A couple of factors have led me to take the leap and overhaul my design blog. First, Blogspot announced they’d no longer be supporting FTP posting. I far as I deciphered, this means I’d have to host my content on their servers as well as use a .blogspot domain name. Second, I was getting pretty tired of the word Ludomancer. It seemed clever, if a bit ridiculous at the time of conception and the ridiculous has felt more pronounced lately. I like the new title, and I think it’s something people can spell and potentially remember.

I’ll be copying the old posts to this account as drafts before the FTP deadline hits with Blogspot (ideally) and easing them in, perhaps updating or revising them. Or maybe I’ll post them as is with an [archival] tag and address any changes in subsequent posts.

Here’s to at least another 2 (sporadic) years under the new banner.

I just discovered XNPlay. It’s an entire review site dedicated to XBL Indie games and is definitely worth visiting if you want some assistance in sifting through the pile.

Here’s a quick smattering of Xbox Live Indie games I’ve played recently and enjoyed. I was originally going to go with the tired cliche’ “Diamonds in the Rough” for the title, but I think what I’ve currently selected is:

1. more amusing
   and
2. more indicative of the XBL Indie experience at present

There are some pretty cool experiences to be had if you’re willing to fish around with your hands in the filth for a while. Just don’t forget to wash up afterward. If I’ve left anything off it’s because I either haven’t played it yet or haven’t gotten to it yet, hence the volume number in the title.

Finally back from an extended stay in Rapture. This is mostly a scattershot attempt at recollecting my thoughs and stoking the coals of this thing once more.

Just finished Bioshock 2 with a great team of designers and other devs. Got back from a holiday break and have begun to ramp up on another project that looks promising.

Darksiders shipped recently. I was on the project for a year and a half, and I’m curious to see it after being absent from its development for a couple of years. It’s a talented team, and I know they’ve busted ass to see this thing from concept to physical manifestation.

Currently rifling through my myriad side project ideas trying to find something that grabs my attention and is feasible. Trying to choose between the following:

• Sim/adventure game where you are in control of a family line of monster hunters. Manage relationships to develop the family as well as the research and development. Use the resources you develop to fuel dungeon expeditions and gradually rid the land of monsters after generations of hard work.
• 2d platformer where you can occupy different scales by inhabiting and controlling larger creatures that also serve as parts of the exploratory landscape.
• Exploratory adventure game that primarily consists of traveling across massive landscapes from A to B. Mechanics emphasize methods of travel, morale maintenance, route planning, adversary avoidance and engagement.
• Figure out a direction to take the internal/external identity prototype I developed recently.
• Finish a couple of simpler XBLA style games. One is an acrobatic arena combat game involving grappling hooks. The other is an action/puzzley game where you control 2 nodes connected by a string and try to collect moving objects of one color while avoiding moving objects of another color.
• Co-op cyberpunk mod using the Unreal Development Kit

These all vary in scope, technical complexity and design weirdity, but hopefully I’ll nail something down soon and start posting my travails as they come up. Maybe more design related stuff soon as well.

Games are interactive systems. The fidelity of a player’s choices determines the nuance with which he can affect and express himself within that system. This goes broad as well as deep. More verbs = more potential choices. More ‘adverbs’ means greater control over the specifics of any given interaction (e.g. maim vs. kill, flirt vs. marry).

While you could argue that more of either of these axes would make for a richer gameplay experience, I think there are ramifications to consider when constructing a possibility space and the verb set the player can use to poke, prod and explore that space.

Feedback and Consistency
Can the player form a model of the system in his head and use that to anticipate the consequences of his actions?

This is a fairly prevalent point in Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things (¹). If the player doesn’t have a clear idea of how the game world’s components interact, he can’t make an informed choice when acting on that world. For all the design work that might have gone into building the system, if that model is too opaque, the player might as well be using brute force trial and error to achieve his goals.

Harvey Smith addressed this at his GDC talk in 2002 on Systemic Level Design (²), and it was a real eye opener when I was getting my start as a designer. The idea is that you build a system with components that are granular enough to interact in interesting emergent ways and then maintain a strict consistency with the way these things behave. The more you frame your environments and scenarios around these consistent building blocks, the more a player can observe a scenario, form a plan and act on it, either getting the thrill of seeing his plan come to fruition or learning from his mistakes in a way that doesn’t feel like the system cheated him.

Does the system acknowledge when the player is making a choice that impacts the state of the game world?

Games have differing levels of agency, the idea that the game is acknowledging that the player is acting within its world and is having some sort of impact. At the low level, this can be as simple as particle effects erupting from a surface as the player sprays it with gunfire. At higher levels, the player could impress a character in a dialogue exchange, resulting in an entire mission tree appearing at a later point in the game.

The issue that arises is how the player knows that his actions will have repercussions and at what agency level of feedback. Take GTA IV, for instance. The player can obliterate literally hundreds of people with no lasting effect on the game world. The game says “hey, you wanted to run over a guy, watch him crumple and bounce off of the hood of your car”. During certain scripted sequences however, a large prompt appears on the screen giving the player the option to kill or spare specific individuals. In this case the game is trying to let you know your choice here will likely impact the narrative or mission structure of the game at a later date.

The thing to note here is that the game asks the player to step outside of system space to make the ‘important’ decision. The player doesn’t really get to make the decision with his native tools so the whole arrangement feels artificial. The game implies that what the player can do with his standard interaction set doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme, as major events will play out the same way regardless.

High impact choices like these are more sparse in narrative heavy games like the recent GTA games. This is because content is expensive, and generating branches of content that nobody will see generally gets a thumbs down from management types. More player driven games like Civilization or (yet again) Dwarf Fortress have a much more granular choice structure. Almost everything the player can do in these games has lasting implications that will sculpt the emerging narrative and interaction space down the line. Crawford touches on this a bit when he talks about Process Intensity (³). By leveraging the ability for the machine to generate content, you can often allow the player to explore a wider range of options as situations and locations you couldn’t anticipate or wouldn’t have time to build can be created on the fly by the computer. This is a bit hand-wavy, as there are many more details to building good procedural content, but it’ll do for my purposes for now.

It’s also worth mentioning that supporting inaction as a player option when he’s using his native verb set is tricky. You’re basically asking the player to walk away in light of instructions possibly to the contrary. An example would be person X telling you to kill person Y if you want his help. The player would probably assume this was the only valid option when the alternative is probably something like walking through a door or waiting around for a certain number of seconds. In this case the UI pop-up is alluring if you can’t think of a clever way to contextualize the scene or provide some dialogue that doesn’t seem too contrived.

Reflection
When the player is presented with the consequences of his choices, does he recognize the causal relationship?

Reflection is akin to feedback, but it’s more of a retrospective thing. It’s the ability for a player to observe the changes he’s affected in the game world and recognize that he had an affect, as well as possibly gauge what might have happened otherwise. For these correspondences to be apparent to the player, the chain of events between cause and effect needs to be well presented. This means the event sequences should be fairly logical, easy to parse and that the time between cause and effect fairly short. I haven’t gotten to play it yet, but I’ve heard The Witcher does a good job of showing the player the trail of events from A to B whenever he’s confronted with the repercussions of his choices from earlier in the game.

If choice effects aren’t made apparent, the player might as well be uncovering a prescribed sequence of events. Branching paths with subtle outcomes could just feel like a magician’s choice (⁴) where the plot is predetermined but the player is given the illusion of a narrative rudder.

There are a couple of other ways that a player’s choices can be presented to him in the context of the path not taken.

One option is a short but deep game cycle. Emphasis in this case is placed on replaying the game to explore all of the possibilities. The brevity of the game is to help make the development more manageable as well as allow the player time to check out multiple scenarios. I’ve posted a couple of times on this in the past(⁵)(⁶), and I think it’s a model that should be explored more. Thus far, the most notable examples of this kind of idea come from Daniel Benmergui(⁷) and Gregory Weir(⁸).

Another idea is to facilitate the comparison of worlds and characters between players. Spore is a decent example of this, although the differences between user choices are primarily cosmetic and have little to no impact on the systems of the game. The Sims would probably be closer to a show and tell system of people demonstrating the range of possibilities the game has to offer to one another. Another good example is Animal Crossing. More than merely seeing how your friend’s world diverges from your own, you can explore it with him and experience the differences firsthand, even bringing back parts of it to use in your own game world.

Paralysis
Does the player have enough information to make a choice from the available options? Are there so many options that the player can’t make a clear distinction between them?

There’s nothing more intimidating than a blank sheet of paper (looking at my post frequency confirms this). If a player is thrown into the thick of important decision making with little context, or simply given too many options at once, he can freeze up. Each option can either seem equally valid or vary in such minute ways that the ‘correct’ path is unclear. There’s a good TED talk by a guy named Barry Schwartz that addresses this very issue. (⁹)

There are a few ways to mitigate negative side effects when presenting players with a vast array of options. One is to introduce verbs and player tools piecemeal, allowing the player to get comfortable with a smaller set of choices available at any given moment before adding more. Once the player gets used to the broader palette of options, he can begin to look at scenarios in terms of the available tools and proceed from there.

Another is to rely on stereotypes. If you have a set of commonly accepted attributes that the player is likely to be familiar with, you have a jumping off point for a broader range of options. If you give the player a choice of archetypes to start a game with, for instance, you could provide the standard fare as a base level. Thieves are sneaky, warriors are tough, etc. As the game progresses, you could offer more nuanced sub-classes of these characters that could refine the set of verbs the player is using as he plays. Your initial 5 or 6 basic classes that rely on general assumptions could blossom into 15 or 20 without rattling the player if you pace it right. The Elder Scrolls games do this pretty well by offering different ways to start. You can dive into the pool of options straight away, or you can let them ease you into it by choosing pre-made packages with pretty clear explanations on what to expect, in addition to the standard fare fantasy classes most people recognize.

I think a decent illustration of overwhelming choice is the Oblivion character creation system. At first blush, all the sliders that control every aspect of the character’s face can be overwhelming. If the player has a plan up front however, usually something like ‘I want to make my own face’, then these tools become useful as a means to an end. From a bottom-up approach, however, the player can tell little difference between a 56% and 57% forehead-sellion-nose ratio.

Wrap Up
I’d intended on adding a section about user interface an accessibility, but it ended up leaning more on the side of usability design and not just about choices. The main take away from that was that the UI is not only the window the player uses to look in on the world within the game, but it’s also his hands and feet. What is the interface (controller input, UI) telling the player he can or can’t do? What information is being presented and what is being hidden behind layers of menus? All of these feed into the player’s internal model of the system and how he thinks he can interact with it and what options are valued above others.

And that’s about it. Just food for thought when you’re constructing choice systems and verb sets in your games, and some of the implications different decisions can have on the way your game is experienced and understood.

References

1. ^{The Design of Everyday Things}
2. ^{Systemic Level Design slides:
   Harvey’s site: http://www.witchboy.net/2002/04/
   My own pilfered copy to spare you a trip to Fileplanet}
3. ^{http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/JCGD_Volume_1/Process_Intensity.html}
4. ^{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_force#Magician.27s_Choice}
5. ^{http://www.kongregate.com/accounts/danielben}
6. ^{http://ludusnovus.net/my-games/the-majesty-of-colors/}
7. ^{Reflection: Why the Indigo Prophecy Demo Was Better Than the Full Game}
8. ^{The Ferry: Short but Deep Webs of Causality}
9. ^{http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice.html}

A the risk of sounding a little cheesy, here’s a brief mini-post to share a quote from Antoine de Saint Exupéry.

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

I think this is a great project management philosophy that’s pretty relevant to building games. I’m also reminded briefly of those whiny sailors in Black & White that I had to throw into the ocean.

That’s all.

It’s been a while. Haven’t had spare time to forge a complete thought in the past several weeks due to a couple of factors.

Deadlines at work.

My son has a new little sister (see what I did there? ehhh?) who loathes sleep and the sanity that it breeds.

Things should level out soon, and maybe I’ll be able to return to my only moderately sporadic schedule.

I’ve found that if I give myself time to percolate an idea, it never ends up getting posted. So here’s something I started writing about the games and art thing, more focused on what we can learn about formal design elements than debating what art is or isn’t. I think it comes off a bit snotty in places, so be warned. I’ll probably continue this as a series exploring some parallels between different media as I come across them.

After a few years majoring in fine art in college and a few years as a game designer, my definition of art is as follows:

An idea intentionally expressed through a medium.

There. Pretty simple.

This, of course, includes games. I don’t think I have to convince you, if you’re reading this, that our medium is a valid form of artistic expression. You get it, and if not I’m probably not going to convince you here. The whole what is/isn’t art conversation has served as pretentious lip fodder at parties well before video games came around anyway, and what interests me as a designer is what makes good art.

There are good and bad examples to be seen in every medium, from Mozart to the latest corporate spawned pop drivel, from Kandinsky to Kinkade. What separates the chaff from the wheat is the potency (and honesty) of the message combined with the skillful use of formal elements. These formal elements, like visual design principles or the interactions of game mechanics, act as amplifiers that can make the message speak louder. If they are used improperly, however, they can drown the message in white noise or negate it entirely (hello, dissonance). In some cases, this can be a fairly one sided equation. The message can be so powerful that little executive finesse is required for it to speak to an audience. On the flip-side some purely concrete works (Mondrian, Tetris) stand solely on their formal merits, where their messages are a sort of meta-expression about themselves and nothing more.

I think some tried and true lessons from the visual medium could offer us some insight in the interactive field. Let’s take something like Munch’s The Scream as an example.

Ripped straight from Wikipedia, Munch’s inspiration for the painting:

“I was walking along a path with two friends—the sun was setting—suddenly the sky turned blood red—I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence—there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city—my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety—and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.”

The article then goes on to postulate what could have made the sky red, or whether or not Munch was being literal or expressive, etc. I think this might be useful for an academic studying some sort of contextual or historical positioning of the work, but for the end user, the observer, all of this is useless. You can’t expect deep resonance from a work that relies on someone standing in front of it to explain each brushstroke. The aesthetic message has to hit the viewer through the power of the image. That’s why it’s a painting and not a novella.

When the viewer first looks at The Scream he gets that message immediately, like a shotgun blast. Munch achieves this with several tools. The first couple of things are sort of narrative, contextual supports.

Title
First, the name itself sets up a preconceived expectation in the viewer. This seems like a pretty obvious concept, but I think it’s worth noting just to be thorough. When someone says, “Let’s go look at ‘The Scream’”, you psychologically set yourself up for something nerve wracking. The same thing goes for an interactive experience. If a game is called “Blood Dungeon” and you start out in a field full of bunnies, you’re going to constantly be expecting things to go to hell at some point. This can be used to reinforce a mood or establish it prior to the user’s exposure. Alternately this can be used to put the user on uneven footing by giving vague or contrary information. Part of using a formal system is knowing when to subvert it.

Subject Matter
Next is the subject matter. Again, this is narrative and contextual and not necessarily a formal element. Formality vs narrative has been a prevalent issue in fine art just as much as it has in games. Personally, I don’t see the story versus gameplay debate as a rift between opposing factions as much as ludo-narrative axes that can be expressed orthogonally. In the case of The Scream, the screaming person in the foreground can’t be ignored as an agent of emotional impact, a conduit of the message.

Now on to the formal elements, the properties of the work that are native to the medium.

Nervous Marks
The very nature of the gestural marks in the work depicts a nervous sense of motion, vibration almost. You can feel the artist’s hand as he put down the marks with his brush. The whole thing is organic and undulating with few spaces for the eye to rest calmly. If you look at the bridge, however, you’ll find more stable linear elements, but these serve mainly to make the wavy marks look even more wavy in contrast. Pushing agents like this can accentuate the qualities of contrasting elements if they’re used in the right proportions.

Distortions
The figures and palette of this piece aren’t very naturalistic at all. The people are recognizable enough to sort of resonate with your empathic core, but are distorted to create a great sense of unease. The contortions look terribly uncomfortable, and part of us can empathize and feel that discomfort as well. The palette is a departure from reality as well, with the reddish orange color taking a prominent role. This is not just an unusual color for the sky, but a very aggressive color as well. Add in the blues and greenish hues and more vibration is added through simultaneous contrast.

In games we have complete control over the laws of nature. If we want to empower the player, we can make him jump yards into the air or run 100 miles an hour. If we want to invoke helplessness we can slow him to a crawl or make him fragile. We are, after all, giving simulations opinions here, so our every physical formula is an expression on how we want our micro worlds to be.

Graphic Elements
By graphic I’m referring to flat 2d elements, not images on a screen In addition to the emotionally charged elements, there are forces at work to ensure the work remains graphic, flat, embedded in the picture plane. The background is a warmer color, so it advances, negating depth. The whole thing is permeated by a reddish ground color, which holds it all together. There’s no modeling of shadow or highlight throughout the work. The perspective lines also fall along structural format lines, rooting them more in the 2d plane than a depiction of 3d space.

For a 2d work to effectively engage a viewer, it has to play to its strengths, the 2d plane. Graphic elements like I mentioned above can reinforce the 2d nature of a work and cause the viewer to engage it as shapes on a plane rather than illustrative simulacra. Linear perspective is an artificial system that is used to evoke space, but the sight lines can be combined with structural lines or subverted in other image-serving ways to negate space while still sort of ‘referring to’ it. Kind of having your cake and eating it too, but it’s all a matter of knowing the rules and how to bend them.

Chuck Close: Abstract Artist

I believe this and other photo-realistic attempts at art correspond pretty closely to the holy grail of simulatory verisimilitude in games. Even at the highest fidelity of rendering, a 2d work is still abstract. The image is flat while the subject matter is three dimensional. The palette won’t be 100% accurate. If you magnify the work, you won’t be able to see cells, molecules, etc. Yes, this is a bit obvious but the point is that you have to stop somewhere in your depiction of reality, and that’s where the designer’s voice can be found. I think that you can give the player the feeling of depth and choice without trying to turn the map into the territory.

That’s a rough pass on some of my thoughts about art and the interactive medium. As usual, I don’t think I’m handing down some sort of gospel as much as opening a dialogue and presenting ideas to be refined through feedback. There aren’t really any specific game examples in this installment, but I might revisit the concept with some examples from the interactive side of things. This might just end up being a rehash of the MDA framework with some visual art parallels, however.

Interesting trio of articles on narrative in games that all reference one another. Mostly linking these here so I remember to read them all the way through at some point soon.

Brainy Gamer: Narrative Manifesto
Vorpal Bunny Ranch: Choose your own Lover
Artful Gamer: Narratives and Interactivity Still Misunderstood

Talking with a friend recently, the topic of designer identity came up. More specifically, the topic of who I am as a designer, what do I stand for and want to make of this career. I think this is a critical question for anyone that wants to be successful in this line of work. By successful I don’t just mean employed, either. It’s (relatively) easy to drift along in a design role, taking whatever projects you can find and making ends meet. You can work at a port shop or shovel-ware factory, still get paid, still call yourself a designer. Don’t get me wrong, I’d take any game design job over almost any ‘normal’ job that people do.

What I’m talking about is a focus, a raison d’être. Artists of any medium develop a voice in their work, and game design is no different.

My initial response was sort of knee-jerk. I stated I was about player choice and expression, falling more on the interactive side of the continuum where procedural narrative and simulations lie as opposed to linear narrative, cut scenes and point to point gameplay. Games are about player interaction, and the bias I chose epitomizes the very nature of our medium.

After the conversation ended I began to think about this response and how it rules out a lot of experiences I’ve enjoyed when playing games as well as experiences I’d enjoy crafting myself.

Looking at my project idea database, only 13 of the roughly 70 games fit the “simulation aided narrative” description, where the player can sort of sculpt the story to their liking. A large portion falls into the “player exploration” category where there’s some large world(s) or system for the player to wander around in and discover. Then there’s the “experimental” category, ideas that are just different from standard assumptions about games specifically and interactive systems more generally. Last are games that follow fairly conventional mechanics but have some specific theme I find interesting.

Looking at some of my favorite games, a lot of them don’t really have player driven narrative or much player expression* at all. The short list: Psychonauts, Shadow of the Colossus, Braid, Portal, Mega Man, Zelda, Knytt. None of those even have as much as a branching ending. Some are exploratory, some are linear while others are less so. They are all fairly artistically cohesive and respect the player by providing well communicated design and few character stereotypes.

I’m discovering that I don’t have as much focus as I think yet. I think focus comes in progressively narrower stages. In the beginning, 2nd to 4th grade all I knew was “I wanna make games! I wanna make games!” Now that I’ve been a designer for a few years I have the opportunity to step back and ask what kind of games I want to make, how I see this whole thing panning out over the next several years. I definitely know what I enjoy playing and things I’d like to see our medium accomplish. I want to be on the forefront of advancing our medium beyond the stereotypical teen male power fantasies and narrative drivel that stigmatize it. I want to see art asserted over profit.

Art over profit is tricky when you do this for a living. Side projects are a good way to vent creative energy in a risk averse business, but I think lessons learned there can be brought into the commercial endeavors. I also look forward to more exploratory experimental design in the mainstream, hopefully curbing the self-fulfilling cycle of games for male teens drawing the male teen demographic so we then focus on male teens ad nauseum.

* Player expression being the player’s pseudo emergent use of granular systems to solve problems with their own ‘voice’ instead of enacting explicit solutions to problems and paths through environments. You could argue that anything interactive supports expression since a player can choose to jump over Goombas instead of jumping on them in Mario, for example.