Raph is, at once, incredibly accomplished, thoughtful about design, and humble about it. I once caught him coming off an international flight, and he was excitedly showing off a game he'd coded on the plane. He genuinely loves working on the stuff and thinking about it.
His writing is often SO full of ideas that I can't absorb an entire piece in one sitting. It's like a 12 course tasting menu. The neat thing with his writing is that, despite what he says here about all 12 pieces being important together, you can often just pick an isolated bit and chew on it for a while, and still learn something.
(Presumably return to the other 11 courses later; they'll still be fresh.)
For reference Raph Koster wrote "the book" on game design, and was the lead designer for Ultima Online (among other things) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raph_Koster
I've come across this kind of comment elsewhere, and the recommendation was that "the book" is Designing Games by Tynan Sylvester (the author of Rimworld)
Raph was the lead game designer on SWTOR a game that was way ahead of it's time and one of the most enjoyable sandbox mmorpg's I've ever played. I'm working on a new game that will take inspiration from lessons learned there.
I remember when Raph was working on Metaplace[1], which was a kid-targeting, programmable (Lua dialect), virtual world/user generated content factory that was contemporary to the launch of Roblox ca. 2006-2007. I wonder quite often what things might be like if Metaplace had gotten to the scale and scope that Roblox wound up achieving.
What was interesting/worked about it's design (and why did the players care?[1])
Was it resilient to the, uh, many, many well-documented problems that the genre pushes players/itself into?
---
[1] There's a lot of ideas in this space that sound interesting on paper to nerds bikeshedding, but often fall flat in actual implementation. I'm curious as to what were the ones that worked.
Game was SWG, not SWTOR. Launched in 2003 and was sunset in 2011 when SWTOR launched.
SWG set out to be something like Dwarf Fortress in terms of depth to the worlds physics; for example, gunsmiths could tinker on all parts of a gun and maybe get a lucky roll to unlock +N more damage or -N recoil. Same with land vehicles and bioengineered animals, droids. Parameters to noodle all the way down. Some under user control, others random to foster sense of a chaotic physical world.
As the in game object economy was entirely propped up by crafters this fostered economic PVP.
Lucasarts of 2000-2003, when the game was developed, did not understand MMO, and 3D games take much longer than 2D adventure games and shoved it out the door 2 years too early.
It also suffered from 90s OOP heavy software development patterns. Devs had difficulty managing it and updating over the years.
Ultimately it failed at being a Star Wars game. PVE was just "kill a nest of bugs" and failed to leverage storylines and characters. Players with nothing else to do ended up ruling the economy or whatever. Could have made them compete against Star Wars power brokers, IMO. Jabba sabotaged your factory, or something. Once a player was kitted out they had nothing to do.
Some have spent the last 10+ years implementing a server emulator, various tools and mods. An emulator built around the original release is here: https://github.com/swgemu
I tinker on a modded private server now and then. Initially added in random world events, to generate things to go do and replacing odd design decisions like mission terminals with NPC models to talk to in that seedy back alley, to foster more in world RP vibe.
When WOW launched SWG was redesigned to play more like that. Typical MBA "copy paste what they are doing" project management.
It truly was ahead of its time, I don't think any one game has come close to implementing such a rewarding group of systems and economy in an MMORPG, except maybe EVE but that is a very different game and admittedly I did not find EVE fun.
The most exciting systems to me had very little to do with combat, but especially as it pertains to this article, also couldn't be as rewarding without it. It was all the player run economies, homsteads, towns and cities, player shops, craftsman and markets. The fact that materials mined had quality which impacted item stats, on and on.
To get good gear, you had to know a guy who made it, they had to know a guy who'd mined good quality minerals, and that person may have found the minerals through another player who had prospected it.
It made sense to be part of a player city, so you could put your house in a known market area for people to visit.
It all mattered because people needed the equipment to go do the quests, and so it was a really symbiotic set of systems that made crafting and economy matter.
The skill tree system was so nice compared to the rigid class systems of other MMORPGs, too.
The fact that player towns just emerged was really cool.
It was such a shame the space expansion was so ... flat. Neither space nor ground had a storyline to follow, but space wasn't an open world, and had no real element of choice in skill paths.
PVE was indeed awful. Especially given the back drop; it should have been full of adventure across the galaxy, established characters messing with players, but was merely "run here and kill 6 kobolds". NPC AI sucked.
Would love to strip from my private server, NPC generation as-is as implementation is static and does not allow dynamic responses. Replace it with modern agents to connect like players and train them to build out the world like players can.
Also started a project to make a new client using video and segmentation, gen AI to recreate initial game engine entities as Godot scenes to have full control.
Too little time for either, initial code has sat untouched for years.
> Also started a project to make a new client using video and segmentation, gen AI to recreate initial game engine entities as Godot scenes to have full control.
That sounds fascinating, I've been working in godot for a few projects now. I'd be interested to know how you would integrate the Godot scenes into the current engine, or if it would be an entirely new client.
My plan was/is entirely new client, mapped client state to SWG emulator server.
Godot is a pain given my workflow is pretty cli heavy though. Since I last touched that project I looked into switching to Wicked Engine. Just include C/C++ headers rather than Godot.
But job got interesting (am an EE in hardware development land) and I have to spend free time diving into AI model architecture to keep up. Both SWG projects have sat idle for 10-12 months now. shrug
I enjoyed the new aspect ships brought to crafting, and there's something special about walking around your own ship while it's in transit. But otherwise totally agree, it was kind of just space combat arenas and not much more.
That "Fun" is a de gustibus sort of thing is the important point. I wonder if there is something like relationships between the various flavors of fun, or if one can infer good "collateral fun" activities from the main genre.
For instance, I think that puzzles are ok in Mass Effect, but the many mini-games in Final Fantasy 7 are borderline annoying.
If you look at most games, they're all repeated challenges, but some are so good that you don't see or experience them as such.
Others are very obvious though; MMORPGs are the obvious answer and they often don't even have an interesting story or reward to go with the grind, because the reward is a gamble. Ubisoft games are another example, ever since the first Assassin's Creed their games have generally been the same formula of an overworld with a lot of repeated but sameish "quests". The Division series combines the two with randomized, chance based loot. (...coincidentally I'm playing that one right now).
But yeah, the "repeated challenges" thing is best left to that particular class of games. Some people realy enjoy it though.
Some pushback to this: I understand MMORPGS are addictive, but for some reason I was never hooked, so their "repetitive" aspect is a negative to me.
For Assassin's Creed, it was so repetitive even within the same game (the first one) I couldn't even finish it once I noticed the grind. It drove me nuts.
A lot of games then followed that pattern (e.g. Shadow of Mordor, Mad Max, and I'm sure countless others -- I just mention the ones I tried). I find some of their mechanics interesting but once the grind kicks in (which is fairly soon, since these sandbox games are all grind-based) I despair and abandon them.
They feel like repetitive work rather than entertaining to me.
But hear this: Papers, Please, a game that is literally a bureaucracy simulator, engages me in a way Assassin's Creed never could. I wonder why! (Random guess: I think it's because PP, for all its repetitiveness, feels like a small game, while Assassin's Creed and its like feel like endless games you could spend your life within... and I have better things to do with my life).
I ask this because Ralph is a luminary in the field and you just likened his contribution to the industry to that of somebody who designs predatory engagement loops and this is utterly ridiculous.
I thought your comment was too dismissive at first, but then I read the whole article, and I fully agree with it.
The article gives useful theoretical tools for understanding and critiquing such shallow games, actually. Its examples are drawn from many genres, and it's thoughtful and insightful about many kinds and aspects of games.
The comment you call out with your question is indeed a low-effort and low-quality dismissal. I struggle to describe it without being more insulting than that.
The important thing to note is that Raph’s ideas are in the formalist camp and there other competing theories about game design. The criticism made in the parent of the thread has been a common one since Theory of Fun was first published. With artistic disciplines like game design you often have multiple ways of looking at similar things that are more about the values of the author than any one view being more inherently correct.
Personally what I find off-putting is throwing around the term "dopamine". Yeah, there's a link and all, but why include this bit?
> Dopamine can release for 'richly interpretable' situations
Ok, and? I mean, Oh, right. The dopamine. The dopamine for gamers, the dopamine chosen especially to entertain gamers, gamers' dopamine. That dopamine?
It's a gripe of mine too. There's a tenuous link at best, and it may not mean what is commonly assumed. If you want to say "it can give pleasure or joy," just say so. Don't invoke a rather indirect, pseudo-scientific, bullshit argument.
> And let me also reject the implicit notion that stories are entertainment but not, academically speaking, fun.
Stories are obviously fun, otherwise no-one would read books, but a story that you interact with meaningfully, that you can change significantly, really hard to do well.
Like every game where you can do good thing or bad thing, and the game punishes you for doing bad thing. It's really hard to write a compelling story where a nasty piece of shit still somehow saves the Fantasy Kingdom from the Prophesised Doom and becomes the hero.
I honestly cant't think of any good examples where game mechanics and stories interacted in a way that gave you significant agency while still being fun. I'd love to be given contra-examples though.
I think of the Mass Effect games and their attempts at this, "Oh you were only 92% Paragon, so now we're at the end, _this_ crew-member has to die for some reason, if only you'd known that 30 hours of gameplay ago when you punched that grifter in the Citadel!"
Or one I still bear a massive, MASSIVE grudge against, Fable III, where if you didn't massively grind for resources before the bit you thought was the end-game - where you fought and defeated the evil oppressive king, you found yourself making ridiculously stupid binary decisions like "Should this multi-storey building be used as an orphanage? Or as a whore-house?" That's literally one of the decisions you had to make. Oh, and the game made sure to tell you "Btw, because you didn't grind enough, if you choose the way that earns less money, EVERY ONE DIES BECAUSE YOU WANTED TO HELP THE ORPHANS."
It was an interesting attempt, to be sure, a brave experiment but I resented the game so much for the heel turn it pulled - "Actually, the evil oppressive money grubbing king you overthrew was RIGHT! Now you have to do what he was doing! Mwahahaha! Irony!"
Worst of all, it never let me make nuanced choices - why can't it be orphans downstairs, sex workers upstairs, and during the daytime, I pay the sex-workers to look after the orphans? Nope, it was either "look after the innocent children" or "four floors of whores". Complete with animations of crying children if you chose sex-workers. Or crying sex-workers if you chose the children. Once again, not kidding.
Once you knew the heel-turn twist, you could game it massively beforehand, one of the best strategies was to buy properties, become an incredibly oppressive landlord by demanding extortionate rents, so when it came time for the "orphans/whores" decisions, you had so much money you could could choose the good path and everyone declared you a saint.
But I felt so disrespected by the game that I didn't even bother.
That's the problem - good stories need direction towards a satisfying end, and it's really hard to give a player agency in a good narrative, and so I felt railroaded into comically absurd black/white choices.
Honestly, I think the only games that have ever done the good/evil choices in a story well were the Knights of The Old Republic series, but once again, it stopped being so much fun when I had to keep on being evil because I'd chosen evil stuff prior.
Can't I just be evil today, and maybe a bit nice tomorrow? After all, the best villains are the mercurial ones.
It's definitely hard to do and since I haven't played those games much I can't really answer accurately, but does Larian (Baldur's Gate 3) do a better job?
I think the main problem with Fable or Mass Effect was that the game wants to converge to one of a few endings, but definitely for ME there's a bajillion decisions you can make until you get there.
I don't know if you can get rid of this "definite" ending thing per se; some games say they have X amount of endings, but again, I can't really name any. It's probably more gratifying to have more self-contained sub-stories where the decisions made e.g. an hour ago have an effect on the progression and outcome, but not too much longer than that. You should have the choice as a player to switch from e.g. "good" to "evil" partway through your playthrough. References back to previous quests and their outcomes are nice but shouldn't be as heavy as "your one choice made 30 hours ago affect the ending of the game in a significant and irreversible way"
> I honestly cant't think of any good examples where game mechanics and stories interacted in a way that gave you significant agency while still being fun. I'd love to be given contra-examples though.
Rimworld and The Sims. Both are procedural story writers.
> I felt railroaded into comically absurd black/white choices
I agree: All these AAA titles essentially are movies where you get tons of "agency" in choices which are irrelevant to the story, but the main plot is hard scripted into a few predetermined paths.
Until we have full generative AI as game engine the only alternative remains the procedural approach mentioned in the beginning.
I've played about 20 hours of Arc Raiders and I'm already a little bored of fishing stuff out of draws and lockers. These days I mostly just hunt Arc, or other players that shoot at me first.
It's kind of hard to stay equipped without salvaging
though.
I feel modern game design as the exact opposite problem: It's all show and no substance. It looks spectacular on video, but it doesn't feel spectacular when you play it, since it's non-interactive script driven gameplay, barely more interactive than a cutscene.
A bit of juice is fine and necessary, but the moment your juice starts to look like interactive gameplay, but isn't, it went way to far and just becomes noise. I rather have some less spectacular debris I can interact with, then just a particle system filling the screen with non-interactive nonsense.
TotalBiscuit was ranting about it ages ago[1]. 2kliksphilip also has numerous videos[2] on the lack of interactive physics in modern games.
Reminds me of this interactive demo (created by the lead of Dead Cells) where you can adjust the juice amount in the menu: https://deepnight.net/games/game-feel/
Same, Vlambeer were extremely good at "juicing" their games. Just look at Nuclear Throne and Luftrausers, games that would only be half as fun without all the action and chaos going on after every shot.
This one talk is the reason why all of my small game projects feature copious amounts of screenshake. :)
Fantastic watch thanks for sharing. I realize now how a favorite game of mine, Wario’s Woods on SNES, juices up a twist on match 3 puzzle and how dry early versions of Tetris were (succeeding despite that).
I hadn't heard of the author before this. I'll definitely read more of their stuff, but I thought the bottom line for part three was a little incomplete.
> Bottom line: the more uncertainty, indeterminacy, ambiguity in your game, the more depth it will have.
Sure, starting from 0%, adding uncertainty adds depth. But the player needs to maintain some influence over that uncertainty. If you crank the uncertainty up too 100% then its pure random which isn't deep or fun.
I've noticed a similar more-is-better trend in a few sequels I've played, where the first game had say 5 mechanics which were fun. Then the sequel has 10 mechanics, and because 10 is more than 5 it therefore must be more fun. But it ends up being too much shit to juggle and less fun as a result.
There's been quite a few games in recent years where I notice some system and think "ugh, do I really need to bother with this, too?". Especially crafting or skill point systems which feel slapped on. Some games make them a fun and integral part of the gameplay, some seem to include them because it's trendy and it just adds friction and mental load with little payoff.
I don't mind complexity, some of my favorite games are ridiculously complex (Dwarf Fortress), but the complexity needs to pay for itself.
I’ve had similar thoughts too: the older I get, the less “extra features” translate to value if I’m expected to stretch my concentration across all of them to have fun.
I’m not as sophisticated as the average Dwarf Fortress player, but an emergent quality of that game that I’ve admired from afar has been how you can ignore various mechanics and you’re rewarded with an interesting ride.
It’s dynamic enough that by pulling various gameplay “levers” you can get wildly different outcomes (and thus value through replayability), but things will sort of run themselves (for better or worse) if you forget about them. So you’re half writing your own story, half discovering it as it writes itself.
In a game design context, he is definitely using "uncertainty" in a wider sense, as popularized by Greg Costikyan's Uncertainty in Games book.
In that sense of the word, it's not only about random things, but also things like "will I click at just the right time to head-shot that enemy?" or "I will checkmate the next turn unless my opponent thinks of some clever move that I don't?"). And the theory is that once you run out of uncertain things there is no more a game, as the player know how it will end and there is nothing more that can fail or anything unexpected that can happen. Basically like reading the end of a book you have already read before, so you know exactly what will happen.
And depth from a game design pov is also not necessarily strictly positive. Make the game too deep and there is, as you say, pure random. You could keep adding rules to chess to make it 100% impossible for any human to remotely guess what kind of move to make, and that's when you added so much uncertainty that it became too deep.
Yeah, you need to strike a balance. Maybe ambiguity is a better way to look at it than uncertainty or randomness; chess is fun, but the only random factor are the whims of your opponent. There's no randomness, but there is ambiguity about what their strategy is, and whether they're seeing something that you're missing.
An extreme example of more-is-better are games like EU4, where just understanding how trade works, is more complicated than most entire games, and that's just a single subsystem. You can ignore it, but mastering it can be satisfying. Or frustrating.
It also matters a lot what type of uncertainty a game has, and what the curve of learning to manage it is.
E.g. slight variations in inputs should produce a slight but ideally meaningful variation in output, so the outcome of pressing keys is both reliable as well as an open space for further mastery.
It's also important that you can trace and understand what happened in retrospect. Just missing because of a 5% chance isn't fun. Missing because you didn't consider wind direction and the movement of an object between you and the target on the other hand is perfectly grokkable.
In some sense though, 100% randomness is meta-predictable: something happens that I can’t predict. There’s a lot less tension. Idk where in the middle is the best spot, I guess that’s where the artistry is
It's like an image, you want neither a single solid colour nor perfect noise, but something in-between with identifiable features, highs and lows. When it changes unexpectedly it should change into something new and exciting, not more noise.
I need to sit down and give this a proper read, but anyone who wants more of Raph giving insights into game design should check out this old GDC talk he did about Practical Creativity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyVTxGpEO30
I’m not experienced game designer, but I definitely view games a bit differently from the author. I don’t like complexity much tbh, and I’m sure there are people like me who enjoy some clicker like experience without game forcing me to solve problems
I loved World of Warcraft for many years, but kind of stopped playing during Cataclysm.
And it's kind of weird, but I preferred the old-style questing (many repeated quests and perhaps less streamlined experience) compared to what came afterwards.
In Cataclysm they tried to improve the quest experience, add more variety, but somehow the game lost a bit of its magic - at least from my point of view.
One thing that gets me is how there hasn't really been a language made solely for gameplay logic..
Almost every other domain has its specialized language: SQL, Julia, even HTML/CSS/JS.. but game developers still have to trundle on with general purpose languages invented 500 years ago by people who had nothing to do with games.
Game development and game design are completely separate domains.
Game development can be generalized to algorithms and languages targeted to specific processors and architectures because it's a subset of programming and computer science. You can't have a DSL for design because the domain is the human mind. The design of a game like Undertale has absolutely nothing to do with the language used to develop it.
Unless you're talking about things like modelling and UV unwrapping and the like, but even then I don't see what benefit a separate language would provide.
Fun, among other things = remaining in the tight channel of flow, where your skills get challenged without ever reaching a point of frustration. Too little challenge = boredom.
Skills improve as they get challenged, i.e. when our prediction and pattern matching system receive enough feedback to improve upon our previous actions to get a more optimal outcome.
So, fun is (among other things) getting better at doing something, and as we get better, what was once a challenge turns easier, so a fun game needs to have a well-tuned difficulty progression to keep in pace with your improving skills.
I think for both contexts its far too simplistic to be more than a generalization and certainly for fun its a very local definition to serve Raph's ideas about what constitutes a game rather than encompassing enough to define it fully.
For intelligence for example you could have a PID controller where there is automatic tuning which would fit the definition of learning and application. But I don't think we'd call it intelligent outside of marketing copy.
True, but one definition of intelligence is the ability to deal with a novel situation. You can't get more experienced if you're "too stupid" to learn and adapt to the challenge.
In that sense most things are simple. Though it's also simple to over simplify. Since often simplicity arises out of the accumulation of expert analysis rather than being obvious from the get go. Which I think is just as important as what you say:
Simple means not complex, means not composed of even simpler parts. A twelve step plan is literally a list of simpler parts, making it not simple. Most things are complex, since there are so many ways to combine simples. It is an ironic title.
I disagree. Most things are complex, yet most things are also simple.
Don't forget that words are overloaded so they only mean things in context. Words are both simple and complex because of this.
As an example: the rules to the game of life are simple. The outcomes are complex. The rules cannot even be decomposed further, making them first principles of that universe.
> means not composed of even simpler parts
These would really be "first principles". Which is a form of simplicity. Being the simplest something can be, yet that sentence itself conveys that "simple" relies on context and in a continuum.
This relationship of "simple yet complex" is quite common. We could say the same thing about chaotic functions like the double pendulum. It is both simple and complex.
My question: is there a concise theory of game design that properly explains why cutscenes are fucking stupid?
There are a lot of AAA games out there that very clearly seem like the developers wish they were directing a movie instead. Sure, there’s loads of cutscenes to show off some cool visuals. But then they seem to think “ok well we need to actually let the player play now”, but it’s still basically a cutscene, but with extra steps: cyberpunk 2077 had this part where you press a button repeatedly to make your character crawl along the floor and the take their pills. It’s just a cutscene, but where you essentially advance frames by pressing the X button.
Then there’s quick time events, which are essentially “we have a cutscene we want you to watch, but you can die if you don’t press a random button at a random time”, and they call it a game.
If it’s not that, it’s breaks in play where they take control away from you to show you some cool thing, utterly taking you out of the experience for something that is purely visual. I usually shout “can I play now? Is it my turn?” at the screen when this happens.
But I digress… I essentially hate games nowadays because this or similar experience seems to dominate the very definition of AAA games at this point. None of them respect your time, and they seem to think “this is just like a movie” is a form of praise, when it’s exactly the opposite of why I play games.
I worked on an AAA game and the cinematic group had a team that worked in a different location from the main development team, we met a few times very early during preproduction, cue about three years of work, we got the completed videos pretty deep into development (nothing major was going to change in either the cinematics or the gameplay) and after viewing them were wondering what the cinematics had to do with the game with we made, to be fair the cinematics looked very good for the time, but I just plugged them into the game's framework to play at the appropriate point as one of my milestones, but all these videos were skippable after one viewing and I only viewed them completely just to QA the rest of the game when I was ahead of schedule.
I don't think it's a modern thing, I tried playing the original Kingdom Hearts on my PS/2 but gave up because there are so many mandatory videos that are unskippable during combat. Not going back as far, Bayonetta series has a ton of quicktime sequences, that I hate, have to beat an enemy, die to due slow reflexes and unexpected quicktime event, repeat and hopefully get the timing right on button press which is sharp contrast to the otherwise fluid combat in Bayonetta.
There was also at one point in ancient history a very big deal to have cinematics integrate seamlessly into gameplay, using the same engine for both, instead of prerecorded video sequences. So then games did that just as a point of pride, and having the cinematics in game engine it possible for non specialists to add (or storyboard and leaving final result to specialists) cinematics into a game's flow.
I think different people value different things in entertainment. For you, the "cinematic" aspects of the media are worthless - but for others, the whole "interactive cinematic spectacle" is worth it even if it comes at the expense of intractability or the ability to execute skills. Take the COD campaigns for example - notoriously, some of the turret-vehicle-chase-sequences don't actually require any user input to succeed at, but a certain class of player still enjoys them because they're in it for different things than you.
Sounds like you're still bitter over Dragon's Lair and other LaserDisc games.
But like AAA has never been an adjective that meant good or fun. Just that the budget is big.
Cut scenese are an opportunity for a change of pace and to tell the story in a different way. Or as a way to emphasize a game action. When you get a touchdown in Tecmo Bowl, you have a little cut scene which is nice (but gets repetitive). The cut scenes in a Katamari game give you some sort of connection to the world, but you can always skip them.
I think I've managed to skip most big budget games for most of my gaming life. That's fine, lots of other customers for those, I'll stick to the games I like.
> is there a concise theory of game design that properly explains why cutscenes are fucking stupid?
Yes. In general it's because they're made by a different team, with different incentives, working to a different schedule.
They're often made using an earlier version of the game lore and story. Due to the massive effort required to make changes and render frames, they often don't match up with late-breaking changes made by the game team.
But sometimes you get lucky and the cinematics team excels. I worked with Blizzard's cinematics team in the '90s, and those spectacular folks produced an amazing body of work.
You should play more indie games. Not only are they more gameplay focused, there is an over abundance of great games at bargain prices.
I just picked up Prodeus, if you like games like old Doom and Quake you’ll probably love it.
Also, From Software games (Dark Souls, Elden Ring, Sekiro, Armored Core) are basically all gameplay. Cutscenes are kept to a minimum and gameplay is is tight AF
As a game designer I’ve struggled with the topic of cutscenes and have landed on the side that they are not inherently bad design. Advancement of a story is a form of progression (THE form of progression in a narrative game) and the release of new story beats, or any new content in general, can be used to reward the player. That’s not to say that they can’t be done badly - many are.
The thing about cutscenes, as with most aspects of AAA games, is that they test well in their target market. Cutscenes aren’t exactly cheap to make, especially if acted. They wouldn’t do them if they weren’t popular.
But it’s perfectly fine that you, like many (and me), don’t like cutscenes. Embrace that and accept that perhaps those games aren’t for you, because there is so much choice out there that that you will certainly be able to find things more to your tastes.
Back in the day, I loved the cutscenes Privateer II (starring a very young Clive Owen from Children of Men (I believe) as aforementioned privateer, bless) included, not the ones with any people acting very badly in them, but the rendered cutscenes that played the first time you arrived at a new planet or spaceport, that showed you, hey, this place is a different place.
I played that in my teens, and 30 years later, I can still remember the name of the peaceful agricultural planet that had blimps as their main form of transportation - Bex.
Why? Because the cutscene played and I was like "Wow, look at this place, this is nothing like New Detroit".
And it didn't make you (IIRC) watch the cutscenes. Every. Damn. Time you landed thereafter.
> My question: is there a concise theory of game design that properly explains why cutscenes are fucking stupid?
Two things to consider regarding cut scenes. First, sometimes they are mandated by the game story writers and backed up by artists wanting to show off. Second, and more importantly from a game developer's perspective, they are a useful tool for hiding scene loading I/O such that the customer experience does not notice a nontrivial delay.
I know exactly what you mean. Lots of video games really do feel more like movies these days. Cyberpunk drove me absolutely crazy with all the cut scenes
Bad take IMO. Cutscenes are fine. Many are beloved, even.
Taking agency away from the player is usually a bad thing, so its not something you want to do when the player has other goals to work on. They are a fine tool to break up the action and games are also about the story and world building so expositional sections are a natural thing.
Its important to not mess with the game pacing, though.
After a heavy boss fight where the player doesn't even know what their next goal is anyway? Perfectly fine time for some exposition.
Running past an NPC on the way to do something? That's a horrible time to whip around the camera and tell the player something.
AAAs have huge momentum so you'll often see plot points and exposition that needs to be shoehorned in to fix some writing issue or what have you. Of course, you also just have game directors making bad decisions.
Agreed. Cutscenes are perfectly fine things to have in a game. Ninkendo is writing like a personal preference (not liking cutscenes) is a universal law of game design, but that is not at all the case.
> But I digress… I essentially hate games nowadays
This is not exactly a new phenomenon. The final cutscene in Metal Gear Solid 4 (2008) is 71 minutes long (Guinness world record). The total cutscenes add up to around 9 hours according to a Reddit user. Maybe more games are doing this now compared to 15 years ago, but I wouldn't bet on it.
my theory is a there are two camps of "games" (really more of a spectrum from the projection of 2 axes "play" and "art"):
- proper games ("play"): if you remove all the lore, cinematics, dialogs, etc the gameplay can stand on its own and the user find it fun. (ex: Elden ring, Pokemon. you can play a cut-scenes ripped version in a language you don't understand and still enjoy both, chess and other abstract games are the extreme end of this category)
- interactive DVD menus ("media arts"): it's a movie but sometimes you get to interact with it. in this category you have also have visual novels with branching trees/DAGs.
they are more than a movie but still ultimately the most important test: they can't stand alone without the story/lore.
I enjoy both, but I wish games and steam pages were more front and center about which camp they are in the beginning before I even buy them.
my ultimate sin is games that think they are in category 1 who give you unskippable cut scenes.
All the AAA games will be inherently fucking stupid almost by design.
And this is unavoidable - massive hundreds of millions if not billions in budget -> even if you alientate the bottom 10%, you lose 10% of sales. Bottom 20%, 20% of sales. Not gonna happen.
So you have Legend of Zelda games where pretty much all puzzles are so simple you can instantly tell what the solution is the very moment you see them, ie. downright retarded with few rare exceptions. This also applies to difficulty, etc.
As a result, AAA games can only be appretiated or enjoyed for not much else but production values. The soundtrack, the setpieces, the massive worlds and how much money must have gone into it, etc.
Or God of War. The puzzles almost solve themselves.
Interestingly, Elden Ring (2022) is AAA but very difficult, though not because of the puzzles. Perhaps puzzles test more for IQ (which can't be changed) than for gaming skill.
the complexity of a given domain is not necessarily an indication of it's difficulty. I suspect that a guy of Koster's experience and reputation knows that and is making a spicy title for the clicks.
It's more like someone ran a PowerPoint presentation through a converter that makes a web site. There's good stuff in there, but the presentation is clearly a slide deck.
I watched a lot of Sakurai's (Smash Bro's director and creator of Kirby) videos on game design and development and not once did he bring up "dopamine" or any other neurochemical. I think once you start thinking about game design from this perspective you are essentially looking for ways to exploit human psychology which explains how a lot of games have now turned into casinos. Some of the best games out there defy a lot of prior design knowledge or things most people don't like but still have a cult following (look at Death Stranding) (Dark Souls made difficulty cool again when everyone else was trying to be "accessible"). The best games are also probably by people who were just passionate about bringing a certain idea into life because they themselves want that thing (Pokemon got a lot of its inspiration from the creators childhood exploring outside) not because people will get addicted to it. I understand treating game design as a science to some degree but it rubs me the wrong way.
Gaming has always been about exploiting human psychology. It's about making people have fun, fun is a psychological state and dopamine release is intrinsicly linked to that.
That doesn't mean that it has to be bad or destructive! Fun is a positive thing, and most game designers I've met from across the industry are in it because they just want to make people have fun.
Dopamine release is a bit of a curio, really. You don't make design decisions based on optimising dopamine release; there's no way of doing that. But it's interesting to know the physiological reasons why people think that things are fun, and it's useful evidence when building a framework such as Raph's.
>Gaming has always been about exploiting human psychology.
If you think about it from this perspective than it certainly makes sense to add elements of randomness with intermittent reinforcement (e.g. slot machine) to any game or quick rewards and exponential progression (e.g. Cookie Clicker). Meanwhile you have games like Shenzhen.io which have a PDF that you need to go through to solve programming puzzles and no hints. What part of human psychology is being exploited here outside of progression from solving the puzzle which you would naturally always have?
Or even look at Shenmue. While every game at the time was a platformer where you collected things, Shenmue made you take on a partime job doing fork lifting, yet it is a cult classic. Did they use a framework to make that decision? Doesn't seem like it when it defied all game design at the time.
> What part of human psychology is being exploited here outside of progression from solving the puzzle which you would naturally always have?
This and the other scenarios you mention are deliberately created to make the player have fun. They are all engineered to manipulate the player’s emotions, the intention is to trigger dopamine and other neurological reactions. As I said, that doesn’t have to be a bad thing!
You don’t have to think about it in terms of chemical reactions, but artificially creating fun is the goal, if you boil it down.
You do get that dopamine hit when you achieve a goal in Shenzen.io, or even a self-directed goal in Shenmue, whether the designers thought that way or not.
As Raph Koster says, fun is linked to progression and learning.
Progression applies to self directed goals too (you’re setting yourself a series of minor goals when driving the forklift in Shenmue).
Ironically, motivation theory tells us that the intrinsic fun of doing undirected chores in Shenmue or mastering facts about the systems in Shenzen.io is stronger than the onslaught of mostly extrinsic rewards generated by Cookie Clicker. You had less fun playing that game, that’s one of many reasons why.
Nothing asserted here is simple. And after reading all that it's still hard to design and build a game that will cut through the noise of all the other games coming out on Steam.
It's not a matter of "simple vs. easy". If you have to write many words to list your ideas and you state each idea is deep and connected to all the other ideas, the thing you are talking about is not simple.
When I started writing fiction I found myself naturally gravitating towards inserting puzzles and mysteries and twists and unknowns. I think some people just love that. There's this dopamine aspect of solving the problem or knowing the unknown and the anticipation towards it can be very intriguing! Games do this in a more obvious way, but the 'rule of fun' is everywhere.
Look how exciting mystery is and how boring well known things are, but ironically there's a lot more to, say, the theory of gravity that if contextualized differently would be exciting and deeply interesting that 'unknowns' like the mystery of some cult or whatever can't even come close to, but in the end, there's something inside of us that wants to read about that cult. I make sure to self-aware of this and do deep dives into the boring 'known' world and push back on the sensationalism and such I'm so drawn to.
To your last paragraph I think contextualising the mystery is a good amount of the fun and I guess all of the storytelling.
There's a lot of things about our real world, that if told by an alien race, would make us sound like ethereal wizards.
"They convinced the sand itself to think for them, guided the power of Sol to move them, and spoke to eachother through the very fabric of energy that moves invisibly through us all"
Similar to that, there's a bunch of magic/fantasy storytelling that can kind of pull me out of disbelief, because I can't help but think "yeah we have that, it's electricity" or "witches are just pharamacists without good research"
Raph is, at once, incredibly accomplished, thoughtful about design, and humble about it. I once caught him coming off an international flight, and he was excitedly showing off a game he'd coded on the plane. He genuinely loves working on the stuff and thinking about it.
His writing is often SO full of ideas that I can't absorb an entire piece in one sitting. It's like a 12 course tasting menu. The neat thing with his writing is that, despite what he says here about all 12 pieces being important together, you can often just pick an isolated bit and chew on it for a while, and still learn something.
(Presumably return to the other 11 courses later; they'll still be fresh.)
For reference Raph Koster wrote "the book" on game design, and was the lead designer for Ultima Online (among other things) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raph_Koster
I wouldn’t say A Theory of Fun is “the book.” It’s more a coffee table read. “The book” is Jesse Schell’s The Art of Game Design
I've come across this kind of comment elsewhere, and the recommendation was that "the book" is Designing Games by Tynan Sylvester (the author of Rimworld)
https://tynansylvester.com/book/
Haven't read it yet myself.
I'd say there's no such thing as 'the book' for game design and which you will jive with largely depends on your preferences and values around games.
Raph was the lead game designer on SWTOR a game that was way ahead of it's time and one of the most enjoyable sandbox mmorpg's I've ever played. I'm working on a new game that will take inspiration from lessons learned there.
I remember when Raph was working on Metaplace[1], which was a kid-targeting, programmable (Lua dialect), virtual world/user generated content factory that was contemporary to the launch of Roblox ca. 2006-2007. I wonder quite often what things might be like if Metaplace had gotten to the scale and scope that Roblox wound up achieving.
1: https://www.raphkoster.com/2007/09/18/metaplace/, or this demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZiB_JcRH_s, or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaplace
What was interesting/worked about it's design (and why did the players care?[1])
Was it resilient to the, uh, many, many well-documented problems that the genre pushes players/itself into?
---
[1] There's a lot of ideas in this space that sound interesting on paper to nerds bikeshedding, but often fall flat in actual implementation. I'm curious as to what were the ones that worked.
Game was SWG, not SWTOR. Launched in 2003 and was sunset in 2011 when SWTOR launched.
SWG set out to be something like Dwarf Fortress in terms of depth to the worlds physics; for example, gunsmiths could tinker on all parts of a gun and maybe get a lucky roll to unlock +N more damage or -N recoil. Same with land vehicles and bioengineered animals, droids. Parameters to noodle all the way down. Some under user control, others random to foster sense of a chaotic physical world.
As the in game object economy was entirely propped up by crafters this fostered economic PVP.
Lucasarts of 2000-2003, when the game was developed, did not understand MMO, and 3D games take much longer than 2D adventure games and shoved it out the door 2 years too early.
It also suffered from 90s OOP heavy software development patterns. Devs had difficulty managing it and updating over the years.
Ultimately it failed at being a Star Wars game. PVE was just "kill a nest of bugs" and failed to leverage storylines and characters. Players with nothing else to do ended up ruling the economy or whatever. Could have made them compete against Star Wars power brokers, IMO. Jabba sabotaged your factory, or something. Once a player was kitted out they had nothing to do.
Some have spent the last 10+ years implementing a server emulator, various tools and mods. An emulator built around the original release is here: https://github.com/swgemu
I tinker on a modded private server now and then. Initially added in random world events, to generate things to go do and replacing odd design decisions like mission terminals with NPC models to talk to in that seedy back alley, to foster more in world RP vibe.
When WOW launched SWG was redesigned to play more like that. Typical MBA "copy paste what they are doing" project management.
Oh wow it was SWG?
It truly was ahead of its time, I don't think any one game has come close to implementing such a rewarding group of systems and economy in an MMORPG, except maybe EVE but that is a very different game and admittedly I did not find EVE fun.
The most exciting systems to me had very little to do with combat, but especially as it pertains to this article, also couldn't be as rewarding without it. It was all the player run economies, homsteads, towns and cities, player shops, craftsman and markets. The fact that materials mined had quality which impacted item stats, on and on.
To get good gear, you had to know a guy who made it, they had to know a guy who'd mined good quality minerals, and that person may have found the minerals through another player who had prospected it.
It made sense to be part of a player city, so you could put your house in a known market area for people to visit.
It all mattered because people needed the equipment to go do the quests, and so it was a really symbiotic set of systems that made crafting and economy matter.
The skill tree system was so nice compared to the rigid class systems of other MMORPGs, too.
The fact that player towns just emerged was really cool.
It was such a shame the space expansion was so ... flat. Neither space nor ground had a storyline to follow, but space wasn't an open world, and had no real element of choice in skill paths.
PVE was indeed awful. Especially given the back drop; it should have been full of adventure across the galaxy, established characters messing with players, but was merely "run here and kill 6 kobolds". NPC AI sucked.
Would love to strip from my private server, NPC generation as-is as implementation is static and does not allow dynamic responses. Replace it with modern agents to connect like players and train them to build out the world like players can.
Also started a project to make a new client using video and segmentation, gen AI to recreate initial game engine entities as Godot scenes to have full control.
Too little time for either, initial code has sat untouched for years.
> Also started a project to make a new client using video and segmentation, gen AI to recreate initial game engine entities as Godot scenes to have full control.
That sounds fascinating, I've been working in godot for a few projects now. I'd be interested to know how you would integrate the Godot scenes into the current engine, or if it would be an entirely new client.
My plan was/is entirely new client, mapped client state to SWG emulator server.
Godot is a pain given my workflow is pretty cli heavy though. Since I last touched that project I looked into switching to Wicked Engine. Just include C/C++ headers rather than Godot.
But job got interesting (am an EE in hardware development land) and I have to spend free time diving into AI model architecture to keep up. Both SWG projects have sat idle for 10-12 months now. shrug
I enjoyed the new aspect ships brought to crafting, and there's something special about walking around your own ship while it's in transit. But otherwise totally agree, it was kind of just space combat arenas and not much more.
Someone should convince Richard Garriott and Sid Meier to write too.
Tim Cain (Fallout) has an excellent Youtube channel.
This reads like the handbook for people making grind-based games. Sure enough, the author exclusively works in the mmorpg space.
If you are a game designer, please take this with a grain of salt.
Fun does not equal repeated challenges. And let me also reject the implicit notion that stories are entertainment but not, academically speaking, fun.
That "Fun" is a de gustibus sort of thing is the important point. I wonder if there is something like relationships between the various flavors of fun, or if one can infer good "collateral fun" activities from the main genre.
For instance, I think that puzzles are ok in Mass Effect, but the many mini-games in Final Fantasy 7 are borderline annoying.
If you look at most games, they're all repeated challenges, but some are so good that you don't see or experience them as such.
Others are very obvious though; MMORPGs are the obvious answer and they often don't even have an interesting story or reward to go with the grind, because the reward is a gamble. Ubisoft games are another example, ever since the first Assassin's Creed their games have generally been the same formula of an overworld with a lot of repeated but sameish "quests". The Division series combines the two with randomized, chance based loot. (...coincidentally I'm playing that one right now).
But yeah, the "repeated challenges" thing is best left to that particular class of games. Some people realy enjoy it though.
Some pushback to this: I understand MMORPGS are addictive, but for some reason I was never hooked, so their "repetitive" aspect is a negative to me.
For Assassin's Creed, it was so repetitive even within the same game (the first one) I couldn't even finish it once I noticed the grind. It drove me nuts.
A lot of games then followed that pattern (e.g. Shadow of Mordor, Mad Max, and I'm sure countless others -- I just mention the ones I tried). I find some of their mechanics interesting but once the grind kicks in (which is fairly soon, since these sandbox games are all grind-based) I despair and abandon them.
They feel like repetitive work rather than entertaining to me.
But hear this: Papers, Please, a game that is literally a bureaucracy simulator, engages me in a way Assassin's Creed never could. I wonder why! (Random guess: I think it's because PP, for all its repetitiveness, feels like a small game, while Assassin's Creed and its like feel like endless games you could spend your life within... and I have better things to do with my life).
Yeah, imagine playing the same level in a single player game 100 times just to get 1 piece of loot..unless it's a roguelike :')
Have you made any games?
Just wanted to say that I really appreciated your articles about game networking and game physics (https://gafferongames.com/)!
Thank you!
I ask this because Ralph is a luminary in the field and you just likened his contribution to the industry to that of somebody who designs predatory engagement loops and this is utterly ridiculous.
I thought your comment was too dismissive at first, but then I read the whole article, and I fully agree with it.
The article gives useful theoretical tools for understanding and critiquing such shallow games, actually. Its examples are drawn from many genres, and it's thoughtful and insightful about many kinds and aspects of games.
The comment you call out with your question is indeed a low-effort and low-quality dismissal. I struggle to describe it without being more insulting than that.
The important thing to note is that Raph’s ideas are in the formalist camp and there other competing theories about game design. The criticism made in the parent of the thread has been a common one since Theory of Fun was first published. With artistic disciplines like game design you often have multiple ways of looking at similar things that are more about the values of the author than any one view being more inherently correct.
Personally what I find off-putting is throwing around the term "dopamine". Yeah, there's a link and all, but why include this bit?
> Dopamine can release for 'richly interpretable' situations
Ok, and? I mean, Oh, right. The dopamine. The dopamine for gamers, the dopamine chosen especially to entertain gamers, gamers' dopamine. That dopamine?
It's a gripe of mine too. There's a tenuous link at best, and it may not mean what is commonly assumed. If you want to say "it can give pleasure or joy," just say so. Don't invoke a rather indirect, pseudo-scientific, bullshit argument.
> And let me also reject the implicit notion that stories are entertainment but not, academically speaking, fun.
Stories are obviously fun, otherwise no-one would read books, but a story that you interact with meaningfully, that you can change significantly, really hard to do well.
Like every game where you can do good thing or bad thing, and the game punishes you for doing bad thing. It's really hard to write a compelling story where a nasty piece of shit still somehow saves the Fantasy Kingdom from the Prophesised Doom and becomes the hero.
I honestly cant't think of any good examples where game mechanics and stories interacted in a way that gave you significant agency while still being fun. I'd love to be given contra-examples though.
I think of the Mass Effect games and their attempts at this, "Oh you were only 92% Paragon, so now we're at the end, _this_ crew-member has to die for some reason, if only you'd known that 30 hours of gameplay ago when you punched that grifter in the Citadel!"
Or one I still bear a massive, MASSIVE grudge against, Fable III, where if you didn't massively grind for resources before the bit you thought was the end-game - where you fought and defeated the evil oppressive king, you found yourself making ridiculously stupid binary decisions like "Should this multi-storey building be used as an orphanage? Or as a whore-house?" That's literally one of the decisions you had to make. Oh, and the game made sure to tell you "Btw, because you didn't grind enough, if you choose the way that earns less money, EVERY ONE DIES BECAUSE YOU WANTED TO HELP THE ORPHANS."
It was an interesting attempt, to be sure, a brave experiment but I resented the game so much for the heel turn it pulled - "Actually, the evil oppressive money grubbing king you overthrew was RIGHT! Now you have to do what he was doing! Mwahahaha! Irony!"
Worst of all, it never let me make nuanced choices - why can't it be orphans downstairs, sex workers upstairs, and during the daytime, I pay the sex-workers to look after the orphans? Nope, it was either "look after the innocent children" or "four floors of whores". Complete with animations of crying children if you chose sex-workers. Or crying sex-workers if you chose the children. Once again, not kidding.
Once you knew the heel-turn twist, you could game it massively beforehand, one of the best strategies was to buy properties, become an incredibly oppressive landlord by demanding extortionate rents, so when it came time for the "orphans/whores" decisions, you had so much money you could could choose the good path and everyone declared you a saint.
But I felt so disrespected by the game that I didn't even bother.
That's the problem - good stories need direction towards a satisfying end, and it's really hard to give a player agency in a good narrative, and so I felt railroaded into comically absurd black/white choices.
Honestly, I think the only games that have ever done the good/evil choices in a story well were the Knights of The Old Republic series, but once again, it stopped being so much fun when I had to keep on being evil because I'd chosen evil stuff prior.
Can't I just be evil today, and maybe a bit nice tomorrow? After all, the best villains are the mercurial ones.
I remember being quite impressed at the way Alpha Protocol handles player agency, but it has been a long time so I couldn't give you specifics.
It's definitely hard to do and since I haven't played those games much I can't really answer accurately, but does Larian (Baldur's Gate 3) do a better job?
I think the main problem with Fable or Mass Effect was that the game wants to converge to one of a few endings, but definitely for ME there's a bajillion decisions you can make until you get there.
I don't know if you can get rid of this "definite" ending thing per se; some games say they have X amount of endings, but again, I can't really name any. It's probably more gratifying to have more self-contained sub-stories where the decisions made e.g. an hour ago have an effect on the progression and outcome, but not too much longer than that. You should have the choice as a player to switch from e.g. "good" to "evil" partway through your playthrough. References back to previous quests and their outcomes are nice but shouldn't be as heavy as "your one choice made 30 hours ago affect the ending of the game in a significant and irreversible way"
> I honestly cant't think of any good examples where game mechanics and stories interacted in a way that gave you significant agency while still being fun. I'd love to be given contra-examples though.
Rimworld and The Sims. Both are procedural story writers.
> I felt railroaded into comically absurd black/white choices
I agree: All these AAA titles essentially are movies where you get tons of "agency" in choices which are irrelevant to the story, but the main plot is hard scripted into a few predetermined paths.
Until we have full generative AI as game engine the only alternative remains the procedural approach mentioned in the beginning.
I've played about 20 hours of Arc Raiders and I'm already a little bored of fishing stuff out of draws and lockers. These days I mostly just hunt Arc, or other players that shoot at me first.
It's kind of hard to stay equipped without salvaging though.
> crazy juicy, so that players are captivated by spectacle, well beyond the needs of feedback from a UX perspective
What a great phrase to describe an aspect of game design to strive for.
https://www.raphkoster.com/2015/06/29/game-design-ux-design/
I feel modern game design as the exact opposite problem: It's all show and no substance. It looks spectacular on video, but it doesn't feel spectacular when you play it, since it's non-interactive script driven gameplay, barely more interactive than a cutscene.
A bit of juice is fine and necessary, but the moment your juice starts to look like interactive gameplay, but isn't, it went way to far and just becomes noise. I rather have some less spectacular debris I can interact with, then just a particle system filling the screen with non-interactive nonsense.
TotalBiscuit was ranting about it ages ago[1]. 2kliksphilip also has numerous videos[2] on the lack of interactive physics in modern games.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOHyD49DaeA
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxQW2GL64U0
"juice" (in terms of game making) will always remind me of this amazing, classic talk - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy0aCDmgnxg
Reminds me of this interactive demo (created by the lead of Dead Cells) where you can adjust the juice amount in the menu: https://deepnight.net/games/game-feel/
Oh I thought you were gonna post that one of Vlambeer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJdEqssNZ-U
Same, Vlambeer were extremely good at "juicing" their games. Just look at Nuclear Throne and Luftrausers, games that would only be half as fun without all the action and chaos going on after every shot.
This one talk is the reason why all of my small game projects feature copious amounts of screenshake. :)
Fantastic watch thanks for sharing. I realize now how a favorite game of mine, Wario’s Woods on SNES, juices up a twist on match 3 puzzle and how dry early versions of Tetris were (succeeding despite that).
Interesting, I came across "juice" in this same sense of relatively subtle UX polish in this article: https://garden.bradwoods.io/notes/design/juice.
I hadn't heard of the author before this. I'll definitely read more of their stuff, but I thought the bottom line for part three was a little incomplete.
> Bottom line: the more uncertainty, indeterminacy, ambiguity in your game, the more depth it will have.
Sure, starting from 0%, adding uncertainty adds depth. But the player needs to maintain some influence over that uncertainty. If you crank the uncertainty up too 100% then its pure random which isn't deep or fun.
I've noticed a similar more-is-better trend in a few sequels I've played, where the first game had say 5 mechanics which were fun. Then the sequel has 10 mechanics, and because 10 is more than 5 it therefore must be more fun. But it ends up being too much shit to juggle and less fun as a result.
More isn't always better
There's been quite a few games in recent years where I notice some system and think "ugh, do I really need to bother with this, too?". Especially crafting or skill point systems which feel slapped on. Some games make them a fun and integral part of the gameplay, some seem to include them because it's trendy and it just adds friction and mental load with little payoff.
I don't mind complexity, some of my favorite games are ridiculously complex (Dwarf Fortress), but the complexity needs to pay for itself.
I’ve had similar thoughts too: the older I get, the less “extra features” translate to value if I’m expected to stretch my concentration across all of them to have fun.
I’m not as sophisticated as the average Dwarf Fortress player, but an emergent quality of that game that I’ve admired from afar has been how you can ignore various mechanics and you’re rewarded with an interesting ride.
It’s dynamic enough that by pulling various gameplay “levers” you can get wildly different outcomes (and thus value through replayability), but things will sort of run themselves (for better or worse) if you forget about them. So you’re half writing your own story, half discovering it as it writes itself.
In a game design context, he is definitely using "uncertainty" in a wider sense, as popularized by Greg Costikyan's Uncertainty in Games book.
In that sense of the word, it's not only about random things, but also things like "will I click at just the right time to head-shot that enemy?" or "I will checkmate the next turn unless my opponent thinks of some clever move that I don't?"). And the theory is that once you run out of uncertain things there is no more a game, as the player know how it will end and there is nothing more that can fail or anything unexpected that can happen. Basically like reading the end of a book you have already read before, so you know exactly what will happen.
And depth from a game design pov is also not necessarily strictly positive. Make the game too deep and there is, as you say, pure random. You could keep adding rules to chess to make it 100% impossible for any human to remotely guess what kind of move to make, and that's when you added so much uncertainty that it became too deep.
Yeah, you need to strike a balance. Maybe ambiguity is a better way to look at it than uncertainty or randomness; chess is fun, but the only random factor are the whims of your opponent. There's no randomness, but there is ambiguity about what their strategy is, and whether they're seeing something that you're missing.
An extreme example of more-is-better are games like EU4, where just understanding how trade works, is more complicated than most entire games, and that's just a single subsystem. You can ignore it, but mastering it can be satisfying. Or frustrating.
It also matters a lot what type of uncertainty a game has, and what the curve of learning to manage it is.
E.g. slight variations in inputs should produce a slight but ideally meaningful variation in output, so the outcome of pressing keys is both reliable as well as an open space for further mastery.
It's also important that you can trace and understand what happened in retrospect. Just missing because of a 5% chance isn't fun. Missing because you didn't consider wind direction and the movement of an object between you and the target on the other hand is perfectly grokkable.
In some sense though, 100% randomness is meta-predictable: something happens that I can’t predict. There’s a lot less tension. Idk where in the middle is the best spot, I guess that’s where the artistry is
It's like an image, you want neither a single solid colour nor perfect noise, but something in-between with identifiable features, highs and lows. When it changes unexpectedly it should change into something new and exciting, not more noise.
I need to sit down and give this a proper read, but anyone who wants more of Raph giving insights into game design should check out this old GDC talk he did about Practical Creativity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyVTxGpEO30
I’m not experienced game designer, but I definitely view games a bit differently from the author. I don’t like complexity much tbh, and I’m sure there are people like me who enjoy some clicker like experience without game forcing me to solve problems
Candy Crush was immensely popular. It's not exactly chess.
It is an interesting article but I find the slides inserted without much context to be confusing.. or is that part of the game?
Indeed, the galaxy brain move here would be to make a game about game design, that itself follows its own principles.
Tell me why all MMOs are crap or just fail and as a result turned into a gambling institution.
I loved World of Warcraft for many years, but kind of stopped playing during Cataclysm.
And it's kind of weird, but I preferred the old-style questing (many repeated quests and perhaps less streamlined experience) compared to what came afterwards.
In Cataclysm they tried to improve the quest experience, add more variety, but somehow the game lost a bit of its magic - at least from my point of view.
That's just like, your opinion man. In my opinion neither of those two claims are universially true.
Because MMOs are expensive to make and run and the people who can afford to fund that expect a strong return on investment or they will shut it down.
One thing that gets me is how there hasn't really been a language made solely for gameplay logic..
Almost every other domain has its specialized language: SQL, Julia, even HTML/CSS/JS.. but game developers still have to trundle on with general purpose languages invented 500 years ago by people who had nothing to do with games.
Game development and game design are completely separate domains.
Game development can be generalized to algorithms and languages targeted to specific processors and architectures because it's a subset of programming and computer science. You can't have a DSL for design because the domain is the human mind. The design of a game like Undertale has absolutely nothing to do with the language used to develop it.
Unless you're talking about things like modelling and UV unwrapping and the like, but even then I don't see what benefit a separate language would provide.
> Bottom line: fun is basically about making progress on prediction.
I'm having some trouble parsing this sentence. Does he mean that "player has fun if their predictions lead to progress"?
In simple, reductive terms:
Fun, among other things = remaining in the tight channel of flow, where your skills get challenged without ever reaching a point of frustration. Too little challenge = boredom.
Skills improve as they get challenged, i.e. when our prediction and pattern matching system receive enough feedback to improve upon our previous actions to get a more optimal outcome.
So, fun is (among other things) getting better at doing something, and as we get better, what was once a challenge turns easier, so a fun game needs to have a well-tuned difficulty progression to keep in pace with your improving skills.
Progress on predictions means both getting better at prediction (learning) and applying that.
Also a decent definition of intelligence
I think for both contexts its far too simplistic to be more than a generalization and certainly for fun its a very local definition to serve Raph's ideas about what constitutes a game rather than encompassing enough to define it fully.
For intelligence for example you could have a PID controller where there is automatic tuning which would fit the definition of learning and application. But I don't think we'd call it intelligent outside of marketing copy.
A PID doesn’t get better at learning and applying predictions. I’d argue that to do that essentially indefinitely requires intelligence.
I can get better by getting more experienced without getting more intelligent.
Why do you think that accumulating experience and applying it to be better isn’t a mark of intelligence?
True, but one definition of intelligence is the ability to deal with a novel situation. You can't get more experienced if you're "too stupid" to learn and adapt to the challenge.
> Bottom line: the more uncertainty, indeterminacy, ambiguity in your game, the more depth it will have.
Well, welcome to planet Earth then, the ultimate game environment.
This feels like a classic example of the concept that simple ≠ easy
In that sense most things are simple. Though it's also simple to over simplify. Since often simplicity arises out of the accumulation of expert analysis rather than being obvious from the get go. Which I think is just as important as what you say:
I think if people remembered these things then things would be more simple. I'll add one more relationshipSimple means not complex, means not composed of even simpler parts. A twelve step plan is literally a list of simpler parts, making it not simple. Most things are complex, since there are so many ways to combine simples. It is an ironic title.
Don't forget that words are overloaded so they only mean things in context. Words are both simple and complex because of this.
As an example: the rules to the game of life are simple. The outcomes are complex. The rules cannot even be decomposed further, making them first principles of that universe.
These would really be "first principles". Which is a form of simplicity. Being the simplest something can be, yet that sentence itself conveys that "simple" relies on context and in a continuum.This relationship of "simple yet complex" is quite common. We could say the same thing about chaotic functions like the double pendulum. It is both simple and complex.
> Simple means not complex, means not composed of even simpler parts.
“Simple” is obviously subjective and context-dependent, but I don’t agree with that.
Getting a bowl of cereal is simple, yet still composed of several simple steps.
> Simple means not complex, means not composed of even simpler parts.
Is that formally defined and widely accepted? If not, I don’t think your argument holds because almost nothing is simple based on what you said.
Yeah kind of feels like "writing a hit novel is simple - you just need a plot that is engaging, well written prose, and a satisfying story arc".
I mean... yeah kind of obvs. Very "rest of the owl".
Well, that wouldn’t give you a “hit” novel. That would give you a good novel. Hit != Good
Jokingly, something about the idea of taking NP problems and making them into games seems cruel to the optimizer in me.
The title is ironic. Game design is very simple indeed.
This is an amazing article. I work on game design and I think this could work as a map of the terrain.
My question: is there a concise theory of game design that properly explains why cutscenes are fucking stupid?
There are a lot of AAA games out there that very clearly seem like the developers wish they were directing a movie instead. Sure, there’s loads of cutscenes to show off some cool visuals. But then they seem to think “ok well we need to actually let the player play now”, but it’s still basically a cutscene, but with extra steps: cyberpunk 2077 had this part where you press a button repeatedly to make your character crawl along the floor and the take their pills. It’s just a cutscene, but where you essentially advance frames by pressing the X button.
Then there’s quick time events, which are essentially “we have a cutscene we want you to watch, but you can die if you don’t press a random button at a random time”, and they call it a game.
If it’s not that, it’s breaks in play where they take control away from you to show you some cool thing, utterly taking you out of the experience for something that is purely visual. I usually shout “can I play now? Is it my turn?” at the screen when this happens.
But I digress… I essentially hate games nowadays because this or similar experience seems to dominate the very definition of AAA games at this point. None of them respect your time, and they seem to think “this is just like a movie” is a form of praise, when it’s exactly the opposite of why I play games.
I worked on an AAA game and the cinematic group had a team that worked in a different location from the main development team, we met a few times very early during preproduction, cue about three years of work, we got the completed videos pretty deep into development (nothing major was going to change in either the cinematics or the gameplay) and after viewing them were wondering what the cinematics had to do with the game with we made, to be fair the cinematics looked very good for the time, but I just plugged them into the game's framework to play at the appropriate point as one of my milestones, but all these videos were skippable after one viewing and I only viewed them completely just to QA the rest of the game when I was ahead of schedule.
I don't think it's a modern thing, I tried playing the original Kingdom Hearts on my PS/2 but gave up because there are so many mandatory videos that are unskippable during combat. Not going back as far, Bayonetta series has a ton of quicktime sequences, that I hate, have to beat an enemy, die to due slow reflexes and unexpected quicktime event, repeat and hopefully get the timing right on button press which is sharp contrast to the otherwise fluid combat in Bayonetta.
There was also at one point in ancient history a very big deal to have cinematics integrate seamlessly into gameplay, using the same engine for both, instead of prerecorded video sequences. So then games did that just as a point of pride, and having the cinematics in game engine it possible for non specialists to add (or storyboard and leaving final result to specialists) cinematics into a game's flow.
I think different people value different things in entertainment. For you, the "cinematic" aspects of the media are worthless - but for others, the whole "interactive cinematic spectacle" is worth it even if it comes at the expense of intractability or the ability to execute skills. Take the COD campaigns for example - notoriously, some of the turret-vehicle-chase-sequences don't actually require any user input to succeed at, but a certain class of player still enjoys them because they're in it for different things than you.
Sounds like you're still bitter over Dragon's Lair and other LaserDisc games.
But like AAA has never been an adjective that meant good or fun. Just that the budget is big.
Cut scenese are an opportunity for a change of pace and to tell the story in a different way. Or as a way to emphasize a game action. When you get a touchdown in Tecmo Bowl, you have a little cut scene which is nice (but gets repetitive). The cut scenes in a Katamari game give you some sort of connection to the world, but you can always skip them.
I think I've managed to skip most big budget games for most of my gaming life. That's fine, lots of other customers for those, I'll stick to the games I like.
Cut scenes can also be a valuable tool for giving information to the player:
- a camera flight go give an overview of the map
- show the location of the final boss
- hint at future missions
- provide a clue for solving the puzzle
- etc.
> is there a concise theory of game design that properly explains why cutscenes are fucking stupid?
Yes. In general it's because they're made by a different team, with different incentives, working to a different schedule.
They're often made using an earlier version of the game lore and story. Due to the massive effort required to make changes and render frames, they often don't match up with late-breaking changes made by the game team.
But sometimes you get lucky and the cinematics team excels. I worked with Blizzard's cinematics team in the '90s, and those spectacular folks produced an amazing body of work.
You should play more indie games. Not only are they more gameplay focused, there is an over abundance of great games at bargain prices.
I just picked up Prodeus, if you like games like old Doom and Quake you’ll probably love it.
Also, From Software games (Dark Souls, Elden Ring, Sekiro, Armored Core) are basically all gameplay. Cutscenes are kept to a minimum and gameplay is is tight AF
As a game designer I’ve struggled with the topic of cutscenes and have landed on the side that they are not inherently bad design. Advancement of a story is a form of progression (THE form of progression in a narrative game) and the release of new story beats, or any new content in general, can be used to reward the player. That’s not to say that they can’t be done badly - many are.
The thing about cutscenes, as with most aspects of AAA games, is that they test well in their target market. Cutscenes aren’t exactly cheap to make, especially if acted. They wouldn’t do them if they weren’t popular.
But it’s perfectly fine that you, like many (and me), don’t like cutscenes. Embrace that and accept that perhaps those games aren’t for you, because there is so much choice out there that that you will certainly be able to find things more to your tastes.
Half-Life got it right. The cutscene plays but you can still run around and do whatever you want (including not listening).
Back in the day, I loved the cutscenes Privateer II (starring a very young Clive Owen from Children of Men (I believe) as aforementioned privateer, bless) included, not the ones with any people acting very badly in them, but the rendered cutscenes that played the first time you arrived at a new planet or spaceport, that showed you, hey, this place is a different place.
I played that in my teens, and 30 years later, I can still remember the name of the peaceful agricultural planet that had blimps as their main form of transportation - Bex.
Why? Because the cutscene played and I was like "Wow, look at this place, this is nothing like New Detroit".
And it didn't make you (IIRC) watch the cutscenes. Every. Damn. Time you landed thereafter.
> My question: is there a concise theory of game design that properly explains why cutscenes are fucking stupid?
Two things to consider regarding cut scenes. First, sometimes they are mandated by the game story writers and backed up by artists wanting to show off. Second, and more importantly from a game developer's perspective, they are a useful tool for hiding scene loading I/O such that the customer experience does not notice a nontrivial delay.
I know exactly what you mean. Lots of video games really do feel more like movies these days. Cyberpunk drove me absolutely crazy with all the cut scenes
Bad take IMO. Cutscenes are fine. Many are beloved, even.
Taking agency away from the player is usually a bad thing, so its not something you want to do when the player has other goals to work on. They are a fine tool to break up the action and games are also about the story and world building so expositional sections are a natural thing.
Its important to not mess with the game pacing, though.
After a heavy boss fight where the player doesn't even know what their next goal is anyway? Perfectly fine time for some exposition.
Running past an NPC on the way to do something? That's a horrible time to whip around the camera and tell the player something.
AAAs have huge momentum so you'll often see plot points and exposition that needs to be shoehorned in to fix some writing issue or what have you. Of course, you also just have game directors making bad decisions.
Agreed. Cutscenes are perfectly fine things to have in a game. Ninkendo is writing like a personal preference (not liking cutscenes) is a universal law of game design, but that is not at all the case.
I think you summed it up yourself, because cutscenes are trying to turn this medium into that of movies.
> But I digress… I essentially hate games nowadays
This is not exactly a new phenomenon. The final cutscene in Metal Gear Solid 4 (2008) is 71 minutes long (Guinness world record). The total cutscenes add up to around 9 hours according to a Reddit user. Maybe more games are doing this now compared to 15 years ago, but I wouldn't bet on it.
my theory is a there are two camps of "games" (really more of a spectrum from the projection of 2 axes "play" and "art"):
- proper games ("play"): if you remove all the lore, cinematics, dialogs, etc the gameplay can stand on its own and the user find it fun. (ex: Elden ring, Pokemon. you can play a cut-scenes ripped version in a language you don't understand and still enjoy both, chess and other abstract games are the extreme end of this category)
- interactive DVD menus ("media arts"): it's a movie but sometimes you get to interact with it. in this category you have also have visual novels with branching trees/DAGs. they are more than a movie but still ultimately the most important test: they can't stand alone without the story/lore.
I enjoy both, but I wish games and steam pages were more front and center about which camp they are in the beginning before I even buy them.
my ultimate sin is games that think they are in category 1 who give you unskippable cut scenes.
All the AAA games will be inherently fucking stupid almost by design. And this is unavoidable - massive hundreds of millions if not billions in budget -> even if you alientate the bottom 10%, you lose 10% of sales. Bottom 20%, 20% of sales. Not gonna happen.
So you have Legend of Zelda games where pretty much all puzzles are so simple you can instantly tell what the solution is the very moment you see them, ie. downright retarded with few rare exceptions. This also applies to difficulty, etc.
As a result, AAA games can only be appretiated or enjoyed for not much else but production values. The soundtrack, the setpieces, the massive worlds and how much money must have gone into it, etc.
Don't be like Kid Rock.
Or God of War. The puzzles almost solve themselves.
Interestingly, Elden Ring (2022) is AAA but very difficult, though not because of the puzzles. Perhaps puzzles test more for IQ (which can't be changed) than for gaming skill.
I have never disagreed more with a comment on this site.
the complexity of a given domain is not necessarily an indication of it's difficulty. I suspect that a guy of Koster's experience and reputation knows that and is making a spicy title for the clicks.
He's pretty clear about it towards the bottom. Roughly "any paragraph in this essay could be a book".
For the people taking the title literally without apparently reading the article:
> Put another way — every single paragraph in this essay could be a book.
It's more like someone ran a PowerPoint presentation through a converter that makes a web site. There's good stuff in there, but the presentation is clearly a slide deck.
I watched a lot of Sakurai's (Smash Bro's director and creator of Kirby) videos on game design and development and not once did he bring up "dopamine" or any other neurochemical. I think once you start thinking about game design from this perspective you are essentially looking for ways to exploit human psychology which explains how a lot of games have now turned into casinos. Some of the best games out there defy a lot of prior design knowledge or things most people don't like but still have a cult following (look at Death Stranding) (Dark Souls made difficulty cool again when everyone else was trying to be "accessible"). The best games are also probably by people who were just passionate about bringing a certain idea into life because they themselves want that thing (Pokemon got a lot of its inspiration from the creators childhood exploring outside) not because people will get addicted to it. I understand treating game design as a science to some degree but it rubs me the wrong way.
Gaming has always been about exploiting human psychology. It's about making people have fun, fun is a psychological state and dopamine release is intrinsicly linked to that.
That doesn't mean that it has to be bad or destructive! Fun is a positive thing, and most game designers I've met from across the industry are in it because they just want to make people have fun.
Dopamine release is a bit of a curio, really. You don't make design decisions based on optimising dopamine release; there's no way of doing that. But it's interesting to know the physiological reasons why people think that things are fun, and it's useful evidence when building a framework such as Raph's.
>Gaming has always been about exploiting human psychology.
If you think about it from this perspective than it certainly makes sense to add elements of randomness with intermittent reinforcement (e.g. slot machine) to any game or quick rewards and exponential progression (e.g. Cookie Clicker). Meanwhile you have games like Shenzhen.io which have a PDF that you need to go through to solve programming puzzles and no hints. What part of human psychology is being exploited here outside of progression from solving the puzzle which you would naturally always have?
Or even look at Shenmue. While every game at the time was a platformer where you collected things, Shenmue made you take on a partime job doing fork lifting, yet it is a cult classic. Did they use a framework to make that decision? Doesn't seem like it when it defied all game design at the time.
> What part of human psychology is being exploited here outside of progression from solving the puzzle which you would naturally always have?
This and the other scenarios you mention are deliberately created to make the player have fun. They are all engineered to manipulate the player’s emotions, the intention is to trigger dopamine and other neurological reactions. As I said, that doesn’t have to be a bad thing!
You don’t have to think about it in terms of chemical reactions, but artificially creating fun is the goal, if you boil it down.
You do get that dopamine hit when you achieve a goal in Shenzen.io, or even a self-directed goal in Shenmue, whether the designers thought that way or not.
As Raph Koster says, fun is linked to progression and learning.
Progression applies to self directed goals too (you’re setting yourself a series of minor goals when driving the forklift in Shenmue).
Ironically, motivation theory tells us that the intrinsic fun of doing undirected chores in Shenmue or mastering facts about the systems in Shenzen.io is stronger than the onslaught of mostly extrinsic rewards generated by Cookie Clicker. You had less fun playing that game, that’s one of many reasons why.
Nothing asserted here is simple. And after reading all that it's still hard to design and build a game that will cut through the noise of all the other games coming out on Steam.
It's not a matter of "simple vs. easy". If you have to write many words to list your ideas and you state each idea is deep and connected to all the other ideas, the thing you are talking about is not simple.
This is an extremely interesting article about game design and it's a bit silly to fixate on the title.
I think it's tongue-in-cheek.
When I started writing fiction I found myself naturally gravitating towards inserting puzzles and mysteries and twists and unknowns. I think some people just love that. There's this dopamine aspect of solving the problem or knowing the unknown and the anticipation towards it can be very intriguing! Games do this in a more obvious way, but the 'rule of fun' is everywhere.
Look how exciting mystery is and how boring well known things are, but ironically there's a lot more to, say, the theory of gravity that if contextualized differently would be exciting and deeply interesting that 'unknowns' like the mystery of some cult or whatever can't even come close to, but in the end, there's something inside of us that wants to read about that cult. I make sure to self-aware of this and do deep dives into the boring 'known' world and push back on the sensationalism and such I'm so drawn to.
To your last paragraph I think contextualising the mystery is a good amount of the fun and I guess all of the storytelling.
There's a lot of things about our real world, that if told by an alien race, would make us sound like ethereal wizards.
"They convinced the sand itself to think for them, guided the power of Sol to move them, and spoke to eachother through the very fabric of energy that moves invisibly through us all"
Similar to that, there's a bunch of magic/fantasy storytelling that can kind of pull me out of disbelief, because I can't help but think "yeah we have that, it's electricity" or "witches are just pharamacists without good research"