Will Wright’s Spore is coming soon. I’m looking forward to it. I still think SimCity4 is one of the most perfect games ever made (and still looks/plays competitively with the latest games out there), and there’s no debating whether or not The Sims franchise was/is a significant game design (and commercial) milestone. I wouldn’t be the first to suggest that Spore will be joining that illustrious crowd, though the missing “people” element (you know, homosapiens, actual human beings) will probably keep it from realizing the scope/breadth/depth of audience that The Sims has seen.

The Sporepedia, which serves as a clearing house for the most popular creatures created by players, employs a very clever (and very user-friendly) means to upload/download creatures: they embed the data in the PNG thumbnail of the creature. Instead of having some custom data format that’s opaque to the user (and basically worthless after it hits their desktop except for importing straight into Spore), the user has a traditional PNG that they can trivially view on any modern browser/OS. Embedded in the alpha channel data of the PNG, though, is a bunch of data (about 1K according to some estimates).

Now, this is an old trick, and you can do it “officially” with PNGs in custom chunks or in JPEGs, etc. It’s possible in almost any well-structured format. But it’s a very clever, modern, web way of handling it. It allows for trivial sharing by the user through whatever means they’re accustomed to because sharing an image is an almost universal feature of any collaborative software. So, user’s can attach the thumbs to their e-mail, or post them to their Flickr account, or put them on Facebook or their MySpace page, or send them in an IM.

Consider this inspiration! I’m now officially on the look out for how I can apply this technique to Mockingbird. Embedding the game’s description in its screenshot? Encoding ActionScript into the action icons? I don’t know, but I’m going to find something. And you should, too! Incorporate this feature into your products today!

An oft-encountered problem when discussing “games” is that we don’t have a fully-developed, universally understood terminology. We’re getting there… we’re much closer than we were just a few years ago, and lightyears ahead of where we were ten years ago. But there’s still a significantly sticky term that we seem to be permanently stuck with: the name of our medium, games.

The term “games” has been around for Really Long Time&tm; (I couldn’t find a reference indicating the date of the origin of the word, buts it has its roots in Olde Englishe&tm;). When we use it today we’re generally referring to video games, board games, card games, sports, etc., i.e. structured (however loosely) activities with interaction, rules and goals. There’s a ton of academic writing on the specific definition that I don’t care to go into… we all know what we’re talking about.

Or do we? The problem with the term games is that for 99% of its history it referred to a formal structure of rules with some goal. But we use it far more liberally these days, particularly in the indie or academic game circles, meaning more generally interactive entertainment (as opposed to films/books/music being passive entertainment).

Randy Smith (EALA) raises this issue in a recent Next-Gen column. Actually, he doesn’t directly raise this issue, instead he raises the issue that we used to have games where the player was allowed to fail, didn’t have a clear path for success, and in general had a much “grayer” experience. He cites Ultima V, which to be honest is cheating, as that game is much more the exception than the rule in regards to “gray” games.

His larger point is that “modern” game design, borrowing heavily from the good designs perfected in the casual market, dictates clear paths to success, objective scoring, concise rules, etc. (you can read his article). His question is whether or not we’re losing something by focusing on these things exclusively, i.e. have we overcorrected and lost something powerful?

The problem is the definition of what we’re doing, what we’re making. If you’re making a game that’s similar to a sport (Quake, practically any FPS with a military-theme, practically any RTS, virtually all casual games, all arcade games, etc.) then all of the elements of modern game design are totally appropriate. On the other hand, if you’re making a game that’s more akin to a simulation or a toy, then all the tenets of good usability, user interface design and accessibility (all different ways of saying the same thing) are critical.

But what if you’re making a game that’s like Ultima V, or Passage, or Super Columbine Massacre RPG, or the Olympic Torch Relay Game? These games are more about the message than the mechanism. The mechanics aren’t elements of structured play, but rather the necessary elements in order to get a specific emotion or point across to the player.

So, we’ve got serious games, casual games, hardcore games, just plain ole games… and message games? These are really our “art” games, games that focus on message or mechanics. They don’t dispense with mechanics, the mechanics are just secondary to the message. And as a result, they often have unoriginal mechanics because it’s not the point.

Note that I’m not dismissing mechanics as important in a “message” game. Cinematography is still critical to good film even if it is secondary to a message in many instances.

What are some examples of message games? I’d love to hear them in the comments. I’m looking for games where the point was the message they conveyed, not the mechanics with which the user interacted with them. I’ll start with the obvious ones I’ve already mentioned: Ultima V (and IV), Passage, SCMRPG… Planescape is probably one, though I’ve never played it. Others?

I first came across a discussion of mechanics, dynamics and aesthetics on King Lud IC. Patrick adds metrics to the equation (no pun intended). His metrics are an interesting idea, essentially measuring aspects of the dynamics then using those measurements to modify the other three systems (mechanics, dynamics and aesthetics). What he’s describing is basically a fitness criteria for the game’s DNA (mechanics, dynamics and aesthetics). I can see how this could be considered the “fourth layer” of MDA.

Patrick keeps asking how one would actually balance it. You could see it as a linear optimization problem (where you’re solving for n variables given m equations/relations). There’s a ton of mathematics research in this field (using computers to analytically solve the systems of equations). The beauty of any matrix of values is that you can run them through transformations (such as neural nets, or min/max algorithms, or even edge detection). It’s just important to remember the relationships. Take values as nodes in a graph, with edges representing relationships between the values.

I’d like to present my own definition of mechanics. I don’t think of it too differently from what Patrick presented; I see mechanics as the tangible, literal, immediate actions (or verbs) the player executes in the game. Classic examples would be run, jump, shoot, move, push, pull. Dynamics would be the effects of the mechanics on the world and the “strategies” that combine multiple mechanics. That may be exactly what Patrick and everyone else is saying, but it helps me grok it better in those terms (so maybe it’ll help someone else as well).

Of course, I may just be being pedantic about the term mechanics, but I see interactive storytelling, or drama games, as simply being more sophisticated dynamics on top of existing mechanics. I really do feel like we’ve developed a healthy enough palette of mechanics for our games; it’s the dynamics that are really too shallow and uninvolved, particularly considering that that’s where the meat is.

I’m sure this is exactly what the academics would say if I was better versed in their writings, but I see mechanics as the necessary instant gratification of interactivity, with the dynamics being the longer term satisfaction of interactivity. That’s why I thought Facade was a failure as a whole: the mechanics were not at all gratifying. How is real-time-typing-hoping-the-parser-understands-and-waiting-for-a-hit-or-miss-reaction a gratifying mechanic? It’s not. Sure, the longer term dynamics of the drama that plays out may be satisfying (when you reflect on it), or the anticipation of what may happen next (when you anticipate it) may be interesting, but the actual mechanics were piss-poor.

Of course, that short term vs. long term “satisfaction” was best summed up recently in this article on the short and long game.

Culture: Games and Metaphor is, very simply, superb. My only problem is its tired insistence that the Wiimote will magically improve things. A very odd supposition, as the author stressed metaphor, yet the Wiimote is far more literal (at least, when used intuitively) than the as-abstract-as-it-gets buttons on a gamepad. Even the example used of the Wiimote in Castlevania: what’s less metaphorical than holding a whip and swinging it at the screen? Furthermore, the more literal use of the Wiimote (argued by others to be its benefit!) almost requires a more literal player-centered perspective on the game world, i.e. FPS, the thing that the author complains about immediately proceeding the Castlevania comments.

Beyond those few errs, the article perfectly hits home the metaphor point. Particularly the discussion of Shadow of the Colossus, the most succinct explanation of that game as art.

Here’s an interesting article on genre from the Escapist that lead me to make this note in my notebook: “Genres help eliminate unnecessary exposition, they provide a known context for author and audience. Genre is economy.” And by “economy” I meant that genres are an efficient mechanism to reduce the overall information burden on the user (just like metaphors!). They help the user “chunk” across content in a given medium (and even across mediums).

Also, in regards to games being “representational,” the article points to a problem with more realistic looking games… the higher quality, “realer” representation implies to the user a higher fidelity interaction (which never scales as quickly). That’s why old school games feel “right” … their representation equals their interaction.

Another suit (from Jack Thompson) against Take-Two/Rockstar regarding GTA and a murder. The standard “informed” rebuttal: games don’t make people killers… if he didn’t have access to guns… it’s the parent’s responsibility… he was a 13yrold playing a 17+ M rated game…

The problem: arguing that he’s a 13yrold playing a 17yrold’s game kinda concedes the point that the game may have caused the problem. While that may be possible, I kinda doubt it…

Another problem: arguing that playing a game can’t have a negative impact on you (can’t make you a killer) kinda goes against the assertion that games are art and can have impacts on the audience, express emotion, etc.

We can’t have our cake and eat it, too: games either have emotional/psychological impacts or they don’t. And if they do, the question is whether the game in particular has a positive or negative one (or if its even related to the case). Of course games have emotional impacts. The best ones aim for it. That does not mean they bear responsibility for its audience’s actions.

Games, like all media, broaden the consumer’s palette of experience. It’s experience-by-proxy. I wasn’t alive during WWII, but I feel as though I have some degree (incredibly slight, to be sure) of experiential understanding of it due to movies like Saving Private Ryan, Schindler’s List, or video games like Medal of Honor. We have to admit, though, that 2 hours of Saving Private Ryan delivers a far deeper emotional impact than 20 hours of Medal of Honor.

Of course, most video game players focus on the mechanics, with the thematic elements being secondary. Thematic elements become repetitive. Much like a movie may revolve around its characters and their development, a game revolves around the mechanics and their application.

Of course, someone predisposed toward violence or who is desensitized to it or amoral for whatever reason may focus on the thematic elements. In fact, they may be attracted to the game because of the thematic elements, as opposed to the mechanics. And if they play obsessively, it may be a kind of “wallowing” in the themes, as opposed to “exercising” the mechanics.

Porn is an apt comparison, a slightly more socially acceptable pursuit that most males will (hopefully) have more experience with than violence. It’s base, just like violence, and is considered a socially undesirable (if not wholly unacceptable) recourse for certain “urges”. One can probably see the distinction between viewing porn “to get your rocks off” as opposed to becoming obsessed and entrenched in it. There’s a difference between getting aroused by hearing a woman moaning as she’s brought to (a likely faked) climax and being aroused by the male-dominating, misogynistic “fake rape” that can be found in some dark corners. It may be a thin line from some perspectives, and their may be no distinction in the eyes of others, but I’d guess most guys can see the difference.

The same applies to video games… the vast majority of the consumers are relishing the mechanics primarily and the themes secondarily. It’s not the life of a real mob assassin that we’re enjoying thematically, it’s the idealized, sanitized version. And we know it’s different. Hell, a 13yrold should know its different. If he can’t make that distinction, then there’s something wrong. A parent shouldn’t be oblivious to that.

So the parents do bare some responsibility, not so much for the child’s actions, but for the contributing factors to those actions. Now, if Rockstar was advertising GTA during Saturday morning cartoons, including it in cereal boxes, and distributing demos at elementary schools, then they’d be doing something wrong (though still not *responsible* for the actions of the players). But rating a game as M, selling it for $60 for a $200 game machine puts reasonable barriers to entry up, particularly for a 13yrold.

In other words, I’ve got absolutely no problem with the existence of pornography. I would absolutely have a problem with my 13yrdold son watching pornography. But if I bought it for him, and let him watch it, could I really turn around and sue Vivid when he got a girl pregnant? Could I honestly blame the makers of the porn for that?

Please note my comparison between porn and video games: the comparison is apt because in the eyes of those defaming video games they are on equal footing, yet they would never think of suing the porn makers (or maybe they would, but no lawyer would give them the time of day ’cause they’d lose). They are not the same thing, though. Porn is like a documentary: it is real people having real sex. GTA is crudely modeled and animated, very clearly not real people doing very clearly not real things (like running from one end of a city to another, and dying, and being resurrected, and getting hit by cars and not getting hurt, etc…).

So, the next time you witness a “games don’t kill people, people kill people” kind of debate, be clear about the point you’re arguing. Don’t diminish games by arguing they don’t have the emotive substance to effect their audience. Its a double-edged sword that we must be quite careful in wielding.

Let’s start our deconstruction with the most basic feature of the player’s character, Link: his movement. Link’s movement displays a surprising amount of subtlety. If you play The Legend of Zelda for a while, you’ll notice that Link doesn’t ever get hung up on obstacles due to unexpected collisions, nor do you ever just miss a bad guy by a pixel or two when attacking him. Yet at the same time, you’ll notice that Link moves fluidly through the gameworld; even tough the environment is tile-based, you can tap the directional pad and link will move a single pixel in that direction. If you’re moving to the left and decide to go up, down or right, Link instantly moves in that other direction when you change directions on the gamepad.

What’s happening here is a very neat trick. While Link can move a single pixel at a time, in any direction, the longer he continously moves in any direction the more he gravitates toward aligning himself with the underlying grid of the screen. The tile grid for LoZ is 16 tiles wide by 14 tiles high (including 3 tiles for the status display at the top of the screen). Each tile is 16×16 pixels. Link operates on a half-tile grid, though (32×28 tiles, 8×8 pixels each). As Link moves, if he’s not currently aligned with the half-tile grid, he is adjusted, one pixel at a time, toward the closest correction. As a result, if Link is 4 pixels off alignment he’ll line back up with the grid after moving 4 pixels.

In case that description doesn’t make sense, here’s an exercise to help demosntrate the technique:

Assume Link is basically in the center of the screen, lined-up with a tile. In other words, Link occupies a whole tile, just as he would in a strictly tile-based game (like a traditional boardgame or wargame). If you tap on the directional pad to the left, Link will move one pixel to the left. If you tap again, he’ll move another pixel to the left. This is pixel-fine control, which makes Link’s movement feel fluid.

Now, if you hold the directional pad to the left, Link will move continously. As soon as you let up, he stops. If you hold left then immediately reverse to hold right, he instantly changes direction (as he does for up and down as well). This is basically lag-free, which makes Link’s movement feel responsive.

Okay, return back to Link sitting squarely on a tile. If you tap left twice he’ll be two pixels over the left edge of his starting tile. Now press up four times. You’ll notice that after each press Link will move up one pixel. But, he’ll also move to the right one pixel, either the first two times you pressed up or the first and third times you pressed up (I don’t have the game in front of me and I can’t remember the rate at which it corrects). So, even though you never press right on the gamepad, Link has now returned to the same horizontal position as he was when he started (before you moved him left two pixels). This is the built-in correction.

What does this correction do for you?

The correction prevents the subtle but annoying problem wherein the player would “snag” on the corners of objects that he anticipated passing by. The more the player moves contiously the more aligned Link becomes, which has the same effect as speed-sensitive steering in a car.

The correction also has benefits for attacking as well. When Link attacks (with his sword, for example), the “kill zone” lies in the tile(s) immediately along his facing direction. Since enemies align along a similar half-grid as Link, the correction serves to line up Link with his enemies (as opposed to missing the enemy by a few frustrating pixels).

Observant readers will observe (as they are known to do) that this “feature” doesn’t appear in the SNES sequel, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past . Even though the gameworld is still tile-based, player (and enemy/NPC) movement is not strictly aligned on any grid. We get the same corrections though, but using different mechanisms.

Movement is corrected by “rounding” the corners of most things Link can collide with. Thus, when he encounters them the “physics” of the game deflects him at a 45-degree angle along his direction of movement (e.g., if he was moving north/up and encountered a corner he would move northwest/east until he passed the corner).

Attacking is corrected in a similarly interesting way. Instead of Link’s sword having a killzone along a straight line down his facing direction, his sword “swipes” in a large arc, an arc that happens to be pretty close to full two “tiles” in the gameworld (one directly in front and half above and half below). This allows the player to attack while slightly mis-aligned with an enemy and still land a blow.

The result for both actions in both games is the same: the player’s desire is successfully expressed in the gameworld, regardless of the potentially pedantic ways of the computer.

It’s no secret that the Legend of Zelda (NES) was a watershed game. The game still has an open-world feel that titles to this day fall on their face trying to emulate, even in this post-GTA design world. This was the first game I ever played that truly was open in the sense that I could go anywhere in the game and basically approach (or avoid) any obstacle as I saw fit. The game also fits the bill as the prototypical example of an action-adventure video game, and the series (with a few minor exceptions) has continued that tradition since.

What is there to learn from a game that originally released in 1986? Twenty years later, there are still design subtleties in LoZ that are overlooked. The game is a perfect example of simple mechanics played out on a vast and varied playing field. From a complexity perspective, the game represents something achievable by any single individual given today’s technology and tools, yet we have the efforts of huge teams with comparitively bottomless budgets failing to capture the subtle qualities that simply make this game work.

In what I hope to be an insightful series of essays, I’ll be deconstructing the elements that I feel make LoZ a relative Citizen Kane of the genre, and see how those successes can translate to useful lessons in today’s games.

As a bit of a preface, let’s look at the game’s premise and detail the overall mechanics of LoZ. The premise follows the classic Hero’s Journey, with Link (the player-controlled character, who was so-named because Miyamoto saw him as the player’s “link” into the game world) out to save Princess Zelda from the evil clutches of Ganon. To achieve this goal, Link must acquire the objects of mythical power (the tri-force) and the one weapon that can kill the ultimate evil (the master sword). To this end, Link travels to many different locales (deserts, forests, mountains, dungeons), doing battle with many monsters and finding many unique weapons.

The mechanics are straightforward. Link is represented onscreen in an top-down view. The player has direct control over Link: the directions on the gamepad (left, right, up, down) correspond to movement onscreen (west, east, north, south, respectively). The A & B buttons are mapped to various actions, usually one of which is mapped to Link’s sword while the other is mapped to a special weapon or inventory item. There’s no jumping. To pick-up an item, Link simply collides with it.

The gameworld is divided into two sections: the Overworld and the Underworld. The Overworld is composed of mountains, trees, bushes, rivers, lakes, rocks, etc., what you’d expect from a classic outdoor adventure landscape. The Underworld is represented by dungeons whose entrances are hidden throughout the Overworld. Each dungeon (of which there are 9) is self-contained with one entrance/exit, each one containing a boss monster and usually an item of significance near their end. The dungeons don’t have to be visited in any particular order, but some of them have accessibility barriers that require attaining items of significance from other dungeons in order to be successful. The final dungeon is home to Ganon, whose defeat is the final goal of the game.

The gameworld is viewed one screenful-at-a-time. When Link hits the edge of the screen (or a doorway on the edge of the screen when in the dungeons) the game “pauses” momentarily while the view shifts/slides to the new screen, at which point player-control resumes. Each “screen” is usually transient, with enemies regenerating and other elements “resetting” when a player exits then returns to a screen. Enemies cannot pursue Link out of one screen and into another, nor can Link attack from one screen into another. Thus, each screen represents a self-contained segment of gameplay, rarely dependent on what came before it.

Enemies are generally very “stupid” and normally just follow set movement patterns. Outside of bosses, few of the enemies actually pursue the player, and most are killed in one or two hits from the player’s sword. Most enemies attack the player with “contact damage,” though some launch projectiles along whatever direction they are facing. Often, enemies leave behind some kind of reward on their death, usually a coin (or “rupee”), heart (representation of Link’s life or hit points) or other refillable items (arrows, bombs, keys).

Of course, all of this is probably not news to anyone reading this, as I would hope everyone is familiar with this classic. It can be easily located in ROM form to play in your favorite NES emulator, or you can grab the version for the GBA (the re-released NES classics). I have both, in fact!

Our first topic (which will be posted either later tonight or tomorrow night) will be some observations on the movement and attack mechanics of Link.

I’m looking forward to getting stuck in Limbo. He’s looking for C++ programmers, but I was first struck with how perfectly this game could be done in Flash. With Flash’s new filters and improved performance, I’d guess he could get the exact same results, cross-platform and with a lot less development pain than C++.

It’s a great example, though, of the kind of results we’ll see as more people with classic art and graphic design backgrounds (with a sprinkling of programming experience) are brought into the gamedev fold. The in-development footage on his sight is hauntingly beautiful, and an inspiration to say the least. Makes me remember those first few hours playing Out of this World, still one of the few games to deliver so much on so little.

Speaking of Out of this World, I’ve always thought it’d be awesome to see that game remade in Flash (it’s largely rotoscoped with a vector-like graphic style, very applicable to Flash development). Hell, if it fit on a 1.44MB floppy and ran on a 286, surely it can run full-speed in Flash on a modern day machine? Those are the kind of side-scrollers people need to be making… there’s a lot of life left in that very simple mechanic! (And the side-scroller view? Well, that aesthetic has worked for “comics” for a hundred years.)

TonyPa first came to my attention with his impressive tutorials on tile-based games in Flash. Later, I discovered his games page, which includes a maddening simple and addictive game called “Gear Taker.” If you go to his site, click on “games” then click on the first game in the list “GEARTAKER” that’ll lead you to it (sorry, no direct links available). This is the finest example of a “one button game.” To play the game only requires pressing a single button (the left mouse button, of course). Yet with only that one means of input the gameplay is as addictive as any good game of Tetris or Bejeweled. And the aesthetics… well, the visuals are black-n-white, stick figures and gears (as simple as it gets), and the music has a single sample played at various pitches and tempos. And while the aesthetics perfectly understate the simple design, the music perfectly understates the incredible tension induced as your hapless stick figure flies across the screen.

Two words: perfectly simple. TonyPa, your creation serves as an inspiration to the rest of us. Thank god I don’t have this on my mobile phone.

I would only add one option, an advanced mode for the masochists that involves timing. But it’s probably for the safety of the masses that he didn’t include something such as that.

My best score is between 2500 and 3000, around level 6 or 7. Good luck!

Raph Koster teaches the Theory of Fun. Eric Zimmerman teaches the Rules of Play. Chris Crawford teaches the Art of Interactive Design. But they all need to take a step back and look at the bigger picture, the underlying psychology — not the “what” of games, and more generally play, but the “why.”

A Theory of Games for Just About Everyone by Aaron Ruby

Excellent article. In fact, so good that I am already eagerly anticipating the next article (he’ll have a series at Next Generation). Yes, so good that I am actively lamenting the fact that I think I gave away my copy of Smartbomb without reading it… To be honest, from the book’s cover (yes, I know I shouldn’t have judged…) and based on who gifted it to me, I had assumed (yes, I’m an ass) the book was more business, more shallow and less practically informed than what I’d be interested in. If it’s anything like this article, than I made a serious mistake.

Aaron suggests that play is part of what philosophers call “intentional attitudes.” While Koster, Zimmerman, Crawford, et al, prefer to define play (and by extension, games) through the physical actions that compose play/games, and by the context in which they occur, Aaron rises above those definitions and points out that play, like art, really is in the eye of the beholder. In other words, play is defined by the player, not by the specifics of his actions.

I absolutely agree with this definition, and I also agree with Aaron’s suggestion that by applying this definition, by looking at our medium through this lens, we can better understand both when/why we are successful with certain elements and in certain contexts, and where we can go to broaden our medium.

How can you argue with a definition that encompasses football, SimCity, Doom, Barbies, D&D and sex?