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>> Hey guys, welcome back to talking about how to play like a game designer.
We left off having talked about observing while you experience,
and getting past your learned biases.
This week we're going to talk about what types of games you should play.
Simply put, a good designer has played and can reference a bit of everything.
I don't care if you hate football games, or first-person shooters, or RPGs or whatever.
There's something to learn from everything.
A good designer plays all types of games and never dismisses anything out-of-hand.
You can't just look at Farmville and say, "It's an awful game.
I'm not going to play that."
If you think there's nothing to learn from a game which a hundred million people played,
you've got some rethinking to do.
Now I'm not going to lie to you, playing these probably isn't going
to be a fun experience for you.
In fact, it might be excruciating if you're just playing from the regular player perspective.
Being a game designer is work, but if you're playing like a designer,
the experience will be edifying, and you'll be a better designer for it in the end.
You can learn just as much from a genuinely bad game as you can from a good one.
In fact, it's generally easier to learn from the bad ones.
In a well-made game, all the elements are tightly sewn together in a well-designed whole.
But in bad games, everything tends to be a little less cohesive, and it gets easier
to pick out and trace all the flaws.
A designer never just says, "this sucks", or "this is good".
Remember, one of a designer's principal roles is that of a communicator.
Whenever you find yourself describing something simply as lame or cool, try to really drill down
and express why those elements in a game were positive or negative
and how all the pieces fit together to deliver the experience they did.
If you can't do that, go and replay the experience until you can.
All right, we're past the high-level stuff.
Now onto the nuts and bolts.
The first thing a designer does when sitting down to a new game is check
out all the menus and press all the buttons.
This gives you a little bit of insight into what the game designers felt was the most important.
The most accessible keys or buttons should generally be mapped to the actions
that the designers felt were the most important.
The actions that they're having the player do the most often in the game.
The menus will tell you what features the designers felt needed to be adjustable
because they couldn't agree on a single best option.
This can be for technical as well as design reasons.
Difficulty is often one such feature, but so is gamma.
It varies.
Next, the designer looks for first-order optimal strategies.
First-order optimal strategies are game play choices or strategies
with a low ratio of skill-in to power-out.
Or put a little more simply, first-order optimal strategies are tactics
which are very powerful, but are easy to do.
New strategies basically.
These are the things like the hundred hand-slap in Street Fighter,
the newb tube, the gurgling rush.
The reason you look for these is because they're one
of the most important things for a designer to understand.
Players will find one of these first-order optimal strategies, and just use it over
and over again unless something forces them to do otherwise.
PVP games naturally force players to evolve past first-order optimal strategies,
as they're never truly the most powerful tactics in the game.
They're just the tactics with the lowest skill-to-power ratio.
In a competitive environment, players naturally develop their skills
and constantly adopt new techniques in order to beat their friends.
But many single-player and co-op games don't have that constant drive to adapt,
which means a first-order optimal strategy.
Okay, we've seriously got to find a shorter term for that.
Hm. First-order op- what about food strategy?
We're going with food strategy.
Anyway, a food strategy can completely break a single-player or a co-op game.
If the designer creates a food strategy in his game without realizing it,
all of the depth he worked so hard to build in there is just going to go completely unnoticed.
Because the player's likely to just hundred hand-slap their way through all the levels.
But food strategies can also have positive effects, and these are equally important.
For example, the newb tube in Call of Duty is there
to give inexperienced players a fighting chance.
Without it, new players would just be jumping into a meat grinder dying left and right
at the hands of better equipped veteran players.
Spawn. Die.
Quit. The newb tube makes the novice player feel like they're at least a little competitive.
And allows them to get over that initial hump, and get to the point
that they can actually hold their own against the veterans.
Yeah, the vets may gripe about tactics like these, but the benefits outweigh the negatives.
The newb tube's negative impact on high-level play isn't going to be enough
to make somebody who's played for hundreds of hours quit the game.
But getting killed 30 times in a row before you can even get a feel
for the controls, that just might.
Food strategies give new players a point of entry.
Which ensures that new players will stick around long enough to get good.
Which, in turn, ensures that veteran players will have a large
and evolving community to play with.
As a designer, we must be aware of food strategies and take careful note
of where they're being used intentionally,
versus where they're simply the result of sloppy design.
Wow. Okay, we'd better move on before this turns into a three-parter.
So after hunting for first-order optimal strategies,
the designer then begins working for break points.
Places where the game doesn't function as intended.
The first of these are systemic breaks.
Places where the interplay of systems combines to do something
that the designers didn't intend.
Something that functions directly in opposition to what appear
to be the design goals of the game.
Example. James was once playing a trading game -- I won't mention which.
Where if you bought the ship with the most cargo room and got all the cargo expansions for it,
you could dock in a port and buy so much cargo that you actually inflated the price,
allowing you to sell it back for a big profit.
Infinite cash basically.
Kind of a game breaker.
But these systemic breaks can be much simpler than that.
Take the Final Fantasy series.
I consider the way that money works in most Final Fantasies to be systemically broken.
Why? Because of the inordinately vast sums of gill required just by playing the game normally.
To progress past any given area in a Final Fantasy game, you need to grind for experience.
The only way to get experience is by killing monsters.
Which means that the designers can make a reasonable estimate
of how many monsters you'll have to kill before you're ready to progress.
But monsters also drop gill.
And killing that many monsters almost always leaves you with so much gill
that you could dive into it like Scrooge McDuck.
Since the designers know roughly how many monsters you're going to be killing,
they could easily balance the amount of gill monsters drop
to ensure the player has roughly the amount of gill he's going to need for that area.
Now obviously it's not a problem that ruins the game experience or anything,
but it's a good example of the kind of system breakpoints to look out for as you play.
Next, the designer looks for technical breakpoints.
This is any point where the technology breaks down.
When you click through the world geometry.
When the camera gets stuck in a corner.
When your characters decides to spontaneously turn inside out.
There are two very important reasons you need to look for these.
One, to understand which bugs destroy a user's experience.
The sad truth is that you're never going to be able to avoid all of these problems.
It's damn near impossible to create a 100% bug-proof game.
So as a designer, you need to understand how these bugs impact the user so you can know
which ones you can afford to leave in, and which ones you need to really,
really focus on fixing or designing around.
Which leads us to two.
Most of the bugs you'd find in a game aren't just there because the dev team sucked.
Most of them are in there because a series
of design decisions actually made these bugs the best possible solution the team could deliver
within their schedule and budget.
This is especially true of camera issues.
Many teams lock themselves into a bad camera from the start with their design spec alone.
As a designer, you look for these things and trace their roots in the mechanics
so that you can learn how to avoid them yourself.
As we've mentioned, a designer builds for production.
They make their choices in order to build a game with a real team in the real world.
So a designer is always on the lookout for interesting ways other designers found to work
around the limitations of their technology team and budget.
So when you're playing these games, look for ways that the camera was constrained
so that the team didn't have to build or render their models to be viewed from certain angles.
Did the game choose to go with a hovering robot instead of a guy with a gun,
so they wouldn't have to rig or animate a bipedal enemy?
Practical solutions to overcome limitations.
Look for them when you play.
One of the best examples of this is the first Silent Hill.
The team wanted a level of graphical fidelity that the PS1 simply could not deliver.
So one day someone said, "Let's just add fog, and reduce the players clipping plane
to like five feet in front of their face.
That way we don't have to render the rest of the scene."
And with that, the franchise was born.
Another good example, Eve online.
We're totally running out of time here, but give it a looksee sometime.
The game is filled with neat little production tricks.
Lastly of all, the thing you have to remember as a designer, is that you are playing to learn.
This means that you're only playing most games for maybe an hour.
Of course some games will merit several hours of play, and occasionally you'll find
that very rare game worth playing all the way to completion because it's packed
with learning material throughout.
This is the only practical way to experience a truly broad range of games.
The majority of games reveal all of their systems
in the first few minutes of game play anyway.
So a good designer can understand their interconnections rapidly,
and move on to the next interesting treasure trove of play.
Don't worry, this won't take too much time away from your regular play schedule.
Even if you just drop one 80-hour RPG from your to-do list, that'll give you time
to absorb knowledge from 60 to 80 other games that you would otherwise have never touched.
Trust me, as a designer, the tradeoff is worth it [music].
Well, that's about all we've got.
Go to it future designers.
See you next week.
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