Street Fighter taught me about yomi: knowing the mind of the opponent. You can’t just play the odds and do the textbook-correct responses, you have to adapt and anticipate your opponent’s moves. The game is merely a medium through which you play against the other player.

Games vary in how much they require skill at yomi, and it occurred to me that a game including yomi skill precludes a game having a Nash equilibrium.

a solution concept of a game involving two or more players, in which each player is assumed to know the equilibrium strategies of the other players, and no player has anything to gain by changing only his or her own strategy unilaterally. If each player has chosen a strategy and no player can benefit by changing his or her strategy while the other players keep theirs unchanged, then the current set of strategy choices and the corresponding payoffs constitute a Nash equilibrium.

Stated simply, Amy and Bill are in Nash equilibrium if Amy is making the best decision she can, taking into account Bill’s decision, and Bill is making the best decision he can, taking into account Amy’s decision. Likewise, a group of players is in Nash equilibrium if each one is making the best decision that he or she can, taking into account the decisions of the others.

Wikipedia

Games like Street Fighter, Kongai, coker, chess, are interesting because they don’t have evolutionarily stable strategies, every player is obliged to change their strategy in response to another player’s change. If a game (or one decision in a game) has a Nash equilibrium, there is no value to yomi, the player doesn’t need to know what the other player plans.

Game designer and thoughtful critic Ernest Adams (his Designer’s Notebook column at Gamasutra is good reading) mused about an F2P developer’s presentation:

Zhan Ye explained in his lecture that in F2P game design, every feature must be measured by two metrics: is it fun, and does it make money? The designer is no longer free to concentrate purely on creating a fun game; the designer must be a businessperson. [...] The F2P business model seems a bit weird to me — it distorts what I think of as the designer’s main role — but it’s not wrong in and of itself, just different.

This reminded me a lot of a complaint from a graphic designer leaving Google a few years ago:

Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that. I’ve grown tired of debating such minuscule design decisions.

The industrial revolution – and especially the concept of scientific management – replaced the concept of craftsmanship with the efficiency of repeatable production. You can’t manufacture the creative work of ad copy, game design, or graphic design, but metrics allow businesses to know with industrial precision what works and doesn’t.

Every formerly creative decision is now an opportunity to be unambiguously wrong. Efficiency replaces autonomy.

Where it used to be possible to design things for design’s sake to meet a designer’s personal standards for quality, it’s increasingly easy for businesses to analyze the effects of even very small aspects of those designs. The designer is used to relying on personal taste, gut instinct, or professional standards to deal with the thousand small questions that crop up in every design, and it feels good to intuitively know the right answers.

The first thing everyone writes about metrics (like A/B tests) is that you’re going to be surprised how often your intuition is wrong, even on questions that seem obvious and easy to answer. The new (or newly accessible) metrics are immensely frustrating to designers for three reasons:

1. Analytics tools are one more damn thing to learn
2. that often reveal experience to only be assumption
3. and transform personal decisions into business decisions.

The valid argument I see against the intrusion of metrics is that they’re short-sighted, eg. a green button may increase sales 8% now but introduces an inconsistency in overall site theme that won’t be measured in the future. That’s hard to make when the web’s cheap distribution can give you millions of new opportunities for revenue in a matter of a few days or hours — or allow you to earn more than you thought off the very few you do have.

Designers are going to have to live with metrics trumping their professional experience and personal taste, at least whenever they work for a boss or investor. it’s not that this is a new awful trend, it’s that capitalism is redefining what it means to do design. The pursuit of profit isn’t strangling creativity, it’s changing what it means to be creative from achieving a singular artistic vision to experimenting and improving iteratively.

I love the way that poker straddles the line between the two. The contest of who has the best hand is indirect, I can’t take cards out of your hand, you can’t prevent me from drawing, we make our separate choices and win solely by ranking.

But betting is direct competition because players can choose to fold, can drop out rather than risk more resources. It’s a sprint where the players can’t see each others’ positions on the track, only claim “I’m at 40m” or “I’ve lapped you” and the truth of the positions are revealed at the showdown. Betting is a proxy for success, and bluffing is signaling a win when you’re actually losing.

Bluffing uses incomplete information to turn indirect competitions into direct competitions. I only know of Bullshit and Liar’s Dice that could be played without bluffing (and would then be simple luck games, like War).

Because I’ve been thinking so much about bluffing and in/direct competition, I’m tinkering around with a design for a poker variation that includes direct competition. I suspect it won’t be as much fun, indirect competition often leaves a losing player feeling they could’ve done won if they’d played a little differently. Please leave a comment if you know if any that already do or other games that play with similar mechanics.

• 1. Ikariam
• 2. WeeWar
• Tangent: The Farming Genre
• 3. Tactics Ogre
• 4. Counter-Strike
• 5. X-Com
• 6. Kongai
• Tangent: Technology Trees
• 7. Warstorm

Verbs

The fundamental difference between games and most other media is interactivity. When I want to understand a game, one step is to list all of the verbs available to the players. For example, the verbs in Super Mario Brothers are:

• Start 1/2 player game
• Walk left/right
• Run left/right
• Duck (when big)
• Jump
• Stomp enemy
• Kick shell
• Break brick
• Open question block
• Go down pipe
• Throw fireball
• Touch Axe

I was thinking of this because I played the browser-based trading card game Warstorm and I was astounded when I realized what the available verbs are on the site (ignoring the account management common to any site with user accounts):

• Edit a deck (“squad”)
• Auction a card
• Trade cards with a player
• Chat
• Challenge an individual player to a duel
• Enter tournament or league (tourney with restricted rule)
• Redeem loyalty points (given for interaction/marketing) for cards
• Buy Challenge Coins (premium currency)
• Play a duel

The first six verbs are common to any trading card game. The last item is the interesting one: play. It looks like I didn’t descend into the same level of detail I did for Mario, but I did.

The player selects which of their decks they’d like to use and the duel proceeds like War. The computer turns up the top card of each deck, applies their effects, and repeats. The only thing the player can do is fast-forward to the end to find out if they won or lost.

I was floored when I realized this, I thought the site was hollow. It’s all about a card game but there’s no game at its heart. It reminded me of gambling in that nearly every verb you invoke involves paying, but unlike gambling there’s no chance you’ll ever get any money back.

I babbled about this to my friends for a few days, trying to make sense of it. Eventually I realized I hadn’t seen where the game was hiding.

Decision Timing

In real-time games (rugby, StarCraft) players are constantly able to take action (maybe with asymmetrical actions, like the separate roles of offense and defense in American football). In turn-based games (Chess, Scrabble, Civilization) players alternate who is allowed to act.

Magic: The Gathering had clever game mechanics that gave players new actions in a preparatory phase called “deckbuilding” prior to playing cards (incidentally inventing a business model). The players make decisions about what actions they want available to them in the matchups.

Warstorm is designed so that all of the actions are up-front, there is no phase of the game besides deckbuilding. It didn’t feel to me like a game because no game mechanic involves direct interaction with the opponent, I didn’t see that I could ever make and change a decision in response to my opponent’s actions (unless we played multiple duels, I suppose). I didn’t even see the game because it was too different from what I was expecting.

But it made me wonder how business concerns drove the game design of Warstorm, a game where there’s little to do besides pay more money.

Business Concerns

When I turned my attention back to Athenge, I saw that my game design implied a lot of business decisions. I like games that require a lot of thought and analysis. I look at the most popular Facebook games and only see pastimes, idle toys requiring action with little thought, minimal direct competition, and even rarer losses. Oh, and tens of millions of players.

Warstorm reminded me that my taste in games is not common. Athenge will be a complex game, lots of instructions and options. It’ll take a lot of time for me, a lone developer, to build. Plus money to buy art, and more resources in marketing to find its non-mainstream audience. There’s risk to anything I choose to build, but Athenge looks to be more risk than it’s worth when I look at the current crop of simple, successful games. I could cut it down more and more, let these business concerns change my game’s design, but I’d rather let them replace my game’s design.

Instead of starting the programming of Athenge now, I’m continuing to improve the successful NearbyGamers and starting on a simpler, much more accessible game I’ve been tinkering with the design of for eighteen months. (Though it’s simple enough that’ll sound ridiculous when you see it, that’s fodder for another blog post). I still plan to build Athenge, but I think it must wait until I’m solidly in the black, until I’m not risking quite so much.

It’s pretty easy to design a game looks fun on paper but doesn’t actually work in practice. Maybe you have too many or too few rules, maybe players never have to make a serious decision, maybe it just feels… off, which means your playtesters are too polite to tell you it’s not fun.

So, we played. And quickly discovered poorly-defined terms, gaps in the rules, bad instructions (up there with Time Walk), worthless options, and gigantic imbalances.

But it was fun.

We spent as much time talking and tinkering with the design as we did playing, but the fundamental gameplay mechanic was, thankfully, fun. So I know it’s worthwhile to spend the time developing that for the web so it can get lots of playtesting and improvement and balancing.

This is a nice milestone, so I’m going to mention that I’ve picked a name for the game: Athenge.

It doesn’t really mean anything, I was playing around with words and my brain connected the high-tech @ sign in email addresses to prehistoric henges. It’s short, spellable, pronounceable, doesn’t sound like any offensive words, and, most importantly, the domain name was available. I’ve tagged my earlier posts on the web game, so they’re collected on the tag page if you’re curious.

Each of the massively multiplayer browser games I mentioned earlier capitalizes extensively on this Karma effect, to the point where some of them don’t even bother to have a graphical side anymore: all you have and play with, is tables with different rankings and statistics that define how well you do: amount of resources, number of bases, successful attacks executed… and that’s it. Playing the game merely means issuing commands with a button, and if your command worked those numbers get higher. And, boy, do you happily obsess over getting them up over time. Indeed one could say that games like these use only the Karma effect, throw a big fat SQL table and a user profile at it, sit back and watch user loyalty go through the roof.

It would be funny if it weren’t dead true. Most of these games feel like you’re using Excel to solve linear programming problems with starships as your desktop background while teenage psychopaths misspell obscenities at you.

Yeah, it’s that much fun. Now imagine it goes on for weeks. I used to call these “spreadsheet games” and only settled on farming games because at least it’s a verb that describes what happens to you.

I think the only think worse than how awful some of these games are is the fact they have tens of thousands of signups.

No shit, quite often tens to hundreds of thousands of signups. Not active players, of course, sane people give up pretty quickly on these games. But the games are successes in that they find an audience that can support their expenses.

I disagree, though, with the idea that scores and rankings work anywhere:

In society this number is often our salary, but for example in Reddit this is called ‘Karma’ and the founders are so aware of the psychological effect they don’t even bother to give an actual meaning to it! And they don’t need to: people will do what it takes to boost their Karma. So let’s dub this – extremely strong – effect the Karma Effect[...]

There’s an awesome book titled 21st Century Game Design that did — no kidding here — actual research into gamers and did a cluster analysis to break down gamers into four groups (eat your heart out, Richard Bartle).

Their four clusters are Conquerors, Managers, Wanderers, and Participants. Conquerors want to dominate the game or other players and are motivated by (and even take pleasure in) anger, frustration, and boredom. Managers want to master gameplay more than win, and they enjoy plot and politics. Wanderers want experiential games that can explore, tinker with, and perhaps display finesse. Participants are not frequently gamers at all but are heavy socializers when they do, enjoying collaboration and shared emotion. (And grab the book, this is a small piece of the good content in this book; I took 5 pages of notes from it.)

Conquerors are the sterotypical “hardcore gamers” that comprise the bulk of gaming culture both by weight and volume (and that’s volume as in taking up lots of space and volume as in loud as hell). These karma, spreadsheet, farming games appeal squarely to the conqueror demographic with confrontation, violence, stark functionality, numeric goals, and explicit ranking.

Nobody’s exclusively in one of these clusters so high scores can pull at a lot of people, but they’re not nearly as universal a motivator as hearing the words “Hey, that was a nice move” from someone you respect. It’s harder to build a game that drives that kind of social interaction, but I think it’s more rewarding.

The blog post also shares some ideas about nesting the game within itself. When working on my game design I worked out how a single turn is nested into a match, which is nested into the base-building game, which is nested into the overall game community. It was a nice exercise in thinking of the entire system as a game to ensure it’s fun at multiple levels of abstraction from the core second-to-second mechanics. The ideas he comes up with remind me a lot of some of the ideas in Sean Howard’s 300 Hundred Mechanics project, especially the Composition Army and Procedurally-Generated Content Cards 1, 2, and 3.

(My thanks to David Bremner for his help in supplying the Windows desktop for the screenshot.)

When you’re collecting resources and upgrading your cities there’s a positive feedback loop at work: you can build a bigger sawmill, hire more children to mine, reach a faster warp factor on your starships, all so you can bring in more resources. Games often address this by making upgrade costs grow multiplicatively or exponentially while the returns increase linearly, but usually the rate of return grows faster than the rate costs increase. If that last sentence made your eyes glaze over, think of compound interest: the more you have, the faster you earn more. The rich get richer.

I traded email with Wouter Smet, creator of the web game DiceAttack. We talked a little about WeeWar and that got me thinking about positive feedback loops because it has one of the worst positive feedback loops I’ve seen. I’d like to give a proper definition and use WeeWar as an exercise in game design.

Here’s the start of a game of WeeWar. I’m going to use screenshots to explain some concepts, but you should sign up (it’s free) and play a game or few against the AI to get a feel for it. To save the pluralization hassles and parenthetical caveats, I’m going to write about WeeWar as if it were only two-player (as it’s most commonly played) rather than multiplayer free-for-all. Everything works the same except that it’s easier to explain myself and give examples. Remember, you win by defeating all of your opponent’s units and capturing all the bases.

Feedback is the game’s response to player actions. There’s UI feedback, where clicking a unit highlights the places I can move it to:

But in this post I’m only talking about game feedback, the in-game response to player actions, like how moving my trooper onto the neutral base starts the capturing process or I spend credits to build a tank.

A feedback loop is when the feedback affects itself. Each base I capture earns the income and provides the staging area to produce more troopers to capture bases. You can really see this in effect if you play the City Sprawl map, every game opens with a flurry of capturing bases and producing more troopers as quickly as possible.

Feedback is positive or negative. The base/trooper example is a positive feedback loop, each time it happens it makes it more likely it will happen again. Negative feedback isn’t something bad happening to a player, it’s a change that makes it less likely for other changes to occur. Let me make the distinction clear:

Losing a unit is negative in the sense that it’s bad, but it’s not negative feedback. Losing a unit is a positive feedback loop, each loss makes future losses more likely because you have reduced attack power and you lose opportunities to use the bonus of attacking an enemy unit with several units in one turn. Losing a unit would be negative feedback if each loss made future loss less likely, perhaps by increasing the health of all your remaining units or teleporting the attacker backwards.

As far as I can see WeeWar doesn’t have negative feedback, let alone negative feedback loops, and I’ll talk about why this is bad in a bit.

Feedback can be weak, strong, or anywhere in-between. To make the unit loss loop weaker the lost unit could be rebuildable by a special repair unit or available at reduced price back at the base, or heal the unit and send it back to a staging area behind the base that constructed it. To make it stronger, we could add an explosion so that destroying a tank damages the allied units touching it, or make a unit’s defense depend on how many allied units they’re within a hex or two of.

Most multiplayers games have feedback. Some racing games and party games don’t; nothing you do will affect how quickly your opponent runs a mile. Chess is interesting in that losing pieces is such weak feedback loop; the ease of taking pieces and importance of position and arragement mean that an individual piece doesn’t count for as much.

Back to WeeWar. Bases are a zero-sum resource, each base you capture is a base I lose. (This is true despite the initial expansion into “neutral” bases, each is a potential resource that players are directly competing for.) Zero-sum resources tend to come with strong positive feedback loops, and WeeWar is a perfect example of this.

Every base on a map is worth the same amount of income. That amount differs between maps but usually ranges between more than enough to produce the smallest unit and enough to buy a mid-sized unit. Most battles involve four or five units on a side, so the ability for each base to produce an entire unit means that bases are quite valuable.

In fact, they’re generally so valuable that capturing one single base from your opponent ensures victory. The battle may rage on for many turns after but the capturing player will almost never lose the lead. The positive feedback loop is too strong for anything else to matter.

So in WeeWar you don’t win by capturing bases, you win by capturing a single base. The gameplay is all about the push back and forth between units, which has been very finely tuned because it’s gotten so much attention. I don’t find WeeWar fun because I expect to be pushing the other player back and forth, maneuvering to flank or retreat. Instead it feels more like the meat grinder of trench warfare, trying to stay one step ahead of the rock-paper-scissors unit balance while rotating injured units out and producing fresh ones. I never feel like I have significant choices, just a formula to follow.

Since the game isn’t really about capturing bases, I’d expect the most successful maps to provide each player with a cluster of bases to defend with significant terrain between them to engage in battle in. This isn’t currently the case, the list is dominated by novelty maps and the maps the game included before the map editor was public. I think is a function of the newness of the map editor and the fact that I can’t restrict the view to see only what maps are most popular among elite players (who want to play on the best-balanced maps).

So, can I imagine how to remake WeeWar more to my liking?

With the game so finely balanced, I’d probably want to introduce more randomness. Let battles be less predictable. Then remove many of the units that are just upgraded versions of each other, like the set of Tank, Heavy Tank, Berserker. Maybe salt in some special abilities to units, like being able to freeze an enemy unit in place for a turn, stop them from attacking, add to the defense of neighboring units, etc. The abilities would make units more interdependent so that you build battle groups instead of send out single units so often, and you’d have to re-balance and change your groups as units are lost. The goal here is to make play more varied, with more strategies and options than just hitting your opponent.

Next, I’d reduce the importance of bases by making the win condition about capturing and controlling otherwise useless immobile flags on the map. Then it’s nice to capture and hold bases, but not overwhelmingly important. The player has to decide between taking flags or taking bases the opponent to slow them down from taking flags. Another approach would be to make it possible for the player to construct their own bases, making the game a balance between economic and military expansion (worked pretty well for StarCraft).

Or maybe change nothing except replace alternating turns with simultaneous turns (my current favorite cure-all).

I’m not going to claim that these ideas are The Perfect Solution, just that I think they’re decent options for improving the gameplay. This calls for lots of experimentation and playtesting. My real goal with throwing these ideas out is to keep exercising my analytical and creative game design skills as I work on my game design.

• 1. Ikariam
• 2. WeeWar
• Tangent: The Farming Genre
• 3. Tactics Ogre
• 4. Counter-Strike
• 5. X-Com
• 6. Kongai
• Tangent: Technology Trees

Talking about Ikariam reminded me about technology trees because it has a particularly big and complex one. When I was playing I created a graph showing how to unlock everything so that everyone in my guild could quickly develop as we needed.

In the diagram below, pink rectangles are buildings, green parallelograms are actions, solid blue circles are ships, red hexagons are military units (with their costs), and the empty circles are technology achievements (color indicating which of four tracks). It sounds really complicated and is overwhelming at first look, but it serves as reference for any player with a little experience.

It’s worth noting that this is long out-of-date; updates to the game have extensively added, rearranged, and repriced things. I created it with graphviz‘s dot utility. It’s a great tool for easily making the directed graphs that show up over and over in computer science. (And read Anathem, it’s a captivating novel that, yes, prominently features directed acyclic graphs.)

OK, that’s all the “Yay, technology trees are keen!” that I can manage.

The Purpose of Technology Trees

They do have some uses. The first three are heavily intertwined:

First, tech trees linearly organize options over time. If a new player could choose from the start whether they wanted to produce smooth-bore or rifled barrels for their soldiers, they’d have to be a suicidal masochist to choose the former. Usually the later technology uses different, a higher quantity of, or more precious resources (like going from bronze swords to steel swords), but often the improved option is such an large improvement that it’s not a real choice which to use. A tech tree makes it possible to present these things in a linear fashion to players to make the game more rational and learnable.

Tech trees also act as gates on content consumption. Until you’ve reached a particular level of development, you can’t use the warp drive and are confined to exploring your solar system. This makes sure that players don’t skim over expensively hand-scripted characters and hand-designed locations (though most PBBGs procedurally generate content). Gating also ensures that players will have opportunities to recognize all the options presented by content — to continue the example, it’d be easy to overlook your mineral-rich asteroid belt if you could immediately cruise off to the stars, and you might end up hamstrung by lack of iron or the knowledge of where to find it and how to mine it. Gating keeps players from being overwhelmed by options and content until they’ve had some time to read help files and make some new friends they can ask questions of.

The third function of a technology tree is to greatly increase the power scale of players. MMORPGs have infamously large power scales: you go from barely triumphing over garden slugs to slaying gods in a casual manner befitting Richard Dawkins. The game Settlers of Catan has a smaller power scale: you start collecting resources from two towns and could grow to five towns and four cities. Chess has a flat or declining power scale.

The final use I’ve seen is as a sink. High-level players often have more resources than they know what to do with, so they lose the fun of hard choices (like equipment in Tactics Ogre). Technological advancements that provide quantitative improvements (that is, shave some percent off of sailing time as opposed to unlock the ability to build steamboats) act as sinks that excess resources can be poured down. This works especially well when the advancements are expensive, ineffective, and public so that players get bragging rights rather than becoming invincible powerhouses.

Technology Trees Usually Suck

Most persistent browser-based games take those first three purposes and crank the dials all the way up. Players use technology trees to go from pointed sticks to nova bombs, from a small space to the most fertile or productive places possible.

The biggest problem with trees is that they act as ratchets. Once you’ve learned The Pulley you always know it and can’t lose it. That’s fine in a game of bounded duration like Civilization or StarCraft, after an hour or few the game is over your research disappears. You don’t start your second game of Civilization back in the stone age knowing how to produce nuclear weapons. But PBBGs are open-ended, a player has a technology until they quit playing entirely (probably being driven to it by someone farther along).

So players get the height of an even bigger power scale to drop rocks on each other from, and if they don’t have a sink for their extra resources they’ll probably shower them onto a guildmate to ratchet themselves up with.

One StarCraft mechanic often shows up with horrible consequences. In StarCraft, there are a number of enhancements that give special powers to units (such as the ability to burrow into the ground or turn invisible) that mean a defender who hasn’t researched the countermeasure cannot attack those units at all. This works in a 40-minute game where the defender gains access to the countermeasure around the same time the attacker gains the power, but in a PBBG new players may be dropped in next door to someone who has played for months and the countermeasure may be weeks away. Awful!

Designers often don’t recognize how special technology is. A player might gift their resources, raze their buildings, move their cities, fire their workers, discharge their soldiers, quit their guild… but they’ll still have their technology. The advancements available rarely reflect that permanence.

Redesigning Technology

One of the joys of long games like MMORPGs and PBBGs is that they give players the opportunity to eventually try everything the game has to offer. Well, unless the player has to make an irreversible decision like character class, then they create alternate characters or logins and decry the grind back up through the tree.

Looking at StarCraft again, I’ve combined two mechanics to design an improved technology mechanic for my game. First, limit permanent technological advancements to the expensive but low-productivity sinks mentioned above. In StarCraft you produce advancements by constructing certain buildings or spending resources at them, like a Spire to be able to build flying units. If you lose the building, you lose the advancement and can’t build more flyers. The other mechanic is “supply points”, a cap on the number of units you can control at once. Certain buildings and units raise the point cap, and most units count for 1-2 points toward the cap. It’s not a resource you can bank, spend, or trade, it’s solely a limit to the number of units you can recruit. It prevents armies from growing too quickly in the beginning of the game and growing too large in the end of the game.

Combining these two ideas, players could build research buildings to unlock different abilities and advancements. They can’t unlock everything because the cap on research buildings is lower than the number of abilities. Abilities stop being an oddity and are better integrated into the rest of the game mechanics — do you spend your money setting up a gasoline engine plant or buy more horses? Players choose where to specialize based on their opportunities and personalities and can raze and rebuild buildings to change their selection.

This is the eighth and final of a six post series on game design, weighing in at a surprising 6,200 words (I didn’t originally plan on these two tangents, but let’s all toast Douglas Adams while I’m about it). I’ve noticed I’ve picked up some new readers, so let me again let me say I really appreciate feedback. I’m going to return to my regular babbling about whatever shiny thing captures my attention — which is to reiterate that you should feel free to comment, email, or IM because that’s where I tend to pick up topics from.

• 1. Ikariam
• 2. WeeWar
• Tangent: The Farming Genre
• 3. Tactics Ogre
• 4. Counter-Strike
• 5. X-Com
• 6. Kongai
• Tangent: Technology Trees
• 7. Warstorm

Kongai is a very different from all the previous games. It’s an online two-player collectible card game. You build a deck of three to five characters (with, optionally, one item each) and defeat your opponents’ characters.

Each turn you have two choices to make and the results are resolved simultaneously rather than in the more common “I go, then you go” fashion. Range is first: you can leave your character where they are or spend energy trying to get to the near or far range. If you leave your character, the range is whatever your opponent sets. If you both try to set it to something different it doesn’t change. Some abilities work only at near or far, some both. The energy you spend to change range is the same energy used to activate abilities, so there are immediately some tough decisions to make about where and whether to spend your resources and guessing what your opponent will choose.

Second, you each choose an action. You can use one of your characters’ four abilities (mostly attacks, though a quarter or so heal or give status ailments), switch your character out for another (dodging any attack), intercept your opponents’ switch (preventing it and dealing significant damage), or rest your character to recover extra energy for the next turn.

It’s one of those simple-but-deep games because of the simultaneous turns. You don’t flail away at your opponent, you have to outthink them. Kongai’s designer, David Sirlin, has written a bit about the process of designing Kongai and how it’s all about the skill he calls yomi, the ability to predict your opponent’s moves and keep yours unpredictable.

This, in a nutshell, is why I gripe about multiplayer games being primarily about deckbuilding like Tactics Ogre. You only get one try to guess your opponent’s plan. If you guessed wrong, you play a (possibly quite long) battle that you can probably only lose. Only then do you get a chance to change your build to have new tactics to try again. Tactics Ogre isn’t much fun because there’s little back-and-forth between the players, battles are just about lining up and smashing as hard as you can (or, worse, about “leveling up” the power of your characters).

Deckbuilding isn’t intrinsically wrong, it’s fun in Kongai and in Magic: The Gathering even more of the game is deckbuilding and it still works well. Many strategy games like Civilization and StarCraft intertwine the building and using phases. You scout your opponent and deceive their scouts to decide your build and sabotage theirs.

Sirlin’s written an awesome book called Playing to Win: Becoming the Champion about how players should approach competitive games to succeed at tournament-level play (it’s also available free online). His pushes players to understand games as they are designed rather than as they may stylistically appear to play. Basketball can be won by playing the court and constantly harassing other players, not by executing a practiced attack or defending the zone (the Traveller example is even more powerful). I also recommend reading Sirlin’s entire blog, it’s similar in content to his book but from the perspective of the game designer trying to plan and balance a complex game that elite players will do their best to break over thousands of hours of dedicated play.

I was thinking about my game’s design and how to prevent it from becoming a slugfest when I thought of Kongai and read Sirlin. The best strategy in any farming game like Ikariam is to find the weakest player and raid them repeatedly. The best strategy in WeeWar is to steal an opponents’ nearest base and the positive feedback loop generated by bases being a zero-sum resource means you’re almost guaranteed a win. Tactics Ogre is a slugfest because there are no meaningful options, the best move on any turn is to move to the weakest opponent and hit them as hard as possible. The constant refrain here is that you never care what your opponent is doing; nothing they do actually influences your moves because you don’t have significant decisions to make.

Counter-Strike is a highly successful tournament game because players are constantly shifting tactics in the real-time battle. X-Com is the only single-player game on this list, but it would have a good shot at translating to multiplayer because it deals with managing limited resources and knowledge in response to your opponents’ actions.

These are the games that had the biggest influence on my design, though there are certainly others like Syndicate, Eve Online, and muds that have had an effect. I seem to have a habit of working on my design, seeing flaws, adopting from other games to refactor my design, and repeating. I’ve been really happy with my current plans for an unprecedented several months, so I’m moving into playtesting to start getting real-world feedback on how well gameplay works. I’ve got one more game design blog post scheduled on technology trees and otherwise will be returning to my regular babbling about whatever shiny thing captures my attention — which is to reiterate that you should feel free to comment, email, or IM because that’s where I tend to pick up topics from.

• 1. Ikariam
• 2. WeeWar
• Tangent: The Farming Genre
• 3. Tactics Ogre
• 4. Counter-Strike
• 5. X-Com
• 6. Kongai
• Tangent: Technology Trees
• 7. Warstorm

So I thought I’d solved everything and was moving along on my design. Players control 1 or 2 secret agents on an isometric map. Turns simply alternate rather than being based on how much you did last turn. Almost all weapons are ranged and powerful enough to kill in one or two shots. Hm. So why would you ever risk getting into someone’s line of fire, should I add fog of war so the player only knows what their agents can see? I guess I could add stances so characters could hide behind terrain, and maybe 3D to make positioning important…

Doubts crept in. Could a game this complex be playable? Wouldn’t the user interface be overwhelming? I took my notes and went to chat with a game designer.

Me:

So, I’m making an isometric turn-based tactical combat game. And I’m not sure it’ll work because most characters in most turn-based strategy games can take many hits but that doesn’t match my urban combat setting.

Ammon:

That sounds a little familiar.

Me:

I don’t know any games like it. So I’m thinking I should really reduce the distance characters can move and do these other things so they don’t just run straight at each other, but that’s getting complex.

Ammon:

This sounds like X-Com.

Me:

Never heard of it

Ammon:

X-Com is single-player, you have a squad of 8-14 units. Units gain XP but 1-2 shots kill so any unit that survives a few missions is awesome.

Me:

Any enemies were the same size and shape as your units? Did they outnumber you?

Ammon:

Yep.

Me:

And most weapons are ranged? That works?

Ammon:

Yep.

Me:

Huh. I guess I’ll check it out sometime. So I’m trying to decide what a turn looks like. Move and attack vs. move or attack, mostly.

Ammon:

X-Com has action points you spend for moving, turning, changing stance. Different fire modes (snapshot, aimed shot, burst fire) take different amounts.

Me:

What’s the gameplay effect of turning? Are attacks against side/rear better? Is there fog of war?

Ammon:

Yep, fog of war is the primary effect. A shot from behind could be a kill and you’d never even know where it came from.

Me:

Hm. One thing I’m pondering is a ‘guard’ action. So an agent could do nothing on their turn but look out a door and nail someone who crosses by the doorway in one turn.

Ammon:

Yeah, X-Com has that.

Me:

Oh. Do any of these model audio? Like you could hear someone sneaking up on you? [Which means some kind of replay of enemy turns before you take yours.]

Ammon:

Yep, you can hear running footsteps, gunfire. Rockets are effective but attract a lot of attention.

Me:

And all that works? It’s not overwhelming?

Ammon:

The only problem was scaling the power curve. A major element was new technologies, which meant building a base, capturing alien equipment during battle, and spending money to research it. Which would attract the aliens’ attention, they’d come attack your base.

Me:

Huh. That was a big part of my game, building bunks to be able to have more characters but also making yourself a more tempting target for other players.

Ammon:

Yeah, base layout mattered a lot. When you defend against attacks, it’s on whatever floorplan you created. So if your barracks are too far from the entrance, aliens could trash your equipment and kill your scientists before you got there.

Me:

OK, stop talking about X-Com. I can already tell I need to play it because it includes every element I thought was original and spiffy and maybe even too complex.

The X-Com series of games was released in the 1990s. You can find the first couple games (#2, Terror From The Deep, is probably the overall best) on abandonware sites and run them under dosbox or easily pick up the port to modern PCs on Steam.

There’s not a lot of description that early conversation left out. When I played X-Com a few days later, I was awed that someone 15 years ago had created almost exactly the game I was inventing.

I pondered where to go from here. I had the confirmation that I could make as complex a game as I’d considered. But if the game has Been Done, can I learn from it instead of (inadvertently) cloning it?

I’ve always liked game designs with simple mechanics and few numbers. I don’t really like to count into double digits, let alone have 382 hitpoints and decide whether to buy an item that gives me a 6% boost. X-Com requires that players be meticulous about equipping units, sending enough ammo that they won’t run out but won’t overburden and slow them down. It seemed like too much deckbuilding, moving the interesting decisions out of the main gameplay and into the preparation. Battles were fairly repetitive once you learned the basic strategy of how to move under cover, search buildings, provide support fire, and balance your team.

I was still working on my design but wasn’t very sure of it until I thought about another game named Kongai.

• 1. Ikariam
• 2. WeeWar
• Tangent: The Farming Genre
• 3. Tactics Ogre
• 4. Counter-Strike
• 5. X-Com
• 6. Kongai
• Tangent: Technology Trees
• 7. Warstorm

As I left off, I wanted to create a turn-based strategy game on the web with an interesting setting. I was pondering what sort of setting hadn’t been mined out and thought of Counter-Strike, by many measures the most popular online multiplayer game.

In Counter-Strike you are on a small squad (3-8 players, tournament size is 5) against another squad of players, one team terrorists and one team counter-terrorists. It’s a fast-paced first-person shooter (FPS) with deep tactical play as teams attempt to complete or prevent objectives like planting a bomb in a particular place on the map or escorting hostages to an exit point.

In most FPS games your character is heavily armored and can survive lots of punishment before dying. Counter-Strike defined itself by using real weapons that kill in a few or often one shot, so players have to have fast reflexes to succeed in a firefight and execute tactics well to ensure they’re in a firefight they can win. Or, better, aren’t in a firefight at all and have snuck up behind an oblivious enemy. I enjoy the way game calls upon a wide range of skills, but I don’t play it much myself because I’m not fast enough for the combat.

Setting is a funny thing: a person might have loved the Matrix but broadly assert “Oh, I don’t like sci-fi” and leave a game’s website at the first sight of a spaceship. Fantasy games are an overwhelming part of the market because potential players reliably don’t automatically disregard them and they open up a lot of design possibilities that a modern setting wouldn’t (eg. modern settings don’t have teleportation or healing spells, which are really handy for getting characters together and prepared to play).

Counter-Strike chose its setting and extracted mechanics from it to create an enduring game. When I considered the idea of a turn-based tactical game with counter-terrorists — no, better: secret agents — I realized it could solve a lot of my design problems as well.

Instead of slugest combat, most characters would use ranged weapons that could incapacitate or kill in a shot or two. The map isn’t just a pretty backdrop, picking lines of sight and areas of engagement is essential. Players can compete in deliberate missions instead of preying on each other. By maintaining a base of operations, players can have the long continuity that draws them back to the site with short gameplay sessions whenever they’d like to do more than wait a few hours for a trade boat to arrive.

I started designing in earnest. Next: the classic game X-Com surprises me from 15 years in the past.

• 1. Ikariam
• 2. WeeWar
• Tangent: The Farming Genre
• 3. Tactics Ogre
• 4. Counter-Strike
• 5. X-Com
• 6. Kongai
• Tangent: Technology Trees
• 7. Warstorm

Tactics Ogre was released on the PlayStation in 1997. You are a young member of a repressed ethnic minority. Your first mission is to bust the leader of your rebellion out of jail. When you do, he points out that your people need some fresh motivation if they’re going to have a chance. So he instructs you to destroy a town and frame your enemies. Do your stain your hands for the greater good or split from the rebellion by refusing? (In which case he does it and frames you as an agent of the empire.) The branching storyline is refreshingly adult, most games would have a deus ex machina sweep in to save the town rather than include the complexity of a quixotically misguided leader committing an atrocity (assuming they could bring themselves to begin a plot based on ethnic oppression).

You lead a team of warriors into turn-based battles against similar groups of enemies. On each turn you can move all of your characters a few spaces around the game board and execute an attack or spell. The genre is called tactical role-playing games and there have been around two dozen successful games released.

One of the unusual things Tactics Ogre does that works well is the limited customization for each character: each character can equip four items at a time and has a class that determines which weapons, armor, and spells they can use. You field eight characters at a time, so more options (for example, World of Warcraft equips characters with 19 equipment slots!) would quickly become overwhelming. You’ll constantly wish you could equip just one more item, but that’s a sign that the decision is meaningful.

The downside to combat is that it’s basically a slugfest. The only significant effect of terrain is that archers have increased range and damage when shooting from a height. On most maps the two armies run straight at each other and stand around trading blows until someone drops. There’s a beautiful map that’s largely useless.

After playing it and similar games (the same team created the more popular Final Fantasy Tactics) I was tempted to make a tactical game of my own but didn’t see what I could create that would be new and interesting.

Years later I saw games like Ikariam and WeeWar and realized I could build one on the web. I’ve found a few online, but they’re even worse slugfests. All the interesting decisions have been taken out combat and dropped earlier, to the character customization. If you don’t enjoy that setup (the equivalent of “deckbuilding” in trading card games) there’s little left to enjoy. And they’re all so repetitively set in generic magical fantasy worlds. I started thinking seriously about how to design a browser-based tactical game and wanted to find a new setting.

Next: Counter-Strike.

Macroing: We are working to address it at its source, but until then we need to enforce our policies. Before we do that we will appeal to players not actually playing the game to log off rather than leaving their character in-game. This will allow more people to be able to enjoy Darkfall instead of unmanned characters taking up server space. If you’re skilling up by not playing the game as it was intended, you will be kicked and repeated offenses will result in a ban.

That last sentence really caught my attention because I’ve been thinking a lot about the process of learning to program. One of the most frustrating things new programmers have to learn is that it doesn’t matter what you want the computer to do, it matters what you tell the computer to do. The difference between the two is called “bugs”.

A computer game’s design shouldn’t be broken if the players have perfect aim, perfect recall, infinite patience for repetitive tasks, instant 24/7 availability, because those are all things they’ll get by using their computer fully. You can try to punish it (as Darkfall is doing), try to detect it (as World of Warcraft and CounterStrike do), try to build a community to police it (as LAN parties do), or try to ignore it (as most small multiplayer games do), but your design will be broken. (Adopting these constraints in the design of a tabletop game hurts as often as it aids, interestingly.)

This is fundamental to creating programs, games, markets, markets, rules, taxes, laws: the system works as you designed it, not as you intended it.

Careful testing can expose the gaps between intention and design, and this is where I find theoretical knowledge becomes practical. The more I read about state machines, parsing, multiplayer mechanics, networking, level design, feedback loops, sociology, database schemas, and a dozen other topics, the better I can predict and the faster I can recognize these problems.

I worked at a startup with an abusive, toxic culture. Insults were used in place of greetings, screaming was used in place of negotiation. The culture came from straight from the CEO. The 2-3 managers (total company size fluctuated between 12 and 60) were his old friends who he only rarely attacked, so they imitated or let his shit roll downhill. The CEO was an amazing salesman, though, so employees were hugely motivated for a few months before total disillusionment.

The company grew and shrank between 12 and 60 at the impulse of the CEO and that quarter’s business model. To address your question, I wouldn’t say that growth was extremely well-managed.

I can only think of one person besides mgt who stayed longer than a year, typical employment lasted 2-6 months. The company released a 1.0 that got limited traction but never was able to release 1.1 because they had a terrible codebase (due to demotivated coders) which no one could maintain (due to everyone leaving/quitting and no docs). I know of one employee whose loved ones staged an intervention to get them to quit, and one whose doctor ordered them to quit.

Last I heard they performed some kind of corporate shell game to get out of obligations to their initial investors (mostly employees) and started from scratch for 1.1. I can’t expect anything to come of it.

I’ve never before or since seen such an extreme in culture, but it sold me on thinking of software as a product of the community and culture that created it. I’ve been blogging a bit about that recently in relation to open source and am consciously planning company culture of the business I’m soon starting.

(Note: Comments speculating the company’s identity are off-topic and will be removed. Save me the lawsuit, ok?)

Daydreaming about building the awesomest web game EVAR was, of course, escapism. I wasn’t happy at work, so I was trying to imagine something wonderful I could play, build, maybe just live inside. Around then I read Raph Koster’s amazing book A Theory of Fun for Game Design, which argues that games are fun (in part) because they exercise the brain’s desire to learn and master new things.

The theory makes a lot of sense (and even helps explain my escapism), and it occurred to me that I could make a game about trust. At the company there wasn’t trust on any level: for privacy, in the competence of coworkers, that agreements would be honored, that promises would be kept. I wondered: could I design a game that teaches people the value of trust and to recognize when it’s being abused?

The first game could think of like this was Eve Online, a massive space RPG with a player-run economy. Players band together in corporations to build the biggest spaceships, to run trading empires, to defend against enemies. But Eve is in the news about quarterly because of some kind of gigantic breach of trust:

This map of Eve space is interesting for what’s not in it: namely a Corporation called Band of Brothers (BoB). BoB was previously one of the biggest Corps in the game, controlling the majority of what is now shown as unclaimed space. [...]

The question is: is this good? It’s definitely audacious and breathtaking. It totally appeals to me as an observer, and Eve players definitely have more control over their fate than in WoW. But in this instance, the work of thousands of players was essentially undone by the betrayal of a single guy. How many people will quit because of this incident? Will this be offset by the people attracted to the possibilities the incident will bring to light in EvE?

Raph Koster nailed why this keeps happening in Eve:

And the game, as a game, does want BoB to fall, because from a purely mechanical point of view, what is fun about EVE is the struggle, not the victory condition. The victory condition is boring.

Lots of folks lose their livelihoods when an empire falls, and players invested in BoB are likely upset that years of work were lost. But EVE is not a game about the height of the Roman Empire. It’s a game about the sacking of Rome by barbarians, so that they can become the next short-lived top dog. BoB existed to be torn down, and anyone who dreams of permanent glory in a game like that should understand that their destiny is to be taken down by the next upstart, in a dog-eat-dog world.

I think it’s possible to design a game that’s about trust but not about betrayal.

I think, in part, this is proved by the success of games like World of Warcraft, where the end-game content is raiding: you band together with a few dozen other players to defeat the most difficult challenges in the game. If your teammates know and execute their parts, you succeed. If someone fails, usually the group fails.

But I’d like this to be a deeper part of the game’s core mechanics, not part of the surrounding social layer. One game that does this is the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma:

Two suspects are arrested by the police. The police have insufficient evidence for a conviction, and, having separated both prisoners, visit each of them to offer the same deal. If one testifies (defects) for the prosecution against the other and the other remains silent, the betrayer goes free and the silent accomplice receives the full 10-year sentence. If both remain silent, both prisoners are sentenced to only six months in jail for a minor charge. If each betrays the other, each receives a five-year sentence. Each prisoner must choose to betray the other or to remain silent. Each one is assured that the other would not know about the betrayal before the end of the investigation. How should the prisoners act?

Here, the game (in the slightly-different “game theory” sense of the word “game”) has trust as a core mechanic. If the prisoners succeed if they can trust each other and lose if they don’t. In studies, the best strategy for playing many rounds of the game is tit-for-tat: trust the other player, but return equally any betrayal.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma by itself isn’t a fun game (back in the “thing you play” sense). It suggests a path I plan to follow, though, where gameplay involves understanding the minds of your teammates and working in harmony with them.

As this is a high-level theme, it may not be especially visible in the finished product. It’s what Twyla Tharp calls the Spine of a work: “It keeps me on message, but it is not the message itself.”

There’s a lot to that high-level description, so let me unpack it one piece at a time:

web-based

You play in your browser, no plugins or downloads. This opens the game up to the widest possible audience, but imposes a lot of restrictions: no fancy UI, no 3D graphics, limited animation. So the game must be more cerebral than action-oriented, and a turn-based game is a natural fit.

5-20 minutes per day

In a day’s typical session, you’ll issue commands in ongoing operations, give base construction orders, and check the mail and forums for news from your allies. It will fit into your life rather than taking hours to play, though if you particularly enjoy it you could spend more time.

roster of secret agents

You’ll begin with a small team of two or three agents under your command. Agents aren’t like characters in an RPG, they don’t “level up” or have innate skills — what you choose to equip them with determines what abilities they’ll have available for use in…

operations

These are the heart of the game: equip and deploy your agents with and against other players. Make tactical choices and know the mind of your opponent to succeed. Turns are simultaneous, so you make your move anytime during the day and all the action occurs when everyone’s done so.

bases

Base construction works in real-time: you give the command to expand the barracks and construction will finish in a few real-life hours or days. The facilities you construct will let you collect and store resources, produce equipment for your agents, and reach out into the world.

online world

The operations you undertake will influence the world that all players (who speak your language) share.

friends

Form alliances with your coworkers or fellow students, or with players from halfway around the world. You’ll work together on both operations and bases.

hundreds of thousands of players

Typically web games end up sharding to cope with the volume of players. By careful game and system design, I think I can build a single vibrant world split only by language.

My next game post will be about my goal in designing a game about (of all things) commanding a secret agency. Also, I’ve avoided cluttering this with references to the all the games I was influenced or inspired by and will be posting about the most important half-dozen.

And, yes, I badly need to come up with a name for this game.

A few months ago I bought from Amazon Merchants for the first time, getting three things from three different merchants. Everything arrived fine and within the same two days, so I went to leave feedback for all of them. They were all small, easily shipped, reasonably-priced, and they arrived fine, so I just gave them all three stars and got on with my day.

Within the next few days, all three vendors contacted me and asked me to remove my “negative” feedback. Well, not so much negative as “average” when I could have chosen “superb”. One looked like a form letter. All of them offered to refund my shipping if I’d delete my rating to stop pulling down their average rating.

It sounds like Amazon Merchants believe that even the smallest amount of feedback that’s not a 5-star rating hurts them significantly. I don’t know if that’s correct, if they’ll be explicitly punished by Amazon or just don’t want to risk having a lower total rating than their competitors, but they would all pay to remove my imperfect ratings. (I didn’t mean to harm them, so I just pulled the reviews without getting refunds.)

Perhaps it’s just chance that all four vendors offered to refund shipping to remove less-than-glowing reviews, but I have to wonder if Amazon’s feedback system is too strict. Buyers won’t see real negative feedback because Merchants are paying to have it removed. If Merchants can’t shrug off a few reviews now and then, unscrupulous buyers could leave negative feedback to bully Merchants into giving discounts after the sale.