Exaggeration

One of the things I like most about working at Klei (and not to be a douche, but that is a pretty long list) is working with some incredibly talented animators. All of our animators come from cartooning, and the perspective they bring is something I find consistently interesting and refreshing. It has had the side effect of turning me into a horrible animation snob and I find myself noticing poor run cycles and ugly poses where before it just would have been unremarkable (not unlike when I started noticing poorly designed doors everywhere after reading The Design of Everyday Things). I'm sure I'll manage somehow.

I've been getting our team together for informal lunchtime talks every couple of weeks. It started with me talking about MDA & Amnesia, and has broadened from there. A few weeks ago, one of our animators talked about the 12 Basic Principles of Animation. They're basically the canonical guidelines for animation, derived from 50 years of work from leading animators at Disney and elsewhere. While I was aware of them before, hearing our animator explain them and then seeing how they're applied in the animation in our games was quite illuminating.

Interestingly, with a slightly different perspective, some of those same principles can apply to design. I may talk about more of them in the future, but today we'll focus on Exaggeration. In the context of animation, it means magnifying characteristics while still remaining connected to reality. Animation that tries to perfectly replicate life ends up dull at best, and often downright disturbing (e.g. creepy Tom Hanks in The Polar Express or all those mocap animated features that somehow think they'll be the ones to beat The Uncanny Valley). There's also a more general lesson in here for the drab and uninspired conclusion that awaits the legion of grey-brown manshoots that hold "realism above all else" as their holy grail.

In the context of design, what does exaggeration mean? It means providing clarity in individual mechanics and contrast between mechanics in aggregate. The role (purpose) of a mechanic is clear. Obviously from the player's perspective there may be experimentation, discovery, etc. But from a design perspective, what purpose a mechanic serves should be clear and should be distinct from other mechanics.

To illustrate, Klei's founder and I were having a discussion about the weaponry in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood. There are a half-dozen different kinds of melee weapons in AC: B- longswords, greatswords, daggers, axes, spears and hammers/maces. The differences between these categories of weapons are clear and immediate. Different sets of animations, different timings; basically, they feel distinct. They are well exaggerated.

But in any individual category of weapon, each weapon has three properties (damage, speed and deflect) rated from 1-5 in each. One kind of axe may have damage 3, speed 2 and deflect 2 while another has damage 4, speed 1 and deflect 3. The distinction between individual weapons is not exaggerated. Aside from saying "it has more," I imagine the vast majority of AC: B players could not explain the difference between a sword with a deflect rating of three and one with four. It's not even clear if the ratings are relative to that category of weapon (i.e. does damage 4 mean something different for a sword vs. damage 4 on a spear?).

And the further complication is most people want to play optimally. If I get a new weapon that looks interesting, but its ratings are poorer than the weapon I've been using, I'm disinclined to try the new thing I got. At the very least, I know I'm making a decision that is an intentional handicap. The player's desire to express themselves (through selecting how they appear) is now at odds with playing the game "well."

Our founder's contention was that having these properties allow the developers to add more content without needing anything more than a new weapon model (quite cheap) and a new line in a spreadsheet somewhere. While I understand the purpose of this quantification is to give a sense of progress, I said AC:B would probably be better served by finding another way to accomplish that goal.

In a Diablo-esque game (or most RPGs, really), where the game is fundamentally about equipment and the stat differences between different pieces of gear, this kind of granularity is well suited. But Assassin's Creed isn't about that. It's about Ezio and what he can do. The fluidity of his movement, his ability to parry and counter, to outmaneuver his opponents. The game isn't strongest when the player is asked to make micro comparisons between different pieces of gear.

The ability to recruit and dispatch apprentice assassins fits well. It makes Ezio feel like a leader and provides the sense of being connected to a larger group of people. Pushing more of the progress into that system and leaving the weapon selection well exaggerated and more open to player expression would probably suit the game better.

Jamie Griesemer gave a talk about this at GDC '10, in the context of the sniper rifle in the Halo series. He's been posting it piecemeal on his blog and it's a very good, in-depth look at the topic of role and contrast in designing mechanics.

This is a relatively minor quibble in the context of Assassin's Creed, but it's been far more impairing in other games. Especially since the designers understand what the distinctions between different features are, they're likely to see the contrast as being larger than the players will. It's vital to be mindful of this. How something feels is usually far more important that what the differences might be under the hood. Ensuring those two things are in alignment will result in a clearer design and ultimately, a game that better realizes its intentions.

Rapier and Hadouken

For the last 9 months or so, I've been taking classes at a fencing school here in Vancouver. Back in undergrad at the University of Colorado, I did a few years of kendo which I rather enjoyed and wanted to seek out something similar up here. What the school teaches isn't Olympic sport fencing though, it's Renaissance era swordplay. Basically drawing on all the sword masters mentioned in the fight between Wesley and Inigo in The Princess Bride, especially Capo Ferro (although the actual fight choreography in the movie has almost nothing to do with what those masters would have taught).

Having practiced for a little while now, it's interesting noticing some game-like properties of what we've been learning. Being that it's not sport fencing, there aren't strictly defined rules per se. The "rules" (beyond the stipulations explictly for safety's sake) are just the techniques that work well and help you not get stabbed as much. But there are still things that emerge out of the constraints of what your body can do and the desire to not get stabbed. Obviously a duel-like swordfight is not dissimilar from fighting games, given that's what those games meant to simulate anyway. Some of things I've learned in swordfighting are directly analogous to things in 2D fighters, but they can apply more broadly as well.

In Capo Ferro's fencing manual, he discusses a notion of "tempo" which basically describes opportunities to strike one's opponent. There a four tempos described by Capo Ferro.

First Tempo (primo tempo): As the opponent is first entering range or generally before they've taken any action.

Half Tempo (mezzo tempo): During the preparation of an opponent's action, our attack finishes before his can become threatening.

Counter Tempo (contratempo): As the opponent attacks, we respond at basically the same time (but with a slightly faster action and superior positioning or strength).

Two Tempos (dui tempi): An attack that takes two actions, the first of which constraints or inhibits the opponent somehow.

In the context of video games, obviously things like attacking an enemy while they're in the wind up for an big attack is something that's been done for ages. But these same actions can easily exists on a high level of tactics. A contratempo response to an advancing enemy force in Starcraft II would be to force the engagement onto a ramp where your forces have a superior position. Or to allow your forces to engaging their main attack host, but quickly slip Stalkers into their resource line, crippling their economy and rendering any possible success of their main attack moot.

One of the common challenges I find in design is finding ways to provide good structure to the the game's mechanics. Structure provides patterns and models, and those make mechanics easier to teach and learn. An action or strategy game that provides meaningful ways to act in all four of those tempos would probably have enough depth to be interesting.

I suppose the broader point is find ways to structure your game's mechanics and be open to seeing structures in places you might not expect. That structure could prove to be tremendously valuable, not just for developing your game's mechanics, but for conveying them to someone who doesn't possess intimate knowledge of them (and this is honestly one of the biggest design challenges for any game).

And if you live in Vancouver, come check out Academie Duello. You can try any class you want at no cost. Certainly more enjoyable exercise that hefting metal disks, at the very least.

Respect Thy Player

"Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend." -Theophrastus

We entreat customers of our games for their money. But in reciprocity, they entrust us with that most valuable thing: their time. Ultimately, it's the only thing we have that's wholly ours and completely irreplaceable. It's a bigger responsibility than many, across all entertainment industries, realize. And while games may be the only place where we can try again forever (and dammit, it's good to see Duncan again), the time we spend play games never comes back. We ought to make that time well spent.

It's something I've been thinking about a bit lately, in terms of making games with smaller scopes. We should question the seemingly prevailing wisdom that more is better, and not just because feature creep will kill you slowly and painfully. I'm interested in finding ways to create games of smaller scope that still have enough substance to carry meaning. When players invest their time in your game, they deserve you having spent some time asking "why are we doing this?"

It's a bit concerning, in that creating smaller games seems somewhat antithetical to the way the best games are made. Prototype, iterate, test, repeat is much harder on a shortened schedule, with all the other dependencies of core tech and pipeline setup, production considerations, manpower, etc. I'm sure these issues can be overcome, but they are not trivial ones.

This isn't a ubiquitous call for shorter games, don't get me wrong. I have no desire to trade my ~80 hours in Fallout 3. But we have a somewhat clearer idea of what that success looks like. And it requires excellent people, a steady hand and flawless execution. Aside from Valve's Portal, we haven't seen as much emphasis on smaller scoped games. Seems like fertile ground to me.

My marked hesitation toward social games is largely rooted in this. Much as with other casual offerings from PopCap et al., these games seem to be setup exclusively to kill time. They don't have any expressiveness or intended meaning and rarely even any craft worth admiring. And it doesn't help that the most successful ones are basically pyramid schemes that exploit the human psyche. While the same charges can absolutely be laid for many AAA games, there have been plenty that have demonstrated it needn't be that way. I have yet to see such offerings from social games and am skeptical their business climate will allow otherwise.

I actually feel the same way about a lot of MMOs being structured as digital Skinner Boxes. And that's not even considering how much of a markup $10 is to model, texture and rig a single character. Now I'm a big believer in person responsibility and don't think these games should be banned, monitored or any similar nonsense. But wow, I can't imagine being okay working on such a thing.

Steve wrote a similar statement a few days ago and it encouraged me to move this from the back burner. While his claims are a little more structural than mine, it seems cut from the same cloth. The time people invest should come with good return, be it meaningful cognitive exercise or time well spent with others. My Left 4 Dead 2 and New Super Mario Bros. Wii sessions with friends provided many good times.

It can even come in ways most unexpected. My wife helped helped me solve the final puzzle of Machinarium, a musical tone puzzle that I have a poor ear for. I tried for about 15 minutes, making an overly complicated graph until finally succumbing and requesting help. She solved it on the second try. Obviously it's much harder to design for those things, but it was still a fond moment.

That's a long-winded way of saying players give us their trust that we will not abuse the time they spend with our labours. Respect that they are choosing to spend some of that most precious time with us and make it time well worth spending.

Designing for Emotion from the Bottom Up

Ian Schreiber recently posted a summary of the Southern Interactive Entertainment & Game Expo (SIEGE). One bullet point in particular seems a brilliant encapsulation of things I've tried to enunciate in the past:

Instead of saying "I'm going to create a game that causes a particular emotional response in the player," start the other way around: find existing game moments that produce your desired emotions, then extrapolate to figure out what mechanics can cause those emotions.

Basically, build emotional experiences from the bottom up, not the top down.

I find designs (both for games and software in general) often get mired with excess structure and stumble when trying to find robust solutions without understanding the full space of the problem. There are simply too many details, too many subtle complexities. Spending a lot of time and effort on the initial solution, only to discover some aspect of it doesn't work, means even more time and effort will be needed for revisions.

I realize this is nothing new to anyone familiar with the ol' waterfall vs. agile chestnut. And even though agile has become more prevalent, at least on the software side of things, it still seems that too many experiences are built from the top down. Designers imagine a profound moment that will provoke an emotional response in the player and then steam toward that. If it's later discovered to be less poignant than intended, various components need to change to move closer to the desired response. But by the time this is discovered, there's already a ton of content (models, environments, dialog) that has already been created and probably other design dependencies. Only so much can change and likely that desired response will never be reached.

The net result of this is evident in countless games. There's a character the player is supposed to empathize with and care about, but instead of organically building rapport, the game just beats the player over the head. For all intents and purposes, there's a giant arrow and flashing neon sign saying "Care about this person!" Of course, we usually don't. And we end up with things like the discovery of Dom's wife in Gears of War 2.

The solution, or at least a step in the right direction, is what Ian's summary captures- find something that works and build upon it. Ideally, those seeds will be in your own game already. But if you have to bootstrap off a similar moment in another game, that's fine. The point is to get something, anything, moving you in the right direction.

Once you have something that works, build upon it. Figure out why it works and how similar moments can be created. In attempting to evoke emotion, there are so many variables it's difficult to predict what will and will not be successful. Rather than (somewhat arrogantly, in my opinion) assume you know what will create the desired response, there will be more success in remaining dynamic and humble.

I'll keep harping on the importance of iteration, prototyping and playtesting, and it's because it has dynamism and humility built in. Realizing you're going to get lots wrong and end up throwing a bunch of stuff away is fine if you're building cheap prototypes and learning from each one. Constantly having those prototypes evaluated and discovering what comes up short will definitely come with a hearty dose of humility.

Obviously you want to have enough foresight to not paint yourself into a corner. A design that's just a constellation of provocative moments without any latticework holding it together will feel disconnected and shallow. Perhaps a few people do possess the vision and intuition to get it right from the onset. But that's a very small number of people and many more think they belong to this cadre than those that actually do. I know I do not possess those necessary qualities, and thus, I cleave to iterative, bottom up design.

Editing this, I realize it's pretty vague and hand-wavey. Rather that transmute this post into Bigby's Unsurmountable Wall of Text, I'll follow this up next week with at least a pair of examples of where this technique worked, and where avoiding it did not. In the mean time, if you have any thoughts on bottom up emotional design and where it has/hasn't worked, I'd be curious to hear it.

Say No to "Fun"

Seriously folks, we need to stop talking about "fun." Or at least talk about it less. I've made this comment in various locales, but I thought given the resurgence of the topic, it would be good to put my stake in the ground here.

I think we should stop saying games should be "fun" when we really mean games should be "engaging."

This is the example I usually come back to, but there are plenty of films that I wouldn't call "fun," but I still enjoyed watching them. Requiem For A Dream isn't a fun film. Not in any way. Certainly not like Drag Me to Hell is fun. But Requiem is still very much a rewarding experience, because it's engaging. Similarly, is listening to Tom Waits' The Black Rider really fun? That seems ... inaccurate. Now is Movits! and their mad Svenska jazz/hip-hop fun? Without a doubt.

The Path, at least to me, is an instance of a game that's engaging but not necessarily fun. It's dark, slowly paced and obtuse in a Lynch-esque way. But I certainly didn't feel my time playing it was wasted or feel I didn't get anything from the experience.

I've got lots of respect for Raph and his book, but wow, I wish he wouldn't have said "fun." Because the satisfaction that he describes arising from discovering, internalizing and utilizing systems is equally valid if we label it as "engaging."

Fun has a lot of contextual baggage. As game designers, we can converse about "fun" and have a relatively decent chance of people understanding we mean Koster's fun, not ice cream, cake and clowns fun (okay, maybe clowns aren't fun for anyone). But many players, and nearly everyone that's not a core gamer, does not think of Koster's definition when they hear "fun." Their perception is largely that fun is a quality of shallow amusements, of toys. And while that's fine, Candyland isn't going to show up in the MoMA any time soon.

Speaking in terms of engagement is going to make conversing with two groups of people easier. One is the existing gamers that Anthony Birch addressed in his rant. While I'm sure some of these people are genuinely believe it's an anathema for games to be anything but shallow, escapist stab-fests, I don't think all of them do. I imagine when some of those people say, "games have to be fun" they really mean "games have to be engaging."

But more importantly, speaking from "engagement" will make the conversation with potential players who aren't core gamers easier. It's great that Nintendo has brought more folks into the fold via the DS and Wii. But to be honest, many of their core games are not exactly rich in emotional depth. Wii Sports Resort and Mario Kart don't exactly speak to the human condition. I don't think the Wii Horse Bag is going to change that.

Again, Nintendo's games are absolutely fine. They do not have an obligation to make more emotionally deep games. But for non-core gamers, their only experience with games is as "fun" things. Being able to say those are one kind of thing and here's another kind that are similarly interesting but won't make you smile like Frisbee Dog will be increasing important.

This subject was broached in a local design group I'm part of and one of the folks there works in more of the serious/health games space. He related that he frequently speaks with non-gamers (e.g. academia, non-profits, health companies, etc.) and he's had vastly more success when he comes at the conversation from "engagement" instead of "fun," even though he means Koster's fun when he says "engaging." It nothing more than a verbal texture swap, but without all the context baggage many have about what "fun" is, he's able to have a far more productive and useful conversation. I don't think his experience is unique.

Believe me, most games will still be fun (like mini-golf and milkshakes fun). But it's going to make the discussion about how to make and why one should play more emotive games vastly easier if we can sidestep the "what kind of fun" quagmire completely.

Ultimately, this isn't about us. We're already on board. We get what we mean when we say "fun." Speaking from "engaging" is about helping other potential advocates (or at least audiences) understand why we see so much potential in what we do. And at the end of the day, that's what really matters.

We Need More Bookmarks

Why are most pop songs approximately three to four minutes in length? Classical compositions are rarely that short. The answer is that the original vinyl 78s and 45s could hold about three to four minutes of music per side without sacrificing too much quality. What was originally a technological constraint became integrated into the way music is created. This technological legacy can still be seen today.

There are actually many facets of games that may result from obsolete technical constraints, but I'm going to address just one here- save systems. Specifically, this was inspired by something David Carlton wrote (with Randy Smith's MIGS presentation about saving before that).

The original purpose of save systems was to allow players to finish games that were too long to complete in a single sitting. The first console save systems didn't even use storage on the cartridge, they simple provided codes (or Castlevania's weird weapon grid) that loaded the game in a certain state. Since, they've become more complicated things with numerous implementations. They may or may not be encouraging negative compulsive behaviours (I tend toward yes on this one).

Unfortunately, the original purpose of save systems and the dynamics that emerge from the newer implementations have become confounded. Their original purpose ought to be broken out, leaving the rest of the save system to be addressed independently.

Simply, players should be able to stop playing a game at any point without fear of losing significant progress. To do anything else is to be disrespectful of your audience's time. It's absurd to require the player to wall off a section of their day to play your game. No other in-home media does this and there's no reason why games should get a pass. (As an aside, all cutscenes should also be pausable. Period.)

I like the Metroid series a lot, but I still haven't played Metroid Prime 3: Corruption yet almost exclusively because of its save system. Maybe MP3 isn't as extreme, but previous iterations required about a solid hour of play to make serious progress. Otherwise it would seem like a waste of time, with much of it spent trekking out and back to the save points.

If having that save anywhere/anytime is problematic to the game's design, providing a single "bookmark" save slot that is deleted after it's loaded is sufficient. Many DS games provide this functionality and as someone who has recently implemented a save system, it's not hard to do.

It doesn't even need to load the game exactly as it was saved, but something reasonably close ought to be ubiquitous. David discusses that save/load systems that force repetition of content as a punishment for failure are the reason why he'll save compulsively. And I could not agree more. If you're forcing players to repeat swaths of your game as a consequence for failure, something has gone off the rails.

Playing Little King's Story recently, I can't help but feel that their save system is unnecessarily punishing. You can only save in one place, there are times when you simply cannot save at all and if you fail in combat, you're immediately booted back to your last save. There was a point where I wanted to stop playing LKS but had to continue for about another twenty minutes or be forced to abandon content that could not be restored. And this was just after a boss fight! I can already tell that the LKS save system is going to force me into the compulsions Randy describes because the penalty for not saving is so extreme.

Japanese developers seem worse about this than NA/European studios, but this problem appears everywhere. We've all seen it. It's the save point just before massive, unskippable cutscenes that rolls immediately into a very difficult boss fight. It's the failure that forces you to perform the exact same series of actions again and again. These things don't make the game more challenging, they don't make it more interesting, they simply make the game more frustrating.

Having a save mechanism that's respectful of your player's time ought to come easily if you're empathizing with them. Provide a solution for the original problem the save system was meant to address. Beyond that, we can experiment more with save systems, looking for ways to move away from compulsive save/load behaviour. But unless players believe they can be confident progress won't be lost to punishing save systems, we're never going to move past save/load OCD.

Kohlberg's Moral Development Comes to the Mushroom Kingdom

Wikipedia has a decent summary of Kohlberg's stages, and a more in-depth one is available here, but the basics can be summarized as consisting of three levels with two stages in each (this is game-ish already!).

The first level is "Pre-Conventional Reasoning," with stage one being "obedience and punishment orientation." Moral reasoning at this stage really consists only of "what is good is that which will not get me punished." Stage two is "self-interest orientation."

Level two is "Conventional Reasoning," with stage three being "interpersonal accord and conformity." At this stage, morality is evaluated based on the impact decisions will have on relationships with others. Stage four is "authority and social-order maintaining orientation," where individuals obey laws and social conventions because they understand their importance in maintaining a functional society. Here morality is largely dictated by an outside force and viewed as relatively unchanging.

Level three, "Post-Conventional Reasoning," hosts stage five, which is "social contract orientation." Here, morality is recognized as general principles agreed upon to promote individual and community welfare. Those that lose their utility can be changed or removed. Stage six is "universal ethical principles," where morality is reasoned through a framework of abstract moral principles, and is somewhat Kantian in nature.

The interesting thing about Kohlberg's stages is he found everyone begins at stage one and move through stages (none are skipped) as they age until stopping at one of the stages. Kohlberg studied a set of subjects over 20 years and at the end of the experiment, about 30% were reasoning at stage 3, about 60% at stage four and about 10% at stage 5. Other research has confirmed a similar distribution amongst a larger sample group.

So, with that lengthy preface complete, what does this have to do with games? Kohlberg believed that development of moral reasoning depended upon a) general cognitive maturation and b) opportunities to confront moral issues, especially when discussing them with someone at a higher stage of reasoning. Games, I believe, can serve as a springboard for the latter in a way other media cannot. Discussing why a character in a film made a decision and theorizing about alternatives is one thing. But discussing why I made a different decision from you and examining our relative consequences is something else entirely.

Most "ethical" decisions in games are truly ludicrous in scope. When the decision is between driving a bus full of school children to the ice cream shop or locking the doors and setting the bus on fire, the rightness of this decision is obvious to anyone at any stage of moral reasoning. If we want to promote more sophisticated moral reasoning in games, the very first thing we have to do is jettison these absurd "dilemmas." While the intent may be to heighten drama by raising the stakes, it really has the opposite effect and deflates any chance of substantive thoughtful reasoning.

James Portnow wrote a great opinion piece on Gamasutra last week about moral decisions in games. One of his recommendations is losing the universal good/evil slider and I wholeheartedly agree. What this does is trap players at the 4th stage of moral reasoning (at best), where morality is derived entirely from an external source and wholly static. By creating distinct moral relationships with different groups, players have the ability to explore different moral frameworks.

If we believe games have the ability to teach and inform, and I believe that they do, we should seek out and embrace opportunities to post interesting questions to players. Especially when we can do so in ways that other media cannot. But the types of conversations games ask players to have are shallow and based on unsophisticated moral reasoning. By creating more substantive decisions, we won't just be creating more compelling stories, we might actually be encouraging moral development in some players.

I don't agree with the sentiment that games universally infantilize players, but in this regard, it's pretty hard to dispute that the moral reasoning games ask players to use is that of, at best, teenagers. Kohlberg's stages give us pretty clear evidence for the benefits of posing moral questions with more depth and nuance. We have an opportunity to make a real difference here. All we have to do is seize it.

Pedagogy, Game Systems and D&D

It seems this Far Cry 2 permadeath experience is interesting to more folks than I expected. Kieron was kind enough to give a mention in RPS' Sunday Papers and Clint himself wrote a fantastic response (and if you're coming here from either of those places, welcome!). And I wanted to discuss that response, or more accurately, ask "That sounds great. So how do we get there?"

That is to say, an alternate title for this post could be, "How Do We Make People Want to Die Forever?"

I highly suggest you give Clint's post a read, but to summarize, he says focusing on using narrative techniques to make games more emotionally impacting is deeply problematic. By emphasizing narrative tools, instead of ludic (game) ones, we're ultimately limited to being as good as film, literature, etc. Instead of exploiting the unique strength of games, we'll inherit the constraints of narrative-based media, and toss all the constraints of games on top of that.

To expand more upon something Clint touches on, one of the big challenges with using narrative-based tools to address these issue is the player becoming emotionally invested in the narrative is a precondition for it being affecting. This is very hard to do and I'd say the majority of games that attempt this do not succeed for most players. Quality of writing/performance will only address this so much. As human beings, we're basically hardwired for emotional empathy. Good writers/actors/directors understand this and they are quite good at creating fiction that creates empathy. Between the uncanny valley, nonlinear storylines, breadth of content and other issues, there's a lot of work to do for games to get to this point, and even then, I'm skeptical of us ever truly hitting par.

Anyone who's played tabletop RPGs for a while will recognized this problem of narrative buy-in. The GM will construct a serious, complicated storyline only to have the players not engage with it at all. A poor GM will become frustrated, dig in their heels and start rubbing the player's faces in a narrative they don't care about. Games have the same problem, except they can't detect when the players are not being engaged and course correct like a good GM can.

Clint argues, and I agree, that if we're going to see games create meaning differently, and possibly even be more engaging, more affecting, we have to do it through the tools of gameplay. The deep meaning games can produce will come from interacting with their systems.

But how do we encourage players to seek out these deep interactions?

As of now, a great many players, through no fault of their own, are content to sit back and enjoy the ride. Engaging deeply with game systems is still a relatively uncommon occurrence, and it doesn't help that there aren't too many games that are especially conducive to this. I'm barely even sure where to start building this pedagogy.

Making game systems more readable (ah, that old chestnut) is a good start, I think. If the depths of these systems is too obscure, it's going to be difficult to encourage investigation. It's easy to add permanent death to Far Cry 2, because the death mechanic is obvious and ubiquitous. Others interactions may be less obvious and playing with them (literally) is only possible when their existence is known and at least partially understood.

Like a good GM, we need to facilitate players in seeking out what interests them and then finding ways to still surprise and challenge them. Creating that investment is the first step toward deep meaning. For narrative-based media, their currency is empathy. For us, I think the currency is interest and engagement.

Beyond that, I don't really know. But it's something I know I'm going to be thinking about a lot in the days and weeks to come. And I know that we have to find some methods of teaching players how to discover these meaningful interactions. It's not going to arise organically for a great many people, simply because it's so different from how we engage with narrative-based media.

To be clear, I'm not saying all games have an imperative to do this. There will always be a seat for the Mario Karts, for the Trines (as an aside, I've been playing this lately and it's fantastic. Imagine D&D + The Lost Vikings + Little Big Planet).

But if we want to create experiences that are profound, that will truly touch those that experience them, we have to light the path for them. So how can we build some lanterns?

GDAotM June - Prototyping

June's Game Design Aspect of the Month article has been posted. This time it's some pretty nuts and bolts thoughts on prototyping. Feel free to share your opinions via GDAotM's comments. And if you're feeling particularly engaged, feel free to contact Sande about submitting an article of your own.

Fallout and The Procedural Skald

To many, the appeal of games is being able to meaningfully interact with a world, making decisions with lasting consequences. Unfortunately, providing this is a very difficult challenge for developers. The combinatorial explosion that even a small number of decisions creates requires providing outcomes for all possible combinations of decisions. Just creating that content is a tremendous amount of work; creating it in such a way that all outcomes connect harmoniously and do not feel unnatural is realistically impossible.

Commonly, developers address this issue either by providing small, isolated pockets of agency that do not interact or by providing choices that are largely illusory, with the core story hitting on the same beats regardless of the player's specific decisions.

Interestingly, Fallout 1 & 2 addressed this issue cleverly, but Fallout 3 abandoned that device for a weaker solution. If Fallout 3 had augmented this instead of abandoning it, I think it could have represented a more significant step toward minimizing the complications of these issues.

Most areas in Fallout 1 & 2 provided a number of different outcomes to the player's decisions, but these outcomes were almost always isolated from each other area. Beyond adjusting the player's abstract reputation (karma), events in Shady Sands don't change what happens in The Hub. Unlike other games that adopt that model, however, Fallout remembers the outcomes of various decisions the player makes. At the end of the game, the player sees a substantial epilogue that describes the impact their actions had on the people they met and the places they visited.

Fallout 3 provided a minimal version of this, describing in binary terms how the player acted at maybe a half-dozen locations. To be honest, this disappointed me far more than the content of the ending itself. Instead of an epilogue, the bulk of response to player actions comes from the game's procedural skald, Three Dog.

(As a note, this construct came from some comments made by Marc LeBlanc at his Game Design Workshop at GDC this year. He used "procedural bard," but I'm going to use the term "skald," as being a tabletop RPG veteran, "bard" has some degree of baggage.)

Three Dog serves as a dynamic skald, providing disc jockey poetics of the player's decisions. This gives the player's actions context, demonstrating clearly that their decisions are not made in a vacuum. Karma serves a related purpose, but responding to the player's actions with a real, human voice has the potential to be more poignant. The nursery scene at the beginning of the third act of Bioshock does the same.

Similarly, this allows for the world to reaction to generally immoral acts without just making all NPCs hostile. Given the reward structures of most games (rewards being experience points, money and/or equipment), making some number of previously friendly NPCs hostile really just gives the player relatively guilt-free access to resources. This only serves to further incentivize immoral actions, rather than causing the player to reflect.

Finally, Three Dog provides live feedback, instead of only at the end of the game, as the epilogue in Fallout 1 & 2 did. I understand that some didn't connect with Three Dog, but hopefully the value of a procedural skald construct is clear. The skald doesn't necessarily need to be a specific person or even a person at all either.

As I mentioned above, the lack of a substantial epilogue in Fallout 3 left the ending feeling quite unsatisfying, and many others felt the same way. Fallout 1 has a very strict time constraint, and Fallout 2 only loosened this somewhat. Without the strict time constraints and very pronounced goals of Fallout 1 & 2, exploration is at the heart of Fallout 3. As the end of Fallout 3 terminates any further exploration (until the Broken Steel DLC, at least), without any kind of epilogue that gives the player's actions greater context and meaning, I can understand why many found the end so unsatisfying.


Players seek the ability to affect change in the worlds they inhabit. Providing meaningful outcomes with cascading consequences explodes into an uncontainable number of stories. Even the most dynamic stories still must collapse to a few certain story points. But by using both epilogue summary of decisions and active in-game feedback, we can make the player's decisions feel more substantive and influential. As our procedural skald tells epic poems of the player's actions, they're providing what many players seek. They are saying something to the world and it will speak back.

Readability Compilation, Now With Bonus Article!

This post is primarily intended for me to be able to easily link to the entire readability series I did over the past month-ish. However, for tolerating such cataloging so kindly, I've added a link to my May contribution to GDAotM as a bonus. I can already hear the gleeful intake of breath resounding across the Internet. Links follow.


On Readability

The introductory post on this topic:

The Importance of Readability in Games

Some examples of readability issues and how they contributed to the decline of adventure games:

Without Readability - The Decline of Adventure Games
Toward Better Readability in Adventure Games

Ways in which we can evaluate and improve readability:

Improving Readability - Empathy
Improving Readability - Data

Finally, my contribution to May's Game Design Aspect of the Month, which relates readability and unintended difficulty:

Meaningful Simplicity

Toward Better Readability in Adventure Games

The problem with adventure games wasn't ever their content. These games featured some of the most compelling characters, interesting settings and best humour in the history of interactive entertainment. Given how often the absence of these in modern games is criticized, clearly something else was responsible for their decline in popularity. Gameplay was the downfall of adventure games.

Telltale Games are the modern flagbearers of commercial adventure games. Looking at their games, it's clear they sought to address some of the readability issues older adventure games had. In the Sam & Max episodes, there is only a single contextual action that can be performed on any object. Inventory items are removed when all their interactions have been performed and there are no red herring items (items you can pick up but are never used). Additionally, by creating shorter games with smaller still scenes in each of those, the amount of possible interactions is made more manageable.

But the most commendable improvement was adding an in-game hint system in the form of Max. There was an option slider to turn hit frequency from never to often. This allowed the player a way to move past being stuck without having to resort to GameFAQs (which, once used, becomes very easy to return to). But as successful as Telltale has been, I wonder if there are some fundamental limitations on how most adventure games are structured.

Adventure games still have linear, unchanging stories. They're not very meaningfully interactive. Some amount of story will occur, the player will be gated until they can solve a series of puzzles, the next bit of story will be parceled out. Repeat until conclusion is reached. If all you want to do is create a linear story, then you're wasting your time trying to make a game of it. Film, theatre, literature; all these do a far better job of telling linear stories and honestly, I think they always will.

For many, I don't think the payoff for adventure games was the interactions as they were implemented. If the payoff from old adventure games really was using verbs with sprites and managing an inventory, then they're not worth saving. But if the satisfaction came from them being non-violent, intellectual games with compelling characters and settings, then there is something there worth preserving.

The notion that most needs throwing overboard is the designer saying the player will move through their story jumping through hoops X, Y and Z. This model leaves no space for interesting dynamics to arise. We need to scuttle this thinking and instead look to create a smaller set of mechanics they can be utilized in interesting way. The Last Express is a very good example of how to create a non-linear adventure game without sacrificing an engaging story. I could write this much again just about it, but to avoid abusing your eyes further, I'll redirect to Chris Remo's excellent write-up on Gamasutra.

This is the empathy I was talking about before. We need to understand that while a great linear story may be interesting for us, there's no guarantee it will similarly engage the player. And it certainly doesn't play to the strengths of our medium. Why must adventure game puzzles only have one solution? Why must every one of them be solved to continue? Why must the player's agency be wholly illusory, with them being unable to make any impact on the story? Adventure games succeed despite their gameplay, not because of it.

The other component is making sure new adventure games don't fall prey to the poor readability of their predecessors. Playtesting games without clear skill progressions (i.e. non-combat games) is doubly important. In his GDC talk about puzzles and interaction design, Randy Smith presented what he called the > 99% problem. Namely, the combinatorics of puzzles make it so that the puzzles need to be solvable by nearly everyone. Some might naively think that having any puzzle in a game solvable by 95% of players is satisfactory. The problem with this is at each puzzle 5% of the players are being lost, such that even if a game has only 4 puzzles, a per-puzzle 95% success rate means almost 20% of players won't be able to finish the game. To have a game be solvable by most players, each puzzle must be solvable by >99% of players. But it must be solvable in the way that makes the player feel clever, rather than feeling like the designer assumed they'd be too stupid to get anything that wasn't blatantly obvious. Testing and iteration are the only way to ensure this threshold is reached.



It's clear that adventure games, of both the text and graphical variety, have fallen from the prominent position they once occupied. Many blame the audience, saying they're lazy and stupid, and they only want bigger explosions and more guns. This is cynical bullshit and there is no way less crass to put it. If the audience is not interested in our games, we have failed to engage them.

If we want to bring these experiences to a larger audience (and this seems to be what nearly everyone wants, there's enough of a niche for free IF/adventure games), we need to create experiences that are readable and engaging. Sure, a sizable portion of the audience is only interested in bombs and boobs. But there are enough thoughtful gamers out there that would appreciate and support a new wave of intellectual, non-violent story-based games.

We're not reaching them through marginally interactive linear story games though. Reaching this audience requires creating games that focus on a smaller set of meaningful mechanics that give rise to interesting story-based dynamics. Providing understandable relationships that allow the player agency and decisions with consequence.

If we are not willing to create readable systems to support adventure games, I fear we will always be talking about the adventure games we played, rather than the ones we are looking forward to playing.

Without Readability - The Decline of Adventure Games

At long last, we have arrived at something tangible. Dispensing with hand-waving theory, I'm going to discuss how the murky readability of adventure games contributed to their falling from prominence. In retrospect, I should have presented this sooner. If this series is compiled into a set of links, I'll likely pull a C.S. Lewis and renumber this as part two and follow it with the posts about empathy and data.

Before I launch in, I need to reiterate that I have a great fondness for adventure games. Some of my fondest gaming moments came when playing adventures. I want to be able to share those experiences with folks who haven't, rather than pine for halcyon times long past.



It's clear adventure games, of both the text and graphical variety, have lost their once prominent position. There are a number of reasons for this, but one that seems largely ignored is the poor readability of the gameplay systems of adventure games. Sometimes this will be addressed by people saying, "they were too hard." But that claim is actually quite misleading, especially given the notions most have about difficulty in video games.

Adventure games suffered from poor readability. Full stop. The mechanics of adventure games provided a truly colossal number of possible actions, but with no real relationship to each other. There was no systematic way to understand or improve at playing adventure games, beyond learning that you should try to pick up every single thing in the game that isn't nailed down (and those you'll probably just have to pry up).

As a quick terminology note, Jesse Schell mentioned this very issue in his book when discussing player actions as a game mechanic. He identifies "operative" actions as distinct from "resultant" actions. The former would be fundamental actions the player can execute at any distinct moment, while the latter are broader strategies or behaviours that emerge from understanding how the game's systems inter-operate. This is remarkably similar to the mechanics vs. dynamics distinct in the MDA framework, and it seems both are describing the same phenomena. I'll be using the MDA terminology here.

Back to the readability problems in adventure games. Take the quintessential LucasArts/Sierra adventure game. The main interactions in the game consist of using a number of verbs (e.g. push, pull, pick up, talk to, use, etc.) with various objects in the environment. Additionally, your character likely has an inventory that allows you to move some objects from one place to another and use them on other objects.

Unfortunately, they way these verbs operate is based on a carnival mirror version of the real world. Pushing object X does nothing, but pushing object Y will get you closer to a solution. Trying to pick up one object results in the player's character saying "I don't want that," but the character is perfectly happy to pick up a different object.

This provides the player with a tremendous number of possible actions to perform, but no way to understanding how they work in conjunction (because they almost never do). There are a lot of ways to use the game's mechanics, but no enjoyable dynamics arise from them. If the player isn't able to infer the designer's intentions, their only option is trial and error. But the permutations of the various mechanics result in a truly colossal number of actions, only a tiny fraction of which have meaningful outcomes.

As a hypothetical, say there are six areas a player can go during a certain stage of an adventure game. On each screen there are an average of eight interactive objects. The player has five possible verbs they can use on any object. They also have seven items in their inventory, all of which can be used on any object. This means that at any given time, the player has 768 potential actions to perform.

Text adventures (or interactive fiction, whatever your preference on terminology) exacerbate this problem, as the limit to possible verbs is literally the player's vocabulary. When stuck, the player becomes a thesaurus, struggling to find the right combination of words to execute what they think makes sense. But as it's impossible to know when an action is incorrect due to logic or just due to the parse, the player can never be certain their solution was fundamentally incorrect, instead of just linguistically incorrect.



Compound this with the truly absurd logic of some adventure games (see Old Man Murray's discussion of Gabriel Knight 3) and it's really no surprise that adventure games fell out of favour. The dynamics of adventure games are not enjoyable the moment the player falls out of sync with the designer's intentions. Coming full circle, adventure games have a readability problem. With all that being said, this definition of readability should make sense:

Readability is a measure of how easily a player can understand a game's dynamics.

To provide contrast, Braid is a good example of a game with a small number of mechanics giving rise to rich, understandable dynamics. Some criticized Braid for requiring the player to guess the designer's intent. While this is true, the mechanics in Braid number in single digits. Personally, I was never particularly frustrated with Braid, nor did I ever feel like a puzzle was obtuse or unfair. Upon solving, my reaction was universally, "Oh yeah, that makes sense." I cannot say the same for needing a cat hair and syrup mustache to impersonate a man that doesn't even have a mustache.

This post has become much longer than intended. In the interest I've brevity, I've broken it in two. Wednesday's post will discuss some ways in which adventure games can be made more readable.

Improving Readability: Data

I claimed in last week's post about empathy that you should never listen to your players. To better illustrate what I mean, you should watch this talk about spaghetti sauce. Unlike all those other boring talks about spaghetti sauce that you've seen, this one is by Malcolm Gladwell at TED. I have no hesitation in saying this is the best pasta-related talk I've ever seen. Seriously, go watch it, I'll wait.




There are two excellent points being made in Gladwell's discussion of Howard Moskowitz's experimentation. The first comes early, in Moskowitz's observation that the search for the perfect Pepsi should have really been the search for the perfect Pepsis. There isn't necessarily a perfectly satisfactory recipe (read: design) that will suit everyone. If something isn't working, finding the median isn't necessarily the right solution. Diverge towards two alternatives and satisfy two groups instead of serving everyone poorly.

Gladwell's second point demonstrates why you should never listen to your players. In the search for the perfect spaghetti sauce, Moskowitz tested countless varieties, none of which the market showed any indication of wanting. He was rigorous and thorough in his evaluation. Game design should demonstrate the exact same rigor.

Mike Ambinder, a Ph.D. cognitive psychologist at Valve, gave a fantastic talk at GDC about applying clinical research methodologies to create better games. He opened with the claim that game design is a hypothesis and playtesting is an experiment. Essentially, he said that evaluating game design ought to be treated like a science. This is exactly what Moskowitz did to find Prego's troika of ideal spaghetti sauces.

Leigh mentioned this on our podcast, saying some developers will treat unfavourable playtest results by saying "Those playtests were dumb and just didn't get it." Then they'll repeat until they find playtesters that provide satisfactory results. Essentially, they're looking for data that supports the hypothesis they want and disregarding any contradictory evidence. This is, of course, the worst kind of bad science. It's actually worse that not testing at all, where there may still be some doubt about the design's validity.

As I discussed in the last post, the development team is too close to the project to evaluate it objectively. Data-based analysis is vital because it provides objectivity our knowledge of the game intrinsically precludes.

While this may seem obvious, it's pretty clear that some studios lack dedication to this kind of evaluation. To be fair, few have Valve's unending wellspring of money and time that makes it much easier to perform these experiments.

Finally, when I say you should never listen to your players, I'm being superfluous (but not by much). Playtesters probably shouldn't be gagged on entering the building. Playtester surveys and post-hoc discussions are an important part of playtesting. But they're good for identifying problems, not solutions.

Watching what they do is more important than what they say. And when even successful game designers can be dead wrong about what a game is missing, the value of a random player's proposed solutions should be obvious.



In an attempt to keep this post from becoming truly colossal, I'll defer to links to provide some excellent examples of how to perform this kind of data-driven analysis. Mike Darga, a designer at Cryptic Studios, has been running a truly outstanding series about exactly this. And it's great to see we're on the same page about the importance of this practice.

This weekend I'll finish the culmination of this series and finally provide some tangible examples of my own. I'll be discussing how the adventure genre ate itself and how I believe readability issues contributed significantly to this tragic autocannibalism.

GDAotM Article for April Posted

I resisted temptation to goth-out and write about the design advantages of short horror games. Instead, I discussed different ways of looking at the content reuse that is necessitated by most short games. In retrospect, it's a little scattered, but hopefully there's still some good bits in there.

If you're interested, I believe Sande is still accepting proposals for future monthly topics and blog submissions (or both if you're ambitious). Next month's topic is trend toward simpler games, which coincidentally lines up with the readability yammering I've been doing (and will continue to do).

Improving Readability: Empathy

Last week, I claimed that game readability can be improved with increased emphasis on empathy and data. I'll be discussing the importance of the former first, but there's quite a bit of overlap between the two.

I neglected to offer a solid definition of readability previously, so I will correct that now before we progress. Consider readability to be a measure of the player's understanding of what outcomes are possible and how they can affect those outcomes. Basically, the inputs and outputs of the game's systems. We can distinguish this on both a micro, minute-to-minute level and a macro, long term level, but it's the case that problems in one often affect the other.

To be clear, readability is a quality, not a value judgment. Some games are intentionally quite complex and unclear. Internalizing the game's systems is the primary source of satisfaction (and even they can often improve upon some unintended obfuscation). But when the readability of a game is diminished, it needs to be deliberately and with great care, which is rarely the case.

This is related to the concept of visibility that Donald Norman discusses in The Design of Everyday Things. The distinction in the interactions Norman presents are almost never explorative in nature. The object in question provides a specific function (or set of functions) and it is the designer's responsibility to communicate these things as clearly as possible, i.e. "If you want to achieve X, do Y." Readability in games more takes the form of, "If you do X, Y will happen. If you instead do A, B will happen." Visibility is about objectives, readability is about decisions.



Finally circling back, what does readability have to do with empathy? Creating a readable game system requires empathy for the player, namely the acknowledgement that your perspective as a designer is completely and irreconcilably different from the players. Readability is about the speed and accuracy at which the player can internalize the game's systems. For the designers, and just about anyone else involved with the project, some amount of this knowledge is already present. This makes their perspective on the game's readability completely inaccurate.

Empathy means acknowledging this truth, which is not isolated solely to games. Anyone involved in any sort of interaction design is simply too close to what is being designed to evaluate it objectively. Having one year of experience or twenty does not change this fact (although ideally a veteran designer has come to grips with this). In my life before games, I worked at a mobile media startup and saw this error made time and time again, to disastrous effect.

Bill Moggridge wrote a fantastic book called Designing Interactions, where he compiles essays from dozens of interaction designers. Suffice to say, it begins with Doug Englebart discussing the invention of the mouse and goes from there. It's very interesting reading for anyone interested in how good interactions are created, and game designers should count themselves amongst that group.

One commonality between most of the book's contributors is the importance of empathy for the user. Time and time again, the designers interviewed discussed how essential a user-centric approach was. Keeping the user's perspective consistently in mind and evaluating possible solutions are the building blocks of creating excellent interactions.

The evaluation part is as important as empathy, and that's the data bit I discussed prior. I'll be addressing this next, and explain what it's important to never listen to your users.

The Importance of Readability in Games

Several folks have been talking about The Design of Everyday Things in the context of games, and this excites me tremendously. I am a big fan of Norman's book, as evidenced, but what I'm really excited about is what interest in this book represents. I believe there is a growing interest in improving the usability in games, and more importantly, improving their readability.

Why does this matter? I believe that one of the most interesting aspects of games is the interactive system that emerges from the collaboration of the game's individual mechanics and dynamics. This is a characteristic unique to games (at least amongst activities we engage with for enjoyment) and perhaps the most emblematic of games' potential for true artistry. But there is an inseparable peril here as well, namely that being able to understanding the system is at least partially a precondition to enjoying it. E.g. there is a lot of time that needs put in before Dwarf Fortress becomes truly enjoyable.

This is a bigger problem than many people think.

Since their inception, games have been trending toward richer simulations, greater graphical fidelity, more varied interactions and more consequential decisions. But it seems a peak was reached and recently there has been a bit of pushback, calls for reducing complexity and making games simpler. I think this is really an acknowledgment, perhaps subconsciously, that we're becoming more aware of the readability issues in our games. By reducing the elements at play in our systems, we can expedite the player's internalization of a system's behaviours.

Certain studios are incredible systematic in their approach to readability and it shows. Oft-touted, but for good reason, Valve has demonstrated how much they value creating games that are as readable as possible. I asked my fiancée to give Portal a try, even though she basically never plays first-person games. Her tastes skew towards social games, be they intrinsically so (The Sims, Animal Crossing) or merely circumstantially (Mario Kart, Mario Party, Rock Band). I was curious how she would engage with Portal. The gameplay style wasn't particularly to her taste, and she found the controls a little wonky. But once the control issue was ameliorated, she was able to quickly parse and solve the puzzles, even though the game's interactions were almost totally foreign to her. Listening to the developer's commentary, in coordination with reflecting on Randy Smith's GDC talk, it's clear this is no coincidence. It's the result of a dedicated and thorough process that behoove most developers to emulate as appropriate.


Making these complex systems readable is important, and not just because it might save the world. Players need to understand all the inputs and all the outputs to make interesting, informed decisions. These are the mechanisms through which we express our will in the game. This is the machinery that transforms our medium from passive to interactive. It's what makes games interesting and might well be what makes them art.

This is a multifaceted (and as far as I'm aware, relatively unexplored) issue, but we can begin making inroads. Making games more readable begins with two things- empathy and data.

I'm going to discuss both in the next few posts, culminating with thoughts on how poor readability contribute to the adventure game genre more or less eating itself. I hope this will be of interest and, as always, I welcome your thoughts.

GDAotM Part Deux Posted

Part 2 of my thoughts on horror games and player death has been posted. This will probably be the shortest post I ever write. Savour it.

GDAotM Article Posted

My weekly-ish posting rate has been saved by Sande Chen posting my submission at Game Design Aspects of the Month. It's my take on how death and repetition as a failure condition is fundamentally at odds with horror aesthetics. (As an aside, I asked the art director of Dead Space about this at GDC and he more or less agreed) The project itself is an extension of the IGDA's new Game Design SIG where a host of design-inclined folks discuss a particular topic. Feel free to comment here or at the source, but I imagine Sande would prefer the latter.

Apologies for no natively new content here, but I returned from GDC on Friday evening and am still catching up on a host of things. For everyone I met at GDC, my sincerest appreciation for being so kind, welcoming and unabashedly awesome. Can't wait to see you all again!

One of many awesome results of GDC was providing a smorgasboard of ideas for me to innaccurate and insufficiently reposit here (well, hopefully not). Next post is already planned and based largely on one of my personal favourite talks from GDC. I'll stay mum to the exact contents for now, but I'll hint by saying my fiancée is wonderfully tolerant. More soon!

On Width and Depth

I finished The Design of Everyday Things recently, and while it does not deal directly with games, I'd still consider it a must-read for anyone interested in game design. Norman has some great insight into what makes an artifact usable and one area where games often suffer is usability, both in the gameplay itself and in the game's support systems. The downside of reading DOET is you'll start seeing bad design everywhere and those around you will likely tire of, "Gah, look how poorly designed that door is! If a door needs a 'pull' sign, it's not well designed!"

One area of Norman's discussion that I found particularly applicable to games was the notion of width and depth within interactions. A wide but shallow interaction affords a small number decisions that have a lot of possibilities, but are not sequential or meaningfully connected. A narrow but deep interaction has a large number of decisions, but the possibilities for each decision are relatively constrained. The culinary analogy he provides is that buying ice cream is wide but shallow- there are a lot of options, but once you've decided on the flavour, there are only a few simpe decisions (cone, toppings) to be made. A nine course dinner is narrow but deep; at each course, there are only two or three possibilities, but there are a many sequential decisions to be made.

Most of our daily decisions are either shallow or narrow, which is why most of our reactional activities are both wide and deep. Amongst games, width and depth can, and should, also be varied to affect the game's interaction. "Shallow" is often used pejoratively as a gameplay descriptor, but here, I'm using it as Norman does, to refer to the size and sequentiality of the decision space.

The width and depth of an interaction are not binary states, but rather a continuum. It's important to consider both aspects of interaction, and deliberately design toward certain levels of width/depth that best support the intended experience.

A game like Animal Crossing is wide but shallow. There is a lot to do in one's town, but the actions themselves are nonsequential. This allows for very freeform play that's quite accessible. Left 4 Dead is narrow but deep. At any moment there are relatively few decisions (auto shotgun or assault rifle? Heal myself or an ally?), but each decision sequentially affects future decisions. Sins of a Solar Empire is both wide and deep, with a myriad of decisions that will directly affect the next decisions made.

It's possible to look at the local gameplay and global gameplay separately. Far Cry 2 offers relatively narrow gameplay decisions at any given moment, but at a higher level the global decisions are wide and nonsequential. Most MMOs a la World of Warcraft start with a narrow and shallow local and global decision space that becomes wider and deeper.

Width and depth are descriptors, not advantages. Trying to make a game seem artificially deep will often obfuscate the things about it that are most interesting and engaging. Adding unnecessary decisions to a narrow game unnecessarily will often dilute the meaning of those decisions and create a paradox of choice, where the player is more worried about the things they won't experience than the things they will as a consequence of their decision.

The Design of Everyday Things stresses being deliberate and conscientious about design. The width and depth of gameplay decisions should be considered carefully, their ramifications understood. Doing so can help keep the design focused and prevent wasting time on features that will only add needless complexity.

Do you prefer a game to be narrow or wide? Shallow or deep? Are there other ways these characteristics can inform the way we look at games? I'm curious to hear your thoughts.