeper can take less than a minute. Nintendo games are also famous for allowing the player to quit at any time and provide core activities of at most a few minutes.
• The average play session length is also lower for casuals: they may complete one level at a time, whereas hardcores can aim at 10 levels per play session.
• Play window: total time spent playing the game. The longer the play window, the longer hardcores will spend evangelizing the game. Therefore, despite most of the players not completing the game, content is crucial! The play window can also be extended by introducing hidden features, higher difficulty levels, variety in characters to play with (to increase replayability), and online PVP (although that only works for Testosterone and hardcore gamers).

Phases of penetration: taking the example of The Sims.

1. Hardcore penetration: the game needs challenge, progress, and depth.
2. Hardcore evangelism: the game needs to appeal to the Lifestyle gamer, easy to reach fun, strong marketing, and a strong license.
3. Casual penetration: the game needs fun, toys, short minimum play session.
4. Casual evangelism: the game needs to get the attention of the mainstream press.

ch3 - Myers-Briggs typology of gamers

Assumption: nature of games people enjoy and frequency of play vary with player personality and reaction to situations. The Myers-Briggs model was developed in the 1940s and indicates how an individual would prefer to react to situations in general. See the Myers-Briggs type frequencies in the US. Four pairs of traits:

Type	Opposite type	Game design
Introversion (50% of pop) think then act, needs private time, 1-to-1 communication and relationships	Extroversion (50% of pop) act then think, likes people, deprived when alone	Most games are played by introverts. Extraverts can take long breaks from the game, so provide a todo list for them when they come back to play, otherwise they'll forget what they had to do in their previous play session. Extraverts like DDR because of its performance aspect.
Sensing (70% of pop) live in the present, apply common sense, based on prior experience, likes clear and concrete info	iNtuition (30% of pop) live in near future, new and imaginative approaches, based on theory, comfortable with fuzzy information, seek for patterns)	Learning and problem solving are frequent gameplay elements in many genres. Learning: in tutorials, S will accept linear series of lessons, but N would rather guess by themselves. Problem solving: S will use trial and error, while N will like to use their lateral thinking skills. Therefore, make lateral thinking puzzles (at most) secondary objectives, or allow the player to progress without having completed all of them. Ex: Super Mario 64 only requires 30 stars to unlock new levels. S want simple and usual mechanics, while N won't mind having to guess the rules and a steep learning curve.
Thinking (30% of women, 60% of men) decide from facts and logic, objective, focus on task, think that conflicts are sometimes unavoidable	Feeling (70% of women, 40% of men) decide from emotion, subjective, focus on consequences to people, wish to avoid conflicts	Clear goals for T. Personal encouragement for F, but T may feel patronized. Solution: useful AND aesthetic/fun items are rewards that will satisfy both T and F. Gathering collectibles give goals to T, but should not be a grind. F are motivated and rewarded when they see their actions have impact on the world or other characters. T enjoy receiving critical feedback (a game over with tips), but F will take it personally. Ex: Zelda gives clear goals (good for T), falling or getting hit results in losing half a heart (and not instant death) and Link has an impact on the game world (good for F).
Judging (55% of pop) plan then move, single task at a time, ahead of deadlines, targets and routines to manage life	Perceiving (45% of pop) plan as you go, multitask, work better before deadline, avoid routine and commitment	J want to beat the game (get all the secret bonuses) and complete objectives. P want to improve their abilities, and enjoy the process. For P, goals completed = feedback that they're on track. Non-linear structure is good for P because if they don't like a level, they can try another and keep progressing. J needs to know what to do to progress. Ex: in Tony Hawk or GTA, players need to collect points (good for J) but they can collect them the way they want (various kinds of skate figures or driving/killing missions or sandbox play, good for P).

TJ vs FP: TJ want challenges to overcome (what most current games provide), FP want easy fun (cf Sims or casual games).

Study hypothesis: hardcore player is a 14-28 year old tech savvy male who plays up to 8 games per month. Supposedly, he plays on his own (hence I), is methodological, goal-oriented enjoys conflicts (T), plays games until completion and looks for perfect score/overachiever (J). Previous quantitative work from the Bartle test by Andreasen showed the average hardcore MMO player is IST. Therefore, let's suppose hardcores are IT. Overall, 15% of women and 35% of men are of type IT.

ch4 - DGD1

DGD1 is intended as a tool to aid in market-oriented game design.

Methods: between 2002 and 2004, ask 408 participants (incl 122 women) to answer a 32-question Myers-Briggs personality test, as well as questions on purchasing and playing habits, and do you consider yourself hardcore, casual, or no idea?. Only look at people who play at least one game per year. Survey advertised on hardcore and casual websites/game portals + university students.

Results: clustering gave a sketchy and incomplete result, and FE and SI dimensions did not help to cluster, but 4 clusters appeared anyway: conqueror (TJ), manager (TP), Wanderer (FP), and participant (FJ). Hypothesis rejected: hardcores are found in E and S (and not only I and T). Still, I and N are higher for hardcores and MMO players than casuals. For each of the four types, twice more respondents reported they were casuals than hardcores.

The DGD1 demographic model

Type	Hardcores Desc	Casuals Desc	Progress	Story	Social
Conqueror	ITJ. Want meaningful challenges, strategies and puzzles, want to complete the game. Want lots of content, try to beat themselves. The game is too easy if they don't die at least a few times. Anger, frustration, boredom, and fiero.	ISTJ. FPS and racing games, they play to compete and win. Rely on genre conventions and do not like deviations from the genre. Fiero (although it's oblivious to them) and schadenfreude in PVP, or in GTA for rampages	Rapid advancement: stats in RPG, better gear in FPS	Focus on plot twists/events, not on characters	Online: vocal hardcores from forums and blogs. They also like to win discussions
Manager	ITP. Strategy and tactics. Winning is less important than mastering the game systems: process-oriented, not goal oriented. Conquerors consider them rivals and targets. Patient. Look for challenging but not impossible. Don't look for hidden features but rather refine their current knowledge. Fiero. Civ series.	ISTP. Want familiar settings and realism. Like construction and management games like SimCity. Hate being stuck even if they suck. Hate interruptions and like smooth difficulty curves.	Steady. Give up if no reliable strategy is found quickly.	Plot, not characters.	None?
Wanderer	INFP. Easy fun and toyplay, not challenges. Variety keeps the fun going. Complete levels in aesthetically pleasing ways. Cf Puzzle Bobble/Bust-a-Move: simple controls, bright colors, and actions with direct and satisfying changes to the environment. See also Mario Party and Super Monkey Ball. Need to be able to give up the current task for another different task. May turn to Conqueror or Manager relatives for help. Emotions: finesse, aesthetics, wonder, awe and mystery, but no fiero.	ENFP. Want to accomplish something in the game world without the need for challenges. Games = way to relax. Feeling of progression or else boredom. Lack of market vectors to reach them [although nowadays there's Facebook]	New toys, colorful and imaginative environments	Emotions. Empathy to characters or investment in world/immersion.	Talk about what they like but avoid arguments
Participant	FJ. Games as social entertainment. Cf DDR, The Sims. Little survey data about this group.		Narrative of group of players	Characters and emotions, but in control of them, not just spectator.	Multiplayer, but must face other players in person, not just online (no MMO)

ch5 - Player abilities

Flow = subjects believe they can complete their activity. Subjects have clear goals and direct and clear feedback. Effortless involvement. Goals should be short-term for participant and conqueror, but long-term for Wanderer and manager because they like to figure out the short-term goals themselves.

Caillois' table of the four categories of play helps understand how flow is related to toyplay. In the table, there really is a continuum between Paidia and Ludus.

The relation between the four play styles of DGD1 and Caillois' categories of games

Conqueror Agon	Manager Agon (Alea tolerated)
Participant Mimicry	Wanderer Mimicry (Alea tolerated)

Caillois' table of the four categories of play

-	Agon (competition)	Alea (chance)	Mimicry (simulation)	Ilinx (vertigo)
Paidia (spontaneous play)	Spontaneous races	Counting out rhymes, coin flipping	Masks and disguisement	Children whirling, swinging
Ludus (structured play)	Sports	Betting, lotteries	Theatre	Skiing, mountain climbing

People with high Myers-Briggs Feeling scores prefer avoiding conflicts, therefore they don't like Agon. They're also more likely to like Mimicry since they focus on people. For example, Wanderers appreciate finesse, which is a component of Mimicry. Ilinx resembles immersion, it appeals to everyone.

Temperament theory gives patterns of behaviors, while Myers-Briggs gives patterns of perception or judgement.

Temperament theory

Temperament	Core needs	Myers-Briggs traits	Skills	% of pop
Rational	Knowledge, competence	NT	Strategic: Think and plan ahead, identify the means to achieve a goal, coordinate actions strategically	10%
Idealist	Unique identity, search for meaning and significance	NF	Diplomatic: Resolve conflicts while recognizing individuality, empathy, find similarities through abstraction	15%
Artisan	Freedom to act and ability to impact	SP	Tactical: Read the current content and manage the situation, work out the next step and take action, improvise to overcome problems	25%
Guardian	Belonging and sense of responsibility/duty	SJ	Logistical: Organizing and meeting needs, optimizing and standardizing, protect and ensure safety	50%

Temperament, Myers-Briggs and DGD1

Type	Myers-Briggs traits	Hardcore temperament trait	Casual temperament trait	Flow provenance	Examples
Conqueror	TJ	strategic	logistical	Capacity to see in advance how to address problems (strategic) and iterate/repeat to improve/optimize the solution (logistical). Willingness to fail and repeat	Production of units in RTS, monsters or bosses with patterns (cf Doom monsters)
Manager	TP	strategic	tactical	Planning ahead (strategic) and reacting to rapidly changing situations (tactical). Hardcores like to get lost in their thoughts, ideally without time limitations. Casuals have flow in the action, and need short-term goals.	RTS have both spontaneous maneuvers and long-term strategies. Civ, Chess or puzzles for hardcores.
Wanderer	FP	diplomatic	tactical	Immersion, explicit short-term goals (tactical). Completion of goals is not a big thing, it happens almost as a side-effect of exploration. Give them time to explore.	Platformers (goal is obvious and challenges relatively easy)
Participant	FJ	diplomatic	logistical	Feeling of belonging, toyplay, optimize relationships (logistical) with other characters or players, immerse themselves in social situation	The Sims, Animal Crossing

Casual audience is best approached with familiar settings and content, and with gameplay that revolves around optimization or thinking on your feet (tactical). Hardcores prefer original games that give them a sense of identity (diplomatic), and problems to solve (strategic), e.g. Final Fantasy focuses on story and strategic battles.

The aesthetics of gameplay: a lexical approach

The aesthetics of gameplay: a lexical approach
Zagal and Tomuro
MindTrek'10

See the PDF or the ACM page.

Primary Elements of Gameplay Aesthetics

Aesthetics cluster	Words in cluster	Description
Pacing	fast, stressful, dull, tedious	The perception of how often game events occur.
Scope	endless, vast, immense, minimal	The size of the possibility space afforded by a game.
Complexity	simple, short, complex, uncomplicated	The measure, or sense, of the number of parts in a system and how they are interrelated.
Demands	hardcore, experienced, retro, demanding	The requirements imposed upon the player by the gameplay
Cognitive Accessibility	deep, unusual, twisted, intricate,	The measure, or sense, of the opacity of a system and the challenges it poses in understanding it.
Impact	addictive, boring, overwhelming, visceral	What we feel games “do to us” when we play them, and how they make us feel.

• Analyzed nearly 400k user reviews posted before April 2009 on gamespot.com. 8k games covered by reviews from 112k users.
• 40% of user reviews contain the word gameplay
• Method: Stanford Parser to perform part-of-speech tagging. Matrix of (723 adjectives total that precede and modify the word gameplay) x (5000 most frequent words that occur before or after the adjective, ie context words, ie words that give a context to the adjective). Cells of the matrix contain number of occurrence of an adjective with a context word. Run kmeans on the matrix to obtain k=30 adjective clusters. (Compared to k=10 or 20, k=30 generated better-looking clusters). Two adjectives are similar (and put in the same cluster) if their context word distributions are similar. Then, give a name to each cluster based on the adjectives it contains.
• Only 2 clusters about narrative elements. Therefore, players have no difficulties separating the formal or mechanical aspects (game mechanics) from their narrative interpretations (representation).
• AI does not emerge as a cluster. Possible reasons: no language to describe game AI, or games AI are not sophisticated enough, or a too recently marketed topic to feature in reviews.
• Genre does not emerge as a cluster.
• Limitations: Gamespot population = 95% males, lots of colloquial words disappeared in cleaning phases.

My remarks

• A group like "fast FPS gameplay" may have been considered as "fast gameplay" because FPS is not an English adjective, and the Stanford parser only looks at English adjectives. Since genre adjectives are not English but rather specific of gamer communities (e.g. "FPS", "RTS", "JRPG", etc.), genre did not appear in clusters.
• It'd be interesting to know which game names occurred most often next to gameplay. For instance, "gameplay like Civilization" may be quite rare, but very meaningful when talking about a niche genre.
• If genre is a label of the dataset, then it could be interesting to cluster a matrix like adjectives x genre. Goal = see which adjectives are explaining most a genre.

Fundamentals of Game Design, ch 14: Strategy Games

Strategy = planning series of actions against the opponent(s). There's usually a large variety of potential actions. Analysis paralysis happens when players have to wait for the other to be done thinking about his next move. In RTS, decisions have to be taken quickly. The basic mechanics of strategy games involve units and the factories that produce them. There can be diplomacy if the scenario is long enough. The attributes of units can be: (max) health, (max) armor, atk, ammo, aspd, area of effect, range, and others ...

Melee unit's value (eg footman) = max HP * shot power * aspd * accuracy * range * walk speed
Ranged static unit's value (eg tower) = max HP * shot power * aspd * accuracy * range^2/2. Squared because the area defended increases quadratically. Halved because units can generally only cover one side/half, the one side towards the enemy.

Most RTS make little use of line of sight and terrain realism; a unit on top of a hill could see further, a unit behind a hill could be hidden from those behind it, units have atk/def/... bonus when they are in their favorite terrain.

Gold is too important for war for mines to be spread out randomly. Spreading randomly means randomly-chosen players get a random advantage from the start, which is unfair. Mines randomly spread also means that players will hunt for mines instead of fighting strategically against each other. Large mines should be positioned symmetrically if they are decisive. Random mines should be smaller and not be decisive for winning.

Lanchester's laws: 1- In melee combat, army strength is proportional to number of units because each fighter can engage only one enemy at once. 2- In ranged combat, units can concentrate their power on a single enemy. When 1 unit is attacked by 3 archers, its life decreases 3 times faster, and it can only attack one of them, ie 1/3 of the enemies. Therefore, 3 ranged units are 3*3=9 times stronger than a single unit (whether ranged or not).

Imagine the tight and strong negative feedback loop: "wounded units attack weaker". Then players have to play sub-efficiently all the time, and they're going to wage attrition skirmishes, not big epic battles.

Do not block or forbid certain units or skills in a particular level. Instead, make the level so that this unit or skill is very inappropriate. Ex: to prevent the player to use air units, give the opponent lots of anti-air missiles. To prevent the use of iron, set the victory condition to "collect lots of iron".

Upgrades

Upgrades can apply to a single unit (veteran units have +1 dmg), all units of a particular kind (grunts get +2 atk), all units of all kinds (Iron Age = +2 def to everyone), or even the whole mechanics (production speed divided by 2). Upgrades can be unlocked by spending resources, time, achievement, ... The tech tree can be:

• totally open: player spends point in any tree she wants, like in WoW
• constrained: finish one branch to start another
• fixed: once player starts in a tree, only this tree is available for the rest of the game

Production and distribution

Production process should be concrete and visible, while the distribution process should be abstracted. Ex: plant farms for food = concrete food production. No supply lines as long as there are roads = abstract supply distribution. There are different shades and techniques for supply lines: troop caravans between cities in Heroes of Might and Magic IV, trade caravans between cities in Civilization series or Age of Empires, or Armored Personnel Carrier that transports troops and fuel in Advance Wars. Another approach is to have cities within a zone of influence to be supplied: cf the influence zone mechanics of Populous (you can only build in your area of influence), Civilization, and Black and White (you can only exert your god powers within your zone of influence).

AI techniques

• Game tree search, as used in games where there is a finite number of possible moves, such as Chess or Checkers. Problem: the search space increases exponentially, which is a problem for games like Go which have too many possible moves.
• Neural networks: patterns are identified after repeated exposure. Problem: training takes time, the system can hardly be tweaked, and adding new patterns means re-training the whole system.
• FSM: units transition from one state (walking) to another (shooting) because of events (enemy appeared in sight). Problem: the unit can only be in one state at once.
• Hierarchical FSM: FSM of the commander gives orders such as "take this hill" to captains. Captains have an FSM that gives orders to soldiers in the squad, such as "cover fire" or "make diversion". Each soldier has its own FSM as well: "if I see an enemy, run for cover". hFSM can create emergent behavior.

[Literature] Fundamentals of Game Design, ch 9: Gameplay

What makes a game fun

50% from quality assets, UI, and code. 35% tuning and polishing. 10% imaginative level design. 5% innovation. A pinch of luck.
Guidelines

• Gameplay before story and graphics
• get a feature right or leave it out
• player-centric, know your audience
• abstract or automate the boring parts
• be true to your vision, do not add stuff for marketing or in hope of getting more players
• aesthetics matter

Challenges

Gameplay is in the challenges.

Challenge hierarchy: to complete the game, the player has to complete chapters, levels, missions, and atomic challenges. Atomic challenges are what player focuses on at the moment. The game victory condition should be explicit, as well as the atomic challenges. Intermediary challenges can and should be implicit: the fun comes from figuring out how to use the atomic tools to reach the end goal. That's why the player should be rewarded whatever path she took or means she used.

Many simultaneous atomic challenges put stress on the player (e.g. Impossible Super Mario levels). Difficulty = intrinsic skill + stress. Intrinsic skill = level of skill required to overcome a challenge without any time limit. Sudoku is pure skill. Stress = perception of time pressure for a given skill level. Tetris is pure stress. Therefore, to make the game easier, give more time to complete skill-based challenges.

Commonly used atomic challenges:

• Physical coordination (hand-eye): speed, accuracy, timing and rhythm.
• Logic and maths: challenges solved by reasoning power alone. Rubik's cube, puzzles
• Race: time pressure reduces strategic thinking.
• Factual knowledge: Trivial Pursuit, quizzes
• Memory: French Tarot
• Pattern recognition
• Exploration: spatial awareness, locked doors, traps, mazes, teleporters. Should still have challenges, otherwise it's sightseeing.
• Conflict: strategy, tactics, logistics, defend weak units, stealth. Checkers, chess, Heroes of Might and Magic.
• Economic: accumulate resources (RTS), balance a complex economy (SimCity), care for living things (Black and White)
• Lateral thinking: there is no obvious solution.

Actions

Actions are IG events directly and immediately influenced by player's input. Player spends most of her time using actions to overcome atomic challenges. Therefore, particular attention should be given to how actions can overcome basic challenges.

Some actions do not overcome challenges, but provide hooks for unstructured play (honking in a racing game), creation/expression (customizing your avatar), socialization (emotes), and story participation. There are also meta-actions: loading, saving, configurations, exit, ...

Saving

Save files are good for testing and debugging. In general, saving harms immersion and story flow/discovery (player can see different branches by reloading and taking different choices). Always allow the player to save and reload the game. Saving can be implemented through:

• level passwords (levels of Lucky Luke for Gameboy),
• save slots (player can keep copies of his progression and try different things, Doom),
• quick save when pushing a key (Baldur's Gate 2),
• automatic save/checkpoints (mid-level checkpoints in Mario platformer series).

[Literature] A theory of Fun for Game Design

Raph Koster. 2004. A Theory of Fun for Game Design. Paraglyph Press.

Quotes taken from Koster's book. I did not try to put them together in a meaningful way, I just copy-pasted those I found most interesting.

ch3: What games are

The only real difference between games and reality is that the stakes are lower with games.
The more formally constructed your game is, the more limited it will be. Long-lasting games integrate variables from outside the magic circle.
Fun from games arises out of mastery.
With games, learning is the drug. Fun is just another word for learning.

ch4: What games teach us

Most of the game designers working professionally today are self-taught.
Games are viewed as frivolity.
Games almost always teach us tools for being the top monkey.
Most games encourage demonizing the opponent. Can we create games that instead offer us greater insight into how the modern world works?
There has not been a topologically different 2d shooter since [the first 2d shooter to have power ups and bosses and scrolling]. Unsurprisingly, the shooter genre has stagnated and lost market share.
Algorithm for innovation: find a new dimension to add to the gameplay

ch5: What games are not

One of the most self-defeating rallying cry in history: "it's just a game"
The part of games that is least understood is the formal abstract system portion of it, the mathematical part of it. Games need to develop this formal aspect of themselves in order to improve.
This is why gamers are dismissive of the ethical implications of games. They do not see "get a blowjob from a hooker then run her over", they see a power up.
Since games are generally about power, control, and those other primitive things, the stories tend to be so as well.
When games and stories are good, you can come back to them repeatedly and keep learning something new.
Getting emotional effects out of games may be the wrong approach. Perhaps a better question is whether stories can be fun in the way games can.
Different kinds of enjoyment:

• fun is the act of mastering a problem mentally
• aesthetic appreciation
• visceral reactions are generally physical and relate to the physical mastery of a problem
• social status maneuvers, intrinsic to our self-image and our standing in a community

Aesthetics is about recognizing patterns, not learning new ones.
Delight does not last. Recognition is not an extended process.
Fun is the feedback the brain gives us when we are absorbing patterns for learning purposes. Real fun comes from challenges that are always at the margin of our ability.
Fun is contextual. The reason why we are engaging in an activity matter a lot.

ch6: Different fun for different folks

Since brains have different strengths and weaknesses, different people will have different ideal games.
People will usually choose to play the games they are good at, that reflect their strength.

ch7: The problem with learning

Players try to find the optimal path to getting to the ultimate goal.
Exploiters are often the most expert players of a game.
Since we dislike tedium, we'll allow unpredictability, but only in the confines of predictable boxes, like games or TV shows. Unpredictability means new patterns to learn, therefore unpredictability is fun.
Those of us who want games to be fun are fighting a losing battle against the human brain because fun is a process and routine is its destination.
If there is not a quantifiable advantage to doing something [reward], the brain will discard it.
Successful games incorporate:

• preparation [choices made before a given challenge], otherwise it's chance. Can the player prepare in different ways and still succeed?
• a sense of space, otherwise it's trivial. Does the environment affect the challenge?
• core mechanics
• challenges [= content] otherwise it's too short. Can the rule set support multiple types of challenges?
• a range of abilities (otherwise it's simplistic). Can the player bring multiple abilities to bear on the challenge? At high levels of difficulty, does the player have to bring multiple abilities?
• abilities should require skill. Not requiring skill from a player should be considered a cardinal sin in game design.

A learning experience require:

• variable feedback (a greater skill should lead to better reward). Are there multiple success states (ie no guaranteed result)?
• high-level players can not get benefits from easy encounters or they will bottom feed.
• failure must have a cost. Player should have the ability to try again (with another preparation round).

ch8: The problem with people

Particular problems and solutions appeal to particular brain types.
Games are not there to fulfill power fantasies.
[The increasing complexity of games within a genre] has led to a priesthood of those who can master the intricacies. Newcomers can not get into them - the barrier for entry is too high.
Designeritis [= being] hypersensitive to patterns in games.
Given the lack of codification and critique of what games are, game designers have instead operated under the more guild-like model of apprenticeship. They do what they have seen work.

ch9: Games in context

The following chart can be applied to any medium.

User goal	Collaborative	Competitive	Solo
Constructive	Community Team game design	Job Commercial game development	Hobby Modding
Experiential	Performance PVE	Sport PVP	Audience Single player games
Deconstructive	Teaching Strategy guide writing	Criticism Hack and cheats	Analysis Writing this book

It's a lot easier to fail to respond to a painting than to fail to respond to a game.
The closer we get to understand the basic building blocks of games (...) the more likely we are to achieve the height of art.

ch10: The ethics of entertainment

For games to really develop as a medium, they need to further develop the ludemes, not just the dressing. By and large, however, the industry has spent its time improving the dressing [...] It's just easy relative to the true challenge.
The best test of a game's fun [is] playing the game with no graphics, no music, no sound, no story, no nothing.
Ethical questions [in games] are aimed at the dressing.
The ludemes themselves can have social values.
As a medium, we have to earn the right to be taken seriously.

ch11: Where games should go

For games to really step up to the plate, they need to provide us with insights into ourselves.
When you feed a player [with a game], right now, we only know "fun" and "boring". Mastery of the medium of games will have to imply authorial intent. The formal systems must be capable of invoking desired learning patterns.

ch12: Taking their rightful place

Games need to develop a critical vocabulary so that understanding of our field can be shared.
Games will never be mature so long as designers create them with complete answers to their own puzzles in mind.

Epilogue

The challenge game designers face is "how do we create games that do not have one right answer?"
[Game designers] are not geeks in the basement rolling funny-shaped dice. Games deserve respect.

Video games birth - 1/2

The quite thorough history of video games given in this article starts with the first video games in the late 1940's and ends in 1977. 1977 is a pivotal year for three reasons. First, second generation consoles appeared - with cartridges! Second, the Golden age of arcade video games started. Third, the home computer entered the market. The simultaneous improvements made in these three different hardwares definitely triggered the adoption of video games in our modern society.

It makes sense to analyze the gameplay and graphics of early video games separately. Gameplay and graphics certainly limit, extend or complement each other. However I think the progress made in each of them were made independently. Video game graphics did not improve thanks to gameplay innovations. New gameplays did not appear specifically because developers/researchers found new ways to display objects on a screen. Looking at the controllers also helps to understand which physical affordances the players could have.

1945 - 1965: Origins

The first video games were, like the first movies, technological proofs of concepts. They relied on electronical/electrical engineering prowesses of the time. One could argue that these games were more about cathode ray tube hacks than proper computer logic and graphics. Wikipedia mentions the 1947 Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device and the 1951 Nimrod as precursors of video games.

OXO (1952) was the first video game, according to students from CMU. It was a version of tic-tac-toe and was only playable on the Cambridge University EDSAC computer. This video shows how the game can be played in an EDSAC emulator. One can measure how clumsy the use of a rotary telephone controller was: the player had to dial the number of the location where he/she wanted to put his/her symbol instead of simply pointing at the location on the screen.

Tennis for two (1958) is a two-player tennis game on oscilloscope. The physicist Higinbotham, creator of the game, reported: I knew from past visitors days that people were not much interested in static exhibits, so for that year. I came up with an idea for a hands-on display – a video tennis game. A video of two people playing the game shows basic elements of gameplay. Around 0:40, the right player seems to dominate the player on the left. The game was only playable on the Brookhaven National Laboratory device, hence hundreds of people lined up to play “Tennis for Two”. For each player, the controller consisted of a knob (for the direction) and a button (to hit the ball).

Other games followed, all developed in universities or by true hackers and which platform were university computers. Examples are Mouse in the Maze (1959), Spacewar! (1962) or the PLATO platform (early 1960's).

The second part of the early video game history deals with mainframes, arcade and consoles.

[Literature] Fundamentals of Game Design, ch5: Creative Play

Self-defining play

Choosing an avatar is an act of self-definition because the players can identify to the avatar he/she controls. A player can choose an avatar from the beginning (in Monopoly or car video games for instance), customize his/her avatar (in old RPGs where the character acquires new skills or equipment, for instance) or build the avatar from scratch (in modern RPGs). The player can modify two types of attributes of his/her avatar: the functional and the cosmetic attributes.

The functional attributes affect the gameplay. Functional attributes can change during the game (eg XP) or be defined by the player at the beginning (like strength, dexterity, intelligence, etc. from Dungeons and Dragons). The player should be able to know how the choices made concerning his/her avatar's attributes will impact the game. Giving players a random number of points to assign to their attributes allows them to make interesting choices and create an avatar who reflects their own personality or fantasies without unbalancing the game. Include a default configuration for players who do not want to spend too much time in their avatar creation.

Cosmetic attributes such as eye or skin color are not part of the core mechanics but bring a lot of fun and do not need to be balanced. Cosmetic attribute must stay cosmetic attributes after updates of the game (example: bigger avatars are not stronger).

Creative Play

Creative Play happens when the player builds or designs things in games such as Sim City or Barbie Fashion Designer. Provide saving and sharing functionalities (cf Sporeopedia or Pokemon global trade station). Creative play can be constrained or freeform.

Constrained creative play provides a structure or tools for the player's creativity, and features can be unblocked as the game progresses. Constraints can be based on the game money (SimCity or RPGs), on the physics of the world (Bridge Construction Set), or some aesthetics standards. The aesthetics rules can either be established by the game designer beforehand, they can procedurally change over time or the public could also vote online for their favorite.

Freeform play sets no restriction at any time on the player's creativity. Constrained creative play-games sometimes offer a constraint-free sandbox mode. The construction of Spore creatures is an example of freeform play.

Other plays

The Movies or Stunt Island are games that feature storytelling-play. They let the players make their own movies and share them online. The player communities around the Sims also produced stories with commented screenshots of the game.

With mods, players can edit levels, items, characters and many other parts of the game. FPS hardcore players sometimes develop stronger bots (in the sense of FPS opponents, not cheating programs) than those given in the original game. However, UGC can sometimes be very ugly, inappropriate, or even amoral (porn, racism).

Test your skills

• Think of a game where the player can build something different than vehicles, buildings or cities. What is the reward given to the player? How could money be spent into the different pieces of this new construction? Could there be upgrades?
• Find a set of real-world existing aesthetics rules (in architecture, clothing, design, music, interior decoration or landscaping for instance). How could your game follow these rules to measure/appreciate the player's creations?
• How can you make clear to the player the consequences of his/her avatar customization decisions during the avatar creation?
• How can you create a sense of community between your players? How do you allow them to share their creations with others?

[Literature] Fundamentals of Game Design, ch 2: Design components and processes

Pages 37 to 73. Thanks to Ernest Adams for his encouraging comment! The book I read comes from the first edition and until now, I have not found any typo: a nice piece of polishing... My comments stay in [brackets]. I sometimes use the acronym GD.

game design is not purely an art because it is not primarily a means of aesthetics expression. Nor is game design an act of pure engineering. Its is not bound by rigorous standards or formal methods.

Player-centric GD

Player-centric GD has two pillars: entertaining the player and stepping into the player's shoes. Entertaining is of higher priority than expressing the designer's creativity. In a player-centric approach, the designer must remember he/she is not the typical player. He/She has to ask himself/herself, for instance, "what if the player is female?" [or Russian? cf Modern Warfare 2 ...] Maintaining that you must love your game to build a good one is the opposite of player-centric. "The player is my opponent" is a vision of early arcade games where players were permanently put under pressure to put more coin to play. This is not player-centric as well. In fact, a good GD combines several characteristics.

Characteristic	Description	Game example
Market-driven	targeting a specific player segment	[Wii Fit]
Designer-driven	Designer's vision only	Daikatana
License	Based on a movie, book or existing Intellectual Property	[NHL, Fifa]
Technology-driven	Show off a technological achievement	Starfox
Art-driven	Show off artwork	Myst

Components of GD

See figure nearby. Glossary:

Core mechanics

Implementable mathematical model of rules, goals and action impacts. All games stand between purely abstract (Pacman) and representational (Formula one racing games). The degree of realism depends on the game.

UI

Provides feedback, entertains and should be smooth to allow a direct mapping by the player between controls and actions. The UI contains the interaction model (the mapping between buttons and actions) and the perspective(s) (appropriate view of the game world).

Game structure

Set of gameplay modes + shell menus + links and transitions between them

Gameplay mode

Particular UI and/or gameplay for a particular game situation. Example: playing quaterback is different from playing receiver in Madden NFL Football, so each situation needs its own gameplay mode.

Shell menu

Located outside of the magic circle, do not affect the game world. Example: save/load, configurations

Design processes

Some more vocabulary:

Concept

Defines what will not change: concept, audience, genre [this phase is common with other traditional software product]

Elaboration

Design details, decision refinements. One prototype per iteration. When all the designers in the team agree on the fundamentals, they share the work and part. Their tasks are: defining the primary gameplay mode, designing the protagonist, the game world, the core mechanics, aditional gameplay modes, level designing and the story.

Tuning

Polishing is substractive, not additive. Most of the time, the duration of this phase depends on how much time is left. This phase makes the difference between a good and an excellent game.

Documents

Even if no one reads these documents, an idea written down is a decision made. Not writing often means overlooking. [A game designer from Blizzard disagreed: "you do not know what is fun on the paper"]

Name	Description	Format
High concept document	Sales tool, short, key ideas, sent to publishers	.doc
Game treatment document	Sales tool, a thicker volume than the high concept, a "in case you want to know about our game more deeply"
Character design document	Specific to one character of the game, contains concept arts, character's history, likes, strenghts, etc.	.html
World design document	Art and audio to give the mood of the world, can contain a map, given to level designers
Flowboard	Mix between flow chart and storyboard, one sheet of paper = one gameplay mode. Each sheet shows the actions available to the player. Arrows link modes to each other. Can be done with Visio [there are open-source alternatives].
Story and level progression document	How level follows each other and where cutscenes or dialogs should be included. Useless if there are no levels or progress in the game.
Game script document	It used to be the Bible, containing the whole project. Nowadays (projects are too big) it contains only rules and core mechanics. Paper-play testing the game should be technically possible with what is written in it. This includes also the target machine and the system requirements.

Test your skills

1. Draw a flow chart of the game you want
2. Which mood could Impressionism, Symbolism, Art Nouveau or Art Déco provide to your game?