Practice 2013: Understanding Players Panel

·         Davin Pavlas (Riot Games), Morgan Kennedy (Assassin’s Creed), Naomi Clark (GameLab, FreshPlanet, RebelMonkey)

(by Davin Pavlas)

·         Research at Riot Games, Senior User Researcher

·         Research as player focus, being player focused requires understanding players (we’re players too, but many kinds of players play our games). Research equips us to understand wants, needs, behaviors.

·         League of Legends – MOBA game with lots of players, competitive 5v5

·         Research definition = propose a model of the world and test that data without bias.

·         Actual definition = test design assumptions to ensure player experiences are positive and intentional.

·         Data-informed approach for design = informed but not driven (use knowledge and data alongside intuition, work with goals and assumptions, intended experiences), players are collaborators and not just data, research isn’t a gate for a box to check (integrated into the design process in an iterative fashion)

·         Interdisciplinary inquiry = telemetric data, modeling, surveys, community management

·         Case Study #1

o   Lucian the Demon Hunter with two guns (Equilibrium style). Sleek, speedy, serious ranged damage character with finesse gameplay.

o   Research flow = concept testing, 3 lab studies, release, post-launch

o   Concept test = simple read of concept art, survey & interview (fantasy, mood, personality, role, fit into the fiction), high appeal scores, good theme conveyance. People thought his two different colored guns meant something.

o   Lab test = moderated one-on-one with players, think aloud protocol, streamed and recorded for designers and team

o   Lab study #1 = felt like stiff movements, not what was promised by concept, movements felt like a turret, abilities didn’t fit player model of the concept art, visual theme compelling but his gameplay was problematic. Solution = remove stuff movements and confusing abilities.

o   Lab study #2 = aesthetics still a mixed bag, high base speed but players feel he’s still slow, ultimate was cool but frustrating to use.

o   Why does he feel slow?  Animations

o   Lab study #3 = he finally felt fast,  gameplay and aesthetics fit the concept, mix of animation and frame speed changes make Lucian feel fast, ultimate was easier to use.

o   Post-launch = fiction quality, theme quality, and default aesthetics were considered high. Visual quality was okay and gameplay quality was low.

o   Summary = difficult champion to get right, theme was very compelling but its mechanics needs to be matched with experience design

·         Case Study #2

o   Champion select screen is where many intense interactions happen. There’s very little time and little information to help make players make these tough decisions.

o   Champion select is not an effective setting for collaboration. Solution = remake champion select to be more collaborative and have intent-based queuing that does not set the meta-game.

o   Externalize all the assumptions and test them.

o   Research flow = concept testing, global testing, prototype testing, lab studies

o   Initial survey = random sample of 1000 NA/EU players, player preferences (each role has at least 15% favorite rate), feature disposition, composition reactions

o   Global testing = initial survey revealed lack of role terminology consensus (fighter, carry, tank)

o   Prototype testing = an idea with merit still needs to be executed correctly. Results = positive disposition, Captain vs. Solo experience, usability flow

o   Onboarding study = test with brand new players, Team Builder vs. Champion Select

o   Public beta testing = more testing with the player base

·         Summary = system and character testing are similar (test assumptions, validate and ensure intended experiences are being made)

(by Morgan Kennedy)

·         Understanding Players (Assassin’s Creed 4 Silhouette and Behavior Differentiation)

·         Was a manager at Gamestop before working at Ubisoft. Worked on Assassin’s Creed series, Ghost Recon, Michael Jackson Experience, Your Shape, and Just Dance 3.

·         Affordances in AC3 = a railing means that the player can free-run there.

·         Mental models = the idea starts in the players head, player learns things about your game each time they play them

·         Ship identification = players had problems telling the different ships apart, can usually tell the gunboat (smallest ship) and the man of war (biggest ship), but unable to tell the difference between the three middle-sized ships (Schooner, Frigate, Brig).

·         Perceived differences = small ships were faster and tended to flee, big ships were slower and more aggressive, the gunboat was the exception

·         Players identify ships = differences in behavior (speed, aggressive, size)

·         Ship archetypes should be optimized around familiar affordances (man of war kept its large size, made the medium long-ranged ship less aggressive so it was more differentiated with the other medium ship that was short-ranged)

(by Naomi Clark)

·         How Indies Playtest, enlisted over 20 indie developers about their playtesting process

·         halfrobot.com/indiesplaytest.pdf

·         “Playtest before you think you are ready. Is it too early for you to playtest? If the answer is yes, then playtest anyway.” – Eric Zimmerman

·         “Don’t playtest very early one.” – Dan Cook

·         Methodical time-slice testing = know your questions, know what your build is suppose to deliver, hit your targets

·         Doug Wilson doesn’t even like the word playtesting. Conventional playtesting was good for small UI tweaks, but not mechanics design. Get key suggestions from influential people.

·         Techniques = don’t talk while players are playing, ask players to think out loud, listen to what players say about problems they had and not the solutions they come up with, construct a heat map, do a more targeted demo (depending on the audience, tell them what to do instead of letting them go through the coded tutorial)

·         “Playtesting is for masochists.” You need thick skin, it’ll upset your expectations, let a day or two to let the ideas swim around in your head without thinking about them too consciously

·         Eric Zimmerman’s under-the-desk creative meditation

·         It’s very bad to show your game to other developers, they will tell you how to make the game instead, other devs can help you construct your own weak points, kid testing is great because they are honest and blunt, don’t necessarily listen to everything kids are saying

·         Maybe games aren’t meant to be played (lose/lose), or will never be played (Jason Rohrer’s A Game for Someone), or refused to be played (Train)

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

·         Lucian’s iterative design took about 3 weeks per cycle. Designer’s intention of the character can sometimes be quite different from player’s perception of the character.

·         Playtesting at Ubisoft is a different service, so testers are not considered game designers. They just provide a mirror of how players are playing the game. The Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag team is about 300 people, with 20 people being game designers. The testers write about 80 page book report every two weeks with lots of empirical data (telemetry data, player quotations and feedback).

·         “Data is fiction. Data cannot tell you anything. Only you checking your own assumptions and intuition will tell you something.” – Davin

·         The community from the internet is not representative of your full community. Everybody on the team engages with the community. You need to learn how to be qualitative with that data.

·         Adam Saltsman’s Grave has complete publicity and openness to the community.

·         Be wary of changing your entire design, which can happen if you listen to too much feedback.

·         Bad research is bad research, and it can come from anywhere.

·         The commonality between all designers is that playtesting is extremely useful for seeing how well your UI works. This is something that is not shared with films because films don’t need to test the viewer’s usage of the product.

·         There is more than just raw playability testing. Testing is useful for testing emotional resonance and connection that players have with the space and characters.

·         In Assassin’s Creed 4, players complained that they hated fog, but sailors hate fog.

·         Set is a game that Davin loves and cannot play because he is red-green color-blind. That is a game that wasn’t playtested enough.

·         It’s not about whether a course of action is correct, it’s about your goals and being able to meet them. Lucian was meant to be a very high skill ceiling char that is fast, and the playtesting and design choices should work towards that.

·         Tight-loop in game design when professional players become game designers of the game. There’s a natural progression at least in the triple A space for players to become its designers. You don’t need to be an expert to give data and insight, but you do if you want to be an effective collaborator.

·         David Sirlin’s games have a very developer-y like feeling to them.

·         People know they are compensated to test, but for League of Legends andAssassin’s Creed, the playtesters are so passionate and excited to test that the games that they give biased information.

·         What kind of affordances can you create with Team Builder to not dictate strategy? Team Builder decoupled roles and position, it focused on how players expressed themselves, not on how the character is meant to be played.

·         Riot uses a lot of designer intuition to make decisions so they come into failures a lot fewer times. Failures are usually not of testing and researching, but of interpretation of the data.

·         There are people who are very excited to use data to dictate decisions. We need stewards to guide the data and interpret them correctly.

·         Self-selection bias – compare to a random sample.

·         In Assassin’s Creed 4’s fiction, you are actually a game developer that’s making the simulation that you experience in the Caribbean. At the end of each mission, you will rate each level from 1 to 5, and it will actually be sent to Ubisoft. It’s gamified gamification.

·         Riot uses modeling to look at impact, temper risks, and find parts to sweat out and be agile about. You want to be able to knee-jerk and develop longitudinally.

·         Was Dark Souls playtested at all? It’s a beautiful disaster that makes you feel alone, afraid, and frustrated… so it clearly has been tested and achieved its goals. It has a very good tutorial too.

·         Riot has a whole team devoted to improving the community and encouraging positive behavior. Team Builder was made by that team. In general, the online player base is not very negative and the negative players that you see in games are not from trolls. Negative behaviors usually come from someone having a bad incident. This makes it easier for the developers because that’s a point where they can intervene and try to change for the better.

·         Testers are injected midway into the process and collaboratively co-design. It’s not a waterfall process.

·         Recommendations = Katherine Ibister’s book, Jakob Nielson’s Usability,Pedagogy of the Opressed

Practice 2013: Creating a Nordic Style LARP

(by Cecilia Dolk & Martin Ericsson, Celestra LARP)

·         Martin has one Emmy win and nomination, and Cecilia has one Emmy nomination.

·         Created a LARP for Battlestar Galactica called the Monitor Celestra. Takes place in a real cold war destroyer.

·         Immersive live action role playing in the ragtag fleet of BSG. There were no actors in the game.

·         It was a massive undertaking. Different forms of culture all acting together.

·         Participatory Culture book. “Who controls the production of cultural stimuli?”

·         Audience culture = We perceive culture as a single author who produces a work, and then the audience sits down and consumes it.

·         Interactive culture = The author creates the productive stimuli and the illusion of or actual agency, there is some interactivity from the audience but the production is mostly scripted.

·         Participatory culture = People create the cultural stimuli for each other and there’s no grand author (ie. tabletop role-playing, BDSM party)

·         “Lightning Bolt” video clip has done a lot of damage to LARP’s image.

·         The IP of BSG and the fact that it takes place in a real destroyer drew a lot of players who were not traditional LARP players.

·         LARP continuum – Game/Structure vs. Story/Freeform. American LARPs tend to focus on game and structure, while Nordic LARPs tend to focus on story and freeform. The Monitor Celestra falls about 60% towards the story side.

·         Mainstream Nordic LARP has very strong ideologies

o   The Warriors Heart = 24/7 immersive, socialist dictatorship vs. rebels, steampunk theme

o   No Man’s Land = uses real airplane

o   Just a Little Lovin = beautiful memorial, very sad and emotional

o   A Quiet Evening With the Family, Europa, Carolus Rex

o   Till Death Do Us Part = middle eastern man and a western woman

·         Commonalities (pillars of classic “nordic style”) = participatory, physical, what you see if what you get, immersive, light rules, dramatic systems, socially conscious, meta-techniques and blackboxing, arthaus (modern day) and mainstream styles (fantasy, classical)

·         Nordic LARP design is the exploratory creation of frameworks for collective player co-creation. The players are the authors. Game engines, players, and stories are motivated by a well designed framework. LARP auteurs are impossible and destructive to the experience.

·         “I have stopped being an artist and have become a prostitute of the audience.”

·         Franchise framework = known clichés are a designer’s best friend, you are not Tolkien so don’t write your own lore, adaption strategy (canon until it’s not, new characters, new situations), new main allegory.

·         All this has happened before and all this will happen again. BSG is a great allegory about cultural intolerance in Europe.

·         Culture framework = taken from Caprica, took the Tauron and Caprican values, “Caprica” as a primary source for culture. Explored collective vs. individual, privileged vs. minority

·         Story framework = Minos City, Tauron turned into a skeleton ship, starts from the end of the pilot episode so the audience can have context after one episode, starts from the Battle of Ragnar Anchorage,  after some jumps they end up in Sector GCS-2998362, players have the power to steer the ship anywhere they want

·         Character framework = writing process, crews (groups, subgroups, vertical groups), contact suggestions, character arcs, casting and costume, 5000 post-its

·         LARP design and production loop = vision, reality bites and test, compromise, realization, how can physical and legal problems coincide?

·         Producing a mad weekend = mid Friday to Monday morning, tasks (distribute costumes, props, signing wavers, cleaning the boat, fire drills, in-game food, feeding GM’s and phantoms, limitations on number of people onboard, etc.), four 6-8 hour episodes, include hotel and meals

·         Construction of the Celestra = took the museum and closed off some of the rooms

·         Physical framework = make players believe they are elsewhere, give time for players to learn each others’ characters

·         Costumes = looks vs. price, Celestra (reinvented the colonial warriors plus soviets in space), Vergis (jumpsuits), civilians (lab gear)

·         Dramatic systems framework = what are the rules, four episode structure, no guns fired in first act, no killing before second episode, and then anything goes

·         Standoffs and conflict systems (what rules are used to enable safe violent conflict), fist < knife < gun < bigger gun.

·         Color red was the next mechanic, none of the players were allowed to wear red, phantom actors wore red and spoke to individual players secretly, two of the phantoms happen to be twins so they confused many of the players.

·         Safewords = “cut”, “frak”

·         Play to lose = always submit to the demands of the other player

·         Simulation systems = hard-core space sub simulator based on Silent Hunter type of PC games, internal power struggle, external locations, exploration and endings, designed by Dr. Karl Bergstrom (iterative design in progress). Later on, the engineers in the game became the kingmakers of the game. There is actual agency and a lot of content so that people don’t actually get to see it all.

·         Technical Framework = 10 cased networked PC’s, 12+ network cables, lots of Arduino boards

·         Game mastering = by an outside group, spawning Cylon ships, 8 run-time game masters on deck who dress up as splinter groups

·         This game was produced with the insane idea that more is more, taking a lot of inspiration from the Nordic LARP scene.

·         Weird observations = rules heavy (on the game master side), is consistency worth it?, emergent gameplay, chaos vs. directed collective flow, genre clashes, hard consequences and impossible choices make players nervous, messy is messy, players will forget to eat but they will always chat

·         Online framework = Youtube Friday features, use interwebs to promote, going viral, mentioned in Ball Blooded Gnome, the IP people found out but didn’t take legal action

·         The creators made this game out of love.

·         Went to Galacticon and met some amazing people from the show.

·         They did not expect to bring this to the US, but the player desire is driving the movement.

·         Bringing Celestra home = challenges (physicality, liability, new crowd and culture, location), opportunities (passionate fans, fan-financed events, props and prices, official possibilities, the perfect fandom event for the US scene).

·         Disney acquired a patent for using costumes in a role-playing scenario for their theme parks two months after they acquired Star Wars.

·         Successes = the universe, visual spectacle, destroyer and consoles were real, crowdfunding, real online presence, all inclusive. Failures = impossible to deliver fully screen accurate LARP, aim for the stars, more is more work, game 1 frakked (tech failures, etc.).

·         www.facebook.com/celestra2.0, #celestra, #celestralarp

o   Cecilia, @frkgeek, cecilia@beratta.org

o   Martin, @elricsson23, martin@ccpgames.com

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

·         Nordic LARP scene brings in a very diverse group of sexual orientation, ages, and genders. But the ethnic diversity is mostly middle-class Caucasians, which they are working on to change.

·         Players don’t need to choose between rules and story. If they feel bored, they can abandon their post at any time to move onto another post that is more interesting to them.

·         Always groups of people who are playing the game and trying to resolve the problems, but other people who are following along the fiction. It’s okay to have these dichotomies exist in the same game.

·         LARPs are just sandboxes for the players. Give the players really fun tools to play with.

·         A lot of off-putting things in LARPs are that people have to put up with tedious tasks like learning to bake bread. Started youth groups to teach people how to do LARPs and acquire skills for the game.

·         LARPs usually require people to come with their own costumes, but many people don’t have the skills to even take the first step. So they are giving costumes at the door to reduce the barrier of entry.

·         Before the LARP, they run several training workshops (trust exercises, improvisation workshops) to get all the players to form a common gaming culture.

·         Dungeons and Dragons is the American Dream essay, reluctance of players to just play what they are. Americans believe that everyone starts out even and levels up together. Nordic LARPs don’t believe in justice, it’s about reveling in what you already are. You can be an elf if you are physically fit.

·         Collective directing / game mastering, use effective episode structure and the players will self-police their actions.

Practice 2013: rogue(like)^n

(by Michael Brough)

·         Zaga 33, Glitch Tank, Vertex Dispenser, O, Corrypt, 868-HACK, Helix, SMESPORT

·         Roguelikes are games that are literally like Rogue.

·         Common properties = randomization (level, monsters, items), permadeath, turn-based grid tactics

·         If you remove the turn-based grid tactics, then they’re usually referred to as roguelike-likes, such as Spelunky.

·         Dungeon Crawl has an auto-explore function, so one mechanic of the game is completely automated.

·         Hyper Rogue = has weird geometry, takes place on a sphere

·         A lot of roguelikes have a wait command because many players don’t like moving towards the enemy to attack them. Michael removed the wait commands from his games because he likes to force the compulsion to move. Maybe an alternative solution to the wait problem is putting in diagonal movement.

·         868-HACK implemented a range attack and also added a wait command that required resources to use. If something is useful, the players should pay a cost to use them.

·         Pillar dancing = run around an obstacle and the enemies can never catch up to you. This is especially bad since your health will regenerate over time, so you can delay any combat to gain back full health. Some solutions involve putting in a time limit or generating more monsters overt time.

·         Roguelikes have a bunch of different types of items (single-use, multiple-use, permanent equipment). Limited use items have interesting choices, but permanent equipment doesn’t because you just choose the one with the higher numbers. Developers usually try to make these numbers difficult to figure out.

·         “Here’s an interesting choice in games… do I quit my PhD to make games? That’s choosing an identity. In games, the interesting choice is that we want to win. It’s not much of an interesting choice. So we try to make the choices as frustrating as possible for the player to make.” – Michael Brough

·         In many roguelikes, players don’t always understand the numbers, so choosing to be the leader of horses or the leader of demons is a role-playing choice.

·         Combos, different resources, varied types of effect, risk and reward

·         In many games, you can ramp up the difficulty but making the game faster. But in a turn-based game, you have to make the decisions harder. One way to do it is to ramp up the use of resources and players have to be more efficient with their resources. Eventually, you have to generate so many enemies to make the game impossible and make the game end.

·         Punch Quest and Mage Gauntlet developer got really into Zaga-33. But he became less interested in high score, and more interesting to survive as long as he can. To get a high score, you have to take risks but to survive as long as possible, you have to get a long streak and be conservative.

·         868-HACK had a scoring system that took a lot longer to get boring, but it’s still quite dependent of luck after a while. He implemented streaks

QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

·         Make your maps smaller so you can show everything on one screen instead of having the player scroll around to see the whole map.

·         There’s no secret formula to balancing a roguelike. Just play it a lot, find the exploits, and fix them.

·         Should developers strive for balance between different classes? Yes, but sometimes there’s no way to achieve fair balance. So the classes can be considered different difficulty settings and some players play the weaker characters for a challenge.

·         Michael’s games are associated with noise and glitches. This is mostly because he develops his games all by himself and there’s no other person there to fix the bugs for him. He’ll see the bugs and get inspired to continue along with them.

·         There’s nothing ethically wrong with killing things in a game because they’re symbols. Players are sociopathic in the game when they go around killing everything, but this doesn’t mean that the behavior bleeds out into the real world.

·         Smiley face chosen as the avatar because he has three hit points and it was a convenient way to show it.

·         Michael has a very bullheaded art style. Everybody thinks his art is ugly right up until the moment that they realize it’s beautiful.

Practice 2013: Open Problems

These are the notes I took from the open problems session at Practice. Note: the questions and all the answers happen really fast, so these notes are often not in complete sentences.

1.       Brad Muir – Massive Chalice, you are the immortal ruler and also a matchmaker, what about gay couples? Let them adopt, magic gay babies, relics, fostering babies, nieces and nephews, magic surrogates and sperm donors, don’t specify that they’re kids, magic blood rituals (for every couple), let players form their own stories, push the problem off to an expansion, don’t make it different from straight couples, adoption is for all couples in general

2.       Dylan Rogers – FPS game that’s combining Gone Home and Papers, Please, find out if people are androids are not, they are the same but they have different behaviors (introversion, different thoughts about love and sex, etc.). How do you build empathy and impactful choices with characters you never meet? Writings on the wall, audio tracks, diary entries, Walking Dead’s environmental storytelling, every object is not a static, Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep?, have a written test somebody has taken, let people talk to you, messages between NPCs, you hear what people felt, hearing audio of neighbors, look for real-life examples of watching people’s rooms, stories that leave behind physical evidence, BladeRunner option, don’t introduce too many characters at once, snoop through e-mails and internet history, see dreams of people, look through their trash, watch movie makings.

3.       Willy & Greg - Yeah Jam Fury, PC game working for the WiiU, WASD to walk and jump, switch characters (one creates blocks, one destroys blocks, one can climb). Use touch to add blocks, use L/R to swap between characters,Yoshi’s Island red line, Lost Vikings, left thumbstick for movement and right thumbstick for the cursor, block placement should always be relative to your character, place Lego games to see how they handle changing

4.       Ilya Ziremski – party game, real-time, real simple, everybody gets 5 dice, every puts out 10 cards (6-6, 1-2-3-4), everybody starts rolling at the same time to match the cards, people cheat a lot. Encourage the cheating, give reward for catching the cheater, self police it, color code the dice, need to ritualize the moment of matching and grabbing the cards, create a guardian who referees the game, Jungle Speed, take someone else’s dice if you catch them cheating, try switching each player’s rolling each other player’s dice, make it coop, give different colored dice, give players ownership of the cards so they check other player’s dice, put cards that are impossible to get to catch cheaters, players pass the dice, make it digital, roll into a dice tower, roll into a communal dice pool so everyone looks at the same dice.

5.       Rob Lockhart – game where code is magic, can freeze time whenever you want to write code, high successful games should have low input to output, have faster feedback loops, but as you get better in this game, the feedback loop gets longer and longer. Create co-libraries so you can drag-and-drop pieces of code that you’ve written before, give hard limits to number of lines of codes, set the feedback loop to a specific duration, LISP is built from smaller LISP programs, continuously run the intermediate results of the program, set a timer on how much they can code, have a short and long feedback loops running at once, make the debug sequence really funny.

6.       Nikita Mikros – Killer Queen, best played with 10 players, barpool arcade game (one person pays for the game and 9 other people gather around to play), what can people do to gather a group of people? Dispense beer, reward people for bringing people back,  excitement draws people to it, print out stickers to wear, the bigger the prize if more people go in, make the game invitation only, set time limit to the game, speed bonus for more people on your team, custom team design and logos, always allow for jump-in and jump-out, reward system through card tracking, hire people to play, one player is a renegade that switches teams frequently, have display onscreen that says how many players are remaining, have instructions on the side of the cabinet so people can learn while waiting, put people’s name in the marquee, cheaper if more people play, AIs are super difficult, QR code to tweet score.

7.       Ben Johnson – Crystallon, match 3 game based on Set, how do you design procedurally generated levels with finer difficulty tuning? Dynamic difficulty, let players select the difficulty, Pandora model (let people answer a survey after a level to gauge their skill), take seeds and record them (use analytics to see which levels are fun), have player-driven hints, the game gets faster and faster, compare them to other players, don’t have a difficulty range, let players tailor the types of matches they want to see, have puzzles with multiple solutions, determine an approximate session length, increase difficulty sliders one at a time

8.       Josh Debonis – Meriweather, Lewis & Clark expedition, “facet system” – when you make a choice, it levels up his stat in that category. “narrative structure” – flashbacks to events. The two things don’t work well together since it creates a time paradox, you are leveling up the character’s attribute, but it changes the past events. Don’t need to address this problem, you don’t get to level up in the past, you level up Thomas Jefferson in the past to help you in the future, let the past raise a facet cap but not the facet itself, dialogue choices in the present level up a skill but choices in the past open up the skill tree, make it a steampunk game with a magic phone, do stuff in the past that lock off things you see in the future, read letters/diary entries instead of flashing back to the past, make the flashbacks dreams, show the stat change happen after the flashback is over.

9.       Gemini – emotional experience between two characters, two stars get close and will rise up, it’s very hard to explore the environment with this mechanism. Zoom out as the stars move away from each other, give players something to collect, have a delay before it starts rising/falling, have stars illuminate different colors and use additive colors to explore the environment, use the stars as colored light sources, make interesting braiding pattern with their trails, create floating cities that are specifically designed for two floating stars, shift the power levels so they are not equal all the time, have a line between them so you can see their relationship, the star who is damaged would call for help, the more of the map they explore then the closer they can come together, give motivation for the star to gain control, towing a car is interesting, certain landmarks can have gravity and pull them towards them, study dance, have small planets in the level, wrap your 2D plane on a 3D object so they wrap, ask what the relationship of the two stars are (not the what, but the why), have objects that can only be gotten if they are apart and some objects only be gotten if they’re together.

10.   Robert Yang – interested in Starcraft, are you a commander sitting at a table? What is the fiction embedded in UI? How do you know what you know? What if it’s a spy game where your units can be mistaken or lie to you? What games abstract mistrust, deceit, and knowledge? Eternal Darknessbroke expectations of what’s happen onscreen, board games with betrayal mechanics, The Mountain Witch is a tabletop RPG where every character has a dark secret, Deadline, Make it Good, ambiguous game states, quantum state world, Poker, 2 Boys, switch back and forth between characters in the same scene, have a bond system, turn the tables and have people working for you but you have to betray them as well, Call of Cthulhu did insanity mechanics, Utopia, Nobunaga’s Ambition, have a vision radius and a theoretical vision radius

11.   Rob Seder – games that train people to do something, if you allow people to save then they can just reset when they fail, are there options besides no saves and lots of saving? Make x actions before you can save, hit milestones before you can save, Max Payne game that gave you limited number of saves per difficulty, have a brainsize that has number of saving, you have a save and a quicksave that deletes itself if you load from it,Resident Evil saving as a resource, Spelunky’s unlocks, Save the Date, the more times you save then the game gets harder, save games are memories and the memories are broken, purchase saves and that cost higher the further in the game you get, get more points for less saves, have only one save slot, Vulgar the Viking where you have to play the game without dying and cannot get the true ending if you saved, Chrono Trigger events have impact much much later in the game, draw the map, have two separate systems to save, remove all failure scenarios when you’re teaching something to the player, resource loss every time you load a save, be careful about how many times a person can save, give people an easy mechanism to retry

12.   Jesse Fuchs – Lessons from developing Guts of Glory, a developer on a board game contributes very little to the core mechanics. Core mechanics, key mechanics, game feel. Vlaada Chvatil’s Prophecy, Mage Knight. There are cards that just give you good luck or bad luck, but doesn’t change any of the mechanics.

a.       However long you think it takes, add six months to it and a pizza budget.

b.      There’s a reason everyone’s making deck building games.

c.       If positional knowledge matters, make it spatial.

d.      Game components subliminally create expectation.

e.      Do not put the name of your game on the back of your cards. It should be the null state of your game.

Practice 2013: Designing Narrative Choice

Narrative and simulation in Versu (by Emily Short)

·         Modeling social physics and behaviors (shyness, aggressiveness)

·         Goes through interactive fiction, but without the text adventure missions.

·         With Versu, the author models characters with characteristics and they act appropriately based on their personalities and on consequences that would benefit them.

·         Failure – simulation runs completely off rails

o   During a scene where you’re talking to one character, two NPCs in another room get into a fight and one murders the other. This breaks the story that the author intended.

·         Failure – simulation doesn’t affect narrative

o   Your boss starts assigning you to a task, he gets on your nerves and you punch him, but the scene ends and the boss ends up shaking your hand and telling you you’ve done a great job.

·         Failure – narrative doesn’t affect simulation

o   Character who is kind of a player get dramatically rejected and re-examines his view on life and women. But still has the same hitting-on-people affordances as ever.

o   Solution – when you choose actions, your character’s traits will change and later action options will reflect the new traits.

 (by Sean Vanaman and Jake Rodkin – co-creators of IdleThumbs and Campo Santo)

·         Walking Dead is an adventure game. You make dialogue choices on a timer, you solve puzzles, you explore spaces, you are given choices that you often cannot remake, choices are about exposition

·         Criteria for designing impactful and meaningful choice, choice is the main verb of the game

·         What is the purpose of narrative choice in a game? marketing (you choose what happens!), empowerment (you are powerful and in control!), player agency (how do you feel and what do you want?)

·         What makes a well-designed choice? 1) Allows the player to express herself in the game, 2) fits within production scope, 3) entertain, enlighten, teach, or surprise the player

·         Entertain/Delight/Surprise

o   In a adventure game, choices that surprise the player are the most important. It’s like the shooting in a FPS or the jumping in a platforming game.

o   Telltales inspired by Monkey Island. What players talked about were the choices that they got to say in that game. Walking Dead tries to give the player really delicious dialogue choices and really fun things to do.

o   Choices illuminate things about the characters. What characters could say (but don’t) tells us who they are.

o   Choice is a form of player expression.

o   Gives players the room to determine how they feel, and a way to tell it to the game. Deliberately doesn’t give a value judgment to the game. There’s no light side or dark side.

o   Walking Dead is effectively a corridor you walk down, you decide how you will walk down that corridor, and the game doesn’t give value judgments to any of your choices. It is very similar toDishonored in that way.

·         Production scope

o   If you decide everything that will happen, you will go insane.  You will accidentally produce a simulation instead of a story, or a simulacrum of a simulation.

o   Montage effect – multiple inputs and one outcome, but will produce multiple stories. At the end of the talk, we can applaud, give a standing ovation, walk out, or call bullshit. If the speakers cry to any of the choices, it will create four different stories.

DISCUSSION

·         Story driven games start with characters. Stories can happen devoid of any specific characters.

·         The specificity of characters is something very interesting. The character you embody and how you make him react is game design.

·         People walked out during the development of Walking Dead because they said it wasn’t a game.

·         Does the breadth of options stunt the player? Do not give choices that are not interesting or not relevant to the story. Make the choices have real consequence.

·         Warren Spector doesn’t care about whys and hows people get through a section, but what they do to get there. Walking Dead only cares about the whys and hows.

·         Don’t care about the debate between simulation and emulation. They just want an emotional response in the player.

·         “It’s good for the choices to be surprising, but not surprisingly surprising. The second derivative of that should be zero.” – Emily Short

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

·         Warren Spector’s talk was really about having characters and objects respond naturally to your actions. Walking Dead was a genius piece of work. The game made players embody Lee’s skin and the most powerful choices were the ones that made you contemplate yourself as a human being. The game also illuminated skill from choice and consequences, and the worst parts of the game are the skill parts.

·         The writers of Walking Dead wanted to remove the skill parts of the game every single day, but there was a lot of pushback.

·         There were no zombies in the Walking Dead DLC, but nobody ever noticed besides marketing.

·         Kentucky Route Zero lets you choose what the story will be, and not what the characters do. It feels more intellectual than emotional.

·         In their latest game, you play as a character and form relationships with other characters as you talk to them.

·         Walking Dead felt like a disjointed movie. How do you create enough conflict in the story, yet players are constantly trying to resolve the conflicts as soon as possible? Get the player to feel “I didn’t get everything that I wanted, but I did everything that I could.” Playing lots of tabletop role-playing games (Polaris, Shock) where players do something and the game never fails you for it, but your actions have some other consequence that the player might not have expected.

·         Walking Dead is a polarizing game and many people do not like it. To them, the choices do not matter. Game designers cannot have every action be solutions because it would wrap up the game too nicely and the game ends in 5 minutes. Make people feel like they are working towards something (building a specific relationship).

·         Expressive/reflective choices – do not have systemic consequences but it’s a way for the player to express themselves.

·         Dota, Minecraft, and Day Z are systemic, emergent games. Dishonored is often brought up as the example, but it still starts with a movie and there are several movies within in.