I've been reading 'A Theory of Fun' by Raph Koster in order to gain a deeper understanding of why people play games, what it is that they enjoy and how I can use this understanding to inform my own choices when it comes to designing my game.
Raph Koster is known for being one of the lead designers on Ultima Online. He's a legend in the gaming sphere and he has a lot of experience within the industry.
"Based on my reading, the human brain is mostly a voracious consumer of patterns, a soft pudgy gray Pac-Man of concepts. Games are just exceptionally tasty patterns to eat up.
When you watch a kid learn, you see there's a recognizable pattern to what they do. They give it a try once -- it seems that a kid can't learn by being taught. They have to make mistakes themselves. They push at boundaries to test them and see how far they will bend. They watch the same video over and over and over and over and over..."
Koster's commentary on how children learn through trial and error is really interesting. I think he's right when he says that children appear to have an easier time in doing something themselves, potentially failing and then learning from repeated tries. Rather than just giving instruction, the act of being practical about a task or challenge may be seen as much more effective in giving a child new information that sticks and is understood.
I think I should bare this in mind in Game Design as, even if the target audience of a game may not be aimed at a younger mind, I'd argue that we still hold that basic 'rule' of, we want to try to find a solution to a problem; if something fails we can use that information to inform our next attempt. This is already in games, mechanics like respawning help this type of learning. The majority of the time, after dying in a game you respawn and are presented with another opportunity to try again.
"Simply put, the brain is made to fill in blanks. We do this so much we don't even realize we're doing it....
We've learned that if you show someone a movie with a lot of jugglers in it an tell them in advance to count the jugglers, they will probably miss the large pink gorilla in the background, even though it's a somewhat noticeable object. The brain is good at cutting out the irrelevant."
I think Koster's point about how peoples brains work on 'autopilot' a lot of the time and fill in the blanks for us is a great observation. I think this is useful information to keep in mind when designing a game.
For example, say I were to design a 3D game environment as part of a game level, it's efficient to have the least amount of poly's and high-res textures as possible so the game can run smoother and be as optimized as possible. Taking the brain's autopilot qualities into account when the player is in said environment, it means that I can concentrate all the detail into 'Hero Objects' -- the most noticeable assets in the environment that the player will be more inclined to notice. Which then allows me to have the less important assets of the environment to be of a lower resolution because it's just there to fill the blanks of the image that the brain has and it won't be consciously focused on by the player.
This form of design, using Hero Objects to draw in the player at higher levels of detail, is used in most games today. It's proven to be effective as it has become a part of most (if not, all) 3D based games. I understand why it's used and why it's effective in what it does. This is also a relief in the production process as it means not every asset, not every model and/or texture has to be of the highest quality.
A little more on this....
"When we grasp a pattern, we usually get bored with it and iconify it...
One might argue that the essence of much of art is forcing us to see things as they are rather than as we assume them to be -- poems about trees that force us to look at the majesty of bark and the subtlety of leaf, the strength of trunk and the amazing abstractness of the negative space between boughs -- those are getting us to ignore the image in our head of "wood, big greenish whatever" that we take for granted."
I like the imagery Koster uses to illustrate his point, brilliant stuff. Really though, I can see what he means, we like to simplify things in our heads, iconify things that we don't want to pay attention to. I think that Game luckily allows for this as it may now be normal to expect characters in a game to be hyper-realistic but in order to have foliage, for example, in a game to be as visually in-depth and descriptive as the image Koster has painted would be a bad idea as it would make the requirements to run the game incredibly high and unrealistic. Taking advantage of these psychological tropes of people seems to have informed how games are made in a huge way. You may get players that stop, take a look around and realise not everything looks as good up close as it does from a far but it's a necessity in game design. Also, gamers understand this, in a much less long-winded way but it is definitely understood by players as just a 'thing that happens in games' -- it comes with the platform, the medium.
"Grok is a really useful word. Robert Heinlein coined it in his novel Stranger in a Strange Land. It means that you understand something so thoroughly that you have become one with it and even love it. It's a profound understanding beyond intuition or empathy..."
Koster then goes on to talk about his experience with guitars and that for his birthday his Wife bought him a Mandolin and despite them quite different from one another, he was able to apply his experience with guitars to playing the Mandolin.
"I have grokked enough about stringed instruments to create a library of chunked knowledge to apply. When I was playing the guitar all those years, I was also working on more obscure stuff, deepening my knowledge of the intervals between notes, mastering rhythm, understanding harmonic progression."
I love that Koster mentions this 'mental library' that we create from learning things that we then go on to apply to other things that relate in some way (or maybe not at all). This sounds a lot like the 'mental inventory' that I have heard RagnarRox on YouTube speak about -- only the 'mental inventory' is more aimed towards just games. The idea that we take previous information learned and practice we've done and apply it to new experiences is very apparent in gamers. For instance, while games are pretty much required to have some kind of guide or tutorial, most people with previous experience in games will already have assumed most of the information given in a games tutorials. Controls, the meanings of colours, menu systems, general mechanics are all things that gamers may be able to adapt to instantly with no need of telling what to do because they've already built up a 'mental inventory' of how games 'usually' work and what is expected.
When you have the information that players will take some things for granted in your game, it can allow you to throw a curveball in there and do something unexpected, pattern-breaking and 'new' to make a game more interesting. Everyone loves a twist, right?
Antichamber, for example, is a game that is based entirely on combating pre-established assumptions on how the game is going to work. Because of that, the designers of the game have said that gamers have a harder time completing it than people who have little to no experience with first-person games because they make less assumptions and think outside of a game mentality.
"Human beings are all about progress. We like life to be easier. We're lazy that way. We like to find ways to avoid work. We like to find ways to keep from doing something over and over. We dislike tedium, sure, but the fact is that we crave predictability."
"And since we dislike tedium, we'll allow unpredictability, but only inside the confines of predictable boxes, like games or TV shows. Unpredictability means new patterns to learn, therefore unpredictability is fun."
These conflicting views of what people crave is really interesting as I can see both sides of the argument and I feel I can agree with this wholeheartedly when it comes to games. In games like Portal, I recognize that I want to learn the mechanics of the level I'm on as quickly as possible so I can progress and sometimes once I've figured out a mechanics I want more of a similar task to complete that confirms the lessons I've learned. Portal does this as when you learn a new mechanic or way of puzzle-solving, it will feature that in its level design 2 or 3 times before adding a new pattern to learn. There's a constant revision and building of puzzle-solving skills that are given to the player to understand and apply.
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Successful games tend to incorporate the following elements:
- Preparation. Before taking on a given challenge, the player gets to make some choices that affect their odds of success. This might be healing up before a battle, handicapping the opponent, or practicing in advance. You might set up a strategic landscape, such as building a particular hand of cards in a card game. Prior moves in a game are automatically part of the preparation stage because all games consist of multiple challenges in a sequence.
- A sense of space. The space might be the landscape of a war game, a chess board, the network of relationships between the players during the bridge game.
- A solid core mechanic. This is a puzzle to solve, intrinsically interesting rule set into which content can be poured. An example might be "moving a piece of chess." The core mechanic is usually a fairly small rule; the intricacies of games come from either having a lot of mechanics or having a few, very elegantly chosen ones.
- A range of challenges. This is basically content. It does not change the rules, it operates within the rules and brings slightly different parameters to the table. Each enemy you might encounter in a game is one of these.
- A range of abilities required to solve the encounter. If all you have is a hammer and you can only do one thing with it, then the game is going to be dull. This is a test that tic-tac-toe fails but that checkers meets; in a game of checkers you start learning the importance of forcing the other player into a disadvantageous jump. Most games unfold abilities over time, until at a high levels you have many possible stratagems to choose from.
- Skill required in using the abilities. Bad choices lead to failure in the encounter. This skill can of any sort, really: resource management during the encounter, failures in timing, in physical dexterity, and failures to monitor all the variables that are in motion."
I find this list of game-making elements to be really insightful, a lot of it is obvious but when you see all of the aspects of what makes games appealing to a player it's really helpful. It's also quite surprising to me that so much thought goes into the psychology of any game, even games as straightforward as checkers.
"There are also some features that should be present to make the experience a learning experience:
- A variable feedback system. The result of the encounter should not be completely predictable. Ideally, greater skill in completing the challenge should lead to better rewards. In a game like chess, the variable feedback is your opponent's response to your move.
- The Mastery Problem must be dealt with. High-level players can't get big benefits from easy encounters or they will bottom-feed. Inexpert players will be unable to get the most out of the game.
- Failure must have a cost. At the very least there is an opportunity cost, and there may be more. Next time you attempt the challenge, you are assumed to come into it from scratch--there are no--"do-overs." Next time you try, you may be prepared differently."
I think the reminder that feedback is important for the player is a great point. Playing a game, to me, is almost like a back & forth between the player and the game itself (or player & opponent). Rewards, punishments and the carrot-on-a-stick properties that are often seen in games are tools that are effectively used to teach, condition and engage players to find fun in the challenge and a want to continue/learn more.
From reading Koster's
'A Theory of Fun' I feel I've gained an understanding on why certain decisions and design choices are made within game development. There are common elements to every game that are what make the experience of games unique and appealing. The psychology of a gamers mind really matters when creating an engaging experience. It also helps with efficiency in regards to design choices that help developers focus on different areas of priority in terms of visual detail & attention.
- Trial & Error. Staying practical is a great way to engage & teach the player.
- Take advantage of player Psychology. On the technical side, use brains autopilot as an excuse to use Hero Objects and differences in asset quality to build games efficiently with minimum impact on the players experience.
- Mental Library & Assumptions. Keep in mind gamers pre-existing assumptions on how games may work.
- Manipulate predictability & unpredictability of lessons for the player in order to create variations of an experience; teaching, revision & skill development.
