The majority of today will center around my presentation on Gamification, Procedurality, and ARGs (Alternate Reality Games).
First, however, I wanted to share some language and resources for making a game. I’m freestyling this, so hopefully you can help me make it better.
Like any endeavor, making a game benefits from developing a more technical language. Technical language gives you “heuristics,” or ways of thinking about any activity, that you might not otherwise have.
I want to start by expanding and explicating McGonigal’s four criteria for a game:
- Goals
- Rules
- Feedback
- Voluntary Participation
For heuristic purposes, I am going to skip over her 4th criteria (though, in terms of ARGs, that’s where I will start). Instead, I’ll start with rules. Here I want to introduce two interrelated terms that I use to think about rules: are they elegant and are they accessible. The latter term speaks to how difficult it is for a new player to begin playing a game. For instance, Kings of Tokyo is a pretty accessible game. It is in part accessible because it builds off of the Yahtzee genre–throw dice, build three-of-a-kinds, score, pass turn. I use the term “elegance” to denote the simplicity of a game’s rules and base design. Most games that are accessible are also elegant. But not always. Take, for instance, the card game Dominion or the dice game Quarriors!. Both of these games have very elegant rules. In Dominion, a players turn consists of only three stages: Act, Buy, and Clean up (it’s easy as A-B-C…). But Dominion isn’t necessarily accessible, since the game play requires you familiarize yourself with all of the various action cards (or, in Quarriors!). For new players, this can be a bit overwhelming.
Also, just because a game is elegant in its rules, doesn’t mean it is shallow in its strategy. Strategy is my way of explicating McGonigal’s notion of feedback. That is, I look for games that allow me to make meaningful decisions. Dominion excels at this, because every game I attempt to build an engine by buying cards that synergize. The game itself provides feedback, by demonstrating whether my card selection worked or whether it was flawed.
The most sophisticated games (and the games that I gravitate toward) allow you to theorycraft, or to strategize approaches to the game. To keep with my example, in Dominion the most simple strategy is called Big Money. So, here is another question to ask of a game: to what extent does theorycrafting, or advanced strategy, impact winning? To what extent is winning determined by luck? Finding a balance between theorycraft and luck is an important part of building a successful game. To clarify: sophistication speaks to the choices I make during gameplay. How many different choices can I make?
Depth of mechanics is important, but game designers have to make choices about how deep they want a game to go. How many rules are there/ How complicated are the rules? Depth, I would argue, is directly opposed to accessibility. Put crudely, the larger the rule book, the less acceptable a game probably is. Although, games can have different “approaches” to rules. Take, for instance, Dungeons and Dragons (which technically isn’t a game, but work with me here). There are very different approaches to playing a pen and paper RPG. For some, DnD is a story-telling and role-playing game, in which the rules are mere suggestions in place to help develop a meaningful world for characters to inhabit. At it’s most pure realization, DnD in this format doesn’t really need dice–the dice rolls aren’t the final arbitrator of what happens as much as a “heuristic” tool providing the story tellers with some random constraints to invent their stories (think of the way that improv comedians use props in the middle of a skit). At the other end of the spectrum, players can approach DnD as a realistic strategy game. This version is far more rules driven, in which gameplay is usually oriented around generating dice. In a rule driven DnD campaign, the dice are God. They determine everything that happens, and every choice a player makes ultimately serves to influence various die rolls (combat rolls, saving throws, treasure checks, range modifiers, skill checks, etc).
Let me present one more example game with this language in mind: Magic the Gathering.
- Accessibility: Magic is an increasingly unaccessible game. This is because the game has been in existence for almost 20 years, and each iteration of Magic introduces not only more cards, but more mechanics. Also, Magic’s central mechanic–the stack–basically requires a PhD in nerd gaming to understand. It is nearly impossible for two people who have never played Magic to sit down and play without either a) someone else who thoroughly knows the rules and/or b) the Internet and several hours to query rules questions (and parse out the virtually impenetrable Magic discourse).
- Elegance: While extremely confusing in terms of accessibility, Magic’s core game play is fairly elegant. For instance, a turn of Magic has clear phases.
- Sophistication: Magic is probably one of the most sophisticated games in existence. There’s so many different approaches to play the game that theorycraft is endless. You can literally spend a dozen hours building a single-deck, and, during gameplay, I am presented with critically important choices every turn. In order to be a competitive Magic player, I need to have a very deep understanding of the current meta (metagaming) in order to win. But this depth of knowledge isn’t enough–I also have to become very adept at reading board strength and making smart decisions during game play. Magic allows for very smart, nuanced, responsive decision-making.
- Depth: I have already suggested that Magic has considerable depth. In fact, I would argue that Magic is, without equal, the deepest game ever created. At this point there is almost 12,000 unique cards in existence. Period. Even though these cards can be broken down into various functions (ramp, scry, tutor, wipe, etc)., there’s an unmatched amount of variety in the card pool. Of course–this is one of the reasons that the game can seem so inaccessible,
My hope is that this language: accessibility, elegance, sophistication, and depth, provides you with lenses both for thinking about the games you play and for the game(s) you want to design. Ultimately, of course, a successful game has to be “fun,” and, as I hope the DnD example indicates, different people can find different things to be fun (some of you probably enjoy playing Monopoly, and I don’t want to think that there’s something cognitively wrong with your brain because of that). My hope is that contemplating these ideas while making your game will help you understand what you find fun (luck? strategy? deceit? cooperation?) and design accordingly.
Resources for Making Games
As we begin project 4, I want to point your attention to a few resources.
Gamification, Procedurality, and ARGs
With the time remaining in class today, I want to address SuperBetter and McGonigal’s arguments regarding the potential for gaming. Here’s a link to a presentation I delivered last year at the 2013 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC’s) entitled Postpedagogy, Gamification, and sf0.
Homework
Work on those research papers!
Read Mark Rosewater’s “Ten Things Every Game Needs”
