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?

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.

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.