[MUD-Dev] A flamewar startingpoint.

[coder at ibm.net]

On 06/11/97 at 09:20 PM, Ola Fosheim Gr=B0stad <olag at ifi.uio.no> said:
>Andrew Glassner has written an article on what he feels is wrong with th=
e
>current state of affairs in computer games.  He is among other things
>arguing against certain personality stats as well as magic. What do you
>think? (For the record, Glassner is a famous computer graphics
>researcher, the man behind the Graphic Gems series among other things)

>http://www.research.microsoft.com/research/graphics/glassner/work/talks/=
games.htm

Which reads as below.  I've inserted brief comments surrounded by double
square brackets]]:

=20
--<cut>--


            Some Thoughts on Game Design=20
            Andrew Glassner, May 1997=20

           =20


 Introduction

 I recently spent several months designing a new computer
 game. There is precious little in the way of successful design
 to emulate; a handful of games have had great popularity,
 some have done well, and many have failed outright. We're a
 long way from having any general principles, largely due to
 the fact that the medium itself is constantly changing.

 So what's a game designer to do? I didn't want to simply copy
 one of the successful games; that's boring and probably
 wouldn't work anyway. But I did have a clear feeling that
 many of the games that I have played have done some things
 poorly. I can't describe the necessary components of a
 successful game, but I can identify some of the things that
 always turn me off. Some are obvious; for example, don't
 make it easy and attractive for the player to cheat. Other
 problems are subtler.

 In this essay I will talk about the poor principles and
 techniques that I see repeated time and again in current game
 design.

 I will refrain from using specific games for discussion here.
 There's no shortage of examples in the current crop of
 products, but I don't want to single any of them out
 individually. Most games have their good and bad points, and
 rather than try to always be fair to each product, I'd rather
 speak in general terms that apply across many games.

 But first, a clarification. By "computer games," I mean games
 with some resemblance to a story with characters; I am
 deliberately excluding cartridge games like those played on
 Nintendo systems; they are very different beasts. The games
 I'm talking about are generally played on a PC or Mac, and
 delivered from a CD-ROM or over the Internet, or both.

 Arcade, Puzzle, Strategy, and Story Game Design

 I see four principal types of games out there right now: arcade,
 puzzle, strategy, and story.

<<Obvious parallels to Bartle's 4 point system>>

 Arcade electronic or computer games began with Pong, and
 today they've moved up to games like Doom. Real-time
 response and high-focus playing are the hallmarks of these
 games. I include games like Tetris in this category, because
 they depend on real-time responses, even though there's a
 layer of thinking and planning involved. Arcade games played
 across the Internet are rare because of the technical difficulty
 in maintaining high-speed communication between players.

 Puzzle games began with Adventure. In these games, the
 designer creates a series of challenges for you to solve. Like
 one locked door after another down a long hallway, the only
 way forward is to solve one of the puzzles in front of you.
 Sometimes the puzzles are overt: decipher a cryptogram or
 play a winning game of tic-tac-toe against the computer.
 Sometimes they are trickier, perhaps requiring you to use an
 object in an unlikely way (e.g. squirt whipped cream into a
 frog's ear to make him jump and release a trap door).

 Strategy and simulation games typically involve one or more
 alternating phases of planning and execution. In a machine
 simulation game, you design an object that implements a
 success strategy and then watch it perform, perhaps in
 competition with other machines. In an environment
 simulator, you make strategic policy decisions that govern the
 lives of the environment's inhabitants. Explicit strategy games
 often support many simultaneous players. Each player plans a
 move (which may be quite complex), and then submits that
 plan to a central authority. The time allowed for the planning
 phase may range from minutes to days. Once all the moves
 have been received, a program combines the player's
 intentions, the rules of the game, the current situation, and
 sometimes a bit of randomness to evolve the game to the next
 state. Each player then gets to see the new situation (or a piece
 of it), and plans their next move. In extreme cases, the
 planning time may shrink to zero and the resolution phase
 may be executed immediately, such as by the application of a
 rule or the roll of dice.

<<The first format seems unartfully reminiscent of the Diplomacy judges.=20
For those not familiar with them, they are email based automatic systems
which act as the clearing houses, automators, "round/move" timers, and
move arbiters for a Diplomacy game.  In a lot fo ways they are similar to
ad-hoc mailing list engines with specially formatted emails required to
define moves, inter-player communication ("press") etc.>>

 The most recent trend is what I call story games. These are
 games that attempt to create some kind of narrative thread in
 which the player is involved. There's a lot of variety in this
 category. Because it's the kind of game I worked on, the rest of
 this essay will be devoted to this sort of game. In today's
 marketplace, most story games are actually puzzle games with
 a running story to unify or motivate the puzzles.

<<I'll note without comment that he ignored the MUD/MUSH/RP/etc end of
interactive multi-player interactive etc games>>

 The next few sections tackle some of the design flaws that I
 see appearing in one story game after another. I call these
 flaws because these are design principles that don't work for
 me - when I play a game and I find myself offended, bored, or
 otherwise turned off, I have tried to understand when the
 problem is simply one of implementation, and when it is a
 bad structural decision. My comments below are addressed to
 those design decisions that I find just don't work.

 Why Argue With Success?

 Many of today's games are successful. That is, they sell a lot of
 copies, make a lot of money, and keep a lot of people happily
 entertained for many hours. Why argue with that sort of
 success?

 My answer is completely subjective: I have found that I enjoy
 these games less and less as I play more and more of them. I
 see the same strategies repeated again and again, and I get
 bored by the impoverished design. Although there is a lot of
 money being spent to raise production values, the design of
 today's games is still primitive. In the worst games - again,
 some very popular - I feel diminished as a person, or even that
 my intelligence or individuality is insulted.

 So why do I (and, I believe, many others) play them? Novelty.
 There is something exciting about the potential of today's
 games, enfeebled as they are. But novelty is transient. I have
 already begun to bore of most genres of computer games, and I
 predict that as time goes one, other players will come to share
 my apathy. Sales and interest will drop as novelty wears off if
 we don't create something enduring to take its place. That's
 why it's important to try to figure out how to build better
 games now.

<<I strongly agree, and for the same reasons.  I have an annual budget of
near zero for games, yet my annual software budget is many $hundred.  The
last game I actually went out and bought was a second hand copy of SimCit=
y
over two years ago.  That was the first game I'd bought in almost 5 years=
.=20
Of course this places me outside of the game manufacturer's target
market/demographics -- but I find it more interesting that I'm being
joined.  I must wonder (hope?) if that motion will become general.>>

 The Myth of Interactivity

 The first - and perhaps most pernicious - design flaw is a
 result of a belief that you can hear routinely discussed and
 solemnly acknowledged almost everywhere people are doing
 interactive design work. It's dangerous because it can sound
 right on first hearing, and it can be invoked as a weapon. I call
 this belief the Myth of Interactivity:

 The Myth of Interactivity: Interactivity makes games
 better, and a game designer should try to make the experience
 as richly interactive as possible.

 Like all myths, it contains a kernel of truth, but it should not
 be taken literally.

 The basic fallacy behind this myth is that it elevates
 interactivity to a special status above other game elements. In
 fact, interactivity is simply a quality or attribute of a game (or
 even moments in the game) like the abstract qualities of genre
 and mood or the concrete qualities of color and sound.

<<The point he is missing is that interactivity gives the player the
illusion of ability to control his character/play sequence down to a
(very) fine level.  Games which play pre-recorded movies/animations, only
allowing limited interactivity between sequences, said activity then
selecting the next sequence, ruin this illusion.  The player is now very
aware that he is riding along on a pre-guided tour, and that it it up to
him to be like a monkey and jump through the right hoops at the right
times to see the whole dong and pony show.  Thus the insult to
intelligence he mentioned previously.  Single-path-solution adventure
games are another annoying version of this rule (cf above mention of the
corrdor of doors above)>>

 Interactive entertainment is nothing new. We've had the
 occasional interactive story since the first campfire, and even
 interactive literature (where you turn to one of several pages
 depending on your answer to a question) for many years; I
 remember reading such a book as a kid. Computer games that
 respond to players are nothing worth getting worked up about.

 Let me state baldly that game quality is not correlated to
 interaction quantity.

 On the other hand, interactivity is certainly important when
 used well. Unfortunately, discussing these ideas is hard
 because the word "interactivity" has been used in so many
 ways that no two people are likely to agree on its meaning. So
 my first step will be to define participation, which refers to
 quality interactive experiences.

 Interactivity vs. Participation

 Anything that responds to you is interactive. An automatic
 door opens when you approach, and a soda machine gives you
 a cold drink when you plunk in cash; these are both
 interactive. When a rat eats a piece of cheese at one end of a
 maze, a new piece of cheese can be automatically dropped at
 the other end to entice a return trip. Literally, this
 rat interacts with its maze. This is not a level of interaction=20
 which I believe is of value for game design.

 If there is a portion of a game where the player is not called
 upon to act in some active way, we say that the game (or
 experience) is "passive." This label often seems to create
 anxiety. There is a common view that says that we must avoid
 passive experiences as much as possible.

 The most compelling defense for this view is that in our
 fast-paced and competitive world, a player must be constantly
 engaged or she will walk away (or click away, on the net). If
 the experience becomes passive, goes the argument,
 engagement is lost, and the player will become bored and
 leave.

 It is certainly true that a bored player will leave a game. But
 simply barraging her with demands for interaction (e.g. things
 to click, choices to make) does not make an experience
 worthwhile. The maze-bound rat must always choose a
 direction at each intersection, but this does not make its life
 fun, or even interesting.

 And those are the key words. Any interaction in a computer
 game must be fun, or at the very least, interesting. If it is
 simply a hoop through which the player must jump, the
 player will sense the subterfuge and resent it; the result is that
 the interactive moment will work against the game, rather
 than for it. I call a quality interactive experience a
 participatory experience, and define it this way:

 A quality interactive experience, also called a participatory
 experience, is a chance for the player to have an enjoyable or
 illuminating insight, or an exchange with the game designer or
 other players: the experience must be fun, interesting, or both.

 This may sound obvious, but there are endless examples of
 games available today, some of which are highly regarded,
 which are loaded with pointless interactive moments.
 Working an ATM machine is certainly an interactive
 experience, but it is neither fun enough nor interesting
 enough to deserve to be called participatory, and does not
 belong in a game.

<<Echoes of the "eat food" debate for MUDs>>

 Weak Interaction

 I believe that most of the interaction found in today's games is
 either pointless or actually has a negative result. The
 discussion below isolates a number of specific interactive
 forms and their inherent problems.

 Needless Demands

 Often game designers create interaction by forcing you to
 carry out mandatory actions. A very small amount of this can
 be fruitful, because it helps you understand the game's world
 through some simple cause-and-effect experience. But any
 more than basic exposure is boring at best; players should not
 be forced into pointless interaction. Good designers create
 objects that automatically do everything possible. For
 example, you can flick two buttons on a dishwasher to initiate
 a complex sequence of events. That's how it should be.

 Game designers should be just as considerate of their player's
 time and needs. Unfortunately, many games require you to go
 through whole sequences of actions that are unnecessary.
 Sometimes you need to do them more than once, which is
 particularly infuriating. For example, many games require
 you to move back and forth between two locations several
 times. To do this, you must plod step-by-step through all the
 intervening locations, even though you've been to each one
 before and have no reason to re-visit them. You accomplish
 your task, and then repeat the dreary process to return. This is
 interactive all right, but horrible. Neither fun nor interesting,
 it doesn't come close to being participatory.

 However, this sort of thing persists. One reason is because
 games sell better if they promise a certain number of hours of
 play; it helps the player feel she is making a reasonable
 financial investment since there's going to be a payback in a
 lot of fun. But there's the rub: you don't get back fun, you get
 back tedium. Walking through those same rooms and
 corridors time after time doesn't make me feel like I'm really
 in the environment; rather, it makes me angry that my time is
 being wasted and thereby removes me from the game's world.

<<This would seem to ignore the value of determining of the two locations
at the ends of that travel path are in fact the ones required for the
process or not>>

 Sure, we can't teleport in the real world, but we would if we
 could. In the computer, we can, so we should.

 I played a game recently that applied this principle nicely.
 One of the game's features is that you can select two objects
 that you are carrying with you and order the computer to
 "combine" them. If this makes any sense, it does so. For
 example, combining a light bulb with a lamp means that the
 bulb is screwed into the lamp's socket. Sometimes very
 complex things get assembled for you in response to this
 single command. That's good design.

 A game should offer the fastest and easiest possible way to do
 everything unless there is some entertaining or informative
 reason to prevent it.

<<Which says a lot about the current state of MUD parsers and much of wha=
t
has been debated here in regard to what could be done>>

 Deception

 Deception is a staple of fiction, where it is coupled with
 emotional manipulation and other techniques to engage an
 audience. But this is very principled deception. The principle
 is the authored narrative, where the audience enters into a
 trusting relationship with the storyteller; that trust is what
 allows a person to voluntarily be manipulated and controlled,
 and even deceived, without resentment.

 Bad deceptions are objectionable to everyone. Imagine a child
 who calls a parent on the phone, crying from a terrible injury;
 when the parent reacts in shock, the child laughs and reveals
 that it was just a prank. This isn't funny to anyone. Few game
 players enjoy similar pranks, particularly since they've paid
 time and money for the pleasure.

 Now consider a computer game where a player finds a scuba
 outfit lying by the side of a mysterious but inviting lake. The
 player has heard stories of a sunken ship and a secret it
 carries; clearly the right thing to do here is to put on the suit
 and head into the lake. Checking the air gauge (which reads
 full), the player dons the gear and enters the water. A few
 minutes later, far from shore and deep in the water, the air
 runs out. As the player fights her way back to safety, she
 realizes that the dial was defective and the air tanks were
 almost empty when she found them. Had she known this, she
 never would have gone in.

<<Was there a value in the fact that the guage was faulty. was there a us=
e
for this datum, or was it merely deceptive to the player?>>

 When this happens in a book or film, it can be very exciting.
 In the best examples, we identify with the character and feel
 her panic, and we feel angry with the villain who placed our
 hero in this predicament. We learn about the hero by how she
 responds to the problem, and are carried along by our fear and
 our trust. We trust the writer of the story to make it satisfying
 for us, and worth our time and concern.

 In today's story games, we do not have a given narrative. We
 are constantly reminded that we are the hero of the story, and
 the things we do determine what will happen. It is not our
 hero who has been tricked, it's us. It's not the evil villain who
 left the broken scuba gear lying around, it's the game designer.
 We are in constant conversation with the game creator, more
 than we are with almost any author or screenwriter. Bad
 things done to the hero in fact happen to us, personally.

 Sometimes you hear this defended with an appeal to
 verisimilitude, claiming that we run across deceptive
 information all the time in the real world. True enough. And
 in the real world, we also get false promises from politicians
 and lies from drug companies. The appeal is weak - just
 because deception appears in the real world doesn't mean it
 belongs in our entertainments.

 Mistakes aren't always bad. Part of the fun of learning about a
 new environment is learning a new set of rules. And part of
 that experience means making mistakes by misinterpreting
 instructions, or mistaking a new object for a familiar old one
 and using it incorrectly. That's learning.

 But a deliberate deception is an artificial roadblock, created
 solely to make life harder for the player. That's not fun, that's
 annoying.

<<Good point.>>

 The game designer should not deliberately deceive the player
 unless it leads to insight.

<<Ie Player requirements should deliver value>>

 Player Profiling

 Some games, particularly branching narratives, try to deduce
 personality information about the player. In order to create a
 "responsive" story, the game builds up a personality profile of
 the player. Often the player is characterized along several axes
 of opposites: e.g. peaceful vs. wrathful, generous vs. stingy, or
 timid vs. bold.

 But the designer of such a game is faced with a difficult
 problem: how to characterize the subtlety of a player's
 psychology? It's hard enough for people to understand each
 other, much less design a computerized analyst.

 Often the result is a crude series of choices - in effect,
 replicating the standard multiple-choice diagnostic
 personality inventories in the disguise of making game
 decisions (this is why the technique is so easily applied in
 branching narratives). Even children see right through the
 disguised choices. Rather than deciding what to do in a
 situation based on their own feelings of right and wrong,
 children make choices for the protagonist they are controlling
 because they want to "make him mean" or "see what happens
 if you make her really stupid." They game the game - that is,
 they attempt to influence the underlying mechanism of the
 game. In other words, they are not playing the game itself.
 This marks failure for a game designer. By analogy, when a
 filmgoer starts thinking about the special effects or makeup,
 the film director has failed.

 Adults see through these personality tests as easily as children,
 but because they are more aware of the fact that they are being
 labeled and pigeonholed they are more likely to resent it. And
 having paid for the game and invested valuable time, they are
 apt to be offended by this attempt to characterize the
 complexity of their personality by a trivial scoring system. In
 effect, the player is being told that subtlety of expression and
 depth of understanding are irrelevant. The player is clearly
 aware of the need to think about how the game will interpret
 her choices, which removes her from immersion in the game
 itself.

<<Sounds like an argument against RP...>>

 Don't trick players into providing a personality description.

 Randomness

 Sometimes games try to make things more interesting by
 adding a random element. The effect of the random choice
 may be small - e.g. the number of phaser blasts it takes to
 subdue a particular creature - or significant - e.g. whether
 someone will break into your house on a given night and steal
 everything you've accumulated throughout the game. Some
 randomness can help keep a game interesting, particularly in
 the small-scale range. But randomness itself is not inherently
 interesting.

 Theme and variation is a basic building block of literature,
 but random variations are not thoughtful ones. Nobody would
 accuse Bach simply employing random variations on his
 themes; the delight in hearing his melodies transform and
 re-arrange comes from the quality of the intention behind the
 changes. In other words, theme and variation is a structure for
 intention. Random variation is unappealing; otherwise we
 would have countless musical and visual computer-mediated
 works which simply created endless random variations on a
 few human-created building blocks. They'd be out there if
 anyone cared to own them. But who would want such a thing?
 There isn't enough time to absorb the carefully crafted works
 by talented people (whether those works be deep or simply
 entertaining); why would anyone want to instead subject
 themselves to a computerized creation? Computers have
 nothing to say.

 Sometimes randomness is used to introduce surprise into a
 game. A lake may be peaceful the first ten times you row
 across it, and then suddenly turn into a whitecapped mess the
 eleventh time. There are small variations in nature, and
 randomness can cover that, but large randomness just makes
 things different for the sake of being different, not because
 there's any purpose or reason behind the change.

 In a game, the player is in dialog with the game designer. And
 when there is no message in that dialog, the conversation
 stops. Randomness is a substitute for deliberate intention, and
 without intention, the value of the conversation drops
 precipitously.

 Avoid large-scale randomness.

 Multiple-Choice Conversations

 Some games guide you through the action by asking you to
 make choices from lists. Often these are lists of places to go,
 things to do, questions to ask, and statements to make. The last
 two categories are the most ambitious, and are used in games
 where you enter into conversations with the characters in the
 story. I'll focus on the use of multiple choices for
 conversations, since it's an inappropriate use of the technique.

 Today's technology is a very long way from creating programs
 that can understand an arbitrary question (whether typed or
 spoken), and then automatically generate an appropriate
 response. So everything must be pre-scripted. When in a
 conversation with another character in a game, you are given a
 list of questions and statements to choose from. Your
 character utters the appropriate one, the other character
 responds to the tone, style, and substance, and then terminates
 the conversation or waits for you to choose another thing to
 say; the list may change in response to your previous choice.

 There are a few problems with this scenario.

 Most importantly, the choice you want may not be on the list.
 Suppose that you are stranded at a roadside, and someone
 stops to offer you a lift. You may either: politely thank him
 and get in, politely decline, ask his name, or ask how far he is
 going. If one of these fits your desires, great.

 But this is a game, not the SATs. There's no right answer, and
 no best answer. Most games go to great lengths to encourage
 you to act as you see fit, so that you feel immersed in the
 game.

 Suppose that you think you recognize the driver as the rude
 man you argued with in the coffeeshop earlier. You really
 want to confirm his identity, but that option's not available.
 The basic principle of the game has been violated: you can't
 do what you want. The only response is to either choose at
 random, or else game the game, meaning slipping out of the
 game's world and trying to figure out what the different
 courses of action will lead you to and picking the one that's
 most attractive (or least unattractive).

<<cf above comment on interactivity>>

 This is a disaster for a story-based game; the player is ripped
 right out of the game's world and all the production values in
 the world won't bring her back in, at least not for a while.

 The apparent ways to save the multiple-choice scenario are to
 include an enormous number of choices, or get the choices
 exactly right so every player can find just what they want.

 Both of these approaches just make a bad problem worse.
 Suppose that through extensive testing the game designer
 realizes the necessity of including a polite question, asking the
 man where he had lunch. Close, but no cigar. You're still
 trying to emulate human conversation, which is subtle and
 complex. Suppose you want to ask the question in an
 innocent way, or a slightly brusque way, or even an accusing
 way. There's no way to script for every possible nuance. So
 even a huge list of choices is too small.

 So in every case you must leave the game's world and try to
 guess what the right answer should be. If you, as a player, are
 talking to a robot or a Coke machine, this is what you'd
 expect. But not from a person. The fact that the game
 masquerades these robots as people is ridiculous; it's
 obviously untrue.

 But what's worse is that you, the player, have become just as
 much a robot as the story's characters. They have scripted,
 pre-authored questions and answers; so do you. They are
 limited to what the game designer invented for them; so are
 you. They have no autonomy, no individuality, no creativity,
 no imagination; in this game, neither do you. Avoid
 multiple-choice conversations.

 Don't Keep 'em Guessing

 Some games try to provide a sense of mystery or exploration
 on top of multiple-choice by having poorly-labeled or
 unlabeled choices. You may be presented with a series of
 options and asked to select one, without really understanding
 what they represent or what your choice indicates.

 This is pointless interaction. If you're not acting intentionally,
 then why are you acting at all? If you don't understand the
 choice, your value as a participant is very small; as with other
 poor modes of interaction, the player is diminished by this
 situation.

 Some designers claim that this is a reflection of the real world,
 where we often don't understand the nature of our choices.
 True enough. But entertainment is not the same as real life.
 Players do not spend time, money, and energy to be faced
 with vague situations and feelings of lack of control. We get
 enough of that every day.

 In art, we are willing to tolerate a certain amount of deliberate
 ambiguity. Carefully controlled ambiguity allows an audience
 to enter into the work and interpret it personally. But too
 much ambiguity means the artist has been too lazy to properly
 shape the work. Similarly in entertainment, we want clarity of
 character and story. And when choice is added to the
 environment, we want clarity of choice. Options that are
 poorly understood are false options.

 Describe choices clearly.

 Repeat Painlessly

 In many games a player must go through a process several
 times in order to achieve a goal. Often, the game repeats the
 entire process each time, including replays of the audio and
 video meant to liven things up. These pieces of production
 can be fun or illuminating the first time or two, but by the
 third time they are simply roadblocks to be endured before
 getting the opportunity to try a different action.

 In one game I played recently you assemble some pieces in
 what you think is the right order, and then push a big button
 to submit your answer. Pushing the button initiates a
 sequence of visual and audio effects, simulating some big
 machine "examining" your answer. Eventually it might tell
 you that some of the clips are in the wrong order, and then
 you hear some audio encouraging you to keep trying. All of
 this takes about 15 seconds, but it feels like a half-hour. By
 the third or fourth time I submitted an answer I was resentful
 that I was forced to waste my time waiting for this now-boring
 effect to repeat. There was no way to hurry it up or skip over
 it. By the tenth time I went through the process I was ready to
 climb the walls.

 I suspect that designers do this because they work hard on
 these entertaining segments and want to get a lot of mileage
 out of them. But too much mileage and their charm is lost,
 ending in self-defeat. A far better approach provides the
 elaborate and time-consuming feedback the first time or two,
 and then switches to a highly abbreviated version that ends
 almost immediately. The player will remember the production
 piece but will not become angry or bored by being forced to
 sit through it endlessly.

 Do not repeat unless the player requests it.

 Arbitrary Complexity

 Many puzzle and story games embrace a technique that I call
 arbitrary complexity. This is the practice of making a game or
 puzzle artificially difficult by wrapping it in layers of
 irrelevant but difficult detail. The old text-style games
 displayed this when they required you to guess exactly the
 right word - for example, to give a banana to the dwarf you
 might try "give banana to dwarf" and "offer banana to dwarf",
 but only "show banana to dwarf" will succeed. The player
 also had to guess and then do ridiculous things to get through
 a puzzle - for example, show the dwarf a banana three times
 and then throw it behind him. The solution is complex
 enough to be difficult, but arbitrary enough that there's no
 principled you could have figured it out; the solutions often
 required great leaps of imagination or credulity, often based
 on very subtle or easily-missed clues. Arbitrary complexity
 makes things more difficult simply by making them
 complicated and obscure, not more fun.

 These puzzles often depend on magic items; these are objects
 that you find lying around the environment, often physically
 and temporally far from where they're needed. For example,
 near the start of a game you might find a sharp pencil on your
 office desk in San Francisco, and at the end of the game you
 need that pencil to defuse a bomb while in a spaceship
 orbiting Mars. Nothing else will do - a hatpin that you found
 in Los Angeles will not work. Two conventions of puzzle and
 story games are that you need to pick up and save all magic
 items when you run across them, and that their ultimate use is
 generally impossible to guess when you first encounter them.

 There are two general approaches to helping the player locate
 and identify magic items. The first is to distinguish them from
 the environment; in the example above, a pulsing red
 spotlight might draw your attention to the pencil on your
 desk. This is the height of artificiality, even when the
 attractant is subtler, such as a thick black outline around the
 object. Drawing attention to mundane but ultimately
 necessary objects has no correlation to the real world; it's just
 an artifice used by game designers.

 The other approach is to make you search and test for magic
 items, so that you just "accidentally" turn them up in the
 course of playing the game. For example, you might move
 your arrow-shaped cursor all over the desktop, and when it
 moves on top of the pencil your cursor turns into a hand,
 indicating that you can pick up the pencil. The testing might
 be more explicit - you might have to actually click on the
 pencil to discover you can pick it up. Why, you might wonder
 to yourself, can't you pick up the scissors? Or the paper? Or
 the phone? The answer, of course, is that they aren't magic
 objects, and aren't needed later in the game. If you could pick
 up everything, everywhere, then you would, and you would
 quickly have an inventory far too large to manage. It would
 also make programming the game enormously more difficult,
 because the implementers would need to accommodate your
 defusing the bomb with any pointy thing, from a paper clip to
 a toothpick.

 Whether magic items are indicated explicitly, or are revealed
 when you test them, finding magic items requires you to
 perform an exhaustive search. And this is indeed exhausting.
 When I purchase a game for pleasure, the last thing I want is
 to be forced to move at a snail's pace through each and every
 room, running my cursor over every visible surface, clicking
 on every visible object just in case it's magical. I recall one
 game where I stood in the midst of a long tunnel built of
 bricks. There were thousands of bricks. A clue earlier on told
 me that there was a secret "behind a brick". I had to spend
 about an hour moving through each section of the tunnel,
 punctiliously clicking on every single brick until I eventually
 found one that moved a little bit; clicking a few more times
 worked it loose and revealed a key behind it. This key was
 essential to continuing the game. I can't imagine that this
 boring, tedious process could really be much fun for anybody,
 and finding the key at the end did not make things all better.

 Avoid arbitrary complexity and magic items.

 Spackled Interaction

 When painting a wall, you can use decorative coat of thick
 paint to provide a textured finish; this spackling is similar to
 the way interaction is placed decoratively over many of
 today's computer games.

 You can spot spackled interaction by asking yourself whether
 the game designer and the interaction designer ever needed to
 speak to one another.

 The remote control for my home VCR is a terrific example of
 this. The bulk of the unit (made by a famous manufacturer
 who should know better) contains ten numbered buttons. To
 choose a channel for viewing, I simply press the one or two
 digits that make up the channel number, and the machine
 jumps to that channel. However, when I want to program the
 VCR to record a program later, I must use a different set of
 buttons along the top of the unit. To program the VCR, I go
 into "programming mode", and set the time of the show. To
 specify the channel to record, I press the same little numbered
 buttons, right? Wrong. The ten buttons on the keypad do
 nothing at all. Instead, incredibly enough, I must use two
 buttons near the top of the remote control, marked "+" and
 "(". If I want to record something on channel 39, I move my
 cursor to the channel field (which defaults to 1), and then
 press the "+" button 38 times. No kidding. Whoever designed
 the programming hardware never spoke to the person
 designing the channel-switching hardware, and neither of
 them thought through or field-tested the integrated product.

 This kind of disconnected interaction is common in many
 games. The person who designs the heart of the game and the
 way it works leaves the interaction tasks for someone else. The
 game is not conceptually whole, and the player feels that she
 is manipulating it from a distance.

 Alternating Cut-Scenes and
 Interactive Periods

 Perhaps the clearest example of spackled interaction is the
 common technique of alternating short pre-produced video or
 animated segments (called "cut-scenes") with interactive
 moments - usually an opportunity to solve a puzzle.

 In the best games, the puzzles are tightly integrated into the
 story, relying on your knowledge of the characters and the
 world to find a solution. Typically, when you're in
 "interactive mode" you have as much time as you like; the
 world of the game is suspended while you experiment with
 the puzzles, and wander around the environment collecting
 other information (e.g. clues and magic items) to help you
 solve the puzzles. After key puzzles have been completed, the
 game goes into "film mode" and plays for you a pre-produced
 cut-scene that shows the next few steps in the plot unfolding.
 Lots and lots of games work this way.

 I find this terribly offensive.

 The problem is that the game is sending you, the player,
 mixed messages.

 When you are working on puzzles, the game is telling you that
 your skill and imagination matter. Your understanding of the
 world and its characters through your creative insight are
 important. You are encouraged to build up an internal
 representation of the world. In the best games, you need to
 understand the psychology of the other characters in the story,
 and take actions that will lead them to respond in appropriate
 ways. I find this very exciting, and I enjoy immersing myself
 in the game's world. My time is my own, my character is me,
 and I act (within the game's limits) as I wish.

 Of course, each puzzle has a correct answer, just like a
 crossword puzzle has a correct answer. My individuality is
 largely an illusion, since I will end up at the same place as
 every other solver of the puzzle. But the enjoyment of the
 game can be strong enough so this isn't a problem - consider
 the legions of people who love doing crosswords. When the
 game is good, the fun of working it is its own reward, and
 there's nothing to break your personal style of involvement.

 Then the cut-scene takes over, and this illusion is utterly
 annihilated. My character starts acting in ways that I would
 never dream of. I cannot stop things from going wrong, I
 cannot control what goes on - I am irrelevant. The cut-scene
 plays at its own speed, hurtling the story forward and carrying
 me along with it. Virtually always these cut-scenes are the
 cinematically interesting ones, which means that they have
 lots of action. Character is revealed by action; what the hero
 does on the screen tells the viewer much of who that character
 is.

 But wait a second, that character is me!

 Well, only during "interactive mode", when I am in total
 control. My speed, my choices. Then I am abruptly jerked
 into "cut-scene mode", where I am a totally passive spectator
 as the action plays out at its own speed, and my character does
 things I would never do. When the cut-scene ends, I am
 thrown back into interactive mode, and suddenly I am left
 with the problem of cleaning up the new situation. A
 situation that is result of my actions, which I never made!

 And that's why I get offended. I'm told that I need to exercise
 my imagination and involve myself in the world and its
 characters, and then I am shown that I got it wrong. Even your
 own character acts in ways that disagree with your intentions,
 and this is the worst: every now and then control of "yourself"
 is ripped out of your hands, and you the player can only sit
 passively while the onscreen "you" acts incorrectly. This must
 be what it feels like to be schizophrenic.

 The game repeatedly and alternately requires you to be
 creative and inhabit your character, and then denies your
 creativity and yanks the character away from you. This is bad
 design.

 Never take over control of the player's character.

<<This would seem to argue against the RP-common point of automating
certain player reactions, such as becoming angry and attacking when
another character spills his beer on you.>>

 Interactive Fiction

 There are lots of attempts being made right now to create some
 kind of "interactive fiction." For the most part, nothing has
 worked yet. And I don't think anything's going to work - it's a
 doomed pursuit.

 Which is not to say that it isn't popular. If you browse the
 shelves or web pages for today's games, you'll find lots of
 enticements along the lines of "Ten Different Gameplays!",
 "Six Different Endings!", and so on. Then there's the more
 direct kind of involvement: "You Control the Action!", "A
 Customized Story Based on Your Choices!".

 Well, sure, we can write programs that respond to input. And
 we can probably use that facility to create new and old kinds
 of art that say things about our selves and our culture. But it's
 a big leap to think that this is a good way to tell a story.

 The Myth of Interactivity Redux

 The popularity of the concept of "interactive fiction" for
 computer-based stories and games is surprising. Is there
 anything compelling in our cultural history that suggests
 people want to participate in received stories? Are there
 stunning examples of successful interactive fictive
 experiences that have turned doubting Thomases into true
 believers? No.

 It's the Myth of Interactivity again - recall that this myth tells
 us: Interactivity makes games better, and a game designer
 should try to make the experience as richly interactive as
 possible. And what goes for regular games goes for story
 games. This belief in the universal power of interactivity is
 what leads people to try to marry interaction and storytelling.

 Story games that are based on some form of "interactive
 fiction" offer you two incentives: they can be replayed
 (thereby increasing the value of your purchase), and you can
 control the development and resolution of the story.

 The first appeal is largely illusion. Why would you want to
 play the game a second time? Much of the fun of interactive
 games is learning about the world and the characters and how
 things work. Once you've played all the way through, you
 know these things. In the best case, you've seen a satisfying
 story and had a good time. Why play through it again with just
 a slightly different twist on things? Most of what you'll
 encounter you'll have seen before, though there will be some
 differences. But you've already seen the game and reached a
 satisfying resolution. In my experience, most players
 investigate some of the alternative endings simply to see what
 they're like, not because they want to play the game again.

 The second appeal of interactive fiction is your participation.
 It's easy to observe that in our culture only the occasional
 curiosity has involved the listener in the telling of the story.
 This has nothing to do with production values or technology,
 but goes right to the heart of storytelling. It comes down to
 this: good stories are carefully constructed by skilled
 storytellers. Whether constructed intuitively or explicitly, a
 storyteller uses craft to engage an audience, keep them, and
 then satisfy them at the end.

 Creating a work of fiction is not easy. That's why we have
 books and college classes on the subject. A skilled author
 understands her characters, and can place them in situations
 where they reveal themselves through action. The audience
 learns about the character from the author; if the audience
 selects how that character should react to a situation then the
 character will not be acting from a central core, but erratically.
 We call such behavior psychotic, and notwithstanding a few
 exceptions, psychotics are not very interesting to watch and
 don't make for good stories.

 So traditionally we trust our storytellers to create interesting
 and appealing characters whom we follow through their
 interesting and revealing story. If we can simply cause
 characters to react in any old way, we've lost both the
 character and the plot.

 The exception to this is where the characters are deliberately
 stand-ins without personality. For example, the little
 computerized people on an electronic football field aren't
 anyone we care about personally, and in most football games
 we can control their actions without worrying about
 consistency (some games try to model the players on an
 individual basis, which is a different situation). Similarly,
 adrenaline games can get away with unmotivated characters,
 who are really just surrogates for ourselves in pressure
 situations.

 But to create a successful work of "interactive fiction" with
 meaningful characters, every possible storyline through the
 narrative has to be as satisfying as the single storyline in a
 successful work of traditional fiction. Otherwise one gets a
 substandard story, and then has the penalty of having
 participated in the creation of this lackluster beast. That's
 hardly satisfying. And given the significant effort required by
 talented storytellers to create a single good storyline, imagine
 the difficulty of making something that will work across
 multiple possibilities. How could you handle foreshadowing?
 Growing tension? Theme and repetition? Plants and payoffs?
 Pacing? The list goes on and on - all the traditional tools of
 storytelling become far more difficult to apply.

 The successful author of a piece of interactive fiction will end
 up investing as much effort in the work as would be required
 by several traditional stories. What justifies this effort? The
 fact that the reader has the opportunity to interact with the
 story is the only incentive. But I argued above that people
 don't want this: they've not wanted in the past when it was
 possible, and simply adding cool technology to the equation
 doesn't make story interaction any more rewarding. It's novel,
 and has some limited, short-term appeal, but novelty fades.

 To summarize, the fundamental problems of "interactive
 fiction" are twofold. First, the author must do much more
 work to create a piece of comparable quality to a
 non-interactive work. Second, when a listener/viewer/player
 controls characters in a story, she can interfere with the
 character's personality, which fatally injures the development
 of the character and leads to a psychotic personality and
 uninteresting story.

<<Comments on this bit from the non-consensual RP gallery extremely
welcome.  I'd guess you have experience there?  Caliban and Co?>>

 Note that exploration games, primarily aimed at children,
 don't suffer from this problem because they are largely
 designed in such a way that the story line is stopped, the
 player explores the environment of the current "page", and
 then the story is resumed when the page is turned. The player
 isn't really interacting with the story itself, just exploring the
 environment in which it develops.

 Computerized Narratives

 At the bottom end of dynamic experiences are those that are
 created on the fly by the computer. There are people working
 on (and selling) programs that generate stories, interactive or
 not, usually based on extensive rule systems and story
 fragments.

 This strikes me as a remarkably fruitless endeavor. There is
 little enough time for any of us to read, view, hear, and
 otherwise absorb the carefully crafted stories and works that
 other people have created for us. Whether simple diversions
 or deep philosophical studies, they are all the result of a
 creative person who is striving to communicate to us. And
 they all have much more to say than any computer.
 Computer-assisted media are just fine; computer-generated
 content is inherently empty.

 Computerized Characters

 Humans are difficult to understand. We are simultaneously
 reliable, unpredictable, and arbitrary. We are also quirky and
 self-contradictory. The complexity of human character has
 been the subject of sincere study by every culture, and though
 our sciences of sociology and psychology have given us some
 vocabulary, the human personality remains a mystery.

 One popular model for creating synthetic characters is to
 build a core personality into a computerized character.
 Careful design can create a character with both consistent
 traits and idiosyncrasies. Bringing out these traits in a book or
 play is difficult enough; trying to display them within the
 context of an unpredictable game is very difficult. Today's
 trend seems to be the simulation of a complex character by
 placing a layer of random behavior over the character's
 programmed behavior. They may be speaking to you calmly,
 but when some unseen roll of the dice comes up larger than a
 pre-defined number, the character becomes more hostile.

 Randomized procedural behavior creates psychotic robots.

 Sane people do not act randomly. They act in ways that may
 appear random, if we don't know them well enough, but their
 actions are integrated into their personality. Even when a
 person holds simultaneous, opposing beliefs, the expression
 of those beliefs is a result of their history and personality. In
 short, there is reason and justification behind the strangest
 acts.

<<This would seem a specious problem for interactions of characters which
are intended to persist only briefly>>

 Unless there is truly no justification at all. Then the person is
 acting crazy, or psychotic. That's the label we use when people
 act in ways that are really random. And that's what behavioral
 control with a layer of randomness simulates. This may be a
 useful technique for simulating a psychotic character, but is
 no good for people that are supposed to be helpful,
 dependable, or sane.

 Interaction and Stories

 There's probably something to be found in the combination of
 interaction and stories, but it won't be the simple insertion of
 branch points at every story decision point and the authoring
 of endless parallel pieces of narrative. That way lies madness
 for the author and emptiness for the player.

 Every one of us can make up and receive stories all the time.
 We talk to friends, read books, watch films and television,
 and attend to stories in the world because they allow us to see
 into the hearts and minds of other people, and into worlds
 with which we are unfamiliar. When receiving a story, we
 trust the author to make the experience fulfilling and worth
 our time and effort. When we take over some of the
 storyteller's job, we are interfering with that process, and
 severing the fundamental relationship between storyteller and
 audience.

 There might be new ways to bring these roles together, but
 they won't be fiction, and we ought not to waste time trying to
 stick close to fictive forms. At best, we will create sterile
 hybrids that simultaneously break the author-reader bond
 while pretending it's still there.

 Participatory Design

 As I stated at the start of this essay, I don't know the rules for
 designing a successful game using computer and network
 media. I suspect that any rules we could divine today would
 be quickly outdated anyway as we see the changes in the
 underlying hard and soft technologies. To use a maritime
 metaphor, I don't know where the good shipping lanes are,
 but in the discussion above I tried to point out where some of
 the dangerous rocks are located.

 At the heart of every good design will be respect for the
 player. And that means that the player's time will never be
 wasted, and the game will never insult or deny her
 individuality, intelligence, or creativity. The player will
 always be engaged in fun or interesting events, whether she is
 receiving them passively or interacting with them.

<<Aside: His persistant use of the female pronoun for the neuter is
amazingly annoying>>

 The powers of the new technologies appear on two fronts, and
 they both derive from the idea behind the participatory
 experience, rather than the merely interactive one. I believe
 that each of these fronts offers a promise of finding the
 enduring qualities of computer-mediated games that will last.

 Person to Person

 The first promise is linking people to people. It will be a long
 time before any program is even nearly as interactive,
 surprising, and interesting as another person. It is not essential
 to always play games with other people; time spent by one's
 self is sacred, whether in quiet contemplation or in some
 activity. I believe there will always be lots of opportunity for
 absorbing and pleasing pastimes that are enjoyed in privacy.
 But when we want to be with other people, sometimes we
 find that everyone is busy or unavailable.

 On the net, there are always people available. As long as
 people have even a sporting chance of finding a compatible
 teammate or opponent, I believe they will take advantage of
 the opportunity. Two people who meet online in the midst of
 a game already have a common interest and a ready topic,
 which is already more than you usually find with a stranger at
 a party.

 Person to Culture

 There is a popular approach to hyping modern media, which
 suggests that by watching a television show or visiting a web
 site, the viewer is actually experiencing something. Of course,
 the viewer experiences nothing but the act of sitting in a chair
 and watching or reading.

 But a game can elevate this, even if only by a small amount.
 The player still is sitting in a chair, typing and clicking. But
 because the player is immersed in a game, he or she will be
 exposed to the environment of the game. And just as with all
 entertainments, this can carry along an exposure to a new idea,
 place, or culture. Playing a game set in a rainforest canopy is
 not the same as "experiencing" being in a rainforest canopy,
 no matter how sophisticated the technology, but it's a lot
 better than knowing nothing about rainforest canopies at all.
 The same goes for games set in 1940's Poland, Ancient Rome,
 an anthill, or downtown Seattle. Executed well, games can all
 offer something more than simple diversion.

 Less Is More

 Many of the techniques that I've knocked in this essay can be
 salvaged. I believe the key to moving forward is, ironically, to
 move backward. By accepting the limitations of today's
 technologies we can avoid problems resulting from their
 over-ambitious application.

 Consider interaction with computer-controlled characters. In
 the discussion above I denigrated the use of multiple-choice
 menus for carrying on conversations. We don't have the ability
 to carry on general conversations with computer characters,
 and just adding on randomness makes them appear
 dim-witted or crazy. But we can create very limited
 personalities.

 Simulating a human by using a weak personality model leads
 to trouble, because we can't deliver on the expectations. But
 we can dress up a small appliance in a tiny personality, and
 it's going to do fine. Who's going to get upset because a
 responsive desk lamp misunderstood the nuance of a request?
 We don't expect too much brilliance from worms or birds, so
 we won't be too disappointed when they fail to deliver it. By
 scaling back to a simple character we can use our best
 techniques and they will fit. Players don't expect much from
 only slightly self-aware toasters.

 Similarly, we can accept the need to talk with the
 environment in very limited ways. Right now, I can only
 express myself to my blender through ten push-button
 switches. If I were given a very limited syntax and grammar, it
 would be a step up. I might ask the blender whether the
 bananas are too squishy, and it could give me back a
 five-word sentence. It's not great conversation, but it's
 interaction that doesn't fail expectations.

 This general rule applies to all aspects of game design. If we
 can't do something well, then we should redesign its use until
 we are applying the technique at a level we can pull off
 smoothly. Pushing technology is fine, and game designers
 hardly need to be encouraged to do so. But I think many of
 today's problems are a result of game designers shooting high
 (which is fine), but then failing to acknowledge where they
 actually ended up.

 In game design, we should embrace the limits of our
 understanding and technology, and strive for the best work
 within (or slightly beyond) those limits. All of the design
 problems discussed in the majority of this essay are a result of
 designers implicitly promising more than they could achieve,
 and thereby delivering disappointment. Promise less, and you
 can deliver beautifully, delighting and entertaining players.

 Wrapping Up

 It would be a mistake to place too much importance on what a
 game can deliver - it is, after all, just a game - but it would be
 equally unwise to miss the opportunity to give the player a
 chance to expand her world, even in a limited way.

 Games can be much more than simple diversions. Successful
 board and card games have combined simplicity, psychology,
 and respect for the player to provide an enduring challenge.
 The best computer and network games will do the same.

--<cut>--

--=20
J C Lawrence                               Internet: claw at null.net
----------(*)                              Internet: coder at ibm.net
...Honourary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...