Teach Game Design

Teaching game design

2011-12-01T11:35:00.001-05:00

Game design is often taught by people who have no game design expertise, usually programmers who really want to be teaching programming but are using games to entice people into learning programming. This is a problem. I believe there’s also a basic contempt, amongst many non-gamers and especially many programmers, for the entire idea of game design, as in “oh, that’s kid’s stuff, anyone can do that” or “it’s just getting a few ideas” (which conveniently masks their lack of knowledge and experience, of course). Nothing can be done about the contemptuous people who are supposed to be teaching game design, but for those with a more open mind, I’ve tried to distill my experience as a game designer who is also a very experienced teacher (17,000 classroom hours).

First you have to decide, are you going to talk about game design and discuss it so that students have some idea what it really about but no clue how to actually do it, or are you going to have them begin to learn how to do it? You can’t do both in one semester; it’s very hard to do both in two semesters. Moreover, you can’t try to teach them game production in the same classes. If you do, they’ll struggle with the game production and learn very little about game design.

There’s a big problem in conveying the difficulty of game design to students unless they experience it first hand (“experientially”). I’ll try to use an analogy to explain.

Most college and high school age people know intellectually that they can die, but emotionally they feel that they’re immortal, and sometimes behave that way as they take foolish risks such as driving while intoxicated. Similarly, they can be told that the ideas in their heads will not translate directly and accurately to what happens in a game (and even if they do, they often won’t be enjoyable to play); they may acknowledge this intellectually, but emotionally they don’t believe it. Instead they think that the game is going to work just as they conceive it and will be great fun (and further, that there will be more detail in it than they actually have in mind).

There is no substitute for them making games and (inevitably) seeing that the game not only does not work as they anticipated, it usually does not work well at all. To do that with beginning students you must use non-video (tabletop) games. If they try to learn how to create video games at the same time as they learn design, the struggle to create will be so great that they learn virtually nothing about design. This will happen even with tools such as Gamemaker that avoid programming per se. And even if they one of the few who might succeed, it takes so much longer to create and repeatedly modify a video game (as opposed to a tabletop game) that they won’t have time even in two semesters to really understand how much happens after the playable prototype is created. Nor will they have the opportunity to understand that the most important part of game design happens after the initial prototype creation.

In other words, to understand game design students must “complete” games, not merely plan them or get to an (inevitably poor) working prototype.

Given that students today are impatient with theory and want to do "something practical", they’re likely to be more engaged if they start by designing games. As you then introduce the “theory” they’ll be able to associate some of it with their practice so far, which will help both understanding and retention.

Another analogy: just as it is usually necessary for someone learning to write novels to write and discard a million words as practice, it is usually necessary for someone learning to design games to design many games that are not publishable but are good practice.

You'll have plenty of chances to teach design skills from the practical experience. Don't end up like American basketball players: "It's like what ESPN analyst ... Jay Bilas says all the time: In Europe, they teach skills, in America they play games. Teenagers aren't coached here so much as they're babysat and herded from tournament to tournament." (Rick Bonnell) But "playing" without teaching at least produces good basketball players. Experience without insight is of limited use, insight without experience is almost entirely useless for actual game designers. You need to be the coach, but they need to make the games.

If the instructor has not actually designed games from start to finish, not just to the point of a playable prototype, then the instructor probably won’t understand what’s really happening either. Most people don't complete games. Instead they think that when the playable prototype stage has been reached, the job is about done, when in fact it's closer to the beginning than to the end.

I understand the notion, once posed to me by the head of the neurosurgery department at UCLA, that "I can teach anything I can understand". The question is, can you understand game design without actually having done it? Not well. Teachers don't need to be professional practitioners, but they must be practitioners.

Yes, someone who has not painted could teach a class about painting, but the result is not likely to be good. Someone who has never sculpted can teach a class about sculpture but the result is not likely to be good. Someone who has not composed music can teach a composition class, but the result is not likely to be good even if they’ve played lots of music. (That is, playing a lot of games doesn’t make one a game design teacher any more than it makes one a game designer.) Games are more complex and less personal than paintings or sculptures or musical compositions, games are interactive and involve people other than the designer, games are more cerebral than these other arts and typically take much longer to complete. So the teachers who are not professional practitioners but are teaching the classes are much less likely to have gone through the entire process. Someone who has not actually designed games from start to finish can teach a class about game design, but the result is quite unlikely to be good.

A poor teacher who is a practitioner may not get results as good as a good teacher who is not a practitioner; but a good teacher who is a practitioner will get much better results than a good teacher who is not.

Example: several years ago one of the local community colleges used their Game Design I class mostly to teach students how to use Gamemaker, that is, they were really teaching game production. Then they used Game Design II to divide students into randomly-determined groups and have them make five Gamemaker games in 16 weeks. (Once again, game production was the main objective.) So a game barely reached playable prototype stage, with barely any design involved, it was mostly a production struggle, with the Gamemaker "programmer" having by far the most influence. Students got absolutely the wrong ideas about game design, as well as great frustration with the concept of working in groups in such limited time-frames.

When I say design and complete games, I don’t mean write game design documents. There are too many curriculums that teach students how to write game design documents but don’t let them learn how to design games, so what goes into the GDD is likely to be garbage. A game design document is just a plan, and when people who have no experience of actually doing something try to plan to do it, it can be a train wreck.

I have just read yet another syllabus for an introductory game design course where the students are not actually learning how to design games. Instead they're learning how to write brief pitch documents describing a plan for a game. (The documents are much too short to actually be a plan; they're a description of the most notable parts of the game for marketing purposes.) This may sound like designing games to you, if you never designed a game, but to me the students are only being asked to express an extended idea. And if you have not yet learned how worthless ideas are in game design then there are many articles you can read, such as "The Idea is Not the Game", http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/614/the_idea_is_not_the_.php and "Why Your Game Idea Sucks"
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_221/6582-Why-Your-Game-Idea-Sucks .

Furthermore, when beginners write extended descriptions of their ideas for video games they tend to focus more on what they wish the game to be rather than on how the game is going to work. See "When You Start a Game Design Conceive a Game Not a Wish List" http://gamasutra.com/blogs/LewisPulsipher/20111014/8668/When_you_start_a_game_design_conceive_a_game_not_a_wish_list.php .

Writing these brief documents doesn't even teach students about game structure, let alone about the process of game design. It teaches them nothing about the iterative and incremental process of taking an inevitably poor prototype and turning it into a good game. The way to learn about the process of game design is to design and complete games.

Example of how this begins to work: the first day of an intro game design class–I don’t discuss the syllabus until the second day–I talk with students about Monopoly, try to get them to understand why it is a poor game even though they may have fond thoughts about it (because they were doing something enjoyable with their families), and (if there’s time) put them into groups to start devising ways to improve the game. As soon as we can, I have them play their version to see how their ideas turn out in practice. (Of course, usually the new versions are a mess.) This gets the attention of the serious people, at least. It may be disappointing for the students who think they're going to play video games all the time for class. . .

(And a related note:)
I was a peer reviewer once for a textbook for an introductory database class, with a strong leaning toward Oracle. The book began with a lengthy discussion of normalization of databases, which is a process of making sure that you don't have more fields in a database than are necessary aimed at avoiding duplication of data. The book then talked about entity relationships and other details of creating database applications. Finally the book got to actually using a database to do something. I told the authors that typical college students would quickly switch off at the beginning of the book because it would seem irrelevant to them. I suggested having the students make and use databases first so that when the students got to the discussion of normalization and entity relationships they would have some experience to apply it to and could understand why it was important.
This bears considerable resemblance to the situation in game design. Beginning students have a lot more experience of games than of databases. Nonetheless, if they have no experience of designing a game then the theory of game design will mean much less to them. They'll associate it with fantasies that it all will happen very easily that I discussed at the beginning of this article. They will still think that game design is all about getting good ideas, not about the execution of those ideas.

(Another related note:)

The intellectual/emotional split between the “theory” of game design and the practice is a little like the split that’s part of teaching beginning students to program: if you try to have them both solve the problems that are posed, and write programs to implement the solutions, they’ll fail at both. You need to either present them with a solution and have them program it, or have them figure out a solution to a problem and then show them how an efficient program to this end works, without the students trying to figure it out. When they’re more experienced then they can do both the problem-solving and the program creation.

Lew Pulsipher

"Objective" is not better than "Subjective"

2011-08-26T08:01:00.000-04:00

(I'd swear I posted this years ago, but I cannot find it. Since the topic keeps coming up, I'll post it now.)

Many people misunderstand "objective" to be somehow more valid than "subjective". This is not true at all.

Objective merely means in accordance with an external standard. For example, a person can use the objective standard of a ruler or yardstick to measure the width of a room. However, if that objective standard is itself wrong--say the yardstick used is not 36" long--then the result is certainly invalid.

A subjective measurement is based on internal rather than external standards, but can be just as (or more) valid. If someone who is very good at judging distances tells you how wide the room is, he may be more accurate than someone who measures with a yardstick, especially if that yardstick is faulty.

Many matters cannot be measured objectively, because we have no way to do so. Can "customer satisfaction" be measured objectively? No, it is necessarily subjective. Yet it is nonetheless of vital importance to, say, computer support personnel. If you try to measure how "good" computer support is by counting things, you may come to faulty conclusions. Simple example: is it good that over time there are more and more calls to a computer Help Desk in a corporation? Well, you could conclude that more people realize that the Help Desk really does help (some don't, you know). Or you could conclude that the Help Desk isn't doing very well, so people have to call back. Or you could conclude that the training for workers, so that they can manage to do things themselves, is faulty, so they have to call the Help Desk. And so forth. An increase in number of calls can be argued both ways. The only way to be sure is to survey the people who use (or could use) the Help Desk, a subjective measure that is much more valid than the objective measure of number of phone calls.

Most sports, for example, rely on subjective evaluations (referees, judges in figure skating or boxing, etc.). Sometimes people are unhappy, but the prizes are still awarded. The judges/referees/umpires use "objective" standards, but they necessarily apply them in a subjective way--"judgment calls".

How about the famous dog shows, judged by a single referee? We could just have a time trial and measure the running speed of the dogs, and that would be an objective measurement, but it wouldn't tell us which was "best", only which was fastest in a time trial.

There appears to be no *meaningful* objective measure available to determine whether a game is "great" or "flawed" or "awful" or somewhere else in between. We can try to use a combination of "kind of meaningful" (do lots of people play it?) and "kind of measurable" (the effect of the game on people, which we have no means to measure objectively) and "kind of objective" (is there player elimination, etc.)

I see people applying the (wrong) objective standard to so many things, because they cannot easily measure what is really important. I'm a college teacher. In teaching, accreditation bodies measure whether people have a degree rather than whether they know the subject (that's too hard to determine). They don't even imagine they should try to measure whether the person is a good teacher--it's too hard, so they measure something that is truly unimportant. My neighbor tells me that a respected teacher at her high school, who has taught special education for 32 years, got a letter from the state telling him he was unqualified--because he didn't have the "proper degree". In assessment of students, we see "end of class" multiple choice tests as the only determiner of student/school quality--MC tests are a poor way to determine whether someone knows something--and as a result we have students coming into colleges who have been trained, not educated, and cannot think for themselves. Even the good students don't understand what they're doing.

At one high school system in a major city, they have a cooperative agreements with the colleges, and instead of running "AP" (Advance Placement) classes they run classes via the colleges--except for American history The entire school system's worth is measured by how students do on their American History End-of-class test because that's all there is to "objectively" measure. Balderdash and poppycock!

Examples can be multiplied in other fields, I'm just using ones (computer support, education) that I'm familiar with.

Game designing and writing as professions

2011-02-18T14:22:00.001-05:00

I was at a local game shop the other day to try out 4th edition D&D seasonal adventures. One of the players had played Warhammer 40,000 but had never played D&D. I discovered on further acquaintance that she likes to write fiction. This seems to be the most common hobby cum professional objective of people in their late teens or early 20s, after wanting to make video games, though that observation comes from my own experience rather than surveys. (Before someone comments that surveys show that teens want to be doctors, lawyers, teachers, and sports people, I’m talking about what they really want to do, not what they think they ought to want to do, or think that others think they should do, or what they think they will have to do.)

Fortunately this 19-year-old recognizes that she isn’t likely to make a living from writing; unfortunately she doesn’t really have any idea of what else she might want to do.

I guess that the number of people who make a full living from fiction writing worldwide is in the hundreds rather than the thousands. I recently read an interview with Glen Cook, who is one of my favorite fantasy authors, who said:

"Even in my best years of the first thirty it was never more than hobby money. The last maybe five I've made enough to support myself in genteel poverty. Certainly not enough to support a family and put three sons through college."

This is a man who worked full-time and retired from General Motors, and wrote in his spare time, but had a lot of books published. Now that he's retired he does about two a year.

In contrast the number of people who make a full living from tabletop game design is very likely less than 100, total, no more than a quarter of those freelancers. The obvious freelancers are Reiner Knizia, Klaus Tauber (Catan), and Alan R. Moon (Ticket to Ride), and likely Richard Borg (Liar's Dice, Memoir '44 etc.), plus people who work at Hasbro and a few other companies.

Perhaps even more in fiction writing than in games, it's very rare for young person to become well-known. Despite the exception of the author of Eragon (who got a lot of help), how many successful fiction authors, people who make enough to make a living, can you name who are less than 30 years old? There's probably somebody in tabletop game design under 30, but the ones I've named above are much older than that. Part of this may simply be that you need to do quite a few things before you become well-known, but in fiction writing I also think it's a matter of personal experience. The authors of really affective [sic] fiction can draw upon a wealth of life experience: they've personally experienced love and death and disappointment and betrayal. (When I talked about experience to my 19-year-old acquaintance she pointed out all the things she had *done* (such as skydiving and horse riding) rather than all the emotional experiences she had had.)

In the age of instant gratification it's now even harder for young people to recognize that practice makes a difference, THE difference. This is true for fiction writing and it's also true for game design. This is what Cook had to say about fiction writing when asked "Do you have any advice for beginning writers?"

"This is the easiest answer of all. Write. Don't talk about writing. Don't tell me about your wonderful story ideas. Don't give me a bunch of 'somedays.' Plant your ass and scribble, type, keyboard. If you have any talent at all, it will leak out despite your failure to pay attention in English. And if you didn't pay attention, learn. A carpenter needs to know how to use a hammer, level, saw, and so forth. You need to know how to use the tools of writing. Because, no, the editor won't fix it up. S/he will just chunk your thing in the shit heap and go on to somebody who can put together an English sentence with an appropriate sprinkle of punctuation marks."

Jerry Pournelle used to say you too can be a novelist if you're willing to throw away your first million words. Brandon Sanderson, who is finishing the Wheel of Time series following the unfortunate death of the original author, wrote something approaching a dozen novels before he sold one. Glen Cook apparently wrote a great many novels before he sold one. And none of those old novels will ever be published.

Fortunately my 19-year-old is writing rather than just talking about writing. I know another 19-year-old who wants to be a novelist who can only make herself write as part of National Novel Writing Month every November. With the support provided by others then and the aspects of a contest she can do it; the rest of the time it doesn't seem to happen. That's not going to work in the long run, is it?

Perhaps several hundred people work as game and level designers in the video game industry and make a living. But very few of them came out of school to get a job as a designer. Just as it's necessary for an aspiring fiction writer to have a fallback career in mind that will enable them to actually make a living, it's necessary for an aspiring game designer to gain other skills that can make them a desirable employee in the game industry. This would usually be programming or art, of course, although many people in game design and even game writing started out doing something for game companies that was not directly involved with game creation, such as game testing, working in the mailroom, working in the IT department, working in marketing, and so forth

Just as Cook says that you have to write I tell students that if you want to be a game designers you've got to design games. And you've got to take them all the way through to completion, it doesn't help just to get ideas or to flesh out the ideas a bit and then stop. A playable prototype is only the beginning.

One of the problems with video games is that it takes a long time to produce a playable prototype. It's much more practical to begin by designing tabletop games, where you can make a playable prototype in a few hours or less.

Of course, to begin with it makes a lot of sense to modify existing games to improve them rather than to do games from scratch. When I was a teenager and early 20 something I designed Risk variants and Diplomacy variants. But I had also designed games to play by myself, once I'd been exposed to commercial wargames beginning with Conflict when I was very young, then American Heritage Broadsides, and then especially Stalingrad, Afrika Korps, and other Avalon Hill games. But I tended to design games that were not commercially viable: for example I designed a massive space wargame that I played solitaire with many many sides, far too many to be practical, and also it used fog of war but there was no mechanism for it, I just pretended as I played each Empire that I couldn't see where the opposition was and didn't know what they were doing.

So when I teach beginners game design, one of the first things I do is talk about what an inadequate game Monopoly is (especially for adults), and why, and then have them try to come up with ways to improve it. And I have them actually play their variant to see that it usually won't turn out the way they think it will.

Cook quotes from http://www.sfsite.com/10a/gc209.htm
I hope I've cleaned up all the oddities introduced by Dragon Naturally Speaking.

What characterizes broad game markets?

2011-01-12T17:33:00.002-05:00

I have been thinking about what characterizes the broader market in games, both tabletop and video. I haven't come to any generalized theory yet (if I ever will), but I have some observations.

"Twitch games" are games requiring a player to move and react very quickly. This is the most common form of hard core video game, as epitomized by shooters, but can also be seen in many casual games such as Tetris.

The 21st century is the world of Instant Gratification, of "oh shiny", of the "Easy Button", of myriad distractions and encouragements to "just do it" rather than think about it. It's the world of "listen to your feelings, Luke", where something other than logic is preferred (e.g. "The Force" is better than any computer). K-12 education in most places in the USA consists of memorization of material to pass multiple choice tests. Students aren't encouraged to think. ("Life is an essay test, not multiple choice", but that's not the trend in education.) Twitch games are far more popular than strategy games because so many people in the modern world are unwilling to shift their brain out of first gear. I am talking about general points of view, not necessarily what YOU are like, of course. We don't need to concern ourselves with whether this is good or bad, it is what it is.

In the past decades we've "dumbed down" the twitch games to reach a broader market, as typical games are easier than in the past, repleat with such features as auto-aim and auto-save. I'm *not* saying this is bad, in fact I think we should go further in story-driven games so that those who want to enjoy the story without the work of playing the game can do so, while those who enjoy challenge can do so. A game can be hard for those who want it to be hard, and can provide auto-pilot for those who just want to enjoy the story.

But the "dumbing down" also means there is even more of a market now for "twitch games" than for thinking games. Kids especially are far more willing to learn the highly repetitive hand movements and the eye coordination, than to apply a lot of brainpower to a game.

There may have been a time--or may not--when the population as a whole were more willing to think than to twitch, but if so those days are long gone.

Not surprisingly, many of the people who like thinking games play tabletop games more than video games. The proportion of "twitch" is much higher in video games (of course), the proportion of thinking games much higher in tabletop because there are few ways to make them games of reaction and movement, and because people are more formidable and resourceful opponents than the computer.

Social networking games on Facebook are an extreme, in a sense a reversion to the original video games that required very little brainpower. Most if not all social networking games are deliberately designed to present very simple puzzles each day (often repetitive puzzles) that any normal person can solve without frustration, if they choose to do so. Nor are they actually social, as almost all of them can be played solitaire; other people are not required.

As a lifelong "strategy gamer" and one who enjoys playing games with other people, I find all of this disappointing, but game designers must deal with it.

Beginners "design" what they want to play

2011-01-09T10:54:00.000-05:00

If you ask beginners to "design" a video game by writing a formal description (a game treatment), what you get is a vague description of the "really cool" game they'd like to *play*, usually overflowing with superlatives like "great story" and "great graphics". There's no recognition of practical limitations. It is "pie in the sky". Nor is there any element of real game design, which is about setting constraints and resulting problems, solving those problems, then solving all the problems that arise from the inevitable weaknesses of those initial solutions, and so on. There are no details, only vague ideas, and I (and many others) have already described how little value there is in ideas.

Game design can be hard work because thinking can be hard work

2010-10-04T08:43:00.002-04:00

In high school, the teacher is expected to think for you, to package everything in small digestible bits that can be memorized for multiple-choice tests. For the most part, you are trained, not educated, taught to memorize how to do something, rather than understand how to do something, or to memorize facts instead of understanding how systems work. Problem-solving is not part of that package, for sure.

High schoolers become accustomed to the thinking part of their brain being in first gear, or park, rather than in top gear. “Idle”.

Game design is all about critical thinking; one well-known “indie” video game designer says it’s 99% critical thinking, though I won’t go quite that far. The teacher cannot think for you, in game design, you have to think for yourself. And thinking is undoubtedly hard.

Too many people think they can get an idea and someone else will do the work–work which involves a great deal of thinking. Too many think they can easily make a game “just like such-and-such but better”, having no idea how hard it is to make really good games (it’s easy to make poor ones). When they’re posed the problem of making a game that isn’t “just like such-and-such”, they are floored.

Further, game design is about problem-solving. In general, a prototype game is broken. The game designer must figure out ways to fix it, and then ways to make it even better even though it works, because lots of games that work aren’t really very good. These are all problem-solving exercises.

If the initial conception is fundamentally good, then there’s a lot of work to be done to get a good (or better) game out of it. If the initial conception is poor, then it will be difficult if not impossible to get a decent game out of it, and that will require abandoning some of the original conception. Even if the initial conception is “wonderful”, there are thousands of ways to mess it up.

Yes, there are hard jobs that are nonetheless rewarding and even fun. Dave Duncan, a well-known science fiction and fantasy novelist, didn’t start publishing novels until he was laid off from Canadian oil fields at over 50 years old. After 33 novels, he said writing (which is largely thinking) was still hard work.

Sometimes, designing games is hard work because thinking is hard work.

Trial and Error in education

2010-07-19T06:37:00.001-04:00

I recently read the following in an article about changing how we teach, at
http://www.ccweek.com/news/templates/template.aspx?articleid=1850&zoneid=7 "They" refers to contemporary students.

"'We know they are different, he said. 'The challenge is to figure out how to reach them. The technology means they learn by trial and error. They are not going to read a manual. The whole educational system is predicated on the notion that failure is a bad thing. But failure means nothing to them.'"

Here is my comment: They've learned to learn this way, but if this method is inappropriate and even deadly in the real world--and sometimes it is--then teachers are duty-bound to teach them the right way, so that they can survive in that real world where their fantasies and their games mean NOTHING. (And remember who's writing this, I've designed games for 50 years, my first commercial games were published 30 years ago. I LIKE games. But they're not the real world.)

I don't want my employees to do things by trial and error, I want them to figure things out and do it right, if not the first time, then very soon thereafter. Failure means a lot in the real world, even though it doesn't in video games. Video games are often designed so that trial-and-error learners can ultimately prosper; the world is not constructed that way.

What we need to change in teaching is this: It's not technology that millennials crave, or trial-and-error, it's interaction with their surroundings (such as they get with video games) and with people (becoming more common in video games). Yet with the dilution and "commoditization" of modern education because of distance learning, we're going the opposite way.

The "Curse" of free and instant communication

2010-04-10T10:04:00.000-04:00

We'll get to the relevance of my discourse to teaching sooner or later. Bear with me.

We're living under "the curse of easy and free instant communication". When I was in England for three years researching my dissertation in the late 70s, the only practical means of communication (for a graduate student, anyway) was letters--snail mail. Phone calls were very expensive. Email, instant messages, Facebook, Skype, were unheard of (though for a few people on the Internet at the time, there was email--no Web though). Everyone was accustomed to these limitations. And so it wasn't a big deal if you didn't hear from someone close to you for months, when in distant climes.

But instant communication has changed how we live. So when my oldest friend's 18-year-old daughter came here from Germany along with her dad in September on the way to college 2,400 miles away (sigh), we were already better friends, and now as adults, than when they had left when she was not-yet-14. I'd corresponded with her through Facebook for nearly a year and talked with her (and seen her sometimes) on Skype. When she went off to college, we kept it up, so I had closer communication with her than anyone (other than her dad) who wasn't in Washington. Of course, there's cell phones as well within the country, but last year she used a pay-as-you-go and so I didn't call, now we both have the same company's phones and calling costs nothing. This would have been impossible 30 or 40 years ago, or even 20 years ago.

But the reverse of this is "the curse": if you've been communicating with someone several times a week, and then that person gradually stops, you can only think "well, I'm not worth the time it takes to answer the phone, or to type a few keys in Facebook. That person must not care for me worth a hoot any more." If it literally takes 30 seconds or less to communicate with someone, when you don't hear from someone it is likely to hurt your feelings. If someone goes from Germany to America, and then cuts off friends in Germany, what are the friends going to think when communication is easy and instant and free? And so forth.

Maybe it depends on how long you've been friends. I've known brothers and sisters who've been out of touch for more than a year, even a daughter who was out of touch with her mother for six months, and the relationships have since succeeded. If you're friends long enough, and are separated geographically, there are ebbs and flows.

Text messaging seems to epitomize this. In a sense, to me millennials seem to be terribly insecure, constantly wanting to stay in touch with friends and family, and now they do it through texts. But I'm assured by the few people I've talked with at length about text messaging, that they feel no need to constantly stay in touch, no insecurity.

Another reason for texting seems to be to find out things you can find out, but which you have no need to know. One of my student's friends, Alex, often comes into my class to use a computer and sometimes, even, to participate in the class discussions. One day he wasn't there, so in idle curiosity I asked Justin where Alex was, thinking he might know off the top of his head. "I don't know, but I can check" he said as he reached for his phone (which was on the desk next to him, not in his pocket. . .). I said no, there's no need, it makes no difference; but now he had the bit in his teeth, and just had to text Alex "where are you" ("home" was the answer). Somehow this epitomizes to me another aspect of texting and millennials, the great need to know something even though that something doesn't change your behavior, is in fact irrelevant.

We see this in the mania for knowing the news "up to the minute", even though intelligent people usually realize that "up-to-the-minute" news is often false news. [see my blog post about Skepticism for examples: http://teachgamedesign.blogspot.com/2008/05/skepticism-how-do-we-know-things.html] So many people want "up to the minute" even though it makes absolutely no difference in what they do or how they behave. I call it yet another "Triumph of Capitalism" (or maybe more accurately, of Marketing).

Out of 39 game design students (Fayetteville, NC), mostly high school seniors, some younger, some college age, 12 send and receive more than a thousand texts a month, and another 7 send and receive more than 5,000 a month! Half of them do more than a thousand a month, more than 30 a day! The distraction is Immense. I'm teaching game design, which is all about thinking, and especially about thinking critically; monitoring their cell phone constantly is detrimental to what I'm trying to get them to do.

So the practical question and point of all this is, what do I do about it? Ban cell phone use? I already have classroom management software (Genevalogic Vision) that can block Internet access (or allow access only to certain sites) and that can lock up the computers, and I use it sometimes. I know there are cell phone neutralizers, but they may be illegal in some places, and of course they cost money. I could just tell students, when I see them using a cell phone I'll confiscate it. At present I confiscate (until the end of class) only in egregious cases.

As with many other maturity issues, the high school folks are much worse than the college-aged students.

Presentation at TGC

2010-03-20T20:07:00.002-04:00

On Thursday, April 8 at the Triangle Game Conference in Raleigh I'll be presenting "What video game developers can learn from 50 years of tabletop game development." The time has not been set yet.

"You can have two out of three . . ."

2010-03-07T08:01:00.001-05:00

Many people worldwide have talked about a maxim related to any kind of manufactured goods, or to projects, that runs like this: For production in general, "fast, cheap, good--you can have two out of three." Discussing the three pillars of project management, controlling the cost (budget), being on schedule, and meeting performance goals, it is: "In projects: cost, schedule, and performance, you can have two out of three." In general, these forms hold true, though it IS possible to make all three in some cases.

This can also be applied to many areas of endeavor where “two out of three” really is the limit. For example, I used to tell my computer networking students, “fast, cheap, long-distance: in networks you can have two out of three.” The Internet is cheap and long-distance, but not fast. The typical local area network is fast and cheap, but not long distance. A fast, long-distance network is ridiculously expensive.

In boardgames, the maxim is something like "short, simple to play, richly detailed. In boardgames, you can have two out of three,” but almost never three out of three.

It took me a while to come up with this form, compared with the networking form. “Complex” could be confusing, and “detailed” alone didn’t seem quite enough. I think the current version pretty well expresses the situation.

Games using cards are more likely to be able to achieve all three, I think, with Magic: the Gathering being an example of the many collectible (and sometimes non-collectible) card games that achieve all three. This may be why cards are now so often a part of boardgames. Yet games that use a standard deck of playing cards will surely lack rich detail.

In video games, you have the advantage of using the computer to keep track of (and display) details. So you may be more likely to achieve all three in one game, because the computer can hide the administrative part of the rich detail that players often must track themselves in a board game.

"Why would I write a game design document for a tabletop game"?

2010-02-01T13:32:00.000-05:00

Answer: you don't. I have never heard of it being done. Sometimes, when you're ready to approach a publisher, you'll write a description for the potential publisher, but this is nothing like a game design document, as it is a marketing tool. If the publisher is sufficiently interested in the game they'll try it out, why would they need a document that describes it when the game exists to play?

When you think you know what you want in your game, make a prototype. If you don't know what to do in the prototype, you haven't thought about it enough. Even after you make the prototype, you'll change it a great deal as you playtest it. So why write a design document?

Hierarchy of degree types

2009-08-03T08:17:00.000-04:00

The more a person knows about the rapidly deteriorating state of American education, the more one recognizes that there is a hierarchy of degrees.

From most to least desirable:

Seated, full-time students at a school designed for full-time students
Seated, part-time students at a school designed for full-time students
Seated, at a school designed for part-time students
Online

This differentiation applies less for a masters degree than for an associates or bachelors, and less for a doctorate than a masters.

Some subjects are most unsuitable for online, some much more suitable.

Yes, this is an opinion. Some people don't care how you got your degree. Some (the smartest, perhaps) don't care whether you have a degree, recognizing that having a degree doesn't mean you can actually do a job: they care whether you can do the job.

"Digital games" are most games, not just video games

2009-05-03T08:33:00.001-04:00

Many people use the term "digital game" to represent what I call electronic or (for convenience) video games (technically, there are electronic games that have no video component, certainly not in the accepted sense of video). Sometimes "analog" is used for non-electronic games. I used "digital" for a while, but the problem is that digital means with discrete steps that have nothing in between: Yahtzee, Craps, and other dice games, Tic-Tac-Toe, all of those are digital in this broader sense, as are most "traditional" games. I sure don't like having to type "non-electronic", but that's much better than "analog" or "non-digital". And "video" works better for me than "digital", because it is closer to what I usually mean.

Games of Maneuver vs. games of "combat dominance"

2009-01-26T20:02:00.000-05:00

One of the first things I do with beginning game design students is give them sets of "Clout Fantasy" pieces and a large vinyl chessboard, in groups, to have them make up games. I have water-soluble markers so that they can draw on the chessboards if they choose. They enjoy the exercise, they get used to working in groups (which also helps them get to know one another), and ultimately they learn that designing a good game isn't as easy as they thought it would be. It also teaches them to work under constraints.

"Clout" pieces are very nice clay chips (like high quality poker chips) with artwork and two numbers on them (and also zero to four dots, but students rarely use the dots). I bought a bunch very cheap ($8 for 12 starter sets listing at $14.95 each) because Clout appears to have failed strikingly in the marketplace. I give each group four differently-colored sets of 15 pieces--two starter sets. The sets are standard, but the pieces differ between each color. Students are free to use the numbers and dots or not as they choose.

So checkers is a game they could play immediately with the sets. I don't give them dice, but they often ask to use them in the end, and I agree.

So much for preliminaries. Students often make some kind of wargame, given what they have, and I find that the students often don't understand how maneuver and combat methods work together.

When I say "maneuver", I mean the location of pieces matters, and is what separates good play from bad, not how they fight. Chess and checkers are games of maneuver. Go is a game of maneuver, even though the maneuver comes through placement of pieces rather than actual movement. Even Tic-Tac-Toe is a game of maneuver, in this sense.

Games of "combat dominance" are defined mainly by the rules of how pieces conflict/fight. This often involves dice. Yes, there is conflict in chess, but the rule for it is very simple, whoever moves into the square, wins. Checkers is similarly simple, Go nearly so.

The most typical dice combat I've seen from beginners is that each side rolls a die, and highest wins. There is no provision for one side to gain an advantage from local superiority of numbers. So if one side has 10 pieces and the other 3, the odds in combat are still 50-50. Unit strength may modify this (say with the numbers on the Clout pieces). Hence maneuver is *pointless*. Why bother to get numerical superiority in an area when it makes no difference to your success? And you have a game that absolutely amounts to dice rolling and no more, when unit strengths do not vary.

About the time three units defeat nine thanks to a run of luck, students will get this, if not before. The ideal to be impressed on the students is that maneuver ought to be important just as the strength of unit can be important.

Of course, combat rules can be quite intricate, though rarely are in the context of this exercise. Shooters and fighting games can have quite complex combat rules, though they are also games of maneuver.

It might be interesting to go through the typical list of military "principles of war" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principles_of_War) and try to apply to simple games. "Maneuver" is one, as is "economy of force" and "mass", if I recall correctly.

(Note: Civilization (computer version) uses one-on-one combat, ignoring other forces present, but I think this is intended to emphasize differences in technology, so that one really good unit can defeat many lower-tech units. Nonetheless, maneuver IS important in Civ., but in a very large context--strategic movement, not tactical movement.)

Why Design Games?

2009-01-22T08:05:00.001-05:00

I failed to point this one out when it was published earlier this month:

"Why design games?" Game Career Guide. You can click on the title of this post.

Origins of Games

2008-12-09T20:12:00.002-05:00

Another article on GameCareerGuide (you can click the title of this post):

http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/662/idea_.php

Useful videos for game creation class

2008-12-02T08:38:00.001-05:00

The DVD of the movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004) has some videos that can be instructive to game creation students. This was the first major movie to be made almost entirely with CG but with live actors. It was shot on a set in the UK using green and blue screens and few props, then CG was wrapped around the actors to show locations as diverse as Shangri-La and out-of-doors in a major city being attacked by giant robots.

What makes it especially applicable is that the writer-director had worked for years to create the movie, including four years to make a 6 minute short (starting with an Apple II, later with a better machine). That short is one of the videos, and can be seen as a particularly successful portfolio/demo. (It's also instructive that he could get a producer to look at it because his brother's wife knew the producer socially from having been to college together.) It is remarkable for the technology of the time, and imaginatively stylish to boot.

There are also two videos (Chapter 1 and Chapter 2) about the making of the movie. The second is particularly good because, I think, it shows the kind of mentality that often exists when a company is making a AAA game, right down to working hours past midnite and everyone pulling together in difficult circumstances.

This is a prime example of how, on rare occasions, a person conceives something that comes to fruition despite major obstacles and the sheer unliklihood that it will get done. My students (most of them high school age this term, though in college classes) watched with great attention, which is VERY unusual.

(The movie nearly made its budget in the US, but was not widely regarded as successful, so the writer-director has not yet had another movie credit. Unfortunately, the plot gets exceptionally dumb at some points, and the acting occasionally wanders despite presence of three Academy Award winners. But it is amazing technically. It's 1:46 long, I showed much of it on the day before Thanksgiving when many of the students were thinking about anything but school, after the videos (I'd showed the remarkable 6 minute short the day before).)

Evaluation of Student Game Projects

2008-11-17T09:21:00.000-05:00

I wrote the following for my current students, and thought it worth posting here.

We’ve all seen movies where we can say “that movie was well-made,” that is, the directors, photographers, sound people, and so on are good professionals who did their jobs well. It could still be a bad movie owing to having the wrong actors (not necessarily bad ones, just ones not suitable for the part) or a bad story. Some people would say that ALL fantastic adventure stories (Mummy, Indiana Jones, Spider Man, etc.) are bad stories, but those movies were generally quite well-made. (This is as opposed to “the old days” when fantasy and science fiction movies tended to be cheap junk.)

When you start designing games, you’re no more likely to be very good at it than Beethoven was when he started composing music, or Rembrandt was when he started to paint, or John Steinbeck was when he started to write. If we hear early Beethoven nowadays, it’s usually because it’s by Beethoven, not because it’s good. Creative endeavors take lots of practice, it is very rare that someone is outstandingly good to begin with.

Further, I am not going to arrogate to myself the idea that I, unlike anyone else in the world, can easily recognize what games are really good, outstanding, just OK, etc. I can tell when games are bad, I can tell when they need to be improved, but at some point I don’t know. If nothing else, I won’t have the time to play the games many times myself, so how am I going to know exactly how good it is? (Again, I can tell when there are bad aspects.) Reiner Knizia makes over a million dollars a year as a freelance game designer, and has had over 200 games published, yet he is sometimes surprised by sales of his games; not even he knows how good a game will be, though he can likely tell the poorest ones from the rest.

So I am not going to grade you on “how good” your game is, or “how much fun” it is. Only people who don’t design games think they can do that.

What I’m interested in is whether the game is well-made, even if it isn’t particularly good. If you do the right things, especially playtesting the game and recognizing that changes can be made to improve it, implementing those changes where time permits, then you’ve got the essence of proper game production. I give you milestones when certain things are due, not only to try to help you stay on track, but to see if you’re doing the right thing.

You won’t have time to “finish” the game or even come close to “perfecting” it. (In a sense a game is never finished, you just finally can’t afford to spend more time for the minimal benefit you can achieve: it’s the law of diminishing returns.)

One of the best, if not the best, games students have made was in my very first game class, fall 2004. The group of students liked their game so much they kept working on it through the following spring and summer, making an electronic version as well. (Notice it was a group project; which means more could potentially get done in a given amount of time, as more people were involved.)

Quoting myself :-)

2008-11-17T07:14:00.000-05:00

Being a teacher:
The goal of a teacher is that students gain the confidence to do well in their lives and their jobs, and to "be all they can be".
The satisfaction comes from seeing the students get jobs in their field, or go on to succeed at higher levels of education.
The fascination comes from watching how the students--people who are often still in formative stages--behave, and work with one another.
The fun comes from talking with the students.
(And the frustration comes when the students are their own worst enemies.)

Teaching is not about “delivering content” or “covering the material”. Teaching is about influencing students to think and solve problems, to understand how to behave in the workplace, to take responsibility for their work and their behavior.

Who owns student work--the school or the student?

2008-11-13T18:50:00.003-05:00

This is a comment I made on a Gamasutra article about schools claiming to own student work (click the title of this post):

Many people misunderstand copyright. I've had to research copyright law extensively because of games and articles I've had published, but I am not a lawyer. For a more authoritative opinion (which matches mine, as it happens) read what Jim Charne, the lawyer who writes the legal advice column for IGDA, has to say. See http://www.igda.org/columns/lastwords/lastwords_Nov08.php for his take on this question, which in my words is "these schools have no basis in copyright law for claiming any ownership, and I don't understand why they'd even think of trying." The notion that a school owns the copyright because their equipment/software was used is ridiculous, in my view. The idea that students attend a school to find cut-rate ways to make games is laughable. Doesn't attending school cost the students a lot of money?

All of my game-related work other than teaching has been on a freelance basis, and in my view no self-respecting freelance author/creator EVER allows his IP to be transferred permanently to someone else unless there is absolutely no alternative--or the lump-sum payment is ridiculously high. "Assurances" often don't matter when money is actually on the line.

I strongly advise prospective students to avoid any school that claims to own the student's work. Always carefully read what you're asked to sign, but better yet, ascertain beforehand what the school's policy is and don't attend one with a doubtful policy. Anytime you attend a school that is owned by one or several individuals, you need to be especially careful, about *everything*. If you sign away your rights, it's your fault.

However, there is a reason for a school to be cautious. Publishers routinely require creators, who pitch a game to the publisher, to sign an agreement protecting the publisher if the publisher should later publish a game that might be construed as similar in any way. This protects the publisher from frivolous lawsuits by game creators who don't understand that game ideas cannot be protected by copyright in any case. (http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl108.html) While a school doesn't publish games, there might be occasions when a student or former student would sue a school for use of his or her game for other purposes. So the school would be wise to require students to sign a document equivalent in some ways to the document creators must sign before submitting a game/game concept to a publisher. That is what the IDGA should work on.

Nonetheless, like Tom Buscaglia I feel IP ownership is a moral issue, and my gut feeling is that most of these schools are just hoping to steal something from their students, to gain control of something they didn't earn by their own efforts. Digi-pen overriding the creators of Toblo appears to be just one of those cases.

Educational videos that come with UT III

2008-11-05T09:33:00.002-05:00

Two videos come with the Deluxe edition of Unreal Tournament III. The shorter one is in some sense an advertisement about UT, while the longer one (25 minutes?) is about making the game.

The latter is the best video I've seen about making games. It is not only well-made, it emphasizes the importance of playing the game as soon as possible (in little more than a month from starting, in this case), the iterative nature of production, and way that new ideas are discovered along the way, the importance of getting rid of what doesn't work. It also clearly shows that level design is a part of game design, with the art important to the end product but added after the game design is tuned to perfection.

The short video is good for making a point, as Cliff Bleszinski says early on that a designer's best resort is to put things into a game that he likes/thinks are cool. This is dead wrong, of course, if you design a variety of games, but is correct if you only design shooters (which is what CB and Epic make). More than any other genre, shooters are all "the same" in the end, so what one fan of shooters really likes, another is likely to like. Even so, he says in speaking of UT I, that they threw lots of things into the game to see what stuck, which again is a reference to the importance of testing, testing, testing. No matter what you think, not matter how cool something seems to be, you have to test it and see what a variety of people think.

UT III Deluxe is also good for the UT editor and many tutorials for the editor.

Teaching critical thinking, teaching attitudes

2008-10-09T08:02:00.001-04:00

There's a fundamental problem in game curricula that a pamphlet cannot repair. When you teach game design, you are teaching critical thinking. You are teaching habits and attitudes that contribute to success as a designer. And you are teaching people to DO, to actually design games (generally to begin with, non-electronic ones, and electronic ones later).

What you should not be doing, because it's very little help, is teaching people to memorize a lot of material and regurgitate it on multiple-choice tests. Yet most teachers are content with that memorization as "teaching", not just in game curricula, in all curricula. I recall one college teacher who insisted on teaching the Windows 2000 operating system even though the school's computers only had Windows 98. She showed the students slides from the textbook. She said "they're scoring 80% on the tests", and I said, "but I bet they can't DO diddly squat." In another case a LONG time ago, a college taught COBOL at a location where none of the computers (Apple IIs) could compile COBOL. "Do"?

High schools have become pure training centers, where students are taught to memorize the answers to the end-of-class tests. The kids get to college and have no clue about thinking or about learning. Unfortunately, "memorize and regurgitate" is the easy way to teach, and multiple choice tests are easy to grade (Blackboard can do it).

Actual successful practitioners are often not allowed to teach subjects because they don't have a degree in the field. Teaching is more and more a matter of "those who have never done, teach".

Until we change this situation--and we're going the opposite way at the moment--teaching at any level will tend to be mediocre, no matter what the actual practitioners hope for.

Sorry state of game education

2008-10-05T06:27:00.003-04:00

Some comments on my second GameCareerGuide article referred to an awful advertisement, by a college I've not heard of, showing "game designers" lounging around playing games, with the implication that game playing is a major part of the work. I've also recently read a book titled "Virtual Apprentice, Computer Game Designer" that does exactly the same thing: one photo caption reads "Imagine a job where you play computer games all day long!" (p 5). These kinds of lies distress people in the game industry, and they distress me. Students should be told the truth.

Someone suggested that the IGDA (International Game Developers Association) should produce a pamphlet that "tells the truth".

Unfortunately, there are many teachers (and even more college administrators) who are unwilling to tell the truth to students, ultimately to tell them "you might be better off pursuing some other subject". Those awful advertisements are an example of the lying that goes on.

Many colleges are desperate to replace the shortfall of technology students, as members of the millennial generation are comfortable with using technology but rarely interested in it as a career. Technology enrollment is weak at most schools, and game subjects are seen as a source of replacement bodies.

Dollars rule in 21st century education. If the school isn't willing to tell the truth, will the students ever see the pamphlet?

Another GameCareerGuide article

2008-10-05T06:21:00.003-04:00

"The Idea is not the Game", 23 September

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=20356

(You can click on the title of this post.)

Article on GameCareerGuide

2008-09-02T20:58:00.000-04:00

My article "Pulling the Plug: In Defense of Non-Digital Teaching and Learning"

http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/602/pulling_the_plug_in_defense_of_.php

was published 2 September on Game Career Guide, the major Web site for people wanting to learn video game creation. This is an edited version. My title was "Why we use non-electronic games to teach game design", they wanted something more provocative.

What is "game development"?

2008-06-13T10:45:00.002-04:00

Recently I talked with some folks from a college involved with game development.

One of them says, "(person X) says he doesn't know anything about game development". Person X is a major official of a group that's all about game development! Then later "(person Y) doesn't know games" (or maybe he said, "game development"). Person Y is heavily involved in game development/creation education, and ought to know something about game development, surely. But person Y comes from the art side of things.

On thinking about it, I recognized that the speakers equated "games" and "game development", and further equated "game development" with computer programming.

Fairly obviously, you can know a lot about games, in a variety of ways, and not know much about game development. We get students all the time who think they'll be good at creating games simply because they like to play games a lot: NOT SO, bucko. Yet you can also be an important part of a team that creates electronic games, and know next to nothing about computer programming.

This long introduction leads to the key question: is "game development" now the equivalent of computer programming for games, or is it something much broader? When creation of an electronic game was a one-person endeavor, back in the 70s and 80s, every game developer had to be a programmer. But this "one hero per game" style practically ended around 1990--I've had students who were born later than that--as most games became too big to be done by one person.

Nowadays, many more artists than programmers work on electronic games. And there are teams of game designers, level designers, sound people, narrative writers, and so forth working on big games. Programming is the minority endeavor.

More important, in almost all cases programming nowadays can only screw up a game, not make it outstanding. What makes an electronic game outstanding is, first, the design, the gameplay; second, the look and feel of the game, which is a combination of design and art. Good programming can certainly contribute, but mostly, programming is there to implement the vision of the designers and artist, and is a fairly mechanical contribution to the game. But if it's poorly done, then it can ruin the game. Patches typically fix programming problems, they can rarely fix fundamental design problems.

Now mind you, unlike a great many of the people who teach programming (I do not), I actually worked full time as a programmer for a while before getting deep into networking and user support. Nonetheless, this is my take on programming, especially today:

"Programming is donkey work".

What I mean by "donkey work" is that programming is mechanical. We know today that many of the steps programmers used to have to do manually, are now done by software tools. Ideally, we'd like to be able to tell a computer-based tool what kind of game we want, provide it with art, and it would write the programming. Game engines go partway in this direction, simplifying programming by (in effect) doing some of it themselves.

Constantly, people are trying to write tools that will make programmers less and less necessary, less and less important.

Yes, yes, we know there is creativity in programming. But once we get past the highly entrepreneurial stage (which we have), too much creativity in programming causes problems. In games we want programming to be reliable, solid, fast--mechanical, not creative.

So what is "game development"? Not programming, folks, it's design and art, with programming coming in near the rear. Programming is a necessary evil, not the heart of an electronic game. (And if we stray into the world of non-electronic games, we have design and we have art, but we have no programming at all.)

Now perhaps we could agree that "game development" means programming, and we can change our "game development" curricula names to "game creation" (those that includes artists and designers, at any rate). Or we can recognize that "game development" means all aspects of game creation, not just programming.

Unfortunately, "game development" programs in colleges and universities are often started by programmers, who have no interest in art and little interest in design (and sometimes, little interest in games!). In many less-well-known schools "computer programming" is going away as a topic of interest for the millennial generation, or has already been dropped; "game development" is grabbed as a life-saver for those who want to teach programming but lack students. These "game development" curricula are about fifteen years out of date when they start. My own experience of this is that when programmers start "game development" programs, those programs are a disaster for artists and designers. "Game development" should be in the hands of gamers who are teachers, not of programmers.

If you're a student planning to pursue game creation as a career, find out whether the school you have in mind runs the programming version of game development, or the broader version that accommodates non-programmers.

"Lecturing" vs. Teaching

2008-05-18T13:32:00.000-04:00

"The Lectures Are Recorded, So Why Go to Class? (http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i36/36a00103.htm) More colleges are taping lectures so students can watch online, but not all professors are sure the results are good for their classrooms." This is the head of an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, online edition 16 May 08. The main text of the article is not online, but there's a stub that confirms the headline: many universities making lecture recordings available to students, and as a result students are not bothering to come to class.

The very fact that this problem can arise highlights the malaise we see in some universities and colleges today. The teachers don't teach, they lecture. If they TAUGHT their classes, that is, if they interacted with the students, if they discussed topics WITH students rather than lecture AT students, then this problem would never arise. Whenever a classroom becomes the equivalent of a book, with the students partaking of the author's expertise but never able to question or ask for clarification, why would students come to the classroom if they hae an alternative? Moreover, this leads to an environment of regurgitation of material, rather than of thinking, of education. Education is about understanding; understanding is enhanced when the teacher and the students work together to understand. Lectures are more appropriate for training, not education (see http://teachgamedesign.blogspot.com/2008/04/training-vs-education.html).

In the past people came to the classroom because the material wasn't otherwise available. (It has to be said, even then if the teacher had written the textbook, and then lectured the same material as the book, students wouldn't bother to come to class.) Now that it's available elsewhere, why would they inconveniently come to listen to a "lecture"?

If someone asks if I'm going to "lecture" about something, I say, "I don't lecture to students, I talk with them". I am a teacher, not a lecturer. Teaching is more akin to coaching a sports team than to writing a book; lecturing is much more like writing a book.

One objection that might be raised to my point of view is, "the classes are so large, no one could actually TEACH them." That's not true; I've read of "lecturers" who went out into the audience, who conveyed information via questions and answers. No, they can't learn all the students' names, they can't get to know the students so that they can coach them, but they can make the learning interactive.

But more important, there shouldn't BE huge classes, as huge classes are necessarily poor education. I had a class of "only" 48 recently, and I managed to make it interactive, but it was very difficult; when the students really got into a topic, discussions were going on all over the room and chaos reigned.

Apply this to a hands-on topic like game development, and the objections to this lecture-style "teaching" are even stronger. Most game development students are of the millennial generation, and millennials thrive in group settings, in sharing, and in interaction. Add to this that the students are game players, very much used to interaction, not passive absorption of material. Finally, millennials hope that their authority figures will be their friends, or at least friendly--like their parents--which the university "lecturer" cannot be because he or she cannot get to know the student.

Yes, I learned the name of every person in that class of 48. And in my smaller (24) classes, I spent at least 10 minutes individually with each person, at one point, to get to know more about them. I'd like to have spent more time but my "office" was a tiny cubicle amongst many more, not conducive to private discussions with students!

Go back to the medieval roots of the university system, and you won't find huge classes, you'll find teachers with small groups. Fundamentally, huge classes are a symptom of the ultimate disease in education, "money". If someone can cope with (I won't say teach) 48 people instead of 24, the school spends half as much on pay for faculty. If a "lecturer" can talk at 200 people, and let poorly-paid grad students take care of the labs, the school saves lots of money.

This is why a good community college--they aren't all good, and that includes the one where I was given 48 students--is likely to provide a much better education than a large university, for the first two years. (Perhaps this is confirmed by the research showing that students who transfer from community colleges in my state to colleges do better there than the students who start their education at those colleges.) Community colleges hire teachers, not lecturers, and classes are usually small, not large.

I have much more to say about this, but I'll stop for now.

Skepticism: How do we know things?

2008-05-01T16:44:00.001-04:00

This seems to be something many young students haven't quite "got" yet. It's a "firm grasp of reality", especially important in the hype of the game industry. And it's an ability to "think critically", to analyze what you hear and decide whether it is likely to be true or not.

I was educated as an historian. One of the things you learn is skepticism about information sources, though some historians seem to lose that skepticism at times.

Many of the stories "everyone knows" are in fact apocryphal, never happened. Something sounds so good it gets attributed to an historical figure who in fact had nothing to do with it. This is true even for living people. Half of what Yogi Berra is supposed to have said, he didn't say. (One of his "Yogiisms" is, "I never said half the things I really said!")

Furthermore, people write and say things that aren't true, sometimes by accident, sometimes deliberately. I am personally skeptical of memoirs that discuss in detail something that happened 20 or 30 years before, especially if it was during the writer's childhood. If the writer didn't keep a diary at that time, I think to myself, how can he or she remember all these details? *I* don't remember that kind of detail, though my memory generally is excellent. So how much do they get wrong, or are they making up?

Lawyers know and study how unreliable witnesses can be, and in what ways. [books about it]

The astronaut Frank Bormann tells a story about something that happened along the way on a trip to the moon. Someone listened to the actual recording of the incident, and found that it was drastically different from the story. He played it for Bormann--I heard this on NPR radio, by the way--and Bormann said, well, yeah, I guess so, but I'm still going to tell the story, it's so good. Imagine how many books about the moon flights, about Bormann, about space flight in general, will include this entirely wrong story as "truth".

The Fayetteville, NC newspaper had a nice report about a meeting at Methodist University (then college) where a well-known writer had given a talk. The problem is, it never happened. Weather was so bad that the meeting was called off. But the report had been "pre-written", and published as is. And a historian reading that paper 50 years from now probably will take it as fact, as truth.

Now I've said this, about the newspaper, but I'm repeating what my wife, who was then chief librarian at Methodist, told me. I wasn't actually at Methodist to see that there was no meeting, nor did I read the newspaper report as far as I can recall. So I could be wrong, eh?

Initial reports on September 11, 2001 (9/11) stated that the State Department had been bombed. Never happened. But this was in the heat of the event. The next day (IIRC), all the major broadcast TV networks reported that some people had been rescued from the rubble, found in an SUV. I checked every network, and all reported this as truth; yet the next day, all admitted that no such thing had happened.

I rarely listen to the news right after some shocking event has happened, because the report will likely have "substantial inaccuracies" in it.

But for months, even more than a year perhaps, after the destruction of the World Trade Center, the tally of dead was about 7,000. Then that was reduced to about 3,000, a number which has held up. Wikipedia now says 2,974 died as an immediate result of the attacks with another 24 missing and presumed dead. (Of course, not everything in Wikipedia is correct.) With all those resources, with the importance of who had died and who hadn't (insurance claims, government and charitable perks for the relatives of those who died), the number was drastically wrong.

Be skeptical. Try to find out where stories come from. Yes, the BBC may report that one Chinese killed another because the latter sold his "magic sword" from an MMORPG, and it MAY be true, but then again, how reliable is news from China as reported by the BBC? Yes, a South Korean may have died from failure to take care of bodily functions while playing online games--or may not. One student told me he knew someone who had to go to a hospital to be treated for malnourishment because he played video games day in an day out--and maybe that was true, or maybe not.

Just because you heard it, just because someone told you about it, just because it was in the news, doesn't mean it's true. "What everyone knows" isn't always true, though frequently it is.

If it sounds unbelievable, maybe you shouldn't believe it! "Take everything with a grain of salt". You can rely more on your personal experience than on anything else, but even THAT can be deceptive.

This is part of critical thinking critically, discussed in Wikipedia as:

"Critical thinking consists of mental processes of discernment, analysis and evaluation. It includes possible processes of reflecting upon a tangible or intangible item in order to form a solid judgment that reconciles scientific evidence with common sense. In contemporary usage "critical" has a certain negative connotation that does not apply in the present case. Though the term "analytical thinking" may seem to convey the idea more accurately, critical thinking clearly involves synthesis, evaluation, and reconstruction of thinking, in addition to analysis.

Critical thinkers gather information from all senses, verbal and/or written expressions, reflection, observation, experience and reasoning. Critical thinking has its basis in intellectual criteria that go beyond subject-matter divisions and which include: clarity, credibility, accuracy, precision, relevance, depth, breadth, logic, significance and fairness."

In some ways game design is an exercise in critical thinking! Especially as you decide how to modify a game based on playtesting input.

Grading student game projects

2008-04-20T14:34:00.002-04:00

How do you evaluate and grade student-designed games? It is hard, no doubt, especially as there’s rarely enough time to play all the games enough to properly test them. Still, here are a few pointers. This is aimed primarily at non-electronic games, which are much better tools for teaching game design than electronic games, because a much greater percentage of a student's effort goes into design than prototype production, and they take a lot less time to produce a playable prototype.

Any “review”, whether of a book, a movie, a play, music, software, or a game, must answer three questions: what was the creator trying to do, how well did he do it, and was it worth doing? These questions can help guide a teacher grading a student game project, just as they help a reviewer evaluate a commercial game. However, I am not going to discuss these questions, except insofar as what follows indicates how well the student(s) did it.

If you don't play games, all you can do is try to judge effort and professionalism. If you do play games, but are not accustomed to evaluating games without playing them (perhaps talking with people who have), you’ll have a problem, because you often won’t have enough time to play the game enough to really find out what it’s about. (This is why game reviewers must spend a lot of time playing a game, to avoid being misled by first impressions.) Some games just don’t sound (or look) like much until you play them. Some sound or look really good, but fail in actual play.

Fortunately, if you’re very familiar with games and have some design experience, you can judge the important things fairly easily.

Just as the three most important factors in real estate are location, location, and location, the three most important factors in a game are gameplay, gameplay, and gameplay. There are several aspects which I’ll discuss in the next paragraphs.

The most important question about any game is, what does the player DO? What are the challenges the player(s) face? What actions can they take to overcome those challenges? This is the heart of most games. You can often see quickly, when evaluating a student game, that the player just doesn’t have much to do, or that what he is doing is quite repetitive without compensating factors.

Related to this is player interaction. What can players to do affect each other? There are certainly good games (often “race” games) where a player can do little to affect another player, but most good games have a significant-to-high level of player interaction. Or if it’s a solo game as are many electronic games, interaction between the player and the game becomes the target.

Another question related to what the player does is, is the game replayable many times without becoming "just the same" over and over? Perhaps this is less important with electronic games, as players EXPECT such games to become “the same”, and they also don’t mind sameness as much as the non-electronic gamers do. (So many AAA list electronic games are quite derivative of the gameplay of so many predecessors.) Nonetheless, the better a game is, the more replayable it is likely to be.

Some people would add one more thing, is the game fair? Do the rewards seem to match the effort?

So much for gameplay design. What about what we might call the professional aspects of the game? Care of construction (NOT looks--construction of the “rules” or electronic equivalent, game mechanics) is important. Sloppiness leads to imprecision which leads to confusion.

Even more important, how much was the game playtested? Are there records (not necessarily elaborate–I tend to list the date, who played, and anything unusual that occurred, along with changes I decided to make (or decided did not work, so I changed back). That can be just a couple lines of documentation per play.

With very few exceptions, a game with a good basic gameplay design won’t actually play well unless it has been thoroughly playtested to work out the little (or big) obstacles to good gameplay.

While the instructor may not be able to play the game enough to know it well, he can suppose that a poorly playtested game won’t be worth much, and that one that is playtested a lot is more likely to be a decent game. “Playtesting is sovereign”, whether the game is digital or not.

I usually ask students to give me the original playable prototype, and the “final” version. There should be very significant changes in the game, if it has been playtested much. You might even ask students to list what significant changes were made.

Here are some specific comments about what NOT to use as criteria:

"Fun" is not a criterion. We can't generally agree what fun is, and your idea of fun is different from mine. A chess master has a different idea of “fun” than your mother has! Some people like party games, some like silly games, some like perfect information, some like planning ahead (hence tend to like perfect information), some like much that is hidden, some like reaction to circumstances (hence tend to prefer hidden information), etc.

Likely hundreds of thousands of people have played my game Britannia, yet even *I* wouldn't call it "fun". It may be interesting, fascinating, and lots of other things, even educational, but many players would not call it fun.

Story is not a criterion. This is especially important because so many students don't understand this, and think story or something other than gameplay is what's important in a game. People play games, they listen to/watch stories. Yes, you can make the story interactive to an extent, but a great many game players really don't care about story. It is absolutely necessary to pound into students’ heads that story is not important in the design of most games.

What about the marketing palaver–the game concept and treatment and so on? These are not even written for non-digital games, though when the game is “finished” and the designer is trying to persuade a publisher to look at it, and then only sometimes, a description of the game will be written that is something like the game concept.

These documents in the electronic game world are marketing documents that have NOTHING to do with the quality of the game, NOTHING. They represent a simple plan for what the game will be.

Consequently, does it even make sense for a teacher to require students to produce these documents? I would say, it makes sense only insofar as the document might help the instructor evaluate the game, or help the students create the game. In that context, the two to three page game concept is useful, but something longer such as a game treatment may not be.

At the least you might ask the student(s) to briefly characterize the “essence” of their game–and let them decide what “essence” means.

Looks of the Game–not a criterion. This counts for virtually nothing; in fact, for non-electronic games I definitely do not want students to spend a lot of time on looks. As long as the physical components of the game are clear, not confusing, that's what counts. (There's a rule of thumb in the boardgame world, that the better a prototype looks, the less likely it is to be a good game, because novice designers spend far too much effort on the looks of the prototype.) I want students to understand that gameplay is what counts, not graphics, even though in the AAA list electronic world graphics become quite important simply because of the youthful audience.

I heard of a “game design teacher” who severely downgraded a student’s non-electronic game project because the box he supplied wasn’t large enough for the game. “The BOX?” That’s completely irrelevant to design; most experienced designers don’t make a box for their prototypes (I *never* have). This is something only novices who don’t understand what they’re doing think is important.

For electronic games, looks only matter near the end of development. And students will rarely have the time to do the playtesting and incremental, iterative modification necessary to “complete” a game and get to the true end of development.

So what else do you evaluate? Appropriateness for the audience. Is there an appropriate mixture for the audience and game type? If it’s a party game (whether “Apples to Apples” or a Wii party game, is it relatively easy and does it promote interaction amongst the players? Here we might actually ask if it’s “fun” in a party sense.

I am not a person who lists exact grade points and values, because I don’t think you can consistently judge this carefully, nor am I confident that my “rubric” would take everything into account. But I can judge an “A”, or a “B”, or a “C”, or something in between, based on these criteria, without assigning specific percentage numbers.

It's very difficult for anyone to "grade" these games without playing them several times, for which there is no time. My main criterion, aside from what I can see about the gameplay, is whether the students playtested the games and benefitted from that.

For groups, I also give them a peer evaluation sheet to fill out. The idea is that I may find out which people in the group actually contributed most, or least. It has its flaws, but is better than nothing.

Training vs. Education

2008-04-05T11:00:00.001-04:00

I've had some thoughts from recent experience about how important the distinction is between training and education in community colleges (and in any educational institution).

Everyone seems to have his or her own definition of "training" and "education". Here are mine.

In general, when you train someone, you tell them a specific way to do (or not do) something. In some cases it can be strictly rote learning, as in how to assemble or disassemble a weapon (there's only one way to do it, by the numbers). In any case, you're not trying to help people make judgments about uncertain situations, you're telling them, "if A, then B; if not A, then C." Many corporate training sessions are of this sort.

In education, you explain to people why something works the way it does or is the way it is, so that they can understand its nature, what's going on. If they lose their way, they can figure out what they need to do to get back to their objective. They can deal with uncertain situations, where there's no clear answer.

In general, the training recipient requires good memory and good organization more than good thinking processes; the education recipient requires application of intelligence, and sometimes critical thinking.

To me, this is the difference between having a set of written directions to get somewhere, and having a map. If you go wrong with the written directions, you may be able to backtrack, but if you get off the path you may be completely lost. If you have a map, you can figure out where you are and get back to where you need to be even if you've strayed far from the proper path. The first is analogous to training, the second to education.

In K12, we now have many schools that are training institutions. The teachers know what is required in the "end of class" test (EOC) , and they know that their job security depends largely on how their students do on those tests. So they drill into their students what they need to know to pass those (usually, multiple choice) tests, and that's all. The students, too, know this is the score; they know they can do next to nothing during the semester, as long as they pass the EOC. Even the smart ones tend to do little, then cram from the book (which, of course, is supposed to contain everything they need to know to pass the EOC), then forget it after the test. (Yes, there are many exceptions: this is the trend, not in every school or every class.)

I've seen the results of this time and again in college. Students expect to be told exactly what's on a test, and what they need to regurgitate, and are dismayed when I require them to actually think. They don't have any idea how to think, because they haven't been required to. In classes I try to impose the "educated" attitude from the beginning, but it's hard for kids to adjust.

Unfortunately in colleges of all types we have teachers who think their job is to "convey the material". I had one teacher say to me, when I was discussing a difficult class, "but you covered the material, didn't you"? That's a dumb question, I'm afraid. That's not what education is about, but it is what training is about. A corollary of the "training mentality" is that if you present the material and the students have the chance to absorb it, and some don't, then oh, well, that's the way it goes. In education, you're trying to find ways to convey what you mean to each class (and each class is different). You've not only conveying information, you're conveying an attitude, a way of doing things. If you can't cover "all the material" because a particular class is having problems, oh, well, your job is to choose (to judge) what's best for the class, and do it, not necessarily "cover all the material".

This is something like sports team coaching, but we don't have as many hours with the students, and we have a lot more students than, say, Coach K at Duke has basketball players (and he has three assistants). Many "trainer" types don't even know the names of their students, let alone understand them as individuals, and don't think that's a problem! How can you judge what the students need, when you know so little about them that you don't know their names?

The problem is, many "teachers" aren't interested in this more complex kind of thinking and understanding of what is needed. It requires more effort, more thought. And unfortunately, school accreditation people also aren't interested, because they can't measure it.

See my post about "educated" people (http://teachgamedesign.blogspot.com/2007/11/game-industry-wants-educated-people.html). I'm not talking about degrees here, I'm talking about a way of thinking and approaching life.

Unfortunately, the US "education" system is becoming more and more training oriented, and less education oriented, every year. Perhaps one indication of this is the very strong tendency of accreditation organizations to emphasize (in teacher qualification) degrees and classes taken rather than actual ability to do something. We are more and more finding "teachers" who have never done what they're teaching in the real world, and it shows. But if all you're doing is conveying material, telling students what to regurgitate on multiple choice tests, how much will the experience of a person who's actually done the work professionally matter? It's a system geared to turn out people who cannot do complex work in the real world--people who have been trained, not educated.

Coping with your first programming class

2008-03-20T11:02:00.003-04:00

I'm posting this here for the benefit of some former students:

If you'll bear with me and read all of the following, I think it may help you a lot in the programming class. The summary is: use pseudo-code (English) to write out what you want a program to do, then turn it into whatever programming language you're using, and you'll be much more successful.

Beginners in programming, especially those who don't find programming an interesting and attractive pastime, have many struggles.

There are always two problems in programming: first, what do you need to do to solve whatever problem you're working on (what is the logic of it), the second, how do you convert that solution into something the programming language can execute (what is the syntax of it)?

It is possible to have a computer program that compiles and runs perfectly (correct syntax), but fails to correctly solve your problem, because the logic is incorrect. That is, you can get the second part right, but if the first part isn't also right, the whole fails.

Hence, initial student programs should be ones where either you don't worry about coding--you just solve the problem--or ones where you don't worry about how to solve the problem--you just code it.

For example, the (logical) solution to the problem of saying "Hello World" on the screen is trivial. In English it's:

Blank the screen (clean off whatever was there)
Show "hello world" on the screen
Make sure the screen doesn't go away because the program ends (or we won't see the message)

You can take that English description and code the program in dozens of different languages. Each one will be more or less different, but all will do the same thing. That's why "hello world" is usually the first program you do in a language, it is entirely a problem of language syntax, not of logic.

Example from one of the simplest programming languages, Windows command files (batch files):

CLS
echo Hello World
pause

Now, comparing the pseudo-code with the actual code, you can figure out what "CLS" means even if you don't know that it stands for "Clear Screen". You can figure out that "echo" means "Show (by default, on the screen) whatever comes after echo". You can guess that "pause" means "wait for the user to hit a key".

But if your problem is, "take a group of numbers and decide which ones are prime numbers", then you have to figure out how you can possibly do this at all, before you try to code it. If at the same time that you're trying to solve the logic problem, you try to figure out the program syntax, it becomes MUCH more difficult.

Object-oriented programming can throw kinks in the process, but most of the code in most programs is procedural, telling the computer to do this, do that, do the other thing. Any set of instructions, whether game rules, or product manuals, or software how-to's, amounts to a set of sequences of instructions, loops (repetitions until something particular happens or doesn't happen), and branches (decision points where the instructions go one way or another, sometimes from a choice of more than two). Since you can write English to reflect these three structures, you can write English pseudo-code for most any procedural problem. The example above is strictly a sequence. We could add a couple lines where the program would ask the user if he wanted to see "hello world" again or not:

Clear off the screen
Show "hello world" on the screen
Ask user if he wants to see more "hello worlds" on the screen
If user says yes, loop back to "Show", or else continue on to end
Make sure the screen doesn't go away because the program ends (or we won't see the message)

Now we have a branch (the IF) and the potential for a loop (going back to the "show"). Note the loop doesn't go all the way back to the start, or else the screen would be cleared again.

In fact this is not possible to do in Batch files (which are very, very simple), because there's no way to get user input within the program! (unless you use other programs for that purpose). But any "real" programming language can do it.

Here's an analogy. If you "kinda" know a second language, it is much easier to listen to (or read) that language and figure out what it means, than it is to take a meaning and turn it into that spoken (or written) language. In computer programming terms, in the first case, you're only worrying about the syntax; in the second you're worrying about both the logic and the syntax.

So, if you know some Spanish and you're trying to talk with a Spaniard who knows some English, you should speak English, and he should speak Spanish. You'll find it much easier to understand the Spanish you hear than to make it up and speak it, because you're not worrying about the creation, about solving the problem of what to say; he'll do much better sorting out your English and not worrying about how he's saying what he's saying, because he'll be using his native language.

By using pseudo-code you separate your "big mess" into two problems that you solve one after the other. It's much easier.

So, you've all heard (I hope) that the longer you take to plan a program, the less time it takes to code it. Pseudo-code is a principle tool when you're writing simple, short programs. (Longer ones require much more elaborate planning, such as systems analysis.)

This is why I advocate not teaching any one language to "novices", instead concentrating on the logic needed to solve problems with computer languages.

Why I'm not an electronic game designer

2008-03-02T09:10:00.001-05:00

Why would I want to design electronic games? I'm better off as is.

The "AAA list" electronic games are really designed by committee. When I design a game, it is almost all MINE. (The rest is playtesters and publisher.)
For most of the age of video games, you had to work full time in the industry, yet the pay was and is poor. I'd rather help young people as a teacher, get paid at least as well, and have lots of time to design games.
The working hours are bad. "Crunch time" (unpaid overtime) is common, though designers are not involved in that quite as much as programmers and artists.
Fighting with the electronics obscures the purity of design. You worry about what the computer can do instead of what the players can do.

Analysis of Some Traditional Games

2008-02-05T10:56:00.000-05:00

This is written with my students of electronic game design in mind, but should be of interest to boardgamers. The best way for students of digital game design to learn game design is with non-electronic boardgames and card games. This kind of game can be brought to playtest stage far more quickly than electronic games, and by their relatively simple nature they reveal the essence of gameplay much more quickly and clearly than electronic games. However, my students are rarely familiar with non-traditional boardgames such as Eurogames, and the traditional ones offer many “false lessons”, that is, what has worked in traditional games is often not good game design.

Put another way, game design students often adopt characteristics of traditionally popular games in their designs. Part of the reason for discussing traditional games is to point out that they are not necessarily designs worth emulating.

So I’ve tried to write a brief analysis of what is wrong with (and right with) some of these games. Sometimes I’ll use the following questions as a framework, after a general discussion of the game.

1. What are the challenges the player(s) face?
2. What actions can they take to overcome those challenges?
3. What can players do to affect each other?
4. Is the game replayable many times without becoming "just the same" over and over?
5. Is the game fair?
6. Is there an appropriate mixture for the audience and game type (consider "take that")?
7. What is the "essence" of the game?

General comments about “traditional” games

There are two types of “traditional” games, the public domain ones that have come down to us over centuries such as chess and pachesi, and those that are commercially-produced games that have become habits with the buying and playing public. The former tend to be for two players only, while the latter are often for two or more players.

I must say I am NOT a person who thinks that recently-designed games are necessarily better designs than “old” games. I am definitely not into “the cult of the new”. But I do believe that the really old traditional games often benefit greatly from the lack of competition when they were first devised/published. Most “traditional” games are played because “everyone knows how to play”. They are bought because “everyone is familiar with it”. They are not traditional because they are particularly good game designs, in many cases. They have attained a place in contemporary culture, have become “a habit”. When you ask boardgame fanatics how well such games would fare if published today, the response is often something between “a dog” and “just another game”.

I have one general comment about the “roll dice and move accordingly” mechanic used in many commercial traditional games. This mechanic gives a player little to no control over what happens. It is almost universally despised by experienced boardgamers. I pose it to video gamers this way: “if you were playing a video game, and your avatar suddenly slowed down for a while, and then sped up for a while, and periodically changed maximum speed at random, wouldn’t that annoy the heck out of you? And what if other player’s avatars were moving at different speeds than yours? You’d hate it. So why would you want to do that in a boardgame?” Yes, it’s easy randomization, but there are better ways to randomize, and in any case don’t we usually want to make games of skill, not games of chance?

I may as well dispose of a class of traditional games here: Bingo, Candyland, and Chutes and Ladders are all entirely random games. This is OK for little kids, who don’t recognize the randomness, and who aren’t up to “strategizing” to beat older players. It’s OK for gambling, too. But it’s worth nothing to people who like games involving skill, who want to take actions to overcome meaningful challenges.

Another point worth discussing is player elimination. Insofar as multiplayer (more than two) traditional games tend to be family games, the possibility that players can be eliminated is undesirable. The argument runs, when a player is eliminated, he’s no longer part of the fun. The counter-argument is, why stay in the game when you don’t have a chance to win? My response is that in family games the purpose is not to win but to enjoy socializing with your family, and there is more interaction if you’re still in the game even if there seems to be little chance that you can win. Some games, such as Careers (one of the best traditional games, but evidently out of print), do not include player elimination, but some do, including our first subject.

Monopoly

As this is the game people often think of first, I’ll discuss it first. Monopoly is a “family game” with a leaning toward adults. It is an average game at best, though quite despised by many boardgame experts. The “roll and move” mechanic is the first point of complaint, but there are others.

There is a dominant strategy--buy everything you land on, if you possibly can, early in the game. This leads to the strong possibility of stalemate, as players may choose not to trade properties to make the sets that allow house building. Consequently, there is a strong possibility that the game can go on for many hours with experienced cutthroat players. In any case, it is a long game–-my students often say they’ve never actually finished a game.

Further, the game works poorly with fewer than four players.

Let’s examine the questions:

1. What are the challenges the player(s) face? The player must get sets of properties, construct buildings to raise the rent, and avoid big payouts.
2. What actions can they take to overcome those challenges? Not much. Movement is random, and decisions are fairly simple. Trading is a major action, as is management of funds (how much to spend on buildings, how much to hold against the possibility of paying large rents).
3. What can players do to affect each other? Trade properties. Otherwise, next to nothing.
4. Is the game replayable many times without becoming "just the same" over and over? Replayability is low, I think. The game quickly becomes repetitive. Few people actually play Monopoly a lot in a short stretch (say a year), but they may play a lot over a very long period, where they will forget how repetitive it actually is.
5. Is the game fair? It’s symmetric, and the advantage of moving first doesn’t seem to make much difference in the long run. There are no “take that” cards to drastically change the game, though a bad roll or two can be deadly.
6. Is there an appropriate mixture for the audience and game? It’s a family game, and there can be big changes in fortune depending on the dice rolls, but it seems appropriate to a “game for all ages”.
7. What is the "essence" of the game? Theoretically it’s a real estate trading and development game, but the emphasis is on the chance of movement rather than on the trading, unfortunately.

There are many variations of Monopoly, in fact most people don’t play according to the rules. I’ve never thought about how to “fix” the game, but one notion that comes to mind is this: instead of playing through rolling around the board a few times, why not allow players to choose some properties to start with? This could be arranged to remove the advantage of playing first, as well. So players might write down a list of five properties (no two from a particular group such as the red properties or the railroads). All are revealed, everyone pays for their first choice (or next, if there’s a tie), etc. until all have three (not five). Then play proceeds.

An interesting variation from Boardgamegeek is, every unowned property landed on is auctioned! The “lander” does not get an opportunity to buy before the auction.

As with most traditional games, Monopoly has a very poor score on Boardgamegeek: http://boardgamegeek.com/game/1406.

Tic-Tac-Toe

Here is a traditional simple game popular with kids. It is so simple that it has been “solved” by many, and it’s easy to write a set of instructions to follow that will result in a draw every time, or a win when it’s available (I have done so). The problem is that there’s a dominant strategy, which amounts to “occupy the central square whenever you can”.

A major advantage of the game is that there is no chance, other than the big difference-maker of who plays first. The major value of the game is to teach kids that they can play a game and not understand its strategy, but as they get older they can learn to be a perfect player in its context.

A much more interesting variation on this game is a four by four grid. You win with four in a row or four in a square.

I am not going to ask the seven questions, which would be overkill here. BGG: http://boardgamegeek.com/game/11901.

Pachisi/Parcheesi

I have not played this game in 40-50 years, but it is simple enough for limited comments. It is a race game dominated by chance (roll-and-move again). It does have the virtue that more than two can play. There is some strategy in the use of blockade, either to stop opponents or to clean up behind the blockade by “hitting” stopped opponent pieces. The frustration factor can be high when you’re the one who’s blockaded.

The seven questions would again be overkill. BGG: http://boardgamegeek.com/game/2136

Chess

Next I’ll turn to the ultimate Western traditional strategy game, Chess. Chess rules are fairly complex for a traditional game, though it’s really quite simple to learn and play. The play is very complex and highly strategic, of course. Theoretically the game may represent Indian (subcontinent) warfare, but practically speaking it is abstract.

Also unlike most traditional commercial games, there is no chance element other than who moves first. As with Tic-Tac-Toe, a perfectly played game will always have the same result, but because no one has specifically “solved” Chess, we don’t know which result it would be, white win, draw, or black win. In practice, as played by experts white has a significant advantage, and draws are common (55% of top-class human games, 36% of top computer-program games (Wikipedia)).

One of the flaws of the game is that a big advantage accrues to those who know “the analysis” of certain situations, such as the openings. Chess has a vast literature, and the solution(s) to certain situations are known, but only to those who learn the literature. In effect, other people have done the thinking for you. Yes, this is a possibility in any game, but other games have not been intensely studied for centuries.

For most people, there are too many possibilities to calculate once the game gets going. This can lead to what is called “analysis paralysis”: people cannot decide what to do and take a long time. Even when played by experts, chess can be a very long game, hence the artificial limitation of two hours for 40 moves imposed via chess clocks.

Finally, many people would say there are too many draws. In a game designed today, the designer would try to find a way to avoid draws; though given the advantage of moving first, perhaps it’s best that draws are possible.

I’ve read that former champion and famous recluse Bobby Fischer advocates a variation of chess that would remove the “prior analysis” advantage, at least for a while (Fischer was one of the best at knowing prior analyses when playing). IIRC, he suggests scrambling the order of pieces in the back row, imposing that order on both players. So from one side of the board you might have bishop, queen, knight, rook, rook, etc.

Despite all of the above, chess is obviously an excellent game. But would it stand out among other games if published today? In an era that values short games, simplicity, and “that was easy”, perhaps not. Let’s consider the questions:

1. What are the challenges the player(s) face? Deploy pieces in a superior arrangement in order to take more of an opponent’s strength than one gives, and finally to capture the king.
2. What actions can they take to overcome those challenges? With perfect information, it’s all about looking ahead, anticipating your opponent, finding ways to make your opponent feel that he is defeated even if, in reality, he is not. Everything revolves around the moves of the pieces.
3. What can players do to affect each other? Player interaction is very high in a two-player, eliminate-enemy-pieces game.
4. Is the game replayable many times without becoming "just the same" over and over? History shows that it is, despite its fundamental simplicity.
5. Is the game fair? Symmetric, but significant advantage to first mover in expert play.
6. Is there an appropriate mixture for the audience and game type? Yes.
7. What is the "essence" of the game? Movement and position.

BGG: http://boardgamegeek.com/game/171

Battleship

This is a traditional game popularized by Milton Bradley’s boxed plastic version. It is largely a guessing game, though some would call it a “deduction” game. As with any game, you can “play the player”, predicting what your opponent will do. For example, a colleague of mine has noticed that his sons will not place their ships in the outer rim of squares. Consequently, instead of 100 squares to shoot at, he has 64. Chance should tend to award him the game most times.

Beyond simplicity, there isn’t much to recommend this game.

BGG: http://boardgamegeek.com/game/2425

Scrabble

An excellent word game. I would eliminate two-letter words from the game, or at least many of the 101 “official” two-letter words.

1. What are the challenges the player(s) face? Make words from random letters, and find places on the board where those words can be placed and score well
2. What actions can they take to overcome those challenges? Very much a thinking game.
3. What can players do to affect each other? It may be possible to block occasionally, but in general, not much.
4. Is the game replayable many times without becoming "just the same" over and over? Given the complexity of language, yes.
5. Is the game fair? There may be a very slight advantage to playing first.
6. Is there an appropriate mixture for the audience and game type? Evidently.
7. What is the "essence" of the game? Creation of words preferably using uncommon letters.

BGG: http://boardgamegeek.com/game/320

Checkers (Draughts)

This is a simpler-than-chess strategy game. The game is sufficiently simple that it has been “solved” by computer using brute-force (trial and error) methods (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6907018.stm).

As with most of the public domain traditional games, this one is only for two players.

BGG: http://boardgamegeek.com/game/2083

Risk

Game design students who have played hardly any commercial games, have usually played Monopoly and have often played Risk. Risk is very simple to learn and to play, with so little real strategy that there is rarely “analysis paralysis”. Although the theme is world conquest, it has abstracted the world so heavily that few players will feel like there’s a real war going on.

However, Risk is a weak strategy game, and a “dicefest”. There’s a heavy dose of luck in combat and in the cards. It is a long game with player elimination, a poor combination in today’s terms.

The turn-in-cards-for-armies mechanic is necessary to end the game in a few hours, but fairly random.

The “Mission cards” victory condition introduced “recently” mitigates some problems, but unfortunately the missions aren’t tailored to the number of players in the game.

As with Monopoly, most experienced boardgamers dislike, if not despise, Risk.

1. What are the challenges the player(s) face? Management of resources to end up with more armies than the opposition; there’s a little strategy involved in acquiring armies; and choosing the right time to try to wipe out an opponent and obtain his territory cards.
2. What actions can they take to overcome those challenges? Choosing where to attack, with how many armies. Choosing where to defend with more than one army.
3. What can players do to affect each other? When it is not a player’s turn, he is usually inactive except when attacked. However, every move affects at least two players.
4. Is the game replayable many times without becoming "just the same" over and over? Strategies are limited, but there’s a fair bit of variety.
5. Is the game fair? Symmetric, but there may be a slight advantage to moving first.
6. Is there an appropriate mixture for the audience and game type? Well, lots of people fondly remember playing it as kids, so there must be something to it.
7. What is the "essence" of the game? Some would say “interminable dice rolling”. Choosing where to attack is probably the essence.

http://boardgamegeek.com/game/181.

Game of Life

This game appeals to younger people, and actually has more choices than Monopoly. However, it is strictly a family game, and players have little control over what happens. It does have the appeal of a partly three dimensional board, and a spinner instead of dice. There’s a story involved (the story of life), and that is nearly unique to traditional games.
I remember it as one of the worst games ever, but this may be too harsh. It is very positive–nothing really bad happens, everyone succeeds in life–but it may teach the wrong habits for the 21st century.

http://boardgamegeek.com/game/2921

Go
The Chinese/Japanese game of Go, the analog of chess in East Asia, is an outstanding abstract strategy game. It is played on a 19 by 19 line grid, with black and white stones places on the intersections of the lines rather than in the squares. The rules are very simple, though I find them slightly difficult to grasp. The strategy of controlling areas is very deep, even compared with a game like chess. From a game design perspective, the game is so unusual that there may not be many lessons to learn.

http://boardgamegeek.com/game/188

Carolina Games Summit, IGDA Meeting

2008-02-04T21:12:00.001-05:00

Notes about Carolina Games Summit, Goldsboro (Wayne Community College), 26 Jan 08

This is the third annual iteration of the event, though the name has been changed. According to the college newspaper, attendance was 700 the first year and 1,400 last year. A security guard told me that last year you could hardly move upstairs where the games are being played. This year, that condition occurred only at a couple spots. I certainly don't think there were as many as a thousand at the event.

I arrived not long after the 10 AM opening. Fortunately, I'd pre-registered, so I didn't have to wait in line with the "munchkins" who were there primarily for the tournaments. Because this is primarily a game playing event rather than an event ABOUT games. The entire second floor of classrooms was devoted to gaming, from a "modder demo" room (not well attended) to a Wii room (little kids there) to some hard-core gaming.

There was one seminar series, with the addition of a keynote from Bruce Shankle of Microsoft, who used to work for Red Storm in the Triangle. More about the seminar in a bit.

The only game developer of note "exhibiting" was Red Storm. I'm not sure why, recruiting testers maybe? And why else would they be there? It can't be worth the cost to the developer to exhibit at such a small event, especially one where the emphasis was on game playing, not on game development.

I saw only six first-year students from Wake SGD there, and in general I think there were many fewer game developers/ GD students than at an IGDA meeting.

The most interesting exhibitor (for me) was NC State, both programming and industrial/art design. Some students were showing a mod they'd made, and there was a notice about a game development expo in late April at NC State, one evening. Prof. Tim Buie was working extensively with one of the new Wacom Cintiq large LCD/tablets devices ($1,500)--got a few photos and movies.

Now for the speakers. These were generally scheduled for an hour or two, sometimes filled the entire period, sometimes not.

The first session was a panel about game education available locally, NC State, UNC-CH, Pitt CC, Piedmont CC (Roxboro), and Wake CC participated.

The next, about learning to play piano with a game, I did not attend.

Then Joel Gonzales talked about game education and serious games. This was rather unfocused, but it was interesting to hear that he had had one company die under him. It seems to be a pretty common experience.

Then Dana Cowley, PR manager for EPIC, talked about public relations for game companies large and small.

I attended the keynote next; Tim Buie from NC State had a session about art in the seminar room.

The "keynote" in the autditorium was delayed 40 minutes owing to a "Rock Band" competition and technical problems with projection and sound. Putting on an event like this is a LOT of work, and this was the only glitch I know of. Unfortunately, people were wandering into the auditorium for the keynote, seeing nothing but a "rock band" on the stage, and wandering away. It wasn't until eight minutes after the keynote was scheduled to start that Michael Everett (the organizer himself) manned the doors and tried to explain the delay, up to that point we were in the dark.

It was another 35 minutes before the keynote could start. Bruce Shankle from Microsoft's DirectX group talked about some of the video settings that many games let you adjust, and what you can do to make your video work better when playing games. He is involved in testing video cards to make sure they conform to DirectX requirements. He also conducted the door prize giveaway of Microsoft-published games and two 8800GT video cards (a Wake student got one of them!).

At 5 PM "Marx Myth" (Mark Smith), an art manager/director, talked about creating a self-promotional packet for the game industry "your art portfolio packet". I wish all the artist-SGD students had heard this. He talked for the entire hour and ran short of time. MM sent me his slides, so I can give some approximation of what he had to say to students in the future. MM had THREE companies that he's worked for, die.

The last session I attended, at 6, was by Alex Macris of Themis Group, about "gamer snacks". What he meant was the equivalent of casual games, but written for hard-core gamers rather than "for your mother". Runescape and Travian were two games he particularly discussed. This is really interesting information for students, who aren't likely to find an immediate place at a AAA list company, but who don't want to make games "for my mother". I had not ralized how many of these games exist, and Macris gave his formula for what makes them popular, the "3 Cs", cumulative (what you do affects you in later sessions, unlike casual games), competitive, contextual (metagame exists). He used the example of his own company's "advergame" for Heroes of Might and Magic V (http://www.heroesmini.com/), which turned out to be more popular, perhaps, than the actual video game. Fascinating.

I didn't stay for the 7 PM "how to break-in" panel with developers.

24 January IGDA meeting: something like 230 people were registered, and it was CROWDED. There were two talks, one about the networking/server aspects of running games online, that I went to, and one about "next-generation narrative". As the speaker for the latter spoke at Wake (I have the DVD, haven't watched) and has written a book, I went to the former. This was especially interesting because Emergent, the host and the company the speaker works for, is mainly known for the Gamebryo engine that is used by such games as Civ IV and Morrowind. The speaker is chief architect for it, and his interest is in making it useful to people who are developing massively multiplayer online games. MMO cost vast amounts to produce ($50 million plus), and having an engine that efficiently provides the online connection (and update capability) would be very valuable.

Unfortunately, the speaker's original talk was not approved by the Powers That Be in his company, he was giving away too much info, so in the preceding 16 hours he'd made up another talk. And while he described what the problems are with specific examples from online games, and what some solutions are that fall short, he couldn't say what his company's solutions would be! And somehow he'd been told to take 20 minutes instead of 45, so he didn't talk so long (25 minutes). A bit disappointing.

Gamemaker, "Monkey" Books, and "Game Design I" Class

2008-01-01T12:46:00.000-05:00

The SGD 112 "Game Design One" classes I taught this fall were set up by the school to concentrate on use of Gamemaker to produce electronic games. Gamemaker is a very clever and useful miniature "game engine" (less than 8 MB) written for educational purposes. We used a book co-authored by the creator of Gamemaker, Mark Overmars, called Gamemaker's Apprentice. The school had paid for the Pro version of Gamemaker, but it was not available to install on the computers. We downloaded and installed the free "lite" version of the program. The book includes GM6 lite; we installed lite version 7, and had no compatibility problems with what was in the book, nor did we need the Pro version, though there were some examples on the accompanying CD that used the Pro version.

Although the book is apparently error-free, and has the reader make some interesting games within the distinct limitations of the engine, it suffers from the major problem of all such books. I call them "monkey books", because typically the reader rushes through the instructions, finishes the project (not without various detours in some cases from failure to follow instructions), and has little to no idea of what he or she actually did. I think of it as like monkeys somehow following directions but being no wiser when they're done. A person can certainly go much more slowly and try to understand what is happening, and the book usually makes an effort to explain why it is necessary to do such-and-such, but typically this is ignored by the students. I tried to go the slow route, and was frequently amazed that the students finished the projects so much faster than I did at home.

Even though it is possibly the best "monkey book" I've seen, it is still a monkey book. Worse, the students get sick of "monkey business" in the long run. They want to "do their own thing".

What can be done about this? The students MUST learn the basic techniques of Gamemaker if they're going to make simple electronic games of their own. Yet some students point out, quite correctly, that they won't be listing Gamemaker on their resumes. (It should be said here that last year this class began using the Alice programmer training environment, but that didn't prove to be very good for games. Gamemaker became the substitute.)

A big problem with the syllabus I inherited, is that the lab (Gamemaker) is a significant part of the grade and the majority of the class meeting time, but no testing of Gamemaker knowledge was provided for, while the CD in the book contained all the finished projects and their milestone versions. So having students hand in a completed project was pointless and proved nothing. In the end I told the students the lab grade would depend heavily on their attendance, and that I could not give them credit for projects they might do outside of class because they might not be doing anything at all! With no testing, students did not care a great deal whether they actually understood Gamemaker or not, once again encouraging "monkey" methods.

However, I am not a proponent of testing as a way to encourage students. I'd rather have them do something productive and instructive--testing is neither. What I would do in a future version of this class is, unfortunately, a bit more work for the instructor, but better for the students. We would still use the textbook as a means of introducing/reinforcing various programming techniques associated with Gamemaker, but we would spend more time creating very simple games, in part collectively, in part individually. We would discuss the designs of these games, discuss how they can be structured for Gamemaker, discuss whatever is needed to make the actual creation easier, and then have the students do it.

We would make "clones" of well-known old-time video games, provided Gamemaker was up to it (and usually it will be). These games, though simple, clearly had good gameplay, good design, and are still played by many people now and again. The games in the textbook are clever, but the students don't connect with them/identify with them the way they might with the famous old-timers. Examples in rough order of increasing complexity:

• Pong
• Space Invaders
• PacMan
• Asteroids
• Donkey Kong
• Galaga/Galaxian
• Warlords
• Missile Command

Even though these would be clones, I think there would be more sense of accomplishment in figuring them out, and in having a variation of a famous game, than there is in reproducing monkey-style the games from the Gamemaker book.

Second, we would "mod" existing Gamemaker games, whether the ones included with the textbook, or others we'd obtain online. (There is one chapter of the book that mods a game from earlier in the book, though in this case the reader observes the effects of the modding, rather than doing the modding themselves.) I would probably mix these two activities together with material out of the book.

In the end, the class is supposed to be about game design. But if students are going to get jobs as designers--level designers, almost certainly, not game designers--then they'll need to produce games for their portfolios, and so we're trying to "kill two birds with one stone". The class MUST do non-digital games as well so that the students can concentrate on game design rather than game production, but doing the game production helps the artists and programmers learn things they need to know, as well.

Delusions of typical students starting game development curriculum

2007-12-22T23:15:00.000-05:00

Here are some of the delusions common amongst beginning game development students. The teacher's job is to counter these delusions. It's better to be honest, to work from reality rather than encourage fantastic "dreams".

They'll design a game and someone else will do all the work!
It's all creativity instead of work.
Ideas will just come to them, floating in out of the ether--and that one idea is all they need
AAA list games can be produced easily--they have no idea of the magnitude involved.
They'll play games all day in the job. (Even game magazine editors cannot do that.)
It matters that they're expert game players (it only slightly matters, and only for designers)
They're going to have a big effect on a AAA game soon after getting a job (they'll probably never have a big effect)
Getting a degree is going to get them a job. (They have to show what they can do, degrees don't count for a lot yet.)
If they just make a game that includes all the currently-popular elements (a market-driven game), theirs will be instantly popular.
They're going to be able to assemble a development team without salaries and get things done on schedule with the promise of royalties once the game goes commercial. (Though at least this happens every once in a while.)
They'll start their career working in the position they want to achieve in the long run.
Think the college curriculum is an extension of high school and act as such.
If they can do just what's in the curriculum, and without any additional effort, they will have 100% of what it takes to succeed.
They will only work on hard core games, underestimating the amount of casual game players.
Work will always be fun and they will always enjoy playing the game they create at the end.
They can never make a "bad" game that gets canceled.
Testing is only playing the game, not writing long reports on bugs and flaws.
They can sneer at and ignore non-AAA titles as though there was something wrong with them and they'd never need to work on such a thing
It will be Easy.

All delusions . . .

Brief review, Understanding Comics

2007-12-20T05:18:00.000-05:00

Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud.
Originally published 1992, this version 1993 (many printings since), purchased recently from Amazon $15.61.

This 216 page softcover "comic book" in largish trade paperback form is an exploration of comics as a distinct art form with its own conventions and possibilities, not merely as a combination of pictures and words. Some of our video game industry guest speakers for our Simulation and Game Development curriculum recommended it. Wanting to be an "educated person", I bought a copy and read it in bits over the course of a couple weeks.

I don't read comics nowadays, but I did when I was a kid and somewhat beyond (the first one I purchased, for 12 cents, was Spider Man #6--yeah, I sold it long ago). My brother collected comics quite seriously for many years. Comics are clearly still a big deal to young people, though often in the form of Japanese manga, which involve different conventions than American comics or European comics.

Anyone who is interested in drawing professionally should think about reading this book. It explains comics on their own terms, and using a well-drawn (mostly black and white) comic to do so helps make many things clear. It is fundamentally a work of...well, I'm not sure I can pin it down. I don't want to say philosophy, or art history, nor is it a "how to do it" book, but the treatment is absolutely serious (with occasional bits of humor thrown in). Though I cannot draw, it was an eye-opener for me, and should be for most people who do draw, whether they're interested in video games, or comics, or films, or something else. There's a lot more to drawing, and to comics, than the "kids stuff" that many people think, and this book illuminates all of that, also throwing light on some of those other media that involve drawing.

I can see why it is so widely recommended. Well worth reading if you have an interest in visually-related storytelling.

Consoles

2007-12-20T04:53:00.000-05:00

I am not a console game player--why, when I have a fine PC?--but I have been impressed with the ideas behind the Wii. The other day I had my first chance to actually play the Wii, which strongly confirmed my point of view.

I need to tell a story about my "worst prediction ever". After the crash of video gaming in the early 80s, I supposed that there would never be another video game console comparable in popularity to the Atari 2600. Because cheap computers, particularly the Commodore 64, could do everything a console could do and lots more, at a similar price. Obviously I was wrong, as the first Nintendo machine revived the genre.

What happened? I underestimated the buying public's fear of computers. In particular, I think parents buying game machines for their kids feared having to cope with a keyboard machine. And we have since seen a long succession of consoles dominate home gaming.

Nowadays, we have expensive consoles that are computer wannabes, the PS3 and the XBox360. Both are "frozen" technology, when compared with PCs. I still don't know why anyone would want to bother with an expensive computer wannabe that cannot be upgraded practically, when you can play on a much more versatile PC. Yes, the game software often isn't available for a PC; but in my particular case, the games I like to play (strategy wargames) are made for the PC to begin with.

What we have in the Wii is a throwback to the days when consoles were simple family fun, when people played consoles yet were afraid to deal with "complicated" computers. The new controllers allow gameplay that you just cannot have on a PC (or competing console) at present. The entire "ambience" of the Wii is that it's a fun thing to do with other people, not alone. That it's a game machine, not a technology machine. That it's for the casual player, not the hardcore type. My recent exposure at a party for a game club, with four playing at once, confirmed every one of those impressions.

So if I were going to buy a console, it would be a Wii, not a computer wannabe. (Though I can see buying a PS3 for the Blu-Ray, I'm not sufficiently into high definition movies to bother--upconversion from a progressive scan DVD is fine with me.)

My experience with game development students is that most of them are very hard core. A major task for the instructor is to convince them that they are not typical, and that they cannot plan to make games only for the hard core. The growth in games, in my estimation, will be in casual games, the downloadable games for PCs and games on such services as Xbox Live. And in simulations. NOT in AAA list games that are prominent in Best Buy or Circuit City. The Wii is selling as fast as Nintendo can make them, much faster than the competing consoles. There's a big market there, and game students need to be aware of it.

An "unbalanced" though symmetric game

2007-12-19T08:12:00.001-05:00

I've observed here that symmetric games are usually perfectly balanced, except that there may be an advantage in order of movement. This is why, in many of my symmetric games, I've tried to eliminate order of movement or at least associate it with some factor that players have a chance to control.

Chess, for example, is a symmetric game with a big advantage to first-mover (white). Other games may have an advantage for last-mover. When I playtest a symmetric game with a set turn order, I try to record the score by move order so that I can look for patterns of advantage.

Recently playing a four player Wii game involving Olympic events (I don't recall the name of the game), I saw a symmetric game that gave a big advantage to later movers. This is not so much inherent in the game as inherent in the situation, where none of the players had played before, and some had not played the Wii before. So as we played we had to figure out the different controls for each event, and how we could succeed. Those who played early in turn order were disadvantaged because they had not seen as many attempts by all the players as those who played later.

The solution would be to randomize turn order. So the player who goes first in the first round of an event, might go third in the next round, then second, and so forth. I'd suspect, though, that Nintendo would respond that this would confuse the players, so just go with the disadvantage.

Once the players are familiar with the event's controls, the advantage is still with those who go later, as they have some idea of how much they have to do to win the event, which tells them how much risk to take. Here I might decide that in each round after the first, the players play in order of the standings, so at least the last-mover would be the player in last place.

A second game design class

2007-12-16T17:27:00.000-05:00

In the community college system SGD curriculum there are two game design classes and two level design classes. In the first game design class, much effort is spent learning Gamemaker, so that students can produce simple electronic games.

The most recent syllabus for "Game Design Two" that I have seen states that students will make eight electronic games, two weeks per game, using different genres, and different student groups, during the class. In practice this apparently means the students will spend a great deal of time on games, probably get to a more-or-less working prototype, then move on to the next game.

This promotes the idea that the designer has succeeded when he arrives at a working prototype of a game. In fact, this is blatantly untrue. 80% of the designer's time is spent testing and altering the prototype in order to get a really good game from it (the prototype is NEVER a really good game). This is just another instance of the "80/20" rule, in this case the first 80% of the work (getting a working prototype) takes 20% of the designer's time, and getting it right (the last 20%) takes 80% of the time. (Perhaps in the electronic world the percentages are more 70/30 or even 60/40, but the point is nonetheless the same.)

This also encourages the idea that highly-derivative games--the ones practical to make in Gamemaker--are good games.

Moreover, this turns the class into a game-production exercise rather than a game design exercise. The students will spend most of their time worrying about getting graphics made (art, not design), about writing marketing documents that have nothing to do with actual design, and about producing a working prototype (which is programming, not design). They cannot concentrate on gameplay, the heart of design, nor do they have the time to adjust gameplay after testing, which is the mechanism that can make a game acceptably good.

So most of their time will be spent on subjects other than game design. Game design is in large part a practical skill ("10% inspiration, 90% perspiration"), something that requires efficient practice. That cannot happen in the "Eight Gamemaker games a term" format.

In comparison to time spent, students learn much more about game design from non-digital games than from digital ones. Gamemaker is a fine simple tool, but not something that will be used in the real world to make commercially-viable games. And even when students use Gamemaker, getting to a working prototype of an electronic game that amounts to anything takes a long time. Already in one Game Design One class, one group tried to make a game that Gamemaker Pro simply could not cope with. They tried many tricks, but found that the only hope they had was to write code that loaded and unloaded graphics and other auxiliaries, for which they had no time nor much expertise.

Finally, as one student also said, Gamemaker is not something you will ever put on your resume.

Consequently, in "Game Design Two" the objective should be to "finish" games or mods, more or less, and that means lots of time-consuming testing of prototypes.

This is not exactly "quality over quantity". This is a case of "completion" (a relative term!) rather than doing half a job. And completion is where the men are separated from the boys. I've already said this, but this time I'll quote from a gent who came from the game industry to teaching (Ian Schrieber): "One of the hardest things when dealing with students is to convince them to work on small games and complete them, rather than working on a single huge sprawling mess that dies under its own weight. It's also hard to convey the 80/20 rule, that 20% of the work gets you the first 80% of the game... but getting that last 20% of the game (which is the polish factor) takes a lot of time after the game already feels like it "should" be done, and pressing on when you're sick of working on the game already is what separates the developers from the wannabes."
(http://teachingdesign.blogspot.com/)

The testing generally will not occur in class, except insofar as the instructor wants to comment on what is happening in the game. The instructor will probably play all the games at some point during testing.

If students are to get jobs as designers, their practical path for classes is to make non-digital games, and to make mods of existing games. The non-digital games will teach them far more about game design and provide games for their portfolios, while the mods will give them experience to make further mods that might get them noticed.

Those who do not wish to be designers will still benefit from working through the entire process, understanding the entire process. And they'll have more time to polish their contributions, whether art, programming, sound, or something else.

So in this class I would have student groups alternate non-digital games and mods of electronic games, perhaps three non-digital and two electronic, perhaps even fewer depending on how this works out in practice. They would FINISH the games, as best can be done in that environment (which is to say, not really finished at all). I'd want a minimum 10 tests for non-digital games, and hours of testing and modification for electronic games. I'd require extensive documentation of testing and of the modifications resulting from testing. In other words I'd want to see clearly the progress of the students after they produce the initial playable prototype.

My first assignment, in such a class, would be to give students individually (or possibly in groups) the task to report on one game engine or moddable game. This report would be presented orally in class, to benefit all the other students. In other words, the students will help each other become familiar with the methods of producing simple electronic games or mods, so that they can decide what to pursue.

Then when the students do their electronic projects, the students will have to provide the game to be modded, or get the game engine to use, since the school won't have those resources and may not be able to install such on the computers being used in most Game Design Two classes.

Results of non-electronic game projects

2007-12-06T07:57:00.000-05:00

I assigned groups of three or four students (generally self-selected groups) the task of creating one non-electronic game and one electronic game. Among other things, I wanted them to see how much easier it is to produce a non-electronic prototype and be able to play it. I wanted them to see how important it is to play a game again and again, modify it again and again, to get a better product.

(There's a serious problem in the game design literature that implies that game design is writing up ideas, and once a prototype is produced--not a preliminary stand-alone prototype, but the prototype that becomes the finished game--the designer's work is just about over. In other words, there's a tendency to think that when the prototype works, you're nearly done. Even books that state clearly how much time is required to work with the playable prototype to achieve a good game, don't illustrate it in practice or in the amount of space devoted to these vital ideas.)

I tried to enforce milestones during many weeks of this process, but in the end I gave students the opportunity to fail. At one point I took each group out in the hallway, sat on the floor (their choice whether they did or not), and had them show me the prototype they had so far. For the "final" version, not final as in done, but final as in we've-run-out-of-time even though it isn't complete, I decided to have them "present" to the entire class, so people could see what others were doing.

Two of my classes are too large for everyone to "gather round a table" and watch, so in those classes the students had to stand up front. And it rapidly became clear that it is very hard to adequately describe a game without playing it, or at least setting it up. One group did produce a set of Powerpoint slides to help illustrate how the game worked, and another took digital photos of a playtest session.

A smaller class gathering around a table works better; then the "presenters" actually play a little of the game, which generates lots of questions. I can also see easily whether they've actually played it before, as those who have not run into lots of mechanics questions they had not thought of.

In general, the more practical games were the simple ones. Not only is this hardly surprising, it helps illustrate the point I'm trying to make, "keep it simple". My motto is "A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." (Antoine de Saint-Exup'ery)

The simple games were also easier to playtest multiple times, of course.

There were many analogs of electronic games, such as boardgame shooters. There were also analogs of card games, such as collectible/tradable card game and a couple of my own games that students had played in the game club. There was even a game that strongly resembled Candyland! Despite my discussion of the faults of traditional games (still be to posted here), some of the games started with the dreaded "roll and move" mechanic of Monopoly, though I did talk some students out of it. Certainly, where most students are not boardgame players and are just starting to design games, the games they produce are likely to be analogs of/derivative of other games.

Some of the games were not playtested, some were playtested a lot. I think those who did do playtesting recognized how important it was. In a few cases a group threw away their first effort after playtesting. I don't encourage this, but in some cases it was certainly justified.

It's very difficult for anyone to "grade" these games without playing them several times, for which there is no time. My main criterion, aside from what I can see about the gameplay, is whether the students playtested the games and benefitted from that.

I also give them a peer evaluation sheet to fill out. The idea is that I may find out which people in the group actually contributed most, or least. It has its flaws, but is better than nothing.

Later in "lecture" class we made a list of lessons learned from the non-digital game project:

• Playtesting really makes a difference
• You can’t know whether the game is much good until you play several times.
• Working in groups is tough
• It always takes more time than you think
• Miscommunication is common
• The last point is more technical, but important:
Symmetry in starting positions removes most worries about balance/fairness (you still must worry if a first-mover or even last-mover in a round has an advantage).

Victory conditions summary for boardgames/cardgames

2007-11-27T19:11:00.000-05:00

For the benefit of my digital game students, I'm trying to summarize/categorize the many victory conditions available in games (especially board and card games).

Achieve a Position
Occupy a location--e.g. Stalingrad, Axis & Allies require occupation of certain cities
Occupy a lot of territory--go, Carcassone, Blokus, many others
Make a pattern of pieces--Tic-Tac-Toe, my Law & Chaos
Move off the other side of board (or the end of the track, as in race games)
There are many other variations...

Wipe out/destroy something
Wipe out everyone--checkers/draughts, Risk [this could be called "last survivor", too]
Take a piece (chess, the King)

Accumulate something or get rid of something (possibly all your assets)
$$$$ (Monopoly)
sets of cards (many card games)
use up all your cards (many card games)

Deduce/find answer
Clue/cluedo
if no deduction is required, this is a form of accumulate (as, sets)

Use up all your assets (be eliminated) either last, or first--can be seen as a form of accumulate something or get rid of something.

Scoring the most points at the end of a set time, or a set number of points, is very common (Settlers of Catan, Brittania), but this is an intermediate step to the achievement of some other goals--money, territory, whatever. Points are used when multiple victory conditions are wanted. For example, Britannia points include holding territory, temporarily occupying territory, killing enemy units, capturing certain locations, and more.

I am going to include "choose own objectives" separately. In the classic game Careers, players secretly allocate 60 points amongst Fame, Happiness, and Money. The first to achieve his objectives wins the game. While it is an "accumulate something" condition, the strategic variability provided by choice is exceptional and notable.

Finally, some games have "Missions" (newer editions of Risk). This is another form of points, that is, each mission is one of the other kinds of victory condition.

I don't consider sports to be a form of boardgame/cardgame, but even sports can be considered in these terms. For example, in baseball, you get points by achieving a position (getting around the diamond to home plate).

Lew Pulsipher

Checklist/reminder list for gameplay characteristics:

2007-11-24T09:35:00.000-05:00

Non-electronic games should reveal the essence of design because they are likely to be simple. But all the comments below apply to electronic games as well.

This is, in a sense, a repeat of some of the things in the playtest notes on the blog, but I fear many have not read those.

1. What are the challenges the player(s) face?
2. What actions can they take to overcome those challenges?
3. What can players to do affect each other (if game for more than one player)
4. Is the game replayable many times without becoming "just the same" over and over?
5. Is the game fair?
6. Is there an appropriate mixture for the audience and game type (consider "take that")?
7. What is the "essence" of the game?

1., 2. and 3. Remember, the essence of gameplay is interesting non-trivial challenges and actions the players can take to meet those challenges. In non-electronic games, which usually involve more than one person, another very desirable element is player interaction, specifically, how can a player affect the other players? A good game is rarely "multiplayer solitaire", or a race where players have no influence on the fortunes of other players.

This amounts to, always ask yourself "what can the player do to influence the outcome of a game?"

4. Replayability. There are other considerations. For example, how replayable is the game? If it plays the same way over and over again, players will rapidly lose interest in it. See my separate piece on Replayability.

5. Fairness. Games should be fair. At some point, if a player feels he was gypped by the rules, he's not going to like the game. He or she should feel that he gets what he earned.

There's a particular mechanism that I'd lump into this category, the "roll a die and move that many" method used in Monopoly and many other traditional family games. I pose it to video game players like this: If you're playing an electronic game, and the maximum speed of your avatar varies periodically and randomly, aren't you going to hate that? That's what happens to a player in a roll-and-move game. And won't you hate it even worse if your opponent varies differently from you? At least, if all slow down at the same time, it's fair, but if one can move twice as fast as another, is that fair?

(I'm writing a separate piece on the flaws of traditional games, so I won't go beyond "roll and move".)

6. "Take that". The mixture of strategies and occurrences in a game must be appropriate to the audience. For example, party games should not require any heavy thinking!

In some games there are plays that pretty drastically change circumstances. These are called "take that" moves. (This often involves playing a card.) If you have a game with lots of "take that" occasions, people may enjoy it as a fun "beer and pretzels" thing, but they won't enjoy it as a strategic challenge. Conversely, if you are designing a strategic game, you probably should leave the "take that" stuff out. In other words, go one way or the other, a "take that" game or one that is not.

Where do you draw the line? Experience and playtesting with a variety of people will tell.

7. Finally, ask yourself, what is the essence of this game? What would characterize it in the minds of players or observers? Is this essence Good, is it desirable?

How to improve replayability in a game

2007-11-22T08:58:00.002-05:00

While the "cult of the new" tends to mean that games aren't played many times before players move on to the next game, replayability is still a desirable feature of any game.

Most of the following amounts to "vary the experience", which of course is what provides replayabilty--varied experience:

• "Multiple paths to victory"
• Variable rather than set starting positions
• More than two players
• Asymmetric game
• Use of event cards
• Scenarios
• Optional rules
• Different sets of rules
• Hidden information
• Special abilities

"Multiple paths to victory" will result in much-improved replayability. Drawback: makes it much harder to balance the game

Variable rather than set starting positions (players choose their starting positions). A few games offer both options. Risk offers a random setup and a setup that lets players choose locations. The drawback: this lengthens the game.

More than two players (each player provides variability of himself). The drawback: lengthens the game.

Asymmetric game (standard starting position is not the same for all players). The drawback: makes it much harder to balance the game (i.e., give each player an equal chance of winning).

Use of event cards (especially in symmetric games or games without other chance factors). The drawback: can be seen to increase the influence of chance. But event cards often adds enjoyable color to the game as well.

Scenarios (which amount to differences in positions or victory conditions (or both)). Used primarily in historical games. The drawback: more time-consuming to design.

Optional rules. Again this seems most common in historical games. These are alternative ways to play the game. At some point, many rule choices in a game design are largely arbitrary, that is, one choice leads to just as interesting a game as the other choice, but the designer must choose one. The other can become an optional rule.

The drawback: virtually none, if the optional was tried sufficiently in playtesting.

Different sets of rules (for example Basic, Standard, and Advanced). The drawback: longer rules, and perhaps a feeling from some contemporary players that there's something wrong with the game because there's not "one way to play".

Hidden information. The game can diverge along many different paths when some information is hidden. Event Cards are an example of the use of hidden information, and electronic games typically enjoy the benefit, as the computer tracks the information much more easily than non-computer methods can. The drawback: something/someone has to track the hidden information, and in some cases, cheating may be possible.

Special Abilities. Cosmic Encounter thrives on the variety of special abilities for each side. Role-playing games typically include a vast number of skills, feats, spells, and classes, not all of which can be included in any single game or series of games. The drawback: play balance can suffer; and there's a lot of information to be devised and incorporated into the game.

Finally, people have suggested that, in general, the more chaos in a game, the more replayability it is likely to have. Even Go, which has none of the overt variation I've listed above, is highly replayable because a single move can change circumstances fairly strongly.

Another point of view is that when the number of reasonable choices is maximized, replayability is enhanced. But too many choices can also lead to "analysis paralysis".

Community in a Game Development Curriculum

2007-11-22T08:58:00.001-05:00

Millennials (those up to about 27 years of age) thrive on community (myspace, facebook, MMOs, etc.). They expect to work together, and to share experiences, even simple things like the high scores they get on video games. Furthermore, unlike older generations, millennials have no "presumption of virtue" about institutions. We older folk assume that a school exists to educate, or a hospital exists to cure people. Millennials suppose the school (or hospital, or government unit, or other institution) has hidden agendas, that education (or medicine, etc.) is not its primary purpose. Teachers and schools have to earn the trust of Millennials in the way we never did with Baby Boomers or Gen Xers. A lack of community, a lack of effort to build trust, inevitably contributes to poor education and poor retention rates.

Here are some things I try to do to foster community:

Game Club. It would be astonishing that a school that has a thriving game development program has no game club. I got students interested in one when I arrived at my current school, and we have meetings twice a week. Paperwork went in last week to become an officially recognized school club. This is one of the best venues for an instructor to get to know students, of course, and vice versa.

I've found that the best time to schedule a meeting is right after a class full of interested people. The situation would be different at a residential school rather than a community college.

Right now we meet in a classroom without computers, but half the students own laptops, so electronic games are played as well as boardgames (prototypes that I've designed) and collectible card games. We've also met in the lab that is devoted entirely to game development, but it is usually occupied by classes.

Bulletin board. You need a large (4 by 8 feet) *unlocked* bulletin board outside the most commonly used classroom, where students can communicate with one another and faculty can communicate with them.

Listserv. Require all the students to sign up for something like Yahoo Groups (which is what I use). It is sometimes amazingly difficult to get students to actually sign up, even via invitation. Ours is an announcement-only listserv, so there is little traffic compared to a discussion listserv. Some faculty think that posting notices to Blackboard serves this purpose, but that is awkward and unreliable, but most of all, many students never read Blackboard.

Web site. Here teachers are severely constrained by school support, and that support appears to be quite poor in some cases. Often the site is out of date and dysfunctional. The listserv Web site can be an alternative up to a point. And I maintain my own site that is primarily links (school rules prevent more).

Surveys. I use Surveymonkey's free service to create surveys, then show students the results. The free version can only have 10 questions and 100 respondents per survey, but that works OK for my situation (about 100 new students this year). Some questions are just curiosity, many are related to recruitment and retention.

Blog. I like to run a blog for each class that students must check every day. This is much more intimate and immediate than Blackboard (which is poor software in any case that has nothing to do with the real world). School rules may prevent a blog for a specific class that can be seen by people not members of that class. Many schools do not support limited-access blogs. Nonetheless, I maintain this blog, and the general game design blog I've written for some years, and ask students to read this one at least.

Forum. Some people think an online Forum such as one implemented with phpbb is excellent, others think it isn't much help. To me, current information gets lost in the threads, compared with the listserv; but it may be easier for students to find information about common topics in a forum. I have not started one.

School support. Some schools encourage student communication, others don't. As an example, at many schools, if students want to publicize a new club, it is easy to put up some signs and in other ways let people know about it. Yet at other schools there are no such avenues. For example, the bulletin board in the student lounge requires permission from the Dean of Students before you can put a notice on it. Only small bulletin boards exist at doorways, and these are "official" and locked.

Impressions. The impression conveyed by some schools is that they want all the students to shut up, do what they're told, and get out of the way when they're not in class. Yet this doesn't work with millennials. If millennials don't feel that they're a part of something, they're much more likely to quit. The building where the game development classes are held, for example, must provide the right signals. If it reminds one of a prison rather than of a pleasant place to learn, how will students react? It cannot be "antiseptic" and "faceless"; it should be warm and inviting, "homey".

I'd say this is all common sense, but there are many, many schools that do not support, or even prevent, some of this from occurring.

Some additional notes about multiplayer games

2007-11-21T16:36:00.000-05:00

In a multiplayer boardgame or card game, the focus is on who (which player) you're going against, not on how you're getting there (maneuver). In a two player game, the focus is on how you're getting there, not on who you're going against, because there is no choice of the latter (you have only one).

In general, in non-electronic games, in multiplayer games you're playing the player much more than the "system". In electronic games, even multiplayer, you're playing the system first, then the other players. You can't "look them in the eye", you can't see body language. Yes, you can use Skype or some built-in system to talk to your opponents, but you may not KNOW them, and you won't see them. It makes a difference.

Do people who play as opponents in online multiplayer electronic games become friends? I'm not talking about co-operative games like Everquest, where they're in the same party/guild. I think the answer is no. Do players of multiplayer non-digital games face to face become friends? Often, if they aren't friends already.

Practice Makes Perfect--You don't start out as an expert practitioner

2007-11-20T21:29:00.000-05:00

Students typically come into a game development curriculum with many delusions. One (well, really three) is that they're going to have one great idea, quickly turn it into a game, and then bask in adoration.

A subset of these delusions, which I want to concentrate on here, is that the first game they'll make will be excellent ("awesome" is the usual word I hear). It's hard to make students realize that initial failure in game design must be expected, just as in other walks of life.

So they make their first game, or game concept. It's usually terribly derivative of other games. If (as they should be) they're required to design non-electronic games, the result is even worse, because they derive their ideas from Monopoly and worse games, the "Ameritrash" that so annoys "real boardgamers" nowadays.

In the "Age of Instant Gratification" young people just don't understand the requirement to learn how to do something well before you can become really good at it. They're shocked to find out that they've produced wholly inadequate stuff. They've been patted on the back for years in K12 for doing next to nothing, because (with exceptions) K12 is all about false esteem rather than capability.

Here are some examples I describe to students from well-known practitioners that illustrate the time it takes to learn a craft:

John Creasey, in about 65 years of life, published over 600 books, mostly mysteries. I once read that he received OVER 700 REJECTIONS (presumably mostly for short works) before he sold any writing. He had to learn how to write well, yet look where he went in the end.

Jerry Pournelle, a well-known science fiction and technology writer (two Ph.D.s) says that if you're willing to throw away your first million words, you can become a novelist. In other words, until you learn your craft, what you're writing--that's the equivalent of at least ten normal novels--won't be worth publishing.

Even good stuff gets rejected by publishers. The Lord of the Rings was rejected by publishers. My game Britannia was rejected by the American publishers, who only published it after it was published in Britain! These were products that proved in the end to be quite viable (Brit isn't on the same level of LOTR, of course), yet they still got "thumbs down".

Of course there are exceptions. J. K. Rowling of "Harry Potter" comes to mind. Though she was much older than our typical student.

How did I practice? I designed variants (often amounting to new games) of a game called Diplomacy for years, and made adventures and rules modifications for the paper version of Dungeons and Dragons, long before I designed commercially-viable stand-alone games.

When students find out how much work is required to improve and then polish a game before it can have a chance to be commercially successful, many opt for another, "easier" career. The following quote (about books) from one of the giants of the 20th century illustrates what happens with games as well:

"Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public." --Sir Winston Churchill

Those who cannot get through these later phases will never be successful in the game design business.

Design Flaws to Watch out for in Multiplayer Games

2007-11-18T21:37:00.000-05:00

Digital game development students aren't used to thinking about the consequences of games involving more than two opposing interests, because most electronic games include only two sides, one often a machine opponent. Several problems named by boardgamers can occur when there are three or more sides in a game. Many of these are much more likely to occur when the victory condition amounts to "wipe out the opposition":
• Turtling
• Leader bashing
• Sandbagging
• Kingmaking (petty diplomacy problem)

Turtling occurs when a player sits back and builds up strength while others expend theirs. This can often be seen in multi-player online RTS games. When there are more than two sides, a player can hang back, building up bases and technology, while he lets other players slaughter one another's forces. Then he comes out and cleans up the remainder.

A general solution is to use a different victory condition. E.g., capture of certain locations as the means of victory forces players to come out of their shells. Giving points for destoying the opposition also encourages aggression rather than turtling.

Another solution is to provide economic incentives to be aggressive. This often involves capturing economically valuable areas, so that a successful aggressive player can build up forces faster than the turtle.

Leader bashing tends to happen in games without much hidden information, that is, it must be clear who the leader is. Then the other players gang up on the leader. ("Of course", many would say, why wouldn't one try to weaken the leader?) If it isn't clear who the leader is, this is less likely to occur. If it is hard for some players, at least, to affect the leader in any given situation, then there will be less leader bashing, as those players will distract the ones who can affect the leader.

Sandbagging is often a consequence of leader bashing. A player will try to get himself in second or third place, rather than first, so that when the first place player is bashed, the sandbagger can swoop in for the win. Timing, obviously, is quite important here.

The solution to sandbagging is to reduce leader-bashing to a reasonable level.

Kingmaking is a consequence of what R. Wayne Schmittberger calls the "petty diplomacy problem". Where there are three interests, and one recognizes that they/he cannot win the game, that loser may be able to determine which of the other two wins. Even if the game is being played by more than three, it will often come down to three major interests. More generally, if a losing player can determine who wins, you have kingmaking in play.

One way to avoid this is to structure the game so that a player cannot be sure he is going to lose until it's too late for him to become a kingmaker. Of course, some players believe kingmaking is the "wrong way to play", that every player should try to win no matter what. But designers cannot rely on players to be self-governing in this way.

Another way to avoid kingmaking is to make it too hard for a player to use all his capability against another to prevent that other from winning. As a simple example, in a race it's usually hard for a losing player to have much effect on the leading players.

Now here are some alternatives to a victory condition of "kill everyone else". These help mitigate some of the problems we've been discussing. These are:
• economies (especially zero-sum)
• points
• missions

Economies. Players receive more assets as the game progresses, in accordance with some rules relating to locations or resources, not merely to a table of additional appearances. If a player plays well, he will earn more new assets than if he plays badly.

In a zero-sum game, each player's gain is another player's loss. The classic game Diplomacy is the best example of this. There are 34 "supply center" locations on the board. A player gets one unit (army or fleet) per center. If a player takes another's center, the first is going to increase his forces, while the second will lose forces, at the next building period.

Points. Players earn points for certain events or achievements. This could be capture of certain locations, destruction of enemy assets, holding certain places at given times, and so forth. In a wargame, a player could be wiped out, yet if he's done enough beforehand he can still have the most points to win the game. In general, where points are concerned the game does not continue until all but one player is wiped out. Either there will be a time limit or a point limit.

E.g., in my "light wargame" Britannia, players receive points for holding areas, occupying areas during a certain period, for dominating regions (king of England), for forcing nations to submit, and even for killing enemy units. A nation may be wiped out in the course of the game, but each player controls several, and the points that defunct nation earned still count. Points are based on historical performance, and are accumulated at different paces, so the current score is not a good gauge of who is actually winning the game.

Missions. This is a form of points because the mission involves completion of particular goals, but when a mission is completed the game is over, so no point record is needed. A mission can be as simple as capturing certain cities, or much more complex. Occasionally the missions are hidden, that is, you don't know which mission your opponent is trying to fulfill.

Now let's take Risk as an example. Risk is not a particularly good game, but a great many people have played it, and it exhibits most of our design flaws.

In Risk the object is to completely wipe out all competition. It uses economy to try to avoid the four problems. You get extra armies at the start of your turn if you hold an entire continent, to provide an economic incentive to attack. There is also card acquisition: you must take a territory in a turn in order to get a card, and matched sets of three cards gain you large numbers of armies. You also get armies according to the number of territories you hold. If you turtle or sandbag you get fewer new armies than your competitors. In fact, it's typical for players to attack as much as they can until they're out of spare armies, in order to limit how many territories their opponents control (and consequently how many new armies the opponents get).

There is certainly leader-bashing, but some players may not have forces near enough to the leader to do any damage. You are often better off wiping out a weak power rather than attacking the strongest, because when you wipe out an opponent, you get his cards, and if you can make another set you get more armies (in increasing numbers) with which to immediately continue attacking.

Kingmaking is also quite limited, as by the time a player realizes he's a goner, he doesn't have enough force to do much damage to one of the leaders.

Despite all this, a couple decades after the original English edition of Risk was published, "Mission Cards" were added to the mix. Each player receives one with a mission unknown to his opponents. A mission might be something like "Control Asia" (the largest continent). Hence a player can win the game, by completing his mission, long before he wipes out all opposition. Unfortunately, the mission cards aren't modified by the number of players, so some may be much easier to achieve than others in certain situations.

(Another well-known board wargame, Axis&Allies, is two sides even when there are five players (Germany and Japan on one side, Britain, US, and Russia on the other), hence not subject to these problems.)

What makes a game great?

2007-11-17T17:39:00.000-05:00

In some classes we tried to make a brief list of what makes a game great. I have my own ideas (which I briefly discussed in my contribution to Hobby Games: the 100 Best), and I intend to write a separate article about that, so I'll just list what we came up with in class in no particular order.

Innovation--it's good to be first

Story

Improving realism (e.g. destructible environments Red Faction) (bullet time) (scars) (camera movement) etc.

Really good gameplay (playability)

PvP, team play--something other than person vs. computer

Variety of modes of play (online, pvp, MMO)

Replayability

Customizable

Verisimilitude of the environment--when you’re there, it feels like you’re really there

Immersive

The music

Your character can grow and change (skills, attributes)

Non-linear gameplay

Good interface and tight game controls

Community

History and History Classes

2007-11-13T05:47:00.000-05:00

All of our game development students must take a history class or two. This requirement comes directly from the local game developers and manufacturers, who want their employees to know something more about history than the average person. This is of particular interest to me insofar as I have a Ph.D. in history.

I'm told that the history classes at my school have proved to be particularly hard for the SGD students, if we can judge from the grades they get. I'm afraid an awful lot depends on the teacher in cases like this: some history teachers think history is a succession of dates and events, whereas history is really a story (the word "story" is in the word "history"). It's a story of how individuals and groups coped with the challenges and opportunities of their time and their physical location. This is why history fascinated me when I was young, and I always wanted to know "what happens next", the same way I do when I read a fictional story.

In a sense, studying history is like watching a gigantic game: games consist of challenges and the actions players take to overcome them, history consists of challenges and the actions people try to take to try to cope with those challenges.

Many games contain stories, and some people (including me) like to play games partly to see "what happens next". The difference, in history, is that "it really happened", it's not made up.

Young people tend to be very uninterested in anything that happened before they were born. For those, I hope they think of history as a kind of (serious) game, and maybe that will make it more interesting. What could people have done differently, how could they have "improved their score"?

I hope students will have teachers who teach history as stories, but if not, please try to treat it as stories and "grin and bear it". Don't let a history class mess you up, because history isn't inherently difficult.

Where Degrees Matter

2007-11-10T21:54:00.000-05:00

Sometimes big companies--game companies are rarely big companies--will have a hard-and-fast degree requirement. Why? Because they leave hiring to the Human Resources department (usually a big mistake), and the HR people frequently don't have a clue about the job they're hiring for. Their main interest is simplifying their task by setting absolute rules. An easy way to do this is to require a certain degree. This puts off many potential applicants, and enables the HR person to easily weed out other applications because the required degree isn't there.

But you don't want to work for a company like that, not if you're creative and imaginative and self-motivated. When HR takes over hiring, you have a company that's already crippled. (Yes, a great many companies are crippled. And it shows.)

The Virtues of Cards in "boardgames"

2007-11-09T09:14:00.000-05:00

I am going to try to summarize the virtues of using cards in boardgames--or perhaps in boardgame-card hybrids. I'm doing this primarily for the benefit of my students, but I thought it might be worth contributing to others as well.

Summary:
• Cards reduce the need to read rules before playing ("put the rules on the cards")
• Cards are a simple way to add color and visual interest to a game (as opposed to expensive 3D sculptured pieces)
• Cards provide a simple and clean way to add "chrome" to a game (chrome usually involves rule exceptions)
• Cards provide a convenient way to "inventory" game information
• Cards are an easy way to increase variety in a game (which usually increases replayability as well)
• Cards can be used as a substitute "board"
• Cards are a more acceptable means of introducing variation through chance, as many people now dislike dice rolling

Cards reduce the need to read rules before playing

"Put the rules on the cards". This is the easiest way to simplify the difficulties of learning a game, especially for those teaching it to others. A player only needs to consider/understand the card-rules when they hold or draw the card. Well-known collectible card game designers introduced me to the "seven line rule": players won't read more than seven lines of rules on a card, so don't put more on them. For millennials the rule is certainly "the less text the better".

This is also a good way to reduce the size of the rulebook. Big rulebooks are daunting even if the game itself is fairly simple.

Cards are a simple way to add color and visual interest to a game

Cards often host attractive color graphics, much larger than you can put on tiles or counters. They are cheaper than sculptured three dimensional figures. 3D figures are seldom multi-colored, too.

Cards provide a simple and clean way to add "chrome" to a game

"Chrome" is the term for special rules that often reflect special historical or personal circumstances. Hence chrome usually involves rule exceptions. And where "chrome" includes a visual, a card is the best way to illustrate/introduce it. This relates also to the first point, putting rules on the cards rather than in the rulebook.

If I designed Britannia today I might include cards to add "chrome" to the game. A variant using "Nation Specialty Cards" already exists (my design, not released).

Cards provide a convenient way to "inventory" information

When players need to keep track of what items or spells or capabilities they possess, cards are an excellent choice. They're familiar, easy to organize, and have both text and graphics. For example, spells are tracked in EL:the Card Game (see below) via cards.

Cards are an easy way to increase variety in a game

"Event cards" are quite common in games these days. Lots of different scnearios/situations can be introduced in a small deck of cards.

The variety of the cards usually increases replayability as well. More possibilities equals more paths that the game can follow. Players can play many times and still be able to say "I never saw that happen before".

Cards can be used as a substitute "board"

I've devised several prototype games that use cards in place of a board. From a commercial point of view, this results in a much less expensive package that is easier to ship and to find shelfspace for.

In Battle of Hastings some of the cards represent Saxon and Norman units; the play area is so crowded until late in the game that the cards can be arranged in a 7 by 6 array of "spaces", though I also have two strips, one to either side, to help orient the rows.

In Enchanted Labyrinth: the Card Game (derived from EL the boardgame) some of the cards represent the "dungeon" being explored by wizards and their minions. As creatures move into new areas, the cards are turned face up to reveal the contents of the area.

In Zombie Escape, face-down cards represent the building (a reform school) that the players try to escape from in the face of zombie infestation. Once again, discovery occurs when players move onto the card areas.

Cards are a more acceptable means of introducing variation through chance

Many people now dislike dice rolling, if only as a reaction against the random "roll and move" mechanic so infamous in older American family games. People believe (and sometimes it's true) that they can manage cards in a way they cannot manage dice rolls.

Lew Pulsipher

The Game Industry Wants "Educated People"

2007-11-08T07:58:00.000-05:00

Before you react, let me hasten to say that "educated" refers to an attitude, not to earned degrees. Fortunately for us, the game industry does not yet have the "degree-itis" that is invading all walks of American life, as though the only way you can learn something is to get a degree in it. The industry is a "meritocracy", where you are valued and hired for what you can do and what you can create. "Educated people" doesn't necessarily imply academic degrees, it implies a certain attitude toward life. It's that attitude that the game companies want and need to succeed. So I am not talking about the classic idea of the "well-educated" person, which relates to particular things like knowledge of the classics.

Nonetheless, if you read good advice about breaking into the game industry, that advice will include "read as much as you can" and "educate yourself as much as possible", even as the advisors suggest that a bachelor's degree is a good idea. For example, everyone interested in "breaking in" should read the wealth of advice on Tom Sloper's Web site (sloperama.com) and his monthly IGDA column. I used to use a book by Ernest Adams, Break into the Game Industry (http://ernestadams.com/), now a bit long in the tooth (2003) but still available from Amazon. His advice is well worth reading (especially about getting a job and how to keep a job), and amounts to the same as Tom's.

No, an "educated person" is a person with a certain attitude toward life, not necessarily one who has a degree. There are people with legitimate Ph.D.s who could be called uneducated (though this is very unlikely). There are certainly many people with bachelors degrees who are essentially uneducated. And there are 17 and 18 and 19 year-olds who clearly are educated people, though they haven't had the time to accumulate a wealth of experience and knowledge that is associated with being educated.

So what makes someone "educated"? An educated person wants to KNOW, and will make an effort to find out things. An uneducated person will tend not to bother. Here's a simple example. An educated person, confronted with a word he doesn't know, is likely to look it up. He wants to improve his understanding (of language, of the world). An uneducated person isn't going to bother.

Further, an educated person teaches himself or herself when necessary, from books or otherwise, rather than wait for a class. The uneducated ones will frequently whine "I haven't been sent to training for that".

Not surprisingly, educated people read a lot, and uneducated ones don't.

This year at my school we had a speaker who helped epitomize this attitude. Bruce Shankle worked at Red Storm at the time (now, Microsoft). He had no degree, but had six years of schooling. He'd taught himself a great deal to help himself as a programmer, and said (IIRC) that 20% of his work time was spent learning new things, and he also frequently studied at home. He paid his way to GDC even in years when he wasn't working in the game industry, because he wanted to know about the industry. This is clearly an educated man in the sense the industry wants, though he has no degree.

I am another example. As some readers know, I worked for many years in computer support at Womack Medical Center on Ft. Bragg, and before that as a dBase programmer. For much of that time I was chief of PCs and networking, supporting up to 900 PCs--and I was the first Webmaster there as well. Almost everything I knew that got me that job and helped me do that job I taught myself, because a Ph.D. in History doesn't help with computing, nor does any degree you got in 1981! I have never actually taken a "real college class" in computing, though I've taken many training classes through the years at Womack. Similarly, everything I've learned about games and game design I taught myself, of course. I read a lot, I experimented a lot, I made a lot of mistakes, too. It does not hurt to have a Ph.D., for sure, but that's not what moved me forward.

Good classes help you learn much quicker, as you take advantage of the experience of teachers and authors. I'd have had an easier time if I'd had classes to take, but such classes rarely existed in the early 80s. Bruce Shankle benefited from many classes, though he had no degree.

Now how does this contrast with typical K12 "education"? There are many exceptions, but generally students in K12 are trained, not educated. The teachers' success, their very job, depends on the students' performance on end-of-class tests in many cases. So the teachers, naturally, try to get students to memorize all the material that is on those wretched tests. The students are trained to parrot material, not to think.

Even good students learn that they can get by just fine by doing exactly what they're assigned and no more. They'll ask what the minimum is, and that's all they'll do. Worse, they think if they do the minimum they should get an "A", though no one in the real world wants an employee who thinks that way.

The habit of students to ask for a test "review"--which usually means, they want to be told exactly what will be on the test--is a consequence. In K12 they're told exactly what's on the test, then they regurgitate it on the test, and fools call this "education". I call it memorization, the same kind of thing that blights computer certification. This year I have told students there will be no review, because it's up to them to decide what's important. That's the way the real world is--there's no review from the great Cosmic All, just as we can say that life is an essay test, not a multiple choice test. Of course, many of the smarter students pay attention to what I say in class each day (a few even write it down), and figure that's what I think is important. How sensible, and yet rare!

This year I assigned students the "task"--though it's a habit they should get into on their own--of maintaining a notebook or other "data store" in which they record game-related ideas as they get them. The "uneducated" attitude surfaced soon after: "how much do I have to include in this?" The student wanted to know the minimum, rather than take the educated attitude that this was something he should do anyway, that was worth doing, and he should put some time into it. (That student has since dropped out, unsurprisingly.)

We show videos of guest speakers, such as Bruce Shankle. Students often don't pay attention, or half pay attention, fooling themselves into thinking they can remember a lot while doing something else, when in fact memories seem to be really poor nowadays. Once again, instead of making the most of listening to an expert talk about what happens in the real world, they try to "just get by". An "old man" (me) probably listens better the fourth time he hears one of these lectures, than many of the students do the first time.

Similarly, I see the uneducated attitude toward this blog. It doesn't appear to immediately affect the student, it's not obviously part of a specific task, so many tend to ignore it, even though I ask questions on tests to see if the students actually read it. The same happens when I ask the students to read a web site. Worst of all, though perhaps more understandable, most students don't bother to read the textbook, though there's a wealth of good advice in it despite its flaws.

Educated people like to use their brains in top gear; uneducated people prefer to run in "idle". The old-fashioned "thirst for knowledge" is what I'm talking about, in a sense; something I still see in older students, but rarely in younger ones.

After I talked about this in a class, one student observed that his generation has been told that the only way to learn is to take a class. I've taught graduate school for 20 years at night, and something like 17,000 classroom hours in my life, and I KNOW that people can get through classes and get degrees and still not know a whole lot about what's important in the topics they've studied.

What's important is what you know and what you can do, not what classes you took or what degrees you have. Unfortunately, this attitude is being squeezed out of American life . Thank heaven the game industry still sees it this way.

Analogy: Level Design

2007-11-01T08:37:00.000-04:00

I'm trying to describe to my students what level designers do. The first thing to say, of course, is "it depends"--depends on what the company expects the level designer to do, and what is "farmed out" to someone else.

Nonetheless, the analogy to a Dungeons and Dragons or other paper RPG referee is good, though a great many younger people don't seem to be familiar with (non-video) D&D these days.

Fundamentally, level design is a limited, concentrated form of game design. The core mechanics of the game are already determined. The level designer is using them to create an episode that will have good gameplay, that will entertain in various ways. Gameplay always involves challenges and actions to meet those challenges, of course. This also involves goals, ways to achieve the goals, paths (such as corridors and rooms), appearances, and behavior of NPC's and opposition (scripts to do better than the game AI can do on its own).

In D&D the "DM" or DungeonMaster starts with the "core mechanics" of D&D and fleshes out adventures. The adventure, analagous to a video game level, usually involves a goal of some kind, if only to "wipe out the badguys". The DM may have particular methods in mind whereby the players can achieve the goal, or he may simply set up a situation and trust the players to creatively find ways to achieve the goal. In level design, playtesting will show whether creativity can prevail; in home-made D&D adventures there is no playtesting, so the DM must be more careful. But D&D adventures that are published are certainly playtested.

A published D&D adventure includes all--well, most--of the information a referee needs to run the adventure. The video game level includes everything needed for the player(s) to play the adventure--er, level.

So the level designer must specify and perhaps place (though probably not make) the graphics, map out all the paths and alternatives the player(s) can pursue, place the opposition (monsters or otherwise), script the conversations, specify the goal and how player(s) find out what that goal is, specify exceptions to the normal core mechanics, and all the other things that are required for the "adventure" episode.

"Fame"

2007-10-31T22:04:00.000-04:00

Bruce Shankle, when he spoke at my school in January '07 about breaking into the game industry, pointed out that even the most famous names are often not recognized by experienced gamers. How many know who Carmack and Romero, or Will Wright are? But mention their works (Doom and Quake, The Sims) and they're recognized. Sid Meier is recognized primarily because his name is part of some game names.

My students generally don't have a clue that I am a little bit famous--after all, I "don't do electronic games". I was amused one day at the game club when a student said he'd talked to a friend in Florida and told him his instructor had designed Britannia. The friend got excited and said something like "oh, that's my favorite game, he's famous". No. Hardly anyone in the game industry is famous. But many people worldwide recognize my name (which is fortunately nearly unique), or the game Britannia, or what I did with D&D and Diplomacy variants ages ago. Measured by that number of people, I'm likely the most famous (or better, least unfamous) person the students know, but they don't think in those terms.

I'm going to edit in a more recent story: Another student (Frank) told me that in his history class is an older man, who obviously knows the history instructors well, maybe working on another degree? He and some other folks have been working on an historical game for 10 years and are about to publish. Frank said, do you know the game Britannia? Yes. The designer of Britannia is teaching game design at Wake, you ought to talk to him, Frank says. The gent got quite excited. Though I haven't heard from him yet!

The "me" generation generally isn't impressed by anyone but themselves, of course. In a high school class I taught last year, about one quarter of the 20-some students thought they would be famous at some time. This is evidently a common "delusion" amongst the younger generation. (I say delusion because, barring extreme chance, you'd not have even one "famous" person come out of a group that small.)

So what can a teacher do about this? Nothing that I can think of. Sometimes only time/experience lets people shed illusions.

Number of people working on an "AAA list" game

2007-10-31T21:49:00.000-04:00

I found this note highlighting the massive size of modern video games:

More than 70 people, including 20 programmers and 30 artists, worked on Madden NFL '07. Similarly, Maxime Beland, creative director at Ubisoft's Montreal studio, says that 150 people worked with him to create Rainbow Six Vegas.

What students can do outside of class

2007-10-31T21:34:00.001-04:00

In classes we made a list of what students can do outside of class to help prepare/qualify themselves to apply for a job in the video game industry. There is no particular priority here, for the most part.

IGDA free membership

Business card!
Use Printmaster or word processor, buy business card stock at office supply

Go to IGDA meetings
“Go to GDC”
Go to DGXpo
Go to Goldsboro cconvention (One-day)

Web sites to visit/monitor:
Gamasutra
Slashdot.org
Gamespot
Mobygames.com
IGN
Sloperama
Engadget
Joystiq

Boardgamegeek.com (for ideas)
Bgdf.com (board game designers’ forum)

And many others

Download and try engines (for programmers and designers), XNA, Torque, RPGMaker, Source, etc.

Application software:
Maya Personal Edition 8.5 (2008)
30 day 3D Studio Max
30 day Photoshop CS3
Blender
Gimp
MS Expression Graphic Designer

Resume

Your Web site
Geocities free
Freehostia free
Lunarpages <$100 / year (my host and package for pulsiphergames.com)

Portfolios (on the Web, and paper/CD/DVD)

Modding/make scenarios

Be a guest speaker (libraries, schools)

Write things (Gamasutra, many other Web sites, Game Developer Magazine)

Remember that many businesses do drug testing of prospective employees

Marwood Ellis came across some interesting networking advice about the Game Developers Conference (and possibly other events) that could be useful to students.

http://www.igda.org/articles/mmencher_networking05.php

Another article written
http://www.igda.org/articles/mmencher_networking06.php

a list of other articles written:
http://www.igda.org/Forums/showthread.php?s=9c6f2892ee6d8d60253a0e792da87a80&threadid=20528

Slides about size of modern electronic games

2007-10-26T09:04:00.001-04:00

As a follow-up to posts about the sheer size of modern electronic games, I made a set of slides linked here.

Playtesting is "Sovereign"

2007-10-25T22:11:00.000-04:00

I've been known to say about game design that "Prototypes are sovereign", that you haven't really designed a game until you have a playable prototype. That's because, until the game is played, you just cannot really know what you've got. But I would be just as right to say "playtesting is sovereign".

When you design a game, you try to see in your "mind's eye" how the game is going to work, but until you play it, you simply cannot know what is going to work and what is not. The first few times you play, many things will change (provided, of course, that you're willing to make changes, which is a major requirement of a game designer).

Granted more experienced designers can foresee weaknesses and eliminate them before reaching the prototype stage. But we're interested here in teaching game design, so this is addressed to inexperienced designers.

Let's clarify something right now. I am talking about playtesting to improve gameplay, not testing to squash programming bugs. The latter is what is often meant by "testing" when people talk about electronic games, and this testing takes place late in the development cycle, when the gameplay and appearance are set in stone (because it's too late to make major changes). This bug testing ("Quality Assurance") is aimed at making sure the game works the way it is supposed to, not at whether the way it's supposed to work is good or not. "Bug testing" essentially does not exist in non-electronic games, although it is important (and often forgotten) to test the production version of a game, as converting the prototype into the published version can introduce its own set of problems. (For example, the boxes on Population Track on the FFG Britannia board are really too small for the purpose; this new version of the board evidently was not actually tested.)

So: here I'm talking about playtesting the gameplay and assorted details (such as user interface) that strongly affect gameplay.

There are three stages to playtesting: solo playtesting (also called "alpha"), local playtesting ("beta"), and "blind" playtesting (also part of the "beta" stage). (In electronic games, often the in-house testing is all called "alpha", and outside testing is called "beta".)

Few non-video games are meant to be played alone. Yet in solo playtesting, the designer plays the game solitaire, playing all the sides independently as best he can. At this stage the designer is trying to get the game to a state where other playtesters have a good likelihood of enjoying it, and of playing it through to the end. At solo stage the designer might try a portion of the game and then stop because something isn't working, or because he has a better idea. When asking other people to play a game I would never stop a game in the middle, or try something that might be so bad I'd want to stop, though I know of designers who think nothing of doing this.

Most video games can be played alone, and if there's a more-than-one-player component, it's usually impossible for the designer to play several sides by himself.

At the local playtesting stage, people are asked to play the game through, usually in the presence of the designer when it is a non-electronic game. Almost always, at the beginning of this beta testing I do not have a full set of rules, I just have notes about how to play, and some of the details are in my head. (This is a big reason why it is much quicker to design a non-electronic game. With an electronic game all the "rules" must be settled precisely before the programming of the prototype can be completed. The programming is the equivalent of the rules of the non-electronic game.) As local playtesting goes on, I make a rough set of rules, then finally write a full set of rules.

As the local playtests occur, I write down notes about what I see and hear, and especially about answers to questions that need to be incorporated into the full rules. By the time I have a full set of rules, I usually refer to the rules for detailed questions, to see if the rules cover that question and whether it is easy to find that information.

The third stage is "blind" testing, where someone is given the game and must play it without any intervention from the designer. This is a test of the rules, somewhat akin to "bug testing". Are the rules clear enough that people can play the game from the rules? What questions do the blind testers come up with, and how can the rules be improved as a result? Unfortunately, nowadays people are often poor rules-readers, so I advocate electronic tutorials to help people learn how to play a game.

I know from experience with published games, especially Britannia, that there will ALWAYS be people who misread rules, sometimes willfully. 99% clarity of detail is about the best you can get using the English language.

In a sense, electronic games can jump to "blind" testing quickly, because by their very nature these games hide the rules from the players, enforcing them through the programming. This is an advantage of electronic games over non-electronic, that no one needs to read and understand a set of rules.

Game design, when taken to completion, is highly interactive. Playtesting sets good games apart from bad, and playtesting is (or should be) interactive. In a separate post I list some of the things you must look for while doing beta testing.

There is no doubt that the last 20% of refinement of a game takes 80% of the designer's time. Playtesting is time-consuming, tweaking rules is time-consuming. In the non-electronic world, often a "developer", another person, does much of this testing and tweaking. I personally strongly prefer to do this myself, even though it is much less fun than creating new games, because I don't want someone else "screwing up" my game. (See http://www.pulsipher.net/gamedesign/developers.htm for some of my experiences.)

Even when you don't intend to change the rules, rewriting them introduces unintended consequences (as evidenced by the Britannia Second Edition rules rewrite by FFG--and apparently having no testing of the new version of the rules compounded the problem). When you rewrite to change a rule, the repercussions are often larger. So a remarkable amount of testing is needed.

In the electronic world it is difficult to quickly and cheaply make big changes in a prototype. This is one of the problems that all makers of electronic games face, and a major reason why some electronic games are not very good. By the time the development studio has a playable prototype, it is too late in the schedule to make the changes that playtesting reveals are necessary.

At some point during playtesting of a game, the designer must decide if "there's something in it" (as I put it): if the game is really good enough that people might play it, like it, and would buy the finished version of it. There's really two times when this should happen, once during solo playtests (alpha testing), the second time during playtesting by others (beta testing). The "something in it" point in solo playtesting is an indicator that it's about ready for others to play. The "something in it" point in beta testing comes when observing people playing the game and their reactions during and after playing.

Usually I need to tweak a game quite a bit from its state at the end of solo play, before I can reach the "something in it" stage of beta testing. Sometimes there doesn't seem to be anything in it during beta testing, and I set it aside for further thought. Sometimes I realize, from solo playing, that there isn't "something in it", at least not yet, so I set it aside at that point.

I strongly suspect that novice designers rarely understand these stages. Their egos become involved, and they assume that because they took the time to make the game, and it's their idea, there must be something in it. In extreme cases, the "designer" thinks he has "something in it" when all he has is an idea, that is, when he has virtually nothing at all. The number of people who think they've successfully designed a game, yet haven't playtested it at all, is remarkable. Playtesting is the meat of successful design, not the end. (I confess that I don't think of "development" as a process separate from design.)

So how do you recognize when there's "something in" a game? That's hard to say, unfortunately. Surveys or written feedback won't necessarily reveal it. In alpha testing, the "something in it" stage is a gradual realization, coming from observing my own thought processes as I play. My games are, almost without exception, strategy games. When I "see" myself thinking hard about the strategies, and liking the options, then I may think there's something in it.

In my case, in beta testing when spontaneously (without any urging) people say "I'd buy this game", I know I've got something. However, this is rare, and I don't remember anyone ever saying that about Britannia, or Dragon Rage, or Valley of the Four Winds, but they have all been quite popular. Perhaps better, if people want to play the game again, in this day of the "cult of the new" when hardly anyone plays a game twice in the same session, there may be "something in it".

I am very low-key in beta playtesting, preferring to watch reactions of people rather than try to solicit opinions, in part because people (being polite for the most part) won't say negative things even when asked. I also try not to play, as 1) the designer playing in a game tends to skew results and 2) when I play, I do a worse job of playing, and a worse job of evaluating the playtesting, than if I did either alone. As I'm that strange sort of person who enjoys watching games as much as playing, why play?

I do not "inflict" a game on players until I think it is good enough to be OK to play, that is, I've reached that first "something in it" stage. Evidently some other designers playtest with other people very early: not me. My playtesters play games to have fun, not as on obligation, and most are not hard-core boardgamers, so I do what I can to make sure the game MIGHT be fun before I ask them to play.

As I said, playtesters tend to be polite. It's hard to find out what they really think. I am skeptical that a feedback sheet will make a difference. Rather,
I sometimes try the "Six Hats" method (devised by Edward de Bono) when playtesting; specifically I'll ask players successively to put on their black hat (the judge), then the red hat (intuition and emotion) to see how they assess a game, and then the yellow hat (the positive side of assessing an idea) to see what they like about a game. With local playtesters I sometimes ask them to think of ways to make the game better (the green hat). Google "de Bono" or "Six Hats" for more information.

Also see the following article on Gamastutra: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20050913/sigman_01.shtml
This includes tips on constructing prototypes.

Things to watch for when playtesting

2007-10-23T09:49:00.000-04:00

Length. A game is always longer to new players, of course. But if it takes too long for new players, will they play again? Length is of course quite dependent on how much players enjoy what is happening in the game. The boardgame Civilization can take 8 to 12 hours, but those who love the game don't find that time weighs upon them.

Down time. Downtime is the time people must wait while someone else is taking a turn. This can be a problem even in a turn-based electronic game. Do people get bored waiting for their turn?

Is the game balanced. Even if the game is symmetric (all players start with identical situations), is there an advantage to playing first (or last). Chess is symmetric except for who moves first, but move-first is a big advantage.

Dominant Strategy. Look for any dominant strategy ("saddle point"). This is a strategy that is so good that a player who wants to win must pursue it; or a strategy so good that some will pursue it, yet that strategy renders the game less than entertaining. For example, in a Euro-style 4X game I've designed, one player found that by getting together a sufficiently large force, along with certain technology research, he could completely dominate other players who weren't pursuing the identical strategy. I want the game to offer a variety of ways to success, so I had to change the rules fairly extensively. This is why it is very important to have testers who are dynamite game players, so that they'll find these strategies during testing, rather than have someone find it after the game is published. I'm luck that I have one such player, and that I can be such a player myself when I put my mind to it.

Analysis paralysis. Are there too many things to watch for or keep track of, or too many choices, so players either freeze up or give up on figuring out what is the best thing to do? There are always "deliberate" (slow) players, the question is, is everyone slow or frustrated?

Rules difficult to grasp. What do the players find hard to grasp. (In my prototype Age of Exploration, players had trouble grasping the difference between movement of units and placement of units. I used the same distinction in an abstract stones-and-hexes prototype, and no one has a problem. Even if, after playing, players "get it", it might be necessary to change something. (In AoE I changed the rules extensively to recast/eliminate the distinction.)

What do players tend to forget? This isn't quite the same thing as what's difficult to grasp. Some rules just don't stick in people's minds. Is there anything you can do about it? Is there some play aid to help people remember?

What do players not bother to use? Some rules exist but no one uses them. If the threat of using them is not making a difference in the game, then perhaps you should eliminate the option. For example, in my hex-and-stones game Law and Chaos I originally allowed people to move a piece rather than place one. This happened rarely, as it was usually better to place another piece and increase the number on the board. So I eliminated the possibility, except as an "optional rule".

This was done in some haste, and I imagine I'll think of more.

Here are some items added from comments on boardgamegeek.
To see the discussion on boardgamegeek go to http://www.boardgamegeek.com/article/1810302#1810302

Adequate control. Do the players feel that they can exert a measure of control over what happens in the game? Remember, any (strategic) game is a series of challenges and actions in response to those challenges. (Harmony)

Horns of a Dilemma. On the other hand, are there enough plausible decisions in a play to make the players think, but not so many that "analysis paralysis" sets in. Even in a simple game, if a player can do only two of five possible actions in a turn, is there tension here or are the plays obvious? As one commenter put it, do the players sometimes feel "so much to do, so few actions"?

Player interaction. Do the players have to take the plays of other players into account? Yes, some games are virtually multi-player solitaire, and some players are happy with this. But most players want to be able to affect other players with their moves.

Taking it to the Max. Can extreme behavior within the rules break the game? Sure, if someone pursues a bad strategy, they'll lose. The question is, is there some extreme strategy that results in an unfair game?

Components and Play Aids. Do the physical parts of the game help play flow smoothly, or does something need to be changed? Is there too much record-keeping? How can it all be simplified?

Stages of play. You probably learn this in alpha/solo testing, if you do solo testing (which I strongly recommend). Are there identifiable stages in the game, especially ones where the typical run of play changes? E.g., in chess there is the early, middle, and end games. Pieces are deployed in the opening, mix it up in the midgame, and so forth. An exploration game has the expansion period followed by consolidation and then (usually) conflict. Etc.

Player interest/"fun". What part(s) of the game seem to be most interesting to the players? I'm not in favor of trying to figure out "fun", because fun comes from the people who are playing more than from the game design itself. And there are many games that I wouldn't call "fun" (including Britannia) that are nonetheless interesting and even fascinating.

Finally, remember Antoine de Saint-Exup'ery's maxim: “A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

Sailors on the Seas of Fate

2007-10-20T08:31:00.001-04:00

My title is a variation of a book title by Michael Moorcock (from the Elric of Melnibone series), a title that has always stuck in my mind.

I am a literal-minded person to an extreme, and as a result I am not good at making up analogies: I would rather discuss the reality than some comparison to that reality. However, I've come up with an analogy that might help students and teachers understand what's going on in many classes, so I'll explain it here.

We are all figuratively "cast upon the seas of fate" in a class, or in life as a whole. But we respond to that differently, in ways that are relatively easy to see in a class. Some are captains of sturdy sailing vessels, some are sailors on small boats, and some are castaways on makeshift rafts (or, like a message in a bottle, bobbing along on the waves without direction).

The Captains are guiding their ships, looking for the best winds and currents, keeping a "weather eye" at all times. They intend to do all they can to reach port. Some of the Captains have helpers (significant others, family, friends, mentors) providing support, some are "solo sailors". But all depend on themselves first of all to get where they need to go.

Their answer to the following two questions is to "disagree". "Luck plays a big part in what happens to me" and "When I'm required to do something (as at work or school) I do just enough to get by." They recognize that much of what happens to them is their doing, not someone else's fault.

Yes, these Captains can be thwarted by the "perfect storm", by circumstances (such as illness) that they truly cannot control. But they're doing their best to avoid those situations.

In terms of students, these are the ones who keep track of when work is due, who actually read textbooks (well, in the current generation, sometimes), who know what "study" means, who are trying to get an "A" rather than a B or C.

At the other extreme are the castaways, or the "message in a bottle", drifting along on the waves, hoping that they'll be carried to a good destination. Like a message in a bottle, they have little influence over where they're going. Like a castaway on a makeshift raft, they might have rigged up a sail, or they might have a paddle, but when things go wrong they often just throw up their hands and say "it's not my fault" instead of doing what they can to guide their fate. These are the folks who tend to blame everything that happens to them on someone or something else. They may indeed have difficult family circumstances, financial problems, and so on, but in the end it is usually a lack of WILL that will do them in.

Their answer to the two questions is to "agree". ("Luck plays a big part in what happens to me" and "When I'm required to do something (as at work or school) I do just enough to get by.") "It's not my fault" is their mantra. They may feel that the world "owes them something", but they find out that in the adult world that isn't true. The "world" is cruel and heartless. In classes, they are likely to fail, or to get really poor grades.

The third group, the sailors, are the "in-betweeners". They are looking to survive rather than to prosper. They try to guide their small boats, but often wish someone else was in charge, and sometimes aren't very diligent. Often they are looking for help. Sometimes they can get it, from family and friends and acquaintances (and teachers), sometimes not. In the end, in a class, you have to do it yourself, and sometimes they're up to it, sometimes not.

In classes they sometimes do what they need to do, sometimes not. They are often content with a C grade, or maybe a B. Their responses to the two questions are often in the middle, of course. They may learn better habits and become captains, or they may fall into the castaway category, or they may muddle along as sailors.

In a community college class you'll find a big proportion of sailors, quite a few castaways, and a variable number of captains. At Duke or UNC-CH you'll find a great many captains and few castaways, but still a goodly proportion of sailors. Many of the sailors will soon become captains, however.

Unfortunately, most K12 education is now designed to produce castaways far more often than captains. People are often told exactly what to memorize for the "end of class" test, regurgitate it, and go on to the next year, without having learned much, certainly without having learned good habits. What they do during the year in class doesn't matter much, what matters is the end of class test. Consequently the students are trained rather than educated. So in college, especially community college, we get many people who are ill-prepared to succeed in classes (or in life, unfortunately).

Where is the teacher in all this? The teacher is the Admiral, the Convoy Commander in wartime, trying to shepherd their fleet to the proper port(s) through dangerous waters. Unfortunately, the Admiral cannot sail every vessel; and when there's a straggler, the Admiral cannot stop (and endanger) the entire fleet for one member. The Admiral can only provide an example, and lead, and provide assistance when practical, and hope that all will follow.

So I say to students, imagine you are "cast upon the seas of fate". How are you going to react, what are you going to do about it?

Lew Pulsipher

Inefficiency of big teams

2007-10-13T18:53:00.000-04:00

Tyler Bello sent the following comment on size of games directly to me:

"I noticed your blog post's about team size/development time and wanted to add something. The business world ticks very slowly, this applies to big game studios. If you compare indy projects to big projects of the same caliber (regardless of sales/studio etc.) you will notice that the indy titles develop 10x faster than the ones from the big studios and with much smaller teams (or, at the same pace, with much smaller teams).

The first example that comes to mind is Project Offset. In only 1.5 years a team of 3 (1 programmer 2 artists) created an incredible engine. I would attribute this to the efficiency of small teams, the bigger the motor the less efficient it is with gas usage.

You can view the video under the downloads tab.

http://www.projectoffset.com/team.html

Another very small team company , whose games happen to sell wildly, is Introversion (Uplink 1 programmer, Darwinia/Defcon 2 programmers). They started with Uplink, which recieved mild sales but much praise. They then moved on to Darwinia which was a smash hit and now Defcon which went straight to Steam and is also very popular.

Minuscule teams can still make games that are just as good/beautiful/whatever as the big dudes, it's just not as common.

I just don't think that teams should be as big as they are and games don't have to take as long as they do to make. The process is drawn out by bureaucracy."

I've seen a few magazine ads for Darwinia, but of about 40 students I asked, only one had played Darwinia, and that only a demo (verdict: not so good). Evidently it isn't quite in the same category as Oblivion, Halo 3, Rainbow 6, and other very well-known games.

When a big publisher plans to publish a major game, they intend to spend a large sum on marketing. Introversion, as a smaller publisher selling games in less-than-top outlets, may not need to spend that kind of money.

Whenever large sums are at risk, companies will want to manage that risk, and monitor it. Managing risk is very important: if your project depends on very few people, then the risk that one or more of them will quit, or become incapacitated, or simply not be up to the task, is very significant. There's every incentive to spread the risk amongst more people, hence a larger group. There's also the notion that more people will finish faster, though this is sometimes regarded as a fallacy where programming is involved, generating a classic book (which I have not read, I must say) called The Mythical Man-Month. http://www.amazon.com/Mythical-Man-Month-Software-Engineering-Anniversary/dp/0201835959/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/105-2718850-6987636?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1192314711&sr=8-1
Further, there will be more people whose job is to monitor and coordinate, because there are more programmers.

I have a saying: "The level of chaos increases with the square of the number of people involved. The level of chaos increases with the CUBE of the number of people IN CHARGE." And more chaos means less efficiency.

I'm also guessing that Introversion self-financed their games, that is, made the prototype and then found a publisher. If so, then Introversion assumed much of the risk, and could choose to risk depending on one or two programmers.

We need to remember also that in the "beautiful" games, there are many more artists than programmers involved.

"You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink."

2007-10-13T18:20:00.001-04:00

The title above is an old saying that I'm reminded of this time of year, as some students are now stumbling toward either dropping out or flunking. Sometimes the problems are practical (finances, transportation), sometimes they come from being in too many classes (which can be solved by dropping out of one or more), but often they occur because the student is his or her own worst enemy. That is, the student has the brains and sufficient time (if managed properly) to succeed, but not the WILL.

One of the most disappointing things that can happen to a teacher is to lose students. However, a teacher can only provide suitable conditions for learning; no one can "make" someone learn in a democratic free society. So the teacher leads the student to the possibility of learning, but if the student won't do it, it won't happen.

Sometimes students just disappear, and sometimes I can see what's coming but no amount of talking or helping can make enough difference. The teacher cannot do the work for the student. Some of the students who lack the will come up with myriad excuses why they cannot do what they need to do, others just... don't do it.

In general there are three groups of students: those who do the required outside-of-class work on time, and usually do it well; those who don't do any required work, which almost guarantees failure; and a third in-between group, who may do some things and not others.

Roughly speaking, the first group also shows up to every class, the second group misses many classes, and the third in-between group is unpredictable in their attendance. (Remember, attendance is generally the best predictor of success in college classes.)

My "Advice about taking a test"

2007-10-06T10:52:00.000-04:00

The following is advice I give to students. It encapsulates my philosophy about test-creation almost as much as about test-taking, so I'm including it here.

Advice About Taking a Test
L. Pulsipher

I am NOT trying to trick you with questions. Trick questions are pointless and serve no purpose. Poorly worded questions can always appear to be tricky, but I try hard to avoid that.

Answer the question. Simple advice, but sometimes people talk about this and that but not about the question! Some teachers tell people, “if you don’t know the answer, talk about something that’s close to the topic, and if you’re right I’ll give you some credit.” Not here. If you have a problem to solve at work and you know the solution to some other problem, it doesn’t help, does it? Nor will it on a test. Having said that, I’m infamous for giving half and even quarter credit for an answer.

If the question includes a comparison or contrast between two things, be sure to address both of them in your answer--don’t discuss one and assume we all know about the other, because the test grader can’t assume that.

Don’t beg the question--that is, don’t give as an answer a reworded version of the question. For example, if you’re asked why such-and-such is true, don’t answer that such-and-such is true (even using different wording): say WHY.

In most cases (other than multiple choice and true-false) use complete sentences, or at least complete phrases. On the other hand, if the question specifically asks you just to name three of something, listing those three will be good enough.

Finally, always remember that as I grade test I have no idea who is giving the answers. I may know, from talking with you, that you know such-and-such, but if it isn’t on paper (or in the computer), it doesn’t count.

Even little games take a lot of work

2007-10-04T20:01:00.001-04:00

I've just read an article in PC Gamer that cites six months and six people to program a cell phone game, Orks & Elves 2, with a little help from famous game programmer John Carmack. They were limited to 300K (not M or G), though I'm not sure whether that was storage space or RAM.

Modern video games are incredibly large

2007-10-04T10:22:00.000-04:00

A recent GameInformer magazine described the budget and related parameters for an "A list" console game (I cannot recall which game or platform.)

Budget:
10% marketing
8% testing
15% design
20% art
30% programming
etc.
(Sorry, it was a student's copy of the magazine, I didn't write it down at the time, and I could not access it online--so this is from memory.)

There were 1,767,000 line of code in the game. Let's get a handle on this. A single-spaced normal page has 54 lines of text. Let's round that down to 50 because some program lines will be longer than the width of the page. 100,000 lines, then, is 2,000 pages of text. A million lines is 20,000 pages.

So let's try a million lines. How long would it take a typist, typing 50 words a minute, to type 20,000 pages of text? A line is about 13 words. Let's call it 10 to account for short lines. Then each page would be 500 words, or 10 minutes. 20,000 pages is 200,000 minutes. That is 139 days of typing 24 hours a day.

Actually, 50 words a minute is optimistic; code is much harder to type than normal text, and must be completely without typos or it will not work.

Now consider that this code must actually be written (created) and tested, which takes immensely longer than mere typing. Nor can we have people working nonstop for 139 days. And this is only just more than half the entire game program, since we did only a million lines.

Now add in the time for creating the artwork. Generally, at least twice as many people work on art as on programming.

So now we've covered just half the budget!

In contrast, we have three hours of lab a week, times 16 weeks, or 48 hours (really less than that considering breaks). So what are the chances that we, in a one semester class, can even scratch the surface of creating an A-list video game? Nil, nought, nada, infinitesimal: none.

The days when one person could create a well-known video game ended around 1990. And even then, that person took much longer than both our game design classes combined, in an era when graphics were primitive and everything was much simpler.

There's a saying, "you can't get together nine newly-pregnant women and have a baby in a month." In other words, some things just take a long time, no matter how badly you want them to happen faster.

This is why I tell people, if you want to learn to create good games, you need to use non-video games, where you can get to a playable prototype in a short time, not in "forever". Until you have a playable prototype, you haven't done even 20% of the work.

Be sure to read Ian's comment to this post, as he has the full figures and makes an interesting comparison to numbers of semesters of work involved.

A related post explores the percentages of work done.

October 26: I have worked on this further and made a set of slides (a rarity). The file is linked here.

Percentage of time spent on various stages of a game

2007-10-04T10:21:00.000-04:00

In a non-electronic game, the time spent by the designer and developer (this is sometimes two different people) is approximately:

10-15% Design
10-15% Prototype production and initial testing to arrive at a full set of rules that works. Most of this time is spent on the rules, not the physical prototype
75% Development: playtesting and revision

For an electronic game the percentages are different. I confess for electronic games I am "pulling these out of the air", they are estimates, and undoubtedly will vary greatly from one company to another.

10-15% Design
60% Production of a developmental prototype (this is very time-consuming)
15-20% Playtesting and revision of that prototype
10% Testing for programming bugs

This is "actual", not desirable. Blizzard works with no deadlines because they can easily self-fund projects. They can say "the game will be released when it is done". Most likely they spend more time on a game than the typical development studio, and a lot of that additional time is spent on playtesting and revision of the prototype. So their percentages would be different. This is the way the game ought to be made, but few companies have the track record of success and constant influx of royalties that Blizzard enjoys, so they can't afford to do it that way. This helps explain why so many newly-released games are seriously buggy.

We have to be careful about the word "prototype". Electronic game prototypes are often very limited versions of a game produced to get some idea of what it will actually be like, and are part of the design process; they are then discarded and work begins on the actual game, which ultimately arrives at a "developmental prototype" that can be turned into the game that will be sold.

High school methods won't work in college

2007-09-28T08:31:00.000-04:00

In community colleges, the following kind of reminder must be repeated over and over before students "get it", and unfortunately some never do. The latter are usually gone before the second semester starts, sadly. This is roughly the spiel:

"College is not high school. You can't fail to turn in work and expect to get a decent grade; you might not even pass. What you could get away with in high school won't work here, among other things because in high school the teachers and schools get blamed if kids don't learn, whereas in college it's the student's fault. The teacher is there to give you every opportunity to learn, but cannot force you to learn anything.

This is, of course, much more like the real world than high school is.

I'm told that the graduation rate of my entire school is 17% (about 1 in 6). There are lots of ways that statistic can be modified, but it makes the basic point: students have to work at what they're doing in order to get a college degree. That degree will serve them well down the road, but only if they work to get it.

What might have excused you at some high schools will not excuse you in college. 'My computer died' won't work, because there are computers on campus (in open lab, in the library, in ILC/Guided Studies/whatever it might be called at a given school). 'My car died' won't work for long, any more than it will in your job. 'I had to work' is a matter of time management. 'I can't afford the book' is rarely believable. EVERYone can find ways to save time and money if they really want to; virtually no one is right at the edge, though many think they are. It is very difficult to do reasonably well in school, work a lot at a job, play video games or watch TV hours a day, and still make it. Something's got to give, and if school is what gives way, then you'll be one of those who are gone by second semester.

You have to take responsibility for yourselves, folks. School is, in a sense, your job internship. If you miss deadlines when you're making games, it may cost your company large sums of money--and could cost you your job. Get used to deadlines. Don't give excuses, give results."

But this often goes in one ear and out the other. I try to help people get used to this regime as much as I can, but in the end I can't hold 100 hands for months. People have to get with the program and do it themselves.

Millennials (Gen Y) have much different attitudes toward school than earlier generations did, which makes this entire situation much more difficult. Typically (there are of course many exceptions) they want an "easy button", they don't think practice is necessary, they want convenience, they expect to get something for nothing, and they're inclined to quit if the going gets tough. No wonder graduation rates are so low.

What predicts success in class

2007-09-26T06:18:00.000-04:00

A couple years ago I listened to a keynote speech at a NC community college system conference (statewide teachers conference) by a gent who had visited 1,600+ colleges to learn how things were done.

One of the things he talked about was the best predictor of success in college classes.
It is not SAT scores or "IQ".
It is not high school grades.
It is not family history.
It is not family income.

It is how well the student attends classes.

This matches my experience. It is worth telling students, who often have the notion that they can miss class and not really miss anything. (Students will thoughtlessly insult the instructor by coming up and saying "am I going to miss anything by leaving an hour early"? Or, "did I miss anything when I wasn't here Tuesday?" What, we often don't do anything important in class?) I tell students at the beginning of a course that I talk about a lot of things that aren't in any textbook, and that we do a lot of hands-on or group activities. These are things that cannot be "made up", especially in our age when students are inattentive and frequently don't write down any notes. In the past I usually included in the tests questions that were easy to answer if you were in class, but not easy if you weren't (and so hadn't participated in the problem-solving sessions). This semester I have "canned" tests (which I strongly dislike, as they tend to be tests about the textbook rather than about the subject), but I intend to work questions about problems we encountered in class, and discussions we had in class, in there some way.

Obviously, I don't teach the way some classes are taught in universities, where the professor walks in, lectures (all one-way) to a few hundred students, and never even learns their names. There the students can get recordings of the lectures and know almost as much as if they had been there, and some schools produce podcasts of lectures for that purpose. I try to discuss things with students, which doesn't translate well to podcasts, though I sometimes record myself using my Sansa MP3 player. Younger students, in particular, strongly prefer interaction during class, rather than "lectures".

Honesty is the Best Policy

2007-09-23T10:35:00.000-04:00

I do not lie to students. "Honesty is the best policy" really applies, and I've always thought that if you're going to lie, it should be about something of near life-and-death importance.

Consequently, I ignore those who say "let them dream", by making sure that students have a chance to understand reality. I think this is especially important with millennials, who have often been told from day one how special they are, and then are shocked to learn in the real world that this isn't so.

The first day I repeat something that famous game developer of olden days Chris Crawford said at an NCCIA conference a few years ago: There are 10 times as many people wanting jobs in the game industry as there are openings. (10 is an illustrative number, of course, who knows the actual numbers--more than 10, I'd bet.) Consequently, even if you're hired, you'll not be treated well, because there are always lots more folks wanting your job. Working conditions are often poor and hours are long. Many people leave the industry within five years. (But often end up in simulations and training industries.) Nonetheless, Chris said, feel free to tell your students this, because they'll still want to "go for it". And that is my experience.

I also tell students in game design classes that there is virtually no chance they will be hired right out of school to design games. Who is going to spend a lot of money producing a game designed by a person with no industry experience or track record in design? Nobody who stays in business for long! However, at my school it is quite possible for a good level designer to be hired straight out of school for that purpose, because we have many game studios and manufacturers in the local area. Where there are no local companies, I doubt that enough people to say so will be hired in any kind of game or level design capacity straight out of school.

Localization

2007-09-21T09:40:00.000-04:00

The topic of localization of games will come up in many classes, but beyond the point of "different language" students may not see what there is to do. American students tend to be fairly insular; many have never been in a foreign country, and few outside North America. So I give some examples.

For many years one of Chevy's main vehicles was the "Nova". The name needed to be changed for the Spanish-speaking market, however, because (I'm told) the word means "no go" in Spanish.

IBM for many years sold the very successful "RS6000" mid-range computer system. Unfortunately, Australians use "RS" the way we would use "BS" as a term of denigration or disapproval. So IBM was selling the "RatShit6000" computer in Australia.

Those are examples I've read about. Here are some I've encountered myself. I lived in England for three years in the late 70s . Many people know that the English call a truck a lorry, the hood of a car a bonnet, and the trunk of a car a boot.

However, at one point I was talking with two young ladies (one of whom became my wife) and said something about the pants they were wearing. They both looked at me strangely, and it finally emerged that the outer garment we call pants is called trousers in England. "Pants" refers only to underwear!

Much more recently, I was playing a game with my English nephew and niece, and niece dropped a piece which skittered away. I told her to "shag it", that is, go get it. They looked at me strangely (niece was 12 or 13 at the time) and I remembered (from an Austin Powers movie!) that "shag" means the physical act of making love, in England. Oops.

Helping students understand the importance of grades

2007-09-20T09:38:00.000-04:00

So many students coming out of high school think grades are pointless, that I have to do as much as possible to encourage them to recognize the importance of grades. I think it is easier to teach highly-motivated people without using grades (which is how Continuing Education works), but a school has a responsibility to evaluate students so that employers can have an additional way to choose between them. The following illustrates that.

Someone tells me that about 15 years ago, my school fell victim to one of the "education experts" who have gradually ruined K12 schools. This "expert" (who likely never taught at this level) said that if a student wasn't getting an A, it was the fault of the school for not doing the right things. The school swallowed this foolishness, and one year the only grade anyone received was an "A".

When employers found out about this, they came to the school and said they would no longer consider our graduates for jobs. They couldn't tell who had done a good job in school and who had not, because all the grades were A. They wanted the school to give grades that reflected actual achievement.

And the school changed back to the standard way of doing things.

My wife, who hired many, many people when she was chief librarian at Methodist College (17 years), definitely paid attention to grades. I tried to when I hired people. If you aren't doing well in school, why would you be expected to do a good job in the real world? In a sense, school is a job internship for the student.

Getting a good grade requires effort (and capability) from the student. The teacher can only give the opportunity, he or she cannot be a magic pill that enables you to learn without effort (Matrix-style). It may be easier for some people than others, but a student has to EARN an A, or earn a B. A "C" is not "average", it's a poor grade, in most schools. Heck, it's flunking in graduate school.

Game (High) Concept documents

2007-09-16T19:25:00.001-04:00

A typical exercise for game design students is to have them write a "High Concept" document for a game.

It's first necessary to make the students understand that this way of approaching game design is absolutely unnatural. Non-electronic game designers do not write formal High Concept documents, which are marketing documents, before they make the game. They may write something like it when it's time to approach publishers, but at that point they have a finished or nearly-finished game.

The reason the document is created, then, is that producing the programming, art, and other assets for a big electronic game is very time-consuming and costs a lot of money. With few exceptions, the development studios do not have that kind of money (any more than movie directors and producers have that kind of money). So they cannot practically produce the game "on speculation", the way a non-electronic game can be inexpensively produced. Hence they have to describe the game to help persuade someone to give them a lot of money to produce it. The game that comes out of this will be almost certainly be significantly different than the game that was described to begin with, if the job is done well.

The "natural" way to design a game used to be pursued in the electronic game industry, and may still be done for small games. A playable prototype is produced as soon as possible. It is played, revised, played, revised, played revised, seemingly forever, until a stable "good game" has been produced. Perhaps the most famous of all electronic game designers, Sid Meier, did this with Civilization. He programmed, he and (mostly) Bruce Shelley played, they decided what needed to be changed, Sid programmed, they played, and so on. In non-electronic games, you don't really have a game until you have a prototype to play, and then "playtesting is sovereign".

Students often are not entirely clear in their ideas until they write them down. When (back in 2004) I had a much smaller class to deal with, I talked with each student about their ideas before they wrote the document, and found that their "brilliant idea" was only half formed. I'd ask fairly elementary questions about their game and they would have no answer, because they'd never thought about it.

I did not have the opportunity to do that with a class of 47 students (SGD111), but I am sending comments back to each one so that they can revise the document and submit it again for grading.

The concepts tend to be highly derivative of other games, not only because the entire "big electronic game" industry is highly derivative in its offering, but because the students have played games virtually their entire lives, know games that they like (or love), and think of ways that they can improve those games. These are the ideas they are going to present first, of course.

Then the difficulty is showing that their version is going to be better than those well-known games they like.

The High Concept is not about mechanics, but in many cases it is the mechanics of a game that the student says will sell it--better battle methods, for example. In some cases they describe the method, but in some they don't.

Another common theme is "our story is better, deeper, etc." I told one student that unless he had a well-known game writer or novelist on his staff, there was no reason to think his game's story would be better than any other. So this isn't a selling point, unless you can back it up.

Another common theme is "better graphics than" such-and-such. I have to tell the students that almost every "A-list" game strives for great graphics, but few succeed. What will make the publishers think your game will for some reason have truly great graphics? Only a track record for your studio of great graphics, unfortunately. So it isn't a selling point.

Sometimes students will say in their document, "I think this will be a really solid game, so it should be produced". I have to tell them that their belief means little to the marketers and publishers. Yes, they want to know that you believe the game will be really good, rather than something just to put food on your table, but they should be able to tell that from your demeanor and discussion when you talk with them--having it in writing is nothing.

Students sometimes don't understand how important it is to express themselves clearly and confidently. Also, students need to have impressed upon them at some point that grammatical problems may be the "kiss of death" for concept papers. If I'm a publisher, do I want to risk my money with someone who can't even get the spelling and grammar in a short paper right? Maybe not.

In general, designing non-electronic games is actually a better exercise, and much more practical, but I'll have to talk about that another time.

"And a miracle occurs"

2007-09-12T18:29:00.000-04:00

I saw a cartoon once that showed a professorial type writing on a blackboard. The blackboard was covered with minuscule equations, except in the middle, where it said "and a miracle occurs". We can always feel like that about math and science occasionally.

My experience is that novice game designers tend to do the same thing, when conceptualizing a game, without thinking about it. They figure out most of the details of a game, but in at least one important part they kind of ignore the difficulties and just figure it will work out somehow ("and a miracle occurs"). Unfortunately, that may be the part of the game that just isn't possible, or practical, that renders the entire thing pointless.

Students have got to face the details, not gloss over them, at least to the point of figuring out what's practical.

I'm going to give an example from one class, because it happens to stand out in my mind.

The idea, originally expressed by one of the students well before the conceptualization exercise, was a game (say chess) in which mirrors are placed on the pieces to reflect at angles a laser. The pieces must be placed so as to reflect the laser to hit the enemy king.

I said at the time that this game is commercially impossible, because no publisher could risk selling a game containing a laser (dangerous to the eyes) that reflects around, no matter how many warnings and disclaimers were included in the game. But that's not the "miracle" part. The question is, how do you get the laser to bounce around the pieces? The laser can come from any of 8, or perhaps 4, directions, yet the mirrors need to bounce it in another direction, not back toward the source. How is that going to work?

It needs to be diagrammed in detail to make sure that it can work. I convinced the group to diagram, and we began to get somewhere. I tried to get them to make diagrams of individual pieces so that you could follow the trail of a virtual laser as it moved "through" (reflected from) each piece, but that didn't happen that day.

This is a very difficult thing to achieve, but the designers felt that somehow it would just work out--that "a miracle would occur".

The next week the students discovered that there is already a boardgame using lasers bounced off mirrors. See http://boardgamegeek.com/game/16991. It is self-published using a National Collegiate Inventors & Innovators Alliance grant; I'd still say that no commercial publisher would risk it.

This is in fact a game that would work best on computer, perhaps as a flashy-looking "casual game", but that's not what "the boss" in the conceptualization exercise wanted to achieve--he was looking for a non-video game.

Boardgames, cardgames, role-playing games, and video games all do different things well, and some things not so well. Sometimes the nature of the game will force you to a particular method, and that may force you to abandon the game in order to move toward your commercial goal.

My situation

2007-09-12T18:22:00.001-04:00

I've come into a "Simulation and Game Development" two year degree program founded by Walter Rotenberry et. al. at Wake Tech. This term I have about a hundred students, mostly in "Game Design One", some in "Introduction to SGD". The department head (SGD is part of the programming department, though most of the students aren't likely to become progammers) tells me my students are really different, and maybe that's true, though they don't seem all that different from the CIT students I have at CCCC. They are certainly millennials (average age 20, only a couple more than 30 years old), with all that entails and implies. Several already have bachelors or associates degrees. If we had more labs and more teachers we could have more than 100 students (in fact, we have about 120 in the five Intro classes, but there are only four design classes). The student demand is certainly there, and fortunately we have many game companies in the Triangle, so students actually have good prospects of getting jobs in the industry.

What this is

2007-09-12T18:18:00.000-04:00

This blog contains comments about teaching game design at Wake Technical Community College, Raleigh NC, by Dr. Lewis Pulsipher. (There is also a blog called Teaching Game Design on blogspot, by a teacher of game design in Ohio.) It complements my general game design blog, Pulsipher Boardgame Design (http://pulsiphergamedesign.blogspot.com/). That blog and some of this one are repeated on myspace (boardgamedesigner).