You Don’t Know Jack is a relaunch of a classic trivia game. But in fact, it being on a console is the only major difference between the late 90s original and the reboot. Now, there are two routes this can go down: the developer can make it shovelware, not caring to add featuresbecause features cost money OR the developer can focus on experience over features, something vastly more subtle. Jellyvision chose the latter.

Here’s an example: the rarely used Xbox “Big Button” controller was packed with SceneIt! but isn’t entirely a market penetrated device. I plugged mine in and it worked! This makes YDKJ a nice segue from SceneIt! or vice-versa. Now base support is one thing, but not only do the button diagrams change on the screen if you are playing with these controllers, but the audio clues do as well! That’s an attention to detail that fixates on the experience of playing versus back-of-the-box features. It actively repudiates the quantity vs. quality metric that many studios use: “How many different kinds of crops are in your farming game?” I’ve had a similar question asked of me.

A logical producer focusing on the task-level will say: how many SceneIt! players will also be YDKJ players? 10,000 at most?

How users play your game needs to be focused on in conjunction with what they are playing. The two live in tandem and you cannot ignore the how over the what.

I was listening to my music library shuffled in my car the other day when a nostalgic song came up. Sega’s 2002 game Jet Set Radio Future is a horrifically underrated platform/action game about freedom and exploration. It has kind of a wacky soundtrack that fits with its funk-punk aesthetic. It’s not normally what I listen to, but it has some catchy songs that certainly blend with the universe. One song, however, bends your ears and makes them bleed. Warning:

“Birthday Cake”. That is just… awful. Right? Why would it be in my library? Well, play enough JSRF and you will hear it again and again and soon it burrows into your brain and associates itself with the fun you are having with the game. Then it no longer becomes about Cibo Matto’s awful siren wail, the song becomes about your JSRF experience. (Side note: I listened to Spock’s Beard’s “Snow” album on loop while playing Super Mario Sunshine and now when I hear certain songs on “Snow”, I can’t help but think about Sunshine, even though there is no stylistic connection between the two.)

When listening to “Birthday Cake” the other day (thank God I was alone in the car or any passenger would have beat me to death), I instantly thought about the A/B testing movement. Believe you me, if “Birthday Cake” was A/B tested it would be replaced by an orchestral score that is bland and that no one would remember. That is what you get when you use a democratic method – the least objectionable material. But the very fact that “Birthday Cake” is objectionable is what makes it memorable. The fact that “Birthday Cake” is a weapon (I assume the US would have used it instead of Van Halen to oust Noriega had it been written then) makes the entire aesthetic experience of playing during that song memorable almost a decade later.

Certainly testing has its uses. Usability is vital and can really only be gauged by testing. But when it moves into the realm of aesthetics and mechanics, it throws the style baby out with the risk bathwater. You look at JSRF and it has style. Katamari Damacy has style. Hell, even Deadly Premonition had style (that’s about all it had). Can we say the same for A/B tested games?

Dan Cook finally posted the Declaration of Game Designer Independence that we worked on at Project Horseshoe this year. As expected from the comments, some people “get it”, some people don’t (hint: it isn’t about ego) and some will concoct elaborate ulterior motives for us because they are afraid of words. Fine.

If I had to boil the whole thing down to one word it would be: respect. Respect yourselves, respect your art/craft, respect your customers, respect your limitations and respect your process. If all designers could get behind that, we would be much more healthy as a profession and produce better content.

I had an interesting conversation here at work yesterday. We were discussing the merits of Farmville et al and I brought up (of course) Cow Clicker. One of the participants mentioned that because there are people that play Cow Clicker non-ironically that it failed. Additionally, this person said that Cow Clicker is in fact a good game because this person would enjoy it because of the “moo” sound effect.

Now, my response was/is: something that is enjoyable and purports to be a game does not equate to that thing being a) a game and b) a good or worthwhile game. Smoking a cigarette is an enjoyable activity to many but is not a game and not a healthy activity. The response to this was that it doesn’t matter. A game does not need to be “healthy” or what I called “nutritious” in order to have worth. It doesn’t need my “permission” to be worthwhile to be.

I find the argument interesting. I can see the logic. It would be easy to use my line of reasoning to pooh-pooh Dragon Lair back in the day, even though it helped lead to much more mature games in the future. So 1) is something that creates enjoyment inherently worthwhile? 2) is it okay that millions waste their lives (IMO) on -villes in the hopes that this some day it inspires something deeper that ends up being successful despite the sort of strip-mining design process?

Agree or disagree?

A few months ago I was interviewing with Ubisoft Toronto. Naturally, the conversation is confidential so I won’t get into specifics, but I was talking with a creative director about the “types” of designers they hire and where I fit in. This was a refreshing topic as many, even within the HR departments in the video game industry, use “designer” as sort of a catch-all phrase. I, for instance, have very little experience firsthand with level design. Level design requires vastly different skills than does systems design which is what I consider my forte. However, by their very natures level design is much more visible than systems design. What is it and why is it important?

I can give you a very technical answer: systems design is the design of mechanics that result in desirable play dynamics. But that likely means little to most reading. Perhaps an example will help illustrate.

The purpose of having money systems in RPGs is what? It’s a very simple system to dole out empowerment to players at various points in the game. Have you played a game before where you had more money than you could ever use by endgame? The desirable play dynamic is an interesting level of challenge throughout the game. The means to achieve that dynamic is a system of rewards that scales well to achieve that end.

Two games I played this past year are, I think, great illustrations of successful systems design: Civilization V and Etrian Odyssey III.

Civ V, I think, could possibly be the most perfectly crafted example of systems design ever. There are literally dozens of systems: culture, influence, military power, research, wealth, citizen growth, happiness (and so on and so on) and most interact with each other. Civ V’s designers had to create these systems to satisfy numerous dynamic requirements: players couldn’t get nukes in the 1700s, no track to winning must clearly dominate in all cases, players cannot have too much money or get stuck in vicious loops. Somehow, miraculously with dozens of special citizens, wonders, units and players of varying levels of understanding of the systems and skill all these moving parts work together and create a balance such that decisions are interesting. In Halo, you pretty much go for the rocket launcher or the energy sword because they are the strongest. The decision of weapon choice isn’t interesting. In Civ V, you have dozens of choices in a turn, many of which do not have a clear answer and are as such interesting.

What should the Reproduction Rate be?

Etrian Odyssey III is another example. The dynamic aimed for is to clearly create a brutally difficult classic dungeon crawl. It would be very easy to make this game too hard to be beat or too easy to provide the challenge (the side most RPGs err on, see the new Golden Sun reviews). Players can be a dozen classes each with vastly differing skill trees – which will the player choose? How much experience with these systems does the player have? How much time will he spend grinding before he gives up? Again, systems designers have to test and retest dozens of variables to elicit the proper dynamics.

How much XP do you give? How strong should monsters be?

In my previous life, I was designing a Facebook game. The game had to remain challenging, yet rewarding every time the player logged on. How often would they log on? What is a sufficient reward? What is an excessive reward? Will they play optimally? What if they don’t?

Let’s say a player gains 10% or 11% in their money per session. Not much difference right? Starting with 100 “gold”, after 100 sessions the 10% player ends up with 1,252,782. The 11% player ends with 3,068,844, almost 2.5x as much. You can see how tinychanges add up. Now imagine if instead of a simple 10% or 11%, the money is generated by a formula with six variables as it was in something similar to my my Facebook game: Money Gained = k * Visits * Tourists * Number of Animals * Rarity of Animals * Interest Level * Item Modifiers. Imagine little ripples in any of those variables and how they impact the composite variables.

Now you have an idea of the complexities of systems design. It’s a house of cards ready to be blown over by the first person to come along with an idea to “improve”. What is your opinion of Monopoly? Is it too slow to get to the interesting bits? Does it drag on too long? If so, you probably play with the “house rule” variants where you get money (for some reason) by landing on Free Parking and don’t auction unsold properties. Both of these mechanics are part of a well-balanced system. But the Free Parking modification floods the game with money, making it last much longer. The ignoring auctions modification makes the game take much longer to get to the interesting bits where players are competing for monopolies.

Free Money!

To outsiders, it seems like you just make up some numbers off the cuff and if they work, super. In reality, a good systems designer does a lot more work, testing and carefully tweaking values until either the tower balances or falls over.

I noticed a subtle positive feedback loop in Dragon Quest IX last night. You have to be careful of these in long form games because they exacerbate over time.

Experience points are distributed by taking the defeated monster’s XP and dividing it by the weighted level of each character. This means if your party was a Level 3 Warrior, Level 2 Mage, Level 1 Priest and Level 4 Minstrel and the monster was 100 XP then the warrior would get 30 (100 * 3/[3+2+1+4]) XP, Mage 20, Priest 10 and Minstrel 40. The weakest characters get the least XP.

The problem with this is that the first time one character dies, the other characters get a relative XP boost and continue to get that boost for the rest of the game. Let’s say the priest in the above example keeps dying. He keeps getting a smaller and smaller share of the XP loot as the other party members take more of the pie, leveling up faster and hence getting more of the pie. While it is almost an accepted mechanic that there is no “catching up” in XP totals, usually the penalty is only for the time that character was out of commission and becomes moot by endgame. In the Dragon Quest example, since it applies to every single battle, the inequity gets larger and larger as the game goes on for mistakes that may have happened thirty game hours prior.

It’s not game-breaking by any means, but it makes it more difficult to go forward when one member of your party can get insta-killed and the others are shrugging it off. A simple thing like an XP formula can cause problems in the game dynamic if unchecked.

I’ve gotten away from posting here and I hope to make amends in the new year. A particularly easy source of material is to just take what you are playing and pull a design lesson from it.

I’m aiming for thirty of these posts this year and as a way of sticking to the resolution, I’m numbering them. My holiday-inspired nomadic lifestyle has pushed me back to the DS as the platform of choice, and I picked up and have been hammering on two Japanese RPGs: Etrian Odyssey III and recent DS-game-of-the-year accolade winner Dragon Quest IX. Both are excellent examples of their genre, but one point is a salient difference between the two: mechanical purity. Etrian Odyssey is an example of what I’m calling mechanical purity. Reviews label it as a “hardcore” game and it most certainly is, even in comparison to Dragon Quest which is itself a hardcore game. But DQ (as I’ll label from now on – not Dairy Queen) spends a lot of game time on dressing: story is presented through animated cutscenes in the traditional manner. Enemies and characters are animated in both battle and overland. There is an impressive number of battle environments. EO on the other hand does not represent its characters in anything but portraits, monsters do not appear on the overland (even bosses are just spheres).

Because of this mechanical purity in EO, it feels like the player can understand the mechanics that remain with more certainty. For instance, there are three types of elemental damage in EO with identical types of attacks. It is much easier to narrow down elemental weaknesses in EO because characters are customized around very simple models for offense and defense. In DQ, the vast array of types of monsters and spells makes this much more of a guessing game. Both are impressive examples of systems design (a post I’ve had brewing for a few months that may see light of day soon), but one is simply more spartan in its offered mechanics.

Is one better than the other because of it? No, clearly not. People love the glossy presentation and bevy of features in DQ. DQ has reviewed better than EO, yet I prefer EO. The design lesson from this in a development scenario where you have an oppressively limited budget, a focus on mechanical purity can offer a bang-for-the-buck that allows you to compete with the titles that are throwing the kitchen sink at the player.

For instance, is your game about story? I’d say that neither DQ or EO are about story, yet one spent significant dev time on character design, animation, camera systems and all the other accoutrements of a story-based game.

Note the purity of EO on the right: 2D models, 2D effects, no PCs. Everything in EO is
about mastering the mechanical systems.

When I was in college, I was a TA for a professor who was also a fancy-pants consultant. One day, he comes in a few minutes late to class and tosses me his keys. “Couldn’t find a parking spot,” he says and he tells me where he was double parked.

I put on my coat and head outside, a little aflutter because he talked about his damned Jaguar S-Class all the time. I got in. The seat, steering wheel and mirrors adjusted to me instantly. The car then said, “Would you like a massage and a cocktail?” Okay, the last part I made up, but it was pretty luxurious. I may have taken a second lap around campus looking for a spot. Hey, it was crowded and snowing. Tough to find a spot.

Anyway, the next day I hike over to the student lot, jiggle the key to open my problematic 1990 Jeep Cherokee whose door handles don’t particularly work and whose heater/AC blows cold air in the winter and warm air in the summer. Now, coming from my professor’s sweet ride I probably should have been spoiled on driving my beater, but I wasn’t. I loved that car.

It’s about expectations. When you drive a $60,000 car, you have a set of expectations about how it should feel, handle and look. With your hand-me-down thirteen-year old car you have different expectations. Honestly, I’d be stressed out to death driving that Jaguar around in the snow and ice on CMU’s crowded campus on a daily basis. Give me my Jeep any day.

I’m getting to a point about games.

I’ve been having interviews with a lot of companies, both packaged and social game makers, and it’s been challenging my assumptions. One of the companies is a traditional game maker shifting to a social game portfolio. We discussed significantly the differing fundamental processes used in each type of production. My most recent call with another really brought up a core difference in the consumption of the two around the concept of demos.

Both traditional and “social” games (I use the term loosely here for any free-to-play game supported by microtransactions) have free versions. In social, these are the primary interface. In traditional, these are demos. Social advocates would have you think that they are equivalent. And for a while, I believed that social games were their own demos.

I recently picked up Recettear on a Steam holiday sale. It’s a charming little economic sim slash RPG about running an item shop in a JRPG setting. It’s a bit grindy and at times feels like it could be a more hardcore Cafe World without time-lock mechanics. I paid $5.00 for Recettear yet I would never pay $5.00 for Cafe World, even if it was a little richer dynamically. Why?

When I paid $5.00 for Recettear, I knew it was an all-you-can-eat affair. My expectations were set. I could play this as much as I wanted and my success or failure at extracting fun out of it would be entirely independent of the price I paid. When I play a demo, it is showing me a hint of what I can get for my $5.00. When I get into it, I know I will get an old Jeep or a Jaguar when I pay my entry fee. The demo is representative of the experience. Even if there was no demo, I still know that I will get a complete curated experience for $5.00.

If I were to pay $5.00 in Cafe World, I would get the benefit of some boost or mechanic or decoration. But my success or failure at having fun is based not only on the internal mechanics which I see in the “demo” version but whether or not I convert. But even after I convert, I don’t know if I am getting a beater Jeep or a Jaguar because there are always more bits and pieces to buy, any of which may or may not increase the fun I have with the game. It’s like a real world version of Zeno’s Paradox where you keep moving but are never any closer to your goal. This has nothing to do with psychological trickery or underhandedness. It is simply the nature of a free game where the potential of unlimited spend is core to the experience (unlike something like WoW, which is fairly complete on its own despite PDLC and provides value in exchange for a subscription fee). It’s like if you went to the movie theater to watch Star Wars for and got in for free but they purposely made it lame unless you put enough quarters into a slot on your seat to see light sabres ($1.25), X-Wings ($2.00) and Alderaan blow up ($3.25). You would feel ripped off, whereas you wouldn’t if you had paid the $6.50 beforehand.

Note that this is different than buying a traditional game with paid downloadable content. In those cases, either you are ignorant of the true cost or it must be incorporated into the full price of the game. If the former is the case, it is a case of misinformation, not design. But how do you do this for Farmville? How much does it cost to play Farmville?

In my quest to figure out whether I want to actually be a social game designer, my key question is not whether the studio uses A/B tests too much but whether the studio believes that fun is independent of spend and whether it should be. I can get behind a social game maker where the designer’s goal is to make a fun game that has a good chance of making money versus the goal of making money with a good chance of the game being fun. I believe strongly that you can do that in the “social” space, but it is going to require innovative business models and more than lip service to craft. I’ll gladly lend my skills to a place whose goal and processes are dedicated to crafting the best games in the world and who doesn’t define “best” by immediate plurality.

Deciding who fits that bill… that’s the tricky part.