One way to think of videogames is that they are useless software. Imagine a word processor that couldn't save or print files. Or a compiler that didn't generate executables that ran on any machine but your own. Why would anyone ever use such a pointless thing?
Well, games are in many ways exactly that. They don't really touch any part of the outside world or produce anything materially useful. They're self contained. So why do people sink time into them even though they can't get anything tangible in return? It's because the process of using the software itself—playing the game—is so intrinsically enjoyable.
If you can learn a little bit of that and apply it to software that does do something useful, you can end up with the kind of programs that build devoted fanbases.
As a gamedev I 100% agree with your assertion that games are useless. An expression I use in game design is "fictional friction". Nothing in my game is real. None of the struggle is essential. Every mouse click or decision was a fiction I designed for players.
Nothing prevents me from giving players infitnite money, in fact there is a dev cheat menu which does just that. Instead all my effort revolves around crafting fake value for otherwise meaningless bits.
Thus games are the peak of software design: people put up with other software to pay for chances to play mine.
I'm almost done with the Coursera CalArts game design specialisation, and they have cited a few resources, but I want to know what the industry recommend amongst themselves.
(That said, I've found the peer assessments on Coursera utterly lacking, some of the videos hard to understand and badly captioned, and will be starting a master's in game design in September...)
The idea we should capture the way games build tangible experiences and apply them to “useful software” is to misunderstand both what makes games useful and software that achieves a task. Gamification is swimming in the shallow end of game design. Swimming in the deeper end is beyond what most productive software should be doing design wise. The goals are different, the results are different and more importantly building software that fuses games and learning is different than either.
I figured some might. Try to charitably understand why I chose to emphasize with that word. Yes, obviously, playing games provides all sorts of meaningful things to the player. As I said, playing games is intrinsically rewarding.
But what most games don't do is provide extrinsic utility. Playing a videogame does not pay your mortgage, fix your leaky sink, cure your halitosis, or get you an A in class. (Ignoring professional game playing for money, of course.)
Your electricity company's website can be a slow, bug-ridden heap of PHP 1.0 garbage and you will still use it because it lets you pay their bill and keep your lights on. A videogame has no such luxury. If using the game itself is not enjoyable, you have no users. That means good game designers are very well trained in making things people want to use. That's a great skill for anyone who wants to design beloved things.
> The idea we should capture the way games build tangible experiences and apply them to “useful software” is to misunderstand both what makes games useful and software that achieves a task.
There is definitely an important aspect of games that cannot be harnessed by useful software. A key, perhaps the fundamental thing that makes play play is safety. There is a lower bound to how much harm playing a game poorly can do. That keeps the stakes low, which allows you to get into a freer, more exploratory mindset.
Obviously, the app you use to pay your mortgage cannot offer that freeing sense of delight. While that safety is what makes games games, that is not all that makes games enjoyable.
> Gamification is swimming in the shallow end of game design.
Oh dear, I certainly didn't have "gamification" and all the sleazy things that has been used for in mind, though I can see how what I said was ambiguous regarding that.
Maybe a more direct way of stating what I was getting at is that game designers have a greater appreciation of usability than many others. Every tool has some mixture of utility (what it can do) and usability (what it makes easy/enjoyable to do). If a tool has important utility, users will suffer using regardless of its usability. If a university's slow automated phone system is the only way to register classes, well, I guess you're gonna sit on hold for three hours. But you won't like it.
Since games have no utility, they must have usability. Usability ("fun") is foundational in a way that it isn't in other fields. And I think there's a lot to be learned from game designers about how they approach that.
I remember I liked a game and I started writing code to play it for me so I could do other things while still having the feeling that an extension of myself was playing.
As a side note, the company had one of the coolest recruiting tactics. I had to examine HTTP responses to be able to send in requests that triggered actions, and they included a call to application in the HTTP response headers "If you're reading this, please apply".
The latest one for me is Ableton Live. It is just a beautiful piece of software. Everything feels smooth, immediate, expressive. It gets out of my way whenever it can but is right there at my fingertips when I want it to be. It's just a lovely, lovely program.
Why do we make video games? I've been programming for 10 years, I love games; wanted to make them. But I went into infosec because it felt...justified? Like it's more noble? But that doesn't seem to make sense saying it out loud.
But your points on understanding game design because of that human-software-machine connection, that just feels like it makes sense.
I'm sorry, this question has just been bugging me for over a year now.
To try to go for a philosophical answer - why do we do anything? Cooking, writing, building shelter, sending spaceships to mars. I think generally, the purpose is to make human brains feel good. Ultimately, we all are going to die and nothing we do will have a lasting impact, but as long as we're here - we spend our time making ourselves and each other feel good. Games are one of the ways to make people feel good.
A more cynical answer - we make games for no good reason. Games feel good in the moment, but feel like a waste of time and energy afterwards, making a net negative impact on people's lives, like junk food or addiction. People play them against their best interests, because it feels good in the moment, and because people aren't rational creatures. People make games because making games is fun and makes them money.
One more answer - making games is art. Art is cool. Making games is an art that can be beautiful, interactive, engaging. It's a combination of multiple art forms (painting, sculpting, storytelling, music, etc). It's also way more fun than most kinds of art, people don't get addicted to paintings or books the way they get addicted to video games. I doubt that people got as much joy out of looking at Mona Lisa as they did out of playing Minecraft.
One more related thought - the real world is overrated. We have the power to make imaginary worlds that are far more engaging and satisfying than the one where we live. Better ones. So we make them.
These are different possible perspectives, pick yours. There can be a bunch more I'm not considering.
Both art and entertainment are important.
* Social - How many people have learned to trade and avoid scams IRL by playing RuneScape? No RuneScape player would have falled for the recent "double your BTC" Twitter scam. * Strategy- From all kinds of games (chess, strategy, fighting games, shooters, etc.) * Working in teams - MOBAs, Rocket League, Shooters. You start flaming your team, you lose. * Health - I know people that hate doing exercise, yet they played hundreds of hours of Table Tennis in VR and losing weight. * Self-esteem - Games allow people to clearly know when they are really good at something. They also make it easy to see progress. So, you might feel like you suck at everything IRL, but you find that one game that you are good at and then people even respect you for that and look up to you. * Mental health - Might be for escapism but also could help you express your anger or other feelings in a game instead of the real world This list could go on forever.
> They're self contained This is so, so wrong. I don't know if you are a gamer or not, but gaming communities are huge. Once you start playing a game, you will want to discuss it with others, learn from others, share your experience with others. Not only that, but through a game, the game developers communicate to you in a sense that no other experience can (books, movies). Yes, the "bits" that make up a game are self-contained as any other physical object, but the story behind them and what they express spreads way further than themselves. I think "real" software is a lot more self-contained, plus most of it is created to hinder value creation, not to actually create value.
This may be true, but RuneScape players do not seek out the game to improve that skill. They don't think, "well, I'm pretty crappy at trading and dealing with scammers. I guess I'll go play RuneScape, even though it's not fun at all, to improve that skill."
The other examples in your paragraph are in the same vein. I am not saying that playing games does not have positive benefits. I'm saying that most players do not choose to play games primarily for those benefits.
> I know people that hate doing exercise, yet they played hundreds of hours of Table Tennis in VR and losing weight.
My point exactly. If all they cared about was losing weight, they would exercise and play Table Tennis at the same rate. The reason they play VR tennis is because it's more usable.
> I don't know if you are a gamer or not, but gaming communities are huge.
Not much of a gamer these days, but I worked at EA for eight years.
You're taking umbrage at what I said because games are clearly close to your heart, but read a little closer. I'm not attacking games. I'm doing the opposite. I'm pointing out that games must be fantastically designed because people will choose to sink hours into them regardless of whether they provide practical benefit or not.
Let's say a study came out that showed that RuneScape actually did not improve your real-life trading skills. Do you think that would significantly affect how much people played it?
Well, they are not exactly useless. Even discounting for educational games, pointless games like Borderlands / Grand Theft Auto have great value. That value lies in providing entertainment in an interactive way, something that was never possible for most of human existence.
There is something magical about highly interactive games, like say Far Cry. GTA, etc, where the player knows his game, while being the same product, is unique to him/her. Services like Twitch have created whole new ecosystems of micro-economies, where a section of population is replacing movies with watching others playing games. There is great fun in watching an expert gamer playing a game. Part of the experience is in unexpected humor through mistakes, wrong decisions, distractions, etc. Part of the experience is in knowing that none of it is scripted and everything is happening in real time.
As an evolution of the entertainment industry, it's not useless.
There are many negative aspects of gaming as well. If played in excess, at the cost of childhood related activities, like playing with friends outside, etc, it can be detrimental to social development.
But those sorts of problems are there in many areas of life. Anything done in excess is detrimental.
But I think you're basically making the argument that games are art. That they exist for the aesthetic experience, and for no utilitarian purpose.
And I'm very much okay with that. :)
This is quite old and focused on rogue-likes, but it might meet your request. Somehow.
One of those definite cases of survivorship bias.
There is survivorship bias, but it's kinda all happening within the one designer.
- Brenda Romero (credited on the book as Brenda Braithwaite) and Ian Schreiber's Challenges for Game Designers[1], which uses a series of design exercises to illustrate concepts like balancing and mechanical loops, and at least from a cursory glance at the Riot curriculum is very similar in structure to it. The exercises still help me bootstrap my understanding of mechanics that I don't always employ in designs, and still occasionally inspire new ideas just by going through one almost like a karate kata.
- Raph Koster's Theory of Fun for Game Design[2], which is more introspective about the nature of games rather than a pragmatic how-to guide. Koster's views are often contentious, particularly on defining what a game is or can be, but I usually go back to this book when I want to step back and remind myself what kinds of audiences might be in my blind spot for a mechanic or concept — I might think something is fun because I think it's fun, without interrogating why, and even if I don't agree with Koster on how he goes about defining it the book does a good job of demonstrating how one builds a definition in the first place.
- Jesse Schell's Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses[3], which just got a 3rd edition last year that I haven't had a chance to read yet. It's a framework for interrogating a design — and I say "interrogating" literally, as the lenses are a set of questions to ask of your design — that touches on mechanics but also how viable an idea is to make into a game in the first place. Walking an idea through the lenses serves like a second pair of "eyes" when I don't have another person handy to bounce that idea off of in depth. There's a card deck version[3] of just the lenses that are handier to have on the desk.
It's likely that there are newer books out there covering similar ground;[4] these are the ones that were around when I came up through my first game design experiences around 2010-2012.[5] These are all high level enough to be pretty general works on the nature and purpose of all types of games, even if all of them have digital games at or near front-of-mind, without being so focused on theory and philosophy that they don't give you actionable things to apply in a design.
(Also, I've found that all three of those names are polarizing, often for very different reasons. I find the works valuable regardless; books don't tend to yell at me in a Discord chat or on social media when I read them, which is a nice change of pace.)
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Challenges-Game-Designers-Brenda-Brat...
[2] https://www.powells.com/book/theory-of-fun-for-game-design-2...
[3] https://www.schellgames.com/art-of-game-design/ — and of course there's a booster pack available, because game designers are insatiable post-publication tinkerers
[4] Procedural Storytelling in Game Design, co-edited by Tarn Adams of Dwarf Fortress and Tanya X. Short of a bunch of procedural indie games and formerly Funcom, is exciting in concept, and Darius Kazemi is always fun to read on the subject: https://www.amazon.com/Procedural-Storytelling-Design-Tanya-...
Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design, by Geoffrey Engelstein and Issac Shalev, looks like it ports the cookbook concept from software development to tabletop games, which feels right up my alley: https://www.amazon.com/Building-Blocks-Tabletop-Game-Design/...
(It seems notable that both of those are by CRC Press, which I associate more with academic textbooks, but neither really fits the usual bill for them.)
Calling it "newer" might be a misnomer, but I'm desperate to get around to the illustrated The Making Prince of Persia: Journals and wish there were more books with the perspective of a journal during development — watching along as opportunities open and close, instead of as a post-mortem that's colored by the end product and invariably focused on what went wrong/how to avoid it. Also it just looks gorgeous: https://www.amazon.com/Making-Prince-Persia-Journals-1985-19...
[5] Steve Swink's Game Feel has been on my list of to-reads on the subject forever, but I've never gotten around to it: https://www.powells.com/book/game-feel-9780123743282
I bounced off Katie Salen/Eric Zimmerman's Rules of Play, but it's lauded enough that it's hard to omit it. If you like Koster's ideas around orthography in game design and want to see a predecessor that takes it further and issues prescriptive rules, or if you have more of an interest in design criticism than creation and want an intro to a critical vocabulary, it might appeal more: https://www.powells.com/book/rules-of-play-game-design-funda...
Tracy Fullerton's Game Design Workshop is a great read, and even more well suited to a classroom environment than Challenges for Game Designers, but it's _too_ classroom-y for my tastes, focused more on getting from point A to a very specific and more directed point B, instead of laying out a more open-ended task where the boundaries can be a creative aid. I've never felt compelled to return to it as a result, but there are folks who swear by it, so it's still worth mentioning: https://www.amazon.com/Game-Design-Workshop-Playcentric-Inno...
The course itself is interesting, in that it's not a programming course at all. It's about what makes a game fun. Download the PDF and look at page 6, which has the useful info.
I applaud Riot for this, but I think they're specialty and reason for their huge growth is more to do with outreach, as jimbob45 noted. For a company with such a focus on competitive PvP games, I would argue they are not very good at balance at all. I would even go so far to say that their monetization scheme is detrimental to the balance of the game because of the incentive mismatch with creating a balanced game vs a profitable one. With that said, I think they have gotten a lot better over the years, and no one can take away from their success.
DotA takes a systemic approach to balance. Each hero is a tool in the team's toolbox. Most heroes have very specific strengths and weaknesses, and their powerspikes are very pronounced. When you draft a team, you are specifically drafting a set of capabilities that you want to exploit against the enemy. This also leads to heroes having very hard counters. But I think the real beauty in DotA is it's item system, which allows you to patch holes in your team's composition and allow a huge amount of flexibility for each hero. I can keep going forever, as I really love its game design. But the most important thing that DotA does in terms of balance is its holistic approach that allows heroes to be individual components to a team, and have items to augment strengths or patch holes that the draft was not prepared for. (DotA's design and metagame sparked my interest in Complex Adaptive Systems, so I just nerd out about it any chance I get).
So to your point, I think the whole need to create imbalance is caused because of the way Riot balances their characters in the first place. I think it is fundamentally flawed from a design perspective, but it obviously makes them a ton of money. They really mastered monetization of multiplayer games. They also made their game very approachable for noobs, and that I have to commend them for.
Edit: Just discovered the lesson plan download link under the headings, separate from the buttons at the bottom of the page. It helps, though am still confused about how anyone would use this material.
It also helps answer micro, nuts and bolts like what kinds of rewards your players will respond to. For example, a player really into challenge might only care about the stats on a magic sword they find, but a player more into narrative or exploration will dig a sword with a mysterious engraving on the hilt even if it isn’t necessarily an upgrade. Real life people usually respond to multiple categories, but if you pay attention during the game you will see this at work.
I got onto this via a post at theangrygm.com, who I really recommend. He’s super opinionated, and the “angry GM” schtick gets old, but he knows what he’s talking about.
To players who actually played SC2 and LoL circa 2011, it wasn’t a surprise when LoL became the premiere e-sport and SC2 withered away.
The agreement was that lol won because it was free, tho it looked and played worse than either Dota or Hon, but the free aspect won riot the entire emerging markets sector
Me as a SC2 player through and through I just looked down on them overall, so feel free to correct me if I am wrong
They have an incredibly robust M&A division, have mastered land + expand with their esports, are putting down roots in pretty much every major gaming category, and have modern monetization practices down to a tee.
Excluding the clearly egregious cultural issues, I would be fairly confident in betting on Riot in the long term
Tencent already did that more than 10 years ago. I wonder how they pick who to invest into, because it seems that in the gaming space they have their hand in almost everything successful. And how come others aren't doing the same?
So, out of all of them?
LoL is probably the only game that I play (maybe once a year I decide to spend up to 50h over some peroid on one title like GTA V or something) for years and it almost always feels "fresh" and very competitive.
The way they do esport is huge part of their success
Lol on the other hand, its like watching Soccer/Golf/Football except the players also have magic/hi-tech abilities. The "depth" of the strategy is also sooo much more than an FPS. flex picks, lane swaps, lane freezing , meta shifts, (also mechanics but that spans across all esports).
Then theres also the music division, that collaborates with mega pop stars in korea/us/south america
The "depth" of the strategy is also sooo much more than an FPS
At a high level, Overwatch is complicated because it effectively combines MOBA elements with FPS elements. It's not really a straight FPS, and the higher skill you get the more you have to pay attention to the MOBA elements in order to do well. As an example: Zarya is a tank whose entire ability kit (sans ultimate) is built around using an ability on herself and a teammate (on different cooldowns) to protect them from damage/negative effects for 2 seconds at a time. This ability can be destroyed if 200 damage is done to the player it's affecting, and Zarya gains increased damage if damage is done to this ability up to a cap. It sounds simple, but players who have mastered Zarya are ones who know _when_ to use these two abilities, which order, etc. which has a lot to do with the current state of the game. Bad Zarya players use both abilities instantly and simultaneously the second they see the opponent. It's all about timing abilities... which sounds a lot like playing a MOBA. But you also have to be good at aim and master the two firing modes she has, among the many, many other things to pay attention to during gameplay.
I don't whether LoL or Overwatch has more "depth", but they both have a lot of it.
Comparing these games to soccer is impossible. Every champion has unique abilities uncomparable to other champion's. If you have no knowledge about what they are doing (or need to be doing) you are just out of depth.
The games are just too fast and way too specific for casual watchers. This is ok but this kind of gaming will never get even near of soccer in spectator interest.
Edit: typo
(Well, and back in the day – this writeup of Crash Bandicoot by Naughty Dog's first employee is a classic: https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DaveBaggett/20131031/203788/...)
My incentive to play is climbing the ranked ladder and, like you, I play in bursts separated by months, but each time I start playing again there are like 5 new champions whose abilities I don't know or understand, which keeps me at a disadvantaged position. I don't have time to study all the new champs abilities.
I think their high champion-release rate drives the casual, but competitive-minded players away.
In the micro, fun and well designed gameplay (Valorant too!). In the macro, their games are a terrible slog rooted in addiction science. All to maximize revenue from rolling skin and champion releases. Every single champion is released overpowered to add a temporary boost in play time and revenue. We can do better.
The entire game industry is pretty bad in general compared to tech or otherwise: one huge concept is that you have to "love the game"; you're willing to take low pay, low benefits, deal with overrun unpaid overtime hours, etc. because you "love the game". Most game companies freely tell you about how disposable you are because they have hordes of players, many willing to work for free.
Riot has serious problems with this. The C-level that was repeatedly reported (for years) for grabbing testicles, dryhumping employees or farting on them is still in their role and hasn't been removed - they were just suspended for a month or two and reinstated. The gender-discrimination forced new legal counsel just a few months ago due to possible collusion.
It is still to this day one of the worst experiences I've encountered.
Why don't game engineers demand better? Start a company with decent work hours and comp and refuse to work elsewhere.
The games industry is sickly and broken.
Game design 101 starts with learning to program or do graphics.
The same with software development. Unfortunately, we as an industry validated an entire class of people with jobs where they literally manage software (agile people) without building actual software for years.
It doesn’t sit well with me, but life is not fair.
No it doesn't, any more than architecture 101 starts with bricklaying, or novel writing 101 starts with learning typesetting and printing.
I don’t know enough about Architecture to point out the fundamentals that you should be making parallels to.
For novels, typesetting is an incredible false analogy. You need to learn how to communicate via writing on a technical level before you can write creatively (e.g stories).
Back to the shot at agile, I would not expect anyone that never dealt with deadlines or technical scoping to manage timelines for either of those things.
If someone doesn’t even know how to write a game loop, they are going to move on to game design?
If you look at a movie, some of your bad screenplay writing can be fixed via casting. Imagine not having any hands on experience with the process, but alas, you move on to movie director because you took movie directing 101. It’s insane, design is a holistic process that requires a lot of exposure.