Tag: game design


Mid-Core Is Bullshit

March 6th, 2013 — 8:15pm

The game industry continues to believe that casual and hardcore players are separate monolithic audiences interested solely in games reflecting their respective play styles.  The latest entry along these lines is the mid-core game, which seeks to claim a middle ground between the two.

The underlying case for mid-core players is genuine enough:  there are many players who would like a deeper, more engaging experience without the burden of a steep learning curve or large time commitment.

But mid-core comes up short for the same reasons traditional casual and hardcore thinking does:

  • It confuses product specific engagement and commitment characteristics (where they are valid) with demographic characteristics (where they are not).  To claim there is an audience of casual players, hardcore players, and now mid-core players outside the scope of a single product is nonsensical.  These are different people for different products, and one game’s hardcore player is another’s casual player.  And remember:  everyone is hardcore about something.
  • It falsely assumes there is a spectrum of play from casual to hardcore where a given product falls, instead of treating casual and hardcore play as separate and compatible in the same game.  To make a game more casual is to make it more accessible;  to make it hardcore is to make it more engaging.  Good casual design increases a player’s willingness to play but does nothing to increase their desire to play.  Good hardcore design improves a player’s desire to play but does nothing to increase their willingness to play.
  • It takes a very narrow view of player behavior:  that an individual seeks the exact same play experience every time they sit down to play.

Of these, the last is most important.  In the busy, chaotic world we all live in, our ability to engage and commit to a product varies from day to day. When you build for mid-core, you haven’t addressed this problem any better than casual or hardcore approaches because you’re still building for a fixed level of player engagement.  Which means you’re still going to lose consumers when they want to engage more and there’s nothing interesting to do, or you require them to engage more and they don’t have the time.

It’s a lot like picking a single price point for your product — it can work, but it’s not terribly efficient compared to free-to-play models.  And it’s a poor strategy for any product hoping to build a long term relationship with the player.

We should enable high levels of casual and hardcore play in the same product, not find a happy medium between the two.  Doing so doesn’t re-align your product with a different demographic or change the level of engagement;  it expands your product’s audience to include a much greater number of players, without sacrificing one group to make room for another.

 

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Why Interactive Storytelling Will Have More Than One Answer

July 16th, 2012 — 7:24pm

A few weeks ago I attended Chris Crawford’s interactive storytelling gathering in southern Oregon.  It was a small group, less than a dozen, but the composition was fairly diverse and included game designers, industry execs, interactive fiction authors, academics, writers and even one venture capitalist.

There’s a lot of debate about what interactive storytelling is and how to solve the “interactive storytelling problem”.  I think this is a bit misguided as it tends to treat interactive storytelling as a singular technological hurdle to be overcome (like 3D rendering).   But interactive storytelling isn’t a problem or a technology, it’s a category, one that will likely have multiple viable product types that each have their own set of challenges to be solved.

I base this on the simple observation that if you’re going to create a category called “interactive storytelling”, there must also be a category of everything else called “non-interactive storytelling” which includes such wide ranging possibilities as “novels”, “music”, “movies”, “comics”, “poetry” and so forth.  While it doesn’t logically follow that interactive storytelling must likewise have more than one form of expression, it does seem more than probable given the diverse range of methods for non-interactive storytelling and the really broad macro level categorization (interactive vs. non-interactive, neither of which is actually descriptive of what someone might experience).

In other words, I think it’s a mistake to think of interactive storytelling as one more means to tell a story the way a novel or movie does.  It’s really a massive grouping of expressive forms, some of which may be mirrors from the non-interactive side of the fence (e.g. “interactive novels”) and some of which may be new things entirely.

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What Is The Game About: Dodgeball

July 9th, 2012 — 5:16pm

This is part four of a multi-part series on focus in game design, using examples primarily from Knockabout Games.  The first post can be found here.

In 2005 my company Knockabout Games built a mobile game for Superscape based on a license to the movie Dodgeball.   We did our homework — that is, we played all the old console and pc implementations of dodgeball and watched the movie — but none of us thought this was a very hard question to answer.  After all, the thematic answer is driven by the license (“it’s a tongue-in-cheek view of niche sports, specifically dodgeball”).  And it’s dodgeball.  Which means that functionally it must be about dodging.

Except, not really.  We designed all our features to support the core concept of dodging, only to find that wasn’t particularly fun (and was quite difficult on a handset with a “team” of 4 or 5 characters).  What was far more enjoyable, once we had the first playable in hand, was hitting opponents with the ball.

So midstream we changed the focus and modified (or dropped) all the game’s features accordingly.  “Dodging” was now a supporting feature, one that you had to pay much less attention to.  And we added things like a unique throw per team (e.g. a curveball or one that bounced off the back wall) and a method for moving your team in lockstep and throwing multiple balls at once.  These were simple changes, but overnight the game went from “crappy licensed movie game” to “hey, this is a lot of fun”.  Indeed, one reviewer later observed they couldn’t think of a specific reason to like the game, except that they couldn’t put the damn thing down.


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What Is The Game About: Precision Pinball

July 2nd, 2012 — 5:24pm

This is part three of a multi-part series on focus in game design, using examples primarily from Knockabout Games.  The first post can be found here.

I’ve designed a lot of computer pinball games.  My first one, “3D Pinball For Windows“, has the odd claim to fame of being seen by pretty much anyone who ever owned a PC.  Back in 1994, when I started working on that game, I wasn’t asking myself “what is the game about”.  I just went and made a pinball game (one that was about as kitchen sink a design as you can imagine).  It wasn’t great, but it was entertaining and acceptable for the time.

So when I sat down to make a computer pinball game for a mobile phone in 2003, I really wanted to get to the underlying core of what pinball was about.  At a minimum, I wanted to identify a key element a mobile pinball game could be built around that wouldn’t be crippled by the device.

What I settled on was “motion”.  Pinball is all about sending the ball careening around the playfield.  Unimpeded motion is far more appealing than obstacles;  and any motion that ends with a reaction (e.g. a target drops or a spinner turns) is better than one that ends with nothing happening at all.

Some of the things we did to reinforce motion in the game:

  • Every possible angle away from the flippers resulted in a target being hit or, more often, the ball gliding gracefully up a ramp or through an arcing channel.
  • We changed the underlying collision detection to be different than the visual, narrowing things like posts and the ends of walls so that the ball was more likely to glide past and into a lane or ramp than bounce back.
  • Lights were laid down in all channels and ramps that would light up briefly as the ball went past, adding to and enhancing the motion.
  • We made the game easy.  There were lots of reasons to do this, but more fundamentally, one ball in play for a long time is more continuous motion without interruption.

Reviewers and players loved the game, although it fared poorly as a commercial title (it only appeared on three handsets, limiting its distribution).  It did very well in OEM, which was oddly appropriate given how most folks discovered “3D Pinball For Windows” a decade earlier.

Next week:  Dodgeball

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What Is The Game About: JAMDAT NFL

June 18th, 2012 — 4:09pm

This is part two of a multi-part series on focus in game design, using examples primarily from Knockabout Games.  The first post can be found here.

In 2004 JAMDAT (now EA Mobile) contracted us to build an NFL-licensed title with full teams and rosters for a mobile phone.  Devices were pretty limited back then — the first real color handsets had only been out a year and the iPhone was a long way off.   Football games to that point were fairly primitive affairs with limited graphics.

Professional sports is well tread territory on other platforms.  Our thematic answer to the question “what is the game about” came with the license — this was “NFL football”, real as can be given the constraints of the platform, and all the expectations that come with that:  play calling, recognizable players and teams, season long play, etc.

But there were many options open to us on the functional side:  should it be about passing?   scoring?  play calling?  We ultimately settled on a very basic idea:  football was about “contact”.

Why contact?  Because it is what defines the real football experience and distinguishes it from other sports, and it happens on every single play.  It is the essence of football, and since we couldn’t replicate Madden on a 1′ x 1′ screen, we had to go to the roots of the game and build it up again from there.

In practical terms, here’s what that meant:

  • Tackling was not binary.  Every single tackle, once started, took time to resolve.  You’d push a player back, or you’d drag (or be dragged) another yard or two.  Sometimes you’d break free.  On rare occasions you and the defender would bounce off each other and fly 10 yards through the air.  But the guiding principle was that you always kept moving when tackled, and the play wasn’t over when the tackle began.
  • We tied phone vibration to tackling.  We didn’t use it for anything else, so the association was very clear in the player’s head (vibration means I’m being tackled, it’s not some UI feedback in the game).  And of course, vibration really does feel like contact, so the more we extended tackling, the more this feature enhanced the game.
  • Because tackling was no longer an instantaneous affair, things like horrible keypad latencies could be hidden by the tackle.  It’s frustrating to press a button on a phone and not have the screen update your action in time.  In this case, even if you were late on the keypress and got tackled, you could still, say, change direction and keep moving (the player couldn’t tell if they started moving a different way before or after the tackle, since they were able to continue).

We were the top rated football game for mobile for two years, and the game sold well for JAMDAT (although sports and mobile were not what we expected overall).  We got a lot of favorable comments about play balance and graphics and such, but I believe the thing that made it work was the underlying focus on football as “contact”.

Next week:  Precision Pinball

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