What I Love About My Company

The game company that I work for intends to update their employee handbook; transform it from a dreadfully dry read to something fun and engaging for our new employees and perspective candidates. A couple of us gathered and discussed what exactly we liked about our company that we should include in the handbook. Coming out of that meeting, I felt quite privileged to be working for a game company that has a great work-life balance and opportunities for growth. It's been in my mind all day and I wanted to write out my personal reasons why I like the company. Hopefully, more game companies out there are listening and taking notes. We need less EA spouses and Zynga horror stories.

I can sum up my favorite things about the company with three keywords. They just all happen to start with the letter E.

1. Education

• I happen to be in a privileged position as a programmer in the Research and Development department. We're rapidly making prototypes about every two to three weeks, so we have many chances to dive into new technologies. Over the past year, I've dipped my toes in HTML5, XNA, Win8 and XAML, Gamemaker, Construct, and Inform7. There's so many more programming languages and game engines that I want to be playing around with in the year to come and my position in the R&D team gives me the opportunity to do so.
• We do, however, build most of our prototypes in Flash because it's easy to get a game up and running in a short time. Also, its high penetration rate means that we can get the prototypes into the hands of playtesters in the most friction-less way possible. Within Flash itself, we learn new technologies by working with several third-party APIs including Facebook, Box2D (physics engine), and Starling (rendering engine). Starling wasn't exactly necessary for our prototypes but we decided to tinker with it anyways because we thought it'll be interesting to explore. The research definitely paid off as now we've integrated a Starling module into our proprietary Flash engine for other Flash developers in the company to take advantage of.
• I'm not an artist by any means, but I love art and I have a strong passion to learn art. I believe learning more skills would feed back into my other talents, making me a better programmer and game designer. The art director at the company has graciously allowed me to attend the weekly artist meetings, where I've picked up a lot of techniques and tricks. I've learned about onion skinning in Flash, smart objects and layer comps in Photoshop, and even how to sculpt clay. We also spend the last five minutes of the meeting looking at inspirational artwork and I've walked out of many meetings with an innovative game idea in my head just from looking at great art.
• I don't just love learning, I love teaching and educating others too. I started an internal university program at the company, where people of talent teach their skills of expertise to coworkers in different departments. Like I said before, learning more skills, even if they don't directly relate to your job title, would ultimately make you a better developer overall.
• I attend almost every game-related event in the NYC area. I take super-detailed notes on pen and paper, sometimes to the point where my wrist starts cramping, and I transcribe all my notes for the company to read. Sometimes, I compose all these notes into a presentation, since I know few people actually like to read walls of text. There's a wealth of knowledge that exists outside our office doors and it's important to be taking this and disseminating it as much as possible.

2. Expression

• Too often I hear game developers say that they don't have a creative outlet within their studio. Luckily at our company, we generally work in small project teams where everyone gets to contribute and have their voices heard. As a programmer, I have contributed so much to design and art decisions in my previous projects. Our company culture makes you feel like you're really part of a team, rather than another gear in the machine.
• We have a company-wide meeting every Monday, aptly named the Monday Meeting, which is hosted by a different employee each week. It's almost like an employee spotlight, giving each employee a chance to talk about their interests outside of work. Some employees take the opportunity to do crazy things like act out a murder mystery, put on a faux late night talk show, play Jeopardy or Family Feud, or read beautiful poetry.
• We also have an open brainstorm meeting every Friday. Following a "there are no bad ideas in a brainstorm" mantra, it gives people the freedom and opportunity to contribute ideas without the social pressures. Though sometimes a lot of ideas end up being jokes and most brainstorms end up not being too helpful, the open forum environment carries on to affect the general company culture.
• The core responsibility of the R&D team is to find great game ideas and prototype them. The engine that generates these ideas are all the people in the company. Any full-time employee can submit a game idea through our system, writing as little as one short paragraph or including a quick sketch. We wanted the idea submission process to be as friction-less as possible. The obvious incentive is to allow  anyone to get their ideas into the world, get it prototyped into a digital version, and hopefully, greenlit into a full production game. We also offer financial incentives such as a cash reward the moment the game is greenlit and profit sharing after the game is released. Some of our strongest contributors include a QA lead and a backend programmer, two non-developer job titles that if at another company, would have little opportunity to contribute to the game design process.
• Another responsibility of the R&D team is to run an annual internal game jam. If you've ever been to a game jam, you'd understand the value that emerges from it. It's the next step above idea submission; not only do people contribute ideas, they jump right into the middle of the game development process. Everyone in the company is required to do this and quite possibly the best thing for us to see is when non-developers get into the thick of it. We saw a lot of people try their hands at different skills and surprise us with their hidden talents. Our community manager drew and animated a bunch of cute animals, a producer made pixel art and recorded a lot of hilarious voice overs, our business team Photoshopped art and made music videos. Our favorite story that emerged from the game jam this year involved a low-end .NET programmer, who discovered that she loved doing game programming, that she asked to be transferred to the HTML5 team that recently lost its lead.
• Finally, we also have weekly department meetings. The programming, art, and game design departments in particular like to issue challenges to its members. These challenges are meant to exist outside the everyday work we are responsible for and are a great channel for personal expression. Just to go over some of these challenges, the programming team has had to make a one-button HTML5 game, a one-minute XNA game, an Inform7 text adventure, and CROBOTs to fight against each other. The art team was tasked to design characters of their own creation, environments, company logos, game jam logos, art comps for weird game ideas, objects sculpted out of clay, and most recently, contribute towards an exquisite corpse. The game design team has had to come up with games ideas based on creative real estates, random images, mashing up favorite games with another designer's favorites, random nouns and adjectives, and mashing up characters with locations. Each of these challenges let the members be creative and allow them to experiment with technology, aesthetic styles, and mechanics that don't necessarily follow our company's standard fair. Fortunately (or unfortunately), the R&D team is a cross-disciplinary team that's part of all three departments, so we have a lot of extra work to do!

3. Environment

• Our company, by far, exhibits a family culture more so than any other company I've worked for. I've worked with actual family too, so that's saying a lot. I can't pinpoint any one reason for this but I think it's a culmination of all things said before. Our weekly Monday Meeting lets us learn more about every colleague, brainstorms and challenges show off our individual personalities and creativity, the game jam forces us to work collaboratively with coworkers we don't normally interact with, and so on.
• We have a lot of company bonding events, mostly put together by our awesome office manager, but sometimes also happens organically. We have annual beach parties and Six Flags trips, we have board game nights, we get to leave a few hours earlier on summer Fridays, and we celebrate every employees' birthdays with a snack of their choosing.

Practice 2012: Designing for Thousands of Autonomous Agents

Stone Librande, the lead designer on the new SimCity, gave a lecture about the autonomous agent system that the game is based on.

Presentation

• SimCity has been in development for three years. Unlike its predecessors, it has added a multiplayer component, both cooperative and competitive, and an agent-based system.
• The first SimCity has a 2 MB filesize. In comparison, Stone's PowerPoint presentation was already 10 MB. The early SimCity games only had graphical indications of traffic, but no actual cars that drove on the road.
• An agent is a carrier of information, bringing data from a source to a sink. Some examples of agents in SimCity include people, electricity, water, education influence, and fire and crime alert systems.
• Resources in the game include citizens, happiness, money, goods, sickness, taxes, water, and electricity. The agents that carry these resources are people, cars, trains, buses, and garbage trucks. The paths the agents use are streets, power lines, water pipes, and railroads. The units where the resources are spent at include houses, shops, and workplaces.
• Previous iterations of SimCity had a cell-based system. A police station, for example, had an area of effect so it could fight crime at any area in its vicinity. In an agent-based system, however, there must be a path between the house and the police station in order for it to work. If there's no path, the house can get robbed and the police station would ignore the crime, even if the house was right next to the station.
• The benefits of an agent-based system.

1. It's more realistic. The sims (citizens) need to work to get money, shops and factories need workers to operate, and there are real actual traffic jams.
2. The gameplay is deeper. Streets and paths are as important as buildings. The game feels like a puzzle in motion and not just an Excel sheet.
3. The game is more engaging. Every sim has a name and motivation, and the players will care about them. The city has a mesmerizing daily rhythm and there's a fluid liquid-like experience. There are actual rush hours twice a day, when people all scurry to work and come home from work.

• The problems of an agent-based system.

1. Agents are slow. They can't get answers immediately and sometimes they won't always arrive at the destination. The economy is driven by many game loops and it's difficult to design.
2. Agents are dumb. Designers constantly have to keep an eye on performance and programmers ruin the fun of the designers. The agents will always get absorbed by the first available sink. If they're looking for a job, they will stop at the first open position they can find, even if it's not optimal to the player. The player might want them to go work at the power plant because he needs power, but the agent would get a job at the 7-11 only because it was the first sink.
3. Agents are deliberately dumb. The team made an early game design decision to not let players tell the sims what to do. If the agents were too smart and made intelligent decisions by themselves, it would be very hard for the players to understand why.
4. Agents create design issues. Statistical analysis of agent behavior is difficult to do and it's hard to predict what will happen even for the designer. There are lots of bugs and it's tricky to troubleshoot problems because of the large agent network. The developers end up not trusting the agents.

• In the early design phase, the designers used lots of Excel and had to figure out correct sizes of all the units. Stone made giant one-page diagrams of all the game flows including residential flow, commercial, and industry.
• In the residential flow, there's a 3x3 grid of possible city blocks, with one axis being wealth and the other being density. Stone made sure that the densest and wealthiest block was not the best one, because players would get to that and feel like they've "beaten" then game. There are cons to becoming too wealthy or too dense. Wealthier people waste more electricity and power for the amount of land that they take. Stone wanted there to be no right answer to play the game.
• The game has a happiness system. Sims will be happy if they shop or go to parks, but sad if there's pollution, illnesses, or traffic. Unwealthy people who have no happiness will become homeless. The player will have to reduce trash from the city to get the homeless people to leave.
• In the industry flow, sims will have to work to get one money token, in which they can spend at a shop. Wealthy people would always shop at expensive stores, and unwealthy people shop at cheap ones.
• How do you work with tens of thousands of agents? Stone created an agent flowchart that defined agent behavior. He realized that if the flowchart was too big, it made the agents too complicated, so he deliberately dumbed down a lot of the AI and split up roles. The sims, for example, used to work until they get money and then shop until they're out of money. This was a complicated flowchart and also created a weird situation where everyone worked one day and then shopped the next day, but not do both on the same day. So he split up the sims into a worker type and a shopper type with one-track minds, and it made the day flow more realistically.
• Tourists can also come to the city by train, boat, or plane and spend their money. A household can also have children who will wander the streets until they find a school. If there are no schools, the children end up being criminals.
• Stone makes a lot of one-page infographics instead of wireframes and documents. This is more engaging for the team to see.
• The game has about 25 high-end systems and thousands of agents following their own agendas.
• SimCity is definitely more entertainment than it is a simulation. The developers are not aiming for realism; the game is ultimately a puzzle game.

Question and Answer

• Stone waits until the last possible moment to balance numbers. He generally keeps the numbers simple and flat so it's easier to think about them. For example, workers always get one money token from working and always spend one money token when shopping. If they decide that expensive shops would require two money tokens, this is a change they make near the end of development. These are also things they plan to retune constantly.
• The past designers of SimCity always wanted to make an agent-based game, but the technology was not ready for it before.
• Stone hopes that SimCity and The Sims never merge together into one game.
• The employee test involves building something on-site using the Glassbox engine in 3-4 hours. Their first task after they're hired is to spend a week building a prototype of their own design using the engine.
• The game uses tiltshift photography and makes the city look like a small toy set.
• The game needs a lot of tutorials and thought balloons from individual agents to teach mechanics. They wanted the teaching to be more organic and approachable. For example, in previous games, you needed to build the entire electricity and water system before sims would even move into your city. This was not particularly engaging to players who expect to jump right into the game and build houses. In the latest game, players can build houses and have sims move in, and then the sims would complain about not having water and electricity. The game plays towards player expectation and teaches through the agents about what's needed.
• There are three designers on the team (Stone himself, a multiplayer designer, and a city simulation designer) and about 10 to 12 scripters who script the flowcharts. The scripters are also considered to be designers but more on the technical side.

Practice 2012: Building a Legendary IP: Growing Creative in League of Legends

Christina Norman, lead creative director at Riot Games, talked about the current problems of the League of Legends IP and how the company is taking measures to fix them.

Presentation

• Christina was previously the lead programmer of the dialogue system in the first Mass Effect, and then became the lead game designer focusing on combat in the Mass Effect sequels.
• League of Legends is currently the most played game with 32 million monthly active users (MAU) and three billion hours played a month. The average player plays above 30 hours a month. It's a multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) with 107 champions at the time of the conference.
• League of Legends is an e-sport and not a narrative focused game, but the story is still important because the players love the characters. Players have deep emotional relationships with the champions.
• Outside of the game, players also spend time in forums discussing the game and making their own media about the game. Players love great stories, but the League of Legends lore needs work.
• The lore has issues. It was appropriate for a small action game, back when the goal was to get to 20,000 concurrent users. But now the game has reached 30 million concurrent users.
• There are four key issues with the current lore and storytelling.

1. Tournament IP.
1. The lore explains that to stop the warring between Noxus and Demacia, a magical tournament was created to resolve all conflict. In this world, all combat occurs in the field of justice, the powerful summoners control everything including the champions, and there is effectively no war. This restricts a lot of conflict and limits suspenseful storytelling.
2. The lore also over explains things, including game mechanics. To explain how allies or family members occur on opposite teams during some games, the lore says that the champions are mind-controlled by the summoners. To explain death and revivals, the champions are snatched right before they enter the underworld and are magically restored to life. The over explanations create an awkward and unbelievable world.
3. To create an awesome IP, you have to respect what the players love and revise when necessary. Riot Games want to tell stories outside the tournament and outside the game mechanics.
2. Lack of character depth.
1. The champions in the game have a lot of personality, but no depth. Mordekaiser, for example, is an undead death knight that's so badass that when he kills you, he makes your soul turn on your allies. But Pikachu is also badass that he deals extra damage when it's the trainer's birthday. Being badass doesn't give a character any depth.
2. The old process of creating a character involved someone getting inspired, they would write a one or two page bio of the character, the bio gets peer reviewed, and it gets iterated. This resulted in pretty good bios, but it was not good at creating depth.
3. Christina was inspired by writer's rooms, putting several creative people in a room for several hours to talk out all the details. She instilled a new process of character creation which involves a bio slice being defined, creative people from different departments would talk for 4 to 12 hours about the character, notes are taken and written into a full-fledged bio, the team approves and validates the bio, and finally, the group iterates on the bio.
4. This is a powerful collaborative process, but the drawbacks include long ideation sessions, needing a showrunner to provide leadership and creative direction, and potentially average ideas resulting from design by committee. The key benefits, however, are higher quality characters, team buy-in and shared vision, and the group is more creative than any one individual.
5. Depth is added to the characters by giving them motivations, relationships, and complications. In Mordekaiser's revised back story, he is an undead general who enslaves souls to join his army and doesn't remember his life before his death. Now the character is deep enough to write a television series about.
3. Lack of world depth.
1. There are 12 major factions in the world of Valoran, but they are not clearly visualized to the player. One of the locations in this world is the Shadow Isles, which previously was just the place where the evil undead characters were from. There was no sense of a real background history or visual identity of the place.
2. Christina looked outside of game narrative for inspiration. She found the House Lanister from Game of Thrones, which has a very distinctive personality and identity that support its characters. The characters in turn support the world. Riot Games also instilled a new world creation process that's very similar to the character process. 
3. The visuals of the revised Shadow Isles were inspired by x-ray flower photography. In this area, life doesn't belong here, trees and flowers are spectral, and if you die here, you stay here forever. Characters are not just an undead horde from this location; they have motivations and reciprocal relationships.
4. Wall of text.
1. The narrative and back story of League of Legends were told in long walls of text hidden in the character details. This is not the ideal way to tell a story, but when your only tool is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail.
2. Riot Games needed more tools to tell stories. One new tool they developed was login voice over monologues. These were delayed by 30 seconds so that they didn't annoy players every time they opened the game, but they had a positive side effect because it made them feel like a discovery.
3. Another tool was in-game voice over. This is not new to games, but it was especially hard to implement in a game with so much action going on. The team added some story bits when capturing alters at Twisted Treeline, a map that takes place in the Shadow Isles.
4. One other tool was themed content releases. In the month of October, they focused their content releases around Halloween and the Shadow Isles. The map, two champions, bios, icons, skins, and ward skins all released in tandem to set the theme.

• With a revised lore, characters, world, and storytelling techniques, the League of Legends IP is now ripe for future content. Movies, comics, and novels are all possible now.
• The key takeaways are to create lore that supports stories outside of the game, use collaboration to develop character depth and rich worlds, and promote less reading.

Question and Answer

• At Riot Games, anyone can submit a character idea. There is no formal structure to submit because adding a formal structure would make it feel like an exam and discourage people from doing it. The submitted idea then goes through curation and the creator makes a one-sheet. Keep the bio as short as possible because nobody reads documentation.
• Skins exist outside the lore, but some fan fiction are inspired by skins.
• People who enter the writer's room come in with the knowledge that 90% of ideas are going to get shot down. Sometimes an idea is saved for another character, but isn't right for the character they're talking about.
• Riot culture supports moving around a lot. Employees need to be talented in creative and technical fields.
• Christina plays about 20 hours a month of League of Legends outside of work.
• You need simple in-game, surface level metaphors for the characters.
• Christina is not concerned about the new narratives getting wasted if the company decides to never do anything with them outside of the game. She is more concerned about not having the opportunity to expand on the characters. She wants to keep the door open for these possibilities.
• Character names are the most debated and passionate topic at Riot Games.
• Be wary of code names because once the name is out, people get emotionally attached to it.
• Dota 2 mostly uses functional names than the character names. People get anchored to the name already and they stuck with it.
• In e-sports, people get and form narratives surrounding the players as well. Casters also help further these narratives.

Practice 2012: Dan Cook on Generation of Value

Dan Cook, founder of Spry Fox and creator Triple Town and Panda Poet, gave a talk about efficiently generating value for players with the least amount of development time.

Presentation

• Dan is concerned with how games can efficiently add value to the world. The two key terms here are "efficiently" and "value."
• Looking at the cost curve of game development, you can see that games used to take two developers and $40,000 to make a game, but now it takes about 100 developers and $40 to $80 million. Expensive projects have a tendency to be conservative.
• Dan lists technology in order from least expensive to most expensive -- Flash, paid mobile, Steam, free-to-play mobile, console digital, and console retail.
• Dan uses a "development years : quality hours" ratio as a metric for determining value of his games.
• He asks players to give his game a fun score on a scale from 1 to 5. He considers 4 and above as positive, and under 4 to be negative.
• Designers have huge responsibility to create quality play. Dan was determined to keep the development years fixed for his games, but improve quality hours.
• With Bunny, Dan tried to increase value through media. Bunny is a game that's the harvesting portion of a real-time strategy game. The problem with media is that players burn through the evocative stimuli like crazy. Developers end up on a content treadmill, continually making more content so that players will stay engaged with the game. As developers make content, players consume content, and it ultimately results in a 1 dev year : 2 quality hours ratio.
• Bunny was just mind candy for players and it ended up consuming a total of 1227 years.
• With Steambirds, Dan tried to increase value through capital goods. People like "stuff" so create lots of stuff for people to unlock and collect. There is economic value in these goods, as they help players earn more currency so that they can get even more goods. In Steambirds, players earn currency to collect planes which help them earn more currency. The problem with capital goods is that the game ends up with diminishing returns. Each additional plane added less value and the play space of fun was muddied by a lot of goods that were not fun. This results in a 1 dev year : 10 quality hours ratio.
• Dan then decided to "screw it" and use math to reduce the number of capital goods that you needed to add. In Triple Town, players can obtain amazing high level structures, but the road to get there is an exponential curve. As a result, level 30 items take longer than the remainder of the sun's life to earn. While this results in a 1 dev year : 20 quality hours for casual players, it actually negatively creates a 1 dev year : -5 quality hours for players who like to grind.
• This is similar to the story of the origin of Chess. The king offered to buy Chess from the creator. The creator agreed if the king would pay 1 grain of rice for the first square of the board, 2 for the second, 4 for the third, 8, 16, 32, and so on exponentially. The king, not well-versed in math, agreed to the deal. Afterwards, he realized that it resulted in millions of grains of rice, more than the kingdom even had. Enraged, the king executed the creator.
• With Triple Town, Dan wanted to add value through skills, a human capital. Triple Town is a single-player tactics and organizational game. There is a whale player named Stephan who has a 62 million high score. The high skill barrier makes about 90% of players drop off, but for the remaining 10% like Stephan, there's a 1 dev year : 100 quality hours value.
• However, some players write "improving Triple Town skills really doesn't count." They end up accomplishing nothing since the skills don't translate to the real world.
• Dan tried to add more value through status. He implemented a leaderboard to Triple Town. This fundamentally deeply ties to the real world since people want to show off their skills to their friends. This creates a 1 dev year : 150 quality hours ratio for top players, but negatively creates a 1 dev year : -50 quality hours for people with low scores. It intimidates casual players and causes immense psychological stress. Leaderboards help some people, but are killing the rest. Studies have proven that normally smart people act dumber in the presence of "high status" people.
• Finally, Dan stumbled on a value engine when he created value through trade. Capitalism creates value. Trading increases total value of all items since excess items can be traded for wanted items. This is also an transformative act. If a player with hot dogs traded a player with buns, they can both form a more complete item. This is a non-zero-sum act and a mutually beneficial act.
• In Realm of a Mad God, the developers simply added the feature to drop items on the ground. Players themselves created a trading subculture. There was an explosion of emergent cultures from trading norms and languages to unofficial currencies and trading houses. There were also advocacy groups that would lobby for or against changes that the developers were about to make. There were trust networks that were formed to determine which players were fair to trade with.
• The emergence of these subcultures blew Dan's mind. What if we're creating these games wrong? We shouldn't think of them as these packages that we build and release, but as engines and its players as the energy cells that powers the emergence of systems. Realm of a Mad God grew out of a hobby and became a lifestyle, resulting in a 1 dev year : 500 quality hours value.
• Minecraft is a horrible piece of media. It has ugly graphics and a bad plot if any at all, but it's an amazing value generator. The ability to create cultural artifacts, build things out of your own imagination, play with friends, and learn while playing with parents make it a value engine.
• Community generated narrative, or fan fiction, is also a great value engine. It turns out that Bunny, while not a very successful game, had characters that resonated with its players. The players culminated in forums and created a bunch of fan fiction.
• We should think about more engines like creative tribes, sports, governments, and religions. Instead of thinking about game development as Creator --> Content --> Consumer, we should think of them as Creator --> Engine --> Community --> Culture.
• Contents of an engine include building positive relationships, mutual benefit, persistence, specialization, working better with a group, shareable artifacts, and most importantly, non-zero-sum relationships.
• Engines are still games and still need scaffolding. Tweaking culture feels like being a "dictator gardener." You are in control of an autonomous amorphous entity.
• Millions will build communities, culture, and art around our games. We are creating legal systems for these worlds.
• Small studios should not waste time making media or content, but just rule sets. This is an efficient use of both the designers' and the players' time.

Question and Answer

• Mods have existed for ages and developers releasing tools like Hammer and the Team Fortress 2 hat system will further instigate them.
• Realm of the Mad God outsourced most of the art to players since pixel art is easy to make. It resulted in a huge net positive since developers get free art and players feel ownership about their work.
• Dan is not concerned about creating short one-off experiences like Dear Esther. However, he thinks the conversation about Dear Esther, in many ways, has more value than the artifact itself.
• Positive psychology has gotten away from the study of "happiness." Hazing is a horrible experience for anyone, but it also has an extremely positive effect on group identity.
• "Fun" is not the only positive value. There's also value in the "potential activity" even if you don't end up doing it. For example, someone can watch a commercial of an outdoorsy person with a hummer and end up buying the hummer without ever going to the woods. But the ability to go to the woods if he decides to is valuable.
• The "big bang revenue model" is to spend a lot of time developing a game, release it, get two weeks of revenue, then see a huge drop off. Developers should look for a constant stream of revenue.

Practice 2012: Richard Garfield on Balancing Games

To kick off the Practice conference, Richard Garfield, designer of games such as Magic: The Gathering, Robo Rally, and The Great Dalmuti, gave a lecture about the art of balancing games. 

Presentation

• We have a broad view of games. Games can mean anything from sports, board games, card games, game shows, and video games. For this talk, Richard is specifically talking about balancing orthogames, which are finite multiplayer games that result in players being ranked.
• Games can be approached with a set of strategies. If there is a strategy that isn't viable when players think it should be, people will think the game is not balanced. If there is one strategy that is a clear winner, the game won’t seem balanced. This leads to "strategic collapse."
• "Toy games" are not actually fun games, but are designed to illustrate a point. Imagine a toy game called Big Rock Paper Scissor. In this game, players can play a big rock (clasp both hands) which beats both rock and scissors. This would remove the viability of little rock as a strategy, but the game as a whole is still viable. If you as a developer don't think little rock should be a viable strategy, then the game is still balanced. However, if big rock is able to beat all the others, then all strategies collapse and the game is unbalanced. One strategy that is not viable is okay, but one strategy that overpowers everything else is not okay.
• A balanced Magic: The Gathering game is said to have 4 to 8 viable deck types. Less than that, the game would be considered unbalanced.
• Sometimes strategic collapse has nothing to do with strategy. For example, in Tic-Tac-Toe, the first player wins 90% of the time.
• Play style collapse is when a game doesn't fit a player's expectation of play style. For example, the player wants to be a builder, but the game only rewards players who are fighters. Common play styles include builder, collector, fighter, explorer, trader, and socializer.
• The MMO Earth & Beyond has three tracks (explorer, fighter, and trader). Richard tried to play the game as a trader but realized that the fighter strategy was way more viable.
• Balance is not an issue with all games, such as Bingo, but there can be stochastic collapse. In the toy game Ingo, you can also win if you dab any spot next to the center. The game loses all tension because a person who is very close to making five in a row can suddenly lose to a player who got one lucky number.
• Games can be balanced holistically (looking at the system as a whole) or componentially (looking at the components of the system). A componential balancing of Hearts, for example, is determining how many points the Queen of Hearts should be worth. A holistic balance would be determining how many points players should play up to in order to end the game.
• When balancing for different player types, you should not balance for the expert because it'll funnel out players. Be prepared to be frequently patching your game.
• Richard designed a game called Spectromancer, which launched with 6 classes. One class, the cleric class, was free to play. The cleric was considered balanced by the team, but because it was free, the players regarded it as the weakest. Later on, the expert players discovered that the cleric was the best class in the game.
• Investigating deeper into this, the developers discovered that the cleric had an okay win ratio for beginner players, a low win rate for intermediate players, and a very high win rate for expert players. Meanwhile, the necromancer class had high win rate for beginners, but a low win rate for expert players. All classes had varying success rates depending on the skill level of the players. This may seem unbalanced, but in practice, casual players play with other casual players, and expert players play with the expert crowd. This makes different strategies viable in different crowds.
• You should not balance for the role-player. You can create a weak sword and a powerful sword, and argue that role players would sometimes use the weaker sword because their character is meant to be weak in the story. However, they will soon realize this is not a viable strategy, especially when playing with non-role-players, and the game will become unbalanced. All types of players need balance.
• Balance is an art, not a science. There is no magic formula. You don't need advanced math, and although some knowledge of math helps with balancing, so do all other topics and subjects.
• While designing Netrunner, Richard tried to make a formula to balance the game. He ultimately failed because for every new card he introduced, he had to add a new rule to the formula. He realized that the formula can't predict any cards, it was only describing what's been done. He attributes his failure to two reasons: 1) games are complex and we cannot solve them, and 2) balance is different for difference audiences. The audience is also changing all the time, growing older and becoming more expert at the game.
• Balance is psychology more than it is math. Fortunately, balance is forgiving.
• Richard shares several techniques he uses to balance games.
1. Iterative design. Design, prototype, evaluate, and repeat. There is no substitution for trying out your design.
1. Magic: The Gathering was playtested for two years before it was released.
2. All quality products are iterated a lot such as Minecraft and Blizzard's games.
3. The benefit to playtesting is that you can't design for experts since everyone is a beginner. However, make sure that you are not using the same pool of players to playtest and that you are always adding new playtesters, so that you keep you design geared towards beginners.
2. Rock-Paper-Scissor technique. RPS offers an excellent structure for balancing and is used in many games. You can use this technique on the component level (ie. an archer beats a lancer who beats the calvary who can beat the archer) and on the holistic level (ie. in Starcraft, a rush tactic beats an economic build which beats a defensive build which beats the rush strategy).
1. In Magic: The Gathering, an aggressive deck beats a control deck which beats a combo deck that can beat the aggressive deck.
2. In Hearts, shooting the moon beats out a ducker (who tries not to take any points) that beats a sheriff (who prevents moon shooting).
3. Rock doesn't need to beat Scissors 100% of the time because you don't want the entire game to rest on one decision. An above 50% advantage is good enough.
4. RPS technique can also work with more than three components.
3. Component costs. Add costs to components you want to balance. This can be a single or multiple resources.
1. Costs can be paid in-game or before the game. Usually, you use difference resources for in-game and between-sessions costs. In Magic: The Gathering for example, the in-game costs for components are mana, but the between-sessions costs would be actual money to collect the cards.
2. Costs can be subtle such as using "mana" or "insanity." It doesn't have to be money. This is a number you can tweak.
3. Robo Rally doesn't have any costs but it has stats. Costs and stats are basically the same in that they're both knobs you can tweak.
4. Benchmark and non-domination. Set benchmarks (vanilla costs) and make sure any new component you add doesn't dominate the older components. Map out a network of strategies and make sure you have a range of viable choices. With less domination, there is more room for exploration and choice, but too many choices can also confuse and paralyze the players.
5. Hosers. If a component or strategy is too strong, add a rule or a component that hoses it. This is a response to anything overpowering and adds a RPS relationship.
1. In Settlers of Catan, robbers were added to hose players who hoard resources.
2. Magic: The Gathering has tons and tons of hoser cards -- ones that hose a certain color, ones that hose a certain ability, and even ones that hose players who like to use a lot of cards with the same artist.
6. Bidding. Bidding for access of elements or features can auto-balance them. Examples of this include auctions in Monopoly, Vegas Showdown, and Star Wars: Trading Card Game. In Star Wars, players bid to play a certain side (Light side or Dark side).
1. This can also be more subtle like a draft pick.
2. The benefit of bidding is that it adjusts itself to players. The problem is that it requires a lot of skill to participate successfully.
7. Variance. A strategy or component that is not viable most of the time might become randomly viable sometimes if the game has a lot of variance, like shooting the moon in Hearts.
1. In many card games, depending on what hand a player is dealt can impact what strategy is most viable to that player. 
2. Variation can also soften the edges of your design. For example, if a game has a problem where the player who goes first usually wins, variation will even that advantage out.
3. Luck in games is not like a panacea that can solve all problems, but more like an ibuprofen that can heal some slight pains.

Question and Answer

• Magic: The Gathering has some deliberate unbalance with useless cards. The developers wanted to give all players the pride of acknowledging bad cards and removing them from their decks.
• The more components in the game, the harder it is to balance. At Wizards of the Coast, the developers created two teams to work on Magic: The Gathering - one to work on overall design while the other focused on balancing the cards. The team was built around a method to balance games.
• Magic: The Gathering avoids balancing new cards against the entire library of old cards by retiring and expiring old cards. This limits the time frame and number of components during the balancing phase.