Strong Foundations

As we have previously discussed, familiarity is a vital foundation for any new concept. However, with a game as a service we have unique challenges that were not seen as important historically. The ability to sustain an audience through hundreds, if not thousands, of plays is something that needs special attention in the design. We need to balance both repeatability and uncertainty if we are to sustain our audience.

This is a topic that many designers completely miss. Too often I see games which are little more than instructions dictating how the player has to complete the puzzles as defined by the designer. Jump precisely ‘here’ to get the gem & avoid the monster. This is a terrible idea for repeatability. What is the player’s contribution to play, other than completing what you created? Don’t get me wrong I appreciate this can be a fun model for some games, but unless there are other variables than success or failure, repeatability becomes impractical. Level designs can take months of effort to perfect and if our players complete that puzzle within a few minutes and never want to go back and play that level, then it’s going to be extremely hard to make a sustainable service experience.

Sources of Uncertainty

Instead we need to find ways to build into our games a level of unpredictability or a variable strategy that will encourage repetition. But where does this uncertainty come from and how can we use it to make a better game?

Without wanting to go into too much detail on specific examples¹ you can essentially break down the sources of uncertainty to five key areas.

Taking a Chance

The first source of uncertainty is found within chance and probability. For the purposes of this book, let’s consider these to be two separate things. In this definition, we will consider “chance” to be an unchanging randomness, that crude but conceivable obstacle where the roll of a die or some behind-the-scenes random number generator determines the outcome. This is an inflexible, but “honest” or “fair” approach to introduce randomness. Traditional games such as Ludo and Monopoly use this to mix up the opportunities for players to succeed and players can always blame the roll of the dice. This can be a great leveler, but when you are the player on the negative side of the lucky rolls, it can get tired very quickly because there is no opportunity for the player to influence the result.

What’s the Probability?

On the other hand, if we define “probability” to mean a random attribute that may be influenced by other external factors, this gives us a useful comparison with chance. For example, as I improve the skill level of my character in a role-playing game the probability of my success with that skill will improve. Here the player (and the environment) influences these random factors. It becomes possible to select the best conditions and invest in the associated variables that will affect the outcome I want and, as a player, I may decide to advance those variables over time. Using this technique to inject uncertainty into a game introduces not just a sense of risk, but also a sense that the player has some level of control. It introduces a level of strategy in the game and creates a reason for players to invest in repetitive mechanics to increase those abilities or to accept that any failure during play can be traced back (at least partially) to their own decisions. However, this can be problematic, especially in the early stages, as it can appear to punish new players who have yet to learn the process. It can also lead to an emergent problem where players unduly focus on a narrow range of variables, creating a range of dominant strategies that reduce the enjoyment of play if overly relied upon.

The Skill of the Player

A second source for uncertainty can be found within the ability of the players themselves, which we know will vary for everyone who engages in the game. The idea of player performance is particularly important for games that have some degree of multiplayer behavior, but can also be used to add uncertainty or choice in single player games. Not every player will have the best thumb/eye coordination. Others might be better suited to special awareness or logic-based puzzles. Being aware of these differences, the designer can introduce obstacles that require different problem-solving abilities or alternative strategies. The problem is that too much emphasis on player performance tends to punish players who lack the prerequisite skills. Going back to Csíkszentmihályi’s concept of “flow,” this imbalance between the skills of the player and the challenge of the task can lead to anxiety; or, in the case where we “dumb down” the puzzle, it can lead to boredom. On the positive side, however, the mistakes I make are my own. Repeated failure, especially where the player considers the problem to have been their own fault can be incredibly compelling to some people. Demon Souls by From Software and SCE Japan Studio is a classic example of a game so fiendishly difficult (largely due to the “permadeath” model the game uses) that it makes me want to throw my controller out of my living room window … moments before I press the button to restart.²

Leaving Room for Interpretation

The third uncertainty source comes from ambiguity. A lack of clarity regarding how to apply the rules of the game can be particularly powerful, provided that there are still consistent rules. For example, is there is an imbalance of information between the game and the players or between opposing players? This often arises when you have rule elements that combine to create different effects. For example, with a collectable card game, each card can introduce new rule elements and the associated strategies can greatly affect the style of play we adopt. My favorite analogy for this can be found with the Californian fast food chain In-N-Out Burger.³ Rather than simply ordering off the simple menu in the restaurant you can order from the “Secret Menu” with special terms like “Double Double” (two Burgers with two Cheese) or “Animal Style” (a mustard-cooked beef patty with additional pickles, cheese, spread, and grilled onions). The system is quite flexible and you can discover different ways to customize your meal, which adds a delight. For example you can order a 3×3 (three burgers and three cheese) or a 100×100 (although they don’t server this anymore apparently).

Dilemma Brings Meaning to Choices

Ambiguity is not about a random consequences, it’s about decision-making without access to all the necessary information. Part of this is to build in a level of dilemma: a concept rarely used to its full potential in games, but used for marvelous effect in The Walking Dead. Do you save Doug or Carley when the drug store is attacked?⁴ Of course dilemma doesn’t just have to apply to a life-or-death decision. Having a limit of two weapons forces me to choose which are going to be most valuable to me in the upcoming plot. That’s a dilemma and it’s based on ambiguous information. These less critical decisions can be an incredibly important opportunity for the creation of depth in the game and of course monetization. The decisions can impact different parameters than the success or failure in the game. We can look for secondary goals or alternative ways to achieve the principle objective. I like to call the non-essential decisions in a game “soft variables,” and these soft variables can add creativity as well as reasons to rewardingly repeat otherwise static game mechanics.

Complexity Creates Emergent Behavior

Our fourth source is derived within the nature of any complex system. We may have simple rules, like with chess, but the way that the pieces interact with each other and their respective positioning introduces dozens of potential alternative moves. Thinking ahead compounds the difficulty, but to be at least reasonably proficient we need to try to think at least three moves ahead,⁵ which can introduce thousands of potential moves. Of course we mitigate this by focusing our attention on only the most beneficial moves, which are often the most likely ones. However, this very act of selection means that we can miss a pattern and find ourselves in trouble. Using complex systems in a game design can create a barrier for users who may struggle to learn these rules and how they interact with each other; rules affecting rules. In particular it becomes possible that a player will inadvertently make a simple mistake early on, which will come to punish them later. An example of this can be as simple as the “interest” mechanism used in some tower defense games.⁶ If I spend all my construction money early on in the game, I never get to gain enough interest to build the bigger turrets I will need to survive later waves of enemies in the game. This can absolutely add dilemma or ambiguous uncertainty into the game, but if it’s not clearly communicated or if the conditions aren’t perfectly balanced this can quickly become annoying if the player isn’t given some hint about what the dilemma means early enough in the process of play.

Feedback Loops

Probably the most powerful aspect of a complex system comes when you start to look at the way different rule interactions can create feedback.⁷ This is a causal relationship where one action had an impact on an outcome and it becomes particularly interesting in games when this forms loops. If in our tower defense game we have “build money” and an interest mechanic, then there is a positive feedback⁸ if we choose the tactic of not spending all our money. The interest mechanic increases both the pot of build money and any interest we had previously earned, the interest becomes an amplifier of itself. If the interest level is set too high, the rate of gain of resources can quickly get out of hand and thereby eliminate the challenge in the game. So we need something that can return the balance. This is where negative feedback comes into its own. Perhaps the more build money you have, the larger the attack waves that come each round. There quickly reaches an equilibrium point where you have to put more of your build money into the game to offset the additional forces attacking you. The study of feedback loops in game design deserves a lot more attention than I can give it in this book and I strongly suggest that you take time to research this in more detail. They can be incredibly powerful tools to help balance your game mechanics and to build engagement and strategy. However, you have to be extremely careful that their use doesn’t introduce unintended consequences. It’s not unusual that games fall into a trap where there is a hidden dominant strategy that ruins the game, even if to use it the player has to do something contrary to the game’s ideology.

Reality Gets in the Way

The fifth and final source of uncertainty comes from the real world. This is the area that many designers simply ignore, after all if you are designing a game, why would you care what players do outside playing that game? However, I argue that if you are building a service that you hope will persist, you can’t afford to make that mistake.

Real life creates demands on your players and this can prevent them from ever returning to your game. More than that, there is the potential that the influences of the outside world and the social relationships of the player can impact on their playing decisions. If you are supposed to be meeting your friends or spending time with your family, or perhaps in a meeting with your boss, the last thing you need is for a game to be prompting you to return to a game to harvest your plants.

If you are worried about when you are going to be paid, the last thing you want to think about is having to spend another $0.99 on a virtual lollypop. We can’t (and shouldn’t try to) know the minutiae of our players’ lives, but ignoring that there might be external pressures will eventually lead to your app being deleted.

The Importance of Culture

Cultural context can also play an important part in the behavior of �players. This includes the differences between players from different countries with different values, religions and politics—indeed even different perspectives on history can have huge effects. At the same time, cultural impacts can also apply to demographic groups that, despite being located in different countries, can in some cases have more shared values internationally than within their own country. Something that I suspect is becoming more common as the reach of the internet allows us to share more diverse experiences.

There is also an interesting argument that sometimes the cultural differences can be a reason for players to actively seek out your game. Many Chinese, Korean and Japanese players like specific Western games and consume them specifically because they are different from the local content; similarly many Westerners enjoy Asian content, in particular Japanese RPG games.

Physical Presence

There are other real-world considerations we should consider. If we are playing a game with other people, are they in the same room as us? If so, how does that space between us influence the experience itself? How does the game take advantage of that? At Game Horizon 2013, independent game developer Alistair Aitcheson⁹ talked about the process of creation which went into this shared screen (iPad) multiplayer game Slamjet Stadium. Key to the design was that the device didn’t know whose fingers were flicking which players’ pieces, and it is that fact which makes the game so compelling. You are encouraged to use the space on the tablet and around it in any way that helps your gameplay. In short, you are encouraged to cheat. We should think about the way the real-world impacts our players. Multiplayer gaming isn’t just about real-time connections, we have to consider the moments where players are going to be comfortable to take the social risk to show off their skills and the conditions where they can rely on the connections. Asynchronous games are not just about how we use Facebook (or other social graphs) to connect with people. The experience has to be genuinely meaningful to the players and their friends who they might reach out to and encourage joining in the game.

With a little thought about the real-world context we can create disruptive experiences, just by considering the environment that the game will be played in and what other forces might be acting on those please. During my time in Sony London Studio working on PlayStation Home, I remember that the EyeToy team was particularly interested in how multiplayer games worked when all the participants shared the same screen. Imagine what that might do to the way you design a game.

Social Bonds

Awareness of these forces means that we can both work with them and look for ways to use them to help us create deeper bonds within the game experience. We can use social experiences to build deeper bonds between players by creating a context within which they can share things they all value. Games like Words with Friends and Draw Something both leveraged the social bonds that already exist with people to create reasons. They were also sensitive to the cycle of play, allowing player to have short intense bursts of enjoyment that need not happen at the same time. Their asynchronous playing style worked ideally to allow the player to enjoy a shared experience without the burden of having to plan to be in the same place or even online at the same time. These solved the problem of creating a meaningful shared moment, resolving the damaging uncertainty and replacing it with the positive surprise that comes from seeing what other players do with the words or puzzles they are presented with. The reactions and responses of other people to gameplay never gets boring and we are usually more forgiving if a person beats us than if we are beaten by the game itself (to a degree at least).

Practical Applications

All this theory is useful, but we need some practical direction on how we can use this concept of uncertainty usefully in games. To help with this I’ve looks at three approaches of how we might bring uncertainty into a game and in particular how we might use this to create reasons to repeat play our games. They aren’t the only techniques out there, but they do provide strong examples worth considering.

Easter Eggs

I use the term “Easter Eggs” to describe the first of these techniques. But don’t be fooled, it’s not just about hiding lots of meaningless little prizes around your game. We can be more imaginative than that. The key is to create a series of secondary goals that do not contribute to the core success criteria of the game. Indeed they can be alternative goals with their own objectives, which may even be at odds with the ultimate goals of the game. I don’t suggest you take this too far, but they can introduce a level of dilemma in play. Typically they involve the placement of incongruous items in places that players need not explore to complete the game or in places that require extra skill to access.

An Easter Egg is a great way to satisfy different reward behaviors than the rest of the game fulfils, for example in a game where players are expected to compete for speed they can adding in a “collecting” element. Alternatively, having a monster you can kill or rush past can add tension to a player’s decisions especially if there might be an extra reward to be found if they make it to the goal early. And of course even the classical egg hunt brings additional pleasure if you are able to be the ones to locate all of them. There is an interesting dynamic which happens when players complete these “side-goals.” It seems to instill a sense of “being on the inside,” especially if they have the means to share their success with others. It can build on their personal identification with the experience and other players like them, marking them out as special, especially if it’s known that this takes skill and ingenuity to find.

Emergent Behavior

The second technique relies on building emergent behavior onto the mechanic. I’m not really sure if it’s even fair to call it a technique, as this often arises by accident rather than design. These are really alternative applications of the rules of the game that create new ways that the game can be enjoyed. They are typically tangential to the normal way you can play the game but somehow retain a level of enjoyment, even if differently from the way the designers had intended.

Some of the best examples are the most surprising. Think about how players decided to recreate the Mona Lisa in FarmVille.¹⁰ This wasn’t the original intention of the game, and there are some who argue that it happened because there wasn’t enough gameplay in the game so players made their own. Finding something to do, when there is a problem in the game but still pent up demand, is a common source of inspiration for players to find these emergent behaviors. We saw this in the early days of PlayStation Home before there was much in the way of playable games. We saw players trying to exploit the tiny snags in the collision-layers that had been missed in the initial testing. This allowed their avatars to popup into the air as if they were defying gravity. For a time it was quite an enjoyable activity but it didn’t take long for those spaces to be cleaned up and, of course, there were soon lots of games to play.

Soft Variables

Despite being largely an accidental phenomena, we can find ways to use emergent principles to introduce new strategies, especially if we use those “soft variables” not directly to influence success, but to add flavor or alternative strategies. In a level-based puzzle game we win by completing the level and lose by failing. However, how fast we complete the game, which path we take, and whether we use any boosts or power-ups are all soft variables we can measure. Plants vs. Zombies from Popcap used this principle to beautiful effect by introducing achievements if the player chose to restrict their options when completing a level. For example, I would gain an achievement if I chose to not use any mushrooms during a night scene, or to not use a catapult in a roof scene. Jetpack Joyride uses challenges to create a similar effect, for example, asking the player to die at exactly 1,000 yards to gain a reward.

Strategic Choices

Emergent properties can also come into effect in the choice of virtual items a player uses to interact in a game. Take the example of a weapon in a first-person shooter. A shotgun and sub-machine gun (SMG) may deliver the same damage per second, but the shotgun does this in infrequent bursts while the SMG delivers a continuous stream of bullets that instead increases your chances to hit. The shotgun might do more damage on flesh, but an SMG might do more damage against armored opponents. The soft variables don’t affect the basic principles of play, but each weapon creates a different strategy of play, either of which may better suit the player.

Imbalanced Economies

The last technique uses the relationship between different playing resources and their affect on the progress in the game and considers how these can be used to create an imbalanced economy.¹¹ The idea is that the creation of new resources requires resources of other types and effort on the part of the player. In any resource-restricted game we might start with a given amount of money, things we need, and a method to allow us to earn more money. As we play the game we earn grind money we can spend on gathering or improving our playing resources, which allow us to earn money faster. However, the rate at which we can interact with the world limits how quickly we can gain resources. This restriction might be a practical issue because of how long it takes to play the core gameplay mechanic or it may be “artificially” restricted through the need for a fuel or energy, or perhaps some cool-down process. However, we can free up those restrictions if we spend grind money (or alternatively real money) on upgrades that affect our performance. In some games this might be complicated by other tools such as storage space, which again needs money to improve. What makes this an imbalanced economy is that every upgrade we take requires more resources to resolve and puts a demand on the player to invest in another aspect of the game.

The principle can be used in any game. We have a tradition of using XP/equipment/potions in a RPG and combat games that serve this exact purpose of creating a level of friction (and achievement) to the progress of your character. Games such as Clash of Clans have perfected the use of an imbalanced economy to create deeper engagement for players,¹² making it so that each success introduces a new challenge for the player, which continues their desire to play.

Game Theory

Imbalance becomes even more interesting when we throw in other players, especially if we allow the players to exchange goods with each other. That process is extremely complex, especially if we try to model precisely the economic implications of trade with supply and demand impacts on price. More complex still if we insist on a ‘”zero-sum gain”—the principle that there is a finite supply of goods so if a player takes more than their share other players are left with less. This starts entering the economics world of game theory, rather than games design using “economies” (two very different things).

Summing Up Uncertainty

All of these concepts deserve much deeper analysis but are presented here to encourage you to think differently about the way you look at game design. My objective is to encourage you to consider how these ideas might be applied to almost any game and deliver greater longevity to your title. Most importantly I believe they can help to create moments that make the game special to each player. In particular I believe that it’s essential to consider how we can use soft variables to give meaning to every play of the game and to open out the opportunity for mistake and error and those crazy moment of genius where everything just works. That’s why uncertainty is important to me as a player, it makes the gameplay mine, not just what the developer decided I should experience.

Notes

1 Go check out Greg Costikyan’s Uncertainty in Games if you want to see a breakdown of different sources of uncertainty with a wide range of games from Super Mario to rock/paper/scissors, http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/uncertainty-games.

2 Yes I know that quitting the game and restarting is cheating. But it’s a cheat I would have happily paid for after my 200th death on the first section of the game, mostly down to my lack of concentration or mishandling of the controller.

3 You can find out more details of the In-N-Out Burger online, but to be honest that takes away a little of the fun of the process, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-N-Out_Burger_products.

4 If you haven’t checked out the amazing The Walking Dead from Telltale Games I strongly suggest that you do, and if you want to relive that moment check out www.youtube.com/watch?v=au09wFtbS3k.

5 This is why I will never be a decent chess player, I lose focus after just thinking two moves ahead and quickly get bored. I once hired Garry Kasparov to help promote a chess service we launched for Wireplay and watched him playing four tables at once, four times over in just a few hours. Unsurprisingly, he won every match easily but it was amazing to watch. There are some great sources out there if you want to improve your game. This one talks about how to train yourself to think three moves ahead, http://antheacarson.hubpages.com/hub/How-to-Think-Three-Moves-Ahead-in-Chess.

6 Don’t get me wrong, I much prefer tower defense games that include an “interest” mechanic specifically as a tool for dilemma that gives me more to think about than to just trying to build the most efficient maze.

7 Feedback is a very important phenomena in economics, biology and, of course, games, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedback.

8 There is a great blog post by Daniel Soli based on observations by Jesse Catron, Jay Barnson, and Kyoryu that looks at the use of positive and negative feedback looks in a series of different games, http://danielsolisblog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/feedback-loops-in-game-design.html.

9 Alistair Aitcheson was also behind the game Greedy Bankers and he had previously explored same-screen multiplayer through the tablet version of his game called Greedy Bankers Against the World, www.alistairaitcheson.com.

10 There have been an amazing range of art pieces created using the FarmVille game, it was a bit of a meme in 2009. This link contains a selection of 21 of the better examples, http://reface.me/applications/21-farmville-art-masterpieces.

11 There is an interesting blog post by Ian Schriber that looks at the use of economies in some detail, http://gamebalanceconcepts.wordpress.com.

12 Personally I find the model used in Clash of Clans to be too steep and I haven’t chosen to spend money in that game, despite my deep longstanding affection for the guys at Supercell. I admire the game and its revenue potential, and appreciate their dedication to making the best possible game, but in this case the combat system doesn’t work for me as a player. I suspect that’s because at heart I’m still a table-top war-gamer and want to control the troops more directly.