Double Buffered

A Programmer’s View of Game Design, Development, and Culture

Red Faction Guerrilla: It Feels Good To Be A Space Asshole

Posted by JZig on October 26, 2009

I finished Red Faction: Guerrilla (RFG) a week ago and had been meaning to write up my thoughts. I thoroughly enjoyed my experience but I was finally spurred to do by the release of the music video Space Asshole by Chris Remo of Idle Thumbs. I’ll wait while you go you watch it. I’m not in a hurry.

There are two components to RFG that come together to build an entirely unique experience:  a unprecedented engine that allows the complete destruction of all man made objects in a huge environment, and a structure that gives you the ability and motivation to engage in that destruction yourself. RFG is part of an elite group of games that simply could not exist before this generation of hardware (along with Dead Rising and a few other physics-based titles). When you swing your giant sledgehammer at the load bearing wall of a building, it explodes in such a realistic way that it brings the same cathartic joy as watching that printer scene from Office Space. It’s long been known by game designers that Destruction is the simplest expression of Power, and RFG is the perfect consummation of that trend.

The game as a whole is well made, but there are a few weird missions. RFG is a game that was built to allow Moments of gameplay instead of a smooth curve of polish. But, I experienced a few moments that will live on in my memory for years to come. The first one was during a demolition mission where you had to take down a fifty-floor skyscraper. The narrative-breaking demolition missions (good, I was getting a bit tired of it) give you a preset number of weapons to destroy a given building. For the skyscraper mission you get 4 huge rockets and 30 shots of a disintegration rifle, which is normally enough to quickly devastate anything in the game. I shot the 4 rockets at the 4 supports of the building, but they wouldn’t give. I had hit the first indestructible objects in the entire game, which was a bit of a shock. I looked around for alternate solutions and noticed the very top of the sky scraper was incomplete. I then zoomed in my disintegration rifle to get a close lock at the connections between the main supports and the spire of the skyscraper, and saw there was only about 12 connections. 14 or so shots later there was a loud creaking noise as the roof titled a bit to the left, where it rested to my disappointment. Suddenly the structural integrity was lowered enough that the roof started falling straight down, where it proceeded to pulverize anything below it, myself included. I then used the giant rockets to finish off the straggling 9th floor, and barely reached enough destruction to clear the level. I had destroyed a massive monument to man with only my bare hands… and a few nanotechnology-infused weapons. I was proud.

And then I started to feel a bit guilty. The game has all sort of vague plot explanations for why I was supposed to be destroying massive skyscrapers (they were uninhabited! and owned by an evil government!) but I still felt a bit like a virtual terrorist. I felt as empowered as perhaps I have ever felt (although the plasma tank in RFG felt just as empowering in a different way), which in retrospect is a bit sad and scary. RFG speaks to the primal urge to leave your mark by burning it into the flesh of earth (Where the Wild Things are, which I saw last night, understands that same urge). It was a unique and unrivaled experience, and for me at least raw destruction has lost a bit of it’s novelty. There’s nothing left to break, time to see games worry about making things instead.

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Batman Arkham Asylum: Greater Than Its Parts

Posted by JZig on September 16, 2009

I just finished playing Batman: Arkham Asylum and it’s probably the best game I’ve played all year. I’m not alone in heaping praise, but I mean Best in a very specific sense. It’s not my favorite game of the year (others have left deeper emotional impact) it’s not the most interesting or innovative, and it’s not given me the most total enjoyment (hard to beat Fallout 3 there), but it’s the best-constructed game I’ve played in a long time. First of all, it’s technically and artistically proficient and uses the Unreal engine extremely well. Secondly it has a good set of base mechanics (brawling and stalking are both individually fun) and a well designed collection metagame. Thirdly the narrative is well written and presented. Many good games have excellent individual components, but what makes Arkham Asylum a GREAT game is the way the design brings together these disparate elements together into something greater than the sum of it’s parts.

The key to this is the pacing and flow of the different components. The game starts out with some sweet atmosphere and character development as you bring joker into the high-security area of the prison, in a scene that is highly reminiscent of the start of Escape from Butcher Bay (nothing wrong with that). From there, it transitions into your first combat scene which teaches you the basics while also instantly establishing that Batman is a badass. Then you do some duct-crawling before stalking and taking down a lethal enemy. Finally, you get the last piece of the puzzle as the Riddler Challenge metagame is introduced, which wraps the whole thing into a compelling Metroid sandwich. From then on it simply alternates linearly placed story/brawl/stalk sections while allowing you to indulge in more free-form exploration at your leisure. Hours 1 through 10 of the game follow an identical structure, but it never gets old. Why not?

It’s obvious that this game went through a lot of playtesting. The secret to why it works is that I never once thought “I am tired of doing what I am doing”. As soon as you finished a tense fight there was always a break before the next brawl, letting the lessons you’d learned sink in while you stalked some fools. Even better, the variety is doled out at a masterful rate. After playing the demo I was worried the stalking would get repetitive, but every single encounter has something new to deal with (stupid exploding gargoyles). For the entire game, there is ALWAYS something new to learn and apply. The high-tech prison environment of the first section changes into what I am convinced is the largest variety of environments that is theoretically possible given the setting. There is no frustrating artificial difficulty curve, the progression in the game mechanics comes naturally from more components being available at once. Arkham Asylum is exactly as long as it needs to be and is almost entirely lacking unnecessary filler.

The clearest evidence that the pacing is key is available inside the game itself. Once you beat the main narrative you can complete the rest of the exploration metagame on it’s own, and it became way less compelling without thugs to beat up and the taunting of the Joker (also I think there are about 25% too many collectibles). There are also separate brawling and stalking challenges that extract those components, but I quickly grew bored. It started feeling more like the game I played immediately before and after Arkham, Uncharted. Uncharted features similarly excellent components, but it tends to clump exploration, narrative, and shooting sections into large repetitive clumps with weird difficulty spikes. The odds are I’ll never finish it despite it’s many positive qualities. On the other hand, I played through Arkham Asylum in 3 very long sessions because I didn’t want to stop. Unlike the vague addiction that comes from playing an MMO, I didn’t keep playing because I HAD to, I kept playing because I wanted to see what would happen next. It never disappointed me.

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PAX ‘09 Was Pretty Great, In Case You Were Wondering

Posted by JZig on September 7, 2009

I just got back from Penny Arcade Expo 2009 (first time for me), and it was probably the greatest weekend of my life so far. I’ve had better single days, but on average PAX reigned supreme, which says more about my life than PAX. Anyway it was pretty rad. Awesome things:

  1. Everyone was basically cool. Gamers may be a bit confrontational on the internet, but get them together in person and it’s a giant love fest. Essentially everyone I saw looked extremely happy to be there (except for a small number of booth babe who were out of place), and hygiene was of an acceptable level. I was expecting awkward conversations with antisocial nerds, but I guess all the REALLY antisocial ones were too afraid to come. Most of the game booths were staffed by actual developers, and I talked to a few of them about random dev stuff. You can’t beat the vibe of 70,000 people who want to be exactly where they are.
  2. I went to an Idle Thumbs meetup (spot the side of my head in one of the photos!), and it was pretty sweet. Got fairly drunk at the Taphouse Grill (they were awesome for letting 30 nerds crash their party room with no advance notice), and talked to a variety of loud but interesting people. Turned down a free copy of Trine because I already had it. Met one of the developers of Sol Survivor, which I played the next day and was pretty fun.
  3. The Live Brodeo Reunion rocked. I don’t see any links to the video or audio yet, but if you enjoyed the old GFW show you are required to check it out. It was awkward for about the first 5 minutes, but after the dramatic reading of Anime Diaper forum posts it loosened up. It then rambled for about 2 hours, in the exact way I wanted it to. The Q&A questions were either good, or so bad that everyone made fun of them. Jazz English might feel bad though.
  4. Paul and Storm tore down the place at the Saturday concert. They were the opening band for Jonathan Coulton and I’d never heard of them before so had no expectations. What transpired was an hour of ridiculously funny comedy music, that worked due to the crowd being totally in to it. The PAX crowd is the most open to audience participation that I’ve ever witnessed, and instead of coming off as contrived and weird the energy made everything work. Honestly, Coulton was a massive letdown after them and I kind of left halfway through.
  5. The variety of fun games was ridiculous. A group of us from work entered a TF2 tournament (won first round, got slaughtered second round). I played some Marble Madness for NES. Cthulhu Munchkin and Nuclear War were played. I watched Spiderman dance on stage at Ubisoft’s booth (because, why not). I played some No More Heroes 2, which looks sweet and will be a day one purchase. I looked over the shoulders of people playing Diablo 3, Borderlands, Left 4 Dead 2, and Mass Effect 2, all of which looked like lots of fun. I participated in pictochat discussions of pirates before the Monkey Island panel. I like all forms of gaming, and all forms of gaming were well represented.

Sometimes it’s a bit hard to explain why I love working on video games, but there is now a succinct and powerful explanation: PAX. I’ve been to other nerd cons in the past, but I’ve always felt a bit out of place due to not really caring about comics or fantasy novels, but the whole weekend I couldn’t get over the feeling that PAX was created explicitly for me. Okay, me and a growing mass of people who all derive deep and lasting satisfaction out of what I do for a living. Much like Woodstock was, I can honestly say that PAX is the statement and embodiment of a unique culture. It has already outgrown Penny Arcade itself and it will immanently outgrow related internet nerdom (still don’t get the Wil Wheaton thing). We’re probably at the point where (like Woodstock again) the culture will quickly outgrow a single venue, so I advise everyone to check out PAX before it’s too late. I’ll gladly go again next year, but I can’t help but think that this year was something special, never to be repeated. I hope I’m wrong.

Posted in Game Culture | Tagged: , , , , | 1 Comment »

Coding on the Edge: How To Survive

Posted by JZig on August 18, 2009

In the theoretical “well run company” there will never be a situation where you, the programmer, will have to write incredibly critical code under extreme time pressure. These companies are either extremely boring or quickly go out of business. In today’s exciting world of Online Game Development, this is inevitable and is known as “launch”. Now, not everyone will have to engage in this practice  but anyone working on infrastructure or performance will find themselves suddenly under heavy demand a few weeks before any big update. I suggest running away. If you’re better at programming then you are at running away (I’m very bad at running away) here’s some advice that may help you out when you have to write 5,000 lines of mission critical code in 2 days:

  1. Channel the Rage: The reason you have to work 70 hours this week is inevitably because someone screwed up. It could be you, a coworker, or a third party, but the cause is going to be a mix of forseeable and unforseeable mistakes. Feel free to note your theories on the personal failings that brought you here, but until things are actually working there’s really no point in complaining to anyone about it. There is no way to keep track of all the possible issues involved with an online game, so missing something critical just means you are human. Whatever anger you feel about the cause of the situation, you want to focus it towards the code itself and not who wrote it. Anger is a pretty good short-term motivator
  2. Focus Your Efforts: Programmers already have a hard time dealing with distractions and interruptions, but during a crisis this gets even harder. When there are 5 critical things going wrong at once, the natural inclination is to try and work on all 5 at once. However, this just means you’ll fail to fix 5 critical issues. Try to pick a problem that you think matches well with your skill set and coordinate with other programmers to get the rest managed or delayed. Departmental divisions and work politics should be basically discarded at this point, because no (sane) person will complain about your rudeness while the world is on fire.
  3. Enforce Breaks: When you have a lot of work to be done in a short period of time, you need to be careful to give your brain some time to relax. The relaxation time between hard crunching is often when you realize the insight that can save you 6 hours of horrible manual debugging. I like to code/debug for 3 hours or so at a time during crunch, and it’s hard to beat video games for breaktime. Also, you NEED to get at least some sleep. Never work on less than 6 hours of sleep, the amount of bugs you add when tired will cost you far more time then you gain by skipping sleep
  4. Assume You Are Stupid: I generally like to design for ease of debugging, but this is absolutely critical during crisis.  When you write code under pressure the odds of you making a mistake are higher, and your code should be structured with this in mind. Whenever you add in a new feature make it run-time switchable at the expense of code simplicity. Add in all the logging you can think of. All forms of cleverness should be strictly banned. I’m not normally into code review or pair programming, but when you’re tired you NEED someone else’s eyes on your code. One of you will figure out the part you screwed up.

Finally, there has to be a point where the crisis Ends. If a company tries to make you crunch for more than a month at a time, you’re at a company that doesn’t either doesn’t understand how programmers work, or is completely incompetent at scheduling. It can definitely be exciting and rewarding to put in long hours and accomplish the impossible, but you WILL burn out. But, hey, I guess some people like the burning out part?

Posted in Game Development | Tagged: , , , | 1 Comment »

The Irrationality of Pricing

Posted by JZig on August 5, 2009

Digital distribution has brought many massive improvements to the world of gaming. It’s generally made things easier to buy and opened up exciting new business opportunities. However, it has brought with it one giant item of confusion: Pricing. Up until about 4 or 5 years ago pricing of games was generally pretty simple and uniform ($50 +- $10 depending on platform, or $20 if your game was explicitly budget-priced). It was this way because of the combination of distribution cost and inertia. In contrast, pricing and perceived value in today’s world is all over the place. You get weirdness like Trine PC being $10 more than Trine for PS3, despite the fact that the PC version doesn’t require a royalty payment to Sony. Peggle is $5 on the iPhone, $10 on Steam, and $20 on Popcap’s own site, despite being an identical game and all being digital. And I haven’t even gotten to DLC yet, where the pricing is so random and the users so confused that it leads to random accusations of developer cheating when blogs misunderstand the small size of executable code. The platform owners, the publishers, the developers, the press, and the users all claim they know the RIGHT way to price and value gaming content in today’s world, but they’re all wrong. There are at least 4 completely distinct ways of pricing and valuing games, and they’re mostly incompatible.

One value model is based on cost of production. The theory here is that the more expensive something is to produce, the more you should charge for it. It makes intuitive sense to developers and publishers, but the gaming public has no concept of how expensive games are to produce and will be upset when their guesses about relative development costs are wrong. The user-preferred equivalent to tieing it to development cost is tieing it to hours of gameplay. Many players (especially the younger set with more time then money) value playing time strongly, which is where that nebulous and always incorrect “replay value” number comes from in reviews. The negative effect of this value model is that it tends to lead to games that are artificially lengthened and have shitty superflous multiplayer modes. A third model is to price and value games relative to similar and successful already released games. This works well for clones within existing genres and on established platforms (ie, this is why everythins is $50), but is no help for new genres or platforms. This means that it’s even harder to get new genres and platforms approved for publishing. The last model is to make a pricing decision purely based on achieving maximum total profit, which is possible because the physical cost is very low. Assuming a neglible distribution cost (ie, old PC games on Steam) selling 100,000 copies of a game at $5 is better than selling 40,000 copies at $10, but not as good as selling 30,000 copies at $20. The problem with this approach is that the empirical data for this is really lacking (Valve desperately needs to release comprehensive sales numbers for steam games), pricing for the maximal short term profit can lead to customers feeling ripped off and lower your profits on future releases.

So what happens when these pricing models interact? Developers and platform holders always trot out “increased development costs” to explain the rise in game prices, but this model makes the least sense out of the 4. Frankly, development costs have no useful relationship to final game quality, given the long history of high-cost flops in our industry. Why should the end user care at all about how hard the game was to make? Every time someone in the industry tries to use production costs to justify price it just irritates users. Never say this. Beyond that one, the other 3 models are all fairly reasonable. Given theoretical economics the pure-profit model is always the best, but that ignores the significant psychological drawbacks to it. Ask Hellgate London if player anger over perceived pricing disparity can be a problem for a game. It’s a great model for pricing re-releases of old games, though. Basically, you want to balance economic optimization against player expectations. Players go in with expectations of pricing relative to other games (and some relative to other time-taking entertainment activities), and if you don’t meet those expectations players are going to be unhappy. If the price is too low some people won’t buy it out of suspicion, and if it’s too high players who can easily afford it won’t because they don’t want to feel ripped off. The worst part is, given the huge variation on value in today’s market no matter WHAT price you pick it will be compared to an existing product and will not meet the expectations of some percentage of players. Given today’s market, I think the best solution is probably to be as transparent as possible about your pricing, in an attempt to manage player expectations. Given that there are no unified standards for valuing games, you want to ease them into whatever pricing decision you do make.

Posted in Game Development | Tagged: , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

No MMORPG Will Ever Beat World of Warcraft

Posted by JZig on July 14, 2009

There’s been a bit of talk lately about the future of Shooters from Cliff Belszinski and others, and there was a nice discussion about it on last week’s Listen Up podcast. The quick summary is that many people believe the FPS genre is headed towards picking up various features from the RPG genre. Nearly every multiplayer FPS released today features a grinding-based level advancement system. As someone who is a huge fan of System Shock 2 and Deus Ex I endorse this trend, and single player games (Borderlands being a good example) are going to take BioShock’s lead and go with it. However, I think this is just part of a larger and more significant trend: The integration of features you might associate with RPGS/MMORPGS into other genres. How will this integration work, and what does it mean for what is currently the MMORPG genre?

Let’s take World of Warcraft, as it is the current pinnacle of the MMORPG genre. To be clear I am using MMORPG to refer to the specific type of gameplay used in World of Warcraft (as well as close relatives), while I am using MMO to refer to the more general category of online games with a persistent world. I feel the success of WoW can be roughly divided into 5 components that heavily interact: The social systems and community that build in and around it, the subscription business model, a persistent world to share with others, the character advancement system, and the DikuMUD-derived base gameplay. The community and social systems are a major reason that players are happy to play your game for years on end, and all other parts of an MMO should enhance those aspects. Although Korea and China have proven that other business models work, the subscription model encourages a strong community, is very attractive to piracy-fearing developers, and is what funds the massive development costs needed to build the rest of the game.  The persistent world (the only thing that Call of Duty 4 is lacking to be a proper MMO) encourages the socialization by giving the players a really solid context to use as the base of forming relationships. The character advancement system ties into the persistent world by making it seem even more significant when you level up. Finally, the base gameplay gives players something to do when they’re not too busy socializing, exploring, or advancing.

There have been many attempts to swap out the base gameplay of an MMORPG for something else, and most of them have failed. Planetside, numerous racing games, ridiculous numbers of free korean MMOs that never caught on. Why is that? The problem is that only certain types of base gameplay fit will with the other components of an MMO design. Quake would make a horrible MMO, because the entirely skill-based gameplay of it does not lend itself well to character advancement. Defense of the Ancients can never be an MMO because the pace of character advancement excludes them from being part of a truly persistent world. My feeling is that Planetside failed because it was too intense. I didn’t play a whole lot, but every indication I’ve seen says that because of it’s focus on pure combat, the game did nothing to encourage out-of-combat socialization. Unless you have breaks and social hubs built into your game (the waiting-for-the-round-to-end time of CounterStrike can serve this purpose well), players will never develop the long term social ties needed to sustain a community. This is also why there’s never been a good MMORTS: the amount of brainpower needed to manage units in a way that engages RTS players doesn’t leave a whole lot left over to build social bonds.

The DikuMUD gameplay is a good match for the other components of an MMO, but it’s reaching it’s limits. First of all, things like MMORPG aggro are still extremely nonintuitive (Why isn’t WoW’s aggro based on positioning? Because DikuMUD didn’t have graphics). More importantly, the direction WoW is moving (towards puzzle raid bosses that need to be solved and game-breaking solo quests with vehicles and such) indicates that Blizzard has run out of ideas to keep the basic tank/heal/control/DPS gameplay interesting. If there’s one thing Blizzard is extremely good at, it is iterating and polishing gameplay ideas. The rest of the industry may be hubristic enough to believe that they’re just going to be BETTER than Blizzard at freshening up MMORPG gameplay, but it’s a better bet to just not try. Age of Conan and Warhammer gave it their all, but they just didn’t do enough to differentiate themselves.

What has succeeded? Eve is an interesting example. The base gameplay of Eve is so barebones that I can’t stand playing it, but obviously others can and it’s still growing. The puzzle genre is an attractive one, and Free Realms may be on the right track (although it’s a bit too scattershot on the base gameplay). I’m 100% convinced that within a year or two one of the major multiplayer shooter franchises will go fully MMO (business model and all). Other variants of the RPG theme, such as tactical positional (ie, like japanese SRPGs) or Action-RPGs (Diablo is 90% of the way there, and there have been a LOT of almost-great Action MMO RPGs) are obvious choices. There are a lot of potential gameplay systems that can be the baseline for an MMO, and I’m sure one is going to come out of left field in a few years and become a bigger success than World of Warcraft. Subscription-based games featuring a persistent world and character advancement will be increasingly successful for decades to come, but World of Warcraft will stand as the pinnacle of popularity for a now-niche gameplay style. At least until it’s time for the retro remake.

Posted in MMO Design | Tagged: , , , , | 5 Comments »

Never Balance Cool Against Useful

Posted by JZig on June 29, 2009

One of the more important parts of most RPGs (both online and not) is having cool rewards, often in the form of items. Great loot design can elevate a repetitive activity to be extremely satisfying (Diablo 2 is the best example of this), or can drag down an otherwise well designed game. To have a good loot system, you need a decent pool of desirable items, and systems for allowing players to acquire the item they want. There are a bunch of interesting ways to grant access to loot (quest rewards, random drops, crafting, auction house), but all design effort put into those systems is a waste of time if the end result isn’t actually compelling to the players. So, what makes an item compelling enough to drive player desire? I think the real value of an item is a combination of two components: Utility and Coolness.

I’m using Utility in the mathematical sense. Basically, the question is how will a particular item help the player achieve their goals more efficiently. Many players (especially the higher-level players) are trying to min/max their character and all they care about are the raw numbers. If you don’t give them hard numbers, they’ll come up with their own (possibly flawed) ways of figuring out what the best gear is. Also, once these players have come up with a system for evaluating item utility, any item ability that is complicated or hard to quantify will be considered of dubious value. In short, these players like Stats. The higher stats an item has, the more they want it.

Coolness is a bit harder to quantify, and refers to a cluster of different things. First of all, there is the simple issue of how cool it LOOKS. Also, items that are specifically rare (ie special mounts in WoW) will be highly valued regardless of utility. More relevant to combat design is how fun an item is to USE. Items that have cool effects (procs, conditional bonuses, active abilities with a long recharge, etc) can vary the combat in interesting ways and keep a game fresh, even if they don’t necessarily improve a player’s overall efficiency. They can even encourage a player to try out completely new tactics, essentially creating a mini-game nested within a larger game. More casual players, as well as players who crave variety, are big fans of items with cool abilities. However, it is difficult to strike a balance between making situational effects useless and making them too powerful (where combinations of effects can break the balance entirely). If you do it right, players will appreciate the unique abilities but won’t be able to abuse the system.

Okay, so there are two reasons why items are interesting: the quantitative improvement offered by Utility, and the qualitative improvement offered by Coolness. They both provide value to an item, but the perception of that value depends heavily on the player. Hardcore number crunchers will devalue cool effects for not being obviously useful to efficiency, while casual players will devalue pure stats for being boring (I think World of Warcraft equipment has actually gotten significantly more boring over time as they cater to the hardcore more). Given that we have two dimensions of value that are difficult to compare, how do we build an economy around them? You could try to estimate the average economic value of stats and cool effects and attempt to directly balance them against each other. This seems to make sense, but I believe it is the wrong approach.

If you balance Utility against Coolness, what you end up with is a system where the people who want stats will pick the items with the best stats but no coolness, while the players who want variety will pick the items with bad stats but lots of cool things. This has two horrible problems. The variety seekers ends up with a set of complicated conditional effects but will be significantly worse at everyday efficiency, which means they’ll fall behind their friends at levelling and be irritated at the game difficulty. The stat seekers will end up with no interesting combat effects, which means they’ll get bored of the combat more quickly. Both players get what they think they want, but are more likely to be dissatisfied over the long time.

The solution is to not balance utility against coolness, but to scale them both up as the value of an item increases. As a basic example, a “common” quality item should have mediocre stats and be fairly boring. If your baseline is fairly boring it gives you more space for improving your higher quality items without having to get too crazy. Then, a “uncommon” item should always have better stats and have some sort of interesting conditional ability. All “rare” items should then have better stats and be more interseting than all “uncommons”. Put another way, instead of constructing an item from one pool of “item points”, you instead construct it from the dual currency of “stat points” and “cool ability points”, which vary per item level and quality. This system results in items that are valued approximately equally by both stat-seekers and variety-seekers (and the majority of players who are in between). This means everyone strives for items that are both fun AND useful, and so everyone is happy! Well, everyone who can pay is happy, and everyone else is looking forward to being happy. In the world of MMOs, that’s even better.

Posted in Game Design, MMO Design | Tagged: , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

The Players Are Wrong, But Listen Anyway

Posted by JZig on June 16, 2009

When you’re deep in Beta, or you’re just taking the unusual step of actively seeking out what people think about your game, you’re going to interact with direct user feedback. Now, unlike feedback that has been filtered through OCR (which sometimes improves it and sometimes obscures it), direct user feedback tends to be either VERY FORCEFUL or just a bit confused. Based on my observations of fellow employees it seems to be standard policy for a new developer to seek out feedback, realize that some of it is hateful or confused, and then conflate the rest of your player base with the minority (well, or majority depending). The human brain really likes to make those kind of assumptions, so it takes conscious effort to get over the impression that not everyone who disagrees with you is a worthless human being. It turns out that most of the direct feedback you get from users DOES have value, if you just know how to mine it. Anyway, here’s my informal guide to Actually Learning From Users, broken down into helpfully pedantic steps:

1. Note Context

The context of the feedback should have a large impact on your interpretation of it. For the MMO-playing audience this can be broken down into Official Forums and Email (except for those bizarre companies that think they’re a waste of time), MMO Forums (F13, Fires of Heaven, Massively), and General Forums (Kotaku, Joystiq, etc). Feedback on the official forums tends to come from either low post-count users with specific issues or high post-count users who are part of the forum community. MMO forums tends to be full of cynical posters with a high level of knowledge and distrust, but with the occasional great suggestion. General forums are full of people who sort of heard something about your game and are a good way to get a feel for how well your marketing (formal and word of mouth) is working.

2. Ascertain Motive

Once you know the context of a posting you can make a quick guess as to the motive of the poster. The first motive is the always exciting Trolling. From my personal experience this is actually pretty rare on official boards, but this happens a lot on the general boards. If the goal of a poster is to instigate conversation or argument without actually contributing anything, go ahead and ignore them. A related but much less evil motive is Conversation. These posters will have very high post counts and are an integral part of the community, but most are useless for feedback purposes because message board posting, much like Blogging, is all about volume instead of content. A small number of high-volume posters graduate past Conversation into Aggregation. These users (I was one at one point) actively enjoy collating feedback for developers, and some are very good at this. During City of Villains Beta I trusted the bug-aggregate threads far more then I trusted our Q/A department, sad to say. Past those, another motive is Confusion. These users are often new and have a lack of knowledge. Because of this they will often be ostracized by the other members of a community, but to a developer they’re invaluable. If a number of posters are confused by some part of the game, there are no plans to make it better, and your game isn’t Darkfall, you Have A Problem. Either the system isn’t being explained well enough, or more likely your system is just too damn complicated in the first place. If players don’t at least have the illusion of understanding a system, they’re going to be constantly second guessing their choices and be too worried to have any fun.

The last motive is Advocacy. These users have a very specific goal, which is to get something about your game changed. These are the trickiest to deal with, because the first instinct is to ignore people who want something as being selfish and self-serving. But this is only part of it. Users who constantly gripe about their class will always exist no matter how well balanced your game is. The usefulness of Advocacy feedback comes in specificity. If a player feels that his class is gimped overall but doesn’t provide detail, that post is largely worthless. However, if a player specifies that a specific ability seems underpowered, and non-regulars agree (regular complainers will agree that everything is broken), it’s worth taking a look at. The odds are good there’s either a design bug or misleading player feedback. Oh, and as for those players who REALLY care about the way that one CERTAIN cape looks and it NEEDS TO BE RED or else they’ll QUIT FOR REAL, those players should be humored but largely ignored. MMOs are so much about personal identity that it’s inevitable you will highly annoy detail oriented people who can’t have exactly what they want. The only people who threaten to quit are those who are highly invested in your game: you should worry about the ones who don’t give a shit either way.

3. Extract Value

Any feedback that passes the Motive check (specific advocacy, content aggregation, and confusion) contains some value to a game developer, and I refer to this as Valid Feedback. Now, I use Valid instead of Good for a reason. The posts contain useful information but there’s absolutely no guarantee that it’s correct information. For instance, a confused user will often make weird assumptions about the cause of a bug because of their lack of background. The useful kind will still report what confused them, but if you see completely illogical feature requests or feedback it’s probably from someone who is confused but doesn’t want to admit it (because of the social ramifications of admitting to being confused). In these situations you have to ask “Why would they say this?” instead of “What did they say?”. Let’s say a user angrily posts that you’re evil for removing his favorite power. Instead of ignoring him because the power still exists in the source data, you can check to see if something weird broke in the runtime to hide it from the UI.

This same principal needs to be applied to Advocates. When someone discovers something about a game that makes them unhappy, the average player will not do a very good job of figuring out why they’re unhappy. Instead, they will grasp around a bit until they find a vaguely plausible cause, and then flog that horse until it’s dead. This often results in a petition of some sort, many of which won’t make any sense. As a developer you can either ignore them for being incorrect, or you can embrace their opinion as being valid but misdirected. For instance let’s say a large number of players complain about the fact that you nerfed a particular self-healing power which was obviously broken and overpowered. You can say the players are selfish exploiters, or you can take a deeper look and wonder if the players are only upset because that broken self heal was the only way to compensate for the occasional player mistake during unforgiving combat. Players choose to post out of genuine frustration, but instead of reasoning why they tend to just rationalize.

4. Repeat

These rules are a bit verbose, but after reading a few hundred posts you can start to filter them really quickly. Most feedback will end up not being useful, which should give you enough time to think about what’s actually important. Basically, if enough sincere people post asking you do something, then there is very likely a real problem. However, the solution to that problem is unlikely to be what they originally asked for (although specific posters with deep knowledge and analytical skills are better at this then your Q/A department. Learn who they are). Extracting out the Valid feedback from the chaff is not a skill that comes naturally, but I think it’s invaluable for making a compelling long-term product. Directly following user requests and completely ignoring them are two different paths to ruin for an MMO, and the solution is to seek the middle path of interprating that feedback without being slave to it.

Posted in MMO Design | Tagged: , , , | 6 Comments »

“How We Decide” If a Game is a 9.5

Posted by JZig on June 8, 2009

A few weeks ago I was listening to episode 4 of Out of the Game, and they started talking about “How We Decide” by Jonah Lehrer. At this point I realized I had been given a copy of it as a present, and given that it’s a book on psychology endorsed by Shawn Elliott I put it at the top of my reading stack. I’m glad I did, because I quite enjoyed it. A quick summary is that it’s a more complete, better written version of “Blink” by Malcolm Gladwell. It combines a few really good anecdotes about quick decision making  (apparently when caught in a quick moving forest fire the right solution is to light a SMALLER fire directly in front of you) with an overview of current research into both conscious and unconscious decision making. I recommend it to anyone with an interest in psychology.

The book builds what seems to be a really solid framework for making good decisions in a wide variety of contexts. There are two main processes we go through for making decisions: emotional and logical. They’re good at solving different kinds of problems, and are very complementary. The unconscious brain is very good at pattern matching and evaluating statistical models, and presents the results as input into your conscious brain as “gut feelings”. However, it is bad at dealing with falsehoods or irrelevant information. The conscious brain is good at simulating outcomes to solve problems and at regulating emotion, but it is very capable of thinking too much and incorrectly overriding emotional inputs. The general formula is to use your conscious brain to filter information and monitor emotional state (the best decisions get made while you are in a moderately excited state, as opposed to entirely dispassionate or enraged), and then let your unconscious brain think about it for a bit. The one that “feels right” will more often than not be the right decision.

I wrote last year about psychology and Game Reviews, and there’s a study in How We Decide that directly supports my thoughts. in 1990 Timothy Wilson put together a study comparing the ability of college students to rate jams to the ability of jam experts from Consumer Reports. When simply asked to rate the jams, the college students showed a correlation coefficient of .55 with the experts, which is reasonably high and shows that the expert’s choices matched fairly well with the average college student. Then, Wilson asked a different group of students to analyze why they preferred certain jams using elaborate questionnaires and a wide variety of categories. This group of college students showed a correlation coefficient of .11, which is essentially meaningless. After further study it turns out what happens is that the jam “reviewers” would try to describe individual components, such as “spreadibility”, that didn’t really affect their overall enjoyment of the jam. Then, as they evaluated all of these categories they tended to revise their preferences to match with what they had written in the review. The reviewers had overthought the problem and in the process had modified their initial preferences to match their specific analysis, as opposed to analyzing their preferences.

A similar study was performed by Wilson with paintings (a Monet, a Van Gogh, and 3 humorous cast posters). One group of women was just asked to choose their favorite painting, and 95% chose the Monet or Van Gogh. The second group was asked to explain why they liked the poster they chose, and that group was split 50% between the fine art and cat posters, because the cat posters had more content available for explanation (the subjects were not trained artists).  The book goes through a litany of other studies, all showing that when you try to carefully think through a complicated decision you end up making poor choices.

Let’s see, these studies are all about situations with a complicated decision and the need to generate explanatory content. In all of them, people who explained their decision before making it made worse decisions. Yeah, that sounds a lot like game reviews. If we assume that game reviewers are trained experts (most are) who have consciously trained themselves to be a good judge of games, and are not influenced by extremely strong emotions at the time of rating, their initial gut assessment of a review score is likely to correlate very strongly to the actual enjoyment of a game. However, if a reviewer rationally dissects a game into components they will be likely to rate a game higher or lower then it actually warrants, because it has “bad replay value” or something. So, game reviewers, stop thinking so much about the game and just pay attention to your emotional state while you’re reviewing a game. You’ll make better decisions.

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UFC 2009 Undisputed: Actually Very Good

Posted by JZig on June 1, 2009

I just finished a 2 hour session of playing random people over XBOX Live. This is the first time I’ve played for longer than 20 minutes against complete strangers, and the reason I kept playing was that I was playing UFC 2009 Undisputed (UFC being the Ultimate Fighting Championship, a Mixed Martial Arts competition brand). It’s a licensed game published by THQ and not developed by Relic, which means that by previous evidence it should be a flaming pile. Despite all of that, it’s actually very good. It’s my favorite non-traditional fighting game (traditional fighting games being everything derived from Street Fighter 2) and although it isn’t perfect, it does some things better than any other game I’ve played. There is no game quite like UFC 2009, and in today’s world of refined experiences it’s great to see something new.

The inspiration for this game came very clearly from the UFC PPV/television product. The first components to the quality of UFC 2009 is presentation. First of all the fight trappings are spot on. The graphic packages are identical to what you’ll see in a real UFC fight, and the recorded audio announcing by Joe Rogan and Mike Goldberg is the single best announcer track I have ever heard in a game. It seems to use a mix of existing commentary and specially recorded bits, and it meshes quite well. UFC 2009 has really reminded me why presentation matters in games: it sets the emotional context for your actions. The fighter models and animations are great on average, and they mostly did a good job on the likenesses. I worked my created character up the Middleweight division (losing a few heartbreaking matches to last minute submissions) until I finally fought Anderson Silva for the Title. Bruce Buffer announced that I was challenging for the title, the announcers talked about previous Anderson Silva title matches, and I felt pumped. After I managed to knock him out with a solid uppercut from the clinch, and they replayed the highlights of the match, I felt extremely satisfied. If you’re familiar with the UFC product the presentation of this game will get you in the exact right emotional space to really care about what is going on, and there is nothing more you can ask from graphics and sound.

In addition to analyzing presentation, it’s obvious that the developers (Yukes) spent a lot of effort analyzing the flow and composition of real UFC fights and faithfully converting them into gameplay mechanics. The main components are striking, submissions, and transitions. For striking, they decided to keep it simple, and map each limb to a face button, with directional input to modify the attacks. Attacking without modifying gives you safe strikes that will do some damage, while modifying it makes your strikes more damaging but ALSO more dangerous for you. Best of all, the damage modeling uses realistic physics and collision detection, so strikes do damage based on momentum changes of body parts. The primary way you get knocked out in the game matches exactly with real life: Moving forward for a strong strike while your opponents hits your exposed area with a strong counter. You can also end a fight by hurting them enough that they get knocked down and stunned, where you finish the fight by standing over them and punching until the ref stops you, which is also exactly like real life. Submissions are fairly simple. In most positions you can attempt a submission at any time by clicking the right stick (on defense you have to grab an arm as a counter), and you will then button mash against your opponent. The interesting thing is that your current stamina (which goes down when you attack) has an effect on this, so it’s quite common for a fighter in the game to get overzealous in their striking and lower their stamina, at which point they are more vulnerable to a submission. Again, this is exactly like real life and the submission and striking components directly counteract each other as ways to win a fight.

The other major component is the transitional/positional game. Previous UFC and Pride games had fairly decent striking and submission components, but the positional game in UFC 2009 is extremely deep and satisfying. There are 3 standing positions, 4 clinching positions, and 12 (I think) ground positions. This sounds complicated, but the rules for each type of position are very similar, and they form clear progressions. Basically, each in each position you can actively choose to strike, go for a submission, or attempt to transition (by rotating the right stick). Also, you can defend against strikes or transitions. Striking an opponent who is guarding against transitions is very effective, as is transitioning against an opponent who is blocking strikes. So, the whole system quickly turns into an extremely psychological guessing game. Should you go for strikes that do long-term damage, or do you transition to mount to try and win the fight right away? Or you can block an opponents transition to make them waste stamina and become vulnerable to a transition.  There is no other game I can think of that places this much explicit emphasis on positional control and transitions, and learning this part of the game will definitely give you a deeper understanding of the actual principles behind MMA fighting. The fact that the combat is deep, systematic (as opposed to being overly based on special moves), and maps very closely to actual MMA fighting is why I love the game.

Outside of the core fighting mechanic and presentation, the game is a bit more hit and miss. The career mode is pretty comprehensive and gives you a fairly fun time-management layer to deal with when training your fighter. However, it features some of the most irritating menus in the history of gaming (when it auto saves, which is like every 2 minutes, it pops up SIX different save dialogs, all with slow transitions between them). The Online play is very playable (the slower pace and higher strategy of the game work well online) and has some nice ranking features, but right now an irritatingly large number of people will disconnect immediatly before losing (I have lost 3 wins to this, to add to the 7 I have that registered). These are issues that can be fixed in updates or next year’s version, but the core game is absolutely worth it. Like few other games in this generation of consoles, UFC 2009 Undisputed is a game that could not have existed 5 years ago (when the last UFC game came out). Improvements in physics have lead to a very realistic striking game. Improvements in graphics have lead to the ability to duplicate the presentation of a UFC fight without having to clutter it up with too many meters (do turn on the stamina meter, that cue is too subtle). The improved popular success of MMA and the UFC has allowed the developers to build an extremely deep combat system that can rely on lessons learned from watching real fights instead of having to copy existing fighting games. UFC 2009 Undisputed (name still kinda sucks) will definitely go down as one of the most unique and best-executed games of 2009, at least on my personal list.

Posted in Game Design, Game Development | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

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