In January next year we will be running a Sydney meet of the Global Game Jam at the Powerhouse Museum. Forty developers, designers and artists will be spending a weekend at the PHM working round the clock to create exciting new game ideas. There will also be speakers from the local and international games industry. It will be a very exciting event.

Details are still being arranged, but if you want to know more, watch the IGDA Sydney Facebook group or follow @GameJamSydney on Twitter. And tell your friends! This is going to be big!

Playing for Real: A Text on Game Theory, by Ken Binmore.

In a text on game design you’ll often find a short advisory note somewhere in the introduction that distinguishes game design from game theory. Game theory has nothing to do with the entertainment industry and is best summarised as the mathematical foundation of economics. It attempts to provide a model of rational decision making in which players strive find strategies to optimise their payoffs. The ‘games’ analysed are usually very simple bargaining problems and are not exactly what we’d consider “fun”. Why then would I be recommending a game theory text on a blog about game design?

There are several reasons. The most obvious is that a lot of multiplayer are bargaining problems. An understanding of at least the basics of economic behaviour is important if you are going to create any kind of trading game. It is very easy to unbalance a virtual economy if you don’t know what you’re doing and a broken economy is rarely fun.

Furthermore, game theory teaches us something about the general problem of strategic decision making involving many players. It introduces us to useful concepts such as zero-sum games, mixed strategies, cooperative games, and utility theory. Even when players don’t follow the ‘rational’ strategies game theory dictates, we can still recognise it as the goal to which they are striving.

In fact, the more counter-intuitive results of game theory form some of the most interesting games to play, because the best strategies are subtle and controversial. Every game designer should be aware of games such as the Prisoner’s Dilemma and Chicken. These simple combinations of reward mechanics can create complex player interactions, which we can incorporate into our games. Alternatively, such dynamics may be unexpected and unwanted. Understanding their origins gives us the ability to control them.

There are many books on game theory addressed at a variety of different audiences, depending on their level of mathematical sophistication. I recommend this one as a comfortable middle ground. The ideas are reasonably accessable to a non-mathematician but there is also enough mathematical rigour to satisfy the theorists. Later chapters do get rather math-heavy, but there it still benefit to be gained by skimming the proofs and just reading the descriptions.

While game theory may seem dry and academic, it provides valuable insights into strategic behaviour, which is at the heart of many of our games. It is therefore a valuable tool in the game designers toolkit, one I definitely recommend you acquire.

Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software, by Steven Johnson.

Emergence is one of those slippery ideas that is hard to define, other than to say “I know it when I see it”. Loosely it occurs when a system containing many interacting “atomic” components exhibits patterns at a higher level of abstraction, especially when these patterns are hard to explain in terms of atomic interactions. So the behaviour of the air in a balloon is fairly easy to describe as the average of the movement of all its individual molecules, but the behaviour of an ant colony is more than just the sum of the behaviours of the individual ants. We say the latter is “emergent” while the former is not.

The popular science press has got a lot of mileage out of emergence. There are certainly a lot of “gee-whiz” stories you can tell about it. Ant colonies, human societies and the human brain are all remarkable things and there is something tantalisingly mysterious about how they work. Steven Johnson writes about these things, and while his prose is good and his topics engaging, he ultimately doesn’t provide much insight into how it occurs. The closest he gets to an explanation is to offer five “fundamental principles”:

1. More is different.

Complex behaviours arise in systems of many small atomic parts. Macro-behaviour is different to micro-behaviour.

2. Ignorance is useful.

Interactions at the atomic level should be simple.

3. Encourage random encounters.

The interactions between individual atoms are ‘random’ or ‘arbitrary’.

4. Look for patterns in the signs.

Atoms react to certain gross properties of the greater system.

5. Pay attention to your neighbours.

Atoms act based on local information from neighbouring atoms.

At least, this is my interpretation of his principles. He never really expresses them in general terms. While these do describe some of the common features we see in complex systems, they do not work very well as design principles because they still fail to distinguish systems that exhibit real ‘complexity’ (like an anthill) from those that do not (like a balloon full of air). Studies of systems like cellular automata show that complexity lies on a narrow edge between vast plains of ordinariness.

Johnson does talk about efforts to engineer emergence in software systems (such as Slashdot’s model for group filtering) but it doesn’t really identify why one such system works but another runs amuck. This example is especially relevant to us as designers because it is a system that incorporates human choice and self-interest. Indeed, it is a system which many people are deliberately playing to “win” — or to grief. Designing such a social system to optimise the participants’ experience is as much about game design as anything else. It requires both an understanding of game theoretic and psychological models of multiplayer interaction. A simple theory of emergence is unlikely to help here.

However there are less complex forms of emergence in our games that can be understood in terms of Johnson’s rules. He cites the example of Eric Zimmerman’s game Gearheads (which really deserves a revival). In that game players do battle with one another with armies of wind-up toys. There are twelve different kinds of toys you can deploy. Individually they each have a simple behaviour, but they react to each other so combinations of toys have emergent behaviour. Zimmerman describes his delight at “[seeing] a player take what you’ve designed and use it in completely unexpected ways.”

I share his delight in such situations, both as a player and as a designer. Emergence is indeed fascinating, but it seems that a real understanding of it remains outside our grasp. Maybe it is for the best. Perhaps if we understood it, it wouldn’t seem so remarkable anymore.

I’m currently preparating a lecture for a class on “Sensation” aesthetics for game design (i.e. the ways in which games evoke sense-pleasure through images, music and movement). In doing so I’ve been thinking about Scott McCloud’s Big Triangle. For those unfamiliar with it (and if this is you, you should go read Understanding Comics right now), it is a depiction of the continuum of artistic styles between realistic, iconic and abstract art.

Most game designers are familiar with McCloud’s work so I won’t go over the details here. Other’s have already dealt with the implications for game art, but it occurs to me the the same triangle could be drawn for game mechanics.


In the bottom left are the “Simulation” games that try to mimic a real-world activity as realistically as possible. Fligth sims are possibly the most heavily tweaked “realistic” games and players put great stock in how correctly a game simulaties the layout and handling of a particular aircraft.

As we progress along the bottom we move from simulation games to representational games. There is still a “real” activity being portrayed, but the mechanics are more iconic than realistic. Guns lack recoil. Jumping is stylised. The laws of physics are drastically simplified. The ultimate representation occurs when we move to interactive fiction games and entire activities like are reduced to a single command, like “fight troll”.

As we move up the triangle, we begin to abandon a the idea of having a “real world” referrent for our game. Mechanics are no longer trying to simulate or represent something else, they merely exist for their own sake. The most abstract games, like Tetris, mean nothing more than themselves.

It’s no coincidence, I think, that the graphical interfaces for games tend to lie in the same part of the triangle as their mechanics. It is natural for a realistic simulator to have realistic graphics or and abstract game to use abstract images. The imagery creates expectations for the simulation. If we have photo-realistic graphics in a game then we naturally expect the interaction to also be realistic. We are more comfortable with cartoon-physics if it is portayed with cartoon graphics. When the mechanics and the representation do not match, then the player experiences a kind of dissonance. Whether or not this is a bad thing depends on what the designer is aiming to achieve.

Games include both representational and abstract sounds. There are ‘diegetic’ sounds that represent events in the game world as well as non-diegetic environmental sounds and background music. Everyday shooter by Jonathan Mak is an interesting case. It blurs the usually distinct lines between diegetic “game sounds” and background music. All the game-event sounds (shooting, explosions, etc) are musical and harmonise with the backing track in a way which makes the whole experience feel like playing an unsual musical instrument as much as playing a game.

Things are going to be quieter for a while as I am busy teaching my game design class, running the UNSW Game Deconstruction Group and trying to do some non-game research on the side.

What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, by James Paul Gee

While this is indisputably a book about game design, it is not a book for game designers or even for gamers. At least not expressly so. Gee, a professor of linguistics, psychology and education, is writing for teachers and education theorists, describing the many learning principles (36 in all) that can be found in modern video games — and are often lacking, he claims, in our schools. So while in a sense the book is telling designers what they are already doing well, it is valuable to have this implicit wisdom analysed and set out as a set of explicit principles.

Gee admits to arriving late and old on the video game scene, but his credentials as a gamer are not to be scorned. He has played an impressive number of landmark games (System Shock 2, Deus Ex, The Sims, WoW and more) and shows all the passion of an avid gamer. Unlike many presentations for a non-gaming audience, this book should not make you cringe. Nor will you get lost in academese. While he uses some technical terms from linguistics, he always grounds them clearly in examples of common experience.

So what, in Gee’s estimate, are we doing right? Well, without wanting to reiterate all 36 principles, his argument is that games support active, critical learning. Learning is always applied immediately in its relevant context, not passively recorded and reiterated. While the application is real, it is done in a context that encourages risk-taking and experimentation, structured to allow skills to be learnt incrementally but always pushing on the outer edge of your competence. Not only is this kind of learning effective, it is also engaging and fun.

In a game we take on the goals and values of our protagonist avatar, often pursuing those goals unreflectively, not considering whether they are right or wrong, but Gee suggests that this power could also be used to encourage critical thinking if the avatar’s goals and understanding of the world are different to our own, or if we are able to play the same scenario (eg a Middle East conflict) from the points of view of different participants.

A good game doesn’t just make learning fun, rather we have fun because we are learning. Raph Koster has argued that this is the essence of entertaining gameplay. If this is the case, then we should pay attention to those understand how we learn best, and Gee is an excellent teacher.

Exercises in Style,
by Raymond Queneau

99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style,
by Matt Madden

These two books both belong firmly in the “Secret Books” category. Neither book has anything explicit to say about games and you’d probably be hard pressed to find anything immediately useful in either one, but they tend to appear on the bookshelves of game designers with surprising frequency.

Both books have the same project: to illustrate how the same basic story can be told in remarkable number of ways. Queneau’s book came first, telling a simple one page story in 99 different styles, with variations in narrator, tense, language, form, and many other aspects. So that the initial story:

In the S bus, in rush hour. A chap of about 26, felt hat with a cord instead of a ribbon, neck too long, as if someone’s been having a tug-of-war with it. People getting off. The chap in question gets annoyed with one of the men standing next to him. He accuses him of jostling him every time anyone goes past. A snivelling tone which is meant to be aggressive. When he sees a vacant seat he throws himself on to it.

Two hours later, I meet him in the Cour de Rome, in front of the gare Saint-Lazare. He’s with a friend who’s saying: “You ought to get an extra button put on your overcoat.” He shows him where (at the lapels) and why.

becomes:

When midday strikes you will be on the rear platform of a bus which will be crammed full of passengers amongst whom you will notice a ridiculous juvenile; skeleton-like neck and no ribbon on his felt hat. He don’t be feeling at his ease, poor little chap. He will think that a gentleman is pushing him on purpose every time that people getting on or off pass by. He will tell him so but the gentleman won’t deign to answer. And the ridiculous juvenile will be panic-stricken and run away from him in the direction of a vacant seat.

You will see him a little later, in the Cour de Rome in front of the gare Saint-Lazare. A froend will be with him and you will hear these words: “Your overcoat doesn’t do up properly; you must have another button put on it.”

or

Glabrous was his dial and plaited was his bonnet,
And he, a puny colt — (how sad the neck he bore,
And long) — was now intent on his quotidian chore –
The bus arriving full, of somehow getting on it.

One came, a number ten — or else perhaps an S,
Its platform, small adjunct of the plebeian carriage,
Was crammed with such a mob as to preclude free passage;
Rich bastards lit cigars upon it, to impress.

The young igraffe described so well in my first strophe,
Having got on the bus, started at once to curse an
Innocent citizen — (he wanted an easy trophy
But got the worst of it.) Then, spying a vacant place,
Escaped thereto. Time passed. On the way back, a person
Was telling him that a button was just too low in space.

Matt Madden takes up this same game in 99 Ways, but his medium is the comic page rather than prose. Again he shows a simple single-page comic and then retells with many different techniques. Some of the variations can be seen on the website for the book.

What makes this book inspiring for game designers, I think, is that it encourages us to consider how we might do the same thing in our own medium. A game could represent the same activity in many different ways. Consider writing an “Exercises in Style” videogame in which each level played out the same situation, in first person, then third, then as an RTS, then as a turn-based strategy, then as a performative Wii game, a team-based multiplayer game, an arcade game, an ARG…

Even as a thought experiment, this exercise raises interesting questions. How would the different styles change the experience? What different skills would they challenge? Which ones would be more immersive? More reflective? More social? Do we even have 99 different styles of play?

One day, when I am retired and have copious free time, I will write this new edition of Exercises in Style. Until then, I read Queneau and Maddon and imagine. And I encourage you to do the same.

Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives
Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardruip-Fruin (Eds).

When we come to discuss writing fiction for games it is common to focus on ’story’ or ‘plot’, which leads to the inevitable debate about whether an interactive game can tell an authored story, or whether the two are wholly inimicable. While this may be an interesting debate, it overlooks much of the craft of writing fiction. The plot is only part of what makes a good story; characterisation plays an equal role, as does the construction of a believable setting.

This act of world creation and population has long fascinated readers and writers alike. Tolkein was famous for it. Middle Earth itself was his first love. It was only at the insistance of his friends in the Inklings that he turned it into the setting for a story. Other worlds grow out of the accumulation of many tales, such as the Cthulhu Mythos or the universe of Dr Who. As the result of many hands and many voices, such worlds take on the status of mythologies.

This kind of creation is one of the main themes of Third Person. As a collection of essays by many authors, this volume looks at the topic of “vast narratives” from diverse viewpoints. Some of the essays are directly applicable to game design, such as Richard Bartle’s “Alice and Dorothy Play Together” on the design of MMO worlds or Maathew Kirschenbaum’s “War Stories: Board Wargames and (Vast) Procedural Narratives”. Others are more obliquely inspirational, and even those that deal with purely literary texts (e.g. David Kala’s “The Long Arm of Fantomas”) have the feel of a writing-game about them, reminding me of collaborative storytelling games such as Lexicon or Baron Munchausen.

In games the exploration of vast, complex worlds can arguably be our most powerful source of fantasy and is perhaps more important and more achievable than an intricate plot. Third person is a valuable study of this idea from many different directions. I highly recommend it.

Six Walks in the Fictional Woods,
by Umberto Eco.

In my recent review of Peter Rabbit I spoke about the dangers of “AI Arrogance” and the embarrassment of Narrative AI research that is done without an up-to-date understanding of narrative theory. Now I must confess that I am not as well informed in this area as I might be. I have attempted on several occasions to read some of the canonical books in this area (Booth, Genette, Brooks) and found them rather dry and hard going. Perhaps it is true of any creative discipline: there are those who are engaging authors and those who are skilled theoreticians.

Umberto Eco is the rare exception, the insightful analyst who is able to express his ideas with clarity and humor. This slim volume manages exactly that. While it is no text-book and will not provide you with a catalogue of current thought, it does provide an interesting and enjoyable journey through several of the puzzles that narrative theory raises: ideal readers and ideal authors, the distinction between fabula, suzjet and discourse, pacing, flash-forwards and -backs, and the role of counterfactual in narrative understanding. For all of these topics it provides references to more comprehensive works, should you wish to follow them further.

I thoroughly recommend this book as a starting place for anyone who wants to start digging into serious narrative theory, or who just likes thinking about story and wants an engaging read. The fictional woods are a delightful place and Eco is an amiable guide.

Jespel Juul and Marleigh Norton presented a paper at the recent Foundations of Digital Games conference in which they questioned the popular wisdom that games should have “easy to use interfaces, but … provide difficult gameplay challenges”. To quote from the abstract:

this paper argues that it is rare to find a clear-cut border between interface and gameplay and that the fluidity of this border characterizes games in general. While this border is unclear, we also analyze a number of games where the challenge is unambiguously located in the interface, thereby demonstrating that “easy interface and challenging gameplay” is neither universal nor a requirement for game quality. Finally, the paper argues, the lack of a clear distinction between easy interface and challenging gameplay is due to the fact that games are fundamentally designed not to accomplish something through an activity, but to provide an activity that is pleasurable in itself.

I argue that they are wrong and the reason for their error is that they are regarding games from the point of view of the player, not of the designer. I will be so bold as to claim that it is of critical importance that the designer makes a very clear distinction between the gameplay and the interface and tries to always abide be the “easy to use, challenging to play” maxim.

An important thing when designing a game is to decide what is the experience you want to provide. Often this is some kind of challenge, physical, mental or social. A good design is coherent, fixing on a particular kind of challenge — say physical dexterity — and applying it consistently throughout the game. This way the player knows what kind of play to expect and can quickly establish whether or not to commit time to the game.

A poorly designed game is careless about the kinds of challenges it provides and so is disloyal to its players. It begins as a fast-paced game of physical dexterity and then later throws up a riddle-solving section that blocks all further progress. Players who committed their time to a reflex-based game are now confronted with a challenge they never expected and may not enjoy. This kind of unreflective mismatching is a great way to lose your players.

Having decided on a particular challenge, then the gameplay/interface divide is clear. The gameplay is that which provides your desired experience, the interface is the realisation of that experience on a particular set of input and output hardware. The interface is designed, along standard UI principles, to get as little in the way of the desired experience as possible.

To claim that in some games, such as Toribash, the “challenge is in the interface” is to be unneccessarily fuzzy-minded. If it is part of the intended challenge, it is not the interface it is the game. As a player it may not be clear which parts of the game were intended or accidental, but the designer should know better.

The gameplay of Toribash, as I read it, is in the strategic planning of joint movements in the anticipation of how the physics will play out and the opponent will react. The interface to this experience is the process of clicking on joints to select how they are going to move. Ans this interface is actually relatively poor. The targets are often hard to access on the 3D model (especially using the clunky zoom/pan/rotate controls) and selecting an action by multi-clicking to cycle through a list of options is tedious and error-prone. While I did not design the game, I doubt that this frustration is the experience the designer was trying to convey.

A better UI to the same game might be to have sidebar showing 2D front and back images of a standing fighter. Muscles could be clear, easy-to-select targets, colour-coded to indicate what they are doing with a drop-down menu or a set of key-codes to select a particular mode for each. Macro keys for selecting certain muscle/action combinations would take the drudgery out of constructing common manoevres through dozens of clicks and camera rotations.

Now maybe I have missed the point and the rapid, precise clicking is where the fun of Toribash lies, but my argument remains the same. Just because the gameplay involves what are traditionally considered UI elements does not mean that the two are the same.

Confusing interface and gameplay only leads to carelessness about whether your interface is providing or hampering the experience you desire. This carelessness can only result in sloppy interfaces that interfere with and frustrate play. Only a poor designer writes this off as “part of the challenge”. A good designer fixes it.