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Lewis Pulsipher
United States
Linden
North Carolina
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Thoughts about some game-related topics that are not long enough for separate blog posts.
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I will be at PrezCon in Charlottesville, VA from Thursday through Sunday. I'm scheduled to give a talk and question/answer session about game design at 9PM Friday.
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We've been talking about depth in games, and how games and gamers have changed. The following quote from Dame Eileen Atkins, a famous British stage actress ("Dame" is the female equivalent of "Sir"), provides some backup for what I've been saying, from an entertainment realm other than games. She was talking to a newspaper writer in New York in October 2003, more than eight years ago now:
"In England, as here, there are always two kinds of audiences: the Royal Shakespeare and the West End. In the last 10 years, audiences have been changed by television. One can tell: people don't concentrate and they expect lighter fare - and I do hate disappointing the audiences. One lady came up to me afterwards here [NY], very complimentary, and then she said 'Well, this is terribly heavy.' And I thought 'Oh dear, you think this is heavy? Because it isn't, it's just serious.'"
Gameplay depth, which requires concentration and planning and some attention to detail, tends to be "terribly heavy" entertainment these days.
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"Copy-cat" games--direct, blatant clones--are a big problem in the video game industry, especially the small games popular on Apple iOS. For example see http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2012-02-06-apple-remov... . Long ago, Diplomacy was cloned in Brazil (with the addition of a supply center somewhere in the south, I think). I recall seeing an ad a couple years ago for a game called something like "Tetris the Strategy Game" that was clearly a blatant copy of Blokus, but I don't follow publishing closely enough to hear of other examples of cloning. Is cloning becoming a problem on the tabletop?
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5th edition D&D is supposed to unify the editions so that players can customize the game to suit their tastes, whatever edition they prefer. But I notice that to comment on Monte Cook's discussions, you must be a subscriber to D&D Insider, so people who aren't 4e fans (Insider subscriptions are for 4e players) are excluded.
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"Multiplayer solitaire" is usually a case of a puzzle that's been turned into a contest. A contest is any activity that can be timed or assigned points, or measured in some other way (as in how far a coin falls from a wall or how far one can throw a baseball). If two or more people try to beat one another's performance in this, and have no way to hinder or help other participants, then you have a contest. Another example, type for five minutes and whoever types the most words wins the contest.
Races are much like contests, but include some method (if only blocking) to hinder an opponent.
Contests, in and of themselves, are not games. There is no design involved. Games and puzzles require design.
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For generals and admirals, war is a lot of risk-taking in the face of high uncertainty. There's sometimes a strong element of "yomi", reading the intentions of the other side and taking advantage of that. Chess, in contrast, is full of certainty, with nothing hidden other than the intentions of the other player.
This is one of the big problems with wargames: if they truly reflect conditions in war, they're games with a lot of chance and yomi, and that's not what some game players want. I was attracted to Stalingrad and Afrika Korps, 50 years ago, because I was able to have some control over what went on, it was something like war but also something like chess. It was "strategic". But it wasn't anything like a real war. (Of course, you can say NO boardgame is going to be anything like a real war . . .)
As Patrick Carroll says, "Chess players have the advantage of lots of 'live practice.' Generals don't. There just aren't enough wars. Of course, this relates to the issue of friction, that study does not equal reality. "
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Someone tweeted "sometimes I feel like @lewpuls just doesn't like euro games, and he tries to justify this by denigrating them."
Say what? Obviously I don't care for them as a category. No, I don't have many good things to say about them. Yet I certainly have no need to "justify" my dislike, any more than I need to justify dislike of coconut or extremely horrific movies or regular-season baseball. Did the poster assume that Euros are "good" and anyone who dislikes them has to justify being "ungoodthinkful", as Orwell would say?
The odd thing is that some people (not necessarily this tweeter) take it personally. If you like the kinds of games you like, what the hell do you care what someone else says? I don't frenetically blast away as Michael Barnes used to (eloquent as he could be), I try to explain. But not over and over when someone is convinced that I'd like the games if I just really understood them. I do understand them, and I don't like them, *as a category*. They do not supply what I am looking for in games, in fact for me many of them are much closer to puzzle-contests than to games. I don't much like puzzles.
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I received a PDF of McFarland's spring 2012 catalog listing my book "Game Design: How to Create Video and Tabletop Games, Start to Finish". I'm guessing it will be out in spring or summer; at this point I have not received galleys nor have I made the index. Web site at http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/book-2.php?id=978-0-7864-6952-9 .
Why would you read a book? When I was a kid in the 50s and 60s, as for generations before, a book was a treasure trove of information, something to be read carefully and absorbed as much as possible. While the book is no longer the absolute treasure trove, it still organizes information in an easily digestible form. But more important, a book can convey the experience of the author to the reader, and if that experience is valuable then this is something the reader won't get anywhere else. A major purpose for me in writing the book is to help beginning game designers avoid the "school of hard knocks" that I had to go through, applying my experience in teaching novice game designers as well.
Nowadays people are much less impressed by books because there are so many other sources of information, but if you really want to learn about something in depth a good book is probably the best way to do it other than having an experienced person teach you directly.
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The Web and computing in general have brought about a mindset that "digital should be free". Fortunately tabletop gaming is relatively immune to this, because a tabletop game is a very tangible product. But what will happen in the long run with video games, especially now that so many are free-to-play? Will the "digital should be free" mindset ultimately drive many of the AAA video game makers out of the AAA business because they won't be able to successfully charge $60 or so for a game? If it does happen, that won't necessarily be a Good Thing, but market forces often cause Bad Things to happen.
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I was the guest on the Ludology podcast #26 about epic tabletop games (not about the video game company). It was posted Feb 19 (find it on BGG or search for "Ludology podcast site"). Ludology is the only podcast I listen to, because it's about "the why of games", not about new games or community chit-chat or fanboyism.
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I am gradually extracting my old articles from various game magazines to compile three novel-sized books. Often because of poor scanning or weak OCR I have to make quite a few corrections so I'm reading some of it as I go along. It's always interesting to read something that you wrote as much as three decades before, though I'm glad to say that I usually agree with myself. :-) Most of what I'm working on is RPG material and I see that much has stayed the same over three decades.
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I need to find a 50-60 year old dictionary and look at the definition of "trial and error". To me it means guessing at a solution, trying it, and then if it doesn't work, guessing at another and trying--until you get lucky and guess right. But dictionary definitions now are broad enough that the scientific method, which is quite different from guessing, could be called trial and error. Someone suggested the substitute phrase "guess and check", so that's what I'll try to use from now on. "T&E" appears to be yet another phrase whose meaning has changed significantly over time.
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Lewis Pulsipher
United States
Linden
North Carolina
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What are the fundamental functional differences between boardgames and card games? I’m not sure how important this question is from a game player’s point of view but it’s certainly important for game designers (even for video game designers). The obvious physical format is important, but now that we can convert physical non-electronic games to electronic formats the lines are less clear. More importantly, each type of game emphasizes or encourages different kinds of challenges and gameplay, regardless of the physical format.
It’s also possible to take a game that originated in one format and make something like it in the other format. I have done this with a dungeon delving game and even made a prototype version of Britannia using cards. I believe this happens a fair bit in the Eurostyle games. For example, San Juan is a card game based on Puerto Rico, and so is Race for the Galaxy. But as we’ll see many Eurostyle boardgames do not use a board in the traditional way, for maneuver and location, instead they use the board to keep track of other information. So what is the traditional way?
The most important difference between the two kinds of games is that card games are inherently games of hidden information and boardgames are inherently games of maneuver and location. (When I say location I mean the location of actual pieces, not a representation of some virtual commodity such as the amount of money you have or the amount of victory points. “Location” implies maneuver or placement.)
Card Games
By their nature cards make it easy to hide information. The information is often hidden from all the players, but commonly in card games one player has some information that none of the other players can access: the cards in his hand and what they can be used for and what they can do. Anyone who has played many card games has encountered this usage again and again.
There are exceptions. The traditional card game Bridge is unusual insofar as, after bidding, one player’s cards are revealed (the dummy). And this tells the Dummy’s partner what cards his opponents have, though not which individual opponent has which cards. Texas Hold ‘em is another card game where some of the information is revealed to everyone and only two cards per player are hidden from the other players. But Five Card Draw poker hides all the cards, sometimes even after the game ends.
Hobby card games such as Bang!, Atlantic Storm, Brawling Battleships, and Lost Cities have hands of cards but some cards are placed on the table so that they can affect everyone in the game.
Boardgames
Most really old traditional board games are games location and maneuver-mancala, chess, checkers, Nine Men’s Morris, Parcheesi, backgammon, Go, and Japanese/Chinese forms of chess. In some of these games there is only placement (and removal) of pieces, for example in Go. In others the initial placement is predetermined and the game is all about maneuver, as in chess or checkers. There are few games that include both placement and maneuver.
Notice that few of these old games use dice. Dice provide uncertainty within a range of possibilities, a kind of hidden information but not the same kind as we get with cards. Dice were the typical way to provide uncertainty before games could include cards. Handmade playing cards first entered Europe in the late 14th century. The technology to make uniform decks of cards did not exist until the invention of printing, so the really old traditional games do not use cards.
Card games are probably more popular than boardgames for a variety of reasons. First they’re less expensive, second they tend to take less time to play, third they can be more colorful than boardgames because of the artwork on each card. Most important perhaps, the hidden information tends to make it harder for a planner-style player to dominate play, introducing elements of uncertainty and chance that make it possible for a less calculating player, or perhaps I should say one who is less a classical/planner player, to win a minority of the time. Another way to put this is that casual players have a better chance of winning in hidden information games than in games of perfect information, most traditional boardgames being perfect information games.
Hybrids
It is possible to use cards to create the equivalent of a board, but then we have something that is functionally a boardgame not a card game. I have done this in two prototypes were my objective was to make a game with only cards as components (to simplify production), yet I wanted to have maneuver and location. Many games that now use cardboard tiles to create a board on the table would once have used cards for the same purpose. While we might think of these as boardgames, such as Settlers of Catan and Betrayal at House on the Hill, they could have been produced with cards, and in the latter game the tiles are used to hide information in the same way that cards hide information before they are drawn from a deck. Tikal and Carcassonne do the same kind of thing. Settlers uses the board for placement, Betrayal uses it for maneuver, Carcassonne uses the “board” as the unit of placement rather than placing pieces on a board.
In a boardgame location and maneuver tend to dominate play. Chess, checkers, backgammon, even Parcheesi, are games of maneuver. Hex and counter wargames are typically games of maneuver, though we also have combat and chance elements in dice rolling. Monopoly is not a game of maneuver because you have no control over where you go, but there is the element of location. In Tic-Tac-Toe (Noughts and Crosses) you don’t actually move pieces once you put them on the board but where you put them is vitally important.
Race games (getting to a finish line before anyone else) are generally about maneuver and location, whereas speed contests (something is timed individually and best time wins) are not.
You can introduce an element of hidden information into boardgames, of course. This is not new. More than a century ago we had a variation of chess called Kriegspiel where each player could only see his own pieces and a referee told a player when an opposing piece took his piece or checked his King. While the phrase “block games” tends to put one in mind of the wargames published by Columbia Games, the technique goes back at least to the game L’Attaque patented in 1909, more familiar in the copycat game Stratego. The Columbia games add dice and more complex boards to the equation but the key element is hiding some of the information that normally is exposed everyone in a boardgame.
Flat (cardboard/chipboard) pieces that are placed face down introduce another element of hidden information.
In contrast to typical boardgames, many Eurostyle games include boards that are not used for maneuver or even for location. The board is used to help keep track of other kinds of information. Player layouts for tracking amounts of virtual commodities are small boards. But even in games with larger boards, the board may not represent location or present opportunities for maneuver. Kingsburg is an example.
Actual warfare is a combination of hidden information and maneuver, among other things. Given the prominence of maneuver in warfare, it’s not surprising that board wargames are much more common than card wargames.
Games that are neither type
There are many games that are not primarily either hidden information games or location and maneuver games. Some Euro games that have lots of parts and cards and boards are primarily games of resource management– Puerto Rico for example. There is neither maneuver nor much hidden information, though there is uncertainty. Resource management depends on hidden information and uncertainty. Uncertainty can come from many places, but mainly comes from the players, hidden information, or dice or other random elements (which cards can also provide).
Auction games aren’t really either type, though they lean toward hidden information more than location and maneuver. You can argue that resource management comes down to set collection, just as auction games do.
Further afield we have games of deduction (which is largely about hidden information, though Clue/Cluedo includes location and maneuver as well). It might be nice if we could pigeonhole all games into a very few slots like “hidden information”, “resource management”, “location and maneuver”, and “auctions”. But I don’t think this is practical, at any rate I see too many exceptions to almost any set of categories at this point.
Collectible card games are largely about hidden information, though some have an element of location (cards face up on the table) just as some traditional card games do.
Tabletop RPGs involve both maneuver and hidden information in abundance. They are closer to video games than to either board or cardgames.
Competition in board and card games
It's fashionable in the hobby tabletop game industry to produce "Eurostyle" games that reduce direct conflict between players to a minimum. They are often more like puzzles that have been turned into speed contests, not games, and "multi-player solitaire" is a common description of many tabletop games. Wargames, on the other hand, emphasize competition and confrontation, of course.
Mark Johnson suggested in a recent "Ludology" podcast that card games are less competitive than boardgames. Is that so, and why? I think it is. Because boardgames are naturally about maneuver and location, they tend to involve more direct interaction than cards, where you can play cards onto the table and do very little to affect other players. Traditional boardgames tend to involve tearing down the opposition, not building up, you start with some pieces and lose them as the game goes along. (Even in Go, where you add pieces to the board, you're taking your opponent's pieces as well. Go is not much like other traditional boardgames, in any case.) Traditional card games usually involve building up sets or tricks. You start with nothing but a hand of cards and gradually build up your position.
In more-than-two-sided boardgames the system of maneuver and location often means that you are not able to attack/hinder all the opponents, because some are too far away. In more-than-two-sided card games you do have a player on your right and on your left, and the rules may allow you to attack only those players, or "anyone".
Video Games
We can ask what the nature of video games is in comparison to card and boardgames. First, it’s relatively easy to make a computer game where most of the information is hidden from the player or players, a card game characteristic. When you program a video game you have to deliberately decide to show information to the player, or he’ll know nothing.
That information can be shown on the equivalent of a board, though the board can be rather more complex than a physical board. Pac-Man is a quintessential game of maneuver, as is Space Invaders. Civilization uses a board, a square grid through Civilization IV and a hex grid in Civilization V (version V generally exhibits a greater influence from board wargames).
Many “strategy” video games appear to be games of maneuver, for example Starcraft and Civilization. Hidden information is also quite dominant. But there are so many layers of production and technology involved that these games are more about resource management than either maneuver or hidden information. When cut down to a simple version as a social network game, Civilization becomes almost entirely a resource management game.
A video platformer is a game of maneuver. An old-style text adventure game is a game of hidden information. Yes there is more to both, especially to the old-style adventures, but these are the major delineations.
The abstract game Tetris is a game of maneuver much more than a game of hidden information. Bejeweled is a game of location and maneuver insofar as you move gems in order to cause groups of gems to disappear. Shooters are games of location and maneuver as well as games of hidden information.
What video games are particularly good at is combining the two major elements of board and card games together as in shooters and real-time or turn-based strategy games.
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Lewis Pulsipher
United States
Linden
North Carolina
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One of the disadvantages of writing articles for magazines, such as “Against the Odds,” is that it can be literally years from the time it is submitted to the time it is published. I recently sent ATO an article about different kinds of war related games, and I’m going to briefly categorize its 4,000 words in 400.
I will not respond to any comments here, sooner or later the full article will be published.
Joe Angiolillo’s taxonomy of war related games:
● Games about war
● Wargames
● Simulations
Games about war
● no connection with reality
● symmetric
● no variation in terrain and units
● no representation of actual or even fictional events
● no attempt to tell a story
Games such as Conflict, Risk and Chess fall into this category.
Wargames
● asymmetric
● variation in terrain and units
● real or fictional event is depicted
● there is an explicit story involved (remember "story" is part of hisSTORY)
Simulations
● wargames taken to an extreme
● term papers with board and pieces and no concern for play balance
● more or less forces particular outcomes in order to match history
Now a different distinction, between war game (two words) and battle game:
War game
● the heart is economy
● ultimate objective is to improve your economic capacity and destroy the enemy's
● for two players, occasionally for more than two
● cover years or even centuries
● territory usually equates to additional forces, following the age-old principle that land equals wealth
● more likely to use areas (like a normal map)
● generally large-scale and strategic
Battle game
● no economy, instead an order of appearance
● ultimate objective is to destroy opposing units because they cannot get more
● intermediate objective (e.g. territorial, or even “capture the king”) as a victory avoids much of the tedium of destroying units
● almost always for two players
● usually cover a few days to a year or so
● territory is only useful for the terrain and geopolitical implications
● usually maneuver-focused, and often use a hex or square grid
● generally smaller scale and tactical/grand tactical
Finally another category:
Conquest games (Risk, History of the World, Vinci/Smallworld)
● can be either war or battle game, usually war
● are usually in Joe’s “Games about war” category
● very few "realistic" or real world restrictions on what you can do--"freedom to do whatever you want"
● attacker can always get the upper hand (odds favor those who attack-attack-attack), so it’s not strategically wise to play defensively
● usually symmetrical
● typically large scale
● combat typically very simple
● particularly attractive type of game related to war for those who aren’t hobby gamers
Take it as it is, please, I am not at liberty to discuss it further.
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Lewis Pulsipher
United States
Linden
North Carolina
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When someone says a game is "elegant", what do they mean? I'm not sure, so I've done a bit of investigating.
Is it used much? In my Info Select database, which includes my own notes about game design and teaching, and material that I've scraped off the Internet about those same topics in the past seven years, there are 84 notes containing the word "elegant" and another 34 containing "elegance". Clearly the term is used a lot in conversations and writing.
What about dictionary definitions of the word?
dictionary.com
el·e·gant adjective
1. tastefully fine or luxurious in dress, style, design, etc.: elegant furnishings.
2. gracefully refined and dignified, as in tastes, habits, or literary style: an elegant young gentleman; an elegant prosodist.
3. graceful in form or movement: an elegant wave of the hand. [my emphasis]
4. appropriate to refined taste: a man devoted to elegant pursuits.
5. excellent; fine; superior: an absolutely elegant wine.
Synonyms: 1. See fine. 2. polished, courtly. [my emphasis]
World English Dictionary
elegant — adj
1. tasteful in dress, style, or design
2. dignified and graceful in appearance, behaviour, etc
3. cleverly simple; ingenious: an elegant solution to a problem [my emphasis]
Wikipedia
Elegance is a synonym for beauty that has come to acquire the additional connotations of unusual effectiveness and simplicity. It is frequently used as a standard of tastefulness particularly in the areas of visual design, decoration, the sciences, and the esthetics of mathematics. Elegant things exhibit refined grace and dignified propriety. [my emphasis]
So could we say, for games: "A solution to a design problem that is seen as ingenious or cleverly simple, polished, and effective?"
At some point I wondered what the difference is between "elegant" and "clever"? For me, something can be clever without being worth doing; something that is elegant is likely worth doing. So I might see a game and say "that's a clever juxtaposition of mechanics", and still not think the game was worth bothering with. I would tend to think of games that model something in interesting or intriguing ways as elegant, whereas games that don't model something may only be clever.
So one man's clever may be another man's elegant.
clev·er
adjective, -er, -est.
1. mentally bright; having sharp or quick intelligence; able.
2. superficially skillful, witty, or original in character or construction; facile: It was an amusing, clever play, but of no lasting value.
3. showing inventiveness or originality; ingenious: His clever device was the first to solve the problem.
4. adroit with the hands or body; dexterous or nimble.
Synonyms
ingenious, talented, quick-witted; smart, gifted; apt, expert.
There is no Wikipedia entry for the word "clever".
A last expression of the idea of elegance, from the point of view of design:
"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." --Antoine de Saint-Exup'ery
When you achieve this "perfection", you also achieve elegance.
So what do you mean when (if) you describe a game, or part of a game, as "elegant"?
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Lewis Pulsipher
United States
Linden
North Carolina
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Recently I came across a new cooperative game related to Fourth edition (4e) Dungeons & Dragons, Castle Ravenloft. The game lets each player act as a novice 4e character, complete with hit points, armor class, and at-will, utility, and daily powers. There are replayable scenarios for 1 to 5 players, with the opposition governed by simple rules related by cards drawn from specific decks.
For $50 the contents of the box are quite impressive. There are several dozen unpainted plastic miniatures in various colors representing the five player characters, undead, typical dungeon denizens, a flesh golem, and the huge dracolich. There is a large stack of roughly 4 x 4" heavy cardboard interlocking dungeon tiles. There are several decks of cards. And there are lots of other heavy cardboard pieces such as hit point markers and character cards.
Gameplay in Castle Ravenloft is very tactical and decisions offer only a few choices. To a considerable extent you can say the same thing about 4e D&D, though the intelligent opposition from a referee ought to make a huge difference. When the opposition amounts to what the monster(s) do when you draw cards the simplicity is not surprising. The number of hit points for each character is much lower than in actual 4e D&D (e.g. 6 for the wizard), and each hit point is represented by a cardboard marker. You can customize your character though your choice of powers. There are five different classes, but no way for a group to have two of the same class. You can even gain second level, though this is unusual.
When you fight a monster it generally inflicts two hits when it succeeds and one hit when it misses. Everyone on a tile fights all the monsters, and all take damage, so there isn’t maneuver doesn’t amount to much, other than which tile you’re in. If you move to the edge of the “board” you draw a tile and one kind of card to see what you encounter; if you are anywhere else (probably fighting a monster) you draw a different kind of card. Adult players can be frustrated because some of the cards simply inflict damage on everyone, regardless of location. This moves the game toward a conclusion, but does not seem “fair” or real.
The party has two healing surges, plus some of the characters have healing powers. The game ends when one of the characters in the party dies and there is no healing to bring them back into the game, or when the objective (such as unmaking the Draclich) is achieved.
A five player scenario takes more than an hour.
Cooperative games without human opposition have become quite popular. I’m sure there are many reasons for this, but one is that such games are essentially puzzles, and they rarely have much gameplay depth to them (as is often the case with puzzles), so players don’t have to concentrate/think hard, even if they’re playing solo. And of course when they’re playing with several other players then the truism “two heads are better than one” means they have to think even less.
I suspect this game is aimed at non-adults, though I saw it at a college game club. It looks great but there really isn’t much to it. Like many games nowadays it offers variety but not depth. Compared to real D&D there’s little if anything to recommend it, other than no need for a referee/DM. Those who have never played a fantasy RPG may well find it much more interesting than those who have.
It’s a cooperative game. It’s good-looking, and clever for what it is. But what it is, is a game for 10-15 year olds, or for adult game players who want to play a youth-like game, for adults more a time-waster than a mental exercise.
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Lewis Pulsipher
United States
Linden
North Carolina
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According to a recent tweetdeck, one of the trending:worldwide topics on twitter was 6 word stories. In the past few months I've asked people to say 6 words about game design, programming, wargames, and casual games.
This time the charge is this: say six words about stories in games (or stories and games, if you prefer).
Sat Jan 14, 2012 10:34 pm
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Lewis Pulsipher
United States
Linden
North Carolina
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Recently I was discussing via blog posts what depth is in games ( http://gamasutra.com/blogs/LewisPulsipher/20111219/9125/What... and elsewhere), and then ran across a discussion of how role-playing games have changed since D&D was first published
( http://shirosrpg.blogspot.com/2011/12/i-weep-for-newbs.html#... ). I’ve realized that there is a connection between the two, that what gamers are looking for in games has changed in a fundamental way in the past 30-40 years.
That fundamental change is that 30-40 years ago many hobby game players looked for gameplay depth (and occasionally narrative depth) in their games. Now most game players don’t look for gameplay depth but look instead for variety, which is quite a different thing. Many more people now also look for narrative in their games, but I’m not sure whether they’re looking for narrative depth or narrative variety. Game playing has become much more passive where long-term decision-making is concerned, and that's incompatible with gameplay depth. Yes, there's lots of activity in many kinds of video games, and short-term decision making, but the decisions and choices often don't really matter in the long run.
Variety tends to lead to replayability, but game depth also leads to replayability. So they are two paths to the same objective, getting people to play the game over and over again.
Is variety "bad?" Certainly not. Is gameplay depth "good?" Not in and of itself, though it's what I have tended to look for in over 50 years of game playing. Regardless of my preference, this discussion is a recognition of reality, what IS, not a criticism of the change.
(At this point I hope it's obvious that I'm talking about trends and tendencies, about majorities, not about every hobby game player. Of course there are many, many exceptions in a group as large as ours.)
I’m talking here about hobby gamers, about people who play games frequently as a hobby. Family gamers are a very different group, and have never been people who looked for depth in a game. Nor did they look for variety, 30-40 years ago, their purpose in playing games was and is to socialize with their families and friends.
What do I mean by depth and variety? I’m working on a very long piece discussing gameplay depth and other kinds of depth in games. For our purposes here I'll say that deep gameplay requires players to make many significant decisions, decisions that make a difference in the outcome of the game, and those decisions have multiple viable choices so the player can pick a better choice rather than a worse one, but more than one choice has a good chance to be successful. (A "viable" choice is one that, at least a reasonable part of the time, can lead to success, as opposed to "plausible" but not viable choices that look like they might work out well but rarely if ever will.) There is often an element of emergence in such games, choices (and sometimes decisions) that players don’t even recognize when they first play the game. This is often associated with decision trees, decisions that lead to others that lead to others and so on in a sort of tree shape, that give a good chance of success in the game. Yet perhaps paradoxically, if a game has *too many* decisions and *too many viable choices*, then it loses depth as each individual decision and choice becomes insignificant to the outcome of the whole.
Variety, on the other hand, is doing lots more of the same kinds of actions and related activity without providing additional significant decisions and viable choices. Variety occasionally replace one decision with a different one, or more often replaces a choice or choices with different ones, but the volume of significant decisions and viable choices, and the depth of the decision trees, remains the same. Variety can be added by additional scenarios or levels, variable maps, different character classes, and random events (among others).
How things have changed
So much for brief definition. How (and why) have things changed? 40 years ago we didn’t have video games, nor did we have CCGs, we had board and card games and we had RPGs just about to emerge. The development of RPGs reflects the 30-40 year fundamental change. Many of the players of original, first, and second edition D&D wanted gameplay depth. In third edition D&D the emphasis changed to ways of optimizing characters using a stupendous variety of published classes and skills and feats, a striving to make the perfect one man army for tactical combat. D&D became fantasy Squad Leader. It was much harder to die and in fact the “fear of death” was slowly being removed from the game.
In computer RPGs this was happening much more strongly. If you died then at worst you just loaded your saved game and continued. In many computer MMO (massively multiplayer online) RPGs you don’t even need to save your game, you just respawn and continue. After all, the makers of the MMOs do not have gameplay depth as an objective, their objective is to keep you playing the game as long as possible so that they can collect the monthly fees. (Now monthly fees are much less common because we’ve gone to free to play games, but the objective is still to have people play as long as possible so that they will spend money on virtual goods and other advantages.) In order to retain players, many online video games reward players constantly rather than make them responsible for earning their advancement and advantages. If there’s no responsibility for earning advancement, decisions become much less significant, and choices matter much less. Social networking games have taken this to the extreme. Engagement has replaced gameplay. (See http://whatgamesare.com/2011/04/how-engagement-killed-gamepl... for more.)
Not only responsibility for your actions but the fear of death has been removed from electronic RPGs, and with it most of the gameplay depth has been removed. If it doesn’t really matter whether you die, if you can try again when you fail, then your decisions no longer make a difference to what happens in the long run, so they are no longer significant in the gameplay depth sense. World of Warcraft is a game with so little gameplay depth to it that professional “pharmers” can, in an economically feasible period of time, play characters up to high levels and sell them to other people who don’t want to *bother* to play the game to get to the maximum level. “The grind” characterizes play, and for many people playing the game is “like work.” (See http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/ .) I’ve said that variety has been substituted for depth in games but in WoW there doesn’t seem to be much interest from the players in variety until after you’ve reached maximum level. As characters work their way up there's little interest in the journey, only in the destination of maximum level. For those at max level, variety is essential to maintain interest in the game.
Even at maximum level, big raids amount to characters doing the same thing, their “role” (DPS, healer, etc.), for extended periods of time. By all accounts it’s regimented and repetitively automatic, and does not involve making significant decisions with multiple viable choices.
In some video games we have the phenomenon of “mini-games”, completely different games that have been inserted into the main game for players to play when they get bored of the main game. Again it’s variety that is the attraction, not depth.
The recent fourth edition (4e) of D&D reflects this change of emphasis. Some responsibility is still there, but the fear of death has been almost entirely removed through lots of beginning hit points, healing surges, easy ways to come back into the action when you’ve been incapacitated, cheap healing potions, and so forth. Characters no longer have much capability to gather strategic (or tactical) information through spells. In the past D&D players had to speak in character to gather information, or figure out how to use spells to gather information: now they roll dice. Some of this may derive from video games where the referee–the computer–is nowhere close to smart enough to deal with a wide variety of dialogue and a wide variety of player intentions, so everything is reduced to dialog trees and numbers and dice rolls. 4e is now, in its "natural" form, almost entirely tactical battles without much long-range planning and consequently with very little strategy.
The blog commenters I mentioned above talked about players complaining about secret doors in 4e D&D. This appeared to be regarded as a “nasty DM trick”. As a counter-comment a 4e DM said he didn’t use secret doors because he knew where he wanted his players to go and what he wanted them to do and there was no point in hiding the path. In other words, in a game where variety and linear narrative is the objective then secret doors only get in the way. In a game where gameplay depth is the objective then secret doors can be a differentiator, and the choice to look for secret doors or not look for them can be significant.
RPGs are now arranged much more for players to experience variety, rewards, and winning rather than to experience gameplay depth and the possibility of losing. They are becoming more entertainments (something like movies) than games, if by games we mean something where there’s a significant opposition that requires thoughtful reaction.
I also think it’s much more common in RPGs nowadays that the referee devises a story and makes the players conform to that story. As Monte Cook observed several years ago at Origins, the published tabletop adventures tend to be much more story-based than in the past. The old-style alternative was to set up a situation and let the players make a story rather than forcing them to follow a linear path. In video RPGs, the Japanese/console style has been to force the players to follow along a particular linear story. (The American/PC style is more like WoW.) In fact some people have characterized the famous Final Fantasy series as stories punctuated with repetitive episodes of exploration and combat that make virtually no difference to what actually happens in the stories.
Favorite Games
30-40 years ago most game players had one or a few favorite games, ones that they wanted to play over and over again. This is far less common now. Ask younger gamers, especially video gamers, what their favorite game is and most will be unable to tell you or will simply name the game they’re currently playing. Some are even surprised at the idea of having a favorite game. They want to name a dozen or more as their favorites, if they can narrow it down that far. The very idea of playing a game a hundred times or 500 times (I know people who have played my 4 to 5 hour tabletop game Britannia more than 500 times), or the video game equivalent, playing the same game for many hundreds of hours, is foreign to most contemporary gamers. Many of the younger people who do have a favorite game that they play over and over have settled on Magic:the Gathering or Yu-Gi-Oh. Yet the very nature of CCGs is to change the game over time (providing immense variety) in order to persuade players to buy new cards; sometimes the game rules are changed as well.
Many AAA video games involve a puzzle or a story, and once you solve the puzzle or experience the story there is no reason to continue. Some of the games will give you several different characters to play so that variety is added to the game. But there is little gameplay depth. A game with deep gameplay can be played again and again while revealing new aspects and possibilities. Puzzles tend to be solved, and once solved hold little interest.
This fundamental change may reflect all forms of leisure activity these days. There are many more distractions and many more opportunities for entertainment than 30-40 years ago. Now we have the World Wide Web, we have hundreds of TV networks, we have movies and TV programs on recordable media and available through instant download, we have smart phones and texting and free long distance and iPads and MP3 players and so forth, none of which was available 30 or 40 years ago. People just don’t seem to stick to one thing the way they used to and that applies to games as well as everything else.
Playing a game with deep gameplay usually requires patience and a commitment to planning. These characteristics are in short supply nowadays as people rely on their cell phones to provide both distractions (time killing) and a way to compensate for poor planning or lack of interest in planning.
We have become “entertainment bathers.” Sound/music bathers like to have 1000 or 10,000 songs on their MP3 players but likely don’t listen to any one of the songs very much. (Clearly of an older generation, I can listen to the same song over and over for an hour sometimes, if it’s a really good song; how many young people would even dream of doing that?) Game bathers like to have lots and lots of games to play but don’t play any one of them very much. Variety is the goal. We've become a jaded society.
This is not the only fundamental change over that period. Even among many who want to fully use their brains when playing games, puzzle-solving (which rarely involves gameplay depth, it is a different kind of skill) has displaced gameplay depth. And in the video game world, engagement has tended to replace gameplay as the objective of designers. But those are topics for another time.
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Lewis Pulsipher
United States
Linden
North Carolina
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Recently a student in a video game design curriculum posted a note on the IGDA Game Design SIG about an assignment. The assignment was to describe mechanics for a game and he said his instructor had told him he’d written rules instead, with the result being a poor grade. I generally emphasize to students that the rules for a tabletop game detail the mechanics of the game, so the question became “what is the difference between rules and mechanics.” And as I discussed this privately with the student I saw that part of the possible confusion was the difference between description and specification, between the general and the specific.
From a teaching point of view the problem is that students often describe what they would like a game to do– a wish list--but not how the game is going to do it. (Which is usually because they really don’t have a clue how it’s going to do it.) If you’re writing rules or writing a specifications of game mechanics you have to say how the game is going to “do it.” (See “When you start a game design, conceive a game, not a wish list” http://pulsiphergamedesign.blogspot.com/2011/10/when-you-sta...). A general description is not good enough for tabletop players to play the game, or for game programmers to produce the software.
When you’re conceiving a game you can say that you intend to use such and such mechanic, for example simultaneous movement or combat using a combat table. But when you write rules or specify mechanics, whether in a video game design document or in actual game rules, you’re going to have to go into much more detail (especially about combat). Sometimes the name of the mechanic, such as “simultaneous movement,” can say a lot to experienced game players or video game developers, but there are lots of ways to implement simultaneous movement and your game rules or game design document specifying mechanics must be absolutely clear. That’s hard to do.
When you’re starting a game you begin with what you want the game to do and you need to get to the point of how it’s going to do it. I think there’s an intermediate stage where you’re considering the structure of the game, and that’s where my nine structural subsystems and the essential questions to ask yourself help you bridge the gap between the what and the how. (The latest version of each will be in my forthcoming book about game design, and you can find versions on gamecareerguide.com.) It’s usually hard to simply jump from what you want the game to do directly to the specific mechanisms or even to the categories of mechanisms.
But back to the original question, what is the difference between rules and mechanics? The rules of a game must include details of mechanics so that someone reading the rules understands exactly how the mechanics work. If the rules are complete, they MUST describe the mechanics of the game as well. The mechanics are a subset of the rules. The principle purpose of the rules is to describe how the mechanics work, but usually include other things as well.
By the way, I have seen people confuse what the player does with the mechanics of the game. Mechanics are what the computer enforces, the player’s actions are his choices that interact with the mechanics to provide a result. A tabletop game requires the players to enforce the mechanics as specified in the rules. Player actions to play the game are not mechanics.
But it’s easy to say what a mechanic is NOT. I haven’t even attempted to get into the morass of exactly what a “mechanic” is. I once started to make a list of “all” categories of game mechanics. I quickly discovered as I looked around the Internet to see what other people have done that “mechanics” varies in meaning greatly from one place to another. As I made my list I found many items “on the edges”. In other words it is not clear what a mechanic is and what isn’t. This is compounded by the tendency to use categories instead of specifics when discussing a mechanic. For example, “simultaneous movement” or “roll and move” are categories of mechanics that can be implemented many ways. For example, the latter can be “roll two dice and move your piece forward that many places,” or “roll two dice and move your piece forward or backward a number of spaces equal to one die and then the second” or “roll two dice and move your piece forward the distance equal to one of the dice, or the sum of both”, or “roll two dice and move one piece the distance of each die” and so forth. And those brief phrases (especially the second one--I’m taking shortcuts) may not be sufficiently detailed to be absolutely clear. All four are of the category “roll and move” but each is different from the others. Mechanics are specific, categories are general.
Mechanics must be sufficiently explicit, sufficiently specific, that there can be no misunderstanding. Most take the form of “if situation A exists, player can do (choices),” or, “if player does X, result is Y (with possible multiple possibilities)”, both forms of if:then:else statements. You don’t have to be a programmer to write rules, but you have to be as explicit in the rules as programmers are in their software.
Despite the uncertainty about exactly what a mechanic is, I’m pretty sure there are some things in game rules that are not mechanics. For example there’s usually an introduction, something that gives the player an idea of the context of the game, what in general he’s doing, without referring to any mechanics let alone specifying any. There is also early in the rules a “how to win” section that lets players know the objective of the game but does not necessarily specify all of the mechanics that determine who wins. The actual mechanic(s) of winning are usually at the end of the main section of the rules along with mechanic(s) determining how the game ends. The early sections provide a context for the play of the game, and extend the atmosphere or theme, if any.
A set of rules may also include hints about good play. Finally, a good set of rules will include examples, which are not mechanics but which illustrate how the mechanics work. These sections provide a different kind of context but are still included to help people enjoyably play the game.
Once again, however, the main thrust of rules is to describe exactly the mechanics of the game. You could write a set of rules that only did that but it would seem abrupt to many players and might be difficult for some to grasp. Something that sets traditional classic games apart from most contemporary games is that they have few mechanics and the rules can include only mechanics and still be understood by most gamers.
I think you could argue that the more a game is marketed to people who are not accustomed to playing games, then the more the rules will include information other than mechanics. I thought it quite notable, when I first bought a copy of tabletop Settlers of Catan to find out what made it so popular (this is about 2004-5), that there were two differently-explained sets of rules included to try to help non-gamers understand how to play the game. There was also a table showing the probabilities when rolling two dice, which is an important part of the game. Those probabilities are not part of the mechanics but are a consequence of the mechanics of rolling two dice. Yet for players who don’t understand the probabilities this inclusion probably helped. Once again this is part of the context of playing the game although it’s not part of the story of the game. But as with the story-context, if you understand the probabilities you’ll enjoy the game more and better understand what’s happening.
So we can in summary say that game rules include specifications of mechanics and a description of the context of the game: “how” and “what/why.” That context can include the atmosphere or theme as well as other game-related material.
One of the problems of teaching people to design games is that they really don’t understand how complex game mechanics can become, and so they don’t try to set in their minds exactly what mechanics they’re going to use. After all, most of them are accustomed to video games that enforce the mechanics on the players without effort from the players. If they’ve played traditional tabletop games that “everybody knows how to play” because they grew up with them, they don’t remember misunderstanding how to play the games. So they might think it enough to say that a game uses the risk assessment mechanic. Well, the game player says, “what the heck is the risk assessment mechanic?” Even if the beginning game designer uses a mechanic name that is more informative such as “simultaneous movement” there are still many more questions to be answered.
The result is that when students write rules they very commonly leave out important considerations. But heck, even experienced designers leave out important considerations from early drafts of rules, despite all their experience. So we keep plugging.
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Lewis Pulsipher
United States
Linden
North Carolina
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Periodic notes not individually demanding a separate post:
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I gave four one-hour talks about game design at Origins this past summer. MP3s of the talks, and some wordy slides, are posted on my Web site, along with other MP3s and slides from older presentations. http://pulsiphergames.com/teaching1.htm
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I have two Risk variants that need playtesting (variants of traditional non-mission Risk, not of the 2008 revision). One is "Zombie Risk", where for every two armies the zombies kill, one becomes a zombie, and the other is Barbarian Risk, where a new map is used, and players represent barbarians fighting over the end of the Roman Empire.
If you're interested in playtesting either or both of these, let me know and I'll send you the rules/map electronically.
When I can do no more with them (I can't spend much time developing them, of course, since they're not commercially viable), I'll post them on my Web site and on the Risk section of BGG.
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While dropping off a prescription recently I overheard two senior citizen ladies talking about Farmville and other games. They both averred that if Farmville started to charge a fee, they would no longer play. Although a third person who came by said that in order to finish something, if she had to spend up to $20 she might do it. One of them specifically said you have to be careful not to play such games too much or you might miss out on enjoying a beautiful day like today (which it certainly was).
I found it interesting that these people played, although they were not likely much older than I am (60). It did make me wonder how games like Farmville make money, but I keep in mind that what people say they'll do, and what they actually do, are often two different things. It's also true that only around two percent of players of "social network" games actually spend money doing it.
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Eleanor Roosevelt is quoted as saying "Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people." I'm trying to adapt this to other situations.
This may be harsh, but it started me thinking about ways to adapt this statement to game design and game players. How about:
Great game designers think it's about playtesting and modification, average game designers think it's about planning, weak game designers think it's about ideas.
Great Britannia players think it's about understanding what opponents are trying to do, average Britannia players think it's about measured use of resources, weak Britannia players think it's all about conquering as much as possible.
Great game players think about strategies, average game players think about think about puzzle solutions, weak game players think about being lucky.
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IGDA's Facebook page asked what is the most important characteristic for game developers. My reply was: For game designers, ability to think critically about their own efforts. For programmers, problem-solving. For artists, ability to understand what others (designers) have imagined, but to improve it if possible. And for all, a productive orientation.
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Game titles are sometimes changed by the publisher. My title for Britannia was "The Invasions of Britain". I like the publisher's title better. On the other hand, "Dragon Rage" is my title.
I read that Robert Louis Stevenson called his book that we know as Treasure Island "The Sea Cook", title changed editorially. Another example of a good change.
I called my game design book Learning Game Design. The published title will be “Game Design: How to Create Video and Tabletop Games, Start to Finish". Works for me.
But I'm sure it goes the other way as well, the publisher choosing a less suitable title. I don't know of an example, though. (Magazine article titles are often changed.)
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Dragon Rage was originally published in 1982. Much later, 3DOpublished a video game of the same name for the Playstation 2, though there is nothing in common between the games in actual play. For the Sony game see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Rage
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Many Euro games seem to be treated, by the players themselves, like puzzles to be solved. It's not unusual to see "opponents" suggesting (in a helpful way) what moves a player might make. No wonder Pandemic proved to be so popular.
Fri Dec 23, 2011 12:10 am
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Lewis Pulsipher
United States
Linden
North Carolina
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According to tweetdeck, one of the trending:worldwide topics on twitter is 6 word stories.
I've asked for 6 words about game designers, 6 about programmers, and 6 about wargames, with interesting results. Now I want to ask about another type of game.
Can you say in 6 words what makes casual games interesting--or not? (And you'll have to decide what "casual games" are.)
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