XI – The Inevitable Post!

Tools for Creating Dramatic game Dynamics

We were recently given the LeBlanc document related to a games Uncertainty and Inevitability. It discusses how drama is a desirable quality of games and how it is a part of a games play content – it is a kind of fun. It also states how we cannot create drama, only the circumstances from which drama will emerge, which I half agree with but only due to the games that are solely based on storylines such as Heavy Rain, which is basically an interactive movie with immense control, similar in fashion to the battle books were you control were your character goes and what items he uses.

Aesthetic Model: Encompass our understanding of what drama is and how it occurs.
Dramatic Arc: Central conflict of narrative, creates tension that accumulates as story builds to a climax and then dissipates as conflict is resolved

What is dramatic tension? 

Dramatic tension is the level of emotional investment in the story’s conflict, the sense of apprehension and urgency with which we await the story’s outcome. It gives the story a sense of wholeness, that it is a complete work with a start, middle and end. All drama originates from conflict – in one form or another, in a game the conflict comes from the contest around which the game is built. For example, a story driven game has its drama in the character arcs, a FPS game has drama on its inherent conflict, kill or be killed etc. Dramatic tension is the product of:

•   Uncertainty: The sense that the outcome of the contest is still unknown, any player can still win or lose.
• Inevitability: The sense that the contest is moving forward towards a resolution, the outcome is imminent.

Without uncertainty, the outcome of the game becomes a forgone conclusion and the players become spectators.
Without inevitability the outcome of the conflict seems distant and players are given little incentive to invest their emotions in the contest.

Over the course of the game we expect the inevitability to increase and the uncertainty to decrease, the climax of the game happens at the moment of realisation, when the outcome is clear

Dramatic uncertainty is needed to create and on-going sense that the game is  a close contest and yet undecided,  uncertainty and inevitability are caused by different systems and mechanics such as a negative feed system which is used to decrease the gap between the leading players and the players that are falling behind.

However they can cause a game to stagnate as they remove inevitability, and so enter the positive feedback system which gives players in the lead an advantage, adding to the obvious outcome of the game and also ensures that the game does not take too long and keeps the players from losing interest.

There are two methods of applying these feedback systems;

• Force - Manipulating the state of the contest itself
•  Illusion - The game seems closer than it actually is

Pseudo Feedback, illusion and dramatic uncertainty 

It seems as though there is a negative feedback system in play, but in fact there is not. It is just the illusion of one, they can be implemented in many ways and here are a few of them listed in the document:

• Escalation: Score changes more dramatically the longer the game has been running, an example of this would be in Tetris, the longer you play the more points you get per line.

• Hidden Energy: creates dramatic uncertainty by manipulating players understanding of the score. It is easy to think of this as a starting resource, or a special item that can be used at any point in the game, using it early on can give that player the lead and it can seem as though they are doing better than the other, but factoring in the hidden energy the score is relatively equal.

• Fog of War: This is about the control of information. You cannot be sure of how well you are doing in comparison to the opponent until you discover what they have been doing under the fog of war. It keeps the score unknown, or repeatedly hides the score slowly adding more and more information until the climax is imminent.

• Decelerator: This is when the score gets slowed down, at one section it progresses slowly and once you are past that it continues as normal. It creates the illusion that the players are close, but whoever reaches the slow section first will also more than likely leave it first as well and then the score will return to its original form.

Dramatic Inevitability – Force

The largest classification of inevitability is the Ticking Clock under which everything else derives. It is the countdown that you see in every game, it can be the health bars in a fighting game, the resources and amount of units in an RTS game, the amount of pickups in a FPS game or a literal clock in any type of game. It measures a player’s progress through the game and gives a sense of how far the end might be, it is a matter of the player’s perception. 

Resolution

In this documents final pages it states how tension cannot rise forever, it needs to drop to give the player a sense of closure on the game, it needs to reach the climax, then change direction and fade away. Sometimes the resolution can occur in the meta-game, but there is still a resolution.

This was an interesting read, it gave insight into how we should plan the methods of progress through a game, it is hard to remember at times that these also apply to solo games against the computer. A lot of these topics will be used later in my computer games design course and also in my own personal projects.

SM – iHK

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X - MDA

MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research

In this document, I discovered the MDA, which stands for Mechanics Dynamics and Aesthetics. The idea is that it will bridge the gap between game design, development, criticism and research while also improving the iterative processes, making it easier to break down, analyse and redesign a broad class of different game designs and classes. 

Mechanics: The components of the game, the rules that the game state must adhere to
Dynamics: What happens when you interact with the game
Aesthetics: How the player feels, emotional interaction with the game

Lens / Layer Each of these can be thought of as a lens, a layer that is separate, but is linked to the others. As you look through one lens to another, you see how its attributes affect all of the other layers.

Although MDA is a great method of game design, it was noted in the document that games are unpredictable as they are consumables. Every game is eventually discarded; it is when that is the issue. It is up to the designer to give the player as much as possible to consume from the game to keep them wanting more from it.

Perspective As a designer, it is natural to work through a game starting with the mechanics, getting the core gameplay working, after which you move onto and then finally you work on aesthetics, the visual and emotional output of the game. However it is also useful to look at it the other way around, the player will notice the aesthetics before anything else, getting them involved from the very beginning is very important and is something a games designer should always be aware of.

 

Describing words - Advanced Edition! It is no longer acceptable in the games community to only say a game is fun, or has good character design. To people in the design community, the terminology of describing game aesthetics is rapidly growing. This is a list of LeBlanc’s main aesthetic traits a game can contain, but there are still more that can be added to this list;

• Sensation (Sense Pleasure)
• Fantasy (Make-believe)
• Narrative (Drama)
• Challenge (Obstacle Course)
• Fellowship (Social Framework)
• Discovery (Exploring Uncharted Territory)
• Expression (Self Discovery)
• Submission (Pastime)

These are some examples given in the MDA document:

1.  Charades: Fellowship, Expression, Challenge.
2. Quake: Challenge, Sensation, Competition, Fantasy.
3. The Sims: Discovery, Fantasy, Expression, Narrative.
4. Final Fantasy: Fantasy, Narrative, Expression, Discovery, Challenge, Submission.

Aesthetic Models From these terms we can now start to evaluate games, tally up all of the aesthetical output into a chart and work backwards through the dynamics and mechanics to get a full understanding of what went into the game and hopefully what made them successful or unsuccessful. This style of analysing games will have a major impact on our own understanding of what makes a game successful and should shape how we design our own games.

Player type looking at an aesthetic model you can build a chart of what type of player you are aiming for. Taking target audience into consideration it is a lot easier to build a MDA structure that will be a success. You can look at players in many different ways, but knowing whether you want your game to be focused on competitive or cooperative, social or a solo game then you will need to build the correct MDA into your game for those players to want to play the game.

Reading this document has helped me to think about games design in a different way. Before I thought as a player, aesthetics first, I would think, if I played this game I want to see X first and although I don’t think that is an incorrect way to look at it, it is definitely not the only way to look at it, and both are required before any major work can commence.
Even though the document had quite a few awkward words that needed some Google’ing, I found it a very good read and recommend it as a great way of analysing games. 

SM - iHK

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IX Zotero - Bibliography creation

I have recently tried to get my brain around using a Firefox extension called Zotero, it basically lets me save a book of a site like amazon, and it gathers all the relevant bibliography information. I attempted to just do a little research and see how it works; these are the results that i got that are relevant to my course:

Busby, J., Parrish, Z. & Wilson, J., 2009. Mastering Unreal Technology: v. 1: Introduction to Level Design with Unreal Engine 3: A Beginner’s Guide to Level Design in Unreal Engine 3 1st ed., Sams.

Autodesk, 2009. Autodesk 3ds Max 2010 Foundation for Games, Focal Press. 

Susaeta, H. et al., 2010. From MMORPG to a Classroom Multiplayer Presential Role Playing Game. Journal of Educational Technology & Society, 13(3), pp.257-269.

Schrader, P. & McCreery, M., 2008. The acquisition of skill and expertise in massively multiplayer online games. Educational Technology Research & Development, 56(5/6), pp.557-574.

I find this programe extreamly over complicated, or perhaps its just the way that the ui is setup, from the way that me and my peers have been talking - everyone seems to dislike this piece of software, not because it isnt very good, but because it has a very long winded way of doing things.

Although, however complicated it is, i think it is going to be extreamly useful in the future when i am required to build a bibliography of my own, even with the awkward learning curve it will save me a lot of time stumbling in the dark.

VIII Games Britannica - Ancient games

Recently watched an interesting show titled Games Britannica which looked through the ages at some ancient games. It talked about how some games had already existed before the roman conquests showing how Britain was already quite developed, however these games were not for fun or amusement, they were generally played by fortune tellers and druids to predict future events.

A pre roman game was found, without rules among various different surgical items of the time, showing it was a learned man, with some form of medical experiences. It is thought that the man was a druid who practiced fortune telling, the two sides of the board were used perhaps to predict the outcome of battles or things of such nature. However it is all speculation without the rules, but it more than likely had some abstract more than life meaning.

There are also remains of marks people had carved into the stone of medieval churches, while they were waiting they used these carvings to play games and pass the time trying to get through that human only trait of boredom.

There are many examples of where other ancient games came from and how they have evolved to this day and age, however the only one that stood out to me, was a game named The Game of Gospels. This is a very tactical game, which is the reason it stands out to me, the general play method is that one player is light, the other is dark, the dark player’s counters surround the light players, the objective for the light is to get his king counter to any corner of the game board, which represented a saint. The aim of the dark colour was to stop him. This was a war game, and thus each counter represented soldiers, either protecting their king or trying to stop the king, you could remove your opposition by getting 2 of your counters either side of theirs. 

I really admire how these people made their own games to pass the time; it shows how anybody can make a good successful game. These people did it without any other games to draw ideas from, it would have been a lot harder for them and they already had good functional games, even if they were used for other means. The first episode is interesting and the next instalment of the show moves further along the timeline discussing newer British games, when I get around to watching the rest of the series I will be sure to keep this blog up to date with its various topics.

SM – iHK

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VII – Gamasutra ^,^

This article by Doug Church is about how game design has been trailing behind in its evolution, which he believes is due to its lack of a common language to be employed when analysing games. In his article titled Gamasutra, he states how “the primary inhibitor of evolution is the lack of a common vocabulary”, their needs to be a shared language of games design that can be applied to any game of any genre. 

Specific genres are still coming along in leaps and bounds, but it gets stuck there, the new design techniques and styles don’t get transferred across the full field of games design and this led Church to develop the idea of FADT – Formal Abstract Design Tools. He believes that we can pick apart games, get down to the core reason of what was good / successful and what was bad / failing and that knowledge can be applied to future games design and allow better, greater games to be developed, he also makes a note to say that although some tools / features that are successful in one game, may not be so great in another. 

He lists a few tools that are common in most games, however there are many more that are not included and that as time progresses the list of tools will increase. Controls are a major tool that shapes gameplay; he states how you can play one game with one set of controls and another, similar game with a completely different set of controls. It’s these controls that shapes player behaviour in a game, once they gradually get to understand the games consistent controls, they will start to develop their own game play styles, experiment and take risks with the games physics and laws, planning on how to reach the next area for example. 

These controls involve the player in the game world, providing just a few actions in a game like Mario and giving them a lot of opportunities to use these abilities causes the player to start and understand the mechanics that makes up the game. Once they are involved in the game world they can take attempt to take control over their own path and play with how to get from one point to another. It’s when they start to experiment that the games mechanics need to be in top shape so that it can anticipate all of the player’s actions and have the character and world respond in a way that is cannon. Even if it all plays out and the player fails in whatever task they were performing, let’s say it was jumping from one tree to another, they will understand why it failed and may attempt again, however if they failed because the next tree wasn’t climbable then it won’t fit into the game state, the illusion of realism that the game was aiming for has been vanquished and the player will feel lost and confused. This ends in the player getting frustrated at the game and possibly having then quit. 

Perceivable consequences can make or a break a game. A game reacts based on your actions and input and moreover, you understand why it reacts the way it does. The player can take a chance, take the left or right road can be totally random, only to find that they took the wrong path and are now dead. This can leave the player frustrated as, how could they have known on a random decision? But in that form of free roaming game, it is that element of surprise and not knowing that can make a game great, but they draw heavily from storyline which is another tool that defines a game.

Story can often take a lot of control away from a game if it is incorporated too heavily. To compensate for this, the player is given more control over small areas of a game. Any fan of the traditional RPG genre will usually enjoy the task of going through the games set paths and getting to the end of the story, as that is one of the most thrilling parts of the game. It’s an interactive story that you control, even though control is limited. The work around for this limitation is to make each area of the game a game in its own right, such as the item system becoming a collection system, the cut scenes becoming interactive, etc.

Story has a massive effect on a game; it’s hard to play any game without a theme and story behind it. Even generic sport games are based on real life which has its own unique story to it. Intention and perceivable consequences can often take a backseat with a heavily scripted and story driven storyline, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In recent open world sand box games, the same situation of going left or right is still in the game, and you have to guess which is the best, but you have that other option to explore the game world provided for you and finding that hidden manuscript that details the movements of a gang or rogues so you know that they are down that right path. This can add a huge sense of realism to the game, the option to research everything and go into every situation totally prepared or take to the unknown – the faster path to just complete the storyline with a harder path set before. Giving that option, the player can use intention to choose their own path through the storyline of the game.

Intention is another tool that Church talks about. The player will have some means by which to complete the tasks set before him, planning ahead with the intent of being able to pass any future obstacles with ease, moving forward with a purpose. Accumulating goals is a great away to give the player an option on how to move ahead, planning ahead on how to accomplish each goal. 

There are many other tools which Church doesn’t go into great detail about, such as cooperation, conflict and confusion, but the three big ones he talks about is intention, consequence and story. They are involved I would say most if not all games of the past decade and are only going to be so much more over used now that the topic of games design is being more precisely researched with more and more people discussing the topic.

SM – iHK

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VI - Building Blocks of a Game.

I recently read a few extracts related to the parts required to make a game, in these writings, topics are listed and evaluated on how they help to make that game good and how they can be translated to other games. In “Challenges for Games Designers”, there is a chapter titled Game Design Atoms. This chapter of the book is all about the parts that make up a game, all the ‘atoms’ that are made separately and then added together to form the full entity that is the game.

It starts out with the Game State, which is a collection of all the relevant information in the game which is subject to change. It not only includes the current, but possible as well, so every possible move, every previous change, every score and stat change all that sort of information makes up the game state. Game state decides how the world works and what the player can do, the player isn’t aware of the entire game state, even in older games; all of this information is readily available to an enthusiastic gamer but isn’t required to play. In modern games, understanding the game state, even if only partially can enable the player more control over the game world and give him the ability to predict and influence the games actions the way he wants.

The Game View is what the player can see; it is defined and caused by the game state. The game view is an immensely important aspect of a game as it shows the player what he is seeing, instead of reading a book to understand the state of the world the game is set on, the player is shown. It is a much more powerful way of conveying a view and meaning to the player than having them read it as if they were playing D&D. 

Game Space is the entire area of the game, including all the areas the player doesn’t get a chance to see. It includes every area in a game, accessible or not. Game space provides a fantasy setting, giving the option for the player to get involved in a game and believe in it. If there is more than what the player can see at one time, then it can seem interesting as it is natural to want to know the unknown, see everything that’s out there. 

Avatars are the digital representation of the real life player. Some games have no visual avatar in which case it usually has the player being in control of something, so they are managing the world as a behind the scenes leader of an empire, or city builder etc. 

Game Bits make up all the items inside a game world. Everything that the player interacts with is a ‘game bit’, npc’s to swords to rivers. It all comes under the category of things that fill up the world and make it more believable.

Game Mechanics are the rules to which the world and the player must abide. If the game world does not follow the same set of rules that the player does, then they will feel cheated and that their efforts are meaningless as the enemy only needs to work half as hard. This can be very frustrating in the newer 3D games when you move around an object one way, and the enemy can run through half of it, it makes the world feel broken and the player wont adjust to the rules in the correct fashion. Getting game mechanics incorporated into a game correctly can be a very long daunting task, as they each must compliment the other – if they clash then things won’t work well. 

A metagame is everything outside the game state, things that happen in real life or in other media forms like a forum. These things can add a social aspect to a game; even things like a fighter where there is no need for a large universe, or a thrilling storyline. It gives the chance for players to talk and discuss the game state and its various mechanics.

This is a list of all the different aspects that make up a game. Without going into too much detail in each point as they can all be broken down for any specific genre, this list is compatible for any game. In my next blog post I will discuss Doug Church and his view on a very similar topic.

SM – iHK

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V Greg Costikyan – I Have No Words & I Must Design?

I recently read through Costikyans “I Have No Words & I Must Design: Toward a Critical Vocabulary for Games” in which he evaluates what a “Game” is. He says how the word game has become overused and plastic as it relates to so many sub topics that can fill multiple pages, it doesn’t just relate to the digital but also the physical and mental aswell.

The word game is adaptable to many different types of mediums and that the best way to understand a game, is to understand the gameplay, all the different areas that make up a game. This way he hopes to find things that all these games have in common and build the ability to define why a game is good or bad by discussing its core mechanics.

He goes on to list some of the major areas of gameplay, without going into too much technical detail:

Interaction – This is an obvious element of any game, but just saying that it has good interaction isn’t enough, you need to be able to define it and discuss why it made the game good. Costikyan says that you need to understand the different between a game and a puzzle. A puzzle is static; it has a logical structure with clues to help you reach the goal. A game is not static; it is constantly changing depending on your interaction.
If every choice and decision was already made for you, it only leaves you to play through that one method of play, which is a core puzzle mechanic. However if your left with the option to analyse the situation and then respond instead of taking the obvious set path, decide on the best course of action, that’s making it a game. If you’re interacting with a purpose, trying to reach the goal through your own means, the way you want to play, that makes it a much more enjoyable experience.

Goals – That leads us onto goals, interaction alone isn’t enough to make a game enjoyable. You need to have a goal/aim/objective that you are constantly trying to achieve. It’s the entire point of playing the game, you want to have the satisfaction of saying – I did A and I got Y for it, or instead of doing A and getting Y, I did B and got Y, X and Z.

It is all about decision making, goals can be built into a games core, i.e. tag – catch the other person, but it is up to the players whether they play solely by that rule or not. As a child you notice how you easily get bored with the simple game of tag, so the rules often changed, one person catches another who will help you catch the rest, or how it gets split into teams etc. This way the players set their own custom goals, but the core game mechanic is still there and it easily allows these new rules to be added and modified.

This option for user created goals can be a big factor in whether a game is good or not, as a player you will notice if the option is there from the early stages of play. Although not every game needs user goals, having something that the player can choose to aim for whether it’s something simple like collectables or not, builds upon the games main mechanics and adds a hidden sense of a built in mini game.

But many games don’t have the capacity to allow something like this; fighting games for example are a lot harder to work user goals into, yet they are still successful and that based on the complexity of the game. The option to fight how you want, you can choose whether you want to hinder yourself and only use one style, or finish your opponent off in a particular way, making the game much harder for yourself, but the satisfaction of completing your own task makes it all worthwhile.

Struggle – Goals ultimately lead to struggle, you need to fight your way to the end or else it will seem too easy. If you’re just given a victory then it won’t seem earned and you will not appreciate it.

Whether it’s a competitive or co-operative struggle to the goal it matters not, as long as the player is satisfied with the resolution and feels like they earned the goal / reward then it will enhance the gamer’s experience.

Structure – Costikyan quotes Eric Zimmerman “Games are structures of desire.” By this he means that the desire is the want to reach the ultimate end, the goal is wanted and important to the player. Structure refers to the rules, components of the game that allow the player to reach and obtain that desire. The structured rules and mechanics of a game guide player behaviour to obtain their goals, after they get to understand the structure they will start to experiment with it, they know what they can and cannot do.

Structure differs from game to game, Mario has players jumping over trees and going down water pipes, but in tomb raider the mechanics of the game are much more realistic, the player knows the characters limitations and they will play by those rules. But they are still able to play with the games structure.

Using tomb raider as an example; there are usually multiple paths the player can take to get on top of that ledge. They obvious paths are things like, walking up a path to the top, climbing it etc. But there is also the much harder option of jumping from one pillar to another and make it across. It can usually take many tries, and there is no particular reward for doing so, but just making it possible makes the game seem much more alive and immersive.

Endogenous – The definition of endogenous is ‘Caused by the factors within the system’. This means that the game creates meaning and value to the player, and this can be unique to that one player based on their experience through the game. If the games structure is immersive and the player enjoys their time playing the game, then the games items and materials can be important to the character, things that are meaningful within the game.

Ultimately all games are a fantasy, they are not real. Every aim and goal you make in the game has no physical real world meaning. But success in a game can mean a lot more to the player, items in the game shape the way it is played, the player always has a preference to how they like to play and if given the option of choose what item to play the game with, then they will grow attached to it as they spend their time through the game.

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All these create the core of a game; define it in a way that it is its own unique entity that only relates to a game, so “A game is an interactive structure of endogenous meaning that requires players to struggle towards goals”. I think that sums up what a game is pretty well.


SM – iHK

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IV Battleships – Playing with fire

A few days ago we were given the task of modifying Battleships. It’s one of those great games that everyone has played; in fact only one person in our class had never played the game. The task, at first, seemed pretty daunting as it is not just any old game were playing with here, it’s a game that has a big history and has been tried and tested for a long time.


We started off by playing the game first, getting a feel for the game and understanding what we enjoyed about it when we played. After a few turns the game ended and we started to draw up our conclusions. We discussed how the game perhaps suffered from a quick nature, once you hit a ship it is quite obvious were your opponents ships are going to be due to their shape, it’s only a matter of time before its sunk. So we thought about the best way of changing this rule and decided to make it so that we could place the ships in any pattern we wanted, so instead of placing them in a line, we could place them in an L or U shape etc.

We tested this new iteration of the games rules and the game lasted quite a bit longer, as new strategies came into play and the games elements started to grow. Battleships, in my eyes has two modes, the single player stratagems of placement and attack style, as well as the mental, or poker themed control over your opponent’s actions. With this one new change, both of these areas of the game became a lot more in depth. You had to read your opponents eyes and actions as they read the board and understand what way they were going to place their pieces so much more drastically than before as now it isn’t just the chance that they are in the straight line and they will find the path within 1 or 2 turns, but now each move is full of risk and chance requiring you to really try to outthink your opponent.

We played a few games with these new rules and I lost each game, but the enjoyment was so much greater than from the original game that I think the new rule definitely made the game evolve into something so much more. However even though the games seemed more fun and enjoyable, the one major downside is that the games seemed to last a lot longer now, and something definitely needed done in order to add pace to the game. We came up with two solutions which we decided to add one at a time, a ‘missile’ attack which we could use to attack 1 entire row at any time in the game, left – right, up – down or diagonal. The other was that after each successful attack you get another go, which had the potential to could create a combo that you could ride all the way to victory in one turn, it could be a good chance to get a ‘come-back’ from some bad luck in the game.

We started off with the missile iteration and it went down pretty well. There was some pre-game diplomacy / bluffing which had effects on the gameplay, then we went in game, the first missile didn’t get any hits and the second got 1 hit. This ultimately didn’t help in the finding of ships, but it did remove 10 squares for us to have to explore through which made the game quite a bit faster.

Although the game was faster, the pace hadn’t improved from the last game and thus our final iteration game into play which fixed up our little bug and made the game quite a bit faster. The final game was quickly played at home and looking back, a pretty good addition to the game. I’m not sure if it would be better than the original, it surely is more enjoyable to me, whether or not anyone else would agree is up to the player. It’s now up to you to play with these new rules and test them out for yourself:

1. You can place your ships in any formation you want, as long as all pieces of a ship are touching a straight section of the ship, i.e. no diagonal placements. 
2. Add a 1 time only, missile attack that attacks each square along the board; vertically, horizontally or diagonally. 
3. Succession attacks, if you get a hit you’re allowed another attack.