Rules to Play by: The Google Method

So after trying several different books and becoming incredibly bored with them for speaking is such general terms that I could find nothing worth writing about (in a positive or negative fashion) I figured I'd turn to the tool of my generation: Google. It's good to see how many interesting hits you can get from Google by searching for 'How to make a fun game' or 'How to design a video game'. Some of the articles were actually quite interesting, made me smile or got me genuinely annoyed. Here's a small selection.

How to make a game fun and interesting
-GDC 2009 Intentionality and fault tolerance, Clint Hocking

This article, written by Charlie Demerjian for the Enquirer, Clint Hocking describes how Far Cry 2 attemtped to tackle the difficulty of designing Intentionality in a game. Intentionality, as Demerjian explains, "is best summed up as allowing the player to figure out the goals and how to accomplish them given a few tools and implicit rules." Intentionality can become problematic when a player has too much room for improvisation and can very well go beyond the boundaries set by the game designer. This is illustrated by the example of Splinter Cell, where a player used a bunch of cameras to guide an NPC into doing something unforseen by the Game Designers. This becomes especially problematic when the player can eventually break the game (The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind was notorious for a design mistake which allowed the player to break the game in under 30 minutes)

Intentionality as such becomes the ability for a player to improvise within the boundaries set by the designer, without the ability to break the game. When Ubisoft first began development on Far Cry 2, they planned heavily on using Intentionality. Designing for Intentionality requires a different approach from 'linear' game design, as it should allow the player to have more freedom than usual. Because of this, Ubisoft used several 'Design Pillars'. Important aspects of the game that would work together to create intentionality. They divided the game into four different archetypical elements; Structural, Environments, AI Systems and Objects. These aspects were then further divided in different elements that together formed a system where every element influenced the other.

During development however, a lot of these pillars were cut out of the game, mostly because they were too difficult to implement implicitly. In the end, four pillars remained. This is where the entire game went down a different path, turning from a game where a player could plan strategic situations and handle challenges the way he wanted to, to a run of the mill FPS that still had mechanics based on the earlier 9 pillars. This in turn created a game that felt unbalanced, where the player's actions had certain consequences implied, but were never felt by the player. The problem was two-fold. On one hand, Far Cry 2 had become a regular FPS, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. On the other hand, the level-design was still based on the old system, but the gameplay no longer supported that design.

The second half of Clint Hocking's talk was on Fault Tolerance. Fault Tolerance is about games being supportive to a player who makes mistakes. It relies on two concepts: Composition and Execution. Composition is the planning fase, where the player sets out his strategy to overcome a certain challenge. Execution is the actual execution of a plan, or the lack thereof. Thief was a Composition heavy game, Wolfenstein 3D an execution heavy game. Most games apply both concepts, but tend to lean to one or the other side of the spectrum. The problem with Composition heavy games is that players tend to be penalized heavily when their plans fail. The Fault Tolerance is virtually non-existant. Execution heavy games deal less with this problem, as composition is less of a factor there. But still, when a player makes a mistake in an Execution heavy game, he can feel frustrated because he might feel powerless. The game 'took him by surprise' and there was no way of anticipating what he should have done. A Fault Intolerant game can quickly become frustrating when a player needs to replay entire segments of the game over and over again just because he made a little mistake. Hocking made a point of Far Cry 2's death system during missions, where a NPC ally would swoop in to save your ass, as long as you kept the NPC safe. Even if you got killed, your ally would drag you away from the firefight and revive you, and you'd be good to go as long as you made sure the NPC didn't die later on.

Hocking's talk makes some very interesting points, eventhough Demerjian never seems to get them, or bother to highlight them.

The idea of using Pillars to design systems that influence eachother is a very interesting approach, as it allows the designer to constantly maintain a clear focus on what is important to the system, and what isn´t. The Fault Tolerance aspect of games might be a very interesting topic of discussion. We all remember games like Contra, which were punishing in their difficulty, but memorable because of it. Making a game too tolerant to a player´s mistakes would make it boring, taking away the player´s sense of accomplishment whenever he defeats a challange. (Think of Prince of Persia, Sands of Time. Rewinding the game everytime you died certainly made the player reckless, or less appreciative of the game's challenges).

How Game Mechanics Can Make Your App More Fun
-ETech lecture, Amy Jo Kim

Another lecture report, this one written by Bruce Stewart for ETech, on Amy Jo Kim's lecture about how Game Mechanics can make Apps more fun. Kim's lecture mentions five key game mechanics that can be applied outside game design to make applications more interesting.

Kim named five key elements:
-collecting things
-earning points
-providing feedback
-exchanges
-cusomization

These five elements are all traits that come from game design, but can be applied to a variety of non-entertainment applications, primarily in a social setting such as MySpace, which Kim uses as an example.

On MySpace a user collects 'friends', similar to how a player can collect items within a Game. Earning points is done by other users giving the main user ratings, or feedback to what they're doing.

Feedback is given by the application itself, showing the user how many friends he or she has, or how many pictures/movies/music he or she has uploaded.

Exchanges are much like collecting, but one-sided. Where an invitation to become another user's friend requires the other user's consent or feedback, an Exchange can be seen as leaving a comment on another user's page.

Customization is one of the things MySpace is known (and most dreaded) for. Every user has his own page which he or she can customize the way he or she sees fit, much like how players can modify and customize their characters in popular videogames.

By looking at these elements we can draw a line towards more social experiences in gaming. The past few years we see a trend where games become more and more of a social event, drawing players away from behind their computer screen and getting them to interact with eachother as integral part of the game itself. This article is interesting because we can try to turn it around, looking at ways social interaction, or characteristics of social interaction, can be applied to gaming in general.