Design from the other end of the games industry

[HeTeleports]

While the Forge is a role-playing design community, any amount of theory is worth investigating how it applies to our design.

This is an hour-long lecture on design -- but that of open-ended computer games.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdgQyq3hEPo&feature=channel
Sims creator Will Wright delivered this lecture on Game Design in 2003.

Things to note:
1. Notice how Wright is coming from the same war-game background as many of the role-playing "fathers." His own fascination of game design's appearance in academia mirrors the evolution of The Forge and the Big Model (as I've followed it). Interestingly enough, he coins the term "possibility space" in the same way some role-players define "shared imaginitive space."

2. Listen to his response at the question at about 1:17:00. He's swimming narrativism and gamism playing modes as it relates to his open-ended game.

3. While the discussion about systems dynamics may be out-dated (by six years now), individual indie-game designers might benefit from an understanding of dynamics.

4. In the Q n' A section (as well as earlier), Wright lays out exactly the reason how videogames overcame an obstacle ahead of role-playing games. That is, the computer can be the GM, and other players, for the single human player interested in a game.
Thought-provoking question: How do you see indie-RPGs overcoming that issue? What strategies can they employ?

5. Re: Women game players. Check out his comment at 1:29:00. "Women gamers tend to be more personally invested in their avatars than men." Not that there's a direct correlation to role-playing games, listen to how he deals with first-person or third-person perspective uses in gender.

[greyorm]

That is, the computer can be the GM, and other players, for the single human player interested in a game.
Thought-provoking question: How do you see indie-RPGs overcoming that issue? What strategies can they employ?

I won't say they can't, I'll say they shouldn't. Role-playing is, fundamentally, a social activity. It is not LIKE a computer game. It's like trying to play football by yourself. Yes, sure, you can come up with rules to play football solo. Is it really football at that point, is it the same activity? Or is it a lot like confusing masturbation with sex? And aren't there similar games you can play solo that are much more fulfilling as solo games?

Despite that, for lone roleplayers (a complete misnomer at that point), there have been products geared towards them over the years. None that are particularly successful AS SOLO PRODUCTS, whether or not they are successful as products aimed towards a group. Frex, Tunnels & Trolls had a number of solo quest books and IIRC, guidelines on creating/running solo adventures using the system, D&D 4E apparently has a section in the DM's guide on how to run solo adventures for yourself, and there is the Mythic Game Master Emulator, which can be used to run games solo (though groups tend to use it, often small groups of just two players).

And it may be that because of that fundamentally necessary social component to RPGs, I should say "can't" instead of "shouldn't".

[HeTeleports]

Indeed, it is hard to imagine role-playing alone, Raven.

My question should have been better phrased:
"How can designers' games help 'lone players' (ie: individuals who want to play but don't have a group) form a new group?"

If role-playing games is incumbent on an audience of groups but individual customers, helping those customers make groups would be a logical step.
Edwards has said in the past that he can't imagine a role-playing market without that 'introductory friend.' (In the 2002, discussion on 'What would make a non-gamer play your game?') Making it easy to be that 'introductory friend' sounds like a valid marketing step for game designers.

[Callan S.]

I really question this 'it's social!' assertion and it's foregone conclusion certain doors are to be treated as if they are forever closed - is football 'social' because other human beings play in it? I can play practice mode in quake live, with a computer running the opposition. The damn things can even bluff! Other people being in a game doesn't make it a 'social game' - their efforts can be treated as no more than bots, in facing off with them.

The real question for any of us is whether, for our individual cases, roleplay as an activity is like going to the pub for drinks - it's actually about socialising? Or whether it is about winning or engaging hard questions and socialising is actually an add on - as much as people might be in a workshop, creating things, but having a chat while they do it. Are you there to have a chat and the creating is just to keep your hands busy, or are you there to create and the chatting is a nice social thing to do on the side? Which has priority? I think calling roleplay a social activity is just pushing one type of priority, with no evidence that that priority is THE priority for the activity.

It's your thread, HT, so if you want to close that door, okay. But don't assume too quickly it has to be closed.

[greyorm]

Ah, thanks for the clarification. That does indeed change things.

Unfortunately, I have no answers for that one*, mainly because I truly suck at that aspect of gaming. Or at least I do now. When I was eight, I was the kid who introduced a bunch of my friends to D&D and so started my hometown's three core groups of gamers throughout grade and middle-school.

However, I am reminded that the Red Box D&D set made this particularly easy, by providing a simple adventure at the beginning of the Player's booklet that served to showcase and teach the system bit-by-bit to the reader-player, and then had a basic adventure included in the DM's booklet that they could run their friends through. It was a very easy introduction, avoiding so many of the pitfalls found in games since then (the two big ones: a dry morass of rules to wade through and no play until you can find a group).

The rulesbook has to act not just as a lecture about the rules, but as that surrogate 'introductory friend'**: the one who knows the rules and sits down to play the game with you thus teaching you the rules, so you can not only 1) get excited about playing, because you just played and boy was it cool and fun! but 2) know the rules because you've played using them and now you know how the pieces work together! Making it MUCH easier to teach others, as it provides both knowledge (I know this) and confidence (I can do this because I have done this).

**Importantly, the actual rules of the game are all at the back of the book. The introductory adventure/rules training-play are at the front as the very first thing in the book. Which is exactly how it happens if a flesh-and-blood friend brings their game over: you play, you learn, then you read the rules. (And, IME, most people who are handed a rulebook and told to make a character/read the rules quickly decide they aren't that interested in playing after all. Completely and totally unsurprisingly.)

I've actually mentioned all this a number of times in the past, especially in regards to how to improve indie games, but as yet I'm unaware of anyone who has taken up the challenge to design their books as actual teaching/training aides rather than as essentially technical manuals rules compendiums for gamers. There is a difference between training and telling: RPG rulebooks, indie and otherwise, tell. Even if they do it in a fun manner, they still just tell.

**(Ok, maybe I did have an answer for that one.)

[Daniel B]

As a matter of fact, HT, it's interesting to me that you bring this subject up.

There are a LOT of different variations playing RPGs these days especially in indie circles; i.e for divvying up narration and content-introduction responsibilities. This is all well and good, but as a player, my own ideal play experience is to treat the imagined world as a virtual world, which is precisely what I would ask for from a computer-generated virtual world.

This is a big reason why I want to actively avoid heavily-distributed narration responsibilities, because it gives those players who share in the narration a "peek behind the curtain", revealing the virtual world for what it really is and destroying the magic. It's like getting caught in a glitch in a MMOG, such as happened to me on Ultima Online .. totally killed the experience when I fell under the world and got stuck at (X, Y, -1000). I feel this same loss when my tabletop GM reveals to me, after the game, how the in-game and apparently spontaneous experiences actually came together. (Couldn't blame him for telling me though as he was a GM-in-training asking for my advice .. but it still sucked to know.)

On that note, I've been researching theory and world on the generation of convincing and immersive MMOG virtual worlds, because there's a lot of parallel between what the designers of these games have to think about, and what the GM of a "virtual world SIS" game has to think about. Granted there are major differences: the computer can show you a particular elf entering a particular bar and ordering a particular drink, whereas the tabletop GM needs good storytelling skills to bring the point home, but in both cases, the goal is to use techniques to draw the player in and make them imagine that they're *really* watching an elf get drunk.

Furthermore, as designers of table-top RPGs, I think we can get lazy in ways that computer-game designers absolutely cannot afford to. I agree with Raven that, in D&D at least, the DM's Guide is more of a technical manual that seems to assume the person who is DM already has a strong understanding of how to run an effective game (or least, their attempts to teach DMs in the manual are really half-assed). MMOG designers absolutely must assume the players are complete and utter "noobs", and do not assume the players have preexisting knowledge (though the best games allow those players who do know what they're doing to skip the first stages quickly.) The games that scare away new, knowledgeless players are the ones that don't sell. I think we should be approaching table-top RPGs. I'd been playing AD&D 2nd Ed for a long time before 3rd/3.5th edition was even a twinkle in a Tweet eye, but when I first picked up the DM's Guide for v3.0/3.5, I literally skimmed through the book and saw the NPC-population-, dungeon-, traps-, and cosmology-generation material and thought to myself "what the hell IS this shit? when am I going to use it?"  I still have no answer for the latter question.

For my own game, I'm going to assume that the GMs are smart enough to build content and share it with each other on their own (or that books can be written with more specific content). For the core GM's Guide, I'll be attempting to weave subtle hints on storytelling techniques and social cohesion (such as the group-building techniques you might find at a business getaway, but not quite so hideously obvious). I say I want to do it in a subtle manner because, also as Raven points out, it's not fun being told I have to do this-and-this to have a great gaming experience, because it feels like I'm being lectured. If it's woven into the rules, it becomes unobtrusive. If the game manuals are transparent and "user" oriented, I think the gaming experience will be a hundred times more fun.

(Actually I think the tabletop gaming market must orient itself this way eventually to become a lot more user-friendly. Computer technology is advancing so rapidly, it may bridge the gap and finally make tabletop games altogether superfluous. I don't think this will happen til LONG after I expire, but if tabletops don't evolve, I'm worried they may die out before their time, which would be a shame.)

Dan

[Daniel B]

Just watched the video at the link you posted, HT

Thanks for posting! I especially loved the comment on how the designers have to really program TWO systems. Not just the technology, but the psychology of the users. As tabletop designers, we too have to worry about mechanics and player psychology.

[HeTeleports]

Well, I’m glad you watched the video, ShallowThoughts! The way the conversation was going, I started to worry a bit.. Understandably, it is a LONG video (about an hour and 40 minutes.)

Both you and Dan have hit on an essential bridge between table-top and computer RPGs that I’ve been discovering.
Role-playing with the computer is wildly different than role-playing with friends.
In terms of its effect on the brain,
Table-top play:computer play::the book itself:movies of the book
(Let me know if I should decode the analogy.)
Computer games have had to surmount a lot of “publishing concerns” (the need of sophisticated programming) compared to table-top games – which is why they’re behind on the theory of gaming. When I was first applying into the videogame industry (note: I’m a reporter, not yet in videogames), the big push was “how do we get women to play videogames?” Interestingly, table-top play has made much more headway – even carrying the load of things like narrative and character (as opposed to chess or Monopoly.)
Dan, I loved your image of the elf going into the bar. It’s what spawned the analogy above; it also proves that computer games still have to get players to imagine – they just have different cues than a GM does.
Table-top game design may never be computer game design, but the two share so much in what they’re attempting to do. I’ve learned a lot from studying both computer design and table-top design (which oddly enough has resulted in a mere board-game, hardly a table-top role-playing game.)

Despite all this talk about what a computer game designer has learned from role-playing game design, I’m posting on a table-top games forum.
What kinds of “lessons” (concepts influential to design) can table-top RPG designers learn from computer designers?
I think Raven has pulled out one of the first and most specific concepts: using a player walk-through of sample gameplay.
Sounds like the tutorial stages of most games.

In future design, I’ll make it a matter of form to incorporate a ‘walk-through.’
(Note of interest: the first board-game that I saw this used was Starship of Catan.)

[Daniel B]

Table-top play:computer play::the book itself:movies of the book

<snip>

Dan, I loved your image of the elf going into the bar. It's what spawned the analogy above; it also proves that computer games still have to get players to imagine – they just have different cues than a GM does.
Table-top game design may never be computer game design, but the two share so much in what they're attempting to do. I've learned a lot from studying both computer design and table-top design (which oddly enough has resulted in a mere board-game, hardly a table-top role-playing game.)

Interesting analogy, but I think there's a tiny catch, and it's precisely because of this catch that I decided to research computer games as well, for a table-top game. In a very genuine way, you're right that the imagined book is the book in a table-top game, while this is not so for a computer-generated image of a book. The computer-generated image is just a collection memory bits. In order to make it open and move and react to gravity and collide with other books (or goblin-heads?), you have to specifically program all of this behaviour into it....

...but ..

if you think about it, the imagined book also eventually falls prey to this when it is brought into a shared imagined environment. When I imagine a book in my head and I'm alone, it effectively is a book for all intents and purposes. When a GM narrates: "there's a book on a pedestal in the middle of the room", the players don't see "The Book", capital T capital B. They just see "a book". Each book in each players' head is their own facsimile, a construction that they believe is precisely the same as "The Book", but which is inevitably not, because it is lacking in some detail, however slight. Player A might say "I walk up and open it," with the GM just answering "Oh I forgot to mention, it's a locked tome. The binding requires a key to open it."

This disconnect between what's in the players' heads and the GM's head is very similar to the disconnect between the computer and the video game players, but the gulf may be larger. Instead of the GM responding "Oh the book is locked,", the computer might respond "Invalid command."

In short, I think how electronic game designers and table-top game designers go about building games is a lot more similar than most people seem to be willing to give credit for. Like yourself, I'm trying to actively avoid limiting my research, by studying computer game design as well as visiting the Forge. I'd be interested to hear more on your work on this subject, HT, or designs you may have constructed (even the ones that end up like boardgames).


Dan

[RabbitHoleGames]

A solo role player is called something else, an author.

[Ralek]

This is definitely not the first time the issue of solo roleplaying has come up on the forge. I highly recommend reading this thought provoking thread on the subject.

[Wordman]

I think the most important lesson to learn from Will Wright is that he doesn't make games. He makes, for lack of a better word, what he sometimes calls "toys". More particularly, his "toys" are not really "about" anything. Instead, they are better viewed as a toolbox, which the player uses for his own purposes. Will's interest seems to be much more about "what do people do with this toy" than it is "I want people to investigate this experience or theme".

While the role-playing game designer may care a lot about theme and how players of his game work with that theme, it seems to me that the the role-playing game player is more interested in games as these toys/toolboxes, that they can rip apart and put together for their own purposes.

[greyorm]

However, no game can be all things to all people. That is, no toy can be all toys. All toys have inherent constraints, no matter how they are made. Designers should not avoid constraints, but embrace them. Likewise, theme is simply a constraint, like "it's square" or "you move little people around". The job of the designer is to make the toy the most fun within the constraints provided, not to make a constraint-free toy. The job of the player is to pick toys that have the constraints that match what they want (that is, don't use a toy hammer and complain it isn't right if what you want is a doll).

[Wordman]

Yeah, but half the fun is using the doll as a hammer.

[Daniel B]

Excellent way to put it, Wordman.  X-)