Archive for Design Advice
-
Brett J. Gilbert
United Kingdom
Cambridge
Divinare — Coming from Asmodee 2012!
-
Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.
— Sun Tzu
How does change happen? That’s the question that’s been occupying me, in amongst the many recent playtests of my and other designers’ games. The initial creative spark is remarkable enough, but no game arrives fully formed, and so all games once created go through a process of change. Playtesting is the method we rely on to both initiate and validate those changes, and it is the very blackest of arts.
For one thing, it can be incredibly painful. Reaction to a new game can range from elation to derision or — which is demonstrably worse — indifference. As a designer you have to learn to suffer these slings and arrows and emerge unscathed, even if your game does not. But what happens then? If playtesting reveals that all you ever had was a bad idea, that’s one thing: throw it out and start over. But if playtesting reveals that you gave a good idea a bad execution — signalled by the playtester’s familiar refrain: “I like it, but…” — then the designer’s work is only just beginning.
First, the designer must learn to properly filter the playtesters’ comments: to tease out, as dispassionately as possible, some degree of genuinely objective meaning. And, assuming that’s possible, the designer must then have the gumption to actually do something about it: to embrace change. However, it is the received wisdom about the nature of that change that I would seek to challenge.
The risk is that game design is perceived from the outset as a process of necessarily iterative, evolutionary change: small, inevitable steps taken along a path that, if through nothing more than plain, plodding perseverance, will eventually reach its goal. But this approach, with each step taken to address a detail not the whole, can, perhaps paradoxically, often excise the heart of the game while leaving the surface scarred but intact.
My advice then is this: that radical, truly transformative change is, far more often than not, the only way forward. It will feel unpredictable, unstable, counterintuitive, dangerously uncontrolled, but the simple truth of it is that anything more timid is just death by a thousand cuts.
No, that’s not the truth of it. The truth, as Wilde observed, is never simple. But I see the result of timidity in my own designs and in those of others: I see it as a palimpsest of carefully placed, well-intentioned footprints, each one obscuring a little more precisely that which the designer was seeking to reveal.
Change is necessary; a journey is demanded; and if you take big enough leaps the footprints disappear.
This post also appears on my BrettSpiel game design blog.
Thu Jan 26, 2012 12:24 pm
-
Brett J. Gilbert
United Kingdom
Cambridge
Divinare — Coming from Asmodee 2012!
-
Mēxihco is a strategy tile game in which you play the part of Aztec rulers, competing to develop and protect districts of maize and bean crops, irrigation ponds and city precincts during the rise of the Aztec empire in the Valley of Mexico.
So reads the introduction to my newly written and wholly revised ruleset for the latest incarnation of the game that started out as Terraform (of which more can be found in the BrettSpiel archives). It’s always been a favourite of mine, and I have returned to the design often over the past few years. There are absolutely nothing wrong with Terraform in its final form, a form which Jackson Pope of the erstwhile Reiver Games seriously considered for publication, but the more I went on to design other prototypes, the more I realised that Terraform could be and do something more, and I have since tried out various ideas to elevate and enliven the player experience.
Yesterday was the first playtest of the new Mēxihco and as playtests go, it was a pretty satisfying and reassuring experience, even if probabilistically arresting — but more of that in a moment.
The idea of shifting the theme to something more Earth-bound was the beginning of this process, and the first thing to change was the name. The play involves landscape building and definitely classifies as an ’area control’ eurogame, but the game itself — the core of it — is actually rather more combative than the average eurogame and is really one of constant brinkmanship. My earlier attempts to ‘fix’ the game missed the mark, serving only to stab at its very heart, injuring the thing that made it interesting in the first place: the cycle of tension and resolution. Never forget the good stuff when attempting to exorcise the bad!
Another key aspect of change — which I discussed at length in my Game Design 101: What Are The Odds? article — was changing the timing and tempo of the game by introducing an (appropriately constrained) degree of unpredictability into its progress. The game has a stash of tiles, which the players claim and place to build the landscape. Terraform simply ended when these ran out, which led to flat and anticlimactic endgame. My solution, as discussed in the article although now implemented slightly differently, is to add a small population of special tiles to the main stash. These tiles emerge randomly, but once they’ve all been played the game is over.
With a little bit of combinatorial and permutational maths you can work out the likelihood of any particular number of tiles turning up before the game can end. I’d done the maths and thought I knew what to expect. But the Universe, it seems, likes to solve its own equations and yesterday delivered a result that was roughly a 400-to-1 long-shot. Thanks, Universe!
In a way, this result only goes to show how careful and respectful the game designer must be when dealing with our old friend Lady Luck. Since just one playtest has the capacity to deliver even the most aberrant of outcomes, any game designer without a meaningful understanding of the maths could be easily deceived into thinking either the best or worst of their creation. I am confident I have a handle on the numbers, but to experience what an edge case actually feels like was very useful.
As I said in my original article, when you hand over any aspect of your game to chance you can no longer rule out the genuinely shocking outcome — ‘Everything Not Forbidden is Compulsory’, remember? — but actually, that’s part of the fun. And last night’s playtest managed to reinforce that message while highlighting the value of an almost Orwellian ‘ignorance is strength’ credo. Let go the reins a little and learn to love the chaos!
Plus — and this was a very important aspect of the playtest — my little LEGO Aztec temples did the job very nicely, thank you very much!
This post also appears on my regular BrettSpiel blog, which you are, of course, more than welcome to come visit!
-
Brett J. Gilbert
United Kingdom
Cambridge
Divinare — Coming from Asmodee 2012!
-
In the past couple of days two articles came at me on different vectors, and both of them were about Gabe Zichermann.
A friend emailed me this interview with Gabe on Publishing Perspectives (‘the BBC of the book world’ no less!), and over on Twitter @tiedtiger tweeted this review by Sebastian Deterding of Gabe’s book Gamification by Design.
The interview is short, but quite long enough to tell you everything you need to know about Gabe Zichermann. And the review, though long, is absolutely worth the read, since, as a byproduct of dissecting the book (of which — spoilers! — Sebastian is not a fan), it gives an excellent overview of the entire subject, and includes lots of pointers and references to other material, all of which is hot sauce for the game designer.
And when I say that the interview is ‘quite long enough’, I mean that it contains this singular quote from Gabe:
“The question I posed myself was: Can games be more than mindless entertainment?”
Right. OK. So… you kinda lost me there, Gabe. I mean, what, exactly, is a ‘mindless’ game? Truly, what do you mean? Now look, I’m not saying games can’t be trivial or ephemeral or ‘merely’ entertainment, but mindless? Really? Seriously? That’s what you’ve got? That’s where you started? That’s the predicate for your whole design philosophy?
It’s like wandering through the Louvre and announcing, after having actually stopped long enough to consider your surroundings, “I wonder if art can ever be more than just paint on a wall?”
So I was not — how shall I put this? — predisposed to take up Gabe’s cause when I came up against Sebastian’s book review. But I wasn’t expecting such an exhaustive and well-written take-down either. There’s lots to enjoy in the review — including a shout out for BoardGameGeek! — and I urge everyone who might be reading this to read it too. For one thing, its author is far better read.
I shan’t rehearse Sebastian’s arguments, but here’s my take on them and, by extension, on the tenet of Gabe’s book and on the nature of gamification as a discipline.
Gamification, at least within the terms chosen by those who currently most vociferously define it, seems to assume the smallest, least imaginative reading of human behaviour — and of game design too — and then proposes to do as little as possible to engage with it. Sebastian highlights in his first paragraph that gamification’s been called an ‘inadvertent con’. That’s generous. And I guess it would be a con if it wasn’t so bloody obvious.
I’m no marketer, but I am a consumer, and you know what? I, like the majority of modern consumers, ain’t no fool. Gamification may call upon the cosseted semantics of words like ‘loyalty’ and ‘engagement’ (and these notions are entirely valid metrics for the marketer) but so-called loyalty schemes aren’t really loyalty are they? — not when they’re just an elaborate form of financial coercion. And it’s hardly genuine engagement if it simply relies on behavioural inertia. By all means try and sell me stuff that I don’t want, but let’s not pretend that I am anything less than wholly complicit if I actually turn round and buy it. And if I do, it’s not because I’m acting against my best interests, it’s because I’ve reconfigured my own notion of my best interests to include something previously alien.
Here’s the failure at the heart of gamification: It assumes you can take something that’s actually work — something apparently against my best interests, something I don’t want to do (but that the ‘gamifier’ does want me to do) — and render it a game simply by wrapping it in the language of play. And that then, as if by magic, my relationship with it will be, quite literally, transfigured. And that suddenly, that which I did not want to do — principally: give you money — I shall find myself doing! Not because I want to — no, I shall do these things quite in spite of myself! — but because, well, you know, now it’s a game! Look, it’s got badges and points and scoreboards and everything! And suddenly this thing that I don’t want to do is fun! (It must be, it’s a game!) Oh, look at how much fun it is! Oh happy day!
I’m not that dumb — and I’m optimistic enough to believe that the majority of other people aren’t that dumb either. So if that’s really what gamification is predicated on, if it’s really a ‘price of everything, value of nothing’ proposition, then it’s all just lowest common denominator stuff and (almost) beneath my contempt. It’s an abuse of language, an abuse of intelligence and fundamentally cheap.
And, which is just salt in the wound, it’s got nothing at all to do with game design.
Gamification: Even the word itself has the most grating and inelegant of syntaxes. But it tells you everything you need to know. It tells you that the process is not about creating something actually playful, but about deconstructing something that isn’t, and then artlessly rendering it mechanically similar to something that is. It’s not about making something fun, but about making something that looks like fun. But that’s the huckster’s best offer, I guess; indeed, that’s all they’ve got. It’s snake oil. It’s smoke and mirrors. It’s a pig in a poke.
Scratch that: This time around there’s not even a pig! Gamification is nothing, hidden in plain sight: It’s the emperor’s new clothes.
This post also appears on my regular BrettSpiel blog, which you are, of course, more than welcome to come visit!
|
|
