Adaptive Design: Player-Focused Games
Since it's also the name of this blog, I thought that this should be my second article. Adaptive Design is a concept that few, if any, games have really incorprated, but is a central design methodology (or at least a guiding principle) behind most of my work. So what is Adaptive Design? Basically, it means that the game can learn what the player is most interested in, and "focus in" on those aspects, letting the things the player doesn't care about manage themselves for the most part. It's a matter of tracking the player's actions over time and adjusting the level of detail of various parts of the game in response.
Here's an example from one of Frostbyte Games' designs, Stellar Trader: the game is a sci-fi simulation in the tradition of Elite, Freelancer, or X2, where the player is a pilot setting out to make his mark on the galaxy. Players have a lot of freedom about how they want their character to participate in the world - trading, fighting, working for someone else, and employing others are all ways to move through the game.
Stellar Trader was designed around the concept of adaptibility, so that a player who isn't interested in, say, optimizing her ship's weapon loadout doesn't have to put much thought into it. She can go to a shipyard and buy a ship "off-the-shelf" with pre-defined option packages for different applications. Maybe she wants a fighter for an upcoming mercenary job - she can buy the small, manuverable ship bristling with weapons and fly it off to battle. If the player wants to, she can swap out different systems within the ship to optimize a facet of the ship's performance - if she wants a little extra speed and doesn't mind sacrificing some fuel efficiency, she can install a more powerful engine. If she's looking to optimize even further, she could even change out components of the engine. Each level of customization provides further options for maximizing a given area, and a player who micromanages that area can get an advantage there, but at the cost of performance in some other place. On the other hand, players who would rather focus on the details of running their trade empire can just fly their new purchase away and be confident that they've got a competitive and capable ship.
That's a step towards Adaptive Design, but it's far from what I would classify as deep. I envision future games incorporating this concept into their designs at the most basic level, and doing some amazing things. A strategy game that for one player is a game primarily about managing a production chain and supply lines, and for another player is all about configuring units for maximum effect. A transport simulation which could be focused on micromanaging train networks for the highest efficiency one day, and a market-based supply-and-demand simulation the next, depending on your mood.
What it all comes down to is maximizing player enjoyment and replayability. Modern games often provide more or less the same experience on each play-through, usually some envisioned ideal of a single designer or team, some time in the past. An Adaptive game, by watching the player's inputs and time spent on performing various activities, would be able to mold itself to be the most fun for that player, right now.
In an Adaptive environment, a player should be given feedback about the way in which their actions are likely to alter the focus of the game. The last thing a designer wants is for a player to suddenly find herself looking at a detailed spreadsheet of her mercenary company's finances when she wanted to be directing her troops from the front line. Color-coding certain parts of the user interface may work in some cases, so that the player can associate a given color with a certain type of activity. In other cases, this may be too blatant and actually detract from the game. In such a situation, the game should find some other way of making the distinction obvious so that a player can be aware of how their interactions are likely to shift the focus of the game. The threshold of such shifts will have to be carefully calibrated as well, so that looking at your company balance sheet now and then isn't likely to shift focus away from another area that you'd rather be focusing on.
Of course, this way of creating games is very different from current methods. It's likely to require a lot of work, at least at first. Once it's been tried a few times and a body of experience is built up about what to do and what to avoid doing, it will probably be no harder to create (or at least not much harder) than today's games. It's all a matter of letting go of the typical model of game creation - stepping away from your carefully scripted experiences and letting the game mechanics speak for themselves. It's a change in the way we think about games, and the assumptions that we have about them - what makes them fun, how they need to be put together, even what they are. It's a big step, but if we can make that change, we can push our games into new territory, finally shedding our emulation of older forms of media and becoming something truly unique.
Read More...
Here's an example from one of Frostbyte Games' designs, Stellar Trader: the game is a sci-fi simulation in the tradition of Elite, Freelancer, or X2, where the player is a pilot setting out to make his mark on the galaxy. Players have a lot of freedom about how they want their character to participate in the world - trading, fighting, working for someone else, and employing others are all ways to move through the game.
Stellar Trader was designed around the concept of adaptibility, so that a player who isn't interested in, say, optimizing her ship's weapon loadout doesn't have to put much thought into it. She can go to a shipyard and buy a ship "off-the-shelf" with pre-defined option packages for different applications. Maybe she wants a fighter for an upcoming mercenary job - she can buy the small, manuverable ship bristling with weapons and fly it off to battle. If the player wants to, she can swap out different systems within the ship to optimize a facet of the ship's performance - if she wants a little extra speed and doesn't mind sacrificing some fuel efficiency, she can install a more powerful engine. If she's looking to optimize even further, she could even change out components of the engine. Each level of customization provides further options for maximizing a given area, and a player who micromanages that area can get an advantage there, but at the cost of performance in some other place. On the other hand, players who would rather focus on the details of running their trade empire can just fly their new purchase away and be confident that they've got a competitive and capable ship.
That's a step towards Adaptive Design, but it's far from what I would classify as deep. I envision future games incorporating this concept into their designs at the most basic level, and doing some amazing things. A strategy game that for one player is a game primarily about managing a production chain and supply lines, and for another player is all about configuring units for maximum effect. A transport simulation which could be focused on micromanaging train networks for the highest efficiency one day, and a market-based supply-and-demand simulation the next, depending on your mood.
What it all comes down to is maximizing player enjoyment and replayability. Modern games often provide more or less the same experience on each play-through, usually some envisioned ideal of a single designer or team, some time in the past. An Adaptive game, by watching the player's inputs and time spent on performing various activities, would be able to mold itself to be the most fun for that player, right now.
The Importance of Player Cues
In an Adaptive environment, a player should be given feedback about the way in which their actions are likely to alter the focus of the game. The last thing a designer wants is for a player to suddenly find herself looking at a detailed spreadsheet of her mercenary company's finances when she wanted to be directing her troops from the front line. Color-coding certain parts of the user interface may work in some cases, so that the player can associate a given color with a certain type of activity. In other cases, this may be too blatant and actually detract from the game. In such a situation, the game should find some other way of making the distinction obvious so that a player can be aware of how their interactions are likely to shift the focus of the game. The threshold of such shifts will have to be carefully calibrated as well, so that looking at your company balance sheet now and then isn't likely to shift focus away from another area that you'd rather be focusing on.
The Bad News
Of course, this way of creating games is very different from current methods. It's likely to require a lot of work, at least at first. Once it's been tried a few times and a body of experience is built up about what to do and what to avoid doing, it will probably be no harder to create (or at least not much harder) than today's games. It's all a matter of letting go of the typical model of game creation - stepping away from your carefully scripted experiences and letting the game mechanics speak for themselves. It's a change in the way we think about games, and the assumptions that we have about them - what makes them fun, how they need to be put together, even what they are. It's a big step, but if we can make that change, we can push our games into new territory, finally shedding our emulation of older forms of media and becoming something truly unique.
Read More...
posted by Brendan at
12:45 PM
2 Comments:
This seems like an 'ultimate game' in which all game genres are mixed into a single title.
So you need to build and balance a sim game, a RTS, an action game, etc. A 'lot of work' may be an understatement. :-)
What is the core experiance you are selling? Attempting to be all things to all people is generally a bad strategic decision. Some one, somewhere will make a better RTS or a better action title. And players will flock to the superior genre winner.
The idea is certainly interesting and may work best with multiplayer games that have networking effects present. For example, it may be worth adding a whole new game structure to an MMO that will bring in another 20,000 users. With an MMO, it is less expensive to add customers to an existing game / community than it is to launch a new game and gather your initial community. So adding a 'command' mechanic similar to an RTS would be a wise choice.
Good luck with the new site! I had fun reading your current articles.
take care
Danc.
By
Daniel Cook, at 4:38 PM
The idea is not necessarily to be "all things to all people," and try to incorporate every type of game into one giant title, but rather to pick a subject and let the player decide how to explore it. Some of my examples were definetely on the ambitious side, but the concept could be applied in a more down-to-earth way.
As an example, I've been playing Sim City 4 lately, and I tend to focus more on the traffic-routing part of the game. If SC4 were adaptive, it might start out with a smaller selection of transport options, but when it detected that I was spending most of my time using the traffic tools it would begin to provide me with more options, and scale down options in areas that I wasn't showing an interest in.
In a way, it's like "levelling up" in an RPG - the more time I invest in a part of the game, the more options the game gives me for dealing with it.
Does that make more sense?
This sort of thing would certainly have downsides, but I think that on the whole, it would let players ease in to the game and find the aspects that most interested them, then cater to the player's interests.
Thanks for the comments, and I hope you keep reading!
By
Brendan, at 6:06 PM
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