No Article This Week

Well, it didn't take long for me to break my once-a-week publishing schedule. I do have a good reason, however. My life has been amazingly hectic and stressful this past week, for reasons detailed here. I haven't been doing this long enough to have an extra article ready for a down week, so I'll have to just skip this one. Catch you all (all what...one of you?) next week.

Linearity in Games

Linearity is one of those game design topics that gets a lot of attention. Usually seen as a bad thing, linearity is often pointed to as a failing of a game title - and used incorrectly, it can be a big roadblock to player enjoyment. But linearity doesn't have to be a problem. Used properly, it can help provide guidance and ease the player into the game experience, in the end enhancing the player's enjoyment of the game. The trick is to determine where a linear experience will be a help to a player and where it will be a hindrance. Let's take a look at some real-world examples to see where they got it right and where they went wrong.



So what is linearity, exactly? For the sake of this article, I'm going to define a linear game experience as one where the player does not have the ability to deviate from a path set by the designer. There may still be more than one path to take - a game where you can choose which of three pre-set paths to follow, each of which will be the same each time it is played through, is still a linear game. Note that this extends to tactical decisions as well. An in-game situation with only one solution is still linear. But what about a situation with one clearly optimal solution and several less-than-desirable ones? I would argue that such a situation is somewhat linear, but less so than the situation with a single way out. So linearity is not a black and white issue, but rather a scale of greater or lesser player freedom. In addition, some situations within a game might be highly linear, while others are very fluid.

How linearity is enforced is also an important factor in player enjoyment. If there is a reasonable in-game explanation for the fact that player choice is being limited, a player will be more accepting of the limitations than she might be if it is abundantly clear that her choices are limited because the designer just decided that a given choice would not be available. Invisible walls are the classic example of arbitrarily imposed limitations. Of course, most of the limitations placed on players are, to one degree or another, arbitrary - the important part is that they feel reasonable to the player.

Let's look at some popular games to explore these concepts more concretely.

Call of Duty vs. Brothers in Arms

There has been a flood of World War II shooters over the last few years, but the one that really stands out is Call of Duty. Not only was it a great game, but it's a perfect example of how linearity isn't always bad if used properly. The most obvious example is that, like almost all shooters, the player moves through a set progression of levels as the story moves forward. This sort of linearity is the standard for most games, and though it's not the only way of doing things, it works well enough. More importantly, within the game you play as a soldier, and so most of the time you're following orders. Soldiers aren't supposed to run off and do their own thing, so this context immediately gives the player a reason to accept limited choices.

The design of individual levels is linear as well - you can't just go running off in any direction you feel like, because there are barriers that prevent you from doing so. Sometimes the barriers are physical - fences or walls that prevent movement. Other times there is nothing to prevent you from running across a field except a row of small signs denoting a minefield. Sure, you could run that way, but you won't get far. Such a device feels right at home on a battlefield, and is an effective way to make the level feel much larger than it really is.

Call of Duty is a very linear game, on many levels. The thing is, you never feel like you're being constrained unduly. There is always a good reason for not being able to go outside the imposed limits. In addition, there is almost always a feeling of urgency to the missions that keeps you on track. Sure, you could go explore that cemetery or see what's around that corner, but your friends are being pinned down by a tank - if you don't do something right now, they'll die.

Compare this to another recent WWII shooter, Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30. You've got the same linear level sequence so common to this sort of game, no surprise there. The levels are also very linear, preventing you from running off across fields and away from the action, but in many cases, the only thing keeping you from exploring is...an invisible wall. Funny, I don't recall those being a major factor in troop movements during WWII. Within the levels, there is usually only one or two ways through a given firefight, with one being the clear best choice. This might not be so much of an issue if the player were just following orders, being directed by a superior officer at every step of the way, but the player is instead put in command of a group of soldiers. There's an expectation there that the player's decisions will really matter, when in reality the game is more or less on rails - and doesn't do much to hide that fact.

Morrowind

As an example of a game that might have tried too hard to get away from linearity, I'm going to examine The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. After a short introductory sequence and character creation, you are basically left to fend for yourself with minimal direction. Someone tells you to go and seek out a certain person in another town, but nothing forces you to do so. You could play the game for dozens of hours without ever meeting that person. There's so much to do and see that at first, the player is overwhelmed by options. There is almost nothing to indicate where it's safe to travel and where you'll meet a quick death, and no one telling you how to get by in the world.

On one level, such openness is refreshing - an inquisitive player can spend weeks exploring caves and delving into dungeons, or running quests for random townsfolk across the island. However, a little more direction to get a first-time player moving might be the difference between spending weeks exploring and spending hours being frustrated before uninstalling the game. Giving the player more leads for local quests, for example, designed to introduce them to how the world works and how to be an effective adventurer - the player could still ignore these tutorials if he wanted, but they would be there to support a first-timer. There is some degree of this already in place in Morrowind, but I don't feel that there's enough.

Just as too much linearity can be a problem, too little can just as quickly sour a gaming experience. The feeling of confusion at not having the faintest clue where to go or what to do can turn a player off to a game very quickly. And even within the spectrum of linearity, the way in which those restrictions are imposed can have just as much of an effect on a player's experience, for good or ill. So when designing, it's important to consider the ramifications of player choice vs. player confusion, and ensure that your game will neither confuse the player with too many options nor make them feel constrained by arbitrary limits.

And please, no more invisible walls!


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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.

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.


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My Great White Game

For my first real entry, I'm going to discuss my Great White Game. It seems like a good idea to get that off my chest, so to speak, to free me to work on other, more realistic things, and also to help provide context for my other ideas. This game has seen several incarnations over the years, and is more of a general idea than a specific design, though I have done some conceptual design on various aspects of it. My other reason for getting this out there is that it serves as a foundation to the rest of what I want to accomplish - this is the base idea that's behind most of my other ideas, and the one that I feel I'm working towards. Almost every smaller design I work on has some piece of this within it. As I design, I usually have this goal in mind, and I try to fit one small piece of this in each design I do, as a way of researching and teaching myself about my eventual goal. I'd also like to point out that this is a design for an electronic game, not a tabletop one.

So, without further stalling for time, I present to you: my Great White Game.

The basic idea is simple: A game that allows for dynamically generated plotlines with dramatic structures that change each time the player starts a new game. Like many simple ideas, however, the actual implementation is a huge endeavor. Let's go into some detail about how this all could be made to work.

You have a player character designed completely by the player, including his goals, dreams and hopes, loves and hates, fears and phobias. You have a richly detailed world with NPCs that go about their business independent of the player. And you have a delicate balance of power between rival factions. Now take that world and shift the balance - find the point of maximum pressure and give it a shove.

To use a classic example, say you've got a fantasy kingdom. The player creates a young Prince, far down in the line of succession, with a desire to be King. He loves his father, but hates his older brothers. So the game creates the following situation: The King is getting old. His children all want to rule after him, and they'll each do anything to get that chance. The only thing holding them back from trying to kill each other off is their ailing father. So how do we start the plot in motion? The King dies under mysterious circumstances. Everyone suspects everyone else, and starts trying to ensure that they'll be the one who ends up sitting on the throne.

Again, easy enough in principle but the hard part is in teaching a computer how to set up such a situation and where to apply the pressure.

Key to this design is my concept of "plot space." This is an n-dimensional space where each axis is a component of the story - some variable that we're interested in tracking. The health of the King, whether or not the secret plans of one of the Princes has been revealed, the player's current standing in the rank of succession, etc. The in-game situation can be mapped onto this space at any time according to the status of the various elements of the game. This leads to a concept of "plot distance," meaning how far the current situation is from some desired condition.

Keeping that in mind, let's come back to our game - starting from the sudden shift in the status quo, the game begins to do three things: it simulates the events of the world, based on the personalities and goals of the various NPCs and factions, it reacts to player input in such a way as to try to draw the player into the unfolding chain of events, and most importantly, it directs the actions of the NPCs and factions to manipulate the direction of the overall chain of events toward a series of goals that will result in the creation of a dramatic arc. When I mentioned the bit about the player having complete control of his character's goals and so forth, this is where I was going - rather than doing what a game like Morrowind does and dropping the player into a plotline that they're free to walk away from if they're not interested, we allow the player to define his character's interests and goals, and the game creates a plotline around those. If the player begins to move away from that set of events, the game does what it can to pull her back in, but if she gets far enough away from that plotline, the game begins to set up new ones around the player's actions, using the NPCs and factions in the world along with the player character's defined goals and so forth.

I'm only part of the way to understanding how this can be made to work. So far, I've been able to work out how to tell a single story, with certain defined plot points, that the player can move through mostly in their own way. The designer charts out some points in the plot-space through which he wishes the story to pass. The game then takes stock of its NPCs and uses them to move the plot toward the desired points. The player will be affecting the direction of things, but certain events will always happen. I don't completely like this, but it's a step in the right direction.

So there you have it: the basic concepts behind my Great White Game. There's a lot more that I could go into detail about, but I think you get the general idea. If anyone has any comments, I'd love to hear them.

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A New Beginning

I'm going to start publishing my game design thoughts and comments here, rather than on my other blog. I'll keep that one for personal stuff and this will be for (hopefully) professional writing. I'm doing this in an attempt to push myself to write more about the things I spend a lot of time thinking about - game design and mechanics.

Here's to being hopeful!