A while back I started to build a case for why I think the hyper-focus on combat mechanics in mainstream games is the primary thing holding them back from being truly “about” the subjects and themes they aspire to and in some cases self-deceptively claim to be about. I had always intended to write a follow-up to that post, carrying further the suggestions of alternate mechanics worthy of further investigation. However, I wanted to lead by example: to back up what I was talking about with practice, and demonstrate a prototype for one of those mechanics.

Two years passed, and life took some unexpected turns. But I did make something and I want to share that now.

“Popular” was a prototype I worked on during the spring and summer of 2010. I consider it a failure, but an educational one that was a worthy attempt at the kind of exploration I’m talking about, and an idea I hope to return to someday.

I became fascinated by social simulation several years ago after reading about Chris Crawford’s valiant stabs at it with Siboot and Le Morte D’Artur, stepping stones towards his Holy Grail of “interactive storytelling”. He chased after these ideas in the most ambitious possible way, and thus I determined to do something small and humble – a Pong for social simulation, if you will.

I actually prototyped the gossip/affinity mechanic seen below in 2005 in a text-only format, and set it aside. Five years later, a lot of what you see in the prototype came to me in a single flash of inspiration. Lesson: sometimes it’s good to let an idea sit for a while!

During the summer of 2010 I met Mike Treanor, lead designer of Prom Week. We were each surprised to find ourselves in the room with someone working on another high school social simulation! It quickly became clear that our work was headed in very different directions, which was both a relief and a joy – when diving into underexplored mechanics, there’s so much to discover that competition is a comfort!

Here’s a video of the prototype in action and a brief explanation of how it works:

Credit where it’s certainly due: the cool student face art was done by the superb and talented Karla Zimonja.

The core mechanic in Popular involves spreading information to affect a social network in your favor. Every student has an affinity towards every other student – represented internally as a postive, negative or zero integer. The implicit objective is to become the most popular student in your class, but being a sandbox it supports other goals.

The information you pass, in the form of little notes of gossip written on notebook paper, makes assertions about the affinities between certain students, eg “Bob likes Carol”, “Carol hates Alice”, and so on. Being gossip, this information is categorically not based on truth, but social perception and speculation.

When a student “hears” new information about affinities, they decide how they feel about it, and this is in turn changes how they feel about the world. Enmities and friendships develop and change over time, all represented in terms of the “affinity map”.

That’s really all there is to it. I wanted to keep the prototype simple and focused on the question: “Can player manipulation of a social network via information exchange be made readable, deep and engaging?”. Adding other features would have just muddied the question and diluted its exploration.

The code for the prototype can be found on the project page where all my open source experiments are hosted.

2013-05-19 Update: Here’s a Windows build of the prototype.

Here’s a summary of the flow of a single turn in Popular:

1. The player examines the current social landscape by hovering the pointer over students’ faces. When a given student has focus, all the other students look at them, and their facial expressions display their affinity for that student: a huge grin indicates strong positive affinity (best buds!), a smile indicates lower but still positive affinity, a frown indicates negative affinity, and an angry, icy glare indicates strong negative affinity.
2. Based on this information, the player can formulate a plan. Do they want to try to start a rumor that two enemies dislike each other, in an attempt to drive a wedge between them? Do they want to compliment a neutral student (in effect saying “[I] like [you]“) in an attempt to gain a new friend? Do they want to shore up their existing alliances by spreading gossip that reinforces the affinities of people who already like each other? All of these things can be expressed with three simple parts of speech: [Subject] [Likes/Hates] [Object].
3. The player presses the “Gossip” button and builds a piece of gossip of the form described above by dragging students’ faces from the classroom view into the Subject and Object boxes. They can click to toggle the Verb between “Like” and “Hate”. When they’ve got the gossip they want to send out into the classroom, they click Send.
4. The player then chooses which Students will see this Gossip, assuming that every student who touches the note will sneak a peek at its contents – a reasonable expectation, if you’ve been through high school. They build a route by clicking from from desk to desk, and then click Pass.
5. The player sees their note go from desk to desk, and each student reacts to the information contained therein. The info window that pops up breaks down the thought process to show what is influencing their final reaction. In a nutshell, the rules are as simple as possible and based on existing affinities, the desire to see friends liked and enemies disliked, and that terrifying constant of adolescent life: peer pressure.
6. Now that the changes in the social landscape have been communicated, a new turn begins and players can read the world and decide what to do next.

Even though this was a spare time project with little hope of turning into something that was A) polished and B) something lots of people would love, working on this prototype was one of the most rewarding experiences of my career. Each little discovery and improvement felt revelatory because I was working in such an unfamiliar and underexplored area.

Here are some things I discovered:

• Humans are shockingly adept at reading social feedback if it’s well-constructed. In the first month or so of work on the protoype, I had much more boring stick figure faces drawn from 2D primitives, and colored numbers above their heads showing affinity. I knew that some proper nice-looking art for the faces would help the readability in some small ways, but considered it mostly an aesthetic thing – not worth going too deep on for a prototype where the focus is on proving interactive integrity. However! As the art developed, we found that by minimizing noses in the character style, I could draw all the face component pieces atop one another at offsets to produce the directional gaze effect. This led to a small eureka moment: humans have a lot of built-in hardware for following gazes and reading expressions – replacing the affinity numbers with the facial expressions worked better than I could have imagined!
• Social simulations generate emotionally resonant narratives more effortlessly than pretty much any other other kind of simulation. Dwarves in Dwarf Fortress grieve for deceased loved ones. The dollhouse-like play of Daniel Benmergui’s “Storyteller” plucks at deeply-ingrained human tendencies toward narrative reasoning. When simulated people are something besides sources or targets of damage, you can’t help but think in terms of who likes who, what will happen when X finds out about Y’s betrayal, and wondering what Y sees in romantic interest Z. This is stuff is tremendously engrossing for most humans to think about.
• Even heavily stylized social simulations can be compelling. Prom Week is fundamentally an AI-driven social sim, built by people who have forgotten more about AI than I will likely ever learn! It became clear fairly early that Popular wasn’t about modeling human social dynamics deeply, but about showing network effects and having little bits of emotional punch emerging from the sim to tickle the social reasoning parts of your brain as you puzzled over how to manipulate the system. Thinking of Popular as “a social puzzle game” helped focus my efforts and kept me from trying to add suggestions of depth that I ultimately wouldn’t have been able to follow through on.
• Topography is important, even in non-spatial simulations. Initially, the affinity map was populated purely randomly – a student was just as likely to love or hate or be “meh” about any other student. This made the classroom’s social landscape feel like noise, which in turn made for an unreadable game state. I started organizing students into groups of mutual affinity on startup, and realized that I’d created cliques! I went a step further and made cliques more likely to harbor mutual antipathy towards other cliques. Cliques are represented in the prototype video above by the colored backgrounds behind each student’s face. As you can see, it starts to feel like a territory map in a game like Civilization. This proved invaluable – now players had ways to chunk their understanding of a web with lots of data in it. My use of the term “social landscape” came from this.
• Non-gamers “get” social mechanics! It was personally very gratifying to show something I’d made to my mother and have her not only understand it, but see why I thought it was cool and worth pushing further!

So why did I abandon it?

Primarily, I feel I was unable to devise satisfying, readable and concise feedback mechanisms for the internal (within a character) dynamics that the social sim depends upon – specifically, what happens inside a student’s head when they read a piece of gossip. My algorithm represented the most basic relevant factors, and I could see it working clearly as intended under the hood, but communicating that to the player proved impossible. Those raw, baffling numbers in the “gossip reaction” dialogs are where I hit the wall – I couldn’t figure out how to convey that simple arithmetic in ways that read as a social calculation. This stuff happens instantly in our brains, and it’s connected with some of the most irrational and under-understood parts of our psyches. If players can’t read this intuitively, then they’re playing a spreadsheet, which goes against my most basic creative intent.

Popular is an abandoned project, but not a dead one. To me it feels like the tip of an iceberg rather than a dead end.

I suspect anyone venturing into this kind of domain will have to struggle with similar challenges. When you’re exploring a relatively unknown mechanic, you’re figuring out the most basic concepts, and making the most basic mistakes. More often than not, that leaves you with a half-working, hard-to-understand mess with a glimmer of potential poking out somewhere.

It’s difficult but possibly necessary to unlearn some prior design experience. My career has had me working on action games in established genres, which has instilled in me extremely high standards for polish, balance, readability and accessibility. These pressures actually work against the goal of failing interestingly in order to find new expressions.

As we explore these new oceans of potential, we need to prepare ourselves for a lot of failed experiments. We can’t possibly design the perfect expression of a mechanic the first time out. Early entries in many genres were some combination of painfully complicated, or missing essential elements that brought unity and breadth to later entries, or often only scratched the surface of potential depth. Wise and well-meaning admonitions to Please Finish Your Game notwithstanding, we need to be courageous and stupid enough to fail in new ways and pragmatic enough to abandon half-finished approaches that aren’t working. It took a bit of wisdom and humility I didn’t always have to step away from Popular – that too was an invaluable lesson.

We also can’t go in expecting a payoff, or with preconceived notions of what our end product will look like – it’s the exploration of a possibly-nonexistent unknown, not the quest for a known. We may think we’re solving one problem and stumble upon the solution to another. The authorial ego-drive of top-down design can snuff out promising ideas in pursuit of false grails. New ideas often reveal themselves only once we become open to them.

It’s possible the perfectly crafted social sims of the future will still have lots of numbers on screen, or have weirdly abstract representations of psychological dynamics. Or maybe they’ll be elegant and intuitive beyond our dreams… who knows? The point is we’ll only get there by exploring, and putting our feet on that path means letting go of what we think we already know.

Please let me know what you think of all this, if you know of any other explorations into new mechanical expressions, and if you have any ideas on how to solve the problems with Popular I describe above.

I left 2K Marin last July to become a designer at Double Fine Productions. I’m working on Ron Gilbert’s unannounced project. Life in San Francisco has been wonderful.

I couldn’t help but think about our slice of that much larger challenge. Specifically:

How do we significantly increase the percentage of earth’s population that makes games?

I’ll explain later why I think this issue is of critical importance to the future of games, but first here are some ideas.

Reduce the financial barriers to entry. For game creation to become an activity practised by all cultures, the hardware must be cheap and the software must be free [1]. Hardware is becoming cheaper, and more ubiquitous in developing countries, at a fairly reliable rate. Software is the tougher part.

The software needed to make games falls into two very general groups: the stuff you need to create content – 2D and 3D artwork, levels, sound and music – and the stuff you need to make the game’s raw functionality, via programming or something like it.

There are already some good free tools for the technical/programming side of game creation. See the end of this piece for a list of good existing resources.

However a lot of the software related to content creation, such as Photoshop and 3D Studio Max, is priced far out of reach for most people [2]. For the professionals that use this software, its cost is an easily justified business expense. However, this won’t work for the mass of amateurs and kids we are trying to empower.

Fortunately, there are free equivalents to many of these software packages in projects like GIMP and Blender. Unfortunately the area where many of these are least competitive is in usability. Often, they focus on providing comparable functionality over discoverability and ease of learning. Which brings us to…

Make the tools much easier to learn. Think of the path to learning to make games as a ramp. Right now we have a lot of solid options for people who are half or most of the way up that ramp. Sadly the low end of the ramp has a lot of snags and bumps on it. Many people try to get started making games and give up because the tools they found were impenetrable, or they failed to grasp some of the more fundamental concepts of game creation.

A well-designed UI can help smooth out those early experiences, increasing the chances that a budding creator will forge ahead and go on to do something great. A well-thought-out workflow can turn a series of arbitrary actions into a process that clicks in the user’s mind. In effect, good tools reduce the cognitive barriers to entry.

Likewise on the technical side, we need more really high quality systems for making simple games with little or no programming needed – tools like GameMaker. Those of us with programming experience may dismiss such tools as toys, but we all started somewhere [3]. The game creators of tomorrow will pick up such toys, and those with talent and drive will reach their limits and move on to something more powerful. We need development at both ends of the ramp – toys and power tools – to launch a new global generation of game designers.

What can one person do to help this trend along? Get involved with the development process for good projects. Submit UI improvements, file bugs, become active in their communities.

Improve game creation education. – A lot of the most useful knowledge about how to make games is locked up inside large studios, or buried in knowledge bases that are difficult to understand or even access. Most good game designers are still working in the industry, not teaching, and formal game education is pretty expensive and only available in a few places (in the United States, at least).

Good designers should be more willing to share the secrets of their craft – conferences like GDC are a good start – but we should also make sure to translate those insights into more languages, and strive to disseminate them more widely than the narrow circle of pro game developers.

We also need more good online resources. Good documentation is wonderful, and we arguably have an even greater need for good tutorials: “How-Tos” written for an entry level, explaining concepts and workflows in depth, not just “what this button does”. And of course, we should help translate these, as well as the tools themselves, into more languages.

Foster strong communities that speak your native language(s). A community of creators can be an amazing nexus of learning and idea exchange. Participating in these communities and helping them to grow is valuable.

It’s sad to consider the extent to which game dev scenes are fragmented by language – there’s very little spill-over between the Japanese indie scenes and those in the West, for example. This is unavoidable to an extent. What we can do is build better connections between the places we do know about. I suspect we will soon see innovations in the social web that advance this beyond the loose archipelago of forums, chat and social networks we have today.

Support technologies that do not limit creator freedom. Dan Cook’s fantastic GDC talk, The Game of Platform Power, makes a very strong case that platform holders cannot be trusted to act in the long-term interests of creators. They architect their platforms in ways that place developers under their control, in both obvious and non-obvious ways. With some smart marketing, huge numbers of creators can be drawn into relationships that ultimately turn them into a commodity.

The kids who will start making games in 2015 or 2025 deserve a future with no strings attached.

What can we do? Support technologies, platforms and companies that embrace creator autonomy in tangible ways that can’t be revoked. Punish bad behavior by taking your business elsewhere. Contribute to open source projects, sell on open marketplaces, and build on technologies based around truly open standards. While they can be chaotic and subject to the same human social dynamics as any organization, these systems are our best bet for a future not dominated by a few all-powerful companies.

Disseminate and promote the means to make games. All the fantastic software in the world is worthless if the game creators of tomorrow don’t know about it. When you booted up a Commodore 64, you were presented with a BASIC interpreter. You could start typing simple commands, make some games in BASIC, and gradually work your way up to writing games in assembly.

Today, you boot up Windows on a new PC and see mostly software related to content consumption. Most of the tech or media companies that control computing have little interest in promoting learning or the creation of culture. This is something we can gradually help some companies start to see the value in. Imagine the impact just one desktop shortcut that says “Learn to Make Games” would have on a generation of kids. My undying gratitude goes to the first company to do this!

Make more different kinds of games. I believe more strongly than ever that broadening the range of human experience we simulate in our games beyond shooting, stabbing and jumping, is the most direct route to establishing games as a cultural force and artistic medium.

Videogames tend to seep anywhere technology goes, but existing devs making a wider range of games will help those new potential game makers be exposed to games that are more likely to inspire them, and less likely to write off videogames as dumb stuff for boys / rich kids / nerds / etc.

Which begins to get to the heart of why all this is so important for the future of games.

The debates over videogames’ status as an artistic medium tend to be mazes of irreconcilable prejudices and slippery or contradictory definitions. Worse, they tend to be very short on actual things we, as creators and players, can do to improve the status of games.

So it would be very productive if we could shift focus away from “art”, which we will never satisfactorily define by consensus, to “lasting cultural relevance and respect”, which we can perhaps check up on in 10-20 years time and see how we did.

Which is to say,

If games aren’t art (yet), maybe it’s because the group of people making them are still relatively tiny and homogeneous and geographically concentrated.

No doubt we should continue to increase the diversity of the existing game industry – year by year we employ more women and minorities, and this is incrementally a Good Thing.

More important though: we should get more people making games. Hence, this post.

Every culture produces music, and we have an almost indescribable diversity of it. It’s difficult to imagine a future for humanity without music.

A film is more work to make than an album, but if you look at the global output of films, a very healthy diversity of films still gets made every year. My local theater can give me windows into rural Thailand, revolutionary France, or the mind of a blind person.

If we can bring about this kind of diversity for games, the cultural relevance of those media will be within our grasp.

One could argue that videogames are already ubiquitous – a PC can cost as little as $100, a PlayStation 2 costs $100, and games for these systems are available in developing countries. This isn’t the same thing as the means to creating videogames being ubiquitous.

I want to play a game made by a middle class girl in India. I want to play a game that helps me understand what it’s like to grow up in poverty. I want to play a game that shows me what the world looks like to someone who practices a religious faith I know almost nothing about.

There is so much I don’t know about what life would be like for such people. Experiencing that would make me a better person, and probably a better creator too. More importantly, humankind is richer for such works existing.

Games are really good at transporting us to other times and places and frames of reference, but it’s amazing how narrow a range of human experience they currently offer us despite that vast potential. We can change that by building a bridge from our small little island to the rest of the world.

It’s worth noting that this worldwide explosion of game creation would undoubtedly result in huge numbers of games that you, personally, would probably not like! That’s the whole point – to broaden the medium beyond a single taste, a single demographic – a single destiny. This is not fragmentation so much as the flowering of culture, as it has happened for millenia. Our tiny tribe can hold back this change, or help it along.

I’m coming to believe this challenge is just as important as the creation of enduring, beautiful games. I hope I’ve provided a tiny starting point for further thinking about this.

Resources

Here are some links to good game making software I know of. If I missed something, tell me in the comments!

Art tools

Inkscape – A vector graphics tool comparable to (and fairly competitive with) Adobe Illustrator. Clever game creators have figured out how to use it as a level creation tool.

Blender – The most advanced open source 3D modeling, animation and rendering program. While their UI still needs some work, they recently released a solid new version with some significant improvements.

GIMP – Photoshop equivalent. If you’re a long-time Photoshop user, this page can help you get you a more familiar key bind setup. Development has slowed lately because there are only a few people working on it. See if you can help out!

Paint.NET. – Windows-only and free-as-in-beer, provides a very usable subset of Photoshop’s features.

Audio tools

Audacity – Good basic sound recording and editing software.

sfxr – Simple sound effects generation. Great for quickly whipping up some retro-style game sounds.

Ardour – Full-featured open source audio workstation suite, comparable to the high-end ProTools software.

2D game creation systems / engines

PyGame – A simple 2D game library that lets you use all the power of the Python language to get games on screen quickly. I’ve made several prototypes with this and it’s a joy to use. If your graphical needs are modest and you’re relatively new to programming, start here.

Monocle Engine – A very exciting up-and-coming open source 2D engine, started by the programmer from Aquaria. Barely a month old, it already supports multiple platforms, has a sweet level editor and a community is beginning to gather round it.

Flixel and FlashPunk – Two different open source libraries built atop Flash that make it much easier to program games in ActionScript without needing to mess with Adobe’s Flash software much. If you’ve played more than 2 or 3 retro-pixely games online, you’ve probably played a game built with one of these.

LOVE – Similar to PyGame, but uses LUA instead. Easy to pick up, great community.

GameMaker – Not free, but cheap, has a very active community and thousands of games have been made with it already.

Scirra Construct – An open source competitor to GameMaker. Windows-only for the moment.

Inform7 – An amazing system for creating interactive fiction whose code actually reads like English!

Processing – Designed more for the general domain of “creative coding” than games, you can do lots of interesting audiovisual experiments with this, and its interactive capabilities aren’t bad. There’s now a version that runs directly in a web browser using javascript and the new HTML5 technologies.

3D engines

Unity – A powerful 3D suite that’s great for prototyping. The interface is a mash-up of a level editor and an IDE. You can do a lot with the GUI but dig into script code when you need to. Proprietary, but has a free version with some features removed and a splash screen.

Sauerbraten – Very interesting FPS engine built around the concept of runtime level editing.

ioquake3 – Open source version of the venerable but quite solid Quake 3 engine. I used this engine for my IGF 2008 game Purity.

Footnotes

[1] “Free” can mean free as in “free beer” or free as in “free speech”. While tools in either sense of the word will held spread game creation, the Free Software Foundation’s explanation of the differences make it clear why the latter sense is important in the longer term.

[2] Though piracy is very common in some parts of the world, we can’t in good conscience suggest that an entire generation of game creators get their start by downloading software illegally.

[3] The interesting thing about GameMaker in particular being that some amazingly good games have been made with it by experienced developers just looking to make something fast – don’t underestimate simple tools!

Fellow 2K Marin designer Steve Gaynor wrote recently about getting his work out into the world, and how it seems like an endpoint of sorts for all the things he’s written on his blog. A quick aside: the Minerva’s Den DLC for Bioshock 2 was led by Steve, and features many excellent contributions from my wife. Everyone involved with that project has a lot to be proud of. I wasn’t directly involved, so it’s the first piece of Bioshock I’ve ever been able to play unspoiled.

I find it interesting where the ideas in Minerva’s Den overlap (or don’t) with Steve’s writing. I’ve worked with him for a few years now, but when I played the DLC and especially the level he was the primary implementor on, I felt like I finally understood deeply what makes him tick as a designer.

Thus, my main point: I grow increasingly convinced that game designers who blog have an obligation to validate their theory with practice.

An ounce of playable game is worth a pound of even passionate, lyrical, incisive critical/analytical writing. Jon Blow gave several talks about the state of game design in the years before he released Braid, and at the time some people questioned his credibility. Ultimately it was the finished work that made it clear he practices what he preaches. This is the standard I strive for.

Tiny games from prolific indies such as Stephen Lavelle have said more to me in the past year than reams of brilliant writing. Some of my favorite pieces of academic writing and journalism come from folks like Ian Bogost and Kieron Gillen, who have waded into the painful mess of actual game development to further understand the medium.

In a field like game design, the process of making a thing helps us crystallize our thoughts on the ideas surrounding that thing, while the inverse is not always true. Purity taught me so much that I have not yet had the time to write about. After de-making Arcadia, I found it very easy to finally distill the insights I’d long understood about Doom’s design. Even though it’s not a game, the process of creating the Ultima IV map viewer helped immerse me in the fidelity constraints of ancient games that first inspired me to think about imaginative play.

For several months now, I’ve had a post about non-combat game mechanics in the works, and I realized that my call for deeper exploration of this subject by the industry at large was almost worthless without examples, without some small act of leadership – given their relative scarcity, I owe it to my subject to provide a credible thrust in the intended direction. So I’ve been working on a series of prototypes for Popular, a high school social simulation. I know that once I have it in a playable state, the post will likely come easily and be much richer for it.

This is a practice I would strongly encourage of other designers. The process of getting a game made is full of messy, illusion-shattering realities – things you would never guess existed if you sit and write, as I did for many years, content to hone your theory under the mistaken assumption that when you have found the perfect theory you can make the perfect game. No game is perfect – any viable design approach works backwards from that inevitability.

So for the future: fewer posts, more things to play. I’m still not a very good programmer – my goal in doing it has always been to ensure that the things within my reach as a designer are within my grasp as a creator. That’s really what all this is about. Best of luck to others on this road with me.

A high-minded goal like “expand the boundaries of the medium” doesn’t always mean forging ahead in crazy new unknown directions. Sometimes it means examining lost evolutionary lines in game design – picking up ideas that were abandoned long ago and seeing if there’s any new life in them. The game I keep coming back to in this regard is Doom. Not the 2004 reboot, but “Classic Doom”: Doom 1 and 2, Final Doom, the Master Levels – and its vast universe of user-made content. What can it teach us today?

In 1993, the message Doom sent to the videogame world was something like “use cutting edge technology to make something dark, edgy and violent”. The world has changed so much around Doom since then that very little of that original impact comes through to players today – though the industry has inarguably gone on to master the techno-fueled ultra-violence thing! Here’s what I’ve found after many years of enjoying the game and digging ever deeper into its design:

Doom feels more like 1st person Robotron than a modern FPS

When you play Doom today, it doesn’t feel much like you’re controlling a human or moving through real spaces. Try this though: press the TAB key, type IDDT twice and pretend you’re playing Geometry Wars, and the moving triangles are your enemies. This is what Doom’s designers were working from in 1993 – back then, the idea of a first person shooter was barely established, and their closest models for many mechanics were from 2D shooters like Robotron, Berserk and Tempest. This approach echoes throughout Doom’s design. The notion of realism in FPS design wouldn’t appear for another few years, and many decisions were made simply on the basis of being good for abstract shooter gameplay.

Partly thanks to this, many parts of Doom’s “game feel” still compare favorably with modern twitch games. Enemy speeds and patterns are very finely tuned, weapon design is strongly orthogonal, player movement has a nice friction to it and level design elucidates all of this. Quake 3 is still considered the pinnacle of arcadey FPS movement and feel, and that lineage starts with Doom – some of the code is even similar.

Doom is about “maneuverability as defense”

In almost every modern FPS, the player moves fairly slowly and a huge proportion of enemies are equipped with instant hit attacks – pistols, machine guns, sniper rifles. This usually puts the player in the role of “damage sponge” – they’re intended to soak up a certain amount of damage from mostly unavoidable enemy attacks, then seek cover and heal up. Halo’s recharging shield makes this mechanic quite explicit – by default, you’re exposed to damage and will die, while seeking cover halts that and completes the basic cycle of any combat.

Contrast all this with Doom Guy, who runs at about 50 scale miles per hour – nonsensically fast by modern standards. Most of Doom’s enemies don’t have instant-hit projectile attacks, and most of the ones that do are quite weak – the lowly trooper and sergeant. Every other enemy projectile takes time to reach its target, and would look comical in a more realistic visual presentation.

So because the player moves so quickly in Doom, and because most enemy attacks are dodgeable, the player can avoid a significant amount of damage simply by moving. A skilled player can often deal with large numbers of enemies sustaining hardly a scratch. This creates a feeling that’s quite rare in modern FPS: that you are powerful because you are agile, not because you’re a tank. This frees up Doom’s encounters to feature huge numbers of enemies, to vary scenarios by mixing in different proportions of threats, and to have huge, sprawling, often non-linear spaces that the player can traverse easily. There’s nothing quite like it today.

Doom has a more varied bestiary than most modern FPSes

In many modern FPSes, the design of every enemy the player faces is sampled from a fairly narrow tactical spectrum – soldier with machine gun, soldier with shotgun, zombie with melee attack. Doom, on the other hand, has a huge range of monster sizes, speeds, strengths and movement/attack patterns. Former humans and imps are slow moving ranged fodder. Hell Barons are large, tank-like threats. Flying enemies range from the small charging Lost Soul to the tough, fireball-belching Cacodemon. Revenants and Mancubi launch homing and spread-fire projectiles respectively, and the three boss-class monsters are each very dangerous in different ways. Some enemies can be stunned by weapon fire more easily than others.

Such diversity creates a large but simple to understand toolset that level design can combine with architecture to create a huge variety of combat setups. One tough guy with a lot of fodder means the player has to do crowd control while focusing on the real threat. Lots of flying enemies make the player seek low cover and choke points. Enemies with strong melee in tight spaces make the player dance and really exploit the stun properties of their weapons. This versatility of the core design makes life easier and more fun for the level designer, and thus the player.

Doom was abstract in ways that empowered its level design

While some of Doom’s levels have a very thin fiction via their title (eg “Hangar”) and general texturing theme, if you actually explore them you find they only resemble real locations in the loosest sense possible. This is precisely what allowed Doom’s level design to present a wide variety of interesting tactical setups. Level designers didn’t have to worry about whether a change made something look less like a hangar or a barracks, just whether it was better for gameplay. This was especially critical for a style of game that was just finding its feet in 1993.

As the march of technology has allowed ever-higher graphical fidelity, virtually every FPS since Doom has attempted greater and greater representationalism with its environments. While games like System Shock began to show that a real sense of place can be a huge draw in itself, designers of such games will always have to manage the tension between compelling fiction and optimal function, unless you are willing to go all out and have the kind of weird, abstract spaces Doom has. I would love to see more modern games break with this conventional wisdom and see where it leads, if only in an indie or experimental context.

Doom enabled a revolution in player-generated content

Though advanced for its day, Doom’s technology was still simple enough, and its content low-fidelity enough, that a huge mod community coalesced around it to produce an unparalleled number of levels, mods, total conversions and other addons. This, combined with the fact that the player base was so focused on a single game, means we’ll probably never see something like it again. The lesson for future games might be this: make your technology extremely simple, easy to modify, ship it with a diverse enough pool of content that people can extend it to create a variety of settings and styles, and promote the sharing of this content as a way to add value to your game.

Many PC games have gotten all that right but failed to attract a huge community because of the content fidelity issue. The barriers to entry facing someone who wants to make a mod for Unreal Tournament 3 today are vastly higher than those facing a Doom modder. You can rough out a Doom map in a few hours and finish it in a few days, while that same amount of time might produce a single texture for a modern game. Again, this is something we could branch out from if we lose our fixation on technology and high fidelity visuals uber alles.

Another unique side effect of Doom’s simplicity is that its design principles can be synthesized and expressed procedurally. Level generators for more modern games have been attempted and abandoned, while the Oblige random level generator creates a decent Doom level with proper combat and resource balance, key gating and architectural themes.

Doom is one of many classics whose less obvious qualities are seldom revisited

Doom’s impact has faded, and its precise recipe for success is unlikely to be replicated; nevertheless, the game industry has become quite adept at mimicking its superficial qualities. However we as creators and critics owe it to ourselves to look at Doom, and other classics of comparable depth – M.U.L.E., Ultima IV and Star Control II are a few examples I would offer – and trace less-traveled paths of analysis in search of deeper truths.

Sometimes we must look to the past for guidance. Other times we must strive to forget it entirely. In the balance of both, we will find much to learn about making the games of tomorrow.

Addendum: Not sure if he even remembers it, but Nathan McKenzie made some observations on Doom about 7 years ago now(!) that set my wheels turning on this post, so I’d like to thank him for those initial insights.

Of course, I had to do something very silly with some of this time. So I did a remake of a BioShock level for… wait for it… Doom 2.

Inspired partly by TIGSource’s amazing Bootleg Demakes Competition, I used a modern Doom level editor called SLADE to recreate Arcadia and the Farmer’s Market, the sections of BioShock on which I was the primary designer. It’s a monster of a level, crammed full of weird little BioShock-to-Doom transmutations and symbolism. If you’re a fan of either game, I hope you enjoy it.

Download the map from here. Inside the ZIP are a standard format Doom WAD readme, instructions on how to get it running on modern systems, and some designer commentary on both the construction of the original map and the Doom demake.

To complement this release, I’ve also posted a design analysis of classic Doom, just as I threatened to a while back. Read it here:

Coelacanth: Lessons from Doom

Now: resting up, rolling on to a cool new project. Making a DOOM map on the weekends.

Stay tuned. In the meantime, read some words Bruce Sterling spoke almost 20 years ago:

The Wonderful Power of Storytelling

This isn’t a standard “old fogey remembers classic game fondly” post though. Ultima IV’s tremendous influence and importance aside, I think for players looking back on it from today, it now exemplifies a value that is quite rare in most modern games: encouragement of the player to engage by using their imagination.

What does this mean though? What does a game that fosters “imaginative engagement” look, sound and play like in 2009?

I feel this question is worth asking simply because the sort of engagement we might give players by embracing this lost art could be powerful, richly subjective and, in a word, personal. Your mental image of a game’s world or a character’s voice might be different from mine [2]. You invite the game into your own mind, to an extent, rather than being enveloped entirely by the imagination of the author. In a word, you participate in a way that complements the actual interactivity.

The dominance of literal images in our culture notwithstanding, this value is actually far from alien to art/entertainment media: just remember what happens every time you read a book. You have to call every person, place and event into being in your mind. The experience depends entirely upon your engagement and interpretation – your brain is the minimum system requirement.

In fact, this value isn’t even alien to games of the electronic kind. Interactive fiction is an established medium whose potential is reasonably well-explored, and whose overlap with written fiction is obvious. Further down the continuum towards conventional videogames, we have games with primitive, but more importantly stylized or symbolic graphics. The best of these still have an effect closer to that of a well-written novel than a film – they evoke images and ideas that are quite grand compared to the simple stuff of which they’re made.

Low Fidelity

In the bad old days, hardware was so limited that games couldn’t muster much for audiovisual feedback. Creators had no choice but to stylize and abstract – to communicate as best they could within the limited fidelity of their format.

It’s also true that compared to today, fewer games tried to create a sense of a fiction or world. Games like Tetris still hold up today largely on the strength of their rules, their integrity as formal systems, and for such games the clarity and aesthetic attractiveness of these abstractions were all that mattered.

Early computer role playing games had quite a different lineage, extending most directly from pen and paper RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons. Games like Temple of Apshai, which augmented its modest 8-bit graphics with a manual full of written descriptions of each room in its dungeons, are the missing link between D&D and later RPGs like Ultima IV onward.

Even with more arcadey games, it’s clear that box art of the era played a big part in providing a starting point for imaginative engagement – check out all the crazy stuff on the cover painting of Missile Command for the Atari 2600:

You see only a basic semblance of this in-game, but its intent was to call into being a world richer than what was represented. Creators of such games and their related artifacts were in effect building a bridge, from their own creative intent to that of their players – or, if you don’t believe in “player creativity”, at least their willingness to engage creatively.

Of course, today technological oneupsmanship drives most of big budget game development towards ever-higher fidelity audiovisuals, in part because that’s the easiest way to show off the power of new hardware. The aesthetics of many modern games have in turn adapted to embrace this – as Epic’s lead designer Cliff Bleszinski recently pointed out, there are lots of bald space marines with intricate, scuffed metal armor in games today because current graphics hardware is really good at that. Are we really okay with this being the driving force of our medium, though?

Clearly, the limitations that once forced creators to work with low fidelity and wield the power of suggestion have all but slipped away completely. Paradoxically, in many art forms this kind of event is exactly the point at which some artists begin to explore how that limitation can be wielded intentionally, as a fruitful restraint, a challenge to inspiration, a means to broaden the scope of what is thought possible.

Sparse Matrices / the Art of “Not Showing”

To paraphrase some wisdom I’ve heard from horror filmmakers, “the monster in the audiences’ heads is scarier than any monster you can put on screen.”

Numerous technical problems with the animatronic shark during the filming of Jaws forced Steven Spielberg to adopt a cinematographic style that was more about implication, the menace of things offscreen or barely seen, or built up through the soundtrack. It had quite an effect on viewers and revolutionized how films like it were made.

Audio can indeed be a powerful aid to this – it’s spatial, subjective and suggestive where visuals fail to be. The two older games that have best retained their ability to frighten and immerse me are Thief and System Shock 2, and they do it largely because of their masterful audio, and in spite of their primitive graphics.

Whether you’re hiding information to scare people, or paring it away to help someone paint a picture in their own heads, the mechanism is the same.

In mathematics and programming, there’s something called a sparse matrix. Unlike a normal array where every value is filled in with a number, like the 1:1 grid of pixels on the display you’re reading this on, a sparse matrix is only filled in where there’s a non-zero number.

It’s a glancing blow of a metaphor, but I think human imagination and memory work kind of like this. Whatever isn’t filled in becomes breathing room. What we as creators don’t show the player creates a space they can fill themselves and inhabit mentally in the larger context of what we do show.

Allow Players to Imagine

However, if you’re a creator it takes some discipline to choose to not fill something in with marvelous detail, and some craft to know exactly when and when not to apply this principle for effect – as an intentional feat of simplification, rather than an omission.

Now that technology can do so many things for us, the default approach today has become “spell everything out as explicitly as possible”. This is changing, however.

So the original question stands: what games would we make if we embraced this fully?

In the last five to ten years, the idea of games with highly stylized visuals has gone from fringe to wide acceptance. Beyond simply looking beautiful or distinctive, stylized / abstracted art plays on the visual side of our cognition and imagination.

Chapter 2 of Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics” describes this as “Amplification Through Simplification” – that by removal of well-chosen details from a representation of something, an artist can clarify it, focus its intent, broaden or twist its meaning.

I don’t think this is a purely visual phenomenon, though. In games, we represent the world and its rules to players via interactions. The sense we give players of its possibility space early on, through training and fiction, can create a space players will inhabit with their imagination.

Remember your first hour with Shadow of the Colossus, when you’d only fought maybe one of the beasts? The sparse loneliness of world seems to continue forever. What’s out there? What are you trying to accomplish? What are the limits?

Hours later, you’ve mastered the world and know how it works; you know what to expect. You know what isn’t in the game… earlier possibilities have faded.

However, the mystery of the place stays with you. If players participate imaginatively even for a short time, that ripples outward to enrich the rest of their experience.

That’s another reason I used Ultima IV as an example to start with – the vastness of its world, combined with the simple art and feeling of freedom to explore, create a similar experience despite the radical difference in fidelity.

Other games have a story that stands out much more clearly from their gameplay dynamics. Even in these, there can be vectors that lead us to imagine – stories that are driven by mystery invite us to speculate, to dream up alternate possibilities – who is the G-Man? What happened to Rapture? We invite more of the game into our creative consciousness – we imagine. Even in games with completely traditional linear storytelling models, this is powerful stuff.

Conclusion

In the future I’d like to see more games wield this power intentionally and explore what’s possible with it. I’d like to see designers stylize or not show something by choice rather than, as Ultima IV did, as a technological compromise. I want to make games that people want to invite into their imaginations. If it sounds like I’ve cast a wide net in searching for examples and potential directions, that’s because there are so many avenues… which is very inspiring.

Steve Jobs once claimed that computers are “a bicycle for the mind”. Videogames could be a bicycle for the imagination, if we have the will to broaden our medium in this direction.

[1] I wrote a bit of code to create this animated screenshot. You can download the program here. Instructions are included.

[2] To be clear, even the most imagination-friendly videogame is still rule-bounded in ways that truly freeform, imaginative play – think kids in a schoolyard playing cops and robbers – is not. The value of the former would not be to replace the latter, but to populate what is currently the vast empty gulf between the two.

• Make games, using proven mechanics from the last 20 years, that sell millions of copies.
• Give people a broad range of experiences that affect them as powerfully as those found in other forms of art.

Visual aids are nice so here’s one for each of those:

Hot New Video Game Consists Solely Of Shooting People Point-Blank In The Face

(Ignore the kid yammering over the video, until about 1:10 in, for the quicktime event sequence.) [2]

We can debate whether encompassing a broader range of human experience is indeed a goal of importance, but if even a God of War game feels the need to have a scene like the one shown above, you might at least concede that it’s something many developers seem interested in furthering.

To cut right to the heart of the conflict I see here, I don’t think we as developers can continue holding our breath and waiting for games that revolve around shooting, driving, running and jumping to someday make a great leap into expressing all kinds of things they were heretofore incapable of.

The problem is that the better versed you are in game conventions, the easier it is to separate the core mechanics of a game from its fiction and theme, and thus say that a game like BioShock is a meditation on free will, the dangers of ideological extremes, and whatever else… despite the fact that you spend about 90% of it shooting people in the face.

On top of simply being good satire, the Onion piece cuts to the heart of that, and reminds us that rest of the world can see this disparity more clearly, ironically by virtue of being less game-literate. For many among the gaming literate, that sort of insight hits pretty close to home.

For a perspective from the other end, I was struck by this comment on io9, a non-gamer blog, from this post about BioShock 2:

I can see how a first-person shooter would be interesting and entertaining, but I would have to fall short of “compelling” when you have to spend that much time, er, shooting.

This person wasn’t being an unreasonable jerk, or advocating the censorship of games. Shooting lots of insane people in a dark, weird place probably just isn’t their idea of a good time.

The common response to this from developers has been things like, “We just need to hire better writers”, “We need better technology”, “We need better artists”, “We need to spend more time planning out our stories”. However, we’ve been doing this for more than 10 years. Whereas if you look at the points where this medium has made the most progress, whenever the expressive capabilities of games have expanded significantly, it’s actually been because new mechanics, or significant developments upon existing ones [3], have emerged that enable new aesthetics. Those other things are quite important, but we seem to have them covered.

One problem is that, deep down, many designers view game mechanics more as structure (or “form”, if you prefer) than as content, when in fact they are both. If you treat them exclusively as structure when designing, you get all manner of unintended message and context… in a nutshell, ludonarrative dissonance. Which in 2009 means mashing the circle button to overcome an emotional inner conflict. Another designer’s analysis accepts this completely at face value, which if anything demonstrates that this issue transcends our usual valuations of craft and art. It’s almost invisible to us, but quite apparent to outsiders.

So as developers, we need to deal more honestly with the disparity between our reach and our grasp – which is to say, what we tell ourselves our games are about, versus what they are actually about. History will see this decade as the period when games struggled with their destiny in this way.

I’m optimistic though, both because of the progress we’ve made in the first three decades or so of our medium, and because the solutions are right under our noses, deep in the fabric of all games. We must search out, and in some cases rediscover, core mechanics that engender new types of experiences – rediscover, because many have already been done at the fringes, promising yet underexplored. Here are some examples I find especially interesting:

AI Companionship: Holding hands in Ico

You reach out to a non-player character and become connected to them. Suddenly you’re no longer a lone entity; you must account and take responsibility for an Other. Sometimes they’re a hindrance, sometimes a help. Whether or not you buy into the designers’ attempts to make you sympathize, you have a real connection to something that’s reinforced by strong kinesthetics. In Ico, there was plenty of platformy adventuring to go along with this, but it seems inevitable that someday a game will make this its primary emphasis.

Victory via Self-Enrichment: Culture in Civilization

Sometimes you can triumph over an adversary simply by being better than them. Rivals come to view your achievements as an example to be followed. Each accomplishment that enriches you internally affords you expansion and encroachment via indirect force. Tend to your own garden and you will become powerful and influential without firing a shot.

Social Reasoning: Diplomacy

The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Many wargames have a diplomacy component, which gets especially interesting when other humans are in the mix. However in a game where direct force isn’t possible, social standing would be its own capital. This is a large part of why character-driven TV shows are popular; humans enjoy exploring the workings and permutation spaces of social networks.

Hopefully this gives an idea of the breadth of directions available to us as designers. It’s equally fruitful to look to the past, at how certain ideas bubbled up from nowhere to expand the expressive range of games.

Circa 1997, before Thief and Metal Gear Solid, Stealth was one of those underexplored mechanics. Suddenly, as it caught on, there were new play sensations we’d never had before – being some combination of sneaky, clever, afraid, transgressive. It transformed players’ perspectives on familiar game environments. It even brought some new people into the medium.

These are basic changes that everyone feels deeply, from a jaded critic to someone completely new to games. They are interactively “true” in ways that a change in setting can only rarely be, no matter how beautifully realized.

As a medium, we’ve proven we can seek out novel settings, themes, art styles, characters and tropes. We have other media to learn from, after all. New mechanics, however, are uniquely difficult. The only inspiration we can find for them is human experience itself, and then comes the struggle of synthesizing, systematizing and iterating. This is the central challenge of working in this medium, and it’s never been more important that we embrace it.

[1] While some of this could be explained as the disparity between what game publishers want and what developers want, that might be giving too little credit to the former and too much to the latter. If there were more proven game mechanics and styles that enabled new experiences, publishers would probably sell them. Past a certain point, the burden of proof is on us.

[2] I want to make it clear that I’m not disparaging GoW:CoO, or speaking in any sense other than constructive criticism. I haven’t played it; in all likelihood it’s a great action game. I’m simply holding it up as an unwitting example of a much more existential crisis in game design today, much as other designers have held up stuff I’ve worked on in a similar light.

[3] Movement is something that gets re-discovered every so often; Mirror’s Edge being the recent example. Flaws in execution aside, players recognized there was something unique there.

Hi there. I’m sorry it took this long to construct an answer to your question and I hope you find this useful. It’s been interesting to write this – I find myself digging deep and thinking about what I would have told myself 10-15 years ago.

I think most of it comes down to these three things:

Know what you love

This sounds simple, but making something you actually want to play makes it much easier to get over the hump of getting started. Figure out what kind of games you’re most interested in and make something for that style of game. A few examples of games with publicly released editing tools – I’ll gladly name more if this doesn’t cover it for you:

Single player FPS – Make a Half-Life 2 or Doom 3 map that uses architecture, AIs and scripted sequences in interesting ways.

Multiplayer FPS – Make a map for Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead or Unreal Tournament 2004. Playtest it online with people and refine until it’s fun.

RPG – Make a quest or dungeon for Fallout 3 or Oblivion.

Understand the medium

Learn to deconstruct games. Think about game mechanics as separate from their presentation – eg “movement, shooting and resource management” versus “you are a space marine” – but also understand that the latter influences the former and that ultimately they are inextricable. Think about how the designers might have gone about developing those “core rules” and how the presentation shapes them.

Think about core rules as separate from level design – eg Halo’s weapons, monsters and shield recharge system, versus its levels which combine those in the right proportions to create interesting experiences – but again, understand how they’re woven together into a whole.

Understand how game mechanics and narrative can both complement and conflict with one another, and think about how to embrace that. Pro game designers are still very much struggling with this today.

Get technical. Game programming isn’t the same thing as game design, but all game systems ultimately break down into some kind of logic and math, and it helps immeasurably to know about those underpinnings.

Make something

This is the most important thing, far more so than the previous two. The only way to get skill in the first place is to start doing it, and the only way to hone that skill is to use it. Make a lot of levels and eventually you’ll surprise yourself.

Most editors have a simple “test level” exercise that will get you up and running with a basic series of rooms. Once you’ve got that down, think of something relatively small and doable, and try to make it. Scale down as needed – almost everyone picks an overambitious concept at the outset.

Don’t get too hung up on documentation. It’s good to have a plan up front, but most of the real problem-solving comes through iterating – playing your own stuff, making changes based on what you’re unhappy with, rinse lather repeat. Even better, get other people to play your stuff, and take careful notes – you’ll be amazed at what you were assuming was self-evident, too easy or unbreakable.

Work at it. It’s like learning to play an instrument; be prepared to claw your way up a steep cliff of failure before you get anything you’re remotely proud of. Don’t be afraid to throw away failed experiments. You never stop learning if you’re doing it right.

Other stuff

Cast a broad cultural net. Read a range of books, watch obscure films, expose yourself to weird art. Do everything you can to grow out of that game developer rut where the same three or four movies (Star Wars, Aliens, Blade Runner, etc) are all you ever draw inspiration from.

The other part of “knowing what you love” is being genuinely critical of games. Know what you don’t like as well and be able to articulate why. Develop a taste that’s unique compared to other gamers.

There’s no substitute for learning via making things, but some theory helps too for balance – there are only a few things written on game design that I would consider useful to someone just starting out. One of them is the “Mechanics / Dynamics / Aesthetics” framework, which you can read about on Marc LeBlanc’s site. Some of what I’ve been saying here, about how all parts of a game’s design are connected, goes back to that.

As far as formal education goes I’m from the era when there were no, or very few, schools teaching game or level design specifically, so I can’t comment directly on which schools if any are decent. I went to an art school, learned a lot of valuable things that were completely unrelated to game design, started making levels in my spare time and eventually got my first industry job right at the end of my senior year.

Other people start off in computer science, learn to program well and come into design that way. Still others come up from QA (Quality Assurance) testing, and succeed via their hands-on experience with what makes games compelling.

Lastly, I’ve touched mainly on level design here. If you’re more interested in general game design – the “core rules” kind of thing I mentioned – I might recommend a different path to building your skills. I’d be happy to go into that side of things if you’d like.

I hope that all this will prove useful to you. Best of luck!