Games of Maneuver vs. games of "combat dominance"

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?

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.

More articles at Gamasutra/Game Career Guide:

More of my writing at Gamasutra/Game Career Guide:

"Opinion: Why Immersion Shouldn't Be The 'Holy Grail'" Dec 19

"Characteristics of Successful Game Designers" Dec 23

Origins of Games

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

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

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 :-)

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.