[MUD-Dev] Evolutionary Design

[danc at anark.com]

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Original message: http://www.kanga.nu/archives/MUD-Dev-L/2002Q2/msg01146.php

It's amazing what threads you find months later when playing around
with Google.  :-) Dave, you raise an interesting point that though
not addressed specifically in the article is dealt with quite nicely
by the evolutionary design metaphor

On Wed, 12 Jun 2002 15:36:06 -0700 (PDT)
"Dave Rickey" <daver at mythicentertainment.com> wrote:
 
> I'm going to snip the article, in the interest of addressing an
> issue the author didn't: Treating the game design process itself
> as an adaptive landscape has merit, but it fails to note that it
> is a landscape of an unknown number of dimensions.  There's
> something big about the Sims I've never seen anyone comment on, a
> dog that isn't barking: Where are the clones?

On of the wonderful things about an evolutionary strategy is that it
has almost zero clue about the landscape that it exists within.  It
is concerned with local variations.  The designer tweaks a few
variables and sees if the result is more enjoyable. This type of
method was used to create a game like Sims in the first place, so I
suspect the evolutionary metaphor stands up.

Two critical factors are necessary however to replicate the success
of the Sims through evolutionary design:

  1) You need a play test group that is in sync with the same
  population as those people who play Sims.  If you stick a bunch of
  Doom addicts in front of a Sims proto-type, expect them to request
  explosions. Sims had a reasonably large percentage of women on the
  development team, and testing occurred in a company that generally
  attracted fans of simulations. Play tester tastes matter.

  2) You need a designer who has an understanding for incremental
  changes that will make the sim game more enjoyable. Which
  direction in the unknown landscape of fun should the design creep? 
  There is a certain amount of learned craft to game design.  For
  example, a console designer relies on patterns such as "A good way
  to end a level is with a boss monsters" A designer highly trained
  in violent reward/punishment type game design is going to be left
  grasping for new features to add to their sim game.  As another
  poster stated, most designers and producers come from a world of
  mature genres.  Don't expect Id to jump on the Sims bandwagon.  In
  general, many established game developers lack the knowledge
  necessary to move rapidly over to a new system of game play.  In
  theory, they could use the feedback mechanisms inherent in
  iterative design to learn new design patterns, but often the
  economic cost of fixing a constant stream of mistakes is
  overwhelming.

All of this leads to a subject that I glossed over in my previous
essay: Intrinsic motivation.  The reward systems I described in the
first essay were all extrinsic motivation systems.  In other words,
the design builds sticks and carrots into the game that push the
play towards a particular type of action. Intrinsic motivation stems
from the player's internal desire to do an activity.

People are more powerfully motivated by internal motivation than
external motivation.  In fact, recent research shows that extrinsic
motivation can actually diminish performance and passion for an
activity.  This is wild stuff if you are a game designer who come
from the "Kill the player when he makes a mistake" school of design.

The result, though by no means surprising, ties into the Sims Clone
paradox quite nicely.  Young men in their early twenties who deeply
enjoy blowing the crap out of thing build games that involve blowing
the crap out of things.  People who deeply enjoy organizing things
and exploring relationships enjoy games about such topics.

The intrinsic motivations of play testers and designers directly
influence the shape of the 'fun landscape' that evolutionary design
operates within. If you *only* enjoy blowing the crap out of things,
you will subconsciously penalize game designs that involve Sims-like
activities. Over time, this results in games that act like first
person shooters instead of simulations of relationships. If you want
to replicate the Sims phenomenon, get together a group of people who
enjoy that type of game.  Building a Sims game isn't rocket science.
It's simply statistically unlikely to find such a group in our
population of 'war not love' game developers.

Ultimately what you need is a cultural shift and a broadening of the
game developer demographics. This isn't the sort of thing that
happens in a year or two. Give it ten to twenty years and you'll
start seeing more Sims like games. That's enough time for the
current generation of designers to finally die off and a new crop of
kids raised on 'love and house fires' to make their way into the
profession.

take care,
Daniel
Danc at anark.com



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