photo credit: JulianBleecker

What kind of architecture do you end up with if you bring the main approaches of game design to real world architecture?

We begin by considering the basic nature of video game environments: Video game worlds are at once supremely user-friendly and supremely dangerous. Ryan North described the situation perfectly, “It’s a world that is your friend even as it’s trying to kill you.”

Video game architecture is solipsistic. An entire world is brought into being explicitly for one person (we’ll get to multiplayer games in a sec).

Video game architecture focuses on the journey, not the destination. Whole cities are laid out in a way that only makes sense if you are trying to have as much fun as possible going from point A to point B. They do not reward or even allow efficient transit. Video games are about long strings of interesting travel. They have few loops and many way-markers. Video game architecture drives you forwards to the next thing.

Video game architects have access to perfect knowledge about the location and actions of every user of the space. They use this knowledge to ruthlessly refine the environment. The tweak the environment over and over in response to knowledge gained from testing.

Video game environments can be solved. Video games are fundamentally rational. Environments may be populated by hazards but they are places to be figured out. They are designed so that every place you go is just slightly harder than the last place.

photo credit: sjgadsby

Every single thing in a video game is there for a reason. It sets a mood, provides a challenge, or masks a technical limitation. Video game architecture knows exactly how important everything in the environment is and arranges itself and its lighting to highlight the right things and obscure the others.

Video games are set in facades. There are no places you can’t get to in a video game because if you cannot get there, it is not a place.

Video game architecture focuses on enabling depth rather than breadth of action. There are very few verbs that you can express in any given game, so environments tend to focus on exploring in increasing detail and complexity how those verbs can be strung together. In the Tony Hawk games, everything can be skated on, ollied over, ground along, or tricked off of. Nothing is for sitting or pushing or climbing or holding meetings.

Multiplayer games are a little different. These tend to be long loops snarled so as to maximized collisions between players. They gently guide people to confrontation. I imagine that a well-laid out club or bar would benefit greatly from a study of the layouts of Quake and Team Fortress maps.

It’s 30 minutes long, entertaining, and worth watching but in case you are pressed for time, here’s a summary:

• Ultra-casual games like FarmVille, Webkinz, Mafia Wars and Club Penguin took the industry by surprise and are making enormous amounts of money.
• Brian Reynolds should make a slot machine where if you win you get real money and if you lose, you get FarmVille money.
• People are starved for authenticity and links with the real world.
• Foursquare and other mobile apps seems like the next big thing.
• Sensors are becoming cheaper and cheaper and are heading towards ubiquity. (Spimes!)
• You think point programs and loyalty cards are a thing now? Wait until game designers get their hands on this stuff.
• Some examples where game designers have redesigned systems with a gaming bent (turning grades from scores into experience levels).
• An extended bit of design fiction where Schell imagines every action tracked and scored and how that might change our behaviour.

Prior art for a universal scoring system.

First thing: we already have a universal points system. It’s called money. Indeed, just about every example that Schell mentioned in his talk were systems by which we’d get points from corporations and governments that we could convert into money, discounts or tax credits, all of which are just money.

So what we’re actually talking about here is a ubiquitous micropayment system, which tracks your behaviour and rewards you accordingly. He’s talking about turning things into games by attaching a reward scheme to them.

Here’s the thing about Mafia Wars, FarmVille and all the rest. They’re objectively terrible games. They are incredibly tedious, repetitive activities gussied up with adorable (or lukewarmly bad-ass) graphics. There is little to no skill or strategy involved and the main path to advancement is to show up and click on things.

Indeed, the main profit centre for for FarmVille is giving players methods by which they can avoid playing the terrible game. You can either pay money to buy points that you can exchange for things that allow you avoid playing the terrible game, or you can look at advertisements you wouldn’t otherwise look at in order to get points that you can spend on things that allow you to avoid playing the terrible game.*

The lesson of these games is that a well-made reward scheme will get people to do all kinds of tedious fucking things. This really isn’t an exciting revelation. All those gambling addiction ads you see? Those are a consequence of the fact that a variable reward schedule will get some people to sit in front of a glowing box and press a single button over and over again until they run out of money. Casinos have this down to a science.**

Unbelievably comprehensive surveillance.

Back to the “ubiquitous” of Schell’s ubiquitous point scheme.

In computer games, the way that we can give you scores, points and achievements for the things that you do is that we know exactly what your avatar is doing at all times. Indeed the bulk of all hacking and cheating in games consists of giving the game bad information about where you are and what you are up to.

So what Schell is envisioning is a ubiquitous, perpetual, highly efficient surveillance society. Efficient to a degree that it orders of magnitude more effective than the worst fears about 1984. Is this plausible?

Well, on the one hand, people are already voluntarily giving out their locations to anyone who asks and voluntarily wear tracking devices so they can exchange bragging rights. On the other hand sometimes people are extremely reluctant to share. It’s a highly nuanced question, with very complex results.

If you can play it, you can cheat at it.

Let’s assume for a second that the right alchemy of incentives, fun, fad, and reassuring privacy policy can be found, and most of us choose to play. A lot of us are going to cheat.

We already do. We made the Game Genie a best-seller so that we could break our single player games. Every set of patch notes for every multiplayer game ever made includes changes made to close loopholes and code exploits that allow cheaters to teleport, fly, fire with perfect aim, and on and on. This is a constant battle waged over games where the gold, points, and scores have no real-world value whatsoever.

That’s just at the code level. There’s a social problem too. You can, right now, hire someone in China to play your game for you. These kinds of things are much, much harder to police and it’ll be much, much worse with real world games giving real world rewards.

Foursquare got their first taste of this when users started checking in from home. Their fix promptly ran afoul of mistaking legit check-ins for cheats. What happens when getting Foursquare points is valuable enough that it’s worth lending your phone or account login to a friend who bikes around the city collecting points for everyone in your crew? People will do it, that’s what happens. Did you hear about the US Dollar Coins exploit that gave infinite frequent flier miles? Ever considered cheating at Nike+? Here’s a guide for you.***

There are a lot of tools in the designer's box.

The lesson here is one that economists have know for ages. Changing the incentive structure will change the way that people behave but it will rarely be in the way that you envision. People will poke at the problem and some of them will find the most efficient way to tackle it, and then they’ll post a strategy guide.

All that said, I’m pretty enthusiastic about turning the best parts of game design to the problems of the world. The promise of ubiquitous sensors that Schell mentions is that it will offer many new ways to make the invisible visible, to nudge us towards better habits and better behaviour. After all, what gets measured gets done, right?

But the emphasis in Schell’s talk on scoring systems — the bluntest, worst hammer in the game design toolbox — is the wrong approach. We already knew that we could get you to do things you didn’t want to do by offering a reward. It’s why we’re paying you to show up at work all the time.

I’m much, much more interested in using game design techniques to make the activities themselves more fun, engaging, and valuable. Instead of replicating FarmVille’s success at papering over a terrible gameplay experience with an effective reward scheme, what if we tried to replicate the successful mechanics of genuinely good games? Jonathan Blow examined this question much more eloquently in 2007.

Notes

*One might think that an easier way to avoid playing FarmVille would by to simply stop playing it. Well, I have a theory about that.

***We’ve hardly even started with the spime games and there are proto spime game hacking tools.

The “A” score measures the difficulty of the routine. A relatively easy move like a one-handed cartwheel on the balance beam adds 0.1 to your A score, while bringing off the astonishing Arabian double front layout rakes in 0.7. (And no, you can’t inflate your score by doing 10 cartwheels in a row; only the 10 most difficult elements are counted, and repeated elements don’t count at all.) Performing two or more elements in close succession tacks on “connection value” of up to 0.2 points per transition. The way to max out your A score, then, is to cram the toughest possible moves into your routine and pack them as tightly together as you can manage.

Guys, they have CHAINS and COMBOS in gymnastics now!

Now, everyone begins as a scrub—it takes time to learn the game to get to a point where you know what you’re doing. There is the mistaken notion, though, that by merely continuing to play or “learn” the game, that one can become a top player. In reality, the “scrub” has many more mental obstacles to overcome than anything actually going on during the game. The scrub has lost the game even before it starts. He’s lost the game before he’s chosen his character. He’s lost the game even before the decision of which game is to be played has been made. His problem? He does not play to win.

The scrub would take great issue with this statement for he usually believes that he is playing to win, but he is bound up by an intricate construct of fictitious rules that prevent him from ever truly competing. These made up rules vary from game to game, of course, but their character remains constant. In Street Fighter, for example, the scrub labels a wide variety of tactics and situations “cheap.” So-called “cheapness” is truly the mantra of the scrub.

I was a Starcraft scrub. I logged onto Battle.NET and only played “friendly” games marked NO RUSHING and whatnot. Every now and then, some jerk would ruin the game by rushing even though it said NO RUSHING and someone would disconnect in disgust. After months and months of play, I never got any better. It never occurred to me that it would be useful to make more than one Barracks (doing so doubles the speed that you can pump out Marines). I was totally inefficient with my resources. I more or less thought that rushing was unbeatable and totally annoying and game-ruining.

And then someone linked me to the Terran build order. Suddenly, I could defend against an early game rush. I started looking forwards to them. It turned out that most players who joined a NO RUSHING game in order to rush, didn’t have any skills past the first attack — they were relying on the other guy quitting in anger.

I’ve never had the drive to become anything close to a professional player, but Sirlin’s series (now a book) gave me a new understanding of truly competitive play. It taught me not to dismiss any move as “cheap” no matter the game.

There is a certain arrogance that comes from being a scrub. It’s the idea that you know better than the designers whether or not their game is balanced. It’s the lazy assumption that because you can’t figure out a better way, that there is no better way. It’s blinding yourself to whole rich fields of strategy and tactics. It’s weirdly choosing not to play the entire game and then blaming others for failing to make the same mistake.

It is in appreciation of the truly competitive game player, the one who understands in detail how the mechanics work and uses ALL of them, that I present the following, taken from a Snopes article about a truly strange soccer game.

Barbados needed to win the game by two clear goals in order to progress to the next round. Now the trouble was caused by a daft rule in the competition which stated that in the event of a game going to penalty kicks, the winner of the penalty kicks would be awarded a 2–0 victory.

With 5 minutes to go, Barbados were leading 2–1, and going out of the tournament (because they needed to win by 2 clear goals). Then, when they realized they were probably not going to score against Grenada’s massed defence, they turned round, and deliberately scored on their own goal to level the scores and take the game into penalties. Grenada, themselves not being stupid, realized what was going on, and then attempted to score an own goal themselves. However, the Barbados players started defending their opponents goal to prevent this.

In the last five minutes, spectators were treated to the incredible sight of both team’s defending their opponents goal against attackers desperately trying to score an own goal and goalkeepers trying to throw the ball into their own net. The game went to penalties, which Barbados won and so were awarded a 2–0 victory and progressed to the next round.

Here I am rollerblading on top of a city bus that’s travelling across a layer of concrete beneath which is — presumably — a river of sewage. The Japanese creators of Jet Grind Radio were polite enough not to make me visit it. And that’s after we bombed the darn heck out of them in World War 2! Developers: Note bright colors and sky and sun.

smackus’ post is weird, relying on a ‘back in the day’ golden age that I don’t think exists. First, the strange assumption that it’s a choice between realism and colourfulness, as if real reality wasn’t colourful as hell. The real conflict is between drab and bright. Then, smackus uses screenshots of Super Mario 64 to show us what a colourful game could look like. As if that was the last example of bright palettes in gameplay. As if Super Mario Galaxy didn’t just come out.

The truth is that an enormous number of brightly coloured games (you get the idea) are being released, even in modern times. The real question is why so many blockbusters continue to be set in Blade Runner, Mad Max or a sewer. This is not new. The same year that Super Mario 64 came out, iD released Quake. Old Man Murray again:

Here’s a depressing rundown of the levels you’ll death-march through: Nali village, cave, cave, cave, cave, dark castle, lava cave, lava dungeon, lava waterfall, lava sewer, cave, dungeon, sewer, Nali village, dungeon, cave, sewer, cave, Nali cave, tall cave with the ceiling removed, cave, dungeon, cave. I think I forgot a sewer in the middle there. If I wanted to visit a dank, lightless cave, I could go explore my own edgy basement right now. For free. I have no explanation for the tedious, sewer-centric art direction in virtually every game. Maybe publishers have convinced developers that the game buying public is composed entirely of homesick C.H.U.D.S.

I have a different theory: I think that publishers have convinced developers that the game buying public is composed almost entirely of teenage boys.

If the binder doodles, film and music consuption habits of my friends in junior high is any indication, adolescence is as much about proving that you’re not into “kids stuff” anymore, as it is about anything else. Remember when Nintendo made Wind Waker more cartoony? Remember how sales spiked when Prince of Persia went from this to this? Remember what the monsters of Doom 3 look like?

This is the legacy of teenage boys that continues to shape our industry. We sell to our audience, our audience thinks that they want “mature” titles and someone told them that mature meant dark, dank and bloody. Dystopian novels English curriculum, I am looking in your direction.

It’s stunningly common in the industry for people to try to hide ideas. I used to interview candidates for an entry level positions at the last company where I worked. When it came to talking about game design ideas, so many of them clammed up (and so weren’t hired). They claimed they had ideas, but they didn’t want us to steal them. You see this over and over again on message boards, with prospective designers asking how they can approach a publisher with a new game idea for funding without risking that the publisher will take their pitch document and run.

Here’s the thing. Every company has a massive vault of ideas that they’d like to work on. At Capybara it was an excel spreadsheet with hundreds of entries, which grew every time we had another pitch meeting. There would be 20 ideas of which 5 were good with only 1 slot for a new project. We had a running joke for every good idea on our list: Within 12–24 months, someone would announce that they were making the game. It happened over and over again. Every idea you have, someone else is already working on or has thought about and rejected for one reason or another.

Apparently, George Lucas has people who’s job is to open every letter to him, destroy the ones that have suggestions for improving Star Wars, pass on the rest and then never talk to him. You could argue that he might have been better off if he’d peeked at a few of them but this is so that he can’t ever be sued for accidentally coming up with the same idea as someone else.

Game developers and publishers don’t need your ideas. The limiting factor in this industry is not the rate and which ideas are being produced. It’s the rate at which ideas can be implemented, tested, tweaked polished and shipped.

Good design is about the thousands of tiny decisions that happen at every step of development. Consider the hundreds of tiny decisions that led to Juiced instead of NFS: Underground 2.

So I love James Portnow’s design challenges, because they get people to approach ideas the right way, as disposable sparks that need to be examined, explored and subjected to criticism by your peers in order to have any value. Design exists in a context of creation, and the realization of the ideas is far more important than the dreaming of them. We all know what happens to those who forget this truth and start shouting “design is law”.

The result has been an entirely rational discussion consisting of game enthusiasts and feminists coming together to form a nuanced understanding of freedom of speech, the troubling depictions of women in violent situations, and the interplay of player agency and creative narrative and mechanics in forming the content of a game along with the shifting line between stereotypes and satire. It certainly has NOT resulted in shrill protestations of innocence by gamers who often fail to even grasp why there is a big deal and even shriller condemnations by feminists, many of whom have never played the game that they are tearing apart.

The problem with trying to find a nuanced middle ground here is that it’s difficult to defend the game without falling back on either the “it’s just a game” or the “well no one HAS to kill a hooker” defenses. Both are disingenuous.

If we believe that video games are an important cultural force (and I do) then when the criticism comes, we can’t back away and say “hold on, it doesn’t count here”. There should be no take-backs. If we think that games have merit then we should be able to defend them on their merit. Grand Theft Auto 4 has a Metacritic score of 99/100. It’s pretty clear that the gaming press broadly agrees that GTA:IV is a good and important game. So it should be defensible as such.

We can’t hide behind “no one has to kill a hooker” or “it’s the players not the designers doing the murder” either. The fact is that any video game is created by a bunch of people and the collective decisions of the developers, publisher (and sometimes regulatory bodies) determines what rules and verbs are implemented in the game. Designers shape the world and decide what can and can’t be done. In GTA:IV, for all its realism, I can’t climb over a wall that’s waist height. At some point during development, Rockstar had a meeting about my character’s movement abilities and “climbing short walls” was left off the list.

Which is just to say that if they’d wanted to, Rockstar could have prevented hooker killing. They could have left hookers out of the game. They could have made it so that the hookers were invulnerable to damage after you’d paid them. They could have had cut scenes as part of the sex act that involved the hooker walking away to safety while the main character dozed in post-coital bliss in his driver seat. They could have made the game’s sanction for killing paid hookers (perhaps a bunch of crazed, heavily armed, pimps) so high as to make the decision untenable. There’s no way that Rockstar was unaware of the controversy around this feature in earlier games from the series, so we can’t argue ignorance or emergent gameplay. Hooker killing is in the game and it’s in there on purpose.

Does this make the game misogynist?

GTA:IV is a game about transgression. Liberty City, as photo-realistic as it is, is not a neutral simulation of the world. Just get in a car (you can borrow your cousin’s), try to avoid committing a crime and you’ll see what I mean. The controls are tuned for high speed chases — it takes real finesse to stay under the speed limit and in your own lane without causing a pileup. Traffic moves at a snail’s pace and you can’t help but gun the engine and blast past all the suckers, careening around corners sending cars, pedestrians, and lamp poles flying. Cars are disposable and easily stolen. A multiple homicide killing spree and police chase can be ended by ducking in to a spray shop to give your car a new coat of paint or simply by laying low for a few minutes out of sight of the cops. You can attack — at any time — anyone that you see. It is far easier to be violent than it is to be law abiding in the GTA universe.

The main storyline tells the tale of a Eastern European immigrant’s rise through the ranks of the underworld, with all the violence of Scarface (the movie) and with the body count of a Mario game (which is to say — a lot). It stars a mostly male cast of racial and cultural stereotypes, though some female characters are present. In order to advance the story, you’ve got to commit a whole lot of crimes.

It also, incongruously, features one of the most robust dating simulators I’ve ever seen in a video game. You meet girls over the course of the adventure, you exchange phone numbers and then you can call them and ask them out. Sometimes, they call you. Once the date is arranged, you can choose to actually meet them, you can call to cancel, or you can just stand them up. Sometimes you have to choose between completing a game mission and keeping your plans. They’ll comment on your car and your clothes as you take them to places you think they’ll like (bowling, darts, cabaret show, drinks) and have awkward small talk with them. You can decide whether or not to go in for a kiss when you drop them off (I haven’t played long enough, but I’m pretty sure that you can’t date rape them, thankfully).

But it is misogynist?

On balance, I think that it’s hard to argue that GTA:IV makes it hard to play a misogynist lead character. As far as I know, there aren’t any male prostitutes offering their services, and you definitely can’t play a female lead (though to be fair, even Deus Ex had to cut the female option because of time and space constraints). There is sex in this game and the sex is clearly aimed at a straight male audience.

That said, it’s easier still to be an equal opportunity scum bag. Of all the people I’ve passed (or run over) on the street, I haven’t identified a single prostitute. The game pulls from criminal and mobster pop culture for its tropes, so the vast majority of the people you will be gunning down will be men. You have to go out of your way to hunt down and kill women. It’s part of the game play but it’s not a core part. There are in-game tutorials on how to date someone properly. You have to work out for yourself (or read about it in someone’s angry or purile screed) that you can hire and murder prostitutes.

The difficulties in talking about games like GTA:IV are legion. For one thing, it’s so big that every player’s experience will be very different. Comparing notes with a friend, I learned that he’d spent a good chunk of time watching his character watch TV. I didn’t even know you could do that. The scope, scale and detailing of the world in which the game happens is astounding.

The biggest reason for any of the controversy around GTA is that it sits on this weird crossroads between a realistic setting and video game ethics. No one is up in arms about the death toll in any of Super Mario Bros, Mega Man, or Final Fantasy despite the fact that the number of flattened Goombas in a single session is APPALLING. GTA takes that ethic and transplants it into a world that looks very much like our own. It’s very easy to stop seeing pixels and start seeing real people, which is why Jack Thompson characterized the games as “murder simulators”.

Cultural commentators see a video featuring the death of two virtual women and get up in arms and the defense, which is “yeah but I killed hundreds of other people too” just takes the discussion on a turn for the worse. Grand Theft Auto IV is probably one of the best games ever made. It’s also one of the most violent both because of the mandatory storyline killings and because of the freedom you are given to prey upon civilians (prostitute or otherwise) whenever the whim strikes you. It’s a fantasy about being able to cause mayhem in the real world and is all the more effective for how real the world seems.

Warren Spector, who is one of the smartest people in game design, sums up my feelings really well in an interview with Gamespot.

I am frustrated that the games in the GTA series, some of the finest combinations of pure game design and commercial appeal, offer a fictional package that makes them difficult to hold up as examples of what our medium is capable of achieving. The fictional context of GTA all but ensures that it will be portrayed in the mainstream press (and, I guess, in the courts!) as little more than a ‘murder simulator’ when it clearly is so much more–if you take the time to look.

Sadly–and this is part of the point I was trying to make in the interview last week–most people won’t take the time to look past the surface, the fiction, the context. They don’t see the fun and the freedom the game provides. They see carjackings and gun battles and hookers. You can talk about game design genius ’til you’re blue in the face. The people who want to regulate games, and the mainstream audience we want to reach, will ignore you. And then they’ll drop the hammer on our medium. Hard.

You should know that Half-Life is one of the best first persons shooters ever made. Much of what was done in that game is routine now, or has been ripped off dozens of times. Much of what they did in the game wasn’t even new to them. It had been done before in other places. But Valve put the pieces together in new and stunning ways.

The following article was written in 1999 and discusses how the game went from near failure to near perfection. It’s very worth reading.

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/19991210/birdwell_pfv.htm

In particular, I think that these paragraphs are worth mulling over for any content designer:

The second step in the pre-cabal process was to analyze what was fun about our prototype level. The first theory we came up with was the theory of “experiential density” — the amount of “things” that happen to and are done by the player per unit of time and area of a map. Our goal was that, once active, the player never had to wait too long before the next stimulus, be it monster, special effect, plot point, action sequence, and so on. Since we couldn’t really bring all these experiences to the player (a relentless series of them would just get tedious), all content is distance based, not time based, and no activities are started outside the player’s control. If the players are in the mood for more action, all they need to do is move forward and within a few seconds something will happen.

The second theory we came up with is the theory of player acknowledgment. This means that the game world must acknowledge players every time they perform an action. For example, if they shoot their gun, the world needs to acknowledge it with something more permanent than just a sound — there should be some visual evidence that they’ve just fired their gun. We would have liked to put a hole through the wall, but for technical and game flow reasons we really couldn’t do it. Instead we decided on “decals” — bullet nicks and explosion marks on all the surfaces, which serve as permanent records of the action. This also means that if the player pushes on something that should be pushable, the object shouldn’t ignore them, it should move. If they whack on something with their crowbar that looks like it should break, it had better break. If they walk into a room with other characters, those characters should acknowledge them by at least looking at them, if not calling out their name. Our basic theory was that if the world ignores the player, the player won’t care about the world.

A final theory was that the players should always blame themselves for failure. If the game kills them off with no warning, then players blame the game and start to dislike it. But if the game hints that danger is imminent, show players a way out and they die anyway, then they’ll consider it a failure on their part; they’ve let the game down and they need to try a little harder. When they succeed, and the game rewards them with a little treat — scripted sequence, special effect, and so on — they’ll feel good about themselves and about the game.