Raph Koster's Blog, page 27

Game feedback & hide-and-seek

Raph, aren't there some situation where lack of feedback actually add to the experience? I'm thinking, for instance, something as simple as a game of hide and seek. You don't really know if you're well hidden until you're found (or not)! Doesn't "knowing you don't know" add more tension and excitement?

-Olivier Carrère

Well, first of all, let's not underestimate the amount of feedback there is for the hider while hiding; the sound of giggles and held breaths let go, the clear sounds of the seeker exploring the area, and depending on your location, actual visual tracking of the seeker. But all of that isn't even really the feedback, as you state — it's whether or not you're found. Having to wait for that level of feedback is common in all sorts of games.

To address your question more specifically: yes, of course a certain amount of lack of feedback is fine. In the case of hide and seek, you are building a heuristic for "how the seeker seeks." So it's a psych game as well as a puzzle of finding decent hiding spaces. You are trying to determine how the seeker thinks, and outwit them. Worse, you have to do so with limited resources (limited environment, limited timeframe).

You get clear feedback for the time running out ("Olly olly oxen free!"). Before that ends, you have to have input your choice into the system — you have "pressed the button" in terms of selecting a hiding spot.

Being able to see or hear the seeker based on your hiding spot means you get variable feedback based on the choices you made (hide inside a wardrobe, you get very little — cling to the ceiling like Spiderman, you get lots). There's a risk-reward tradeoff there. Many of the best spots to hide will limit your feedback; many of the hardest spots to use will offer great feedback. But basically, it's the seeker's turn; in basic hide-and-seek you have no verbs at this point.

Finally, you're either found or not. This is properly understood as the feedback for what you did in "your turn." It's the resolve state for your turn followed by their turn.

Having to wait until the end of a turn for full feedback on a choice is very common in games. Often, in board games, you have to wait for many people's turn (thinking here, for example, of card games ranging from Poker to Bohnanza, wherein full feedback for your "input" choice doesn't occur until after a full round has gone by).

Hide and seek actually has a classic flaw in it, that the feedback for the victory state for a hider kind of sucks. I remember playing hide and seek, hiding too well, and the other kids eventually gave up and I didn't know whether the game ended!

I suspect this is why the "run for home base" variant exists, to correct that flaw. If you hide well, the game offers a fresh victory condition that requires you to surrender your safe location and assume greater risk to get a victory condition with good feedback: the act of slapping your hand on the home base tree and yelling "HAHA!"

So, a multiphase game fairly readily decomposed with game grammar:

Overarching goal: outwit seeker's hunting algorithm.
Hider turn: select hiding spot from among available choices. Prep stages include knowing the environment well, having on good shoes and camo clothing, etc.
Seeker's turn: run preferred search pattern. This can only result in a win for the seeker, or a "draw" unless played with a time limit.

In the "home base" variant, there is a verb for the hider during the seeker's run: to run for home. This is a whole new phase in its own right dealing with assessing each other's speeds, the intervening landscape, the use of stealth or charging for it, etc. And this one has a win condition for the hider with great feedback.

Notes on game feedback

I was mentioned in a comment on Google+, and ended up writing a little bit about game feedback as a result. So here it is.

The discussion was on the absence of combat logs (scrolling text windows showing you exact numbers for combat actions) in the new SWTOR MMO. Some folks regret the absence, because they use the logs to optimize what they are doing, and use it as a learning tool. Other players find them a legacy of the text mud days, or a feature that hastens the deconstruction of the entire system and therefore damages the fun factor.

Both sides are right, really. Combat logs are just a form of feedback. The more feedback the system gives you, the more information you have for the process of figuring out how the system works. This then makes the process of optimizing play easier (read that as "getting the results you want from a given input").

The first thing to realize here is that everything the game shows you, really, is a form of feedback. The locations of chess pieces on a board, the "game state," is a type of feedback. Numbers floating off the enemy are feedback; the glowy effect trailing a swinging sword is also feedback.

Some forms of feedback are better suited for certain types of information than others.

Vector and physics information is more easily grasped when presented graphically than when presented as numbers, for example.
Feedback intended to provide emotional content, such as "this was a good event" versus "a bad event" is typically better conveyed using sound or color. We have a lot of associations with things like major vs minor intervals, specific colors, etc, that are more easily triggered this way than with, say, text.
Some forms of feedback are more susceptible to noise in the signal than others — they are harder to filter, or might have multiple channels coming at the user at once, making it hard to distinguish between multiple simultaneous messages.
Some forms of feedback are best conveyed to users by concretizing them, using analogies that better get across the information.
For the geeks among you, the forms of feedback you use are essentially exercises in solving particular issues in information theory.

Since a player is essentially trying to figure out the rules inside a black box, some form of feedback must be present as the base case, or else the player can press buttons all day long and to them, it looks like nothing is happening whatsoever. In that case, they build a mental model of the black box as being an empty box with some fake buttons on the outside of it. Remember, the player is attempting to arrive at a heuristic for interacting with the model. It does not have to be accurate; it just needs to have reasonable predictive power.

The corollary here is that a deep system with poor feedback will read as shallow to players. For example, it doesn't matter if your AI NPCs all carefully track twelve levels of anger if they only have three facial animations to display them. Players will instead decode this as three levels. Worse, you can have a situation as in many simulation-based games, where you might have a robust and detailed world simulation that players can't see, or that feels to them just like a much simply hardcoded state machine (this is the trap that the original ecology in Ultima Online headed into).

OK, so in terms of looking at whether or not to look at combat logs… you have to show the fact that damage is being done at all, of course; that requires at minimum displaying one or both of the current state of the target (aka, its current HP), and the delta that a given action resulted in (aka, the damage done). This is why we tend to see meters (which do state very well, and deltas less so) and floaty numbers (which provide the delta, with higher resolution than a meter does).

But: meters alone have poor granularity and low readability for nuances like source of damage. Combat logs prove full detailed feedback exposing the full depth of the system. And that is why people who care about, say, who did what damage (a whole new type of information) want that feedback.

If you have a shallower combat system you can cap at a shallower amount of feedback. If you have a deep system, your feedback should accommodate revealing that depth or else you may as well cut the depth because people will often literally not be able to tell it is there. In the case of a multiplayer combat scenario, people will obviously know that everyone did something, but they may not be able to tell which delta was associated with which player, leading to arguments over the effectiveness of a given team member.

This can be solved. Every attack could draw a color-coded rope between the player and the target, and tie the delta to that rope, so you could see exactly who did what. It would in fact be a very high-value means of displaying the information, with greater clarity than a rapidly scrolling combat log. But it has two disadvantages: it's clinical and would work against cool force lightning effects; and it lacks history so you can evaluate it after the fact. But even these things could probably be solved.

This is why combat lags are still around even though they are ugly, and painful to follow in real-time. They satisfice the requirements for players who are invested in investigating the depth of the combat system. They can be captured and analyzed at leisure. They can be used as a raw data flow that can be translated into a variety of more visual tools. This doesn't mean combat logs are the best feedback design for the purpose, but it explains why the more hardcore (ie depth-invested) players have a desire to have it.

So does it ruin the game and suck the fun out of it to have that sort of information, and the fun "optimized away"?

To pull random perhaps-misremembered quotes out of the book:

"The definition of a successful game is therefore one that teaches everything it has to teach before the player stops playing."

and

"Fun is a process; boredom is its destination."

The fun getting optimized out sounds to me like exactly the expected behavior. The players collaboratively figured out the system. This is not the fault of the feedback mechanism per se; all that does is accelerate or reduce the rate of player progress towards their heuristic.  Fun is in the discovery process (barring subtleties like replay as meditation, or the joy in perfect execution of a coordinated strategy which is effectively a different game). If it's all laid out as a schematic for you, it's over. Move on. It's time for the next game (which might very well just be a different system within the same game) or MMO.

Interview for a high-school junior

Hi this is N—–.

I am a jr in high school right now, we are doing something called a jr research paper, and the career that I chose and have been looking into is game design and I need to get an interview with a game designer, I was wondering if you could email me back and you may help me. If you have the time that would be really nice.

Thank you

Sure. Here's my answers to your questions:



What is a good way to enter the field?

It's been a long while since I entered it, but I think the way I did it is still a good approach: make games. Make games on your own. Design them, be they as board games, little video games, whatever you can make. The craft of game design works across media, so you can learn as much about game design from making as pen and paper game as you can from making a platformer or shooter. Have people play them, and learn from what they do and don't do. And use them as your calling card when you go looking for a job. I would expect any game designer I hire to have a portfolio of ideas, designs, and thoughts about game design.

How are the conditions in the workplace? (Stress level, schedule, etc…)

A lot depends on where you work. The game industry is not at all a stress-free environment, as a whole.

The game industry is notorious for fairly long hours and "crunch time" – periods of intense work in order to hit major deadlines. If you're an indie, you may be crunching yourself all the time just to put food on the table. If you're a salaried developer, then a lot will depend on the things that affect the company where you work, whether it's the need to ship a game inside the fiscal year, or put together a playable to land a publishing contract, or whatever.

In general, game companies often keep loose hours, what gets called "core hours." Pretty typical would be something like "you have to be at the office between 10am and 5pm. And you have to work at least 40 hours a week." That means you could be the sort who comes in early, or who stays late.

If you are working with online games, you have to get used to being on call or working during holidays and times that other people get time off for – those are peak times for gameplay, so if something goes wrong, you have to be available.

How many hours do you get per week on average?

It does vary, but 40-60 hours a week is not unusual at all. I usually do 9 hour days working through lunch… but I have gotten older and more protective of my personal life. I used to regularly do 10-12 hour days.

Are there any physical/emotional stresses of the job?

Many! It's a creative industry, and that means that you have all of the usual stresses that arise from that. If you are a creative type, like a designer, then you have things like whether you'll ever get to work on your own idea (the answer is usually "no" if you work at a big company); creative disagreements with others on the team; angst over whether you're good enough; compromises made to creative ideas in order to hit business goals; all that sort of thing.

If you're a non-creative type, there's the fact that you have to deal with creative types, which is plenty stressful a lot of the time – they can be high maintenance. 

The hours can take a toll on family life as well, and because of the relatively small amount of places that are centers of game development, finding jobs may mean having to move every time you change companies.

It's also a pretty sedentary job, so you have to work to keep your health; it's super-easy to pack on pounds sitting at a desk.

What kinds of people do you work with? (Is it usually a friendly workplace)

The games business can be an awful lot of fun. Yes, it's usually a friendly place. People work hard, but they also play a lot. Board game nights at the office, jam sessions, desks covered in figurines, cartoons on the whiteboards, you name it. If everyone were less busy, it would be even more fun.

Is there any form of evaluation taken annually to see if you are working up to qualifications?

No. Like most of the arts, the proof is in the pudding, and you are as good as your last few bits of work.

What are the advantages/disadvantages to the job?

Being a game designer lets you exercise a lot of different talents. A good game designer will be conversant with many or all of the parts that go into making a game. They'll understand the rules. They'll grasp how the code works. They have a good eye for art and level design. They have an ear for music and sound. They know how to pitch and present and in general do PR. They understand the business equation and how the game will make money. Cross-disciplinary knowledge is the best way to grow as a designer. For the right kind of person, this is a tremendous advantage, because you don't get bored.

The disadvantages tend to have to do with the overall way the business works – the publisher model, the gatekeepers who control whether your game is seen by large amounts of people, the crowdedness of the market, the trendiness of specific game genres, the rising costs in making games, and so on. And the hours.

How much education did you have prior to the job?

I personally had a Master of Fine Arts degree. But that isn't really typical. I am not sure there really is a typical degree for a game designer, but in general, I recommend a liberal arts background.

Does this career open up any options for the future?

It can… but basically, if you make it to the upper tiers of game design, you end up as a manager or a director of games. From there, you might become an executive at a game company, or you could found your own studio, or become a consultant. These days, some people make the jump to teaching, now that there are game design programs at colleges. Some also make the jump to other media altogether – toy design, television, film – though this is much rarer.

4th part of video history of MMOs

Turns out there's an MMO Part 4: End Game Content video that I didn't know existed. I haven't watched it yet, but here it is!

3-part video history of MMOs

I was sent a link to this set of YouTube vids on the history of the MMO genre from MUDs forward. It's worth a look, even if only to get  a rare glimpse of actual video footage from some of the older games that many folks today don't even know existed (after all, WoW invented the genre, right?)…

Among the oddities, errors, and omissions:

Leaving out Kingdom of the Winds, which predated Lineage.
Leaving out kids' MMOs entirely, especially Club Penguin.
Saying that the Ultima Online team had never made anything multiplayer before (Ken Demarest, mentioned in the documentary, left very shortly after UO actually had a team put together — and the original core team that was assembled on the programming and design side was all MUD/MUSH/MOO veterans except for one guy).
Saying that Meridian 59 going flat fee was what opened up that business model… I'm fuzzy on this, but my recollection is that M59 was not flat fee at launch… it happened later. And for a while they had a weird complicated fee structure…
Leaving out Kart Rider, the genre explosion, and the rise of free-to-play in Korea… it just sort of stops short at Lineage there. Instead F2P seems to all be attributed to Runescape, which is a real misread of where the lines of influence actually flowed, I think.
No mention of key non-game worlds like Second Life and Habbo Hotel. I suppose this is excused by the emphasis on game worlds, except for the mention of Habitat.

As a side note, on the graphical MMO explosion — even though a bunch of titles launched in a very staggered way that is covered in the documentary, I think that in practice just about all of them started development around the same time. It's just that some of them finished faster.

There's definitely a book to be had about everything in this history… someone (not me) should go write it.

Vids after the fold:

 

A Theory of Fun website is back!

After a bunch of painful adventures with domain registrars and WHOIS and other stuff, I am happy to say that the A Theory of Fun for Game Design book website is back.

In the process, I also modernized it — it's all CSS fancy now, instead of using ancient Javascript stuff to make highlighting buttons. It's got a fresh coat of paint on it, and actually looks like it was maybe made this century, maybe.

Check it out and let me know what you think.

"After the Flood" is available again

Back in 1999, the audio guys at Origin had spare time, and they put together this cool little program whereby people who worked there at Origin could get recording studio time.

In my case, that resulted in my only CD, AFTER THE FLOOD, which features Matt Mitchell on bass, Todd McKimmey on bass and electric guitar, and Stretch Williams on slide guitar.

I put it up on mp3.com back when there was such a thing, and some of the songs did fairly well — the opening track hit #9 on the folk-rock chart, for example. But then mp3.com went away.

Then I put it on CafePress just so it wouldn't vanish altogether. And then CafePress did away with CDs.

So basically, it's been out of print for years and years.

I decided, hey, if I am going to write hundreds of songs in a spare bedroom, I should actually let someone hear them. So the CD is back! (Well, as mp3 downloads anyway).

If you like it, leave a review, tell friends… if you don't, blame it on it being from so long ago.

http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/raphkoster

Video for "It's All Games Now!"

The GDC Vault has posted the full video of "It's All Games Now!", my talk from GDC Online. And it's one of the free ones!

I have a brief precis of it here, if you don't know what it is about. But hey, it's only an hour of your life, right? So go check it out even if you don't know what it is about.

Gamasutra interview post-GDCOnline

The normally vivacious Leigh Alexander was an a contemplative mood as she posed questions to me in an hourlong interview right after GDC Online. We talked about how games are changing with mobile and social coming along and making sessions shorter and arguably less classically immersive; and how we ourselves are drifting away from the big games, as players.

I wish more of the interview fit in the format of a Gamasutra article, because it was a great, quiet little discussion.

"Another way to think of it is, we always said games would be the art form of the 21st century: Gamers will all grow up and take over the world, and we're at that moment now," he continues. "It's all come true — but the dragons and the robots didn't come with us, they stayed behind."

Yet in plenty of ways this loss isn't even about social games, Koster believes. "We're losing some of our most cherished things — and honestly, we already had. The more big business we got, the more that got replaced by women in too-little clothes, or guys that all look the same and have bullet-heads and everybody's dressed in green and brown."

In light of the increasingly risk-averse and market-researched nature of traditional games, the increasing size of the mainstream audience has been something of a boon. "If you'd asked someone in 1998 whether there could be hit games about cooking, fashion design… a guy running over roofs, [as in Canabalt], still there's an element of a broader frame of reference, a broader aesthetic there."

And while he himself is a big science fiction fan, Koster says that a wider frame of reference is "incredibly exciting" for games that can be about all kinds of things now, beyond the expected. "We lose something, but we gain something that is potentially bigger," he reflects.

– Gamasutra – News – Raph Koster Talks Loss, Opportunity For Games In The Social Media Age.

RPG Fanatic interviews me

Carey Martell, whose interview of Richard Bartle I blogged about not very long ago, stopped by the office here and did an hourlong interview with me, after we failed to connect at GDCOnline. There's a little ancient history, some talk about the lecture I did at GDCO, and a brief sidebar on gamification in there, and I don't remember what else.

RPG Fanatic: Raph Koster Interview – YouTube.