The Beautiful Road: A Writer’s Guide to Putting Gameplay First

Notes from a CGVW talk by Dave Kosak, a Blizzard quest designer, at UC Irvine on February 22nd 2012. Original talk called "The Beautiful Road: A Writer’s Guide to Putting Gameplay First" delivered at GDC Online 2011.
TLDR: When gameplay comes first, story-telling must make it beautiful, not suffocate it. There are different ways than text to convey story and characters.

The problem

Games can be story-driven (RPG or interactive fiction), gameplay-driven (Blizzard's "gameplay first"), technology-driven (early games on Kinect, or to show off a 3D engine like Crysis), or money-driven (Zynga). How can stories be included in gameplay-driven games?

Looking at other media, telling a story requires different amounts of time: books take 10 hours, movies 2 hours, sitcom episodes 20 min. Books are walls of text, movies have long scripts, and sitcon episodes have at most 3-page scripts.
In MMOs, it's hard to display walls of text: there's a limited amount of screen and UI real-estate, and players have a limited amount of attention. Players can pay attention to the story most in calm solo exploration, slightly less in group quests, even less in dungeon raids, and nearly not at all in intense PvP.

In Diablo, the core gameplay activity is kill -> loot -> sell -> repeat. Content designers should not obstruct the core activity, e.g. with cutscenes during game action. Instead, content designers should enhance the core gameplay activity. If gameplay is a road, content should be beautiful flowers on the side of the road.

Brevity is key. Example: the Red Dead Redemption mission called free the captured sheriff. When the player sees this line popping on the screen, and the minimap showing markers for sheriff, outlaws, and nearby weapons, she figures out herself what to do first: she could go save the sheriff, kill outlaws, or look for a powerful weapon. Moreover, the quest becomes an answer to the situation presented to the player: why has the sheriff been captured? Which kind of person is the sheriff?

Telling a story without a wall of text is possible through:

• dynamic level design
• dynamic environment aesthetics (changing to reflect quest progression/completion)
• events triggered when player arrives
• hints in NPC or enemy dialogues

Characters

Character geometry: balance between too few traits = cliche, and too many traits = too complicated + boring + harder to understand. Example: Sylvanas Windrunner is persistent, protective, and hard-hearted. When she becomes undead, all her traits are even more accentuated. Other example: Han Solo is cocky, scoundrel, and egocentric.

Interactions with other characters and the background of the character let us know, without the need for a wall of text, a character's traits. Ex: Han Solo leaves his friends when they need him, Luke meets him in a shady place, he owes money to Jabba.

Quirks are not traits: quirks are minor and only serve to further individualise a character. You can find a list of traits there.

• 1-dim characters: enemies or minor allies. Ex: Hungry ogre.
• 2-dim, with 1 expected and 1 unexpected = interesting: quest givers and companions. Ex: elf druid who is protective (expected) + violent (unexpected).
• 3-dim: franchise characters such as Arthas = cocky + practical + naive. Only and exactly those 3 traits make him pick Frostmourne. When he turns undead, naive becomes power-hungry.
• 4-dim: Freeman's character diamond. Often leads to contradictions between traits, also called masks, which can either be total pretense (clown pretends he's happy but is actually depressed), partially revealing, or representing a character's aspirations. Used in marketing personas and novels.

How to compel people to a character: Cf Writing screenplays that sell:

• sympathy
• jeopardy (we want Indiana Jones to survive)
• talent/good at what they're doing
• funny
• heroic/noble
• independent/do their own thing/own quirks
• artistic/admires beauty (ex: Sherlock Holmes plays the violin)

Cliches can be used as a shortcut to establish a character. When established, take the cliche, and throw it away: Her eyes were as blue as the sky can become Her eyes sparkled like saphires on black velvet (jewels give a refined connotation) or Her eyes were the same milky blue as my mother's eyes were before I killed her (surprise and suspense!).

Social status shows differences between high-class people (smooth movement, complete sentences, slow speech, direct eye contact) and lower-class people. Body language also works. Cf the movie 300. Changing status generates interesting dramatic situations. Ex: the boss has high status at work, but when he's back home, he's low status obeying his wife.

Graphics cards on Ubuntu

Problem

My configuration: Lenovo T410, Ubuntu 11.10, Nvidia GT218.

OpenGL does not seem supported by default. Running nvidia-settings in a console says You do not appear to be using the NVIDIA X driver. Please edit your X configuration file (just run `nvidia-xconfig` as root), and restart the X server..

After following these steps, the environment does not show up anymore when rebooted - only a console-like frozen screen. An actual command-line console can be found using ctrl+alt+F1 to ctrl+alt+F6. Ctrl+alt+F7 goes back to the console-like frozen screen. The screen is frozen most likely because the x server did not start.

It turns out the actual problem is the hybrid graphic card configuration. Hybrid cards configurations for laptops have 2 cards: one for performance (e.g. Nvidia GT218), and one for battery life (usually integrated graphics, e.g. from Intel). The switching is supposed to be done automatically by Nvidia's Optimus software. But Ubuntu 11.10 does not support, by default, the switching between integrated graphics and Nvidia graphics.

Quick fix: to discard permanently the integrated graphics, in the BiOS (F1 at computer startup), pick Config > Graphics > Discrete. Problem: heavier battery consumption, and Windows, which is has no problem using Optimus, will now be forced to use only Nvidia. Not good.

Fixing the problem: Bumblebee

Bumblebee is a solution for Optimus on Ubuntu, and they have a tutorial to set it up. But in case it one day disappears, here are the steps.

1) Check hybrid config and support

Determine graphics card(s): lspci | grep VGA

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Core Processor Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 02)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation GT218 [NVS 3100M] (rev ff)

So there's an Intel integrated card and an Nvidia GT218 card: that's a hybrid configuration. Check Nouveau's supported cards to see if the opensource driver supports your card. If it does not, maybe the proprietary Nvidia driver supports it?
Anyway, the next step is to check that the Nvidia card is not doing its part; run glxspheres. This outputs:

Polygons in scene: 62464
Visual ID of window: 0x97
Context is Direct
OpenGL Renderer: Mesa DRI Intel(R) Ironlake Mobile
21.494593 frames/sec - 23.987966 Mpixels/sec

21 frames/sec is quite lame, so Nvidia is most likely not picked.

2) Installing Bumblebee 3.0 (as of February 2012)

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bumblebee/stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install bumblebee bumblebee-nvidia
sudo usermod -a -G bumblebee $USER
sudo reboot

3) Testing

Any program to be run with the Nvidia card should be prefixed by optirun; for instance, optirun glxspheres outputs:

Polygons in scene: 62464
Visual ID of window: 0x21
Context is Direct
OpenGL Renderer: NVS 3100M/PCI/SSE2
101.341234 frames/sec - 113.096817 Mpixels/sec

Although it takes a tiny bit of delay for the program to start, it's much better than the 21 fps of earlier. Running optirun -c yuv glxspheres shows even better performance (145 FPS). But the CPU consumption remains high: Bumblebee only has the Nvidia card compute 60 frames per sec and send those frames to the Intel card anyway.

References

• Unity and games don't work on new Thinkpad T420
• Thinkpad T520 - problem detecting nvidia card after enabling it after installation
• Bumblebee FAQ explains how the two cards share a frame buffer.
• .desktop files: To launch an application using optirun without having to type it in a terminal, edit the .desktop file of that app, located globally at /usr/share/applications and locally at ~/.local/share/applications (make the folder if it does not exist).

MVC for games

Second thoughts on MVC (following a first article about the use of MVC by game developers). Let's assume that the user inputs are first caught by a controller, and a view is displayed to the user at the end. What are the communication possibilities in-between?

Vanilla MVC

As seen on Wikipedia, the theoretical 'vanilla' MVC refers to an architecture where the controller updates the model, then notifies the view, which in turn fetches the data to display from the model.

Application for games: the system is event-based: it is only awakened by the actions of the user. If the world has NPCs, they can not act independently of the user. It may be OK for turn-based games like Chess, but not so much for games with living worlds like Morrowind or Harvest Moon.

Web MVC

In web development, the "logic" is often split into multiple controllers. To determine which controller the user's action is targeted to, web frameworks such as ASP.NET or Spring use a front controller pattern. The front controller maps URLs to actions to execute (and which controllers to call). I'm not entirely sure, but compared to the vanilla MVC, it seems that the (front) controller is now giving the model to the view, instead of having the view fetching the model by itself. Therefore, the model to be displayed is carried from M to C, and from C to V, twice more data going around than in vanilla MVC (where it used to be moved only from M to V).

In games, the model can get quite large, and moving it around can get costly. It would not be so costly if only resulting differences to the model (instead of the whole model) were exchanged, but it depends on the modernity of the rendering. Alpha compositing makes it possible to render variations of the game state (ie the model) by layering image elements. Many games/game frameworks such as pygame still use bit blitting, which requires to erase and reprint the whole screen.

Game MVC

This nice article about MVC for games explains:

• The controller handles the input and flow of the game logic. This is akin to the states your game can be in. My primary two controllers are main menu controller and an in-game controller. They are responsible for converting input into something the game world (model) can understand. Eg "Create unit x at base y".
• The model handles all game logic. It has nothing to do with input, rendering or networking. It is a pure view into the game world. Designers need only worry about what’s in the model.
• The view DOES know about the model. The [view] has read-only access to the model. This model can be anything. For my main menu it’s a list of UI controls the controller has built. For the in game view, it’s the game world. Rather than "reusing views in different controllers" what is more important is "having multiple views on a single controller". For example there might be a 2D and a 3D view of the game world.

What is still missing from the picture is the game loop. In games, the model is rendered by the view 60 times per second, and the inputs of the user are processed at the same frequency. As mentioned in the quotes above, some component, be it a controller or something else, still has to determine which view should be active at any given frame, and which controller it is associated with.

Links

• Organizing the game code to fit MVC (Stack Overflow)
• Is MVC used in commercial games? (Stack Overflow)
• MVC in game dev (TIG source)
• Design patterns for games from Zach Simpson's 1998 GDC talk

[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.

Indie game developement and polishing

Video games are among the most complex softwares to design and implement. They deal with graphics, database, UI and so on. Yet programming them is very accessible: there are books, forums and frameworks for game programming in nearly any language. All recommend using rapid prototyping, and player-centric game design requires a design -> code -> test -> redesign loop as short as possible. After a few iterations in the loop, game development can get very messy if the code has not been organized into components. Software components are embodiments of the software engineering principles of encapsulation, abstraction and modularity (Taylor et al. p69). In other words, building a game from early prototype to end-product requires modularity (and therefore components). More generally, modularity is the key to adding and editing features in rapid prototyping and agile software development processes.

But looking at game repositories such as pygame, it seems the myriad of small projects it contains seem to pay no attention at all to modularity. I think they may have started all right, but as development progressed, the code got tangled without them noticing it. Locating themselves in the development process became more and more difficult. In the end, their project does not have any distinct component, they have three 500-line files named "main", "game" and "classes". Each of these files contains more or less the whole game and does not have any comment. The game is certainly working, but it is ugly and buggy and does not give a good experience to the player.

Braid is the opposite. It has been polished to provide a unique experience to the player. Images taken from the Gamasutra article about The Art Of Braid: Creating A Visual Identity For An Unusual Game.

Reknown game developers such as Chris Hecker ranted about unfinished games. Hecker gave the example of games (or rather game design proofs-of-concept?) developed in less than 20 hours. Cactus, the main indie developer targeted by Hecker, explained that his mentality was to make games available for others to be inspired by. Other indie developers of growing fame such as Mathew Galant disagreed cautiously: nobody can create a masterpiece without first making a hundred crude sketches, and It's better to get those ideas out there, even if they're flawed and incomplete!

I think there are very distinct categories of indie game developers: veterans, explorers and beginners. For veterans such as Hecker, agile processes promote sustainable development (taken from the Agile Manifesto). For explorers such as Cactus, agile is actually cowboy coding (not in a derogatory sense). For beginners, agile is a way to learn. Voluntarily or not, explorers and beginners do not pay attention to modularity. In my opinion, this is what sets apart veteran masterpieces from beginner and explorer trials.

Flair, learning and visuals in Wario Land and Wario Land II

Wario Land and Wario Land II are two Gameboy (and/or Gameboy Color) games from 1994 and 1998 respectively. They have a few features I found worth an article.

Flair, or Get smart

Think outside the box

Very fancy mechanics such as breaking the fourth wall happen during boss fights, such as the one with Psycho Mantis. In Wario Land and Wario Land II, the player has to break the wall of the level very often in order to collect coins or find a path to the end of the level. At first sight, this breaking the level could have a negative influence on the magic circle. But in practice, it just rewarded the player for thinking harder about exploration. It certainly did not give the level an impression of open-sandbox-world because the breaking could only happen once in a while, and not everywhere. But it added fun and rewarded the searching player nicely.

In fact, the feeling of a destroyable world was nearly never felt in the two games, except a few times such as during the Wario Land battle with boss Funfun.

In the first level of Wario Land II, the player can choose to stay asleep in doing nothing. This lets Wario sleep and opens a branching in the story. It took me quite much time to figure the way to unlock the alternate story branch, because doing nothing was not an intuitive way to solve a problem. But I found it very funny when I saw Wario concluding the level still sleeping (middle screenshot), while he is usually congratulating the player for the money and treasures he gathered (right screenshot). So it was not frustrating and somewhat rewarding to see this scene happen.

Monster infighting

Monster infighting is tricking enemy monsters into fighting each other. It happens in Doom and (apparently) 70 other games. There is also a little trace of monster infighting in Wario Land, but it is more rewarded than in Doom. Mostly only Pouncers (heavy falling spiked cubes) and Pikkarikun (a cloud throwing lightning bolts) could turn other enemies (such as the small Pirate Gooms) into gold coins. Unlike Doom, there was a strategy for each of Pouncer and Pikkarikun to use them as "infighters". For Pouncer, the Gooms had to be thrown under it when it was up. For Pikkarikun, Wario had to be protected under a floor and a Goom had to pass between Wario and Pikkarikun.

Learning design

The game design = learning design talk by Gee at FDG2010 is illustrated very often in the two games, but particularly well in Wario Land II. The Big Kamukamu (a fish) boss encounter, for instance, is a check that the player can make his/her avatar swim well enough to kill the boss.

As usual, most bosses strategies deal with dodging their attacks, finding their weak point(s) and attacking at the good time. Most have three phases, the third one killing the boss being the hardest and the most intense. However, there is a learning-by-the-example phase before two bosses: Awabo (a bubble) and Ghost. Before those two encounters, Wario sees Captain Syrup, the final boss, being imprisoned by the boss. It ignites a bit of schadenfreude from the player towards the Captain. However, the player is warned: the way Syrup is kicked out is what Wario must avoid when he fights.

Visuals

Except throwing enemies, burping is the only ranged-attack (first on the left). Japanese version of Crazy Wario is actually Drunk Wario, and Penguins throw beer mugs (second). Surrealism (third). Typical Japanese TV entertainment color shades? (fourth)

Video games birth - 2/2

This article is the second part of the origins of video games. Here, I detail the 1965 - 1977 period relatively to arcade, console and mainframe video games. Many more games than those I mention have been published in this period. However, I try to mention only the ones I find the most interesting and innovative in each of the arcade, console and mainframe video game fields.

Arcade video games

The first arcade games were coin-operated. Arcade controllers were very similar to the 1960's controllers: each player had a knob and a few buttons.

Galaxy Game was released in 1971. I could not find any screenshot or video of it. Computer Space was released two months after Galaxy Game in 1971. The video of the game shows how similar it was to Spacewar! from 1961. Both Galaxy Game and Computer Space were 2D space shooters. In 10 years, not much had evolved, but the shmup genre was certainly defined. I think the Cold War space race context influenced a lot the design of video games. Anyway, Pong was published by Atari in 1972. The video game sport genre began.

Gun Fight was published in 1975. Each of the two players controls a cowboy and shoots at the other. Unlike Spacewar! or the other shmups, bullets are limited in number and bounce against the screen. I could find a few screenshots of Gran Trak 10, the first racing game released in 1974. Gran Trak used ROM to store the game data. People played versus an AI. The player could use a steering wheel, two foot pedals, a gear shifter and a knob. Sprint 2 was a racing game published in 1976. This arcade game added two AI cars and more diverse tracks, but the controller stayed the same as Gran Trak 10. Night Driver, a racing arcade game released in 1976, was the first game to show the world in a first-person view. As seen at the end of this video, the speed of the car increases gradually to make the game more difficult for the player.

Breakout was released in May 1976. You can see the video of its port to the VCS 2600. In the original gameplay, orange blocks speed the ball. Each level increases the speed of the ball and the difficulty of the game.

Home consoles

Before 1977, many home consoles embedded the games inside the hardware - few consoles used ROM cartridge. So it makes sense to analyze the consoles as a whole. I found many information about first-gen consoles in this article.

Magnavox Odissey was the first home console. It was released in 1972 and did not use cartridge (the 1978 upgrade of Odissey has cartridges). Odyssey 200 was a 1975 upgrade of the original Odissey console. It contained three built-in variations of Pong.

Pong was ported from arcade to home in 1975 in the "Atari Pong" home console. This console had the game built-in (there was no cartridge). It took a year for Atari to find a retailer interested in funding the fabrication of the home console. Pong was nevertheless a success on Christmas 1975. In June 1976, Magnavox filed a lawsuit against Atari for patent infringement. Like the Pong console, the APF TV Fun released in 1976 had a monaural sound channel. Like Pong, the APF TV Fun had two knobs and several buttons. Four games were built-in: tennis, hockey, squash and single handball.

The Coleco Telstar was a first-gen console series starting in 1976. Its games were built-in Pong variants (hockey, handball, tennis and Basque Pelota) as well as Pinball games. Some 1978 upgrades had sound and games in color. One of the Telstar upgrades had text in French and English for the Canadian market.
The Color TV Game was a series of Nintendo consoles released in Japan only. Although second-generation consoles started to appear in the US around 1977, I think the Japanese market was at that time out of American console makers' reach. The CTG15 had the first controllers linked by a cable to the console, making the play experience more enjoyable. Games were built-in. Some were based on Atari's successes such as Pong or Breakout, but there was also a racing game.

Mainframes

There are several Mainframe games mentioned at wikipedia. I am sure some games are missing or have been forgotten since the 1970's. The mouse had been invented in 1963 and the ball mouse in 1972. Hence players could already use a mouse and a keyboard to play mainframe games on terminals.
These slides from Pamela Fox provided a lot of information (and screenshots).

PDP-10

PDP-10 games nearly always relied on text-based UI for the input and output. Sometimes, the possible player actions or game feedback were printed (on paper, at 10 or 30 characters per second). Lunar Lander appeared in 1969 (on PDP-8). It was apparently textual (I could not find any screenshot) and was ported to a graphic terminal of PDP-10 in 1973. The company who made the graphic terminal commissioned the game to be written in 1973 as a demonstration of the capabilities of the terminal. The user input was taken from a light pen. Starting in 1971, Don Daglow wrote several games during his college years. Baseball was coded in 1971. No screenshots or videos were found. Then Star Trek in 1972 and Dungeon in 1975. Dungeon was the first RPG and it was multiplayer. Colossal Cave Adventure (or simply, Adventure) was an adventure game created in 1976. The game shows both recreational and educative elements.

PLATO

The TUTOR language was introduced in 1967 for PLATO III. TUTOR made it possible to code PLATO games. The third slide of How College Students Influenced Gaming shows a quite exhaustive timeline of the PLATO games. Users had only a keyboard - no mouse - to interact with a PLATO terminal.

pedit5 was coded in 1974. It was the first dungeon crawler game and it was using some of the Dungeon and Dragon rules. The name of the game, pedit5, was deliberately misleading in order to hide it from administrators who had forbidden them. Following the same naming strategy, another dungeon crawler called m199h was coded in 1974 (and deleted). dnd was allowed to stay on the PLATO mainframe by system administrators in 1975. Before that, at least 7 major versions of dnd [...] were deleted from the PLATO system for being illicit games on computer system designed solely for education. In dnd players could buy items from vendors and face the first boss monster of video games (a dragon).

Empire appeared in 1973. The game was accepted by mainframe administrators because it was part of a class work. Up to 30 players could play the same game of Empire "online". It has been upgraded regularly until 1980. The game looks a lot like Spacewar! - spaceships attacking each other. Nevertheless, the game mechanics were more complex as teams could use spaceships with different characteristics ("strong but slow" versus "weak but fast"), and spaceships had two different weapons on-board.

Spasim was a 32-player 3D networked space shooter coded in 1974 and inspired by Star-Trek (and previously mentioned PLATO game Empire). In Panther (1975) players were driving tanks. The terrain in Panther was generated randomly.

Other mainframes

Several other important games were released on other mainframes than PDP-10 and PLATO. Highnoon was written in BASIC in 1970. You can play its emulation. Hunt the Wumpus was coded in 1972 also in BASIC. It was a text-based maze adventure game. Later implementations had graphics (see this video) but the first version of the game was totally textual. Maze War was done in 1974. Two players (connected by an Ethernet cable) wandered in a 3D maze and tried to shoot at each other. It was the first FPS (see the gameplay on a Xerox machine). The Oregon trail was released in 1974 as well. The goal of the game was to teach children about the 19th century pioneer life. In fact, the gameplay is mostly about resource management.

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, ch6: Character Development

Even though characters should have a clear role to the player, they must not be too stereotypical (if they are, they should have a little something that differentiates them from the standard stereotype). Characters should be credible. Even if they can be complex, they must stay consistent. Like in movies, a game's IP and marketing often rely on the main character. Games often use the main character's name for the game title to make consumers associate the IP with the character. Examples are Super Mario Bros, Duke Nukem or Sonic the Hedgehog. In short, characters should be appealing, believable, and the players should be able to identify with them. Incongruity and Disharmonious elements can be introduced for humor's sake.

Relationship between player and avatar

In RPGs where the player avatar is designed by the player, the avatar has no personality other than what the player chooses to create. In old textual adventure games (or Half Life), avatars (like Gordon Freeman) are nonspecific: the game designer does not need to specify or ask anything to the player about the avatar because the player never sees it. But computer graphics improved. It became awkward to write more and more complex stories about empty avatars.

Avatars became specific. Depending on how the player controls the avatar, he/she will not identify with it the same way. Some avatars such as Mario or Lara Croft remain puppets inside the hands of the player. Others such as April Ryan from The Longest Journey have their own will (she refuses to act too dangerously when the player asks her to). The avatar utterances can also be very important to the player. April Ryan speaks a lot (and sometimes gives clues to the player when she talks) while Gordon Freeman from Half-Life does not speak at all. The player can be directly inside the avatar (Half-Life) or just suggesting where it could move (The Longest Journey). Semispecific avatars are between nonspecific and specific avatars: the player does not know enough about them to form an opinion, but these avatars have a decent background (like Link in Zelda or Mario).

Men can identify with female avatars as long as the character is acting in a role that men are comfortable with such as exploration or adventure. However, women can be disgusted by hyper-sexualized female avatars. While men tend to simply use an avatar as a puppet, women care more about it and may appreciate to be able to customize it as they wish. The more details given by the designer about an avatar, the more independent it will be.

Personality

Three factors help show a character's personality: its appearance, behavior and language.

Visual appearances: art-driven character design

Art-driven character design consists of thinking about characters' appearance first. It is usually employed for quite shallow and straightforward characters that can also be used in other media like TV or comics. Characters can be humanoid (2 legs, 2 arms and a head), non-humanoid (vehicles, machines, animals or monsters) or hybrids , robots like C-3POr cyborgs). Cartoon appearances can provide 4 stereotypes to characters:

• cool (detached but focused, clever and often rebellious to authority) like Ratchet or Otcho
• tough (aggressive, strong, often hyper-sexualized) like Duke Nukem or Lara Croft,
• cute (large eyes and heads, round body, innocent look but sometimes handle weapons bigger than themselves), like Mario, Sonic or Pikachu
• goofy (funny, comedic), typically like Goofy from Disney

Representations of stereotypes may vary depending on the culture (cute in a manga is not the same as cute in Tintin or Marvels) and age (cute or scary is differently represented for 5-year-old girls or 30-year-old men). Although kids love cartoonish characters, they hate goody-two-shoes ones.

Clothes and weapons suggest a lot about a character: see Darth Vader's helmet or Indiana Jones' hat and whip. A rapier suggests elegance, while a meat cleaver suggests blood and violence. Jewelry and accessories such as crowns, bracelets or rings also help a lot to recognize a character's role. They can also act as containers of skills or powers that can be transfered between characters. Names (Bugs Bunny), nicknames (Snake), clothes color palette (blue, red and yellow for Superman versus plain black for Batman) or sidekicks (Tails for Sonic or Watson for Holmes) also help define the characters. Sidekicks can also sometimes help the player (the fairy Navy in Zelda) or provide an additional perspective of the hero to the player.

Concept art is done early in the design process and should not consists of too elaborated drawings. The concept arts are to be used by the marketing and programmer teams to get a rough idea of the game.

Behaviors: story-driven character design

Story-driven character design consists of thinking about the character's role, personality and behavior rather than its appearance. Artists come after the designer has decided how the avatar interacts with the game mechanics. Even though the interactions were not really complex, SSX Tricky gained a lot in including meaningful character rivalries in a snowboard game.

When characters appear for the first time to the player, there is a minimum of information about them to give to the player: where does the new character come from? Why does the avatar meet him/her? Also, character traits should be shown/seen/experienced rather than directly mentioned in the game handbook. Behaviors convey more depth about character's personalities than their appearances, providing the player has opportunities to observe these behaviors.

A character can be described by its attributes. Status attributes such as Health Points change frequently while characterization attributes such as age or gender (nearly) never change in the game. Emotional states and relationships like in the Sims are another very recent kind of attributes that describe characters' behaviors.

Dimensionality can give a more realistic perception of a character. The table nearby, deeply inspired by figures 6.9 to 6.12 of the book, illustrates the possible dimensions of characters found in the Lord of the Rings. Zero-dimensional characters have binary emotional states with no mixed feelings. They may have more than two emotional states, though. One-dimensional characters only have one emotion that can change during the game. Two-dimensional characters have multiple non-conflicting impulses, they face no ambiguity, while three-dimensional characters can have contradictory and conflicting emotions producing inconsistent behaviors. Three-dimensional characters can do things they do not really want to, reluctantly, or even sabotage their own efforts subconsciously.

Number of character dimensions	Lord of The Rings example	Figure
0 dim	Orcs
1 dim	Gimli and his attitude towards elves change over time
2 dim	Denethor never faces any moral dilemma... until the end
3 dim	Gollum towards the Ring

Characters, especially the hero, can grow while the player progresses through the game. They can grow physically, intellectually, morally or emotionally. RPGs often feature a rich and complex growth of the hero and other characters in the game. The stats of the character, its appearance, skills, language, interactions with other characters or even the plot can evolve to show various types of evolution (more power, more knowledge, etc.). Some character archetypes such as the mentor or the rival have proven they were instrumental in the success of a story, but they should be used wisely.

Language: audio design

Characters can also be recognized to their notorious sound (Darth Vader's breath) or phrases ("What's up doc?" from Bugs Bunny). Much of sound design involves psychological expectations: "glug glug glug" for a drowning person or metallic sound when metallic-looking objects are touched. Sounds must also fit the movements of the character.

Accent or vocabulary specific of a time-period, social class or country helps setting the context of the game. Bad grammar reveals bad schooling or Master Yoda. Speed of speech can indicate excitement, boredom, anxiety or suspicion. The tone of the speaker and vocal quirks such as slutter also convey a lot about the character.

Test your skills

• Think about a human two-dimensional character as a child, teenager and adult. Give several attributes giving clues about the age and maturity of the character at each stage.
• Imagine two characters whose strengths and weaknesses complement each other. Show how they seem unalike but nevertheless complement each other quite well. Show how they are weak when they are alone.

[Literature] Fundamentals of Game Design, ch4: Game World

A game world is the place where the player pretends to be while in the magic circle. Th world is vital to sustain the interest of new players. Experimented players (of Counter Strike for example) sometimes stop viewing the game world and instead focus on the core mechanics (jumping, hiding and shooting at strategic moments). However, customers buy the game for the (visual, audio) fantasy of its game world made apparent on the box at the retailer shop. Mechanics are experienced after the game has been bought. [Although some stores do have consoles on-site so that customers can try demos of AAA games in the shop].

Dimensions

Games have physical dimensions. Spatially, it can be 2D (side-scrollers), "2 and a half D" (god-view RTS), 3D (Tomb Raider) or 4D (which should actually be two different but related 3D worlds, like in some action-adventure games where the hero has a special sense/skill that lets the player see the world differently). The spatial dimension must serve the entertainment value of the game: Lemmings 3D was less successful than the original Lemmings in 2D. The scale encompasses the absolute and relative sizes of objects, people, terrain, etc. as well as their speed. It is sometimes needed to distort scales a little, particularly in a god-view world. Zoom-in and out when needed: houses or dungeons have to be zoomed-in to be explored in 2D-RPG for instance. Some games have natural boundaries (sport, driving or indoor/underground FPS) but sometimes the boundaries need to be disguised to keep the magic circle: mountains, water, deserts, etc. or forcing the player to return where the action is (flight simulators). Unless the game world can be represented as a sphere (cf Populous), a cube or such 3D shape.

Temporally, day and night can be meaningful (cf Baldur's Gate). Most games which use time as a significant element skip or fasten uninteresting periods when nothing happens (between missions or when all the Sims work for instance). Allowing soldiers to fight continuously permits the player to play continuously without a pause also. Anomalous time consists of giving an incredible amount of time for a task to be done, absolutely or relatively to other tasks in the game: building a house takes nearly as much time as gathering berries, or the Sims take 15 minutes of the game to go to the mailbox. Letting the player choose the speed of the game is a way to cope with too long or too boring periods of the game.

The environmental dimensions consists of the cultural context and the physical surroundings. The cultural context contains the overall background of the world (religion, politics, architecture, landscape, personal stories, etc.) The UI should may to the cultural context (ie tribal look for a game with tribes). The physical surroundings composed of visuals and sounds define what the game looks like and are influenced by the cultural context. The level of detail determines the realism of the world. Rule of thumb: include as much details as you can until it begins to harm the gameplay. The style consists of both the content (eg medieval city or a hospital) and the way to present the content, ie the drawing style (Impressionistic, black-and-white, etc.). Keep the style consistent throughout the game. Try to find original settings off the beaten tracks: everyone designs games set in muddy and feudal European Middle-Age while at the same time, Islamic culture was magnificent. Angkor Vat, Easter Island or Machu Picchu are other original settings. [How many world designers subscribe to National Geographic?] All is grist for the mill, but borrowing concepts from movies is a quick-and-dirty backdrop.

The emotional dimension in a single-player game comes from the storytelling and the gameplay. Multiplayer games also rely on relations between players. Until recently, games have been seen only as light entertainment ... [but that] doesn't mean that's all they can be. Emotions can come from stimulating challenges at the appropriate difficulty. Emotions range from a fulfillment of power, greed or ambition in Tycoon or god games. For suspense to work well, the player needs to feel vulnerable and unprepared. Love, jealousy and outrage can be felt by the player if he/she identifies with a character. Saving the universe may convey some emotions to kids but adults will laugh at it. Trying to be fun can restrict the field of emotions conveyed (sorrow, guilt, despair is far from fun). The potential for our medium to explore emotions and the human condition is much greater than the term fun game allows for, but publishers and current markets want fun.

Games sometimes let the player do things he/she can/should not do in real life. Hence the designer can define the game's own ethics and morality. They are actually part of the culture but need a particular attention. If the player has to kill people to win, then killing is not morally bad. [Koster would argue that players do not give any credit to morality, they only take into accounts the mechanics for the fun of it]. Violence happens everywhere, the only problem is how it is portrayed: chess pieces can be killed but it is very far from killing humanoid characters with realistic graphics.

Bonus

• Choose one film maker and one composer whose works could fit well together into creating an emotional tone for a RTS, a mature action game or a child (non-violent) adventure game.
• Pick a game. Which actions are rewarded? Are they moral in real life?