Games Britannia, Part 2

Games Britannia, Part 2

Greetings, mortals.

Well, with my lack of wit persisting into the morn, I have little to say to (at) you other than the serious notes about my second viewing of the Games Britannia series.

In this episode, some more modern board games are discussed, most of which were developed and published in the mid to late 20th century. The first game discussed was Mansion of Bliss; in the late 19th century, as school became a mandatory part of the life of Britain's children, a game was adopted and popularised in schools to entice them to attend. Mansion of Bliss is an entirely chance-based race game, much like Snakes and Ladders is, with moves being dictated by a chance mechanism similar to a die, and is intended to teach children while they play. These teachings the game was intended to impart were focused around supporting virtues, such as obedience to parents, and deterrence of vices, such as animal cruelty.

This was the case with this game to the point where the 34 playing spaces on the board are split into virtues and vices, virtues offering rewards to the player who lands on them, and landing on vices resulting in a forfeit. The goal of the game is to reach the centre space, the Mansion of Bliss, before anyone else.

Next was a game designed around the politics of Britain at the time, during a time of major political reform. Brer Fox an' Brer Rabbit ultimately inspired Monopoly, which was released in 1936. This game included a great deal of buying land for profit, and was intended as a critique of the reform, or a particular party.

There was more to this episode, but unfortunately enough, the library's streaming tool (I believe it's legal) is not functional for this particular piece, meaning I can't re-watch the episode and continue to take more thorough notes. The main focus was politics, however, and the Brer Fox an' Brer Rabbit was a major part of this.

That's enough from me for now, I think. Praise that Emperor!

Games Journalism: Old vs New

Games Journalism: Old vs New

Evening, mortals.

Ok, so, I think this might be the last post. Let me check... Ah, I need to upload the Games Britannia pt 2, but other than that, this is my last post for the foreseeable future.

Right, journalism!

New journalism is a form of literary expression, a creative and/or artistic way of writing. New journalism and fiction writing are not (apparently) mutually exclusive, as one can display aspects of the other.

I don't know if I'm comfortable with fiction overlapping with journalism...

One major difference between new and old journalism is that while the old will assert objectivity when possible, new journalism will tell a story from the author's point of view.

New journalism developed after a reporter named Tom Wolfe was having difficulty writing in the old format of journalism in 1963, and sent his editor his notes on the event rather than a full-blown article.

So, basically, the main difference between the two is that old journalism offers an objective summarisation of the event being reported on, whereas new journalism is closer to the author's account of what happened to them personally.

In my opinion, both of these can work, and should be applied to different situations as the author believes it suitable. Less formal publications, such as magazines or web logs, can and perhaps should use new journalism methods, whereas newspapers and other formal publications would be better off using old journalism.

There's not really much more for me to say on this matter; I've given the essential facts and my opinion on the matter. This post still feels short, though...

Well, mortals, it's been fun. I've thoroughly enjoyed boring the life and soul out of your host bodies, but now you can end this. Go! Be free, before I change my mind!

Hail the Emperor!

Bibliographical Things

Bibliographical Things

A fine evening to you, mortals.

So, bibliographies.

Bibliographies are, for those of you who don't know, a collection of information about a source of information created for the purpose of providing credit to the source, and helping other to find that source if need be.

There are many ways to format a bibliography; I have been taught one of the Harvard systems, and will be using that.

First thing's first, let's cover books.

A full-length book has it's information listed in the following order in a bibliography:

Author surname, initial, (year of publication), title of publication, Publisher, city of publisher.

So, for example:

Braithwaite, B., Schreiber, I, (2009), Challenges for Game Designers, Cencage Learning, Stamford.

Fullerton, T., (2008), Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games, Elsevier Inc., London.

Next, contributions to books; these go something like this:

Contributor surname, initial., (year of publication), title of contribution, "in" author's name, initial, title of contribution, city of publisher, publisher, page number(s).

More examples:

Becker, A. (2007), The Royal Game of Ur, in Finkel, I., Ancient Board Games in Perspective, London, British Museum Press) pages 11-15.

Bittanti, M (2003) "The Technoludic Film: Images of Videogames in Movies" In Nakatsu and Hoshino., Entertainment Computing: Technologies and Applications. Springer. 307-312.

And, finally, journal articles are laid out thus:

Author surname, initial., year of publication, "article title", journal title, month/season/part number.

Keighron, P., 1993. “Video Diaries: What’s Up Doc?” Sight and Sound. October. 24-25.

Gonzalez et al. (2013) "Learning to Stand in the Other’s Shoes: A Computer Video Game Experience of the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict" Social Science Computer Review. 31. 236-243.

That ends my ranting on bibliography; hail Emperor, mortals.

Ian Schreiber on Game Balance

Ian Schreiber on Game Balance

How do, mortals?

This appears to be the final entry in my notes before I hit the stuff I've already blogged about.

After this, I probably still have a few more things to post on, so I'll get any of those out of the way, but after that, I think we're done.

Balancing, according to Schreiber, is best left until after you have a good set of core mechanics.

Balancing means different things with different types of games;

• Singleplayer - to make sure the challenge level is appropriate.
• Asymmetrical mutliplayer - to find out if one starting position is easier than the other.
• Strategy - to find out whether one strategy is more powerful than another.
• Game objects - to find out if different objects have the same cost/benefit ratio.

When balancing a singleplayer game, it's important to note that the audience's skill level will increase as they play the game. The way the level of challenge increases over the course of the game is called pacing or skill-ramping. Finding the level of challenge appropriate for the audience's level of skill can only really be done in one way: play-testing.

One problem about the audience's skill level is that, when plotted on a graph, the number of people in relation to the level of skill will form a bell curve; the highest number of people with have a middling skill level, and a lower number will be more/less skilled at the game, meaning that you can't reach all of them with one difficulty ramp. The best thing you can do when balancing is to try and hit as many members of your audience as possible.

One alternative measure is to incorporate support for those players who are more or less skilled than your target audience, through methods such as multiple difficulty levels, handicaps, and alternative rule sets.

Asymmetrical multiplayer games involve the two (or more) players or teams of players having different starting positions and/or resources. Balancing this means making sure that, while the teams are different, neither has an unfair advantage over the other.

Truly symmetrical multiplayer games are rare; even Chess, in which both players have more or less similar starting positions and resources, is asymmetrical to a point because one player gets to make the first move. Of course, that doesn't mean that Chess is imbalanced, it's just not perfectly symmetrical.

The general rule is that the more asymmetrical a game is, the more playtesting is required in order to ensure it's truly balanced. A good way to check for balance is to quantify the resources into a comparable system, such as numbers. This isn't always possible, however, and the harder direct comparisons are, the more playtesting is required.

Strategy games, or games in which different strategies are used against another player or the game itself to achieve victory, have a gaping potential problem: a dominant strategy. Once a single strategy is found to dominate all other strategies, that strategy will be used by all players that know it, and the game will cease to be fun or interesting. This is what happens with Tic-Tac-Toe (also known as Noughts and Crosses); once players know of the winning strategy, the player who goes first automatically wins the game, provided they know the strategy. If a dominant strategy is found, the best thing to do (to the best of my personal knowledge) is to remove it from the game.

If a strategy game has several potential winning strategies, however, it is best for these to be well-balanced to make the game more interesting. Te ensure this (and to find any dominant strategies), the game will require a great deal of playtesting. Note down any strategies that seem to be used more than others, and which strategies seem to win. Remember that players may well choose the easiest or simplest strategy rather than the most optimal.

Game objects can be anything that have an effect in a game; cards in a trading card game, units in RTS and war games, weapons, armour, and so forth in RPGs. Try to ensure that any and all game objects have a similar cost/benefit ratio. When balancing a game with game objects, you want to prevent two things:

• any game object from being so powerful that it becomes a dominant strategy.
• any game object from being so weak that it becomes a false choice.

According to Schreiber, there are three ways to balance game objects: transitive, intransitive, and fruity.

Transitive relationship: find the cost curve of the game, and directly alter the item's cost or benefit to match the correlation of the other objects.

Intransitive relationship: similarly to rock-paper-scissors, have one object defeat another, and be defeated in turn by a third object, which will in turn be defeated by another (potentially the first object).

Fruity: when the game objects simply can't be related and compared as in a transitive relationship, being just too different, the only way to gain balance is through excessive play-testing, tweaking, and reiteration of the object.

Next, Schreiber tells us three general game balancing techniques:

• Mathematics (which is difficult and can be wrong)
• Instincts as a game designer (which can be inaccurate)
• Playtesting (which relies on the quality of the testers)

And finally, he gives us a few tips and techniques.

• Be aware of the different objects and systems in your game and their relationships. (What is the aesthetic core? Look at the interconnections.)
• Make one change at a time.
• Learn to love Excel, as this has a huge number of benefits, such as keeping/organising lists, task management, and collecting and manipulating statistics.
• Use the rule of 2 when altering game statistics; if something is too small, double it; if something is too large, half it.
• Balance the first turn advantage; rotate who goes first, give the disadvantaged players some kind of support, or reduce the effectiveness of early turns.
• Write down your own game design rules as you learn them.

This reading overall made another great deal of sense (how about that, all of these wonderful, informative pieces of reading filled with great advice!). Game balancing isn't something I've put a whole lot of thought into, but this has reminded me that it's very important to perform to ensure the game is both fun and... well, balanced.

Well, that's about that, mortals. It's been a good day for this blog, I must have written and uploaded at least three or four new posts.

I apologise if the previous one and this one have some bad grammar or spelling mistakes; the spellchecker seems to be broken. I'll see if I can fix this once this is posted.

[Edit - this has now been fixed. Still don't know what the problem was.]

Praise the Emperor!

Game Design: A Brainstorming Toolbox

Game Design: A Brainstorming Toolbox

Hello, mortals.

New reading, "Game Design: A Brainstorming Toolbox" written by Dave Perry and Ruses DeMaria.

"What is a puzzle?" According to the authors, it is "a baffling problem that is said to have a correct solution."

There is a problem and it has a solution.

I don't personally feel that is a terribly good definition of a puzzle, it doesn't incorporate the intention for puzzles to be fun.

Next, the authors mention that, while puzzles are challenges, not all challenges are puzzles; the distinction should be made between the two.

It can be said that puzzles are situational challenges (still ignoring the purpose of puzzles here); they can appear in more or less any game genre, and can range from putting pieces together to finding missing objects, to making difficult decisions, to making the right choices when faced with a particular scenario or set of clues.

There are also puzzles which involve moving objects; movable objects can be utilised by the player as a jumping platform, a barrier, a route-blocker, as part of a configuration puzzle, as a trigger or weight, to fill a hole or raise the level of a body of water, as a floating platform, or as a material for another problem.

There are a huge number of ways something like a movable object can be used for, and a huge number of game objects and mechanics other than movable objects.

Another example can be a key; a key doesn't necessarily need to be an actual key or keycard. It could be a weapon, or part of a corpse (such as a severed head or hand), a piece of fruit, some jewellery, a tattoo, and so on. Literally anything could be a key in modern video games.

While we're exploring potential game puzzle mechanics and objects, let's mention configuration puzzles, sequences of tasks, follow-the-leader puzzles, obscure objects of desire, barriers, chaos management, moral dilemmas (seriously, I want more of those in my games!), riddles, signs and wonders, devices, mental puzzles... you get the picture.

There are so many available puzzle mechanics at the hands of digital game designers, they can more or less make any puzzle they can think of. This goes to the point where there are entire games based around nothing but puzzles, such as Tetris. These often employ slightly different mechanics, including:

• Matching colours and shapes
• Alignment
• Constructing an image
• Moving/Rotating pieces
• Memorising
• Spotting differences
• Time pressure
• Calculations
• Strategy

Both digital and non-digital games can also include codes and cryptography, in the form of transposed letters in text, letters shifted according to a certain formula, text that can only be read with a mechanical device, colour codes, and so on. It's also perfectly possibly for the designers to create an entirely new language.

Ok, that's this one done. There were a LOT of examples in this one, things which any of the readers can take and go and use when creating a game. I didn't know there was such an extensive list of possible uses of movable objects in games. This reading gave me a lot of ideas for making puzzles and making them more interesting, which I can hopefully apply at some point in the future.

Praise the Emperor, mortals.

Game Mechanics Support Puzzles

Game Mechanics Support Puzzles

Greetings once again, mortals.

No preamble to be found here, let's discuss Jesse Schelle's view on puzzles in games.

Puzzles form a key part of many games, visible or not; this isn't an opinion, this is a flat-out fact A lot of games use puzzles, that's not news.

Schelle tells us that the defining way to spot these is when you stop in a game and think about how you're going to do something. It can even be argued, he says, that any time that you stop and think in a game, you are solving a puzzle.

A lot of people don't want to classify puzzles as games; a lot of puzzles simply don't fit with established mental perceptions of games (such as Rubik's Cubes, Crosswords, and so on).

Some people have argued that many games give the same output when completed, and can be completed an infinite number of times by applying the same input. This would classify these as puzzles rather than games. Such games include Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy.

Personally, I would argue that games like Zelda and Final Fantasy include random elements which mean that the same input doesn't work.

Schelle then mentions Scott Kim's definition of a puzzle: "A puzzle is fun, and has a right answer." Once we have that right answer, Schelle says, the puzzle ceases to be fun, meaning that they have no replayability. Games, on the other hand, have dynamic elements, meaning the problem is usually slightly different each time you play, making it fun to play more than once.

Another way to define a puzzle is as a game with a dominant strategy. From this viewpoint, puzzles are games which aren't fun to replay, and where the real goal is to find the dominant strategy.

Another personal opinion to shove in here; the difference between most puzzles and games is that a puzzle is static, it doesn't change it's goal or challenge. A game, on the other hand, is a dynamic piece, which changes in ways the player doesn't control.

Next, Schelle asks whether puzzles are dead; a lot of students or younger people may think puzzles are outdated, for example. But he answers that no, they're not dead. Many modern games include puzzles in one form or another, but these are often better-hidden by the designers than in older games. Remember that anything that makes you stop and think in a video game is a puzzle.

A sign of a good puzzle, Schelle tells us, is that the player knows what they are meant to do right away; this doesn't mean they solve the puzzle right away, but they know how to go about doing it. To help up identify and create good puzzles, Schelle gives us a series of "Puzzle Prinicples".

Puzzle Prinicple #1: Make the goal easy to understand.

Puzzle Principle #2: Make it easy to get started. Scott Kim says that to design a good puzzle, you should first build a good toy, as the player will be drawn into manipulating the toy and experimenting.

Puzzle Principle #3: Give a sense of progress. If a player doesn't feel like they're making any headway, they'll eventually give up. This is the main difference between a puzzle and a riddle (though riddles can be turned into puzzles, such as with 20Q).

Puzzle Principle #4: Give a sense of solvability. Make sure the player knows it's possible to complete the puzzle, especially if it's particularly hard. Rubik's Cubes do this by coming pre-solved, and the player then proceed to unsolve it first.

Puzzle Principle #5: Increase difficulty gradually.

Puzzle Principle #6: Parallelism let's the player rest. A danger for all puzzles is that when the player stops to think, they find themselves unable to think their way past a certain problem, which can cause them to give up entirely. This can be solved by giving the player other puzzles of similar difficulty to focus their attention on instead. "A change is as good as a rest."

Puzzle Principle #7: Pyramid structure extends interest. A series of smaller puzzles can each provide clues to a larger puzzle.

Puzzle Principle #8: Hints extend interest. A well-timed hint can restore a lost player's hope and curiosity.

Puzzle Principle #9: Give the answer! Arguably the best part of a puzzle is that moment of solution, when the player sees how to solve the puzzle, even if they didn't solve it themselves.

Puzzle Principle #10: Perceptual shifts are a double-edged sword. Some people just won't be able to make that shift and will lose hope of solving the puzzle. Either you get it or you don't.

I really liked this piece, all of the information makes sense and is very easy to understand. I don't feel entirely comfortable debating the differences between games and puzzles, if I'm honest; I have the fear that someone is going to present an irrefutable reason why they are the same thing, and everything I know will turn out to be a lie.

I personally believe that there's some fundamental difference between games and puzzles, but I have yet to pin that difference down and put it into words.

Another blog post, another reading piece covered. I'm not certain how many of these I have left, but I fully intend to go through all of them. The reading task each week has come to an end now, so my posts will be less frequent, but I have a good stockpile of notes here to upload.

Be praising that Emperor!

"What is a Puzzle?"

"What is a Puzzle?"

*grumbles quietly*

[Before I start this, I kinda want to explain something quickly; when I call you mortals or tell you to praise the Emperor, I'm not trying to force any kind of religious doctrine or belief on you (I personally hate people who force their views upon others), I'm just semi-role-playing a Warhammer 40k theme, based around the Holy Imperium of Mankind and their God Emperor. It's just to give this blog some flavour, something a little different from everyone else's. I don't by any means intend to offend anyone or attack their personal beliefs.]

Hey, mortals, if you read the last post like good little servants to His Will, you'd know all about me being behind on blogs, upcoming deadline, yada yada, let's get onto some content!

Scott Kim asks us "what is a puzzle?" in T. Fullerton's "Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games", 2008.

And then he answers his own question.

The Roundhouse Dictionary defines a puzzle as "a toy or other contrivance designed to amuse by representing difficulties to be solved by ingenuity or patient effort."

From this, Kim gets two factors common to all puzzles, which he uses to create his definition of a puzzle:

1. A puzzle is fun.
2. A puzzle has a right answer.

So, to decide whether or not something is a puzzle, we ask "is it fun?" first.

There are different ways to decide if something is fun; for example, is it novel? Does it take something familiar and give it a twist?

Or perhaps it's simply not too easy and not too hard; or perhaps, it doesn't appear to be easy, and presents the player with something that looks harder than it is to keep things interesting.

Maybe the puzzle is tricky; using elements such as perceptual shifts can make a puzzle very interesting indeed. Perceptual shifts occur in many hypothetical or two-dimensional puzzles, forcing the solver to think in a different way to find the solution.

Remember, however, that in all of these, fun is in the eye of the beholder.

So, once we've established that the something is fun, next we must find out if it has a right answer. With puzzles, there is the potential for multiple solutions; keeping it to one solution restricts the puzzle, but also gives the designer the ability to define it as THE right answer, and create new elements based on this (such as a "PERFECT" rating).

How can we define a puzzle from a game, you may be wondering. Well, Kim tells us that games are rule-based systems in which the goal is for one or more players to win. Puzzles are also rule-based systems where the goal is to fins a solution. This makes them similar in many cases, but remember that they aren't; puzzles have little to no replayability (unlike games), and games are larger structures which often include puzzles, whereas a puzzle is more often than not a single, stand-alone piece.

Toys, on the other hand, are manipulable, but have no fixed goals like puzzles and games do. Stories involve fantasy play, but cannot be changed or manipulated by the viewer, like toys, puzzles, and games all can.

Finally, Kim gives us a quick rundown of puzzle design. Designing puzzles involves two major aspects: rule design, in which the overall rules, goal, and format of a puzzle are conceived, and level design, where all of these are put into place with a suitable challenge for the player.

Puzzle design, Kim says, has the same goal as game design: to keep the player in a pleasurably challenging state of flow (mentioned in the previous post). Good puzzle design should include an attractive goal, seamlessly teaching rules, giving feedback to the player, and rewarding the player appropriately.

This was a nice, short bit of reading; easy to get one's head around and make progress with, I thought. Overall, the message Kim tries to give is clear and makes sense, and I feel I have a better understanding of puzzlemaking having read some of his pieces.

Anyway, I'll leave it here, mortals. Praise the Emperor!

The Puzzlemaker's Survival Kit

The Puzzlemaker's Survival Kit

"...I feel like I'm forgetting something. What do I usually do? Well, there's the reading every week or so, and... Oh."

Yo, mortals...

*sigh* Ok, let's get this straight; my productivity has been at an all-time low this past month. I've been doing the reading each week and not much else.

Let's... let's just get this done and out of the way.

So, first thing I've been reading is The Puzzlemaker's Survival Kit. This was a presentation given by Scott Kim, which I had access to the PowerPoint for. This was mainly about how puzzles are used in games, and how they could be used.

To start with, Kim comments on how puzzles are parts of many games, by themselves, within larger games, on the Internet and phones, and in education games. Therefore, when designing a game, it is likely that knowing how to make a good puzzle will be extremely useful.

There are some key concepts that are common to all puzzles; Kim draws his definition of a puzzle from these concepts: "A puzzle is a problem that is fun to solve and has a right answer."

Next, Kim states that it's important to be able to differentiate between puzzles and other forms of play. To explain this, he presents us with the Play Pyramid, which contains the common forms of play and orders them.

Game: This covers multiplayer games such as Chess, where the goal is to beat other players.
Puzzle: Single player games in which the goal is to find the right answer.
Toy: Toys have no goals, but allow the player to freely explore the toy and set their own goals.
Experience: This can be any non-interactive play from screensavers to books to movies.

My notes are a little bit all over the place with this reading, as they can be with a PowerPoint presentation, and next cover the motivation to solve the puzzle; this can be for the challenge, as a distraction from life, for the character and setting that the puzzle is inside, or for some deeper meaning.

There are many different kinds of puzzles (again, all over the place). Most fall into one or more of the following categories: Word puzzles, such as crosswords, Image puzzles, such as jigsaws, and Logic puzzles such as a Rubik's Cube.

Combinations include Rebus (Word/Image), Sliding Block (Image/Logic), and Hangman (Logic/Word).

Some other elements that commonly appear in games include chance, knowledge, dexterity, and prizes.

There are five genres commonly associated with puzzles:

Pure puzzle - a pure puzzle includes Solitaire, Minesweeper, Crosswords, and so on; they don't include elements from the other categories. The key issue with pure puzzles is larger form, or how to build them into a coherent larger product. There are several ways to do this, including a linear map of puzzles, increasing the speed of the puzzle in each suuccessive stage, like with Tetris, or a sawtooth arrangement, where the difficulty will increase slightly, and then drop again when a new element in introduced (Plants vs Zombies did this particularly well). It is preferable with these arrangements when the player needn't complete one puzzle to move onto the next, or if they have other puzzles to try if they get stuck on one.

Action puzzle - often under time pressure, such as Tetris. Error recovery is often necessary in such puzzles. These can also include rhythm, and are usually easy to learn, and involve a random element.

Story puzzle - combine puzzles with a story; some examples are Myst, Metal Gear Solid, and Amnesia: The Dark Descent. The key issue with story puzzles is the role of the puzzle in the storyline. There is also how the puzzle affects the storyline to consider; this can be done through  a branching narrative, a linear narrative, a semi-linear narrative, or an enhanced narrative where the puzzles are optional but provide more depth.

Competitive puzzle - these include multiple players working against each other; Tirivial Pursuit is a good example. Chess doesn't qualify, according to Kim, as that is more about strategy than puzzle-solving. The key issue is scoring and decideing which player wins. This can be quantitive, as with Jeopardy, progressive, as with most board games, or some other way.

Construction puzzle - construction puzzles combine puzzle solving with the fun of building things; these are highly popular in education games as they force people to think and come up with mutliple potential solutions, and then experiment with the one they think is most likely to work. My favourite example of a construction puzzle is World of Goo. The key issue here is modularity; the designer has to decide how much structure they want the construction side of things to have. Too little structure, and the player is forced to rely on their own imagination, and will eventually give up. Too much structure, and they can't apply their imagination at all, only able to build a few very specific constructions.

Next, Kim gives us three lessons to improve puzzle design:

1: Indulge one style - As demonstrated, there are many styles of puzzle, but a designer should focus on one in order to satisfy the player's appetite for it. These are economical to produce, and can be released on a regular basis to keep the player coming back for more.

2: Generate puzzles - using computer algorithms to create fresh puzzles isn't necessarily easy, but once it's been perfected (which some companies have done), there are almost an unlimited number of levels that can be produced with ease.

3: Easy to learn - To help the player learn the puzzle quickly, it should be familiar at first glance, the control method should be simple to work out in their heads, there should be some element of self-demonstration, and the player should be able to discover more about the puzzles as they go along, to keep them moving forward.

Well, I just looked ahead in my notes, and this is going to be a LONG post... Let's get this over with so I can move onto the next one.

According to Kim, there are eight steps to achieving a finished game:

• Inspiration - this can come from other games, digital or otherwise, or simply from a particular subject matter. It's important to be prepared to change the idea to optimise it for the chosen medium. It's also possible to retrofit a story and gameplay based upon art.
• Simplify - identify the essential core skill or mechanic, eliminate any irrelevant details, make all of the pieces uniform, and simplify the controls.
• Editor - next create a prototype with no art or other details; this lets programmers create some reusable code, allows game designers to tweak rules, and the level designers (and even players) to create levels.
• Spec - it's now time to decide upon the essential elements of the board, pieces, moves, and goal, as well as to create some design goals (about the audience or platform), art assets, sound assets, writing, programming, and back-end programming issues.
• Level Design - you may want the levels in your game to start with a bang, teach techniques to the player, paint a picture, and/or develop a theme.
• Hinting - games should offer a variety of challenges of increasing difficulty, to continue challenging the player as they improve; there exists an area between ability and challenge, and keeping the player in this area is called flow. It's important that games try their best to keep players in this state where they won't get bored or frustrated. Some tools for keeping them there include giving hints and letting them change the difficulty.
• Testing - play-test the game with different people over and over to find out if the rules are clear, how hard the game is, are there any unforeseen solutions, and is the game fun?
• Presentation - finally, check that the art, sound, story, and UI aren't just attractive, but also tell the user how to play the game.

Ok, I believe that's it. That was a long, hard block of text, but I applaud you for getting through it.

*clap clap clap*

PowerPoints are easy enough to read on their own and make notes on, but then formulating those notes into a solid block of writing like one of these posts is more difficult. From what I've seen, I'm not all the great at this. Slides tend to jump around a lot with little connection between them, which is fine, notes can do the same, but then you need to link everything in a single piece.

The actual content of this reading was pretty good, plenty of information was given; I like the way Kim differentiates between different forms of play and how he's split different types of puzzle up into categories. I hope that I've relayed this and everything else in an understandable manner.

Right, straight onto the next one; the deadline for the blogs is tomorrow, and I have a lot to do.

Praise the Emperor, mortals.

Rule-Writing Post 2

Rule-Writing Post 2

Hello again, mortals.

So, straight into the next reading with no preamble! The second reading piece was by Jacob Devonport, and is entitled Writing Game Rules. How very creative.

As Devonport says, reading the rules is the first part of any traditional non-digital game. This first step is the basis for the player's first impression of the game, and poorly written rules will frustrate players.

Devonport offers a set of fundamental properties: clarity, brevity, and completeness. Everything extraneous should be stripped away. If it doesn't help the player, it shouldn't be included. When nothing else can be removed, you are done, he writes.

Next, Devonport gives a basic order of explanation, much like Seigel's work.

Devonport tells us that we should give players information in the order that they will need it. Start with a summary or a metaphor that the game represents, so that the players have context to help them understand the rest of the rule set.

Next, explain the objective of the game. Avoid leaving the reader in suspense; explain a mechanic when you mention it, not on the next page, or three pages later. It's also important to utilise plenty of white space and lists to help organise the rules; when doing this, keep related rules close together on the same page.

When a rule set is done correctly, one player will be able to read the rules out loud to other players, and they can start playing with no further explanation. If the reader has to translate, then the rules haven't been written properly. Again, use white space and bullet points to help the reader with flow and pauses for digestion of information.

Examples of certain rules can often be helpful, especially when accompanied by illustrations. Italicise examples so that the reader can skip over them if they choose, but find it again later if they need to.

Devonport then tells us that thorough testing of rules is very important. Have others read your rules and try to understand them, as you will be biased due to your previous understanding of the game. Note down any confusion, and be prepared to rewrite the whole rule set if necessary.

Finally, Devonport, like Seigel, offers us a list of quick tips.

- Print the rules in the most legible way possible; resist using interesting fonts if they get in the way of understanding the game.
- If a reference card or page helps, include it somewhere easy to reach.
- Consider how the rules will be used; whether they will be read once and put aside, or if they will be checked frequently.
- Get input from other people wherever possible.

With frequent revision, consideration, and rewriting, your game will be as accessible as possible to new players.

Now, this reading makes as much sense as the last one did; while I preferred the layout of the Seigel reading, Devonport includes more content in general, including that a mechanic should be explained before it is used to explain something else. Devonport also gives advice on more that just writing, but also on testing and printing as well, which is really helpful.

Overall, I prefer this second reading for its extra content, even if it feels more like a block of text that Seigel's did. Despite these differences, there are far more similarities between the two pieces. Both offer similar advice at times, such as to first explain any narrative of the game for context, and then to describe the win conditions, and so on. With two separate writers giving the same advice, that advice gains a great deal of credibility.

Well, that's me more or less done for tonight, so I think I'll quite while I'm ahead. Dewa.

Oh, and of course, be praising that Holy Emperor of Mankind, mortals!

Rule-Writing Post 1

Rule-Writing Post 1

Halsningar, mortals!

That's some real metal nonsense right there.

So, anyway.

Yes, I'm behind on the blog posts, but I'll fix that soon. You have my word.

But that's not important! What's important is writing rules well. I've been asked to do two short blogs posts about this, so I'm going to do the first short reading in this one, and the other short reading in the next, k? K.


So, first reading was by J. Seigel; How to Write Rules (Without Confusing People).

Rules of the game, Seigel says, are the most important thing for players to understand about a game; in a non-digital game, if they don't understand the rules then they can't play at all.

Therefore, the rules should be well-written to enable players to play the game.

Firstly, according to Seigel, rules should leave no stone unturned; players should not be questioning meaning or be unsure about interpretation of something. On the other hand, rules should be concise; players don't want to read books here, that's not what they came to do.

Seigel then offers these pointers to help write good rules:

1. Flavour First: If a game has a narrative binding the mechanics together, make the narrative clear immediately, as this offers context for players to better understand the mechanics.

2. Get the Boring Stuff Out of the Way First: After narrative, list the materials the game needs, and any pre-game setup instructions. If this gets too wordy or overly complex, slim the text down and include illustrations to help explain.

3. Begin with the End: The first rule you should give is the win condition. This helps players to understand how the other mechanics build into victory.

4. General to Specific: Describe the broader, more general rules first, and then get into details about exceptions and instances. Explain what happens most often before what happens least often.

5. Tell Players What They Can do Before What They Can't: Always explain the least constricting rules before the most constricting.

Finally, Seigel gives us a few tips. For example, it's best to use short sentences and low-end vocabulary, as well as illustrations when necessary. Also, a page of text is intimidating. Use white space and breakers such as bullet points and short paragraphs to stop things from getting too heavy. Seigel also tells us to be friendly to the reader, and use a light-hearted tone if it doesn't contradict the theme of the game.

Overall, these are some damned fine points he makes. They generally make sense and I feel they could really add to my ability to write rules for non-digital games.

My only issue with this is the third major point: begin with the end. In my experience of many games, the winning condition is heavily reliant on mechanics that need to be explained before using them to explain something else. That's more or less my only concern with this otherwise decent, concise piece of reading.

The second post will be up momentarily, mortals!

In a bit! Praise the Emperor!

Triple-A Games for Women?

Triple-A Games for Women?

A fine evening to you mortals.

So, as stated in my previous post, I've been reading the Gamasutra article "Triple-A Games for Women? Seriously?" written by Ernest Adams.

Ignoring my personal irritation at what appear to be wild and unjustified accusations made toward video game marketing researchers, let's jump into this one without looking first and answer the question provided:

What do women want from games? How does this differ from men?

Well, according to Brandii Grace, the article's interviewee, women want games which offer more in the way of emotional conflict, as opposed to the direct conflict so popular among male gamers. And they certainly are popular; just look at more or less any popular core game over the last few years, violence and other direct conflict is fun in games. Guns, swords, armies fighting armies, people being killed left right and centre, core games are typically a very violent part of the media.

However, can we be certain that games with emotional content are what female gamers would play? This is somewhat hard to tell by looking at video games; most video games have a certain level of anonymity, making it hard to tell if any one player is male or female, unless they grab a headset and start talking to other people playing the game, at which point they are instantly treated differently by many players because she is female.

Video games are also very much a male-dominated medium, as this piece of science shows:

Now, this fact sheet shows an estimation of the male to female ratio of people playing games, and roughly how much time each side of the demographic spends playing games. As you can see, males typically form the majority of both, very significantly, in the case of younger males in the case of time spent gaming.

So, if we can't draw any solid, dependable conclusions from this media, the next best thing is to look at a similar media and work it out from there. Movies are about as close to video games as we could wish for in this case; action movies, like action games, are very popular to male movie-watchers, as with science-fiction, horror, and sport (though of course, popularity is usually on a film-to-film basis, rather than overall genres).

So, if the same genres and themes are popular between video games and movies for men, we can assume that the same could well be true for women.

Let's look at some films which are popular among women, and the themes replicable in video games.

Number one, Twilight. No getting around it, this film series was popular among the ladies. The most major theme employed by the Twilight series was, of course, romance, probably the most emotional of all film genres. Other themes include mystery, action (to a lesser extent), and drama. So, overall, a very emotions-based series.

Another popular film among women was The Notebook (apparently). Again, just from reading the IMDb brief on this, I can easily see that romance was the major theme. Looking at IMDb's list of most popular women's movies, actually, I can tell you that more or less all of them have at least a minor theme of romance.

So, the stereotype that women like romance movies is very much true, it would seem. Romance bases itself in the emotions of the characters on-screen, and the emotional reactions of the viewer, so it's very much an emotion-based theme.

Assuming that popular themes and genres among men and women carry over into games, it would appear that emotional content, such as relationships and both personal and interpersonal conflict, is exactly what female gamers want. Men, as we have already established, typically enjoy direct conflict in movies and video games, but that doesn't mean that's all that we want.

If you look at my previous blog, I presented three video games with differing levels of action and emotion. Call of Duty 4, the least emotional game among the examples, made the least impression on me, while Katawa Shoujo, the most emotional, made the biggest impression, and is the game I am most likely to remember of the three a hundred years from now. Of course, that's not to say that Katawa Shoujo was my favourite title in that list; Mass Effect 2, offering a nice blend of emotion and action, in my opinion, was easily my favourite.

So, taking that into account, we may be able to conclude that while male gamers do enjoy action in games, many might also like emotional content to be there in some form as well.

Well, that's me more or less done, I think. At last. It was a long post, but I'm kinda proud of the effort I put into this one. I coulda left it at a single paragraph, but no; I decided to do some research and draw my own conclusions.

I don't frankly care for this article overall; the idea of marketing directly to female gamers is nice, but they're slicing out the majority of the gaming demographic with it. Rather, why not just advertise to both males and females with more emotionally-focused game content? That kind of stuff could be popular among male gamers as well.

Also, I have no idea where Brandii Grace is getting her information from, but any video game market researcher who says "women need main characters with three-letter names," was either fictional, or had no right to be a market researcher. Or be allowed into normal society, for that matter. The same with "women won't play games with no real-world benefit." Honestly, if there is any such researcher, then please immediately fire him, he's doing his company no favours.

Have a good weekend, mortals. May the Emperor go with you.

Action versus Emotion

Action versus Emotion

How-do, mortals?

So, it's about time to get a reading post down up in here.

This isn't it, however. This is a post of my own about action versus emotion in games.

Quite often recently, I've been faced with the problem of video game sotrylines and why they're emotionally inept. As I was in the process of reading the article "Triple-A Game for Women? Seriously?" written by Ernest Adams, I have found that I really want to get my thoughts recorded here before I fuddle the mucking things up. It also gives me a reason to have another rant, so let's do this!

So, Adams was speaking to someone he knew at a 2012 gaming event, Brandii Grace, who he learnt is forming a company to create AAA game titles for women.

My first reaction to this was that this is nonsense; women don't play games anywhere near as much as men do, this isn't me being a sexist pig, this is flat-out, statistical fact.

Well, this is where the article gets interesting.

It seems that Grace's line of thought has lead her to the conclusion that women will be more drawn to games which offer emotional conflict as a feature. She uses Twilight and Underworld as an example;

Underworld attracts a more male-oriented audience by using sex appeal and guns to advertise their movie. Twilight, on the other hand, is much less focused on fighting and action, and more on emotional bonds. According to Grace, it seems, games for women need to be more focused on drama and personal and interpersonal emotional conflict than on the kinds of action games currently feature and place emphasis on.

Which brings me onto my point of action versus emotion. Now, I hate Twilight as much as the next male (in most cases), but I can't help but think that some games which feature emotion and emotional investment would be pretty sweet.

I'm going to offer three example games here: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Mass Effect 2, and Katawa Shoujo. I think these games offer some decent context of the various levels of emotion and action in games.

Call of Duty 4, in my opinion, is a game which is almost entirely focused on action, rather than emotion; I enjoyed playing the campaign, it was shoot-y, it had a storyline I could follow, and I was given a heck of a lot of things to blowup. What more could I want from a game? Well, my problem is that, while all of this was happening, I had no reason to care about any of the things that happened. Oh, so this guy just got shot and killed? Big deal, he wasn't all that important anyway.

I had no emotional investment in CoD4, largely because the player wasn't supposed to, it wasn't created with that in mind. Therefore, once I was finished, that was it, it was over. I put the game down, and haven't played it seriously since. It was fun while it lasted, but I just don't care about anything that happened in the storyline.

Mass Effect, I think, offers a nice balance between emotion and action; the gameplay has a lot of shooting and gunplay in it, but it also has characters I care about. I want to learn more about Tali's people, I want to find out what Garrus thinks about this new situation, I wonder what Mordin is working out right now in his lab.

In Mass Effect 2, when the mysterious Archangel took of his helmet, revealing himself to be Garrus, I was overjoyed enough to shout out with glee. When he was gunned down less than an hour later, I was furious, not towards the developers, but towards the bastard who had just shot my friend. Garrus survived, by the way, thank the Nine.

It's moments like this that made Mass Effect my favourite series of games ever created, and the reason I cared about these moments was because I was emotionally invested; these were people I cared about. not plastic or cardboard nobodies with guns.

And finally, Katawa Shoujo. Ok... this is the game I ranted on about at the end of the Christmas break for about a good page. That was a page of me being an emotional wreck. There's no action, just emotion. The gameplay of Katawa Shoujo is literally nothing but reading and making very occasional, but significant choices.

I'm still affected by the thing; just listening to the music is enough to inspire some of the same emotions I felt when playing. I'm practically having flashbacks as I listen to it now.

Now, I fell in love during the course of this game; Hanako is the most wonderful character I've ever met in a game, I care more about her than any other character ever. And if I click on the piece of music from the end of her storyline, when she's spilling out all of her emotions to my character, confessing to everything she's done, falling apart as she exposes her soul...

And I'm suddenly incredibly close to tears, just from listening to it. This game has broken me.

I was so emotionally invested that I'm scared to even open the executable again.

Look, my point is that I fell in love in this game. Not my character, me. And that is enough for me to dub this game a masterpiece of character development and writing. I doubt I'll ever find anything that makes me feel the way a few pieces of artwork and some writing with the right music has.

I can't get this from Call of Duty. Mass Effect makes a good go, and almost succeeded, but it just fall short of the mark.

What I'm trying to say is that action and emotion are two very different things. They aren't in direct competition, but they can be hard to pull off together. Action is easier to create; you're a guy with a gun, here's some other guys with guns, go have fun shooting each other. However, action is a one-off event; it's only important to a player while it's happening. Emotion, on the other hand, is harder to create, and it has the potential to stay with you for weeks, months after the initial experience is over.

I'm going to have to stop here and go and cry for a while. I'm entirely serious, I... I just need to spend some time alone.

Gods damn Katawa Shoujo, and Gods bless it at the same time.

4Chan, you have crafted something incredible.

UPDATE - By all means, leave me a comment about what you think of my conclusions, I'd like to know exactly how botched this post is.

Walk always in the Emperor's Light.

Interactive Stories

Interactive Stories

"Oh, yeah, I promised three posts, didn't I..."

Sup, mortals!

My final reading post for tonight is Chris Crawford's chapter on Interactive Storytelling from some book I don't know the name of. "New Riders" was written on the page, but I can't tell if that's the title or not.

Anyway, Crawford tells us exactly why the stories in games are poorly created and emotionally crippled, so here we go!

First of all, he discusses the nature of stories; a story, Crawford says, has a complex structure which must meet certain criteria, many of which are hard to specify. However, even a child can tell you what is and isn't a story. For example, Itsy-Bitsy Spider, the nursery rhyme, has a story to it, including a protagonist, a conflict, struggle, and a resolution. A child could identify this as a story. However, something along the lines of "Once upon a time, there was a knight who lived in a castle. One day the knight went out on his horse, but they fell into a hole and died. The end." is not. You tell that to a child and they will tell you that that's not a story.

So, if a child doesn't accept that as a story, then why should a game? I can more or less guarantee that a game somewhere has had that as it's player story, even if not it's complete narrative.

Next, Crawford tells us that stories are not about things; they are about people. For example, The Lord of the Rings isn't about the one ring. It's about Frodo's struggle, among many other things.

Games, however, seem to place much more value on objects, like swords or armour, than on people. To give one of my favourite quotes so far this year,

"The cardboard people in games do for drama what inflatable dolls do for sex."

After this, Crawford tells us a thing or two about conflict, and yes, I am rushing this a little bit, because it's half past two in the morning, and I'm kinda tired. There are two types of conflict, according to Crawford; direct and indirect.

Direct conflict is done very well by video games; fighting and wars are seen in nearly every video game worth remembering. Indirect conflict, however, is more difficult to represent in a game world, or so you'd think. Indirect conflict occurs between two sides which aren't openly fighting, but the struggle for victory is there in the background of the narrative. Think Jurassic Park 2.

Puzzles are next in my list of notes. As should really be fairly simple logic, a puzzle is not a story. Rather, a story forms around the people solving the puzzle; if a puzzle is going to show up in a narrative, it had damn well better be focusing on the choices of the individuals rather than the puzzle itself. Also, a puzzle is not a necessary component of a story, but is a method of helping to develop characters for the audience.

Choices are also very important; a story is, after all, at it's most basic form, about the choices individuals make, which build up characters, which the audience is interested in. This is true to the point that a story can build up to or revolve around a single key decision made by a main character, kinda like the final Matrix film.

Spectacle is an interesting one here. Spectacle is the form of entertainment based of exotic visuals; looking at something just because it's different or exciting. Michael Bay movies are full of spectacle (unless it's Shia LeBeouf, and who really cares about Shia LeBeouf?).

Video games are also filled with this nonsense consistently with more and more realistic-looking graphics, and it makes them sell. However, spectacle is not story, and the new generation of gamers is becoming confused between the two.

This has led to the "Tyranny of the Visual", as Crawford puts it; culture is being dominated by the image, rather than the word, he believes (and, hey, I don't think he's wrong). This can be a good thing, he says; war glorification is harder with films like Saving Private Ryan floating around, showing people being blown up and ripped apart.

However, it can also lead to a lack of enlightened perception of the universe. For example, when we look at a tree, we can know about all of the things that are going on inside the tree, and that alters our perception of it. That knowledge was imparted through word rather than image, and with the word side of things receding, it may become that case that, in stories we don't understand certain narrative points because we're not paying attention to what isn't directly shown to us.

Thus, visual thinking should not dominate storytelling.

Next (we're almost done now, I promise), is spatial thinking.

Okay...

Spatial reasoning is the brain's ability to anticipate and project an object's spatial location based on previous input. I saw the spoon fall behind the fridge, so I know that if I reach back there, I'll be able to find it.

This line of reasoning is out of place in drama, Crawford says, because, simply, it doesn't matter. In Odysseus, no-one questions the location of this mythical (and fictional) island, because that has no effect on the narrative.

Space is comprised of stages with no spatial relation; what happens between those stages is merely transition, it's what happens IN the stages that counts.

And finally, stories have a certain trait called temporal discontinuity; this means that the narrative rarely goes perfectly chronologically, but rather skips large portions of time and goes backwards and forwards and to other places entirely, depending on the requirements of the story. Flashbacks, skipping of transitional or otherwise unimportant periods, "x units of time later"s, these are all necessary in a story to keep it on track and not get filled with completely meaningless nonsense.

Speaking of meaningless nonsense, I'm more or less done here.

Great article, loved reading it, it made a wonderful impression, 10/10, game of the year, whatever, I'm going to bed.

I'm being serious there, the article really was very good. It made me think harder about what makes video game stories so frankly dreadful.

For me, it's the lack of significant characters. There hasn't honestly been a non-player character I've cared about (discounting Katawa Shoujo, cos that game is freaking built around caring about the characters) since Mass Effect. It was borked at the end, but up until that point, I really, honestly gave a damn about Garrus and Tali. And Wrex, I guess, but not so much. I could care less about Miranda and her problems.

Oyasuminasai, mortal-chan. Kotei-Kami-Sama Homeru!