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.

This NES emulator shows how Super Mario Bros. sprites and graphics are stored both on the cartridge and in active memory. It’s really cool.

As a bonus, you get to play the first level of Super Mario Bros. and be reminded of how it’s one of the finest examples of a tutorial level despite (maybe because of) having no text, videos or scripted events. Watch how everything you need to learn is carefully broken down into logical bits, each one building on the last section of the level.

So good.

Too many of us are still holding onto design philosophies that were born in the days of quarter-gobbling arcade games. Too many developers get most of their design feedback from QA teams made up of hardcore gamers who have played a game way more than most normal people ever will. Making a game “just hard enough” (be that very hard or very easy, depending on the person playing) is one of the primary keys to fun — and, I think, an under-appreciated way to significantly increase sales. It deserves more attention from our industry, even as we search for ways to incorporate meaningful, educational, and remarkable consequences back into our games.

I’ve long been a fan of the approach of having multiple difficulty levels at once in the same place, using things like optional badges, multiple levels of success and bonus objectives. The simplest form can be found in most racing games, which allow you to pass a race in 1st, 2nd or 3rd place.

Medals, optional missing objectives, secrets, collectibles, level (and game) completion percentages – all of these allow you to have more than one level of difficulty on the same map at the same time, which can substantially reduce QA time and other design problems that come from a situation where you need to run the same content more than once during testing because the rules have changed in some way. If advanced players have the same experience as regular players, except that they skip less, a lot less can go wrong.

David Sirlin’s excellent analysis of Donkey Kong Country 2’s secrets was the first writing that got me thinking this way. Time and time again, working on small games with tight deadlines and short QA cycles, we took advantage of this technique.

This is not to say that it’s impossible to do dynamic difficulty well. People smarter than me are already working on better automated ways of adjusting difficulty in real time and presumably, they’ve solved the QA problem. I wonder how they’ll solve the emotional problem. Some people love being frustrated by games and some people hate them. Until game systems can detect how mad you are, the system will have to err in one direction or the other.

A fixed difficulty with a range of levels of success is the best of both worlds. Instead of dynamically adjusting difficulty is that it allows the player to decide for themselves how difficult they want the game to be, in real time, in a highly contextualized way. If the one section is too frustrating, then they can ignore the side missions and just get things done. If another is going really well, they can reach for the gold. If it’s going poorly but they are still enjoying themselves, they can reach for the gold anyway.

Plus, it makes it easier to compare the size of your achievements.

My attempt stuck closer to it being a shooter than a lot of the winning entries. Mechanically, I think that you could run my idea as an expansion pack to just about any of the AAA WWII shooters. But where these other games emphasized the comraderie, glory and heroism of one of history’s greatest tragedies, I wanted to emphasize the absurdity and confusion of being on the ground.

ULTRA

In 1939, with the help of intelligence supplied from Poland, British Intelligence broke the ‘unbreakable’ Enigma code that the Germans used for almost all of their cryptographic communications. This was a goldmine of information, which carried with it one serious problem: it often couldn’t be used! If Allied forces acted on knowledge they could only have gained from the Enigma decrypts, the Germans would conclude that the code had been broken and change their system. If the new system was impossible to break, the Allies would be cut off from a vital source of intelligence. Before the stolen information could be used, cover stories needed to be constructed. A scout plane would be sent on an otherwise unplanned patrol and ‘happen’ to come across a German convoy. Congratulations messages would be sent to (fictional) informants, thanking them for passing information. Most of the time, these cover stories could be arranged remotely, but sometimes, they needed a more personal touch…

In ULTRA, the player takes control of a (probably) fictional squad of soldiers tasked with protecting the secret of Bletchley Park. Sent on extremely dangerous missions characterized by strange constraints and absurd orders, the squad of elite soldiers progresses through an action packed campaign across the secret battles of WWII.

Tone and Setting

The battles of ULTRA are behind the scenes events. Players will be the secret heroes of WWII, asked to take on crazy missions and perform covert operations that allow the newsreel heroes to look good. A kind of stoic British stiff-upper-lip sarcasm will pervade the characters and events. Mission debriefs will be period-piece newsreels of the official story which will be in sharp contrast to the true story that the players live out. ULTRA will be a sly-cynical counterpoint to the starry-eyed jingoism of Medal of Honor.

Sample Missions

The missions of ULTRA will be characterized by restrictions designed to maintain a cover story of one kind or another. Instead of kill-them-all run and gun, missions will be a mixture of combat and a kind of global puzzle-solving. We’re not talking ‘open the lock’ puzzles. We’re talking “how can I ensure the Germans identify me as an Italian informant and yet live to tell the tale”.

Pre-D-Day. Intelligence indicates that the Germans are beginning to suspect that we will be landing in Normandy. Take a team, armed as a scouting party to Pas de Calais and land covertly. Encounter German patrols, engage them, but don’t kill them all – they must live to tell their superiors that we were there.

The Listening Post. An allied commander got cocky and sunk too many convoys near the African coast. We need to make it look like we’ve had a listening post in the area for months. Get your team in to an abandoned church covertly, make it look like you’ve been living there for awhile and then have the Italians “discover” you. Your escape should be as spectacular and noisy as possible, but do try to make it out of there alive…

The Warning. A German speaking special operative will be assigned to you. Attack and secure a German radio post without any messages getting out. Then maintain control of the post while the operative delivers misinformation to the enemy. Be warned, there are regular German supply runs to the post. You’ll need to ambush them before they can discover the truth.

The Prisoner. A group of soldiers including an Allied commander with some knowledge of ULTRA has been captured. Disguised as French freedom fighters, mount a rescue operation, discover who he might have been interrogated by, find and kill them. Bring the commander back if possible, otherwise ensure that he’ll remain silent forever. Remember, the French resistance doesn’t have access to the greatest weapons and they don’t speak English…

The Submarine. A U-boat has shipwrecked off the U.K. coast. This is an opportunity to collect critical code books and other information. Capture and secure the sub from any Germans still on board, collect any information you can and then destroy any evidence that you were there. Before it finishes sinking.

Gameplay Mechanics

In support of the cover story missions of the game, missions will be characterized by critical objectives that constrain the player’s actions. Enemy awareness will be a critical factor in most missions. It’s no good dressing up as resistance fighters if none of your victims live to tell command who (they thought) you were. Players will operate on a constant knife edge, trying to keep their people alive and fight effectively while behaving in an authentic manner for the story they are trying to convey to the enemy.

To this end, mission planning will be a critical part of the game play. Players will be given options of different starting points and will have to balance squad load out and equipment between efficiency for the job and believability. If members of the squad are injured, they’ll need to be rescued or killed to prevent information falling in to enemy hands.

Keeping Costs Down

By combining this new awareness mechanic with scripted mission constraints, we will be able to have a wide variety of scenarios without too many different assets. Combat will be at a smaller more intimate scale than most WWII games, allowing us to have simpler AI and avoiding a lot of the costs of a larger scale game. The nice thing about the approach of using known mechanics with different rules of engagement means that a lot of the core gameplay will be a solved problem, minimizing iteration of fundamental gameplay elements.

Doomed to Failure?

The problem with attempting to make a subversive war game is that the people who showed up to play your game don’t want to be called jerks for wanting some escapist fantasy violence. Arguably, this is part of why Blacksite: Area 51 didn’t really work out. It was a middle of the road modern war shooter which seemed to be upset with you for wanting to pretend to be a heroic soldier. ULTRA might let you be a little more heroic, but in a lot of ways it risks making that same mistake.

First Person Shooter, might not be the right vehicle to get players to think about this particular story.

Years ago, before they were called blogs, Smith maintained a site at Planet Deus Ex (who remembers the “planet” brand”). It hasn’t been updated since 2004 (and before that, like 1998) but it contains a lot of gems about good design. Witchboy’s Cauldron.

In particular, Distinct Functions in Game Units and Features Without Interface are really worth reading. His Half-Life review is also really good and a blast from the past.

Did you know you can win the first level of Star Wars just by standing in one place, turning in constant circles and holding down the “X” button? Aunt Wendy got something right. He was thrilled. And when he heard the cheerful chimes, a signal to those of all ages that you’ve won something, there was jumping around and fists in the air and lots of shouting I didn’t understand.

But then the next level came up, and things started to go downhill. The instant it began he looked confused. It took him a few seconds to put it into words, but then he said it. “I already won this level.”

And suddenly, the decision to make Super Marios Bros. World 1-2 happen in a cave is revealed to be utterly brilliant.

The main concept of the game is that there are secret masters of history behind the scenes, controlling and crafting events. The player takes on one of these puppet masters, in conflict with all the others, which are controlled by AI (or other players?). The goal is to (secretly) take over the world.

At first glance, the game appears to be very similar to any game in the Civilization series. However, all nations are entirely AI controlled. The player has no direct ability to manage unit production, send out settlers or any of the other standard Civ activities. Instead, they can direct members of their conspiracy to infiltrate organizations and governments, foment dissent, assassinate or indoctrinate leaders and other shadowy things. The idea is to shape history and humanity in a way that matches the ideology of your conspiracy.

Early portions of the game are Player vs City and then Region and then Nation. The conspiracy grows, takes over other groups as puppet organizations, and slowly winds its tentacles around the immediate area. As agents infiltrated different levels of government, the player gains more and more ability to see and then affect the direction of policy-making by the AI Nation. In time, the player encounters another shadowy organization and the real war begins.

The conflict plays out backstage, with assassinations, infiltrations and counter-infiltrations of puppet organizations, occult ceremonies, and the occasional out and out attack on your enemies. Wars are started and stopped, economies collapsed and restored and surveillance systems are created and cracked. Half the battle is getting accurate information about where and who your enemies are.

Once the existence of other secret masters comes to light, the game becomes an exercise in paranoia. Are the leaders that you’ve installed actually loyal? Is the information that you’re getting from your agents compromised? Have you really infiltrated the enemy, or is it yet another front or has your agent been brainwashed? With each passing turn, the player must sift through public information (which may or may not be lies) and secret reports (possibly also lies), attempt to sort out what’s going on and act accordingly.

All the while, the player is attempting to drag humanity toward enlightenment or bring about total submission or cause Armageddon or just built enough new landing strips for their Extra Terrestrial allies.

Aside from the Civ games where you play an apparently undying ruler over millennia, the closest game I can find for this idea is Republic: the Revolution a game I had high hopes for – hopes dashed by the lukewarm reviews. Steve Jackson’s Illuminati also has some inspiring material, though it doesn’t have a world simulator running underneath the main conflict.

Someone should make this game!