Just One More Game…:
Learning as Central to Gameplay
Martin C. Martin
www.martincmartin.com
Note: When giving this talk in person, I use a different version of
this PowerPoint file with almost no text. This version is designed
to stand on it’s own, without my talking along side it.
Why Are Games Fun?
This presentation talks about what makes
games fun. It’s a big topic, and I’ll only
scratch the surface.
There are, of course, many things that
make a game fun. Beautiful graphics,
such as this image from Fary Cry, are one
thing…
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Why are games fun?
.. and an engrossing story is another. This
is an image from Shenmu for the
Dreamcast, one of the most expensive
games to make for it’s time. It received
raves for its engrossing story line and the
open endedness of its world.
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Interaction
But movies, books, and TV can have beautiful
images and engrossing stories. Yet there’s
something different about games. People play
games for 8 hours at a sitting. (Or 24 hours. Or
36 hours…).
If a movie takes longer than 3 hours, people
complain it’s too long. Yet dames typically take
40+ hours to complete, the entire time in the
same world and story.
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Interaction
What’s more, Tetris was the most popular game
of all time for 20 years, and yet it’s graphics
were nothing to look at, and had no story.
The difference is that games are interactive. But
how, exactly, does interactivity make games fun?
That is what this presentation will address.
There are common answers to this question,
such as shaping the story, the thrill of winning, or
…
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Interaction
• Affecting the world. This image is from
Duke Nukem 3D, whose great advance
over Doom was that you could shoot out
windows and lights.
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Only For So Long
But those only hold our interest for so long. For
example, Choose Your Own Adventure books allow you
to shape the story. Every few pages, they pose a
question like “To take the path going up, turn to page 24.
To take the path going down, turn to page 137.” While
fun at first, they’re rarely read today. Rather than
becoming a new genre of book, they’ve mostly died out.
And tic-tac-toe is fun at first, but becomes boring once
can play perfect game. In other words, the more you
win, the less the thrill of winning holds our attention.
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Only For So Long
• And while affecting the world by, say,
breaking open crates is fun, by itself it’s
not what keeps players glued to their
computers for so long.
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Figuring Out How To Improve
This presentation proposes that figuring
out how to do better and better at a game
is what keeps us so absorbed.
We’ll look at what this tells us about
existing games; extract some game design
principles; and suggest some pratical
steps that game designers can take.
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Figuring Out How To Improve
• Think of how a First Person Shooter newbie approaches
the game.
• Aiming is tricky, so when they want to shoot, they tend to
stand still
– Must choose: dodge OR shoot
• As the game gets difficult, player gets frustrated
– As the enemies shoot more often, the player spends most of the
time dodging and rarely shooting.
• Then becomes clear: they could do a lot better if they
could dodge AND shoot
• As they start to get the hang of it:
– They think “Now I’ve got it! Just one more game!”
– They feel they have an edge over other players
– Confidence rises: its own reward
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The Learning Cycle
•
Player always trying to achieve goals
–
•
E.g. hit enemy, don’t get hit.
Always has a strategy to achieve them
–
–
•
E.g. dodging, looking for powerups, looking for cover
The player looks at the world in terms of these goals
Always trying to improve strategy
–
•
Leads to discovery of subgoals. E.g. discovers a place with
good cover but also good shooting opportunities: a sniping
location
Thinks “Now I’ve got it! Just one more game!”
–
Feeling competent is an emotional reward. It makes these
goals easier.
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Game Design Principles
1a. “What approaches will the player try?”
– When confronted with a choice, player
comes up with some “approach” to solving it.
I use the word “approach” rather than
“strategy” because I want something with
the connotations from strategy to tactics to
hand-eye coordination.
1b. “How can they tell what to improve?”
– The initial approach is often quite simple,
and needs to be improved over and over.
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1. What’s The Approach?
• Asking these two questions about existing
games explains a lot about the success or failure
of certain genres of game.
• Choose your own adventure games are fun until
you realize: there’s no way to figure out which
choice is right.
– If you’re in a cave trying to get to the surface, and one
path goes up while the other goes down, you’re just
as likely to be eaten if you go up or down.
– Once you realize this, you just choose responses at
random. There’ no skill.
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1. What’s The Approach?
• Why does tic-tac-toe survive, but only as a kid’s game?
It’s fun while you’re learning.
• Imagine someone playing for the first time, and how they
might approach it. They’ve been told that the first person
to get three in a row wins, so they may approach it as a
race: get to three in a row as quickly as you can, ignoring
the other player.
• After being blocked a few times, and losing when they’re
one step away from winning, they realize they need to
block an opponent who has two in a row.
• They think “Ah, now I can play better! Just one more
game!” The insight spurs them on.
• Once they become perfect, the game becomes boring:
it’s just turning the crank on an algorithm
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2. Combination Puzzles Aren’t
Much Fun
• Suppose a player finds a safe, and somehow
knows they can’t find the combination anywhere.
The only thing they can do is try numbers and
find out whether that set of numbers is right or
not. What’s the approach?
• Just try all combinations one after the other. Not
much fun.
• It’s amazing how many forms of gameplay
amount to the same thing.
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2. Combination Puzzles Aren’t
Much Fun
• Games that are too easy aren’t any fun. So
sometimes, to make a game more challenging,
they make it so you almost need to be
clairvoyant to defend against attacks.
• Imagine a level of an RTS where the goal is to
defend a base. Suppose the AI rushes the
player, sending a large force from the south only
a few mintues into the game. Suppose the only
way to survive is to build defenses like mad from
the start, all at the southern edge of the base.
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2. Combination Puzzles Aren’t
Much Fun
• Then, a few minutes later, the enemy attacks from the
west. Again, the only way to succeed is to spend that
time moving defenses to the west, and building up more
there, leaving the rest of your base undefended. And
then, just to top it off, the same thing happens a few
minutes later from the north, with the same requirement
from the player.
• If a player does the reasonable thing and build up
defenses evenly on all sides, she’ll get creamed. What
approach does she learn? “Play the game until
attacked, then once I know where it will come from,
revert to a saved game and defend against that.”
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2. Combination Puzzles Aren’t
Much Fun
• That’s just turning the crank on a simple algorithm. It’s
not much fun. This example comes from a published
game (although not Warcraft III pictured here), where the
designers wanted it to make the first level very hard to
appeal to a hardcore gamer audience. But build/get
attacked/revert doesn’t keep your interest long, even for
hardcore gamers.
• Simply asking “What’s the approach they’ll learn” can
cure this.
• Another important point: once players hit on the strategy
of build/get attacked/revert, they’ll stick with this as long
as it works, even if other, more enjoyable or successful
strategies become possible. There are enough
examples of that to turn it into it’s own principle…
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Game Design Principles
1a. “What approaches will the player try?”
1b. “How can they tell what to improve?”
2. “Guess The Combination” isn’t much fun
3. Players stick with existing approach until
it fails
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Introducing New Units
• This is important when introducing new units or abilities.
Imagine an RTS where, when you start some level, an
artillery unit becomes available. If it shows up in the
menus without much fanfare, people won’t think to look
for it. They’ll stick with the infantry units that have
worked up till then.
• If they can take out the enemy base using only infantry
with a Hurculean effort – grabbing all the resources on
the level as quickly as possible, building up the biggest
force, honing all the tactics they learned on earlier levels
– they’re likely to do just that, and think it’s an unusally
hard level.
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Introducing New Units
• But suppose there’s something that clearly can’t be
solved the old way. For example, they need to traverse
a bridge or other narrow path where they’ll be pelted by
enemy artillery from a far – out of reach of their infantry.
If the infantry gets wiped out in seconds, no matter how
many units are thrown at that pass, they’ll stop an
reconsider. What can take out that enemy artillery from
a distance? There are a lot of units in that tech tree. Is
one of them useful?
• When you want to player to change their approach, it
helps to make the old approach clearly infeasible. If it
just becomes very difficult, people may think the level is
just hard.
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Changing Difficulty Levels
• How do we create easier difficulties? A common method
is to just weaken parts of the game: make the enemies
slower, do less damage, etc. Obvious, right?
• Well, what does this do to the player’s approach? If the
enemies are slow enough, then in a game like capture
the flag, the player may learn to just run past them.
• Later, when the game gets harder, they’ll be forced to
learn the basic of combat when the AI has more accurate
aim and is better at dodging. That can be very
discouraging.
• Unreal Tournament 2004 does this well: bots at lower
skill levels simply turn off various advanced tactics,
making them behave more like newbie players.
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Game Design Principles
1a. “What approaches will the player try?”
1b. “How can they tell what to improve?”
2. “Guess The Combination” isn’t much fun
3. Players stick with existing approach until
it fails
4. Player must be able to find viable
approach
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Only Advanced Maneuvers
Succeed
• Realistic military airplane simulators were a viable genre
in the 1980s, but have died out.
• What initial approach will users try? Almost no one
reads the manual, so they fly around until they see an
enemy plane, then turn toward them.
• But they have a big turning radius, and the enemy is
turning towards the player as well. They end up going in
circles, chasing each other’s tail.
• What will they try next? Maybe turning at random, or
climbing & diving, or some other desperate gambit. But
even when you somehow get mostly lined up, it’s hard to
hit the enemy since it’s hard to “fine tune” your aim with
all your momentum, not to mention that you must lead
the target.
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Only Advanced Maneuvers Succeed
• Instead, they must learn maneuvers like the
Immelman (pictured here). Typically, only
military buffs are motivated enough to study the
manual and practice these maneuvers. No
wonder they’ve become niche games.
• Lesson: it’s not enough for there to be a viable
approach; the player needs enough feedback to
discover it.
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Players Need Feedback
• In SimCity, why is nobody moving in to your city?
• The game provides lots of feedback displays for just this
purpose: maps showing pollution levels, police & fire
coverage, traffic congestion, etc.
• Without these, the player is left to just guess. “Maybe I
need to increase desirability by adding a big park.” The
game’s responses seem random.
• With those, you can say “Oh, the crime and pollution
from the industrial zones are spilling over into the
residential zones. Next time I’ll separate them! Just one
more game…”
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Advisors?
• Complex simulation games (such as Civilization II shown
here) can be overwhelming for newbies. One way to
help is to provide advisors to suggest actions to take.
• But what will that do to the player’s approach? They’ll
listen to the advisor. If there are multiple, conflicting
advisors, how will they know which one to listen to? Just
doing what an advisor says is turning a crank, and you
don’t learn anything about why a given suggestion is
considered best.
• So it’s not surprising that info screens are essential to all
sim games, while advisors seem to come and go without
contributing much to the gameplay.
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Existing Gameplay:
Dialog Trees
• What do these principles say about existing games?
Let’s look at adventure games, starting with the dialog
trees. What’s the approach?
• Choose each item in turn
– No real penalty for wrong answer
• No strategy for recognizing correct one
– Even if, say, “get them upset so they make a mistake” worked for
one character, the other characters will be completely different
– Answer often non-obvious, to make game more “difficult”
– Result is essentially the same as the “choose your own
adventure:” a combination puzzle
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Existing Gameplay: Adventure
Games
• Outside of dialog trees, the situation isn’t much
better
• Sometimes the answer is straightforward (e.g.
give the membership card to the bouncer)
• Sometimes out of the blue, i.e. use a towel to
“flick” someone in your way.
• Either way, there’s no way to learn from wrong
solutions
• Last resort: apply every object to every other
• Ends up being the same as a combination
puzzle
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MUDs and MMORPGs
• MUDs and Massive Multiplayer games are the opposite
• First levels: learn interface, how to use weapons to kill
easy creatures
• Once you get the hang of this you can reach level 5
where easy monsters don’t give much XP, but more
powerful monsters are too difficult
– Forces you to form party, work on social skills
• As you progress, you’re always learning something new:
spells, monsters, quests, parts of the world…
• These games are all learning curve
• These games are some of the most absorbing out there
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Dialog With Internal Logic
• So how could you create a dialog system with
rules underneath, and feedback to help the
player figure them out?
• The otherwise unremarkable game Law and
Order: Criminal Intent (2005), based on the TV
show, provieds an interesting clue. In the dialog
tree, instead of choosing the text you say, you
choose the effect you want to have on the other
person’s emotions
– E.g. flattering, empathetic, confrontational, etc.
• So what internal logic could these dialogs have?
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Dialog with Internal Logic
• In this scene from the game, the bartender has
just found out that one of last night’s patrons is
dead. Goren asks “Ever seen him before last
night?”
• She responds, visibly shaken, “No, he’s not one
of the regulars. Look, this is getting a little heavy
for me. OK? My girlfriend gave the cops
information on a robbery lsat year and they
made her testify and everything and it was awful.
I want to help but, ummm… I don’t know.
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Dialog With Internal Logic
• When someone wants to help but is afraid,
should you be straightforward,
confrontational, or empathetic?
– If you’re straightforward, they’ll still be hesitant
and avoid your question
– If you’re confrontational, it’s even worse: they
said they were afraid to help, and you’re
making them more afraid!
– You need to be empathetic.
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Dialog With Internal Logic
• The game doesn’t really communicate this logic
to the player, and there’s not a lot of penalty for
guessing wrong.
• But if game designers could find a way to
communicate to the player that they’re affecting
the character’s emotions, and that mixes with
their temperament to produce their actions, I
think dialog in games could have much more
depth, and be a lot more fun than simply “try
every possibility.”
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Save Anywhere vs. Save Points
• Game design community is divided. Some feel “save
anywhere” is far superior to save points; others feel the
opposite just as strongly.
• From other theories of game design, should be minor
– World is just as interactive, doesn’t change units, abilities, etc.
•
•
•
•
Yet it affects learning, sometimes drastically
One isn’t better or worse – they’re different
Differ in how well skills must be learned
Save anywhere: even 1 in 10 chance of clearing a
screen means you can progress
• Save points: player must learn skills well enough to solve
challenges regularly
– Each challenge can’t be as hard
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Practical Steps
Next, some practical steps for game designers
Because of too much involvement, [game
designers] are unable to objectively comprehend
how the actual players would feel when they
play the game for the first time.
- Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo
Creator of Donkey Kong, Mario Bros.
and Zelda
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Practical Steps
• Put range of approaches in design document
– At very least, forces designers to ask “what’s the
approach?”
• Kleenex Testing: play testing for design
–
–
–
–
–
Use each play tester only once
Team member watches but can’t say anything
Done for Half-Life, settled many design arguments
Sims 2 team swears by it
Like user testing in HCI; verbal protocols in AI
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Example: Space Invaders
• What might you see during such a test?
On the next two slides are a hypothetical
Kleenex Testing result
• It’s also a good example of the core
learning dynamic
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Example: Space Invaders
•
•
•
•
•
Shoot blindly into crowd
Few shots go between columns
Slows firing rate  think how to avoid
Pay attention to aiming, align with column
Aligning difficult, so try for entire column at
a time
• Invaders don’t stay still long enough, so
move half way through
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Example: Space Invaders
• Move back to column after dodging
• [Learning fine motor skills to position base]
• Soon, leading targets and trading off
shooting vs. dodging
• Later: shoot hole through bunker
• Take out lower rows first
• Take out outside columns first
• Infrequent fast missiles: can’t dodge, so
stay covered when not firing
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Design in Space Invaders
• To other theories of game design, the points
below are minor. But they make a big difference
to how someone learns Space Invaders
• One shot on screen at a time  rewards aiming
– Worse aim  game slows down
– Better aim  game gets frantic
– Unlimited could lead to firing faster, not better
• Then forced to learn accuracy at higher levels, when also
trying to dodge & strategize
• Invaders shoot sparingly at first
– Player focuses on shooting columns before dodging,
encouraging fine control
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What’s the most fun AI?
• A feature’s effect on gameplay:
– Not just how it changes the rules
– But how it changes approaches & learning
• People agree AI should be fun, not smart
– Is a coordinated enemy more fun than mindless
hordes?
• Mindless hordes are fun in e.g. Space Invaders, Doom
– Should units have morale?
• Without any further framework, discussion ends
up on realism
– See, for example, the transcripts of the GDC
roundtables
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Realism
• In an RTS: Simulate physics of missiles?
– Could lead to defender micromanaging movement
– Whoever clicks fastest to move their defending units
wins the game. Not much fun.
• AI in FPS: Learning? Shell Shock? Stress?
Panic? Morale?
– Effect on approach essentially arbitrary
• Strategy games: Alliances?
– Must be understandable, not schitzophrenic
– AI logic transparent: lots of warning before a pact is
broken, emissary explain why happy/mad
– Player must know how to exploit it
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Summary
• When confronted with choices:
– Players develop theory of game world
– Come up with strategy/approach
• Apply approach
– Find strengths/weakness, always thinking how to
improve it
• When it succeeds, they feel rewarded and
competent
• Game is a journey: the path is at least as
important as the outcome
• www.martincmartin.com
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