   Game Designer Responsibility (ramble)
  I'm almost burned out on Arcanum, which isn't productive anyway, so I think I need to find something new to do. I mowed lawn the past two afternoons and once I got into it it was nice. It really is a kind of moving meditation. My mind wanders and then sometimes it stays loose, sometimes I start to get very intense ideas.Yesterday my train of ideas started with the idea that game designers have a responsibility when they create games. I was rather frustrated with having played Arcanum all day (half-ogre crush things, yum) which made me wonder: if I had spent all day reading Hemmingway or The Great Gatsby I wouldn't have considered it an unproductive day. Why is that?Both are entertainment and, although in different forms, they both more or less have the same purposes driving their creation. Obviously there are cultural conventions to contend with, being "well-read" is positive, you're improving yourself, while playing Zelda five hours a day is simply "a waste of time" (or wasting time, more accurately). But is there something fundamentally "better" about the medium of the written word?Not as far as I can tell. You can easily find crap books that are just as much a waste of time as Pacman. However, there are important fundamental differences between the medium of games and books.By its very nature reading stimulates the imagination. No matter if it's Catcher in the Rye, Macbeth, or a hack romance novel, you as the reader are looking at symbols on a piece of paper and seeing something in your head that doesn't actually exist. You -have- to use your imagination in any kind of reading.Games, on the other hand, spell things out as much as possible. You don't have to imagine the setting, what characters look like, or how things move, everything is right there. Games stimulate in a different way. From Pacman to Black & White, a game teaches the player a system of interactions. It teaches the player how to obtain a specific goal in some sort of imaginary system.Of course the game doesn't actually "teach" the player, it only provides the system of interactions and the goal. It's up to the player to find the patterns within the system that obtain the goal. The power behind this is that the game forces the player to understand, on an almost visceral level, what's going on in the game's system. The lessons learned are a kind that could not be obtained through reading or any other sort of passive watching. The problem is that in general games aren't teaching any useful systems.Any sort of medium - literature, radio, comics, paintings, movies, TV or games - are at their hearts simply a way for the creator(s) to communicate ideas to other people. This is an extremely powerful concept because enormous parts of a persons identity are simply the ideas they think. Watching "good" movies, reading "good" books actually is self-improvement because you're expanding your understanding of other people and the world around you, thinking of things that you couldn't before. That's because "good" media communicates something. The flip-side is that bad media is media that doesn't communicate anything. A movie or book full of cliches or whatever other crap, (technical execution aside for the moment) is pointless because it doesn't expand the viewer in anyway. Brilliant technical execution can sometimes lack meaningful content if the execution teaches the viewer about the medium itself, but few possess that level of skill. It's good enough to only be technically okay as long as you have an idea to communicate and you understand what sorts of ideas your medium is meant to tell.I'm don't know enough about a lot of different mediums to say for sure what their strengths are, but I can give general examples. Books are better at stimulating people's imaginations, putting them in someone elses shoes. Movies are good at (to be obvious) showing things, showing events. TV is similar to movies, except it can stretch story over longer periods of time and show aspects of characters that wouldn't fit into two hours. Radio is similar to books except that it can be much more communal and the author has control over pacing (how fast words are read, which can create some types of humor or drama more powerfully).Most of this is just off the top of my head, but I'm sure real experts in whatever medium could say more. Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud is an excellent dissection of comics as a medium and helps you think about the strengths of other mediums too.All of this is very interesting (I'm sure), but of course what we're interested in are games. Games are an incredibly young form of expression. It took hundreds of years before literature had it's Shakespeares, and although I'm sure the pace of games development will be significantly faster, we still have a huge amount to learn before we can exploit the medium's strengths to the fullest.At this point the majority of all game development has been towards better display of visuals and sound. This is a very important aspect, granted, but without some kind of understanding of the structure behind it you essentially end up with either the basic Pacman pattern of moving around in a maze with things chasing you (with biscuit shooting action), RPGs, strategy games, fighting games, or simulations of driving a vehicle (for single player games at least). Game makers understand that they're basically doing the same thing so they try to make the graphics better and games more like existing mediums such as movies or books. This is a dead end because eventually you end up with games trying to communicate ideas in ways other mediums do better.I started all this with the idea of game designer responsibility. Why? Because games are so much more engrossing than other mediums. If a book is crap, not expressing any ideas, someone might read it anyway. They're wasting their time but if something more important comes along in their real life, they'll follow it instead. It doesn't monopolize their time. Movies are much more engrossing, if something else is happening, someone might watch a bad movie anyway (think Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle). This is more dangerous than books, but in the end it's only a couple hours wasted at most. TV is the only medium close to games in regards to engrossment. Both can waste equal amounts of time if they're crap, but games that express nothing are even harder to break away from than TV. We're talking about 10-100 hours for RPGs or games with small replay value, and a practically unlimited amount of time for games with high replay value.Game designers have a special responsibility to express ideas because players entrust so much time to them. Sure, entertainment can be a means in itself but if people are giving you hundreds of hours they could have spent improving their lives you might as well give them back something useful besides highly honed pacman instincts.This takes us back the strengths of games as a medium. To express ideas designers have to understand what kinds of things games are good at showing. It's hard to even say what the possibilities are because so little time has been devoted to exploring the possibilities, but here's a couple ideas I had off the top of my head.Games are good at explaining systems. In a game a player has a goal and a system of forces around them that interact in certain ways. Players find patterns that best achieve the goals within the system. Instead of someone simply telling them what the patterns are through words on a page and memorizing them, players actually understand what cause the patterns to be the way they are because they're working against the same forces.Here's a concrete example. Recently I read an excellent book called Guns, Germs and Steel that was about how the natural environment of a culture affects its development. Why the Europeans ended up invading and slaughtering the Americas instead of vice versa for example. It went into many environmental advantages that the Europeans had, Eurasia being on a east-west instead of north-south axis, domesticatable animals and plants, etc. It was a fascinating read and I'd highly recommend it. It gave me new ideas and disproved some, like the idea of a certain race's inherent superiority. Very educational but I think a game could have taught the ideas even better, and it's much more likely a teenager would pick it up.Pretend this is a game. Single player for now. It starts at about 10,000 BC when humans are just starting in the America and everyone is still basically hunter-gatherers. The player can either choose the side of the hunter-gatherers colonizing America, or the hunter-gathers in the middle-east/fertile-crescent. Both humans have the same abilities, same needs, they're just in different situations. The hunter-gatherers in America have it really easy to begin with. In the Americas none of the animals evolved with humans so they don't know to be afraid with them. Hunting is as easy as walking up and hitting something on the head. So they expand rapidly across the Americas. Back in Eurasia hunting is harder. Since humans evolved with the animals the animals know to run away. Because of a much larger land area, however, Eurasia has more plant species and hence more that can be domesticated. Someone domesticates, say, wheat (This is all a little fuzzy, please don't look to it for historical fact. More like cause-effect fact). Because hunting is so hard in Eurasia, domesticated plants can support ten times as many people per square mile as hunter-gathering. Even though it's not as healthy and a lot of farmers are undernurished, ten undernurished farmers can kill one healthy hunter-gatherer. So in Eurasia, the farmers spread and begin to live in cities.In the Americas there's still so much easy game that people don't need to resort to farming. But slowly big mammals that may have been later domesticated are dying out due to the easy hunting.It goes on, farming spreads much easier in Eurasia because they have large areas in the same climite zone; a plant grown in China could spread -across- the continent to a similar climate in France, while a plant grown in Iowa would not be able to spread -down- the continent to some similar climate in Chile (geography rather hazy).Through playing the game the player would begin to understand the forces that governed the creation of cultures and why certain patterns have worked throughout history. They'd be playing the game and improving their awareness of the world around them; awareness of ideas that games are uniquely excellent at conveying.Another idea would be a sort of ethical playground. Basically it would center around the idea of "do unto others" so that whatever the player did would be mirrored by all the rest of the games inhabitants. If the player murders, other characters might try to murder the player, etc. Both are rather hazy "concept" ideas. Whether they would make enjoyable games is debatable. But the ability to take a similar idea and turn it into a playable game is what we, as game designers, need to learn.What's most important about this kind of game is to keep it open. Games' strength isn't in telling linear stories of an author's creation, it's in showing what patterns emerge from the rules of the author's creation.I could probably ramble on longer, but fingers are telling me to stop. I'm just throwing ideas out there, please tell me what you think. I think awareness and discussion of the potential of games is more important than anything.Hehe, Rome won't be built in a day, but we may as well start laying the foundations.[edited by - Murtagh on July 30, 2003 11:59:47 PM]
  Games are just as old as other mediums. Sports have been around for millenia as both a reason to improve athletically and to prove the worthiness of some athletes over others. Board games like Nine Men''s Morris or Go tackled the intellectual aspects. And technology is transforming almost all forms of media; if you read the "not-quite-a-sequel" to Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics, Scott McCloud talks about how technology will eventually break the barriers of traditional comics - no need for panels, electronic distribution changing the business aspects, etc. The same goes for all our media, and games just happen to be among the first to reap visible benefits from it.I think the major difficulty that we have to deal with in making video games is how to make best use of the other types of media we combine in developing a game, and not to let the other media "hijack" the gameplay. In Final Fantasy, for example, storytelling and cinema are the centerpiece, not the battle sequences that break up the story. This makes it a popular whipping boy nowadays as the flaws in this system became more apparent with each generation and other games have made more of the power of new technology.In the original games, almost mirroring what happened with video games, the media used was minimal, usually just a few lines to mark boundaries or grids, a ball of some sort, or small stones or other shaped pieces. And modern games in traditional media can now dress up, just like video games: There is no end of cheesy games based around the Game of Goose or Snakes and Ladders concept with some fancy pieces and board and maybe some other visually exciting gimmick. Minatures games are perhaps the pinnacle of traditional games using high production values. And they certainly sell, but cheap chess sets also sell too. Only occasionally do you see new classics emerge in modern times with games like Monopoly or Risk.I think one thing that a lot of video games do miss, though, is a way for the player''s skill to improve indefinitely. That is perhaps the best way to hook a player, by letting them know that they can do better with just a little more effort, rather then letting them zombify themselves in front of the screen, not really developing their abilities at all. It can''t be done in every genre, but it can in a lot of them. ;  The main problem is that books and movies are forms of art as such they all a great deal of freedom and creativity on the part of the author or directer.  While computer games are about buisness.  The companies know what works and what doesn''t and so they focus on making the games as visually appealing as possible the plan being that you will buy the based on how it looks and it genre.  The fact is that most games these days are completely formulatic, they have FPS formula, an RTS formula, an so on.  Take a look at any FPS shooter they can all be defined with the same formula. [Character Name] is fighting against evil [Enemy] armed with a selection of [10 or X] guns. They must battle their way through [10-20] levels against [8 or X] diffrent kinds of enemies. [Game name] use the revloutionary [Comercial Game Engine] to achive stunning 3d settings and models.Its sad but true that there is fair little in the way of innovenation and creativity in terms of gameplay these days. Most companies are focused on creating a visual impressive game that will generate sufficent revenue to carry the company until the next game.  But thats how the buisness goes the companies know that its takes 1-3 years to create and millions of dollars.  They have to be careful they know that a poorly recived game can put the company in jeporady. RTS games have been around a long time know and there has been little innovation and changes in terms of gameplay.  They are all still played the same way with the same 3 objectives, kill everyone, kill enemy X, get to point P.   -----------------------------------------------------Writer, Programer, Cook, I''m a Jack of all TradesCurrent Design projectChaos Factor Design Document ;quote:Games are just as old as other mediums. Sports have been around for millenia as both a reason to improve athletically and to prove the worthiness of some athletes over others. Board games like Nine Men''s Morris or Go tackled the intellectual aspects. And technology is transforming almost all forms of media; if you read the "not-quite-a-sequel" to Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics, Scott McCloud talks about how technology will eventually break the barriers of traditional comics - no need for panels, electronic distribution changing the business aspects, etc. The same goes for all our media, and games just happen to be among the first to reap visible benefits from it.I think computer and console games are significantly different from "classic" game types (board games, card games, even war games and pen and paper RPGs, although less so) and sports that they can be considered an entirely different thing, in the same way theater and film are considered different media.  Although I haven''t read Reinventing comics it looks like McClouds ideas about the future of comics using technology (no panels, etc.) is probably closer to very limited animation and flash stuff than traditional comics. Technology tends to create new types of media even if the basic ideas of that new type are from another media.quote:The main problem is that books and movies are forms of art as such they all a great deal of freedom and creativity on the part of the author or directer. While computer games are about buisness. The companies know what works and what doesn''t and so they focus on making the games as visually appealing as possible the plan being that you will buy the based on how it looks and it genre. Books and movies aren''t about the business?  When it comes down to it, all these things cost money to produce.  There is a wider amount of creativity and variety in novels because they are cheap to produce and so many of them are produced every year.  A publisher can flood the market with all kinds of random crap and hope that some of it sells. The stuff that doesn''t sell doesn''t cost them too much.  Film on the other hand is as bad as games are, if not worse.  While the average cost for a AAA game is $5-$10 million, the average cost for a AAA film $50-$100 million (at least.)  And if you think movies aren''t about being visually appealing and hoping you will go see it because of genre you''re badly mistaken.  Look at all the big summer movies, they all involve lots of CG and blowing shit up.  In fact, movies are becoming more and more game like all the time as graphics cards get faster and movies use more CG and Matrix style physics.  If movies aren''t comic or game liscenses they are comic or game influenced.  Of course, not all movies are like this, but I''d say that a good 25% of the major motion pictures released this summer fall into that category.  The saviour of the movie industry is independent film which is more art driven.  Even so, business is important because a dirt cheap talking head independent film still costs as much, if not more, than it costs to make a AAA game. Independent film still tends to introduce some interesting new concepts into mainstream film, although there is innovation within mainstream film also.  The problem is, afaik, independent game development is almost the opposite of what independent film is.  Most independent game developers are making tons of derivative puzzle games and flooding the net with them trying to make a buck.  There is some innovation, but the biggest recent independent innovations that actually have an effect on mainstream gaming are from the mod community.  Mods tend not to be very radical when it comes to gameplay innovations, although they sometimes do a good job of innovating within their given genre.  Mods, for example, started the whole semi-realistic trend in FPS and also introduce other weird gameplay stuff that doesn''t make it into many mainstream first person shooters. There''s some innovation in freeware (Progress Quest) and experimental (indie game jam, ludumdare 48 hour contests, etc.) stuff, but I haven''t seen any of those ideas get developed into a full game, probably because most of them aren''t feasible or fun in a large scale, mainstream style title. Your ideas seem very interesting Murtagh.  The Native American game sounds pretty cool, kind of like a more serious version of Lionhead''s BC. There are a few things that come up in books, movies, music, even TV and comic books that I just don''t see in games.  Games tend to entirely avoid political commentary, and if they do go into it it tends to be really juvenile and silly, like a stupid version of Southpark.  Your morality idea was very good also.  While there are some games that get into morality it''s generally not very complex. Games tend to be crazy power trips where players do all kinds of blatantly illegal and underhanded stuff in order to beat the system.  A game that actually makes players feel bad about the optimal choice, to the point where (some) players are willing to sacrifice game advantages so they don''t end up finishing the game looking like a evil sick bastard, would be interesting.  ;  One thing that you seem to be overlooking in your comparison is that what you may consider a waste of time or a worthwhile afternoon may be **TOTALLY** in opposition to the next guys views.  Some folks enjoy zombifying into something.  And in fact, these are the folks we want to target most often cause they spend the money and buy the titles.There really are 2 different camps here.  Game making to you is either art form or business.  They are MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE.  If you are making games from the perspective of art form, expect to die broke.  Most artists do.  This is not to say that there are not elements of art within business.  As a businessman, you do indeed have a responsibility, but it is different than the responsibility you have as an artist.   My sig used to be, "God was my co-pilot but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat him..." But folks whinned and I had to change it.  ;  I agree that games similar to computer games have been around for a long time. Chess and Go are probably good examples. I don''t know if I would count sports as quite the same, although the strategic aspect could be considered a game I think the physical aspect transforms sports into a genre of their own. The main change that computer games brought about was the ability to play games beyond the complexity of Solitare by oneself.I think this can lead to more of an imprint of authorship on the game. Chess is a sort of timeless game. Playing it against other people, although the rules are the same, the strategies other players employ are infinite. The chess equivalent of a computer game would be playing within the same rules of chess against an opponent that employed a consistent strategy. Then the player develops their own strategy of how to defeat the opponent within the rules of chess. Of course the opponents strategy could be more complex, adapting to the players as a real opponent might, but a computer game isn''t playing against every concievable opponent, it''s playing against one opponent, the author.I think a distinction should be made between the rules of a game and the "strategy" the game employs. Taking chess again as an example, the rules are the capabilities of the different tokens, a knight moves in a certain way, a pawn attacks in a certain way, if the king is in a certain configuration of pieces it''s in check, etc. This is static, it doesn''t change, it''s the same for every game of chess. The strategy is how pieces actually move, the mind behind them. Even though a bishop could move up to four squares in a certain situation, one strategy might only move it one square, another only three.The distinction of strategy vs rules applies to all games. In Warcraft units have certain characteristics, speed, health, attack strength, and whatever other abilities, these are the rules of the game. How the players, computer controlled or otherwise, utilize those rules varies greatly. Same for an FPS, a driving game or a fighting game.Most games follow similar rules, with slight variations in the values of characteristics (different speeds, healths, attacks), and then with varied strategies within the modified rules. The complexity of a set of rules is something that can roughly be objectively measured. Compare chess to checkers. Chess has maybe (pulling this number out of nowhere) four times the amount of rules as checkers, but an immeasurably greater amount of possible strategies. As the basic rules of a game increase the strategies generally increase exponentially.The fact that so many computer games have been created around the same few sets of rules speaks volumes about the complexity of the rule systems, but we''re still working within the same five or six rule systems. If you think of games as vehicles for expressing ideas, the rules of a game are the rules of some situation. The situation could be anything, it could be the situation of orphans in Cairo, an explorer on the north pole, a child in the middle of a divorce, or the ruler of a south american country. The rules are how the world around the player -can- interact, the laws of human nature, the physical world, psychology or global economics. The strategy of the world is how the world around the player -does- interact within those rules.You plop the player down in the middle of the world, constrained by it''s rules, and then to make it a true game, you give them a goal. Maybe their goal is to survive, to find the south pole, to bring their parents back together, or to raise the gross national product of their country.If the rules of the world are well designed enough, the strategies the player can attempt to use to reach their goal are many. Some of their ideas won''t work, some will. But through their attempt to reach the goal they will begin to understand the system they''re playing in, and eventually understand the strategies people in similar situations use to reach the same goals.I think this is the power games have, the kind of idea they can express better than any other medium.Obviously rule sets can be adapted to different situations. The rules of global economics can be used for a south american country or iceland if the strategies the game world uses within global economics are modified. Every time a person makes a new game they don''t have to make a completely new ruleset. A hundred people could make unique games about global economics the same way a hundred people could write unique stories about the death of a family member.But we -do- need to understand how to make new rules. The building blocks, what makes one set of rules work and another fail. This is information we need to know before the conversion of an idea about roughing it in Alaska can be made into a workable game. This is the art of games that is barely twenty years old.Of course there are economic realities. The expensive parts of making a game, the presentation, are what will sell millions of games. Companies that spends millions of dollars have to be sure their game will sell, they can''t afford to experiment. So with a  few notable exceptions, I''m sure, mainstream blockbuster games aren''t where games will develop as an artform.It will be the shareware developers, the indie game makers. Making a game with beautiful graphics is expensive, so the cutting edge experimental games probably won''t have beautiful graphics. But if the rules are good, it won''t matter. Chess with state of the art 3D graphics isn''t neccesarily better than chess with simple 2D bitmaps. It''s the mechanics of the game that are beautiful, and that''s what needs to shine through in the beginning.Then of course the mainstream will follow and you''ll have new sets of rules with cutting edge graphics. But before that can happen, new rules have to be made. And before that can happen, we have to understand how rules are put together....The interesting thing to me about the morality game is that it would help players understand why morals are the way they are. The most "moral" choice would actually be the best choice in a situation, fuzzy feelings aside, because what''s the use of murdering someone for money if you''re murdered two days later.Er, yeah. Probably should go now. ;  It seems most of the discussion has focused on the "story-centric" style of games.  I completely agree with what''s been said that these types of games need to "grow up" (so to speak) and cover more serious topics.  However, I don''t think that every game of this type needs to cover serious topics.  I mean, look at Shakespeare.  I don''t believe he was always trying to convey some higher message, at times he just wanted to entertain.  Yet the quality of those stories is still much greater than those found in video games.As for multiplayer games, I think a simple addition would make them change from "waste of your time" to "worth your while": voice communication.  Lan parties are great, because you can interact with the other people playing the game while you play the game.  Fireteam was great, because it required voice communication and allowed you to interact with the other people playing the game while you played the game.  Currently, multiplayer games have very little human interaction of this sort.  Sure, you can send a few messages through, but you usually have to find a lull in the action (so you don''t die) and then are probably more focused on discussing strategy than anything else (otherwise you won''t get a chance).  Think about when you play chess, poker, or even Candyland with someone.  There''s some sort of idle conversation going on unrelated to the game.  In my experience, traditional multiplayer games are more of an excuse to get together and talk (and can provide something to talk about when the conversation runs dry) than anything else. ;  Have you played many games that include voice communication?  Most of the time, they channels are overloaded with inane 12 yr old drivel chattering about boob size.  There are several games out that allow voice communication and most of the time, it actually makes the experience worse.  Imagine you are playing Counter-Strike and your clan decideds to go with voice communication and it turns out that your exalted leader who you''ve grown to respect and have this wonderful imaginary image of comes over voice with a squeaky, cracking, "I work at McD" voice.  It destroys your illusions.  It drops a big-ole wet blanket on your suspension of belief...I think voice is far overated...   My sig used to be, "God was my co-pilot but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat him..." But folks whinned and I had to change it.  