What every game developer needs to know about story: John Sutherland

Week 10 reading was a Gamasutra article describing to game designers the basics of story, and what is consists of. Throughout the whole article a line was being constantly drummed into the readers heads; story is conflict. As with the constant advancement of technology, the quality of the games designed are also following suit. The game standards bar is rising and this is increasing the amount of interaction us as players want with our games. Stories are one of the features within games that are being influenced, story and storytelling is a human experience and is part of our ancestry, an item i mention in my most recent post on 'funativity' by Noah Falstein.

This article stresses that Games aren't movies!

Movies were the first of their time, as are game currently. Movies have had their time of experimentation and have had their time to refine what they do best, storytelling in the medium of picture and sound. However games have their own tools and features that make them stand out from movies, and that is player interaction. This conflict in these stories used have to be planned out from the start, many of the classical stories use a basic layout which if kept too can makes your story passable, but not exceedingly good. The structure goes like this:

First, there's a protagonist, a hero.
His or her world is thrown out of order by an inciting incident. (Look at the sabotaged dope deal in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City for a good example of this.)
A gap opens up between the hero and an orderly life.
The hero tries the normal, conservative action to overcome the gap. It fails.
The world pushes back too hard.
The hero then has to take a risk to overcome the obstacles that are pushing back.
Then there is a reversal. Something new happens, or the hero learns something she didn't know before, and the world is out of whack again. A second gap has opened up.
The hero has to take a greater risk to overcome the second gap.
After overcoming the second gap, there is another reversal, opening a third gap.
The hero has to take the greatest risk of all to overcome this gap and get to that object of desire, which is usually an orderly life.

So now we move onto characters and why characterisation is important within a game. Character is not what the person looks like but it is how the hero/villain acts towards situations and scenarios. This character should be revolved around by the other characters in the storyline. The article suggest that the game world should always be antagonistic towards the character to increase the amount of struggle the player has to endure.

Reversals:

John Sutherland suggested the use of reversals are paramount to creating conflict. He says that each act within the story are driven by reversals. These reversals Can lead to 3 different types of conflict:

Internal conflict (typically novels) - Inside your head

Interpersonal conflict (typically plays) - Between different people

External conflict (typically movies/games) - Society in general/outside world.

Plays are 80% Audio 20% Visual

Movies are 80% Visual 20% Audio

Sutherland goes on to say that within games, if you are able to make the player do something the see the story, then that is the up most priority, however showing the player is second priority, and then telling them in last.

DO - SHOW - TELL

My iterations of The Royal Game of UR

Recently I had to write an essay about iterating an ancient board game from the 2600BC period. This is the oldest known game to man and I found this one of the most interesting games I've had to study. The game consists of a set of nets which combine to be the game board which the players have to manoeuvre around to get the end to score a piece. The players roll a set of 4 D4 dice with 2 sides marked in order to move around the board, this gives the game an element of chance with these game bits. The game board was found to have specially decorated cells and consistently throughout there was found to have a rosette square believed to have importance with the game play.

My task was to iterate the current mechanics of the game to improve the games overall playability. But before we can iterate the rules, what were the rules?
 The most basic rules are currently considered to be these:

• Using four sided dice, each players moves their pieces around the board, the player must roll the exact number to leave the board.
• If a piece lands on a marked rosette square(one with a star on it in this case) the player receives another go.
• If a piece lands on a square with an opposition piece on it, the piece is removed from the board and must restart.
• A piece on a marked rosette square cannot be taken.
• First player to get all 7 pieces to the end wins the game.

Board diagram:

My iterations of these rules were and why:

Players were able to stack two game pieces on top of one another and move them simultaneously, the player was only allowed a maximum of two stacked, this was because when we played by the original rules the game lasted too long and so we iterated this so that we could speed the game time up.
Players who landed on the rosette square were not allowed to stay on there, they had to roll and move that piece instantly, this was iterated as players began to 'camp' on the rosette squares and it became frustrating for the other player.
Because of both these iterations, it created another problem with the game dynamics, players began to put stacks on rosette squares which gave them the ability to move their stacked pieces up the board too fast, so we made a mechanic which stopped the players from putting stacked pieces on rosette squares. From these iterations we found the game ran faster, yet not too fast. It made the game more enjoyable to play.



Game board image: http://www.britishmuseum.org/images/ps121289_m.jpg

Chance and Skill

For week sixes reading we were advised to read Brenda Braithwaite & Ian Schreiber (2008) Challenges For Games Designers. Chapters 5 and 6. These chapters were specifically about luck and chance, and the importance of how and why they are needed in game. Here I will be describing just that in more detail.

Chance is an element used in board games and even digital games to keep the player interested in the game for a longer period of time. This is done by the chance element giving the player a more varied experience during game play. Therefore increasing the replay value of the game in hand. By also giving a variable experience every time, the game designers can prevent players from mastering the game. Chance can be appealing as to also create tension in games. Lets take Texas Hold'em Poker for example, the longer the players bully each other into submitting more money into the kitty, the higher the dramatic tension factor; however there is skill involved with this, its all down to the luck and chance of the cards drawn. This tool that anyone on the board could potentially have a winning hand causes this dramatic tension.

Chance is needed in many games; games which do not have an aspect of chance at all can become very boring very fast. It then leads the games mechanics all down to skill; let’s take Tic Tac Toe for example. It’s a game that is based purely on skill, and because of the small range of possibility, it can easily be mastered and is easily done. If the game was to have on chance element incorporated into the game then this game would have more replay value as well as be more challenging and fun. So what are the tools we use to create chance in a game? Well here are some:

· Dice (There can be many different outcomes depending on the number thrown, there can also be more dice involved giving a higher chance outcome and no matter how many are rolled, the previous roll will never influence the future roll).

· Cards (Cards can be randomised by shuffling, they can be used as resources and they can also be hidden from other players, or not.)

· Pseudo-Random number generator (This is a digital chance producer and can work for most games, must be made sure that the outcome is not bias in any way.)

And now I will talk about the aspect of skill in a game. Skill gives a player the chance to actually improve the way they play games as it doesn’t revolve around a chance element. These games are usually more competitive as the dramatic tension can be high if two similarly ranked players are matched together. The good thing about skill is that it creates many chances for the player; a player of a game that must make decisions based on information given is a skill. There are many decisions that can be used to create an aspect of skill and here a few:

Meaningless Decision:

• These can become frustration for the player if they do not affect any part of the game and should be removed if this is the case

Blind Decision:

• This means the player has a very limited viewable information, or even none at all
• These decisions are usually connected to gambling

Obvious Decision:

• An obvious decision is pretty obvious. One way will have an extreme positive and another will have an extreme negative. Hey player will always go with positive, if these rules exist in games, the game designer should make them rules instead of decisions

Trade-off decision:

• When a user has a hard decision between two choices that are pretty much equal in stats.

Dilemmas:

• This tool gives the player a sense of danger in every possible way
• The prisoners dilemma is when two players must choose the same answer together without contact and if they both get it right, they share the reward, if they don’t, one can take all the winnings, or they both lose dramatically

All in all I thought this was my favourite reading so far as it has made me think more about games and how hard it is to balance a game between chance and skill

Game design tools and vocabulary: Explained in week 3 readings

This week we were given readings from a Doug Church article about game tools as well as a chapter to read in Challenges for Game Designers by Brenda Braithwaite and Ian Schreiber. This chapter was about advising and showing how all games could be broken down into tiny atoms, hence the title of the chapter being Atoms. They focused on design tools used in the making of games and they both had different methods of selecting these tools. So let’s begin and start the dissecting.

Doug Church really emphasises in his article the lack of technical and precise language used within the game industry, specifically in the design of objects and assets. After explaining the way in which most people analyse work by saying "oh that was fun" or "I don’t know, it wasn't that fun" he expresses his desire for the need of a structured framework for a design vocabulary around the basis of designing games. The fact that many people analyse assets of game design like this doesn’t really give the designer much information about what or how they have done something wrong, sure they get a very basic idea that its wrong, but not a precise enough amount of detail that they can set it straight, hence the need for a specific system.

The framework he has come up with was FADT (Formal Abstract Design Tools.) Here is the broken down phrase explained: 'Formal,' criticise and define items and be able to explain this to somebody else; 'abstract,' to explain an array of new and fresh ideas around the whole subject; 'design,' as well, we're designers after all and 'tools,' as this is the actual framework we will be creating. The first tools he explained in depth with so far was; intention and perceivable consequence. But to break it done into a blog post I have simplified these:

Intention: Giving the player a feeling of intention and progress into the game by letting them act on their own plans as they understand with your game world.

Perceivable consequence: Giving the player the ability to assess the situation of an event easily and so that they can learn from their mistakes and not feel cheated by the game in any way.

After reading this article I really began to appreciate the vocabulary and tools Church suggested. The feeling of being able to see what went wrong when you attempted a move on an enemy and it was unsuccessful really does get the player more involved into the game especially when you can see what went wrong and apply that observation to the rest of the game world. However the chapter from Challenges for Game Designers broke games down into even smaller and easier digestible atoms of information, so let’s have a look at that shall we?

Instead of breaking the games down into tools of what designers use to create a game and to make the player feel absorbed, here they (Brenda Braithwaite and Ian Schreiber) break games in general into simple tools that the designers can use to create the finished product. Here they give all these terms very simple names; however they still define complicated issues. These were the definitions mentioned inside the chapter:

Game state: A collection of all the relevant game data that may change during play. The chapter gives poker for example; the game state would be each players hand and chips, the size of the pot, whose turn is it to bet, who has folded on the current hand, which cards are in the deck and in what order. Basically it is every bit of information the game needs to operate.

Game view: Is the area of the game the player can see and interact with. In a game of draughts, the game view would be the board, the pieces and that’s all. None of the information is hidden from the player, however in battleships; the game view is vastly different.

Game space: This is the whole game area in general.

Avatar: This is the object that represents the player digitally

Game bits: This is the category for all the games pieces such as dice, cards, and counters. All the physical objects that make the game

Game mechanics: To explain this simply, this is the game rules and how the player interacts with the rules to complete the game. E.g. how when you land on a snake on snakes and ladders, you MUST go down to the bottom of the snake. There are no exceptions.

Game dynamics: This explains the pattern of play that occurs after implementing the game mechanics. They explain in this book that a game such as Risk and Civilization are highly involved with territorial acquisition.

Goals: Many games have one ultimate goal, and that is to win. However some games have separate goals that are used to submerge and absorb players into the game world by getting them to slay beasts and receive a reward afterwards.

Theme: This is a general definition for: what’s the game about? Battleships is about you, a captain of a fleet of ships, hunting down enemy ships pretty much blind. Snakes and ladders is about reaching space 100 and avoiding the snakes.

Both the article by Doug Church and the Challenges for Game Designers book describes this vocabulary used to create a more structured game design phrase. However I personally feel that although Doug Church was attempting to make sense and increase the amount of precise accurate vocabulary, his attempt actually made the words more ambiguous to me. However that’s my own opinion. He did however point out tools in Mario 64 on Nintendo 64 that got me really thinking in terms of how games are designed more thoroughly. All in all I actually preferred Braithwaite and Schreiber’s vocabulary of game design. Simple and straight to the point, theres no need to complicate things.

New game definitions, Ludus, paidea and others...

In our last weeks lecture with Eddie Duggan we looked at how we could define video games in different terms. We were also given a section ofa book called Videogames by James Newman. In this particular blog post I will be looking at chapter 2: “What is a videogame? Rules, puzzles and simulations” In this chapter he describes the main categories of games as: paidea, ludus, agon, alea, ilinx and mimicry.

I found that these terms will become very useful as I become a game designer in the coming years to help use specialist terms and precise description in my analysis of other works as well as my own. So what do these words mean I hear you ask? Here are the most basic terms for each of them that he mentions in this chapter:

Paidea - Gaming just for pleasure

Ludus – Is a game constrained by rules and has an outcome (winning or losing)

Agon – Competitive game play

Alea – Randomness/change involved in-game

Ilinx – Movement

Mimicry – Simulation, role-play etc.

I will go more into depth with paidea and ludus now to show you an example. Paidea is a term given to a game when the main objective of the game is not clear, if there is any at all. The whole idea of the game is that the player is free from rules and can do whatever they please. The game will not have a solid framework in which the player would have to follow and. This flexibility of the game having no goals or rules leaves the whole game limited to the limitations of the imagination of the player. I personally find that these games are one of my favourite genres, as being a game designer, creativity is a must and being given the ability to go mad with some software is just my idea of a game. I mentioned earlier in one of my blog posts about Greg Costikyans views on games. In this article Costikyan mentions that Will Wright, the SimCity designer, talks about his product not being a game, but an “industrial toy.” This feeling is also shared by James Newman as he mentions SimCity as an example of a paidea game. Another example game which is described by this word is a game called The Powder Game. It was a game that was released many years ago on the Dan-Ball website and has since been deleted. It is a game that has no rules at all; it has no goals and no objectives. The player is given a menu with a choice of many materials such as gun powder, magma, stone and many others. There is a blank canvas in which they can construct anything they so desire. This game also has a physics mechanic inside as some objects obey the laws of gravity and some do not. There is only one limitation to this game and that is that there can only be a certain amount of pixels placed in the game, but I would imagine this is so the game runs as smooth as possible.  This game however does dip its toes into other definitions that James Newman talks about. Mimicry is when there is a factor of simulation involved, and seeing as this game mimics that of the materials of ‘real life’ this can also be considered. The fact that many games can be adapted with very simple changes to fit many different definitions is a sign of a good game, an adaptive game.

Ludus is a term given to a game which has rules and goals weaved into the framework of the game. This player has to follow these rules in order to eventually be rewarded with an outcome; this could be either winning or losing. One of the first examples of a rule constrained game would be the original game of Tron. A character controls a light bicycle that draws a path that remains until the end of the round, the first person to crash into either yours or the enemy’s path or even the wall loses.  It is a very simple concept for a game but it contains rules that must be stuck too or else the player will not receive the desired outcome (to win). Even though the rules are minimal, this game is a ludus game due to the constraints placed upon the player as the game begins. No touching walls, no touching any paths including your own, you can only use arrow keys for movement and first to die losing a round. This game is however even more adaptive than the last mentioned. The fact the game relies on player movement puts this game under the ilinx category as well as the agon category due to the fact that it’s a two player game and whenever a game has a second player, there is a competitive edge. This is because as humans, we have a tendency to change anything into a competition and to be the best out of the best. This is often the case, and the smallest things can often become competitions. But anyway I’m going off track here…

These exceptional topical description words will now be incorporated into my analysis of future topics and games. The fact that one game can consist of many different types of definitions leads me to want to use these useful descriptive words to construct a more structured and selective piece of writing and analysis.

Tom Sharman

If any of you guys (especially Ed) would like to try this Powder Game then here is a link:

The Powder Game