Starcraft2: e-sport design - Bowder 2011

Notes from a talk given at UCI by Dustin Browder on April 18 2012, titled "The Game Design of STARCRAFT II: Designing an E-Sport". You can also see the GDC 2011 video.

For a game to be an e-sport, it needs to be watchable, simple, and clear. It should show player skills, and there should be uncertainty about the outcome. The audience should try to guess the players' next moves.

An e-sport needs few units, so that people don't have to know so much about the game. Plus, with too many units, the expert players figure out which unit is the best for a particular situation. With few units, each unit has more varied types of gameplay; for instance, the Collosus has a strong attack and walks slowly, so it is best used with other units in front of it. However, it also climbs cliffs, so it could be used for taking a base from behind. Similarly, the Force Field spell can be used to protect, split armies, or channel enemies into choke points.

Micro-management is important: that's the R of RTS.

The unit size is important: if Ultralisks or effects were larger than buildings, they would hide zerg rushes, and also make the whole game less clear.

There are standard openings, but there's no standard "5-min building phase" happening in every Starcraft 2 game.

In a "big-army game", units die often, so they can't have a name. Unlike in Warcraft, there's very few heroes. There's also less story.

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] Game Balance ch10 - Economics and Multiplayer Dynamics

My notes from course 10 of the Game Balance class of Summer 2010, by Ian Schreiber.

Economy

In an economic system, players can generate, consume/destroy, or trade resources in a zero-sum fashion (what a player consumes is what another can not consume). Supply and demand curves:

• supply = f(price) is monotonic (increasing): if I sell for $5, then I also can sell for $10
• demand = f(price) is decreasing: if I accept to buy for $10, I also accept to buy for $5

Market price = where the 2 curves intersect. Prices fluctuate as players need or produce items. Prices fluctuate more if there are fewer players. Demand curves affect each other:

• substitutes: SP potion (+ casting Heal spell) is a substitute for HP potion. Increasing supply of X means decreasing demand of Y.
• item sets/collectibles: when together, sword X + shield Y give +10atk bonus. Increasing supply of X means increasing demand of Y.

The price per unit can increase or decrease depending on how many of that unit the player already has. If more units of the same kind brings increasing bonuses, then marginal cost decreases. If each unit costs more and more, the game is more stable and homogeneous.

Demand increases with scarcity. Example in FPS: ammo can be limited (player don't shot all the time, therefore it'd make sense if they died in one shot) or infinite (trigger happy, players should only loose a bit of life when they're hurt). In RTS, limited number of mines to get gold from means shorter games, whereas more and bigger mines means longer games (and more military encounters).

Closed-system = game systems that are self-contained, nothing outside of them can influence what's inside. Somehow, gold farmers open the closed economies of MMOGs, making them harder to design and control. The game should not allow players who have more RL money to have more power, it should just allow more options/variety. Experts using cheap/default CCG decks should beat novices using expensive/rare decks. Yet RL money could be used to speed up progression/avoid grinding.

Inflation happens in MMOs because the game is positive sum (money comes from quests and monsters). New players will never catch up unless negative-sum (sinks) or zero-sum elements are included. Negative-sum/Sinks can be: NPC, repair and death penalties, luxury items, or even tax richest players and give that money to poor players (Robin Hood transforming positive-sum into zero-sum). Zero-sum can be: player-bound/non-tradable items, quests can be repeated but reward only once. Nothing tradable also is a solution.

Trading mechanics

By giving players resources they do not need, they'll have an incentive to trade. Trading mechanics usually serve as a negative-feedback loop, especially within a closed economy. Players are generally more willing to offer favorable trades to those who are behind, while they expect to get a better deal from someone who is ahead (or else they won’t trade at all).

• future agreements: I give X now for Y now and Z later. Players could renege, making them more suspicious when trading with delays.
• scope: powerful resources (eg victory points in Catan) should not be tradable. Tradable resources become more fluid.
• time and phases: players can trade all the time, and trades could take effect at once. Or trading could be limited to certain phases (every 5 turns, or before player starts his building phase) and/or this phase could be timed (eg 5-min timer to bargain).
• evenness: gifts (0 for n) vs even trades (1 for 1) vs uneven trades (1 for n)
• quantification: trading can happen only once per turn/per hour, or as much as player wants. Number of exchanged objects may be bounded as well.
• tax: if trading coalitions are too powerful, put a tax as a cost to trade
• forced: I look at the cards in your hand and pick the best, and give you in exchange my worse card.

Auctions

Auctions = players' willingness to pay for a resource. Auctions work best when the actual cost is variable, different between players, and situational. Each time players decide how much the resource is worth to them, they are making an «interesting choice».

• Many types of auctions (increasing, blind, decreasing, ...),
• with different kinds of rewards (winner gets the entire lot, or first pick in the draft, and/or looser gets bonus or penalty),
• different payers (top bidder, top 2 bidders, top and bottom bidders, all players, ...),
• different recipients (bank = deflation, shared fund, or to other players),
• different events when no one bids (resource given to a random player, or more resources are added to the current resource and the auction restart, or resource is just discarded)

Misc. problems

Name	Problem	Solution
Turtling	Everybody shelters and nobody actually plays because attacking seems more costly and inefficient than defending and waiting for opportunities.	Give incentives to attack (when players wins, she gets more resources next turn), or force players to attack (player has to draw and play one card each turn, and 90% of cards are attack cards).
Kill the leader and sandbagging	Players recognize a clear leader, Players see their best chance to win as eliminating the leader, Players coordinate to attack the leader Players fear to become leader, and play suboptimally	Hidden scores make it impossible to know who is the leader, or make it obvious that eliminating the leader is not the best chance to win, or make the game non-PVP, or make players not able to team-up against another/give advantage when a player defends against many
Kingmaking	One player recognizes they cannot win, Player recognizes that they can give support to any leading player, Losing player chooses one leading player to win	Make players believe they can always win, or make it impossible to know which action will make a king, or make it impossible to choose who to make king, or simply do not allow last players to help leaders
Elimination	Player is killed at the beginning of the game and has to wait for the game to end	Players can only eliminate others if they are strong enough to eliminate all others, or the goal can be to collect points (instead of killing others), or when one player dies, the game stops immediately or within a certain time, and winner is current leader, or make the killed player take control of NPC, or make it interesting to look at other players playing (cf Mafia or Werewolf), or let killed players have goals as well (Cosmic Encounter or BSG)

Final note: balance is not always a must-have. Some games are ostensibly unfair but fun nevertheless. In single-player games, progression matters more than fairness. The unfairness of some one-against-many multiplayer games sometimes makes them fun.

NPC and virtual society

Think inside or outside the box?

In order to immerse the player, game designers build what is called a magic circle. In games, NPC are instrumental in the setting up of the magic circle. Their dialogs set the tone of the world. Their quests teach the player which basic avatar actions (walk, talk, attack, buy) can be used to achieve higher-level goals (leveling, getting appropriate equipments or traveling). Such NPC somehow teach which actions can be done in the society.

A society can be described (maybe not entirely, though) by what it contains or what it supports. In Western societies for example, charity or monogamy are seen positively. But a society could also be described by what it does not support (selfishness and polygamy). In fact, immersing a player in a world with original social rules could be done more easily in showing the player the few "bad" NPC rather than the anonymous crowd of "good" NPC. For example, Jon Irenicus in the beginning of chapter 2 of Baldur's Gate II is being apprehended by the Cowled Wizards. His casting spells and killing people inside the city clearly defines him as an outlaw because of the Wizards trying to arrest him. With this only one cinematic sequence, the player understands his acts will have consequences. The message is understood more directly, meaningfully and intuitively than if it was done by several "good" NPC (eg a tutorial character mentioning in a dialog that "every act has its consequences" or even city Guards saying "I keep an eye on you"). Illustration nearby: covering the entire (white) box surface needs more crosses than marking the (red) box boundary.

A sense of belonging

As seen before, NPC can help the player know the rules of the virtual society. But they also can strengthen the magic circle in giving the player a sense of belonging to this virtual world.

Robert Hercz, a Canadian journalist from the Saturday Night wrote that Psychopaths are not like the rest of us. In his psychopath examples, he includes the con man, whose real-self is manipulative, lying, parasitic, and irresponsible. Success psychopath movies such as The Silence of the Lambs or Dexter (TV series) insist on the differences between "them" (psychopaths) and "us" (normal people): they can kill people in cold blood (pun?), they manipulate people without remorse, etc. These differences make us remember that we are not psychopath. Hence they comfort us in our belonging to society.

Similarly, Bergson in Laughter explains that we laugh mainly to compensate for a "bug" in a situation. He gives the example of people not paying attention: stumbling on the sidewalk curb, colliding with a streetlight or falling from a chair one just tried to sit on. The lack of attention is the bug, transforming the attentive humans into stupid and blind machines. Laughter is a social protection.

In video games, NPC designs are most of the time based on the function they provide to the player (quests are used to earn XP, merchants to make money and monsters to complete quests or earn XP) and not on the experience provided. Designing flat true NPC does not strengthen the magic circle. One could argue that in movies, kicking the dog, You have failed me or You have outlived your usefulness followed by the horrified faces of the "normal" people go in this way. To my mind, they are just clichés used to show how really bad the Big Bad is; their goal is not the magic circle. So for games, simple NPC dialogs or actions could easily convey the sense of belonging to the society. Why not seeing a NPC spontaneously laughing at another during an embarrassing situation? If having a lot of money should not be a symbol of success in your favorite MMOG, then why not thinking of NPC who criticize rich players?

[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?

[Conf] Regulating Today for Tomorrow's New Technologies

Last Wednesday (ie on February 10^th 2010), Han Somsen talked about "Regulating Today for Tomorrow's New Technologies: The Challenge of Connecting Regulation to Technological Realities" at the UCI School of Law. Somsen is a Dutch researcher at the TILT of Tilburg University and an expert in the areas of biotechnology and environment regulation. In his talk, he managed not to focus too much on bioechnologies but more on the regulation issues of new technologies in a broad sense. From a MMOG perspective, this (great) talk brought a lot of interesting points.
Do MMOG worlds need to be regulated? Unlike traditional single-player games, MMOG gather thousands of players in the same virtual places. Hence, in order to prevent their virtual worlds to collapse in chaos, I think MMOG need regulations. My comments are [in square brackets].

Regulators have three ways to regulate A (A = anything that can be regulated) [for MMOG: bots, trade, leading a guild, ...] [regulators can be Game Masters: hunting bots, game devs: implementing an anti-bot system, game designers: designing the game actions so that a bot can not do them, etc.]

What the regulators can say	What enforces the regulation	[Examples in MMOG]
A is morally bad	society	[bot, cheat, exploit, hack, corpse camping]
A is not in your interest or A is useless/stupid	market and law	[weird character builds, tradeskills, AH]
A is impossible	code, encryption [or conceptual design]	[teleportation at will anywhere in the world, changing the public transportation destinations, destroying buildings, infinite inventory]

How can regulatees accept regulation? New governance can be a solution if adaptive mechanisms can be found to keep the machine running by itself and not crash. [As seen in the diagram, MMOG lack clearly-defined third-party actors. Are they game journalists? Add-on/Mod communities? Hackers??] [However: MMOG are games, and games can be artful. Art does not need third-party actors and new governance models at all, it is delivered to the end-user as it is. But MMOG gather so many people that they need a regulation of some sort.]

Conditions sine quibus none:

• all parties have to agree on the goals [we do not want cheaters/bots]
• Name and shame policies are unlikely to word, and sometimes regulatees do not have a reputation to loose [you never see "Dude987 was a bot!" in the news of MMOG websites for this reason, and also because there are too many bots banned at a time]
• communities must be mature

Sources of regulatory ineffectiveness
Regulators can be unclear about their goals [why do you enable a certain add-on/macro API function if you know it might be used to automatize actions that should not be automatically done?]. Regulators have to monitor efficiently [is everything logged?]. If the system fails, regulators must have backup/repair procedures [can you use a load-balancer strategy to host the map servers?].
Regulatees can try to resist the regulation a priori or a posteriori, or they can or comply only in the spirit of avoidance (this quote is taken from the paper from Brownsword and Somsen entitled Law, Innovation and Technology: Before We Fast Forward — A Forum for Debate).
And obviously, external factors (ie neither regulators nor regulatees) can threaten the regulatory system.

Questions raised: Does the introduced framework connect all parties? How do we keep parties connected? If there is a disconnection, should we reconnect?
Hints: The more vague your words are in the law, the more breathing space justice has in court judgements. But this solution relies on courts and legal precedents, not on law. More formal laws need to be updated more often and consume much more time. We have to think about what happens if we change our laws or policies, and what happens if we do not change them. Cooperation, education and persuasion are more effective than coercion. The more you educate people, the more cirtical they become [WoW Threat Meter used to be an empirical add-on and became provided within the game by Blizzard with the 3.0 update]. Better say "I do not know" than nothing [hmm... I do not know if this one always prevails in MMOG].

Sometimes it is hard to subscribe both to global values (human rights, WTO) and local values (EU, cultural differences) [global = MMOG should be fun, local = Hardcore versus Casual, Asian may prefer XP grinding and hardcore PvP versus Western players prefer PvE? Asian and Western do not see virtual property the same way].

Edited on February 22nd 2010 to add regulatees sources of effectiveness

[Literature] Fundamentals of Game Design, ch 1: Games and Video Games

These are my notes for the first chapter of Fundamentals of Game Design, a book by Ernest Adams and Andrew Rollings (pages 3 to 35). I do not know if I will do all of their chapters, but you can expect other posts dealing with this interesting book. [My comments will be inside square brackets.]

What is a game?

Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and ... Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do
-- Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

A game contains rules, goals, play and pretending. [play and pretending bring games close to theater]. Toys have no rules. Puzzles have only one goal but no rules. In some languages like Swedish, playing with a goal and playing without one are two different words.

Interactivity: Games require acive players whose participation changes the course of events. Play is a participatory interactive entertainment. Unlike books or movies which are presentational, ie their content does not change. [What about Gamebooks?]

Suspension of disbelief: The Magic Circle is the playground for pretended reality. However, the distinction between real world and pretended reality is sometimes blurred if events in the game [losing for instance] are meaningful outside of it [death! cf Mesoamerican ballcourt game sacrifices].

Challenge: A game must include challenge [cf Flow Csikszentmihalyi]. Challenge difficulty is perceived differently by players. Gameplay consists of challenge and actions.

Rules: Victory and defeat conditions are not must-have rules. They only make the game more exciting. Metarules are immutable rules that define how which mutables rules can be changed. [cf Morpheus in Matrix: some rules can be bent, others can be broken] [smart metarules make mods possible; this kind of meta-concepts echoes software engineering principles]

Players who are trying to achieve different unrelated goals that are not mutually exclusive are neither competing nor cooperating - they are not really playing the same game [what about AH/bankers/tradeskill players in MMOG? It seems there are different goals players can look for. Are there different games within MMOG (ie different rewards for different actions) or different ways to play the same game (ie same reward for different actions)?]

Symetry and roles: In a symetric game, all players follow the same rules. Fox games are non-symetric games: one player has the fox, the other has the sheep/geese/hounds.

Types of interaction	In simple words	Examples
Single-player	"me versus the situation"	Solitaire
Two-player competitive	"you versus me"	Chess
Multiplayer competitive	everyone for himself" (but agreements between players might be possible)	Monopoly, Diplomacy, Agricola
Multiplayer cooperative	"all of us together"	Shadows over Camelot (without Traitor)
Team-based	"us versus them"	Bridge

Conventional games versus video games

Advantage of video games: With video games, players do not have to control the rules themselves. [In MMOG, Game Masters are often needed, not only for police purpose but also for in-game events] This means more immersion for the players.

Avoid trial and error [that is also a general HCI recommendation: users do not read handbooks. I wonder if "trial and success" could be a relevant game design that teaches the rules to the player. For example, whatever possible action done by the player in the first levels of Plant versus Zombies leads to victory. Even though it is not really a tutorial, the point is only to teach the player what key elements do and the principal game mechanics and actions.]

AI: Players often believe the game contains smart AI. In fact, most of the time, the game only fakes smart in-game characters to entertain the player enough. But sometimes, the magic circle is broken because of AI dysfunction or an unexpected choice from a player. [see for instance a NPC in eXistenZ that stucks the player in a while loop]

Segment: Your game can not please everyone because everyone does not enjoy the same thing. [interestingly, this applies perfectly well to marketing segments]

Gameplay is the primary source of entertainment in all video games. But aesthetics and harmony/coherence matter.

Types of challenge	Video game examples
Physical coordination	DDR, Tetris, Street Fighter
Logic	Mastermind
Pattern recognition	Sonic the Hedgehog (behavior patterns of ennemies), Mahjong
Time pressure	Trackmania, Zuma
Memory and knowledge	You Dont Know Jack, Memory Match
Exploration	Doom, Portal
Conflict	Age of Empires, Pac-Man, Half-Life, ICO
Economic	Civilization, The Settlers
Conceptual Reasoning	The Incredible Machine, Façade, Syberia

Risk implies reward, otherwise there is no incentive to take the risk.

Types of immersion	Examples
Tactical	Tetris trance, the action is so fast the brain has no time to focus on something else
Strategic	Chess master, observing, calculating and planning [you need a player of the same or higher level so that you are not bored]
Narrative	being inside a story, like in good books or movies

Test your skills

Each chapter has a collection of multiple choice questions to let you check if you have learned the biggest points the authors wanted to make. Following the questions, a few exercises and discussion questions bring interesting and inspirational matter about the current chapter. I only give my pick of the best exercises I found in this chapter.

• Create a competitive game for two players and a ball that does not involve throwing it or kicking it.
• Define a competitive game with a single winner, for an unlimited number of players, in which only creative actions are available.
• As a potential designer, do you see yourself as an artist, an engineer, a craftsman, or something else?