The Game and the "Real" Game

So I went to work today and saw this little guy up on Massively.com.

For those too lazy to click a link and read two additional paragraphs, it's concerning Lord of the Rings Online's new feature that allows players to easily click a button and return to the NPC who gave them whatever quest they were on. Of course, every time you use it, you'll need to fork over some change at their cash shop.

In reality, this isn't such a crazy concept. In Skyrim, most dungeons are designed to have a shortcut to the entrance after you've gotten to the chest room. In Guild Wars 2, every story mission and dungeon can be quickly exited using a button that appears near your mini map. After all, you've already done the quest so why force the player into trekking back over the same content they just did?

There is something to say about how quickly getting back to the quest giver should have been included in a fitting way from the very beginning and that this cash shop is just selling the convenience of not dealing with bad design, but I'm going to ignore that for this post. Instead, I'm more interested in what the developers are telling their players by adding this.

What do I mean? Well a cash shop is usually not intended to make a game easier. It's purpose is to make certain inconvenient things about the game less annoying. For instance, some people move at a faster pace and just want to be playing the level cap game, so they buy experience boosters. They skip over some content, but in the end, the challenge of playing against enemies relative to their level is still there. Enemies still hit just as hard and the fights are just as challenging and rewarding.

But when you start adding certain items to the cash shop that help players circumvent inconvenient stuff, you are also making a statement about what your game isn't. At the very least, you're telling them what doesn't matter--what isn't the "real" game.

For instance, if I sell a Wandering Trader summoning stone item at the shop, it sounds like a great idea because then players can sell their loot halfway through a dungeon and quickly get right back to doing the dungeon. No walking back to town. You only care about the dungeon, so the developers should let you do that, right? Sure, but now the player is getting messages that the walk from town to the dungeon doesn't matter and isn't the real game.

This isn't actually a bad thing--yet. You see, there are plenty of games designed to fit into the idea that it's all towns and dungeons. Guild Wars 1 felt that way with a fully instanced explorable world. Dungeons and Dragons Online was the same way. Dungeon Runners was even more-so in that design, where their towns were basically interactive lobbies.

The difference is that Guild Wars 1, Dungeons and Dragons Online and Dungeon Runners were designed from the ground up with that in mind. My hypothetical generic MMO with a summonable merchant isn't. And, Lord of the Rings isn't a fully instanced world either where typing "/resign" ports you back to town (and therefore, the quest givers).

No, instead, LotRO is a persistent world, obviously attempting to be immersive and have some real life breathing through it. So when they offer a way to circumvent the immersive world feeling and teleport back, they're saying "Oh yea, that beautiful landscape, meticulously crafted AI and gorgeously realized creature design--they don't matter. Here, gimme a buck and just skip it."

Which means that their game isn't about having that immersion and feeling of a living world or running into another player by chance who can help you and you can help them. It's a game of raiding, or questing, or whatever it is you do in LotRO end game. The game... just doesn't matter outside of that experience. And at that point, the game isn't even very fully embracing it's technological foundation as an MMO, instead leaning closer to a hot-seat dungeon crawler.

This reminds me of my recent playthrough of Skyrim. I had decided that I wouldn't ever use the map travel system. Instead, I would walk everywhere I needed to go and pay for the use of the wagons to get from major city to major city. What I found was that while it took me a lot longer to progress in level than my roommate (who also started a playthrough around the same time), I had found more locations, gotten more loot, and discovered a lot more about the world than he did. My experience was overall richer. The developers of Skyrim made the journey obviously a very real and tangible part of the game.

But that isn't always possible in MMOs. MMOs tend to have a static design. Once you play an area, you never really go back. An exception to this is GW2, which by design hopefully can offer you something new every time you go to an area. In a typical MMO, though, there is no random bandit who comes and attacks you on the road or a sudden dragon attack as you approach a wayside inn.

LotRO doesn't have these things either. While an easy solution is to add in a feature just like the one they implemented, a better solution would be to actually make the journey to and from the quest giver a better experience. Give them a random cave troll, a pack of wolves, or thieving little hobbit. In the long term, players will come for the experience--because that's really what games are offering.

The caution for LotRO is that after sending messages to your players that this part of the game isn't important or that part doesn't really matter, you will quickly find you've run out of game to mark as "not important." Eventually, your game will be reduced to towns, dungeons, no level progression and a dungeon finder so that you can teleport from town to dungeon. While a feature like the "teleport to quest giver" button will probably boost their revenues in the immediate, I have a feeling that they will slowly chisel out the engraving on the game's tombstone.

Because players will catch on to the messaging, even if the developer doesn't realize what they're saying. When the player sees that the majority of the game "isn't important"... they'll get it... and they'll go find a game that is important.



Disclaimer: I actually think that a design where all players start at the same power (max level, or no level at all), and play dungeon instances only, providing towns for lobbies, is a great design and a game I would probably play if executed well. I'm not knocking that design--I'm just saying it's not an MMO. If it is an MMO then it should be an MMO. If not, then don't pretend it is.

Itemization, Design Principles, and You!

If you've been keeping up with Guild Wars 2 at all, you're probably aware of their recent addition of Ascended items. I'm a bit irritated by the addition of these items and I want to talk about why, because it provides a good case study for learning a bit about itemization and design in general.

A lot of other people talk about the promises ArenaNet has made and that they're going back on them and not sticking to their manifesto. I'm not going to go into that if I can avoid it. I understand that some promises made can't be kept in the end. A good idea on paper doesn't always work in implementation. That's how game design works. I'm not going to bust their balls for that.

But lets get into the issues. To kind of lay it out real quick, items in Guild Wars 2 work similarly to any other MMO, but are a bit more refined and systemic (at least I think so). I actually really like the itemization in Guild Wars 2 a lot. Your weapon has a damage/armor rating, it has some "baked in" stats, and then it has an upgrade slot. The upgrade slot allows players to customize their equipment, making it a pretty robust system.

Primarily, two things determine an equipment's base power. Item level (which is also the required level to use) and the rarity (aside from differences in types of items, such as chest armor vs legs armor). Prior to Ascended gear, Exotic was the effective highest rarity. Why do I say "effective"? Well, because there is also the "Legendary" rarity. Legendaries had the same effectiveness as exotics and were just cooler skins that took a lot of grinding to get.

Hopefully that gives you all the main points needed to understand the rest of the article. If you still have questions, the Items article on the official wiki can give you a lot more information.

Grinding and Power

In the past, ANet has done a great job of making effectiveness in the game based on skill, rather than time spend in the game. This was a huge tenant in Guild Wars and was intended to remain a tenant in Guild Wars 2. The itemization reflected this. Once you got to the higher levels, Exotics were still pretty uncommon, but not grindy to get a hold of. You could get "best in slot" gear with relative ease, usually just by playing the game normally.

Legendaries and custom skins were a totally different thing. Why? Because legendaries weren't power. Those custom dungeon armor skins? Not power. They're appearances. Ways of showing off that you're hardcore or achieved something cool.

So ANet introduces Ascended gear saying it will bridge the gap of grindiness between Exotics (easy to get) and Legendaries (grindy as hell to get). It sounds well and good, but ANet is forgetting one major difference between Legendaries and Ascended. One is actual power and the other is just cosmetic. What they introduced was a grind for power, which isn't just a big no-no for them (skills determines who wins, not time spent playing). It's also a trending big no-no in the MMO space.

Changing the Game

There was one thing I forgot to mention about Ascended gear, and that is Infusion. Infusion is a stat that helps you resist a new condition called Agony. Agony is basically unavoidable and unmitigated damage. The concept has it's roots in Guild Wars: Prophecies, but is implemented quite differently in Guild Wars 2. Agony can only be mitigated by the Infusion stat--you armor rating means nothing to it. But only Ascended gear can have Infusion. Furthermore, the Infusion stat is primarily put on your weapon using the Infusion slot, which replaces the typical upgrade slot in all other gear. For Ascended items, stats that are normally in the upgrade slot are "baked in" to the Ascended item.

Why is this bad? The design of the game has spent the last 80 levels teaching players about itemization. These stats work well together and you can customize your items using these upgrade stats to get the build you want. With Ascended gear, they've taken the systemic norm and thrown it out the window. At max level, you now can't customize your gear. The game has changed and it's not a change players can simply avoid or ignore. You can't just keep using your Exotics that have the customization, because Ascended gear is actually more effective. The stats are simply better on Ascended gear and there's no way around that.

Getting it Done Right

I don't think Ascended gear is all bad. I don't mind having an additional rarity that is more powerful than what existed already, and nothing in their design says otherwise. But it needs to be implemented in accordance with the rest of your game. Keep that in mind, I don't believe there is a "correct" way to implement a new rarity. The only way it is "correct" or "wrong" is in so far as it agrees with the rest of your design. And even then, it's not so much right or wrong as much as it is good or bad in the eyes of your players and for the effectiveness of your game.

That being said, I of course, think there is a good way to implement Ascended gear. If it were me designing it, it would look something like this:

• Ascended gear can be achieved through normal means of playing the game, albeit the harder stuff and dropping less commonly than Exotics. No grinding or repeating dungeons hundreds of times.
• Ascended gear has an additional upgrade slot meant for infusion upgrades, rather than completely replacing the upgrade slots seen in all other rarities. This keeps consistency with the rest of the itemization's design and allows players to upgrade on top of it for the specific Agony mechanic.
• If "bridging the gap" of grindiness is really that important (I argue it isn't, because Legendaries are only cosmetic) release new skins with Ascended gear. They are unique looking weapons, like Legendaries, that have no bonus stats and take a bit of grindiness to get. You could even release a whole set of Fractal Weapons (to go with the new dungeon) that has these unique skins.

All in all, ArenaNet forgot (or maybe decided they weren't important) two design principles: The first, in a multiplayer game, grinding for power is bad, but for cosmetics its fine. The second, don't change the design after teaching players that it acts a certain way for the entire rest of the game. Adhering to these design principles are important if you want to keep your game fun and engaging for a sustainable length of time.

Keeping A Secret

It's been awhile since I have posted a blog entry. Working full time (and then some) while trying to get my living situation under control (still sleeping on an air mattress) proves to be quite time consuming.

Today, however, as I sit in San Diego Airport waiting for my flight, I found I had spare time and not much to do with it. So here is something that's been on my mind for some time.

It's "good practice" to convey to your player what's going on. I don't think anybody really argues this anymore. Conveyance is even perhaps a bit of a buzzword in the game design world. However, I'm learning that there are times when you actually don't want to convey things to your player in order to create a more full experience.

I thought of this while playing Guild Wars 2. There was an event running where we needed to defeat several waves of enemies. According to the "good practice," I received information on my Quest Dynamic Event Tracker telling me how many more waves there were. It dawned on me that dynamic events felt flat to me because I knew exactly what was going on, how many people left to kill, and how soon I would be done.

I contrasted this to perhaps one of the most dreaded missions in Guild Wars: Prophecies. Yes, I'm talking about Thunderhead Keep. While this mission is now a breeze due to power inflation from later installations, when the game first came out, Thunderhead Keep was a pain. Some people were stuck on that mission for weeks. The end of the mission is set up where you are holding the keep while waves of Mursaat and White Mantle come at you. Sounds pretty similar to the dynamic event I described above, right? The big difference is that in Thunderhead Keep, it just says "Defend King Jalis Ironhammer," or something similarly vague. There was no quest counter saying "5/12 waves remaining." You have no idea how far you are to completing the mission. When it begins to just drag and drag and drag on, you feel exhausted by the end, if you even get to the end at all. And if you lose, you have no idea how close to finishing you got, which makes the defeat that much more defeating. By not showing people their progress, you can deliver a better emotional experience. When you quantify the number of enemies, it suddenly makes the experience feel very flat.

I was happy to see moments like this return to Guild Wars 2 in their dungeons. It became apparent to me that while dynamic events are intended for the casual crowd who want to know how many waves are next, dungeons are meant for those experiences where you have no clue what's going on and have to really observe the patterns and habits of your enemies.

I think this is ultimately the crux behind the Kill Ten X quest formula or at least a major part of it and what makes a lot of MMOs feel like another dry experience. I believe it's also why emergent gameplay scenarios offered by competitive online games like PlanetSide2 are delivered to great effect without the designer having to create that scenario explicitly. At SOE Live, John Smedley said that EverQuest Next was held off in order to redesign it with emergent gameplay as a core philosophy. Given the above observation, I hope that EverQuest Next proves to be a new step in the evolution of online game design.

The lesson: sometimes it's good to keep information from your player. You just need to know when.

Rewards and Experiences

A lot of online games get themselves into a hole. What they do is they set a precedent of rewarding players with artificial rewards for achieving goals and are never able to get themselves out of it. For instance, when I kill an Ogre in Guild Wars 2, I feel a little disappointed if I don’t see his corpse glow with the little indicator that tells me there is some loot on him. Eventually, we begin to only play the things that earn us some sort of reward.

But in reality, we don’t always receive artificial rewards like this — in fact more often than not, we don’t receive those types of rewards at all. We are given natural rewards. For instance, there is no artificial reward for climbing Mount Everest. People simply do it as a matter of personal challenge and for the breathtaking experience of the view from the top. There are internal rewards for doing something that no cheap artificial reward could ever compare to.

What if everything in the world did have artificial rewards, like our games lead us to believe? I’m not suggesting a reward for every accomplishment either — I’m suggesting a reward for every action. What would that do to our ambition? Would we ever seek to achieve something as a personal accomplishment? Or would we only do something if there was some cash dangling at the far end of it? Are we so far from that today?

I had the most surreal experience about a month ago when my nephew was born. The little guy was a huge baby — 10 lbs 12 ounces. Hours after he was born, he started to flush away a lot of his birth weight (pooping, basically). This, I was told by medical people much smarter than me, was a very positive thing. He needed to be flushing that weight in order to live healthy. (I supposed if I hadn’t pooped for nine months, I’d consider pooping a very healthy activity too!)

Whenever he would do his thing, my sister (his mom) would get all excited and smile at him. She would giggle playfully and tell him what a good baby he was. Whether the little guy smiled back because he appreciated my sister’s affirmative tone or because he had just sunk a dookie, I don’t know. But I do know that my sister was trying to reward him for doing something good. This is a thing psychologists call positive reinforcement and it’s useful for developing good habits, especially in children.

But most of us aren’t children. We’re full grown adults and yet our games treat us like children by making sure to reward us with absolutely every activity we do in their game. Killed a monster? Got some loot (and exp!). Completed a quest? More loot, experience, and gold. Killed 500 monsters today? There’s an achievement for that. Literally everything we do in many of today’s games have artificial rewards.

Contrast this to a game like ThatGameCompany’s Journey. What they offered as reward for completing the game was not experience, gold, or achievement (okay, so there actually was an achievement, but that’s because of their publishing deal, not their game design). They only had to offer the experience of playing the game itself and a small “Thank You for Playing” in the credits. That was enough. Ask anybody who played Journey and I guarantee you that they would have played the game, with or without the achievements. Most people go for round two or three just because the experience was that good.

This is something we absolutely do not do in MMOs. In fact, when we find something that players are interested in and would do on their own anyway, we latch on to it and build in artificial rewards. A perfect example of this are Vistas in Guild Wars 2. I played an early beta where vistas hadn’t yet been incorporated. They found from feedback that players just liked jumping all over the place to see how high they could get. The players wanted the natural reward of experiencing the view.

ArenaNet took that and made a system out of it. They chose some of the more interesting high places in the game and put these vista icons over them. Whenever a player would go to it, the player would be given a short cutscene where the camera would pan around, outside of the player’s control, and view whatever was interesting and nearby.

The strange thing is that I would often go to a Vista, expecting it to show me something in particular, but instead the camera would turn toward something else that I had absolutely no interest in. This cool thing where players made a choice to go became no choice at all. Now when I go to Vistas, I don’t even consider the beauty it has. Instead, I think of it as a target for experience. I go to the vista, click on it, then close out immediately. Why? Because it’s rewarding me improper to what it originally was. I don’t even have to sit there and wait for the vista to complete to get the experience reward — I just have to click on it.

The odd thing is that I don’t consider vistas all that bad. In fact I see them as a useful tool in showing players something they may not have noticed before, so long as they bother to watch the entire cutscene.

Compare this to an experience I had while playing the game I work on. Now, the game I work on is a struggling old girl who has trouble keeping the engine running. She is finicky, doesn’t always cooperate, and often has systems which irritate me to no end as just poor design. She is, however, a 3D MMO, and for all her faults, has some incredibly beautiful terrains. It’s not that the environment design is overly interesting or amazing, but the breadth of the world and dynamic range of terrain is what really does it.

This is especially prominent when viewed from high places. You can literally be sitting on one mountain peak, look all the way down the valley and up at the other mountain peak on the other side of the valley, a huge distance away. As a born and bred Alaskan, I’ve done a lot of hiking around the Chugach Mountain Range, and this sort of picture makes me super nostalgic for home.

The coolest part was when I got to this really tall mountain and just looked around. It was a peak, so I could turn in 360 degrees and take it all in. It was awesome! It was breathtaking. And for a moment I forgot about all of this games troublesome characteristics. The funny thing was that I did this on an internal server. I wasn’t even playing the game properly. I was simply so enthralled that I had to experience it. There was no reward. No chest at the top full of sweet loot. Just an amazing view.

And then I realized how cheap this must be to most of our players. You see, in the game I work on, there are flying mounts, which have absolutely no limitations. I took the time to make the climb up there and then experience the breathtaking view. Most players could fly up there in a matter of seconds. If they didn’t have a flying mount, they could rent one. There is nothing challenging about getting up there, so the reward is cheapened by the easy experience. They wouldn’t have to fight past the yetis, drakes, and wolves. They wouldn’t have to navigate treacherous cliffs and nimble leaps. They would just... fly. Easy peasy. No big deal.

So, I guess I have two thoughts here. The first is that eventually, the design and experience of the game needs to be rewarding itself — a natural reward for playing — or else the game will increasingly find itself backed into a corner of players demanding a reward by entitlement. The second is that the experience of the game can’t be rewarding if it isn’t challenging. Not overly challenging, but not incredibly easy either. As the saying goes, “nothing is easy which is also worth it.”

My wonder is whether an MMO like this can exist. Can you create a massively online multiplayer game where there are no rewards, or at least only rewards in the beginning. An online game where it’s just a beautiful world and the activity of the game to do in it and the best reward is just the activity itself and what it has to offer you.

I can’t say whether a game like that could exist or not because I’ve never seen it. What I know for sure is that if anybody is willing to try it, it’s the type of game I would like to create. I’d be thrilled to jump on board for such a project.

Goals vs Obstacles: Using NPCs in Quest Design

My job is primarily looking at quests, creating new ones, editing existing ones, and refining them until they're acceptable to public viewing. Given that, I do a lot of thinking about quests. Why do we have them? What am I trying to do with this quest? What should the player be thinking or feeling? Is this quest fun? Should I care if it's fun? Do I know what 'fun' even means?

As you can tell from those few questions, there's a lot of spider-webbing topics to talk about surrounding quests. Today I'm just sticking to a particular aspect of quests: goals and obstacles and how enemy NPCs should be used in quests.

Lets start with why I'm even bothering to talk about this. Quests are an issue of debate in today's MMOs, especially quests known as "Kill Ten X" (KTX). KTX quests are notoriously boring. Players loath these sorts of quests and we mostly know why. "They're shallow," or "they're boring," are common 'reasons' why they're bad. Those answers aren't very specific or scientific, though. They're not descriptive so they don't help designers a lot in deciding how to address the issue of the KTX quest.

#3: The Quest Objectives.

To find out what the hell is wrong with KTX quests, I'm going to introduce you to someone much cooler than I am. His name is Mike Birkhead and he's written a substantial amount on game design. In an article he wrote about great level design, the first thing he says are important are clear goals. In quests, we often call these "objectives". They're small bullet point lists underneath the quest name that shows what you're supposed to be doing. 

In a KTX quest, the objective (goal) typically says something like "Cows Slain (0/10)" or "Slay 10 cows. You have 5 cows remaining," or some other similar syntax which tells you what you need to kill and how many.

Mike talks a lot more in that article about progress, story, and conveyance and stuff. The important thing for us that he talks about (although not explicitely) is the idea that a level needs obstacles. Mike has written another article that we can use which will closely related to obstacles. Mike talks about the gap.

The Gap, as a principle of story, is the separation between a hero and his goal. In any given level of Mario, his goal is clear: get to the end of the level. The gap between Mario and the end of the level are the obstacles in between them. Goombas. Buttomless pits. Cannons. Pipe-dwelling flowers with giant teeth. These are all things that are in the way of his goal.

The Gap also talks giving the player the means to overcome the gaps. Basically, you must give the player the means to overcome any obstacle you throw at them. If there is a chest, there better damn well be a key for it somewhere in the game.

To outline, lets list these things in a Mario game and identify them:

• Goal
1. Get to the end of the level.
• Obstacles (just a few)
1. Goombas
2. Long distance bottomless pits
• Tools and Methods (to overcome the obstacles)
1. Jumping (either over to on top of the goomba to kill it)
2. Running (combined with the jump lets you jump far enough to cross the pits)

For Mario, there are a lot more goals at a variety of scopes ("Cross the level" is a smaller scope than "save the princess") and even more obstacles (and ways to overcome them). The above are just a few.

The scope of goals in Mario. Areas, Worlds, and the entire game.

Goals. Obstacles. These are important. Okay, so lets get back to quests.

We know that goals and obstacles are important to a well designed game. You simply must have them. What isn't so obvious is that the obstacles cannot be the same thing as the goal. That would be like asking Mario to kill 10 goombas. Silly, right? In an MMO, however, this is common (bad) practice.

Lets do the goals/obstacles list that we did for Mario, except this time for a KTX quest.

• Goals
• Kill 10 cows
• Obstacles
• Cows fight back/have health
• Tools and Methods
• You can attack the cows. You have health to withstand their attacks.

So a KTX quest has obstacles and goals. That's good, right? Well yes, except that these are fundamental concepts of most MMOs. So... a KTX quest could be useful at level one, to show players that they can fight and kill things. After that, a KTX quest just becomes showing the player what they already know. On top of that, there are better ways to show players how to play the fundamental parts of your game than to implement it in to a quest.

So we want to get rid of these KTX quests, but quite obviously, there are only so many ways you can interact with an MMORPG, and combat is one of the biggest ones.

The solution is to take the killing of monsters and remove them from the goal list and put them into the obstacles list. Instead, save goals for more tangible things that better represent the narrative of the game.

Cows are a weak example, so lets shift gears to bandits. A quest could say "Kill 10 Bandits" but we'd get the same issue of shallow goals and obstacles as we had with cows. Instead, lets ask ourselves why we should be killing bandits to begin with, because that will reveal our real goal. What if we make the goal "Escort the caravan to the village." Well we have a goal, but what's preventing us from getting to the village? What are our obstacles? Bandits, of course!

Guild Wars 2 does a great job of using goals properly. Here, players gather to escort a caravan. Have a guess at what's between them and their destination. Bandits, Centaurs, caved in passes, and all manner of obstacles.

Lets say that a part of our narrative is that highwaymen and bandits are commonplace along the route the caravan has to take. Suddenly, we have a very natural obstacle: bandits want to destroy the caravan and steal the goods. We want to escort the caravan safely. Lets put this into our list format.

• Goal
• Escort the caravan safely to the village.
• Obstacles
• Bandits are in your way (lets just say, roughly 10 of them)
• Tools and Methods
• You can fight the bandits.
• (If your game's mechanics allow) You could pay off the bandits.
• (If your game's mechanics allow) You could persuade the bandits to leave you alone.
• (If your game's mechanics allow) You can choose another route.

The big thing to note here is that by making the NPCs the obstacles, you've given players options about how to deal with them. When they are the objective, your player has no choice in what they do to reach the goal: the player is forced into killing them. If they're the obstacle, you can deal with them in a variety of ways.

There are also several bonuses to looking at quests in this way. The first of such is that design is easier to implement. You don't have to think about making sure that there are enough NPCs spawning for everybody to fulfill their quests. You don't have to think about kill triggers which update quest objectives and the whole management behind that. You can implement and remove quests without having to also rip out population or change the world narrative.

Another huge advantage is how recyclable content becomes. Now I know that the term "recycled content" has a bad connotation to it, but in this case it's a good thing! I can design a zone and populate it entirely without quests, giving it all meaningfulness in ambient dialogue and other ways of immersive design. Then I can implement quests which are goal based, not obstacle based.

A good example of recycling obstacles: Any time you need to visit this cave for quest-related reasons, you'll have to go through the ice imps that guard it.

Now, if I want to go back to that area and develop an NPC's personal narrative, I can very easily do that by simply dropping in a short quest definition and create a meaningful objective. The obstacles are already done for me. Better yet, they're obstacles that would naturally occur within the area.

For a producer, this makes the goal-oriented quest design a godsend, because it means that the designers can quickly implement content over old content and make it feel fresh. With a little bit of dynamic polish in the area and a few quest-context-sensitive spawns, this design can make a world really feel like it breathes organically.

The ultimate reason for thinking about quests as goal-oriented is that it's simply more entertaining for the player. When "Kill the NPCs" is in the goal and not the obstacle, you end up just giving players a dry task list. They get bored, then they stop playing your game, and that's not good for anybody.

Don't make players stop playing your game. Use NPCs as obstacles --  not goals.



Post Script Note: I know I use Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2 examples a lot, but dangit, those people at ArenaNet know what the hell they're doing. Props to them for having such high standards of quest design.

The Art of an Online World

I believe that videogames are art. Even games which do not appear to be art, actually are. They are, simply by the fact that they were created by a human being. Now, that's a whole different philosophical argument that I'll leave alone for now. The big takeaway here is that games are art, however, just art is very different from good art.

Are video games art?

Additional to that, I prescribe to an art as classical thinkers would have thought of it. In a sentence, art is a mirror of reality. Reality, is beautiful, and therefore art is as beautiful as far as it can accurately reflect reality. Here’s a quick side-note to clarify what I mean: the amazing thing about art being a mirror of reality is that you can use fantastic things to reflect reality more clearly than “realistic” or “modern” art could. Fantasy can be an embodiment of invisible realities, which can make them easier to grasp and understand.

Another thing, beauty classically has three things: wholeness (or complete), proportion (or harmony), and radiance. I believe that good videogames have these three things.

And lastly, a game is really just a vehicle for an experience. A better way to say it is that a game designer doesn’t so much design a game, as much as they design a room for experience to take place. The real art behind the videogame is understanding that the designer cares about the experience more than they care about the game.

Given these premises (which for now, I am just asking you to take at face value), I’ve come to realize that most games suck. Especially games that I like the most: MMOs. Almost all MMOs, by definition, are deprived forms of their natural self.

The basis for my premise is that most MMOs (or the room for experience they create) don’t agree with themselves. In other words, they lack harmony (one of the three attributes of beauty). A man much greater than I has pointed this out in other games and didn’t really talk about MMOs, but what I subscribe to you is that MMOs also suffer from the sort of conflict which Jonathan Blow has spoken about.

Much of the conflict arises from the misunderstanding between narrative and story (and I’ll note that when Mr Blow speaks of “story” in the above video, that is equivalent to what I call “narrative”). A narrative, is that Mario found a note which was presumably signed by Peach and promised to him a delicious cake if he came to visit her. The narrative continues when you discover that Bowser is actually behind everything and you must once again, save the princess.

A perfect example of narrative in video games.

Story transcends that. Story takes place in the mind of the player. Story is moulded more by design decisions than it is by narrative decisions. Story is also molded by the decisions the player makes. This is why a developer does not design a single experience, but rather, a room for experience. In other words, a developer designs a room in which the player can experience a story (which may or may not be supported by a narrative).

To give you a better idea of what I mean when I say "story". In the game of Tetris there is story. When the player comes oh so close to a game over and somehow miraculously manages to save himself and go on for another two levels and beat his high score, that's a story. Why is it a story? By the simple fact that a human experienced it.

Oh yea. Lots of narrative going on there.

Every MMO today has a very clear and solid narrative. However, the design of an MMO suggests that there should be a greater emphasis on the story, rather than the narrative. What a persistent world design begs for is that the players create their own story by living it out, rather than participating in a static narrative.

Why do MMOs have this inherent conflict? When you consider that MMOs have their roots in tabletop RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons, it becomes very obvious why a developer would have always thought that an MMO needs a narrative — and absolutely never questioned why.

ArenaNet, the creators of Guild Wars, saw this conflict when they created the first Guild Wars game. They decided early on that the MMO design doesn’t agree with itself. How do you have personal quests in a globally impacted world? You get a ton of design issues and conflicts that you have to work around. Trust me: all I do is quest design for an MMO. Part of creating quests is making sure that one person doing the quest won’t ruin another person’s progress in it. Quests are an attempt to create a solo experience in a multiplayer world. It just isn’t harmonious.

Guild Wars took the opposite route and made a game that was heavily instanced, so that the solo (or limited multiplayer) experience was preserved and made sense according to the design. When they approached Guild Wars 2, they wanted to solve the issue by taking the opposite direction: fully persistent, but get rid of quests.

Even Guild Wars 2 heavily relies on a personal narrative.

Even so, I don’t think Guild Wars 2 has quite figured it out (although it’s a huge step in the right direction toward a harmonious game design).

I bring this up because of the aspirations of ThatGameCompany in the online world sphere of game design. If you follow ThatGameCompany and their job postings, you’ll know that they’re interested in facing the challenge of creating an online world that fits with their design style of evoking emotion within players.

So what makes me think that ThatGameCompany can do an online world different than has already been done? Well the first is that their games tend to not have a narrative (or at least, it takes a backseat to the experienced story). When you have a studio that has no ancestry in the narrative-driven tabletop RPG industry, I think that approaching the concept of an “online world” will yield vastly different results.

Journey was ThatGameCompany's first step into multiplayer games.

I have no idea what those results might be. I am simply excited to see what they will find. And really, it’s something I would like to try as a designer and see what I come up with. Moreover, I encourage anybody to give it their best shot and come up with something unique that will blow me (and the rest of the world) away.

No Magic Here - The Recipe to Success in the Game Industry

I recently started teaching myself C#. My first bit of meddling into anything related to programming was Javascript when I was 16 years old or so. Because I started with a scripting language, I was always kind of terrified of "real" programming. It was when you just stay in Kakariko Village when you play Zelda Ocarina of Time instead of moving on to Death Mountain. Maybe not all of you did this, but I did when I was a kid. Death Mountain terrified me, and somehow I thought that if I just stayed in Kakariko Village, the game would magically complete itself or something.

When I went to college, I was forced to take some Objective-C courses. That was cool and all and I enjoyed it. I liked how it was very similar to scripting. I didn't really have to think of it as "programming". Now, very late in my college education, I'm teaching myself C#, and using a very lite physics engine as my project to learn on.

When I talk to other game students or game designers (ones who aren't into programming), I say "I'm working on a 2D physics engine in XNA." Their response is usually to be completely blown away. "WOOOAH! That's so cool!" They treat me like some sort of magician or wizard who holds the secret to the universe. My reaction, almost always goes like this: "Yea... I guess... I mean it's not that big of a deal."

And the reality is that it's not a big deal. Once you understand a few basics of programming and how game loops work, everything else is just a problem to be solved, and the language is the tools to accomplishing that. In the case of my physics engine, the problems go something like "I need to mimic actual physics. Such as, when something is in motion, it stays in motion until something else acts against it." That's high school Newtonian physics, people, not rocket science or brain surgery.

I had only been lightly thinking about how it isn't really that hard to be successful or do something great. I've had conversations with my fiance about it (whom, by the way, thinks that what I do is rocket science) and read a blog post or two about it (shout out to Mike Birkhead). Ultimately, it all comes to "just do it" (Nike had something right).

Now I can preach this until I'm blue in the face, but the reality is that I don't often "just do it." Today, I woke up at 10:12am, despite my alarm going off at 8:45am. Why did I sleep in? I was lazy. I didn't have a "just do it" mentality. Wanna know how long it's been since I worked on my physics engine? I can make excuses all I want. I'm a full-time student and part-time intern at a large game development company. Where would I have the time to work on my physics engine?

Alright, I'll tell you. It's been at least five days since I worked on it. That's horrible, especially when I spend a good amount of time just sitting and reading twitter, facebook, or articles about the game industry. And really, a lot of people do this. They sit. They read. They observe. They say, "I'll do it tomorrow," and then say it again when tomorrow rolls around.

But maybe today, sitting and reading twitter has been a good thing. I follow a particular game designer named Jonathan Blow. If you know anything about the indie industry, you'll know who that is. He recently had a twitter conversation with someone who asked him about the making of Braid. Since I'm not cool enough to implement twitter conversations into my blog posts like all the cool kids, I'll just transcribe it for you guys. I know it's not the most readable it could be, but you get the idea.

@Raticide: @Jonathan_Blow Hi. I love Braid. Do you have plans to open source it when it's run its course?
@Jonathan_Blow: @Raticide So far, not really. Mostly because I am not sure how it would help anything.
@Raticide: @Jonathan_Blow Mostly I'm just curious how you built the engine :)
@Jonathan_Blow: @Raticide By putting my butt in a chair and typing code.
@Raticide: @Jonathan_Blow I meant from a technical point of view. No worries though. I'll look at some open source games that are around.
@Jonathan_Blow: @Raticide But butt-in-chair is way more important than whatever style details you might see in whatever code.
@Raticide: @Jonathan_Blow True. I guess I'm too impatient :) I'll experiment and see what works.

When I reflect on how I started my physics engine to begin with, Blow's point is dead on. Sit your butt in a chair, in front of a computer, and start typing code. What's that? You don't know how to program? I know another indie developer who can help you with that.

Watch this. It's a technical postmortem for Fez, a recently released indie game for XBox Live Arcade. Watch the entire thing if you want (I encourage it), but for the purpose of this post, skip to the end (~50 minutes in) where he is answering questions. Someone asks him what resources he would use to address issues he didn't know how to do. What was his answer? Basically, when you've got something you don't know how to do, Google it.

So, back to the earlier issue where you don't know how to program. Close Facebook. Close Twitter. Close YouTube. Turn on Pandora/Spotify or whatever you do to get yourself in a working mood and start Googling stuff. If you want to make a physics engine, I suggest that you google "Newtonian Physics." That's what I did. Want to know how to perform collision detection? Google it. Want to understand game loops? Google it. Delta time? Google it. How a Vector2 works? Google it. How to use matrices on a 2D Cartesian coordinate system? Google it. What's the difference between velocity and speed? Google it.

I've Googled all these things. And now that my physics engine is ready for objects to react when colliding against each other, I've got more Googling to do. I've got more "Butt-In-Chair" to do. I've got more "typing code" to do.

And the most comforting thing about it all? That's all it takes. A little butt-in-chair, a couple Google searches, and just a dash of critical thinking. No magic here, folks. The recipe to success is really that simple.

Additional Note:

I thought it'd be nice to share some of the resources I've found helpful, that perhaps others would enjoy as well.
C# Crash Course: http://rbwhitaker.wikidot.com/c-sharp-tutorials
Simple Collision Detection: http://paulbourke.net/geometry/insidepoly/
Classical Mechanics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_mechanics#Position_and_its_derivatives
XNA Reference Library: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb203940.aspx
And of course: https://www.google.com/