Dear Kinect devs: I do not want to do simple binary actions with complex interpreted gestures.

Let’s say you have a menu select gesture where you have to wave your hand and hold it up for a second. If I have a n step-depth menu tree and it takes two seconds to select with a gesture versus 6 frames to select via button press, it is likely to take 10*n longer to get anywhere I want to go using gestures versus the old button system. If your menu tree takes six steps like a “Play Now” game of Madden, then you’ve increased my time to get into the game by ninefold, not to mention any additional interpretation time or false interpretations.

I can use a gesture to open a car door in Forza. Great. Why do I want to do that? To show off the technology or for increased enjoyment?

How about button presses versus gestural gameplay? We’ve seen this on the Wii already. Shaking the sword in Twilight Princess was inferior than the button presses used in the Gamecube version. Shaking to spin in Madden/NCAA Wii was vastly inferior to the button presses on its next-gen brethren. But aiming via tilting the Wiimote with our bow in the aforementioned Twilight Princess or using the MotionPlus to putt in Tiger Wii were much better applications of new tech. The tech is not good or bad, but applications of the tech can be.

Let’s learn from our mistakes. Gestural methods can create new outlets for gameplay. You can’t do EA Active with button presses and it was a creative success. If Kinect creates new gameplay methods, like it seems to in Dance Central, then the tech is being used appropriately.

There’s some great stuff being produced, just don’t let the tech tail wag the gameplay/usability dog.

I was setting up a game of Power Grid this weekend and thought I was incredibly clever:

The other players weren’t as entertained as I.

Extra Lives’ subtitle is “Why Video Games Matter”, which is sort of inappropriate because the text itself does a fairly poor job of making any kind of argument. The book is at its best in the early chapters, particularly the one about Resident Evil, exercising what is awkwardly called “The New Games Journalism”. Bissell unfortunately plays up to the stereotypes of gamers: underachievement, mixing real and artificial relationships and addiction (the tepid Grand Theft Auto IV chapter also details his addiction to cocaine).

The book is essentially a collection of essays, one of which was published in The New Yorker and which I complained about last year upon reading it for being too gee-whiz. His chapter on Braid falls for the same sort of fetishism, but the Far Cry 2 chapter which interviews Clint Hocking is surprisingly adroit at addressing what was unique about the underrated title.

If the thesis of the book is “Why Games Matter”, then it is only touched upon in a very meta way. Indeed, the quality of the prose in the book is vivid. If game reviews read like this, I’d be more apt to actually read them. A better subtitle might have been, “Why Games Are Trying to Matter”, because the pathetic swings at trying to rationalize his addiction leaves a sorry-feeling miasma over the whole book. But I don’t think the book was for me. It was for non-gamers. So perhaps I am unqualified to take his book as a softcore polemic towards the Eberts of the world.

I’m being hard on it.The book is entertaining at times and I found myself highlighting all over the early chapters for its more general insights.

Here, on my arch-nemesis, tutorials:

It would be hard to imagine a formal convention more inherently bizarre than the video-game tutorial. Imagine that, every time you open a novel, you are forced to suffer through a chapter in which the characters do nothing but talk to one another about the physical mechanics of how one goes about reading a book.

On Resident Evil and utterly stupid stories:

[It] helped to create an unnecessary hostility between the greatness of a game and the sophistication of things such as narrative, dialogue, dramatic motivation and characterization [...] But most gamers do not care because they have been trained by game designers not to care.

On quantity of detail not being the definition of story:

For many gamers [...] and game designers, story is largely a matter of accumulation. The more explanation there is, the thought appears to go, the more story has been generated. This would be a profound misunderstanding of story for any form of narrative art, but it has hobbled the otherwise creative achievement of any number of games.

When the author tries to dig deeper and find some interconnecting bonds, he fails. Perhaps the author is too ashamed of his addiction that he is desperately trying to attach meaning to it in oblique ways. Overall, the work is entertaining despite not really addressing a core thesis in a meaningful way.

Many games are justifiably criticized for having a “thrown-in” story. You’ve played these before – games where the story is so full of holes, or presented so poorly that it seemed like an afterthought. These games start with the play mechanics and once a fun experience is wrought, a story is shoehorned in to add context. These can still be good games, yet the converse is rarely held highly by gamers and reviewers.

Some very successful games are like this – putting the gameplay cart before the story horse. Do you think that Rockstar started with the idea of the plight of an eastern European immigrant learning to adapt with a foreign culture? Or did they start with mechanics: a living city, carjacking, police chases, helicopter rides, etc. and add the story later? It isn’t pejorative to say a game’s development starts with mechanics – it is simply a different development strategy.

In Alan Wake the story is front and center – so much that the game’s “episodes” add punctuation points to gameplay setting up “cliffhangers” at key story points. This is interesting. Cliffhangers make sense in television. The story in television dramas has to fit in a predefined time block and it cannot be guaranteed that the viewer will return for the next episode. So they leave with a question that must be answered in the hopes that the viewer will come back. Games like Alan Wake don’t have that limitation. The consumer has already bought the disc. There is no predefined episode length. They can play right through.

But the cliffhangers serve an important psychological goal – or at least they did in my case. Despite it being a device used specifically to draw player attention, it is where I stopped playing. Was this a mental cue that I picked up from years of watching television? Perhaps. But these episode breaks served as a cue to portion out the experience evenly. Many reviews that complain about the “sameness” of the gameplay may have rushed through and ignored these natural stopping points. Throughout the day after playing it, I’d wonder about the cliffhangers and come back with a renewed interest and drive to continue.

Back to the issue of story preceding gameplay. The gameplay is repetitive. But this serves the story in the same way the repetitive gameplay serves the story in Half-Life 2. Alan has a particular problem he is facing and for him to swap genres or wildly increase the breadth of mechanics in order to increase the breadth of gameplay (as happens in GTA, RPGs, etc.) would be putting gameplay before story.

You play as the plumber Mario and your goal is to save the beautiful Princess from the evil Koopa menace. Only Alan Wake isn’t as sacchrine. Mario is a New York writer. The Princess is your nyctophobic prize. The Taken are just as ill-defined as the Koopa Troopas. But it is a maturation on the same beats.

Some have complained that the game doesn’t follow the same horror tropes and is thus less scary. But these tropes apply in different ways to games that are story then gameplay versus games (like Resident Evil) that are heavily gameplay then story.

Additionally, the game is self-described as “thriller” not “horror”. Horror is meant to scare, first and foremost where thriller is meant to cause anxiety. So the string cues that let the player know that Taken are coming actually help the cause. They aren’t meant to be scary surprises – they are meant to make the player say “Oh shit, what now?” Alan Wake succeeds in spades.

Many words have been spent comparing Alan Wake to Heavy Rain and the comparisons are apt. Both are story-first, gameplay second. Both are console-exclusives that spent a considerable time in gestation in European development studios. While I enjoyed both a great deal, I believe that Alan Wake provides a better game experience.

When you play a game you make mental models to explain a number of highly strange things. For instance, let’s say I am playing Team Fortress 2. I need to explain that making a certain movement with my finger will cause my character to shoot a grenade. I need to explain what my target is by seeing it on screen and making a judgment that it is a “bad guy”. I need to explain that my “avatar” needs to move to the “control point” to win. I need to explain that a movement with my thumb translates to movement of my avatar. I need to explain that these things together will help me achieve my goal, which is standing on the control point.

The point I am trying to illustrate is that we have a lot of abstraction in something that we consider very familiar. Heavy Rain changes those abstractions. In order to open up a drawer, I have to make an odd swirly motion with my thumb. Why am I opening it? Uh, well, I’m not sure, but there is an icon on the screen telling me so. Where Heavy Rain fumbles is that the abstractions aren’t congruent with what we’ve expected. That is fine in of itself – every innovative game has, by definition, messed with our models of how things work. But when your entire presentation scraps the conventions, you have a lot of explaining to do – not literally, of course – but to the models we create internally. I have no problem moving a stick to walk my character to a car in Grand Theft Auto IV, pressing Triangle to carjack and then pressing R2 to accelerate away. It melds with our models and isn’t that strange. To do the same thing in Heavy Rain requires moving your character in a unique way, interacting with the door handle in a unique way, and driving automatically without input from the player. Our models are all frazzled!

Alan Wake, however, sprinkles its innovations amongst things that confirm our mental models. To say “it controls like an action game” is to say that it conforms to our models of the mechanics and dynamics of an action game. But does it really play as an action game? Not really. I’ll leave it to the reader to list all of the ways action games are vastly different than Alan Wake.

Let me thwart the straw man response that would assume that I am saying that breaking mental models is bad. Indeed, it is the only thing that provides us any growth. But look back at Alone in the Dark (the old one) for example. Games before that generally looked at player characters from the side or from above or from a subjective viewpoint. This game changed the mental model by making the camera a third-person observer. But we can answer the question ‘why’. The designers did this because it could create generally creepy moments. The payoff for breaking this model was a new presentation of emotion (fear) that helped further the game’s themes. There are numerous examples of changes that are just for the sake of change that do not further the games themes and these are less compelling and thus harder sells.

So here are two games that choose to eschew the common gameplay-then-story development process. Both are essentially “on rails”. Both are excellent games. But one breaks down nearly all of the common mental models for players. The other keeps you on edge by mixing the comfortable with the new. The new here is integrated with a way that dovetails with the game’s themes. Neither is essentially “right”, but I think this explanation is, for me, why one was more enjoyable than the other. I’m interested in hearing others’ opinions.

Sebastian Deterding’s “Just Add Points?” is, among other things, an exercise in showing how the delivery of ideas (in this case, beautifully-designed slides) can highly augment their stickiness. If you would have told me I was going to read through a 90+-slide presentation twice today, I’d have called you a liar, sir.

The point of the presentation is “Here’s what UX designers can learn from game designers”, but I think moreso it can be “Here’s what game designers can be reminded from a UX designer perspective on game design.”

I have issues with Koster’s analysis, so his quoting him makes me cringe a bit but it is otherwise fantastic. I’m posting it so I remember to go back and read the related Slideshare presentations at the end.

One of the few things that I like about New York City is the density of unique events. On Friday, I read about the Come Out and Play festival in Brooklyn and figured that would be some good times for Glo and I. It was!

The essence of the festival is a mix of ARGs and impromptu sports. The above picture is me playing the awfully named “OMMRPG” which should really be called “Laser Football”. The idea is that each team has one laser pointer and a number of players with mirrors and must direct the laser to a “goal” while avoiding the other team’s defenders. It is wildly chaotic and actually works without a lot of rules. I stealthily hid behind an “official” and scored three times before the opposing team caught on and I was marked for the rest of the game. Once you are marked, there is little you can do to score, which is a weakness of the game (in basketball or soccer you can out-finesse someone to shake off a defender, in this, due to the precision required of angling a mirror, it is less possible). After I was sufficiently frustrated by a defender, I passed off my mirror to another player. I think more organization would lead to these kinds of strategies – passing mirrors to confuse defenders. I was surprised at how well the game worked.

There were a number of games that took place over the entire weekend. One was hosted by Scvngr. Since they have no vowels, you know they are Web 2.0. You download the Scvngr app for Android or iPhone and you are led on a photo scavenger hunt around town. It is the perfect melding of an old game with new technology and if AT&T’s network wasn’t such balls, it would have been very clever and smooth. Scvngr allows you to set up your own scavenger hunts for others. They are partnering with museums and such to offer these sort of ludically-guided tours (I just made that phrase up, sorry).

You can see on the above picture a bandanna tied to my leg that says “Human”. It was part of another of the whole-weekend games called simply Humans vs. Zombies. It is essentially Massively Multiplayer Thematic Tag. One player starts out as Subject Zero and by tagging humans (those with bandannas on their arms or legs) can turn hapless humans into flesh-eating zombies (indicated by bandannas worn on the head). Humans can stun zombies by hitting them with socks or nerf guns at which point they must wear their bandanna around their neck and cannot tag for ten minutes.

Gloriana and I were on our way to an event on Saturday morning when we saw a Zombie across the street in the direction we were headed. I paused and we made eye contact, yet he smiled and continued walking away from us. Were we safe? Was it a trap? I peeked around the corner. No Zombie there. But by then it was too late. The Zombie was hiding behind a trash can. I was taken, but Gloriana survived by spiking me and the attacker with socks.

My attacker (left) and the decoy (right).

Now, this led to an uncomfortable situation. I was a shambling shell of humanity while Glo was still pure. Nonetheless, she felt like she had a hand on the situation. She set her phone to go off in ten-minute intervals. When it would ring, she would instantly spike me with a sock. Hmph. I felt like in the last scene of Shaun of the Dead where Ed is chained to the shed and can only play Timesplitters instead of eating flesh.

Glo was protected in safe zones like the park (the game was suspended if you were in the park playing another game, in a business or crossing a street). Also helpful was the overprepared Nerf-based militia that patrolled Park Slope looking for zeds to shoot. Not pictured above is the guy who had a bandoleer of socks and a belt of Nerf cartridges.

But as in the precautionary zombie movies, a split second of indecision can upend an entire life. I was on the phone talking to a friend who were we going to meet for the day. While Glo thought I was distracted, she crossed the threshold of the park and was no longer in a safe zone. I tagged her “undead” and she was upset! Geeze, you would have thought that I did something bad like forget her birthday – I only converted her to a mindless automaton of insatiable hunger!

We continued on with the games. “Field Crumpets” was a lively variation on field hockey that was just wacky enough to be novel. We participated in a horde event where we Zombies milled about trying to trap helpless humans (we won!). And we also took great efforts to complete the SCVNGR hunt. We used props for extra effect. The prompt was to hug a tree in Prospect Park. Instead, I prosposed to one:

It said no.

Our pictures were pretty good (Glo is a creative photographer) and in the end thanks in part to our funny pictures, we won the SCVNGR hunt! Our prize? A new 3G iPad! Whoa! Supposedly, they are ordering it today and it will be in the mail.

If it doesn’t show up, I know a horde of flesh-rending abominations that I can send to the SCVNGR headquarters.

So players are jumping off of the “social” game bandwagon at lightning speeds and everyone is flailing around wildly asking why.

Look at the chart here and you will notice a few things:

1) Older games are generally declining faster than newer games. This tells us that users are growing tired of the same old formulas. This isn’t unique for “social” games. Look at the numbers of people still playing Project Gotham Racing 4 or some other “core” game. People just tire eventually. Remember when everyone was playing Snood? This bodes poorly for copycat games. Where once people couldn’t get enough farming, restauranteuring, etc., the platform will have to branch out to new genres (not just new themes!) to continue growing. This isn’t a shock – it is expected. Did you really think more people would be playing Farmville in 2011? 2012? 2020? At some point the genre had to peak or level off.

2) But newer games are also losing steam. Treasure Isle, for instance, is down half a million users. This could be for a number of reasons. One is that Facebook has had a lot of negative publicity lately with regards to privacy. Users could simply be not logging on or shedding the platform across the board. Some loss must be attributed to this, but there’s little forward-looking devs can do about that.

Some blame the across-the-board losses on the removed ability to spam via notifications. If these newer games are designed on the same models where one has to be reminded to play, then they will suffer the same user burnout as in (1). Since these games do have some bits that are new coats of paint, they should weather the storm for longer.

3) The gross data tells us nothing about whether the users leaving were the lookie-loo free players or the folks spending cash on virtual tchotchkes. If it is the former, is it really such a blow to Facebook developers? The data behind this will clearly be held close to the individual developers’ chests.

4) Older games that aren’t declining as much are games where you don’t have to be nagged or pressured to play them – they are generally fun in of themselves. Texas Hold’em and Bejeweled Blitz are the examples here. The novelty of “I’m playing a game with friends on Facebook” is wearing off. Now the games actually have to have some fun mechanics to stick, which sucks because it is a lot harder…

Of course, it is just easier to whine and complain that we can’t spam notifications anymore.

• Looping back to the previous post on feedback loops, I am playing EA/Playfish’s FIFA Superstars Facebook game. It’s got some neat stuff in it, but I am at a point where I am absolutely suffering from the positive feedback loop I’ve seen in most every EA Sports game.I’ve lost my free coach (you only get him for a limited time), so my team’s power/rank/whatever has dropped twenty points. Yet I am forced into a league where I have to play people who still have the coach and are thus at my same level yet at the same time completely outclassing me.

  Now here’s the exacerbating problem: when you lose, you lose training power and you get significantly less money and significantly less experience – thus you are put in a position to do worse in future games and have no mechanism to escape (sans paying real money). Not only is this reinforcing, but it is through no fault of your own.

  It is easy to fall into this design when working on sports games because sports are very much based on power law distributions. There are a bunch of shlubs and a few superstars. The superstars get all the money and fame and endorsements. The problem with modeling that in games is that nobody wants to be the bench player. They all want to be LeBron James or Tom Brady or Sidney Crosby. This works fine if you have early successes (flip “heads” the first few times and gain the advantage), but for most players (the schlubs), it just won’t be very fun through no fault of their own. So my advice is to stay away from the positive loops that model real world success onto players and instead let the players themselves be the embodiment of the powers law while implementing negative reinforcement that allows the schlubs to catch up to those superstars. Does it model reality? No, but it shouldn’t have to.

  Meier commented on the fact during the last GDC that when units have stats that if it is the player’s units that they should always win when they have the higher number and that the game should roll the dice when they are the underdog. But in multiplayer games (like this one), you are more or less guaranteed to have an underdog and a champion that share this bias. If you use the stat-based method, it is very easy to fall into the power-law situation where there are a bunch of schlubs and a few superstars and the player has little control over which they will be.

• I completed Alan Wake over the weekend and I am surprised that everyone isn’t finding it as wholly compelling as I did. It has a clever battle mechanic, fantastic presentation and gripping story, not to mention fantastic score and soundtrack.I then dug into Red Dead Redemption. Now, it is my own damn fault because I generally avoid previews but I didn’t realize that when people said it was “Grand Theft Auto” in the west that they were being literal. These are the same mechanics that you played in Grand Theft Auto 3, Bully, Grand Theft Auto 4, and so on and so on. Literally, there was a mission that had me steal a horse and then watch my minimap as deputies raced after me. I had to be outside their zone of awareness while a meter ticked down and then they forgot about me. Sigh. I was looking for my horse’s radio controls but couldn’t find them.

  Now, I am being biased because I hate the controls, hate the reticule, hate the World’s Slowest Poker Game, hate the bugs, hate that you can’t often tell who is firing at you or where they are, hate the stupid same missions I was playing five years ago, hate the “hold A to experience mission” gameplay and so on. But since the frustrations are raw and in my face, it is hard to acknowledge that there are a lot of great things in the game. There are!

  Hold on. A comment on that last item. I have a great deal of skepticism towards open world games for one reason: much of the gameplay time by percentage tends to be taken up by traveling from gameplay event to gameplay event. In Wind Waker, you spent a lot of time sailing from point to point. In GTA, driving. In Far Cry 2, more driving. In most open world RPGs, walking. In Red Dead, you spend a lot of time simply holding down the A button to follow an NPC that will talk to you on the way to some mission. These mechanics are not substitutes for compelling gameplay.

  These are tasks that we do in order to fulfill a larger purpose. Some games get this right: Sly Cooper 2 (condensed world full of interesting decisions), Oblivion (density of discoverable points in travel along with very easy quick-travel), Silent Hill 1 (Very directed open world for the most part), Burnout Paradise (they made great pains to make the actual travel to events fun).  Red Dead puts band-aids on the wound: coach taxis, campsites, etc, but they do not really fix the problem. Had Alan Wake been “open world” (it could have been very easily!) it would have suffered from the same remarkable sameness of gameplay, paced poorly and frustratingly extended.

  Back to what works. The formula for Grand Theft Auto is to make a world and then fill it with stuff rather than to first design stuff and put it in a world that fits said stuff. To this degree, they do a great job. You can do everything from pistols at dawn to liar’s dice to cattle ropin’ and hell, you can even pick flowers. They sure get quantity right. The fact is that there are many types of players (Bartle provides one definition, but it is far more branching). It is hard to create experiences that satisfy everyone. So if you cast a wide net, you can hope that everyone can find something that they enjoy. I, for instance, find the Treasure Hunting quest line very interesting and fun. It comes at the expense of making sure that all these mechanics are usable. Some mechanics give you no chance to learn them (poker cheating) and others simply feel like they were checked off a list as “done” and forgotten (horseshoes).

  So maybe that is where the 95 Metacrtic comes from in a game full of nervous-twitch inducing issues. The production was clearly difficult, as evidenced by the EA-spouse-esque leaks. So that a game that could come out to such rapturous reviews is emblematic of a team that put their hearts, souls and bodies into creating something that people enjoy. Kudos to that. The San Diego team has my utmost respect.