Ludomancy

I am still trying to gather my bearings again after several days of attending sessions and meeting people at the GDC.

This year’s EGS was unusually big and featured many games of wildly different concepts. Coverage can be found in Gamasutra, so I won’t go over the details.

Personally, I’ve found new exciting fronts for experimentation during the conference:

Games 2.0

Where game meets web by Raph Koster: Mr. Koster really wanted to make an effect in this lecture. He sort of doomed the “mainstream” game industry by stating that content can be generated by the users themselves (like Spore does), and then doomed content creators by stating that “out there is a lot of people better than you are, willing to generate the content for free”. This whole Games 2.0 intitiative has very profound implications on game design and development because the players are also the developers. But I won’t go over it right now; meanwhile you can read a presentation about it in Raph Koster’s blog.

Also I’ve met Justin Hall and his Passively Multiplayer Online Game. I was shocked by the fact that he did almost the exact project I had in mind to make. Damn.

Gameplay-centric Games

This year Rod Humble showed The Marriage during the EGS and Nuances of Game Design session (you can check out a coverage in Man Bytes Blog). It’s a game about the abstracted dynamics of a married couple and the lifetime evolution of their relationship. I got to try it during the GDC, and felt very excited about the possibilities that this kind of games offer.

The point of gameplay-centric games is that they express feelings and situations through gameplay instead of in-your-face graphics, voicing and text. You can’t put representational graphics into them because the elements are abstract and thus can’t be represented. Tufte would be delighted at this.

The upside of these games is that they are very cheap to make. The downside is that they are hard to explain…The Marriage seems a crappy experiment until you sit down and let yourself be carried away by it. These experiences are certainly worth it, so I’ll give a little more thought to it.

Conclusion…

As usual I got to meet new, interesting people like Petri Purho, from Kloonigames (you have to check out this game he made, which made the whole room laugh).

I’m very happy with my takeaway from the conference. It gave me a lot to think about!

Prototyping an experimental game is like having to cross an unexplored desert in hopes of finding green pastures at the other side. Since the destination is uncertain and you’ll be alone at least until you reach an oasis of successful gameplay, the trip is going to feel like a spiritual pilgrimage. Only your will is going to keep you from cowering back to known territory.

And as in every religious test of will, there will be devils trying to tempt you out of your ventures into new gameplay. These temptations are the bane of experimentation, and your only aid against them is to be aware of how they work.

One of the devilae that plague the path of the pioneers is The Programming Succubus:

The devil led him up and showed him in an instant a graphical level editor, an XML configuration file and an engine to run the game on. And the devil said to him, “To you I will give their glory and all the coding fun; for it has been told that only on strong foundations a kingdom is built. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.”

Programmers are very weak against this. While prototyping you are not really building a kingdom; you are building a tent that can be moved easily so you can keep going. Many programmers I know will be developing their “engines” and “editors” for a long time until they realize the gameplay they are building upon is sinking into quicksand and they are already working over ruins.

Usual signs of this temptation:

• “I will do a level editor before I try out gameplay, so I can test comfortably”
• “I will develop an engine to get the technology stuff out of the way”
• “It will have some physics, so I am still working on that. Hard stuff.”

Michelangelo made his sculptures by removing the unnecessary parts from the original marble block until only the statue remained. Putting technology before gameplay is like growing the original block just in case you wanted to make an elephant in real scale, taking ages to figure out that you just wanted a tiny statuette.

You might have fun coding a prototype for an experimental game, but if you are spending more time having fun coding than struggling to achieve good gameplay, you’re being led astray by the programming succubus.

These days I am hacking out a prototype for a concept I had in mind for quite some time: a game about being a psychotherapist. I’ve always been fascinated by the resolution of some clinical cases carried out by professional psychologists, as well as the more mundane interventions some sensitive people make with the people they love, even with no formal education.

Whether the game is going to be enjoyable or not, I do not know at this point. I have a vision on the experience I want to achieve, and some interesting ideas on how to achieve it, but the execution is demanding details I am still struggling with. I wanted to share some thoughts and insights on this process I’m going through while attempting to build something unusual…

My Drive

I admire empathic people. Empathic people have a strong perception and sensitiveness that allows them to resonate with the emotional states of others. I also admire wise people. Their wisdom allows them to understand the rationale behind other people’s drives and behavior even if they are unaware of it.

We are lacking in games with mechanics based around wisdom or empathy. Games about people’s troubles, their weaknesses and their way to deal with life. Games that reward sharp gut feelings. Managing to get an empathic person to use their skills in the game successfully is my goal: I want to prove that a game like that can be done.

The Challenge

Shrink is set in a psychotherapist setting. Patients seek help to deal with whatever they are making themselves unhappy with. But their cooperation is limited as they will block things out, lie, and refuse sharing stuff that could be critical for treatment. Psychologists use their knowledge of the patient’s life, some general laws that apply to most people, and put themselves in the patient’s shoes to attempt discovery of their drives. But their job is mostly an informed guess.

Therefore, Shrink is about guessing. The information you need to do those guesses is not intrinsic, so the game does not present you all the information. You will need to fill in the holes using your real-life intuition (though no hard psycho-nerd stuff is required to play).

But the execution poses some problems:

• Disarming logical approaches: I don’t want players to brute force the patient to win or allowing solutions that don’t imply making an honest, intuitive guess. This is quite hard to achieve with the current design, since the patients are hand-made and the solution space is still small. Still seeking a good solution to this.
• Hellish level design: By “level” I mean “patient”. Designing a person’s life, their drives, situations and memories while at the same time making sure that their psyche is challenging enough is unlike anything I dealt with before. It has the same problem as adventure games…something that makes sense for me might not for most people.
• Keeping the laboratory germ-free: I want to stick with the initial idea of making a game about empathy and not a game that just includes some usage of empathy. Still, I feel tempted to add some known mechanics like resource management and puzzle solving. This is because the blind spots in the design are making me feel lost and insecure. Fighting back this temptation is the hardest bit of doing this project.

Now I’ll go back to continue working on the damn thing. I’ll post about the actual design soon, together with the prototype demo.

(Please re-read the title, it is not “Experimental”, it is “Experiential”)

I was reading Raph Koster’s “Influences” speech at the Project Horseshoe, where he showed his Andean Bird Demo, a sort of Jonathan Livingston Seagull game. He explained that he wanted to make a game about flapping. Not a simulator, fighting, strategy or any kind of challenge.

These experiential games are about giving the player the chance to experience something that might be outside his reach: flying by flapping, dragging clouds around or being a pulsating being in a psychedelic world. When I first met these kind of games, I disregarded them as failed attempts at making a *real* game. But maybe there is something untapped behind them. But what is an experiential game?

I think there are two factors that sets them apart from other games:

• They lack force-fed goals: the player will choose his own goals
• They provide experience-oriented tools so the player can actually feel the experience

The first one is obvious, if you are fantasizing about being a huge robot crushing cities, you don’t think “Whoa! I have to be careful not to tread over the pointy buildings, it would reduce my hull integrity!”: you’re smashing stuff and feeling powerful and that’s it. Feeling compelled to add goals to these games is the trap most designers fall over (unfortunately, Raph Koster ended up putting goals to the flapping game). A pure experiential game should have no goals whatsoever, not even for teaching the player to play.

The second factor is not so obvious. We like to point out that games are different than movies and books because of interaction, but most of the time we don’t give much thought into it. In Andean Bird, Raph wanted you to experience flapping and not flying. So you use the controls to move the wings. If he wanted you to experience flying, he would have chosen an easier way to control the bird (like mouse controls), and more feedback on the experience of flying. In Shadow of the Colossus, you gain speed while riding by spurring with a button tap, that felt quite like horseriding; If it was a strategy game experience instead, you would have moved the horse by clicking on the destination.

The experience is defined by the way it’s manipulated by the player, so every interaction tool must be part of the core experience the game wants to convey, which is very fragile. A misplaced tool or feedback, and it is ruined.

Sometimes you get hints that maybe there is a niche for this kind of games. Some people enjoy crushing cockroaches in Half-Life instead of gunning their way out of Mesa. Cloud is a well received game.

It would be interesting to see more of these games: They are great for introducing non-gamers.

A while ago, Chris Crawford said:

Almost all games rely on spatial navigation with a small set of verbs for moving through a space. They then populate the game’s space with all sorts of interesting, complex elements that provide the game with richness. This is fine-it works well. But game designers are stuck in this approach-they just can’t see beyond spatial navigation. Why does every game on the market have to have a map? What’s so all-encompassing about spatial reasoning?

Last year I was bored at home, recovering from an unexpected illness, when I decided I wanted to at least start developing a small RPG. I did that several times before, always failing when having to do the massive level design typical of a classic RPG. Not to mention the amount of art maps need.

Since laziness is one of creativity’s booster (the other one is desperation), I came up with a way to avoid most of the grudgery of level design: to take away spatial navigation completely.

Hunter RPG has all the elements of an RPG like questing, leveling, fighting and looting. But your character is not at a particular location at any time. You are not anywhere, you don’t walk anywhere. The game is about revealing opportunities.

Jonathan Blow described it as a sort of Progress Quest but with actual choices during GDC ‘06 Experimental Gameplay Sessions.

Even though the demo is just a concept, I’m sure a full-fledged RPG could be developed with Hunter’s mechanics. If you can’t imagine how an RPG could be done without any concept of space, get the Hunter RPG Demo.

 

I recently read a very old book about choosing toys for children. Besides being interesting because it is mostly about telling parents to avoid stupid mistakes that hinder their kid’s development, Sten Hegeler, the author (mother of 10 children), made fun of most parent’s worries like their male kin playing with  dolls or smashing their expensive electric toys to pieces.

But there was an issue in which she took a deadly serious tone: about kids who don’t play or have many difficulties doing so. She went on to say that this needs immediate professional assistance since this problem could cause a serious blow to the kid’s development in life. Since playing is training to live, not playing is terribly bad for a kid. Not playing prevents them from learning, experimenting and growing. Our mind enjoys playing, and reward us when we do. If we are genetically so encouraged to play, it is because it is crucial for learning and fortunately, we adults are still able to learn.

But I find it curious that you’ll rarely hear someone worried about a non-playing adult. At most, he would be considered “a little too serious”. Sten found it very sad that mothers did not feel curious about their kid’s toys because they were busy with “more important stuff”. Learning takes effort, as well as playing, and the truth is that they don’t want to bother.

Refusing to play is refusing to learn, and not wanting to learn is for stuck, dumb people.

Therefore, if you don’t play, you’re dumb.

The games industry keeps screaming “We need more innovation!” over and over again. You could hear it everywhere in this year’s GDC. What’s funny is that every game designer working at obscure startups I’ve met there claims his company’s strength is doing “innovative gameplay”.

Yeah, right, like everybody else.

Most people complain about the industry being stuck, risk-adverse, in sore need of originality, etc. But as soon as I dig deeper, I realize most of them did not even think about what is “original gameplay”.

Doing something “original” means that nothing like it has been done before. Unless you are some kind of visionary genius, if you do something new, you are not certain it will actually work. To know if something new works, you have to experiment.

We can call gameplay in this experimental stage, well, experimental gameplay.

The definition of this is not very easy to pin either. The folks at the Experimental Gameplay Sessions tried by giving counterexamples of what is not experimental gameplay.

But let’s try this simple definition:

Sounds obvious, but there are a few implications:

• There is not other known game to safely compare your gameplay to
• You might end up with something that sucks