[work]

It seems to me that the responsability the games try to avoid as a medium comes from the responsability already avoided by the individual games. I mean, in a game often you can kill and loot with little consequence, even inside the virtual world the game is placed.

If we want games to be seen in a more respectable way, maybe we should make games that demand more responsible courses of action.

Heh.  Yes, let's make a GTA clone where you shoot one person and then spend the next 20 years in jail. 

While your post is initially appealing, I think you are incorrectly polarizing the issue. You state: "Either games are a powerful medium that can have a meaningful impact on the audience or they are insignificant playthings that contribute nothing to culture.  Take your pick."

Your argument for this is based on taking responsibility, which I wholeheartedly believe is something that every person on this earth should do. However, you are taking this concept to unnecessary extremes; is it not possible for a medium be meaningful and/or be an insignificant plaything, depending on the intent of the individual artist(s)?

An individual work may be meaningful or meaningless depending on the artist, but not the medium as a whole.

If the medium has power, that's enough to say that it's not a harmless plaything.

Man, I remember the old days of Quake modding fondly.  I didn't manage to finish any complete mods, but just creating crazy stuff in the game was tons of fun.  I think I was trying to make a flight sim with random maps or something.

Perhaps its me, but I don't think any shooters after Quake kept the modding magic quite as well.

[“Without responsibility, there cannot be power.”]

With the resignation of Atkinson, I've been thinking about the way the gaming community responds to outside criticism.  This lead to the following blog post:

We’ve all heard the old Spiderman line – “With great power comes great responsibility.”  I was never a big fan of this saccharine moralizing.  It seems to me that when you have power you should be able to do whatever the heck you want with it.  To redeem this nugget of wisdom, I’d like to turn it around:

“Without responsibility, there cannot be power.”

The idea is pretty simple.  If you continue to insulate yourself from all consequences, you will be safe from repercussions.  And safe you may be, but you also cannot take credit for any success.  If you remove yourself from the field of battle, you can’t share in the spoils.

You see this phenomenon often in corporations.  Companies that ooze process out of their every pore are very big on separating responsibilities.  Usually, the people who are doing the separating are focused on the stuff that they don’t have to do.  Bonus points for every task that you manage to offload onto others.  They don’t realize that there’s a hidden cost to this behaviour.  By armouring themselves in this way, they’ve made themselves irrelevant.

What does this have to do with games, you ask?

Every time you see someone in the media pipe up about violence in games, the chorus of apologists starts up.  ”Games are just for fun; I’ve played them since I was a kid and I’m ok”, say the game players.  ”Games can’t make anyone violent”, say the game designers.  If you listen to these voices, you quickly come to the conclusion that games have no effect whatsoever on the audience.  They pass through the psyche like so much meaningless noise.

The same people who will wave their hands at the violence question will explain to you how games are ART and should be respected.  Hypocrites!  It’s time to take responsibility for our work.

You cannot have it both ways.

Either games are a powerful medium that can have a meaningful impact on the audience or they are insignificant playthings that contribute nothing to culture.  Take your pick.

I believe that games can become art and that they have power – maybe more power than any other medium.  This means that I also have to accept that they are often misusing their power.  This is not a conclusion that I like, but it’s the only one that I can accept.

Instead of railing against the clueless politicians, I propose a different solution.  Let us make games that enrich people’s lives.  Let us use our power to talk about things that we care about.  Let us take responsibility for our creations.

Writing has a principle of "Show don't tell."  Fundamentally, I don't suppose that we're losing a lot by slashing the verbiage.

@alex - i feel that it's the publishers in the mainstream game industry that favor content, not the programmers or game designers; i feel the 'interaction is king' theory dominates game programmers / game designers, as well as games journalists / game reviewers, and most intellectual gamers. besides, while most games in the mainstream industry favor heavy content creation (especially in japan) that doesn't mean that they theoretically understand why it's good to favor that, or are favoring it in the right way.

This is a good point.  Programmers tend to be a lot more system-minded, it's true.

and yeah, the issue is narrower than what i mentioned, but i feel that the reason you believe what you wrote in the OP is because of the theoretical underpinning that content doesn't really matter, that once you create the game design rules most of the job is done and the rest is just tedious work. to me, creating good content is almost everything. creating the content for games is the most fun part of game design for me.

I've created both content-heavy games (Pandora's Gearbox) and mechanic heavy (Swarm).  To me, when I'm making a mechanic-heavy game, the system IS the content.  That's the value that I'm delivering to the player.  I don't shirk the responsibility of creating the game, I just do it at a different level.  It's a noun vs. verb thing.

Curious that you consider spells and such to be "content".  I'd say that they're a bit of both.

You're correct that my perspective of the interactivity debate informs my views.  I suppose that for counter-balance I should create a story-heavy game.  I have come to respect the power of storytelling recently.

Also, I'm curious about something.  I saw the story of ID almost as a comment on the meaninglessness of tower defense in the larger scope of things.  In other words, it was an anti-immersion game.  Most games pretend that their world is the real world and the player is meant to ignore the jagged edges.  ID used the very jagged edges of the TD genre to make a point.

Was this intentional or was it more of a coincidence?  The reason I ask is that I thought that it was a very effective example of using the gameplay to support the story.

the 'lie' reference was a reference to the saying 'everything you believe is a lie' and not to be taken literally -- i forgot that english wasn't your first language, should have been more careful, i didn't mean to make it sound as if i was offended; you didn't strike a nerve per se, it's more that i was dismissive because pretty much 99% of game devs nowadays (through the theoretical influence of crawford) feel that gameplay/interaction is the most important thing about a game, and that anyone who thinks otherwise is a heretic.

so i've come to be somewhat brusque about the subject, since there's absolutely no way to convince someone that they're wrong on this topic, and arguing over it is pointless. your OP is an example of this; you prove theoretically that you're right, at the cost of ignoring case studies and empirical evidence to the contrary (such as many of the games many people, including probably you, most like are content-heavy games).

i've presented my thoughts on this topic elsewhere (most recently tigirc and in my early questions on formspring, and in these forums in a thread i don't remember the name of right now, but i remember alec had a big post in it where he presented an opinion similar to mine) so won't go into it much, but basically i believe separating gameplay from graphics, sound, story, etc., is a bad idea and that believing in that separation and favoring gameplay over the other inseparable parts of a game is the primary reason for how bad most games are (both aaa games and indie games).

so yes, i really do believe that most game design theory is false, from its basic axiom, from first principles. a realistic theory of game design would have to start from scratch, and treat games as a whole, as organisms where every part is crucial and changing one graphic or one sound effect can cause the entire game to fail or to excel, rather than as machines with interchangeable parts and "gameplay" as the core system and graphics, music, and story as the chrome that surrounds the core system and is just there to be a pretty interface to the world.

note that this is opposite to the way it was when crawford started out, so we've come full circle: he used to have to struggle terribly to get anyone to care about gameplay or interaction, whereas now we have to struggle terribly to get anyone to think there's more to a game than its interaction and core mechanics.

I wasn't aware that idiom was in wide circulation. *shrug*  I think that it has less to do with my language and more to do with Twitter's brevity restrictions.

As far as your stance goes, I thought that Jesse Schell put the case forth pretty well in The Art of Game Design.  He's of the holistic experience school of thought as well.  Besides, I think that you're overstating Crawford's influence.  If it was as great as you state, he wouldn't go into exile to work on Storytron alone.

If anything, the mainstream industry is on the other side, Paul.  They've been tripping over their feet to cut out the gameplay from games since the early 90's.  Witness the love affair with Hollywood.  We have designers like David Cage who would switch to director at the drop of a hat if they let him.  What about the cutscene-fest that's the latest MSG?

To be honest, I wasn't really looking to wade into this discussion again with my initial comment.  My point was that there's a way to get non-linear returns on your time as a designer.  Admittedly, I have to concede that this would be very hard for games that you create.

I'm sorry, I don't follow this?  I thought you were just talking about using stuff like procedural generation to make more hours of gameplay.  To me, more hours are not always better than fewer and that randomized content is hardly ever better than well designed content.

(also, I'm actually not sure Dwarf Fortress is a good example of making a better ratio.  Sure, most people can play it for a long time, but do you have any idea how long he's been working on that?)

Now that I think about it some more, you're right.  If all that you're looking for is a fun 10 hours, the fixed content creation is probably superior.

My original thought was that you could scale it down to still be 10 hours with less work.

What bothers me is how much work goes into making a game. Think about it. A smart, talented and passionate designer like Paul goes underground and cranks out a game in two years. That’s TWO YEARS of someone’s life. How long does it take to play; 8-20 hours? That an incredibly worrying ratio.

Is that a worrying ratio?  Seems reasonable to me.  Take a look at how much time and energy is often put into novels (can be read in 8 hours) or movies (watched in 2).  Or hell, what about a painting?  Seen in one second.

Not that I don't like games like Dwarf Fortress--I really do love them.  But it's true, I think, that procedurally generated games can often lack a certain consideration that painstaking and extremely well designed games can have.  And generally I don't think it's good to be thinking in terms of how many gameplay hours you can squeeze out of something.  Honestly I would prefer it if most games kept it around a really really solid ten or something.

You're right about the books and movies.  They are in the same boat.  The difference is that they can't escape.  Games can.

With regard to length, think of it in terms of cost.  Right now, games are more expensive to make than books.  Because of this, books have a much greater reserve to draw upon.  This leads to there being more great books.

If game designers get more bang per design hour, the average quality of games will rise.

You know, the topic title is a good one for a game.

Speaking of, I can see what you mean.  I'm a bit surprised Paul kinda jumped down your throat with-- no wait, hang on.  Never mind.

But what you suggest...isn't this what metroidvanias and roguelikes (when they do it well) are already for?  I don't see how a story-driven game with heavy narrative could possibly benefit from this structure.  

I admit that doing something as meaningful as Immortal Defence would be very hard right now.  Is this because it's impossible or because we haven't tried hard enough yet?

I see glimmers of hope in DF - you periodically see players telling stories of dwarven tragedy in their games.  Perhaps that element could be isolated and refined.  DF spends, what 90% of it's time simulating spleen physics and stuff like that?  What if we spent the time simulating the emotional responses of characters?

By the way, I don't mind Paul's response.  We need more people who put a lot of thought into their design.  If they happen to be opinionated, then it's that much more fun. 

[Linear Output]

Yesterday I posted a comment on Twitter directed at Paul Eres. “You know Paul, it just kills me to see you pouring all the work into levels. Why do you focus on linear content production?” I think that I may have struck a nerve, because his response was, “well, to me, the heart of game design is content, not mechanics. most of what you believe about game design is a lie.” I can see how my original message could be taken the wrong way, but it wasn’t meant to offend. I've written this post here and on my blog to explore the issue further.

If you follow Paul’s blog, you know that he periodically posts messages about having finished some area of Saturated Dreamers. The game must be huge, because he’s been at it for a while now. One time he put up a video of the level creation and it looked like a painstaking process. I think that he places all of the game objects manually, essentially hand-crafting the levels.

This really bothers me at some level. Perhaps it’s because I really liked Paul’s last game – Immortal Defense. The mechanics were well made, but it was fundamentally another tower defence game. The compelling thing about it was the story – a tale of an immortal protector being trapped in an alien void. I suppose that it’s not surprising that Paul is a staunch defender of the “content” approach.

What’s my problem with this approach, anyway? If it works, it works, right?

Linear Output

What bothers me is how much work goes into making a game. Think about it. A smart, talented and passionate designer like Paul goes underground and cranks out a game in two years. That’s TWO YEARS of someone’s life. How long does it take to play; 8-20 hours? That an incredibly worrying ratio. Here’s the root of the problem:

Content = Time * K

The content that one designer can produce is essentially proportional to their time and the K is skewed against you really badly in this case. The good part, I suppose, is that the case above is at least somewhat feasible.

Diminishing Returns

Other approaches aren’t so lucky.  For example, this is what it takes to create a branching storyline.

Content = Log(Time) * K

Because of the branches, creating content actually gets harder as you keep creating. This is a really bad situation to get into – a combinatorial explosion. It’s the primary reason for us not having true interactive storytelling yet. Remember how in Mass Effect 2 the characters more or less ignored your actions in the first game? The above formula is the reason.

This is why seeing any designer chip away at the content bit by bit is disturbing to me. I want to see more games like Immortal Defense and that’s hard if designers have to toil at every pixel. So, what’s the solution? One is leverage – get better tools so that your K goes up. That’s another topic. I propose to turn the formula around.

Harness the Explosion

Content = K^Time

In other words, the more effort you put in, the more content you get – the effect is exponential. How is this possible?

Instead of thinking about the game as a series of events or a narrative, what if you shifted your frame of reference? What if you thought of it as a set of interacting mechanics? The advantage of this stance is that each element that you add to the game has potentially interesting relationships to all others. The designer harnesses the power of combinations instead of being a slave to them.

I’ve briefly glanced this mode of design in my work. Attack of the Paper Zombies, for example, has a random zombie mutation mechanism. I tried to make it that different combinations of upgrades would feel unique to the player in significant ways. A better example of this is Tarn Adams’ Dwarf Fortress. The stories in that game are entirely an outcome of the interacting game elements.

Problem Solved?

I think that I’ve made a good case for why working primarily on content is not the most efficient approach. Now let me discuss some reservations that I have for this method. Firstly, just throwing in more game elements is not the solution. They must interlock with other parts of the game in an interesting and comprehensible manner. Fortunately, this is just a mater of craft. A more serious problem is that the designer still has to keep the entire interaction set in mind. In other words, while you have this amazing creative power, your judgement ability doesn’t necessary scale to compensate.

The above concerns may or may not be significant. Roguelikes have been using the power of combinations for decades and they don’t show any signs of hitting theoretical barriers.  The best course of action, I think, is to try this approach on a lot of games to see what comes out.

What are your plans for the full version?  Do you have a particular twist or hook that you want to explore?

This looks interesting.  Maybe now my games will have more-than-rudimentary sound.

Looks like nobody cares about my pontificating. 

What I meant by efficiency is that there's a giant difference between 1 and 2.  I know exactly what I want.  I don't have to write design documents or convince myself.  A Designer-Programmer can iterate way,way faster then Designer + Programmer.  Then there's the added bonus of inventing new game features through program exploration.

Can't comment on the art side.  If I was a competent artist, maybe I'd be able to dig up synergies there too.  I wonder if Phil Fish has observations there.

Holy crap!  Is that what I think it is?  That looks awesome!

Whew.  I've finally made my way to the weekend.  Tomorrow, the coding begins!  I hope to have a rough 1st version out on Monday.

-- A girl who was Tuesday

I sense a fellow G.K. Chesterton fan.    I thought that book was amazing.  The man is witty beyond belief.  I especially liked the scene where they're chased by the crowd in the town. 

Oy! You've got me there.  Maybe it's a french-spanish revolution?

Feeling awkward when talking about zombie games is going to be a non issue in a few years anyways.

Games are getting more and more popular and socially acceptable very quickly lately.

If I made a movie about chainsawing things to death, I believe that I would have a similar feeling.  It's not about social acceptance; it's about the fact that we've been starting at our own work for so long, that we don't realise that we're remaking the same game for the last 20 years.

This is some good stuff.  I'm going to start throwing code together.  Keep tossing out suggestions!

Interesting suggestions so far, everyone.  I'm going to have to sweat to implement these. 

With regard to genre, I'd like to have as much freedom as possible.  Obviously, this is restricted by the amount of work that I can do.