It’s been six months since the LoLCG project kicked off, a pretty intense six months at that. We’ve gone through several major incarnations since then and it’s time to show the working a bit. I’m releasing the first playable preview of the game today as a celebration of six months for us, the World Championships and the end of Season 3 for all. Looking for something to do while LCS is off the air and you await the upcoming preseason changes with anticipation? Look no further- you can try the LoLCG today!
I admit I’m a little scared to put this thing out. It’s been a lot of work and what you see here is only a tiny part of it. It’s also fresh off the presses- we haven’t tested this little preview set at all, so in a sense it’s a bit of a test in itself. Will it be understandable? Will it be cool? Most of all, will it be fun? Those are questions only you can answer, so be our guest and try it out.
I’d like to thank both the LoLCG testing group and Riot themselves for their incredible assistance in keeping this thing trucking along- almost any other company I know would probably have C&D’ed this project, but as far as I can tell Riot actively altered their policies to allow it- and other fan projects like it- to happen. They are, in the most genuine of senses, champions.
As always, I welcome your feedback in whatever form it comes- the best way is through the project email at lolcgproject@gmail.com. There’s a lot of work still to do, there probably won’t be a real release until sometime next year, but I hope this whets the collective appetite.
I’ve been rather quiet of late, mostly because I’ve had quite a bit of design stuff going on. Not only is the LoLCG project now worthy of the title- a project of more than one- but the prototypes for Wild Abyss arrived and getting both sleeved, sorted and played has been taking up pretty much all of my time.
There are other things in the works, too, but I’ll leave those for later. I have the next part of the ERI framework series about half done as well as a bit of writing on bioshock: infinite, but I think the latter has been done to death so it probably won’t see the light of day.
In the meantime, I’d like to talk about a particular issue I run into as a developer, that might be interesting for other people interested in taking their design a bit more seriously. It has to do with that most terrifying of processes, playtesting. I’m also going to use the opportunity to show off some of the goodies I’ve been working on that have been keeping me quiet.
In any game design, it’s important that you go beyond the people you are familiar with for testing purposes. Whether that’s your inhouse studio folks for an indie developer or a regular gaming group, these people will be familiar with you, your style and idiosyncrasies. They’re good for providing people against whom the most basic of tests can be performed, but beyond that any data you get from testing with them is likely to be inaccurate compared to how the game may perform in the market.
So you need to go about finding independent playtesters. If, like me, creating a commercial NDA and paid testing environment is impossible, that means finding volunteers from outside your normal circles.
This is where the prototyper’s dilemma strikes. In a perfect world, you could post your paper-slip prototypes and nascent ideas on the internet and get a bunch of enthusiastic, capable playtesters interested in a moment. In reality things are a little more difficult. Back when I was 14, I spent around 3 years prototyping and developing a warhammer army book. I wanted to make sure this thing was balanced and interesting, so I tried to organise playtesting. That experience taught me more about game development than all my university education put together. If you want to get tests done, you need to present your testers with a product that isn’t entirely dissimilar to the quality of commercial product they are used to… or at least one that looks like it. You need to get them to buy into what you’re doing through giving them a clear indication of just how serious you’re taking this. Hand scrawled notes on notepad paper do not do this.
One of the reasons the LoLCG looks so spectacular is because of those lessons I learned. You cannot get good, unbiased testing happening without that level of production pre-invested in your designs. Enthusiasm will fizzle, tests will be delayed, people will drift away and you will lose momentum or end up getting frustrated and making decisions based on insufficient data. To keep people attached to the project, you have to give them something that, even if it doesn’t play that well, looks and feels like it should.
The dilemma, however, is that a playtester coming in from the cold, especially one with little experience of the development process, will look at yourdesigns and assume that’s the best you can do, that your first prototypes are the equivalent of a videogame public beta, when in reality the guts of the game are about as polished as a rotten stick in a peatbog. This in itself creates expectations and dissappointments- I’ve found people tend to overlook the visual design of the LoLCG cards in order to focus on the text because they feel the text is more important.
While in the long run, that is true, the text of cards and the precise wordings are the last thing that needs polishing during the card design process. First the parameters under which those wordings must be constructed must be established- how much space do we have, what symbols are available, how many can we use before the cognitive burden becomes to high. There needs to be text there for the testing to actually be valid, but the balance of these texts is by nature rough and ready until it can be established what the restrictions under which a polished version must be constructed are.
Unfortunately, the sort of people likely to volunteer for playtesting are the sort likely to fixate on these sorts of discrepancies and thus you end up distracting your testers from simply playing the game in a relaxed, open state where you can get good information on how the areas you want to isolate are working out. Add on the natural focuses of the various kinds of players, whether you use Bartle’s suits metaphor or Mark Rosewater’s timmy, johnny and spike etc, and life is hard.
So this is the Prototyper’s Dilemma: Without achieving superficial similarity to a finished product, you will not be able to attract and retain testers. The more effort you spend in that regard, however, the more your testers will have unnatural reactions to the parts of the material that most need testing.
I’ve discovered that it’s not as simple as simply getting your game to the tabletop or screen as soon as possible, nor is it about polishing like a madman before doing any testing. Like many things in game design, there is an elegant balance to be struck between conveying the identity and overall mechanisms of your game effectively and not jarring your testers into over-analyzing things.
I should note that the impact of this is largely dependent on just how hardcore you take your design. For games like LoLCG and Wild Abyss, everything matters- colour choices, fonts, layouts, grammar, amount of cards, visibility, even the size of a playset.
This might not seem important, but it IS. If I want people to be able to realistically play a game, having a set of cards that will fit neatly into a schoolbag or a hoodie pocket or similar is the sort of thing I take into account very early in the process. Isolating and testing these kind of dynamics is really important to getting the desired experience for a player. Tweaking and perfecting mechanics are the last priority, not the first.
So, how to resolve this? Unfortunately, the point of a dilemma- in fact the very meaning of the word- is that there is no simple solution. Luckily, unlike the famous Prisoner’s Dilemma, this one isn’t exactly binary in its solution space. For Wild Abyss, I’ve taken what I learned from earlier games and attempted to create a prototype which strikes that balance. The visual designs are colorful at a distance but minimalistic and simply executed.
The result is a game that looks impressive but only took me around 30 hours to prototype from start to finish- less than a week’s work in the evenings. This whole game went from initial concept to first prototype in 16 days
While polished, this is clearly a first prototype- not least because it’s written all over the thing. The ship designs are just too far on the clumsy side to be finalized, the resource card designs are clean and generic etc. I’ve had a good reaction from my playtesters for this game- they’re happy to just play it, and aren’t overly inclined to focus on technicalities. The result is after only a few games I’m getting a lot of good information on where I need to make changes, and after the twenty or thirty more I want to get done with this first prototype set I should be able to make some really significant choices that will benefit the game based on solid, unbiased information.
So, I finally got enough proofing and polishing done to print my test set for the LolCG. The very first cards, hot off the presses.
After about six hours of sitting at a table that looked like this:
The LoLCG finally went on her maiden voyage!
Courtesy of Master Summoners Pachi and Mike
This is one of the most joyous culminations in the cycle of design and development, seeing your baby hit the table or the screen in a serious game for the first time. Pachi tried a strong jungle deck, but forgot to draft any good jungling champs, while Mike played my more conservative summoner spell heavy engagement deck. At the end, Mike came out on top, but it was a close run thing. The game MVP was Warwick, healing himself through Singed’s poison clouds to build a solid lead and a strong point from which Mike could leverage his offensive.
If you’re interested and you find this post, please share it through twitter/FB/tumblr/forums, however you like. The more interest we get, the better the game will be! Autosharing links are available if you click on the post title.
I’ve had to pause the development of LoLCG for a little while so I can work out any remaining niggles with Riot (don’t worry, things are going fine there), so I’ve had a few weeks between when I hit what I felt was the most I could do safely on that project and now. In the intervening time, I’ve had a shot a whole new game, this time entirely of my own design and style. I’m using a lot of what I learned doing the LoLCG project both in terms of gameplay mechanics and technical development skills.
The result is looking pretty swell for a first prototype. Not as swell as the LoLCG, but I’m drawing all my own art here (well, the non background stuff anyway)
I’ve loved and adored civilization and epic strategy type games, ‘4x’ especially, since I played civ 1 when I was very young. Risk was the only real boardgame of that kind of scope back then, and while fun it wasn’t that great. Since then there’s been a determined attempt to bring 4x to the tabletop, from the sprawling Twilight Imperium to the sleek 7 wonders. Unfortunately, the pendulum swings one way or the other too much. From intense complexity, endless rules and hundreds of pieces, to elegant simplicity that loses much of the depth an narrative that the 4x is so good at conveying.
Wild Abyss is a space-based 4x game with an emphasis on resource allocation and combat rather than territory control, negotiations and maneuver. It’s almost entirely card based, with no star map or persistent board, meaning it doesn’t need a lot of space. Turns are largely simultaneous, so games with loads of players don’t take much longer than ones with only a few. It has a combat system that’s not much more complex than games like eclipse or TI, but offers a lot more in terms of both tactical and cinematic depth.
I’m looking forward to talking about it more in the coming weeks. I’ve kept a kind of stream of consciousness diary of the process which I’ll put up once I can edit into something that makes vague sense.
This week I’m going to have a look at time economies, which is to say the way players allocate their time during games. Economies are a pretty basic part of game design, any time you have a limited resource it generates an economy for that resource. Since the advent of the videogame, time has become an important one of those resources, but even in games that are technically not time-constrained, time is often modeled through limiting actions per turn or some other similar mechanical resource. This article will look at both designing a real-time ‘attention budget’ and and interesting example of a simulated time economy, specifically in Android: Netrunner.
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Time is one of the most fundamental resources available for a game designer to manipulate. In videogames you’ll usually find it taken into account either in terms of player attention- providing a greater amount of time spending activities than the player has time to perform in order to force them to make choices about where to focus their attention, or in terms of commitment- going to the store takes 30 seconds, going to the healer takes 30 seconds, and overall time is limited in a very similar manner to a cash-resource system- you only get 30 seconds before the next wave of baddies, so you have to pick one and stick to the decision.
Precisely because it is so fundamental it is easy to overlook as a subject of design and analysis, but examining how time is handled in a game can often be incredibly fruitful in problem solving and generating new ideas.
A particularly valuable exercise, and the one I’ll focus on here, is plotting out how much time you intend players to spend on particular aspects of your game, either overall or focused in on a particular area.
Lets say I’m designing an RPG. How much time do I want my player to spend exploring? Fighting? Reading/watching narrative stuff? Browsing their customization menus?
In a fight, how much time should be spent making actions and controlling characters? How much spent planning and strategising? How much watching the action unfurl?
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If my focus as a designer is on the the narrative immersion of the player, I might want weight the player’s time economy on talking to characters, exploring the environment and engaging with the stuff I spread through the game. If my focus is on a particularly elegant combat mechanic set I’d come up with, I’d want to push a player to invest more of their time exploring that to get as much out of it as possible and so on.
So in this way you can start building up a fairly complex ‘spending plan’ for time, something like this:
early game
40% exploration/familiarisation with setting
40% experimentation/learning mechanics
15% combat/achievement
5% character customisation
midgame
20% exploration
30% experimentation
40% combat/achievement
10% character customisation
endgame
5% exploration
5% experimentation
70% combat/achievement
20% character customisation
This one is just off the top of my head, but you should be able to get the general gist of it. In the early stages of the game I want to invest the player in the setting, get them comfortable and encourage them to spend time messing around and getting a feel for the mechanics and what does what. Combat and character customization are light and more intended to add flavor and points from which to build learning than challenge
In the main section of the game, I want the player to move their time balance out a bit. Still spend a lot of it figuring out the mechanics, as this is one of the key components of engagement in almost all RPGs, but now they’ve got a model of what’s going on to work with, I want them to spend more time mucking around tweaking their character than digging into the background material.
In the last stages of the game, the world has largely been explored and the plot established. I want the player to have figured out how all the various mechanics of the game interact and so not need to spend time mucking around- they should know how they can approach the challenges the game throws up. So we turn that up to 11 and give them a flood of such challenges to reward the knowledge they’ve built up. As with most RPGs, the last stage will also be accompanied by a fair bit more fine-tuning and tweaking of characters to overcome the challenges thrown up.
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By going through the process of establishing a ‘time economy’ you do a very important thing: you give yourself clear targets and goals in your design. You can look at the way your prototypes are developing and say- ‘man, people are just not getting into this setting enough, I need to give them more things to spend time on there’, or ‘people are just fighting all the time, I have to give them incentives to slow down a bit and look at the scenery’
I should be clear that this time economy is the one you think best expresses what your game has to offer. Individual players will always have preferences and will lean towards one or another kind of time spending, so you want to give them room to do so- nothing sucks more than a game that rails you into spending exactly the amount of time the designer prescribes on something, no more, no less. Your designs upon the player’s time should be guidelines, not hard and fast rules (unless you’re using time itself as an acknowledged resource for the player to spend, of course).
This isn’t just a useful tool for videogame designers though- I recently played Eclipse, one of many 4X boardgame attempts. Though it’s apparently one of the more elegant products of its type, I found it incredibly clunky. I did a kind of time budget in my head as I played and for the small scale, three player game mode we were using (which is apparently the fastest and most intense), the time budget for players seemed to be something like
30% setting up the game and putting it away
20% figuring out what you want to do
5% doing it
35% waiting for your turn with nothing to do
This is even accounting for the fact I was a first time player, having to figure out all the mechanics on the fly and that there were only 3 players of a potential 6. Any designer worth their salt should be able to look at that outline and immediately see that there’s some seriously frustrating games waiting to happen. People might be willing to tolerate it because, admittedly, the actual gameplay is pretty solid. Tolerance, though, is not a pretty word.
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Another note is that I’m using very general stuff for my time economy profiling here. If I was designing half-life, for example, I might budget for things like ‘physics puzzles’, ‘travel’ and ‘recuperation’. Again, by making you put your thoughts down on paper, doing this sort of analysis will help you identify these categories of behaviour and action
One last thing the time economy does is really force you to pin down what you want your game to be about. You only have one hundred %’s to play with. Your player can’t be gazing at your amazing backgrounds 80% of the time and fighting desperately for their life 80% of the time. So planning out a time economy isn’t often a fun task for the designer. Just as much as the player, you want All The Things, but you know as a designer that is rarely a good choice in design. Figuring out your game’s time budget forces you to put, in paper, where you want your player to invest their time and, consequently, where you should invest yours.
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The second part of today’s discussion is perhaps a bit more palatable for the more math and statistic oriented crowd. If you don’t like bouncing numbers off each other, however, this next bit might not be for you.
As part of working on the League LCG, I’ve been studying up on the market. In particular i’ve begun to play Netrunner with friends and watch a lot of content there to get a feel for how FFG are managing their LCG model. It turns out Netrunner is a really good game as well and one that has some really nice mechanic/dynamic outcomes that revolve around time as a resource.
Netrunner is somewhere between Magic and chess. Where in Magic you can do whatever you want in a turn so long as you do it at the right time and you have the resources and in chess you can do one thing once per turn, in Netrunner you have a limited amount of actions per turn, but those actions are pretty versatile. Most important for us here are three- you can spend an action (you have 3 or 4 per turn) to draw a card, earn 1 unit of currency (bit) or play a card.
First up, this instantly tells us that these three actions are of equivalent worth. Drawing a card is worth 1 unit of currency, as is playing a card, and so on around in a circle.
So, for example we have a card called Diesel.
It seems pretty amazing (if you’re a magic player anyway). No cost, draw 3 cards. holy moly. But in Netrunner, playing this card costs an action, which you could use to draw a card anyway. So you’re only really up 2 cards. Not only that, but it doesn’t actually do anything for you but give you more cards, when Netrunner puts a premium on getting a lot out of your cards. So that’s really another card down. All in all, you’re up 1 card over just spending an action to draw.
Then there’s a card called Quality Time that costs 3 bits to draw 5 cards. So the card cost is 1 action to play and 3 actions to earn 3 bits to pay for it. Four actions total. In magic, it would be utterly broken, but the time limitations in Netrunner make it, at least without considering synergy, worse than Diesel.
Netrunner, however, is a subtle beast. In general, a card on its own only gets you ahead of your basic actions very slightly- with increasing power based on how hard it is to play. For example, there’s a card that costs nothing to play and gives you 3 bits, for a net bonus of 2. There’s another card that costs 5 to play, but gives you 9 bits, for a net bonus of 3. Because as a condition of play you need to have 5 bits lying around, it’s a little bit more efficient- but only a little bit. Other cards are even more efficient but have trade-offs.
Pad campaign gives you money every turn, but it costs money to play, so you need to keep it alive for 3 turns to break even (1 to pay for the action spent playing it and 2 for the actual cost) . Once you do, however, it’s a gold mine. Because it gives you 1 bit WITHOUT costing you an action, you’re effectively getting an extra action per turn- going from 3 to 4, an increase of a whopping 25% in efficiency from one card. So if your deck can keep it alive, it’s amazing.
Typically, your opponent has to spend 1 action and pay 4 bits to ‘kill’ it, so it costs them 5 overall to get rid of it. If they do that right away, you end up 2 bits ahead, but some cards let them kill it cheaper or give them free money to do it with, so you start getting this incredibly complex time-economy where players are trying to end up coming out ahead by 1 action worth of a resource- be it a card, a bit or something in play. Over the course of the game, a couple of good action ‘trades’ like this can give you a lead to let you do something that would be impossible if both of you were on even footing and thus win the game.
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Coming back to our original cards, Diesel is a great card if your deck has, for example, a lot of low cost cards, so each card draw action is worth comparatively more than if your deck was full of high-cost cards that put a premium on taking actions which earn money. If you have a lot of synergy that allows you to efficiently generate bits, then quality time becomes a better card than Diesel, since that 3 bit cost may only convert to one action, not three.
In this way, Netrunner creates a complex dynamic of time management in a non-realtime setting. A player feels incredibly constrained by their few actions, so tools which give them more ability to act feel liberating and powerful. Because pretty much every economy card gives you one or two actions worth of resources overall (excepting some which give you more but as a drip feed like pad campaign), how you fuel your economy is entirely dependent on card synergies and the structure of your deck. Time is expressed as a resource extremely successfully and good, efficient Netrunner decks are all about time management- creating efficiencies that give the player the time to execute the strategies necessary for victory.
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So there you have it. Time is something that you can explore as both mechanic and dynamics. As an overall design tool you can plan out how time will be spent playing your game to focus and clarify your design and give you signposts to use during your testing and iteration. You can also use time in a more focused way as a resource in games which aren’t formally time-constrained in order create an aesthetic of intense action without forcing real-time constraints on the player.
Disclaimer: LoLDDCG is an independent fan project, it is unaffiliated with Riot inc. or any employee of Riot inc. Use of Riot’s graphics is intended for the purposes of prototyping and makes no attempt to challenge ownership of those graphics. All original graphics, system and design are displayed under a CC-BY-NC licence. League of Legends is (c) Riot inc.
This week’s work in preparation for the first alpha tests has mostly been producing the set of item cards. All up I built 56 items this week. I’m not sure if all of these will make it into the initial release, but they provide a good baseline set from which to work. In that light, this week I’m going to talk about how items work to provide gameplay for the LoLcg
First, there are a few major conceptual differences between the card game and videogame items. The main one is that players can only have 3 items at any one time, so choosing which items to buy in which order is far more important.
Second, items are generally more powerful and more expensive by unit- a longsword in the card game will provide a far higher level of power than a longsword in the videogame, and this is multiplicative- a champion with 2 big items in the card game is more or less equivalent to a champion with 6 items in the videogame.
Health potion restores over 50% of many Champions’ basic hitpoints
This was done for two reasons. For one, the numbers in the game have been kept low and simple- an item in LoLCG cost between 1 and 6 ‘gold’, while items in the videogame can cost anywhere between 35 and 1600. So if you take the health potion and needlessly large rod, which cost these amounts in both games, a health potion in the card game has to do a lot more than a health potion in the videogame to be worth what you’re paying for it- it’s a consumeable that costs half as much as a basic item like a longsword, not one tenth as much.
The same sort of idea is true across all items. Weaker items are generally stronger than their equivalents when compared to bigger items. Since the base stats of champions don’t scale innately in the card game, items are the only way your champions are going to get stronger. I felt it made sense, then, that their impact is comparatively more significant in raw terms as well.
For two, items in this game provide the same kind of complexity that card subtypes provide in other games. In Magic,, many cards will have synergistic effects with specific subtypes of creature or spell. In Netrunner, subtypes of program determine how they interact with each other and how they can be interacted with by other effects. While this is rarely absolutely critical to the effectiveness of a card, good players keep track of what their opponent is capable of and work around it using these subtypes as guidelines
In LoLCG this same functionality is provided by statistics. Just as in the videogame, if your opponent is stacking physical damage you want to build armor, if they’re stacking magic damage you want magic resistance, and if they’ve got a balanced output or true damage you need to build health.
The rightmost statistic vaguely represents magic penetration and is quite rare, making malady a valuable synergy item
Not only this, but when attacking Champions sometimes receive a ‘synergy’ bonus that replicates multiplicative scaling in the videogame. A Champion with three points in a single physical statistic will deal three damage, but one with a single point across all three stats will deal four damage.
By limiting item space to 3, a champion cannot simply itemise a bunch of small items perfectly tailored to their position. They need to make hard choices and upgrade their items with more expensive advanced items in order to fit in some more stats. Gamers familiar with tower defences will understand this kind of tension. While on the surface it would be more efficient just to spam an entire TD map with low level turrets than upgrade a few to high level, the amount of prime real-estate on the map is limited, and upgrading towers with synergistic effects near to each other yields great results (an upgraded slowing tower near to an upgraded splash damage tower is going to do more than if it were next to a long row of un-upgraded ones, only a couple of which get the extended firing time granted by the slow.). This limit is enforced more harshly here- you only have three spots to put your towers on, so you better make sure they’re the right ones for the specific challenge your opponent presents you with.
Like in the videogame, banshee’s veil provides a good, but expensive, way of dealing with champions who can blow you up with one ability
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Onto the items themselves
The core set has most of the basic items in the game. Currently the only ones that are excluded are vision wards (not sight wards) and some of the tier 2 AD items (cloak of agility and recurve bow), for a total of 20. On top of this there are 36 of the advanced items in the game, mostly simpler ones that fit into the alpha ruleset neatly.
Because of the way the economy of the game balances out, Champions will often only get to one large item in a game, sometimes not even that. Champions are also more likely to have to build balanced stats since the cardgame doesn’t take into account mechanical skill- no matter how good you are, if you build all damage you’re going to blow someone up and then get taken down in short order. Since one big item for damage is plenty and every champion has to be able to stand their ground on their own, I expect to see a little more hybridisation in terms of what items get bought. Carries will need to itemize some defenses, tanks and supports will need to itemize some damage stats. This sort of balance also means I can give big items some more powerful or wierd effects since there won’t be that many floating around a game.
Rod of ages has a particularly complex effect that I tried to avoid including. Since you’ll rarely see more than one in a game, however, it’s justifiable
I’m hoping that this will also make building champions feel a bit more unique on a game by game basis. Champions will likely have a signature item that perfectly synergises with their ability and statistical kit that they want to build towards. Unlike in the videogame however, this will be the only completed item they get over the course of the game, so a morgana might have a zhonyas hourglass while a twisted fate has a lichbane, instead of both having a zhonyas, lichbane and deathcap as they would at the same stage of the videogame. This is one of the things I’m most eager to see come out through playtesting, whether this more rigorous itemization can make up for the loss in individual character the champions incur from being simplified for the card format.
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For another preview, last week was mostly spent building up the first draft of the playtester’s rulebook. When testing games and rulesets with distributed testers (ones you don’t have direct, personal access to during tests), I think that you need to go to a lot of effort to get the aesthetic feel of the game right, since people who aren’t specifically trained to be able to ignore those things will often get tripped up when working with low-fidelity prototypes. I take this philosophy even to doing rules, making sure rulesets are well formatted, presented and accompanied by diagrams and examples, just as in a published rulebook. This also has the upside of making playtesting a more pleasurable experience and, since I’m not able to pay testers, will make it less likely I get a dropoff in testing.
That’s it for this week. Playtesting draws ever closer, I’m hoping to begin recruitment around the second week of may. If you’d like to get involved, please subscribe and you’ll be the first to hear when the doors open!
This week’s indepth article is brought to you by recent developments in the Moba scene with Dota creating a new tutorial system and League revamping theirs. As LoLCG might suggest, I’m quite interested in that style of game, but I’ve also followed competitive gaming of all sorts for quite some time. These games are pushing the conception of videogames as a legitimate arena for competition forward and, as Esports begins to find traction, it’s time to question assumptions videogame designers have made for decades about how to go about that.
In this article I’m going to go over a particular method competitive games use to foster and develop their player communities. I’ll look at how game designers can learn and improve upon these models to create competitive games that foster even more passionate players and fans than they do already. Then I’m going to look at four paragons of the genres of competitive game. League of Legends, Streetfighter, Tribes and Starcraft. I’ll look at the positives and negatives of how these games have approached training their players and the impact those decisions may have had on the games overall. Finally, I’ll bring it together and propose a set of guidelines for designing successful training and tutorial elements for such games, which can be summarised in these goals:
they must be rewarding in their own right
they must clearly communicate context
they must provide a safe environment
they must isolate and identify particular skills
they must support perpetual skill development
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Introduction: Something or other about Tennis.
Amongst my library of design proverbs, I’ve found one coming up more than most recently. ‘You don’t learn to play tennis by playing tennis’. I hope I don’t need to draw you a diagram. It’s one of the most lauded properties of videogames that they decrease the need for dedicated training and development. One learns by playing, seamlessly, without even realizing it. As I discussed in my analysis of Portal 2, this capability can be intoxicating for designers, so much so that they miss exactly what it is they’re doing.
Analogue games- more specifically, real-time analogue games with a high mechanical skill component- don’t successfully induct new players or fans by getting them to play even a limited version of the full game. Instead, players are more often introduced by participating in drills or mini-games which isolate and clarify particular mechanical components of the whole. These aspects are then given context and brought together in parts and finally in full, but more limited exercises remain a constant part of training.
I remember, when I was a kid, going to tennis camp. First you got to play with a racquet, then you got to mess around hitting balls against a wall. Over several days you’d move to trying to hit the ball into the other side of a court underhand, trying to hit it back when someone else hit it across (or rallying balls from a ball machine), playing volley games, little best of three rallies and finally moving onto serving and replying to serving, all the time drilling positioning, how to hold your racquet and so on. Just like in videogames, rewards provided a carrot to keep you interested, though unlike videogames these prizes usually went only to the top performers.
There are two important things to learn from here. First is that tennis camp had no illusions about what it was. When you went to tennis camp, you didn’t play tennis (well, much) you LEARNED to play tennis. This doesn’t mean you didn’t play games, they just weren’t tennis, and you knew the purpose of these games were to teach you skills to help you play tennis, which acted as another level of reward for success. Second, the formal reward mechanism used (prizes for the top performers) is antithetical to the best aspects of videogame design- all players deserve rewards for challenging themselves and overcoming their limits. It’s true that in these camp games everyone got a reward- they learned to be better tennis players- but that wasn’t much consolation when Timmy McBuffwrists was scoffing down half a bucket of M&Ms. This is something videogames have shown they CAN do better. In non-competitive games, the reward is most often advancement of the narrative or player capabilities, but in competitive games this often isn’t a great thing to offer. Players want to be become better at the full game, show them they are and that is going to be reward enough for many.
Tennis camp, I’d argue, is a tutorial on how to play tennis. Because of the skills tennis requires, the tutorial can’t just teach you the concepts and allow you to apply them at your own pace (which you can do with a mechanical skill and time insensitive game like Chess). It must actively develop the skills to a minimum level suitable for playing the game itself. To do so, it must isolate and train these skills to a level where their value to the game can be demonstrated to the player in a hands-on way. It’s all well and good telling a player when to apply a smash, but they’re never going to get it until they can actually smash and get a feel for when it’s practical.
Videogame tutorials, on the other hand, remain as kind of interactive rulebooks or introductions to concepts, without really giving players this hands on training. A token gate will often be provided (You shoot things with your left mouse button. Do you know where your left mouse button is? Oh good, proceed), but it’s rarely designed carefully enough to actually test whether a player has grasped a concept (ok, so I got out of that stupid tutorial thing, I’m not exactly sure how…) and this is often most pronounced for the intricate mechanical challenges of competitive videogames. So much so, in fact, that historically videogame designers have left tutoring to their communities, rather than trying to make good tutorials or training aids, they pay them lip-service and hope desperately that some internet personality will go viral with a series of learn to play videos or guides or develop some mods to help others train. Sometimes they get so fed up with the whole paradigm of minimalist tutorials they produce something like this (skip to around 5 mins):
Which, while hilarious, is even more intended for people who are already educated consumers. The problem with this approach is it relies on a very, very slow trickle of players joining, because the normal channels through which people are introduced to new, fun videogame experiences (the games media, forums etc) won’t work- you can’t just drop into the game cold and get the intended experience. It’s a sort of a catch 22 thing. You only get introduced to learning how to play the game if you’re already a member of the community of people who already play, or at least on the fringes of it. This phenomenon is particularly pronounced in the fighting game community and, up until a huge community effort over 2011-12, the Starcraft community.
This is a serious problem for developers, who want to get as many people playing as possible. That problem is doubled for developers aiming for an Esport presence, as not only do you need a vibrant player community, but an even larger spectator community as well. Player count and fresh blood matter and without a good way of reaching out to them and helping them into the community, competitive games stagnate and slowly become ever more inaccessible.
In order to reach out to truly new players and introduce them to the joy of competition, competitive videogames need to embrace the lessons that can be learned from sport camps. Provide the tools for your players to break down the game and train efficiently. Reward them for that training. Help them understand the game in the same way the best players do, so a conversation can exist between them. These are the objectives of tutorials and training for competitive games, so let’s see how it’s been done so far.
Game analysis
1: Streetfighter (Streetfighter IV)
Introduction:
Street fighter IV features no formal tutorial (the basic controls and goals are covered in the manual), only two modes aimed at helping players develop their skills. Challenge mode gates players through a series of increasingly complex combos, with the goal of showing them the particular capabilities of a given character. Training mode drops players in a sandbox fight where they can adjust the properties of their opponent to test their own skills and devise their own challenges.
What it does well:
Unlike many competitive games, Street Fighter IV recognizes the need for a space in which players can train at their own pace and isolate specific aspects to train formally. The training level’s grid gives players the tools to practice footsies and spacing. The challenge levels attempt to introduce players to the particular capabilities of each character. It even has a rudimentary reward mechanism through unlocking stages a completion meter.
What it does badly:
Pretty much everything else. The training and challenge levels are more intended for players who are already committed to learning the game to a high level and have studied how to do so through online guides accessible, more or less, only to people already deep into the fighting game community. The game makes no attempt to explain necessary skills or help new players reach the point where they are competent at them, other than providing the sandbox area mentioned so they can practice in an undirected way without having Zangief constantly trying to piledrive them. It doesn’t explain where various skills might be valuable, nor what they’re called by the player community (oh, of course that un-named combination of twenty motions ten deep in challenge mode is referred to as an Ultra-FADC. How silly of me not to know that)
There’s no attempt to reward players for engaging in learning activities and training their skills (other than being able to go from ‘helpless cripple’ difficulty to ‘clumsy infant’ difficulty, a tremendous boost to their self esteem). There’s no attempt to teach players concepts that get flung around like misogynist jokes in the FGC. Want to learn how to cancel your dragon punch into a mixup tech bait? Don’t ask here… The game doesn’t even tell you how to block.
The result:
The amount of independent effort required to even learn how to throw a fireball unless you’re already familiar with fighting games is staggering. Given how much more complex real PVP Street Fighter is, it’s no wonder that the game remains a cult phenomenon, mostly spread by people being individually tutored by their friends. Some might argue that mashing buttons is perfectly cool and enjoyable, which is true, but it’s also an example of terrible design. If 95% of your audience is going to just fondle their controller like an awkward teen virgin, why on earth bother spending huge amounts of time and money creating a level of balance and pixel perfect execution that is perhaps the most demanding of all the Esport genres? Would it not be worth the comparatively minimal effort of designing some good in-game introductions to these capabilities that would show novice players the delight that comes from exploiting all this work you’ve been putting in. I certainly think so. Apparently Capcom disagrees.
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2: Tribes (Tribes Ascend)
Introduction:
Much like Street Fighter, Tribes has a cultish, ultra-high skilled community and markets itself as a highly competitive, spectacular game. Ascend features a very limited tutorial set which introduces players to the two most basic principles in the game- skiing (how to go faster) and inheritance (why you never, ever hit anything, you noob). There’s a free-roam mode where you can spawn into an empty map and access all weapons, even ones you haven’t bought, but like SF, no attempt is made to explain their use and functionalities to the player. Finally, post release some basic target practice modes were added, but in a very tacked on style.
(Skip to 18 mins)
What it does well:
Tribes sells itself as a high skill, high complexity game. It certainly takes balls to advertise yourself as ‘the hardest game’. While this is debatable, the rhetoric is clear: this is a competitive game, no questions asked. I actually had the pleasure of interviewing the project lead on the game and, when I asked him about easing in newer players with some fun sub-games that might help them master skiing, his response was in the vein of ‘we want people to play a shooter, not a racing game. Interesting idea, but we probably won’t do it any time soon’. I can respect that… sort of. Ascend does use community language throughout the game in such a way that it’s usually easy to interpret, lessening the conceptual burden for spectators or novices trying it out for the first time, but these occurrences are achieved more through luck and referential humor than deliberate design. The addition of some basic training maps post release has given players somewhere to go, but they’re incredibly rudimentary, lacking in direction and give the player no rewards, so the only incentive to try them is getting your ass handed to you against other people.
What it does badly:
Unfortunately, what Tribes: Ascend wants to be is a game that is amazing once you spend maybe 30 hours learning to walk and shoot at the same time. You can play Tribes like a regular shooter, running around on the ground, but it will feel terrible. The whole game is balanced around the assumption that players have mastered some fairly impressive technical skills.
Like Street Fighter, no concession is made to the rookie. If you want to become a Tribes player, you’ll do it sweating blood and tears. For people who enjoy that, or have enough shooter experience to be able to get the feel of it intuitively, great. So, like 10% of your potential audience. Whoopie.
In particular, being able to even achieve lasting damage in the game is somewhat dependent on mastering the aim of some particularly finicky weapons. You have a low ammo count, so amongst newer players it’s not uncommon for two people to run each other entirely out of ammo because neither can actually hit the other reliably enough to stop their halo-style health regeneration kicking in. This is possibly the most frustrating thing I’ve ever experienced in any shooter game and the fact that, at least originally, there was no place you could go and practice against moving targets that mimicked the target profile of another player at all was more than a little awful. Due to negative feedback, the target practice modewas added, if only to save both you and some other guy the anguish that is trying to bite someone strolling across the map with your flag to death because you spent enough ammunition to level a small city block trying to hit his buddy wearing the scifi equivalent of a loincloth and rollerskates. Yet the tacked on style and lack of direction mean that such a training mode is once again only really suited to advanced players, not the ones who really need to train.
This is further exacerbated by the fact that Tribes in its standard format is a teamwork heavy game. Players have serious roles to play that involve things other than shooting at the closest bad guy. There’s no attempt made to explain these necessities and how they’re handled to players, which leads to Moba-level raging when new players do what is completely natural and fly around shooting at people while veterans rip their hair out in frustration. There are tools to communicate what to do, but without the context provided by training, they fall flat for new players. So the typical competitive-rookie divide grows sharper and players are turned away.
The result:
Tribes: Ascend is pretty clearly a failed experiment. It’s not an unsalvagable one and if HiRez persist for a few more years, I think it will resurrect once the level of archived content reaches a critical level that lets people buy into the game without needing the developer’s assistance. But will the servers still be up by then? Who knows.
I think it’s no exaggeration to say that Tribes Ascend has performed poorly specifically because the developers neglected providing sufficient well designed training and tutorial content in the game. Tribes is perhaps one of the most innovative and engaging shooter genres, one that remains more or less unique in terms of its core mechanical concept (high speed player movement combined with low speed weapon projectiles). Like many games, it spiked high on launch, but without the ability to train and grow in a structured environment, the player-base quickly waned and now we’re left with a community similar to the one that tribes has had traditionally. Small, closed, high skilled and insular.
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3) League of Legends:
League of Legends has made inroads into improving player experience and play quality, but has it achieved anything in that regard when it comes to helping players learn the game? Perhaps. Perhaps not. The game has yet another very rudimentary, if well executed, tutorial that covers the basic control system and objectives of the game. Like many popular games, the developers seem content to leave players to manage their own training through custom games and other ad-hoc solutions however. League does provide a very well integrated VS-AI mode that gives players legitimate rewards comparable to playing against other people (for a limited time) and so is more enticing than similar play in Street Fighter or Tribes.
What it does well:
League of Legends goes out of its way to be welcoming to new players and reward them for engaging with the game. For new players, playing vs AI is weighted similarly to playing against humans, which helps reduce ladder anxiety for players unfamiliar with competitive gaming. Champion rotations and the F2P economy stagger the weight of information a player has to take on and social mechanics designed to encourage players to be welcoming and supportive help mitigate some of tensions and apprehensions of diving into an unstructured learning environment.
What it does badly:
Despite my good feeling towards Riot, however, in terms of content explicitly designed to help players develop competency and/or mastery, League is still just as flawed in terms of design as Street Fighter or Tribes. If I’m going to point at those games as having terrible implementations, League must be tarred with the same brush. No matter how much you try and paint cute happy faces on it, learning to become a competent League of Legends player on one’s own, or even in most company, is still like toileting with sandpaper.
Given the tremendous weight of community knowledge that players must absorb, a new player to a Moba is orders of magnitude below the capabilities of even a sub-50% hack like me. Mobas take for granted a control scheme that many people have serious difficulty adapting to (inverted keyboard-mouse control where the mouse controls movement and the keyboard controls actions and interactions, whereas in almost every genre but RTS and its mechanical variants the opposite is the case- RTS being one of the most niche genres of videogame in terms of raw player count). Alongside this a player must juggle incredibly complex contextual decisions and situational awareness while performing mechanical operations that can be tricky for even veteran keyboard jockeys.
Like many other competitive games, League gives nowhere for the player to isolate and refine these skills, let alone somewhere which is catered to with League’s otherwise industry-leading player engagement strategies. The result is that, despite its intense popularity, League is still beyond the reach of many who might otherwise be fans if their introduction to the genre was better structured.
The result:
League’s huge playerbase, vibrant and creative community and intense dedication to communication and involvement masks a lot of the flaws the game holds. The sheer weight of external guides and information as well as Riot’s policy of adopting player jargon to give new entrants a handhold to pull themselves into the scene means players are more often able to get the things they need to learn down and, more importantly, why they need to learn them. Where it falls down is providing them the space to do so.
So I have still borne witness to far more people flaming out on League than getting hooked. It was particularly strange to see the infographic proudly claiming, among other epic statistics, that over 90% of league players were male. This despite the fact that, overall, the videogaming market is half female(Pg3) and a majority of those women play on PC. While I imagine those statistics come as a surprise to some, to those it doesn’t this infographic was something like saying ‘hey look at how successfully we’ve failed to reach the majority demographic in this market space!’.
While there might be other reasons, I think that the average western woman is more inclined to learn a game at her own pace without the pressure of competition and with the ability to structure and control the experience. Honestly, I think the average guy is too, but men tend to be more willing to adapt to and pressured into a PVP grinding mindset in the presence of their peers, or take out their frustrations through mindless soloqueing. Perhaps if League introduced content to help new players learn the game at their own pace without someone looking over their shoulder telling them what to do (while frequently being wrong) there might be more ladies willing to take the plunge.
For all its strengths, League still has a lot to learn
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4: Starcraft (Starcraft II)
Starcraft is an interesting beast. In some senses it demonstrates best practice for competitive game tutorial/training design. Any way you look at it, the single player campaign is clearly aimed at steadily introducing players to new units and their intended purpose bit by bit. Starcraft also features a challenge mode which trains players on core concepts like multitasking, base building and so on.
Yet, despite the claims of developers that a greater percentage of people are cutting their teeth than ever before, Starcraft still remains a game where only a tiny percentage of buyers are willing to engage in the competitive play that turned a well-received but otherwise unremarkable RTS into one of the most important videogames of the millenium.
What it does well:
Of all the games explored here, Starcraft tries the hardest to introduce players to the concepts and techniques required to play the game in isolated, carefully constructed settings with their own ludic value. The design is still ambiguous in the sense that while learning a particular skill or capability is emphasised, you can usually get by without it: there’s no gating to ensure players have picked up the desired concepts. Starcraft is also the only game of the four to provide a true, focused training mode that isolates core gameplay dynamics, gives them a space for practice and identifies them formally to the player.
What it does badly:
Unfortunately these designs, while commendable, are still not particularly effective. Blizzard’s need to make a singleplayer that is open and enjoyable for freeform play detracts from its value as training for competition, not to mention the fact that units in the singleplayer are often significantly different from their multiplayer incarnations.
The challenge modes aren’t really integrated into the whole game experience that well. They’re not signposted, beyond achievements there’s no real reward for doing them and more importantly the concepts expressed have undergone ‘Blizzardation’. Blizzard seems to shy away from using the same terminology as their community. So ‘defending a rush strat’ becomes ‘defending an early attack’. I mean, who’s ever gone up against a ‘zerg early attack’? This may seem like pedantry, but it creates a cognitive dissonance between players training in the official challenges and the competitive community. Rather than being introduced and involved with the community directly from the game, players must undergo the same linguistic trials as if they were entering the fighting game community. As we talked about in the tennis analogy, it’s important players understand that training is training FOR something. That doesn’t mean it can’t be fun, and it does mean that the skills developed are more likely to be successfully transferred.
Secondly, the challenges cap out very low. Not only can you fudge them by quicksave abuse to just get the achievements, but even not doing so getting the highest tier of the challenge isn’t particularly difficult even for a novice RTS player. An important property of analogue training is that there’s a lot more potential for skill development- since some level of competition is usually involved (often indirect a-la videogame high scores), the ‘top tier’ of the challenge is constantly rising as the skills of the training group increase. Blizzards challenges help players train to a basic level, but don’t help them really push each skill beyond their limits again and again and again in isolation, which has proven the best way of developing a player’s competitive potential for time immemorial.
The result:
Competitive Starcraft remains a game that the average player struggles to get into. A lot of games which feature dual singleplayer and multiplayer experiences have this problem- people tend to buy the game for one or the other. If you get Starcraft for the singleplayer, you’ll generally consider your experience complete if you finish that and then do nothing else but play custom maps or get challenge achievements, which in terms of the competitive side of the game is missing the point entirely.
So there still remains a gap between multiplayer and singleplayer Starcraft. Furthermore, because the challenges are solid introductions to very basic concepts, but do not scale in such a way players can focus on developing their skills to work towards the capabilities of a multiplayer veteran, there is no safe space for players to practice such development in a directed fashion. Like many competitive games the only options are to play free-form games against AI which require the player to internally isolate skills they want to practice. This means they need to understand which particular skills need practicing and why, something the game doesn’t do a great job of conveying.
As a result, very few people who own the game play competitive Starcraft. Anxiety and a feeling of being overwhelmed from going into open play holds many back and frustration with slow progress and continually making the same mistakes creates a high dropout rate. Once again, real efforts by the developer to open up the game to new blood are far more clumsy than they should be given the care put into the rest of the game.
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What we can learn:
Let’s just pause to remember that we’re talking about a very specific thing here: tutorials and training players to be capable players of a competitive game. We must assume a baseline of skill to be considered capable– I’m not capable of playing tennis if I serve a game of double faults more than 50% of the time, or even if I do so around 30-40% of the time. I’m not capable of playing soccer if I can’t pass a ball accurately to an unguarded teammate. The same sorts of baseline skills can be argued for the competitive games above- executing a bread and butter combo reliably, hit a guy with enough reliability that you can actually kill them before you run out of ammo, get a few last hits per minute, macro an army that can beat an easy AI. Without these skills- which actually are quite difficult to achieve for non-gamers- a player cannot experience the intended basic flow of gameplay the designers expect them to and are consequently excluded absolutely from the intended play experience.
The absolute minimum baseline of these tutorials/training should be to reliably get a new player with no assumed knowledge or outside assistance whatsoever to this level of ‘capability’. Achieving this objective would allow a game to develop a new audience independent of the efforts of its own community. The more popular a game is and the larger its existing community, the less absolutely essential this is (as in League), but for games with tiny, insular or non-existent communities, it is crucial (as in Tribes). Even for games with large communities, such design might allow new demographics to be reached and brought into the community more successfully (as with women in League of Legends)
Here are what I would say are the crucial design goals of such an endeavour:
It must be rewarding in its own right
The most important value of any videogame design is that any activity the designer desires the player to undertake must be rewarding, either through engagement or some kind of external reward. Activities which have lower engagement necessitate a larger external reward and vice versa, though that’s not to say you can’t make an activity both engaging and rewarding.
So training or tutorials must be fun in and of their own right. If they’re not, a player needs to already have the desire to be a competitive player to endure them, something we want to avoid- this training should help show people why they would enjoy competitive play, not the other way around.
It must clearly communicate context
Tutorials and training must communicate their purpose in the larger scheme of things clearly and in language that is in common use amongst the existing player community. It’s no use creating a masterful minigame in which people are trained to do X perfectly if they don’t realize that X is a feature of the larger game, or they do, but can’t recognize when and when not to apply their skills. This often means stepping outside the fourth wall and talking frankly to the player, which may on the surface break immersion and engagement. What this fails to recognize is that learning a game is an immersive experience, on a level up from the narrative setup used to draw the player along. You may break their immersion in the story, but you won’t break their immersion in the game.
It must provide a controlled environment
Training is something that a player must have control over. As I discussed in my article on Portal 2, the tutorial’s function is to provide a safe, contained environment for skill development away from the wild world of emergent challenges. Tutorials should emphasize a player’s development and ability to proceed at their own pace. Training should be able to be smoothly stopped, restarted, made easier or harder. Rewards provide incentive for players not normally inclined to push themselves to do so. Every attempt should be made to ensure a player has the flexibility to control their own development.
It must isolate and identify particular skills
The purpose of tutorials and training is to give a player the chance to focus on understanding and developing a skill or skillset in isolation. This is a far more efficient and rewarding way of developing skills than simply participating in the full, formal game. Training and tutorial systems should carefully identify and break down skills required for gameplay and present them in such a way that their relevance to the main game is understood, but that the tutorial environment gives the player the freedom to focus on them one by one or in smaller combinations, without the pressure of being in an environment that taxes other skills as well.
It must support endless development
Perhaps the most important quality of competitive training is the ability to scale with the player’s skills. Training should always be capable of raising or lowering the bar, as it were. It’s not as if this is a foreign concept to videogame design: it’s the core idea that popularised the first videogames at the dawn of the medium. A single, simple mechanical exercise that grows in difficulty until eventually the player can’t keep up. Victory is not in absolutes, but in beating a personal best. Thus, every round can provide a new victory and every player can find their own limits and test them constantly.
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So those are my thoughts. As with all my indepth articles, this is a springboard for future discussion and design practice. I’d like to talk about the community designed micro and macro maps in starcraft, how League might go about integrating training modes with their reward models and so on, but I think you’ve probably all had enough for one day XD.
Like many long time gamers, I have a special place in my heart for the FPS. I remember playing half-life back when I was still freaked out by hair starting to grow in weird places. I went to basement lans where puttering old machines were balanced on plyboard and milk crates to play unreal tournament and Tribes. As the years went past I played almost all the notable shooters, and I still enjoy sitting down and burning through the latest Callofhonourface* for a bit of mindless clickporn. Like many others in my generation it’s ceased to be something I look forward to particularly, but I still owe a debt to the shooter in the form of a way of going about structuring designs for linear games.
I call it beadstring logic. It’s not a difficult metaphor to follow. Classic shooters are like chains of beads on a string- isolated, open potential spaces joined by one or two-dimensional gates. For more complex games sometimes you need nested beadstrings to get a good conceptual model, but the metaphor is quite robust when working with digital spaces.
It gives you a good view of what a rail shooter actually does for a player. It creates a series of self-contained challenges which are more often than not clearly marked as such through various means. I think Halo is perhaps the most elegant in doing so: Open, often almost circular, challenge spaces gated by narrow passes or doors. The challenge is signaled upon entry- a circling dropship, enemies flooding in through an opposite pass, a good vantage point, all the usual tricks- and agency generating resource choices are provided within easy reach- to your left there is a crash with ammunition and medpacks, to your right a knoll with ideal sniping cover. It’s fashionable to sniff at this sort of thing these days and look elsewhere for game design to praise, but it can’t be understated just how elegant and delightful these self-contained, high agency challenges are when well executed. We praise games like Braid and Bastion because they are novel and beautiful. This shouldn’t blind us to fact that the shooter has been perhaps the single most influential genre in the history of videogames. Beyond the violence porn, beyond the wish-fulfillment, beyond all those fashionably blasé criticisms, shooters have had a monumental impact because the beadstring is a deeply, deeply powerful way of organizing interactive experience and shooters are the genre that most successfully exploit it. Deep down, the rail shooter is an amazing gametype. We shouldn’t forget it.
It’s clear that many modern shooters seem to lack some of that elan vital that their ancestors possessed. I think there are many reasons for this and the beadstring helps illustrate at least one of them. To begin, there is power in simplicity. Many of these highly regarded ‘classic’ shooters are not particularly deep. Their weapons are simple, minimalistic but well tuned. Resources are either apparent or cleverly placed to make hunting them out interesting and enemies are challenging but clearly presented. The beadstring formula works best when the player is at least somewhat aware of the structure, as in Halo. Modern shooters are often characterized by incredibly chaotic, fast paced level design that doesn’t give the player any time to establish the scene and the challenge, or pins them in to a very specific way of dealing with it.
The particular strength of the beadstring metaphor is as a graphic model. I’ve found it’s a really great way of rapidly plotting out various interactive sequences. Think of it like an interactivity storyboard. Storyboards are there to rough out camera angles, sequences and transitions. Beadstring diagrams rough out challenge levels, space and time allocations, resources and suchlike. Here are some examples.
This is a very simple beadstring showing the basic components of the diagram. The game flow consists of ‘beads’ (potential spaces) and string (gates or non-interactive sequences). Each bead can contain a description, rough diagram or anything you like describing its contents. You can use the length of the string components to show the sort of flow you’d like- short strings for simple gates like doors, longer strings for periods of low interactivity to rest or prepare your player. You can colour code the beads for intended challenge, size them for intended scope and so on, which leads to beadstring diagrams like these
An exploration/ wide-railed early game progression sequence with narrower challenge areas and wider, easier exploration areas
A horror style progression- a hard fight to leave the player weakened, followed by a sharp drop in difficulty and subsequent slow ramp up in tension through space control and difficulty until replenishment, shortly before the next crippling fight.
A more complex example of the beadchain applied to a nonlinear game flow. While beadchains work really well with linear design, they can be used to plot out multi-path games pretty well so long as things don’t get too hectic.
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So there you have it, a quick and dirty prototyping and communication tool for the early stages of nutting out a linear game. It’s been pretty useful for me, so I thought I’d share.
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*It was a standing gag amongst my friends and I at Uni that any hypothetical game we came up with during discussions was somehow based around ‘face’, as a vague parody of the awful lack of imagination amongst game titlers. So Face Wars or Face Dancing: Extreme for example. These occasionally got more than a little silly, including the notable imaginary bestseller Reign of Face IV: The Facening. I couldn’t quite believe when Crytek announced Warface. It was too good to be true.
After every GDC the conversation about definitions blossoms once more. This time, it’s Raph Koster and Leigh Alexander heading the sides. It’s always a fun time to listen in and see what got mulled over at the latest conclave, but it’s also very frustrating for me at times.
The discussions are always vivacious, passionate and filled with fantastic examples of interesting things being executed within the medium, yet I find they lack something: a desire to reach useful conclusions.
I have a pretty stringent conception of useful, which may rankle with some folks who love a good chat about what this or that means. I was brought up in an environment saturated with science and scientific literature, so Popper has been sitting on my shoulder for a long time and Kuhn has been whispering in my other ear. Their work was directing science to its modern understanding of itself- the practical search for useful information. The usefulness of information is directly related to its capability to successfully predict things. So the statement ‘Any time you have a triangle where the sum of the squared values of the shorter two sides is equal to the square of the longer side, the two shorter sides form a right angle, so it is a right angled triangle’ is extremely useful, as it predicts a very specific phenomenon with 100% accuracy. The statement ‘Any time you have a game, it is a set of rules with an objective’ is… not useful at all. It is descriptive, not predictive.
So useful here is used in a specific way- the ability to predict something (with the important possibility that the prediction might be demonstrably wrong). Our definitions of games are not useful definitions, because they don’t predict anything. They don’t come out of a set of useful ideas, like ‘right-angled triangle’, about which we can make predictions. If I have a right angled triangle, I know it will behave in certain ways, because through a lot of effort it has been shown to do so beyond reasonable doubt. Currently ‘rules’ and ‘objective’ are not useful ideas because they tell us nothing of that sort. They are just definitions, we don’t actually know what they do, what their footprint in the non-hypothetical universe is.
This kind of property in a concept is crucial to any practical field, be it engineering, medicine, chemistry or what-have-you. Design is one of the most practical fields of all, since its whole raison d’etre is about figuring out how to build things from ideas. If those ideas are not predictive, we can’t use them to make design decisions. These discussions of the definition of game, while fascinating to me as a scholar and thinker, are next to useless to me as a designer. They don’t make predictions, they don’t render themselves wide open to testing. Given they come from a community of people who identify themselves as ‘game designers’, I am, perhaps now more understandably, frustrated.
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The main frustration for me is this calls attention to a broader lack of purpose in the discussion around game design. We are perpetually involved in observation and examination, but rarely do even those most qualified to do so offer a useful statement. Each designer stands alone, reliant on their own experience to form their own system of useful guidelines and rules upon which to base their design.
It is true that we have some useful design rules, ideas about maximizing engagement and immersion, structuring game flow and so on, but these typically are on the vague side of useful. Given the design community’s fascination with genre and detailed analysis of gametypes, I’m continually disappointed at the scarcity of people offering testable predictions of a more focused sort, ideally with them presenting a well defined and rigorous test they performed themselves.
I’m not saying that the design community should turn into a bunch of whitecoated statisticians, but it’s important to recognize the value of presenting discourse in such a way as to generate useful ideas. Not only does it give new designers a handhold to pull themselves into challenges of the field, but it will, eventually, aid in the development of a consensus on these nebulous definitions we love to argue about.
So when you want to talk about something cool you’ve found in design, think a bit about what the underlying idea you think it demonstrates really is. Is there a way you can show that? Can you say something like ‘This demonstrates the principle X, which suggests that if I did Y, with this or that parameter ensuring I’m just testing X, I would get an outcome within the bounds of Z.’
Even if you can’t do such an experiment, constructing your thoughts about an idea this way will help you figure out whether the idea really is that interesting for other designers. The more elegantly you can demonstrate your observation a falsifiable way, the less time you have to spend arguing with people on the internet about it. You’re either right or you’re wrong. If you’re right, the design community gets some really useful information. If you’re wrong, the design community gets some information that is not quite as useful, but still way more valuable than most.
To tie this back into the recent debates, I’ll quote Leigh:
“My main idea is that we have much more to learn and gain, at least for now, by eschewing definitions than we do by prescribing them.”
This sentiment is probably informed by the same feelings I have. Our definitions are not founded upon useful values. By ignoring broad categorical definitions for now and focusing on studying their components to produce more practical understandings of how those components function in reality, we will achieve more than trying to wrangle definitions that are ultimately not that beneficial to designers, as much enjoyable banter as they create.
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PS: again, I will stress, I’m deeply interested in conceptualizing and understanding the concepts of games and play for my own pleasure. I just find these thoughts impractical when I get my hands dirty, compared to more functional psychology, sociology, physics and so on. Relying on these disciplines to provide our predictively tested information is all well and good as a juvenile discipline, but if game design seeks to stand alongside other fields, we need to create our own research agenda grounded in practicality and applicability to real-world design tasks. I think this approach should be championed and promoted more by the luminaries who act as role-models for the design community.
I’m also not saying that general discussion around game design is not useful in a more casual sense. It’s absolutely necessary for giving us insight into where the more stringently defined useful information can be discovered and why it might be important. It’s just that mistaking that sort of discussion for the most important, serious level of analysis in the community is a real problem that’s holding game design as a field back.
MAKE A GAME OF THAT 
