It appears that a major game company, which I would assume is Blizzard, is attempting to design cheating right into its esports platforms, based on a report from Crazy Days and Nights, of all places:

This A list gaming company which is a merger of two big companies has a patent in which their match making services (traditionally random based on certain parameters) can be rigged in order to influence in game purchases. If one reads between the lines, this implies that all random events in their games are determined server side.

The ramifications of said patent were present for all to see at the online collectible card game world championship in 2019. In said tournament, the company fully rigged random results left and right in order to obtain political favor with China. This incident occurred within a few weeks after the company banned multiple players for speaking out against Chinese oppression of Hong Kong.

Examples of rigged events on behalf of the Chinese player included always having certain key cards in her hand by X turn, always going second when playing a deck that greatly benefits from going second, or random results from cards played always swinging significantly in her favor.

Many people who watched the live stream of the event suspected the fix was in, but had no proof. It is unknown if the player herself was in on it (assuming no due to innocent until proven guilty).

This is potentially the worst scandal in esports history.

Here’s the patent that can prove the fix is in. The one that by reading between the lines, a lot can be inferred. I also quoted some of the more disturbing passages that prove that the company can rig random events (quotes are about matchmaking, which is supposed to be random).

“In another example, if a player has been performing poorly (e.g., getting killed at a rate higher than the player's historical rate), the scoring engine may dynamically adjust one or more coefficients to match the player in a game that will improve the player's performance. For example, the player may be matched with easier opponents, matched with better teammates, and/or placed in a game that is more tailored to the player's preferences (e.g., players that play in games more closely aligned with their preferences tend to perform better).

To fine-tune the matchmaking process, the system may include an analytics and feedback engine that analyzes player and match data to determine whether a given match was good. A match may be deemed "good" when a player is determined to have enjoyed gameplay associated with the match based on one or more quality factors that are used as a proxy for player satisfaction. The quality factors may include, for example, a duration of a gameplay session (e.g., via analysis of player historical data), player psychological state (e.g., frustration level), and/or other information.”

I don't see how this is going to be legal, much less even remotely acceptable to the players being manipulated by the patented algorithms. 

DIVINE RIGHT is not the only board-and-counters game we are currently developing. Once we have the counters done and refined for VASSAL, we will start looking for playtesters interested in playtesting WAR LEADER, which can be thought of as an advanced tactical combat game that is to fantasy combat what ASL is to WWII infantry combat. We're looking at it as a system that will initially be constructed for the world of Selenoth, but will allow modules of different fantasy worlds to be developed, so the same system can be applied to scenarios involving everything from the Uruk-Hai to the Cauldron Born, the White Walkers, and the goblins of Zorn.

Elder Scrolls Online is currently one of the most popular MMOs with over 15 million players and while I’m sure there are many reasons for its remarkable success, I believe one is that the world is carefully crafted and not just made.

While exploring one of the many dungeon delves across Tamriel, I noticed that the bandits who lived and would soon die by my hand had done their laundry. It was hanging up between a few tents with a desk in it, near some barrels, weapon rack, cooking fire, and various other details like a very nice and out of place chair—all stolen no doubt.  

It was completely unnecessary and they could have had the NPC bandits just standing around near some crates, barrels and maybe a fire and nobody would have complained. Zenimax, was not content with that level of detail and immersion so I carefully made my way around the dungeon, slaughtering its inhabitants as I went, to see the details. Remarkably, this sort of immersive detail was scattered throughout a simple dungeon delve.

I believe there is a very valuable lesson for any writer, dungeon master, game developer, or cartographer: the little details make the world. This isn’t to say you always have to mention the laundry, but adding small details instantly adds to believability and immersion.

Think about the most popular fantasy worlds like Middle Earth, Azeroth, the Imperium of Man, Gotham, Krynn, the Star Wars universe, Narnia, Hybora, Westeros, and Tamriel (Skyrim at least), and they are all filled with depth starting with small details. So take a moment and add a few small things to your world if you are creating one, or at least stop and smell the fresh laundry before continuing the slaughter.

 

Game Design legend Chris Crawford explains a fundamental mistake made by many game designers:

One of my most deeply-held beliefs recently gelled for me. Throughout my career, I have devoted my most serious design efforts towards working out the algorithms that form the foundation of my games. My thinking here is so deeply held that only recently have I realized that other people don’t think that way. They think about games or interactive storytelling in terms of graphics, mechanics, user experience, gameplay, and all manner of other minor details. They seem to think that game design and interactive storytelling are just a matter of putting all the right features in place.

Frankenstein’s Mistake

To make my point, I’ll use an analogy based on the Frankenstein meme. The basic strategy used by Dr. Frankenstein was to stitch together a lot of pieces of the body (features) and then ‘animate’ them with electricity. To him, a human being is a collection of pieces: arms, legs, kidneys, lungs, heart, brain, and so forth. Just put them together, give them a jolt of electricity, and you’ve got yourself a human being. 

That’s entirely wrong, and it could never work, because the human body is not a collection of pieces; it’s a system of processes. To build a human body, you start with the most elementary processes: cell metabolism. Once you’ve got the biochemistry of a cell working, then you have to design lots of specialized cells: muscle cells, cells that manufacture and secrete special hormones, nerve cells, blood cells, and on and on. 

Once you’ve developed the ability to manufacture all the different kinds of cells, you need to start assembling them system by system rather than piece by piece. Perhaps you start by putting together a skeletal system, then adding a circulatory system, a nervous system, musculature… things get very complicated here. But the key point is that you build it system by system rather than piece by piece.

In exactly the same manner, games and interactive storytelling are not assemblages of features, they are systems of processes. People do build Frankenstein games by just stitching together a bunch of features, but the results are as clumsy and stupid as the Frankenstein monster was. If you want to do it right, you’ve got to stop thinking in terms of the conventional features listed above and instead think in terms of the processes that you will build into the design.

What he's talking about here includes my observations on imitative design, but he goes much deeper than that superficial categorization. What he's saying is that it is the interlocking elements that go into the various features of the game, all of which ultimately depend upon the algorithms that create them, that should be the the designer's focus. This simultaneously requires an ability to think in both holistic and highly detailed and technical terms, which is why there simply aren't very many good game designers out there.

To the extent that Crawford believes it is necessary for the designer to write the algorithms, or even comprehend the math underlying them - and I am not saying he does, I'm am only addressing the theoretical possibility - I would tend to disagree. But the designer needs, at the very least, to understand the purpose and the output of the algorithms that underlie the systems of his design.

I interviewed game designer Chris Taylor, an industry friend since the early 1990s, in April 2007 for DEVELOP Magazine.

Chris Taylor is the founder of Gas Powered Games and the designer of hits such as the Total Annihilation and Dungeon Siege series.  His latest game is Supreme Commander, the new RTS which is topping the sales charts as game industry pros congregate at GDC.  

A lot of people were under the impression that the possibilities of the RTS were pretty much played out by now. Obviously, you didn't agree and the sales figures tend to back you up.

I knew that there were so many more things we could do with the genre. In Supreme Commander, the key design element was the Strategic Zoom, as the ability to zoom in and out combined with the bigger maps allowed for more actual strategy. Supreme Commander is unique because it's actually the only strategic game in the genre. It’s not focused on the tactical side like most. The difference is important--strategy is what happens before the battle, tactics is what happens during them. Strategy is Eisenhower planning for the 10 months before D-Day. Then the troops hit the beach and everything is decided in a matter of minutes. That's what it's like in most RTS games, where you're thrust right into the tactics.

You have been one of the most consistently successful designers of the post-id era. And yet whenever you are interviewed, you seem to be disappointed about your inability to fully execute on your designs.

 I aspire to give each gamer the greatest game ever, the best thing that they can possibly take home from the store in a box. I really want them to take it home and have a crazy, over-the-top experience. That's not realistic, though, there's just too many constraints built into the industry to ever give that pure unedited, flawless vision. And yet, I will never stop aspiring to deliver it.

How do you go about shooting for that experience despite the constraints?

I think the key is to surround yourself with the best and most-talented people you can get your hands on. I've learned that I've got to go out and pull in the best people and sell them on my vision. Without that, you're done. You cannot do it on your own.

How do you know where to draw the line between your design vision and the reality of production?

Today, with all the processes we have in place, it's become pretty clear. In the old days, the reason we had so many time and cost overruns is that we didn't know how to go about managing the process. Now, when someone suggests a change, we know what the calendar and dollar implications for hitting the milestones will be. I think it's good, though, it's healthy. 

What is your biggest regret from Dungeon Siege II? How about from Supreme Commander?

The intro, the tutorial area should have been smaller and tighter, if not taken out entirely. We should have thrust the player right into the action. Instead, we chased the whole tutorial thing and it was wrong. It was bad. I don't have many regrets about Commander, although I wish we'd had more time to fine-tune things and reduce the system requirements. That's not a problem over time, obviously, but right now I really wish we could have hit a lower spec coming out of the gate.

You've spoken previously about wanting to add more modding capacity to Supreme Commander. Was that an important part of your design concept? 

I wanted it from day one. I love the mod community, and the mod manager is baked right into the game. We'll continue to support their efforts, and we're going to keep providing the hooks they need to make those mods.

Do you have any intention of getting involved in the MMO space in the future?

I have some ideas, but if I'm going to get into that space, it's got to be a radical, inspired change. I don't want to do just another one. I'm kind of done with copying existing genres and adding a twist to it. That being said, you can copy ideas, and with one small change in the genetic code you can change the outcome entirely. 

How do you feel about the transition from the very small production team you had when working on Hardball II compared to the size of the teams you are currently overseeing? 

You can build these really huge, comprehensive games now. The challenge is holding the vision throughout the team, evangelizing and reinforcing the vision. But if you take your eye off the ball, you will create enormous production problems for everyone. You have to stay on top of them. People are complex, and they need leadership and vision.

You've said that the era of the giant single-player RPG is over. Obviously, MMOs play a role in that, but is there anything more to it?

It's not just MMOs, it's the idea of communications and community. I think that the feeling of community and the pleasure of playing together with people, even with just one other person, is so compelling that going back to the big solo RPG is hard to envision. There will be exceptions, of course, someone will probably come up with a new and really compelling gameplay mechanic. But then, someone else will add a multiplayer twist to it and trump it again.

 As I was working on deepening the magic system for WARLEADER and increasing the number of available spells, it suddenly occurred to me that the game could be just as reasonably described as tactical Master of Magic as fantasy Advanced Squad Leader. This conceptual breakthrough will not only aid in the development of the rules, but should make the game more marketable as well.

DEVELOP, June 2007

I received a lovely email last week. It wasn’t long, only three words, but what it lacked in quantity it more than made up for in quality, for there are few sweeter sights than the magic words: ‘They approved it’. But getting from conceiving the initial design concept to receiving final development approval can be a longer and more arduous process than most would-be designers imagine, assuming that one is fortunate enough to get there at all.

The first thing to realise is that there is a substantial difference between an idea for a game and a game design concept. Ideas are worth little in themselves, as any experienced designer can attest, far too many people readily volunteer their unsolicited ideas for ‘what would be a really great game’. These ideas are only valuable for momentary amusement, as a little examination usually shows that the idea not only would not be a great game, but often isn’t even a game at all.

Seriously, ‘what if you were, like, a dinosaur, only in outer space’ is not a game idea. (1) What is the object of the game? (2) How is success defined? (3) Why would this be fun? If the idea does not at least implicitly answer these questions, it is not a concept that can serve as the basis for a successful game design. 

The game must be inherent in the idea. For example, consider how these two classic games can be identified from the way in which their designers answered the questions: 1. a) consuming dots; b) escaping the premises. 2. a) clearing the level by consuming all the dots; b) finding the exit and surviving to reach it. 3. a) pursuing monsters provide a dynamic challenge to eating all the dots; c) hordes of monsters block the exit route and require copious violence to remove the obstruction.

These answers are much more meaningful from a design perspective than simply saying, ‘imagine you’re a yellow circle’ or ‘suppose the player is a space marine’. And yet, you’d be surprised at how many designers still make their pitch in terms of the experiential reference instead of explaining the basic game concepts.

As with any other industry, personal contacts are the single most important aspect of selling a game design. You can’t sell a design to someone you’ve never met, and the sheer quantity of designs being submitted to various publishing houses preclude them from taking the unsolicited slush pile very seriously. Around five per cent of designs submitted get approved, so it’s not just important, it is vital to spend some time doing market research, learning who is responsible for the various levels of the decision-making process at the different publishing houses, and determining which genres are of interest to the various publishers.

It’s an especially good idea to discover what games have been produced in the past by the executive producers and vice presidents, because there’s no point in trying to present a Gears of War-style game to an executive whose resume indicates a strong interest in adventure titles. Every executive has his own preferences and biases, and if you can reasonably align your design with his historical preferences, your chances of success will be much greater.

Keep in mind that less is often more when it comes to a game design submission. Publishers don’t make their decisions based on 300-page design documents, but on ten-page summaries. They’re looking more to get a general sense of the game’s basic concepts and its sales potential than they are to learn precisely how the various mechanics are going to work, so investing a few hundred dollars in artwork that accurately conveys a sense of your vision can be an effective tactic. But you’d still better know your mechanics too, because somebody’s going to ask about them at some point.

Finally, the most important thing to keep in mind is not to get too caught up in your one great idea. If at first you can’t sell your game, put it on the back burner and occupy your mind with designing another one. Timing is everything and what looks like a hopelessly unsaleable game can turn out to be a prospective triple-A design a few years later. Later this year, I expect to sign a design with a major console publisher that I first drew up five years ago. Patience isn’t merely a virtue for the game designer, it’s part of his essential skill set.

 From the WARLEADER rulebook:

6.3  ATTACK RESOLUTION:  Melee combat attacks are resolved by adding together the total number of AF belonging to all attacking units in the hex.  This total is then modified by the Attack Facing modifier, when applicable, to determine the final AF strength of the attack.  Subtracted from this final AF strength is the total number of DF belonging to all the defending units in the hex being attacked, modified by any applicable Defense Facing modifier.  Make a DR, add any applicable DRM from the effects of terrain, spells, leadership, or other combat modifiers, then cross-index the adjusted DR with the applicable AF-DF column on the CRT to determine the results of the attack.  The attacker uses the rightmost column of the CRT containing a number that does not exceed the AF-DF number of the attack.  Any extra AF have no effect and are lost.

6.31  #CAS:  As many defending units as the number indicated (#) take Casualties, (defender’s choice); all other units in the attacked hex must take a Morale Check equal to the number of casualties indicated.  

6.32  NMC:  Normal Morale Check. Each defending unit must attempt to pass a Morale Check by making a DR less than the Morale of the unit, best leaders first; those which fail take Casualties.  A unit which rolls exactly the number of its Morale suffers a Pin/Retreat result instead.

6.33  #MC (1,2,3,4):  Same as the NMC, but ten times the number preceding the MC are added to the DR.

6.34  NPR:  Normal Pin/Retreat Check. Each defending unit must attempt to pass a Pin/Retreat Check by making a DR less than or equal to the Morale of the unit, best leaders first; units that fail this DR must Retreat if the NPR was a result of being attacked in melee combat.  Units which fail an NPR as a result of a ranged combat attack are Pinned.  

6.35  #PR (1,2,3,4): Same as the NPR, but ten times the number preceding the PR are added to the DR.

In the interest of comprehension, I'll include a sub-section from the next section. 

7.13  CASUALTIES (CAS):  Casualties are considered to be automatically failed MCs.  A Casualty is a negative one level change in a unit’s status, progressing downward in four levels for GC: Fit, Shaken, Broken, and Fleeing.  It takes four Casualties to completely eliminate one Fit GC.  Since there are only two status levels for IC: Fit and Broken, it takes two Casualties to eliminate one Fit IC. 

The objective here is to simulate the degradation of the unit's fitness for combat, which is ultimately more related to morale and a willingness to hold its position than the mere number of dead and wounded. One thing that rapidly becomes clear from reading military histories is that it was much more common for defeated armies to fade away than be slaughtered in their ranks; the dreadful lethality of Cannae was a rare exception, not a rule. In Machiavelli's History of Florence, he records many battles between thousands of soldiers in which the dead could be counted on two hands.

This system also allows for fairly rapid counter updates without requiring any additional counters being added to the stack, with the exception of the Pinned state.

Game design legend and CGDC founder Chris Crawford explains the optimal way to get into the computer game industry as a game designer. And although he later reconsidered his position on studying game design in college in light of the various programs that are now available, I still think the original advice is essentially correct.

Here’s how it works. First, get yourself a real education, not some one-night-stand training. Go to a real school and major in anything except games. Almost anything will do: biology, physics (that’s where I got my start), art, literature, history, psychology, linguistics. Just make sure that you get what used to be called a “liberal education”. Take lots of courses outside your major. And yes, you should probably minor in computer science.

On the side, you should be experimenting with building games. Don’t go for the snazzy graphics just yet – that can always be slapped onto the design. You want to concentrate on the guts of the game, the architecture and game mechanics. How do the little gears and levers inside the game operate? Don’t try to build games that are just as good as the commercial games – for crying out loud, those games have dozens of people working on them; anything that little ole you can do will look pretty pathetic next to those extravaganzas. Think of your process as rather like building a car. Don’t worry about the chrome and the paint job just now; you want to concentrate on learning how to put pistons together, how the valves operate, what the carburetor does. You want to build little go-karts, not shiny Rolls-Royces. They’re all experimental; you should never think that your designs have any commercial potential. Build them and throw them away. Creativity requires you to murder your children. If you are so enthralled with your designs that you can’t let them go, then you’ll never have the hard-bitten creativity of a truly good designer.

Meanwhile, keep building the intellectual foundations for your creativity. There’s no way you can compete with the formidable creativity of a seasoned game designer, so for now, concentrate on building your strength. Hey, even Neo couldn’t take on Agent Smith until he had spent enough time building the foundations of his skills. Learn everything you can. Do not graduate without having examined every bookshelf in your library; you’d be surprised what interesting things you will stumble on in those dusty aisles.

Once you get out of college, don’t rush into the games biz. Get a real job at a real company and earn some money, but keep expanding your education. You’ll learn a lot about organizational behavior and how to handle yourself in a corporate environment. You’ll learn how and when to stand up to your boss – which is rarely, by the way. And you’ll prepare yourself to swim with the sharks when you do enter the games biz.

But continue to work on games in your spare time. Build lots of different games go-karts, trying out each one for its handling, its speed, and its other characteristics. Once you’ve gotten six or ten games built, you might want to think about putting together a substantial project, but still on your own. Recruit a few like-minded folk to help you out, and build something really impressive. Show it off to the world. Then you can use that game as your resume when you do apply for a position in the games industry. If your game is good enough, you’ll get a job as an actual game designer, not some dime-a-dozen minion. You’ll still be a junior assistant to the assistant game designer, but you’ll be in the right place, and if you work hard and do your job well, you might actually have a future in the games biz.

I realize that this is not what you wanted to hear. What you want to hear is a quick fix. Take such-and-such courses and you’ll be guaranteed a high-paid job with a big office, all the best computers, and complete creative control. Sure, everybody wants that – but nobody gets it. Anybody who tells you that kind of story is a shyster trying to get your money. The sad fact is that the pioneering days of game design are over and it’s now a big industry; nobody gets “discovered” and turned into a superstar overnight. It’s a long, long slog for beginners.

That is pretty much the way that I got into designing games myself, although I went directly to lead designer courtesy of starting my own company with my best friend after studying economics and history, then spending two post-college years in the graphics hardware industry. The point is that having a base of knowledge that is broader than a player's perspective on the most popular games is vital for learning the holistic view that is necessary if you're going to design anything that is more than a slavish copy of a game whose mechanics you don't fully understand. 

Nearly two decades ago, I began designing Warleader, a tactical fantasy game inspired by Advanced Squad Leader. While I never finished the design, the world I created for it turned into Selenoth, which served as the backdrop for the Arts of Dark and Light novels, including Summa Elvetica and A Throne of Bones.

Now that we're working on both computer and board game editions of Divine Right, I had a great conversation with Glenn Rahman concerning a tactical adaptation of Divine Right, tentatively called Divine General. He was enthusiastic about the concept of combining ASL-style tactical combat with his world of Minaria, which led me to the idea that Warleader could be converted from a single world setting into a generic tactical combat system for which modules dedicated to different fantasy worlds could be created. The idea is to start with the board games and VASSAL adaptations, then eventually make the transition to full-blown computer games.

It's an idea, anyhow. Here are sections 2 and 3 from the Warleader rules, which addresses the components and the sequence of play.

2.  COMPONENTS

Four 8”x11” full-color mapsheets

Four sheets of cardboard playing counters

One 30-page rulebook

One 8”x11” page of charts

Two ten-sided dice

2.1 MAPBOARDS:  The geomorphic mapboards represent the terrain.  Each mapboard is divided into hexagonal sections called hexes.  Each hex represents a piece of land approximately fifty yards across.  The various images shown on the mapsheets represent different terrain elements which can effect line-of-sight, movement, and combat results. 

 2.11 HEX COORDINATES:  On each of the four mapsheets, every hex is marked with a unique alpha-numeric identifier.  If the mapsheet is placed lengthwise, the upper-leftmost hex will be marked A1 and the lower-rightmost hex will be marked K20.  These hex coordinates are used for unit placement and reference purposes.

2.2 COUNTERS: The cardboard counters representing troop formations, individuals, and creatures are known as units.  Other counters used to provide information during the game are known as markers.

2.21 CLASSES:  Units are divided into five classes: Infantry, Cavalry, Artillery, Individual, and Creature.  These classes are divided further into specialized types based on Allegiance.

2.22 INDIVIDUAL COUNTERS:  Counters representing Leader, Hero, and Magic-User units are known as Individual Counters.  (IC).  Counters representing Infantry, Cavalry, and Artillery Counters are known as Group Counters.  (GC).  Units of the Creature class may be represented by IC or GC, depending on the specific unit.  

2.3 UNIT INFORMATION:  Each unit counter is marked with several numbers and symbols that convey specific information about the unit.

2.31 QUALITY:  Elite, Veteran, Green, and Conscript.  Units which have a Quality rating consisting of a number instead of a letter are considered to be Veteran units if the number is greater than three, otherwise they are considered to be Green.

2.32 ATTACK FACTOR:  The leftmost of the three numbers across the bottom of a unit counter is the unit’s Attack Factor, (AF), which represents the unit’s ability to attack in combat, prior to any modification.

2.33 DEFENSE FACTOR: The middle of the three numbers across the bottom of a unit counter is the unit’s Defense Factor, (DF), which represents the unit’s ability to defend in combat, prior to any modification.

2.34 MOVEMENT FACTOR:  The rightmost of the three numbers across the bottom of a unit counter is the unit’s Movement Factor, indicating how many Movement Points may be spent by the unit in one turn.

2.34 MORALE LEVEL:  The number on the right side of the counter is the unit’s Morale Level indicating the unit’s ability to perform as a combat unit.  There are four Morale Levels, Fit, Shaken, Broken, and Fleeing.  When this number is exceeded during a DR due to a Morale Check, the unit is considered to have taken casualties and its status is decreased by one level.

2.36 RANGED ATTACK CAPABILITY:  Each unit counter is marked with numbers and/or symbols that convey information about the unit's ranged attack capabilities.

2.37 LEADERSHIP:  Each unit counter is marked with several numbers and symbols that convey information about the unit's ability to rally itself without the benefit of a Leader counter.

2.38 MAGICAL CAPABILITY:  Each unit counter is marked with several numbers and symbols that convey information about the unit's magical capabilities.

2.4 BLOOD AND BONE DICE:  The ten-sided red die is henceforth referred to as the Blood Die.  The ten-sided white die is henceforth referred to as the Bone Die.  The significance of these distinct identities will be explained later in the rulebook.

2.41 THE DOUBLE-ZERO:  A roll of the Blood and Bone dice resulting in a matched pair of zeros equals zero, not one hundred.  The highest possible unmodified roll is a ninety-nine.  However, the double-zero is a special roll that may lead to some unique results. 

3.  SEQUENCE OF PLAY

3.1 PLAYER TURN:  Each Game Turn is divided into two Player Turns.  The player who controls the current Player Turn is designated the Attacker for the duration of the Player Turn; the other player is designated the Defender.

​ 3.11 ORDER PHASE (OP):  Broken and disrupted troops are rallied.  Spell point counters are distributed.  Prayers are made. Existing spells are updated. Supernatural beings make Planar Checks.

​ 3.12 SKIRMISH PHASE (SP):  Attacker’s magic users may cast spells. Attacker’s range troops may fire. Attacker’s cavalry may declare charge.

​ 3.13 MOVEMENT PHASE (MP):  Attacker’s magic users may cast spells. Attacker’s cavalry charges executed. Attacker may move troops. Attacker may build field defenses.  Defender’s range troops may fire.

​ 3.14 DEFENSE PHASE (DP):  Defender’s range troops may fire. Defender’s magic users may cast spells.

​ 3.15 BATTLE PHASE (BP):  Melee combat resolved. Attacker’s magic users may cast spells.  Defender’s magic users may cast spells. Attacker’s range troops may fire

​ 3.16 RETREAT PHASE (RP):  Broken troops must retreat. Fleeing troops must flee.  Units marked with a Retreat counter must retreat.  Supernatural beings removed from board

​ 3.17 ADVANCE PHASE (AP): Attacker’s Fit troops may advance one hex into adjacent, open hexes in their Front facing.  Attacker’s non-Broken troops may rotate one hexside.

3.18 SECOND PLAYER TURN: Upon completion of the Attacker’s Advance Phase, the first Player Turn is ended.  The Attacker now becomes the Defender, the Defender becomes the Attacker, and a new Player Turn begins, repeating the above sequence.  Upon the completion of the second Player Turn, the current Game Turn is ended and a new Game Turn begins.

The man known as the Dean of American Game Design toils alone, unfunded and underappreciated, in a forest in Oregon. He has renounced games; or perhaps, one might say, games have renounced him.

Who is Chris Crawford, and why does he toil alone? 

Is he Don Quixote, a dreamer slaying dragons that exist only in his own imagination? Is he Albert Einstein, an unsurpassed genius fruitlessly spending his winter years chasing an impossible grand theory while his peers reap high praise for incremental improvements in proven fields? Or is he Miyamoto Musashi, a peerless master soon to emerge from the wilderness of his isolation with brilliant insights into his craft?

I’ve hunted him down to find out.

A Portrait of the Designer as a Young Man

I didn’t know where to start, so I started at the beginning and asked Crawford about his life before games. He didn’t say much.

“I studied physics, got my masters in physics, and then I taught physics for two years. Then I moved back to California and had a teaching job that was kind of crazy. I did high school assemblies on the Energy Crisis.” He was quick to add that “I was working on games pretty hard, even then. I built my first computer game back in 1976 on an IBM 1120.”

Crawford joined Atari in 1979, where he created two educational simulation games, Energy Czar and Scram, for the Atari Home Computer System, before he was promoted to manage programmer training. n his spare time, he created Eastern Front (1941), which went on to become his first best-seller.

Eastern Front (1941) was one of Crawford’s most noteworthy creations so I decided to press him for details. “Eastern Front was a creative implementation of an obvious idea. ‘Let’s do a good wargame on a computer!’” he said. “Pulling it off involved an awful lot of creativity, but it required tactical creativity as opposed to strategic creativity.”

I was puzzled by what he meant. Crawford has a reputation for being outspoken, but it’s a cryptic sort of outspokenness, profound to the point of incomprehensibility. Talking to him can be like reading A Brief History of Time at 120 words a minute. You always feel like you’re missing something.

“Tactical creativity is implementation creativity. How do we build a good map? How do we move units around? How do we build a good AI system? You already know where you are going and you are just figuring out how to get there.”

“So would you say in today’s game industry we have a lot of tactical creativity and less strategic creativity?” I asked.

“Nowadays the stuff we call creative is tiny, tiny stuff. It’s hard to even call it creative at all. Technically, yes, I see a lot of creativity. But I see almost no design creativity in the stuff that’s coming out there.”

I decided we should review the rest of his work before we moved into philosophy. We got back to the details. After Eastern Front, Crawford created Legionnaire, Gossip, and Excalibur, and wrote The Art of Computer Game Design, the first of his many books. His reasons for the book were intensely introspective.

“I wrote Art of Computer Game Design really as a self-education exercise. The best way to figure something out is to write a book. You don’t realize how ignorant you are until you try to write it down,” he explained. “The book took me a year to write and there isn’t that much prose in it, and that’s because it took me so much time to sort things out.”

The intellectual self-development paid off, as Crawford’s following game, Balance of Power, was his most successful. It sold 250,000 units in 1984 – a staggering number for the time, more so given it was in the Dark Age after Atari had imploded and before Nintendo came onto the scene.

In 1987 Crawford founded the Game Developers Conference, which he would chair for the next seven years. He also created Trust & Betrayal: The Legacy of Siboot. “It’s the game of which I’m most proud,” he said. “Trust & Betrayal went further beyond games than anything else I had done. It had major innovations. If we think of an innovation or creativity as a leap, then Eastern Front had some good sized jumps, Balance of Power some very good sized jumps, and Trust & Betrayal had a bunch of truly mighty leaps. It was completely alien.”

Alien indeed. Trust & Betrayal put the player in the role of an alien acolyte competing against six computer-controlled acolytes of other species for the title of Shepherd. Each of the computer-controlled competitors had a distinct personality and the core of the gameplay was figuring out which ones to ally with and which to oppose. It was a pioneering attempt to put real characters into computer games, relying on artificial personality and language parsing solutions that were innovative or clumsy. No one had ever made a game like it before, nor since.

It sold only 5,000 copies.

Trust & Betrayal was the beginning of the end of Crawford’s pursuit of computer game design. In the eight years prior he had designed twelve games. In the next four, he did just four, and two of them were sequels (Balance of Power II and Patton Strikes Back). The other two were global simulations, both released in 1990: Guns & Butter and Balance of the Planet.

When I asked Crawford about Balance of the Planet all he said was “it was good, but it was not one of my best.” A few years ago, he was not so circumspect. In a 1997 essay, Crawford spoke of his reaction to the release of Balance of the Planet: 

I was so proud of that design! …I wanted to create a game that honestly addressed environmental policy problems, something to show just how powerfully a computer could present a complex issue. I did just that… Yet when I released it to the world, the reaction of industry, press, and consumers was unenthusiastic. Perhaps their reaction is best summarized by a review of Balance of the Planet appearing in Computer Gaming World. The reviewer noted that ‘it is the closest thing to art to be sold as computer entertainment...but it is just not fun...if the game is not fun, it simply wouldn't be right to endorse it...’ Here we have an acknowledgement that Balance of the Planet is some kind of art, yet the review refuses to endorse it because it isn't fun! …perhaps our reviewer would react to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony like this: "Gosh, Mr. Beethoven, your symphony made my heart soar in awe at the majesty of the universe, but you know, it's just not fun. We need some tunes we can dance to, or catchy jingles we can snap our fingers to.

Ulysses

Crawford, I believe, could have endured commercial failure for his artistic work, if he had received critical acclaim as a visionary. But critical condemnation for lack of “fun factor” was too much for him to endure. He left the game industry in 1993, beginning a decade-long odyssey of false starts and fresh ideas that continues to this day.

Crawford announced his departure in a famously histrionic lecture known as the Dragon Speech. “It was the greatest lecture I’ve ever given in my life,” Crawford told me. “It talked about my pursuit of games as an art form, and how I had seen the industry moving away from that dream in the pursuit of money. It had completely discarded any pretense of doing anything worthwhile. It was just pure money-grubbing of the most short-sighted kind. And the industry had no real future with that sort of an attitude. So I decided to just go off and do my own thing.” 

I asked him why it was called the Dragon Speech. “Throughout the lecture I used the rhetorical device of the Dragon as the artistic ideal, with me as Don Quixote – the fool who defies all industry logic and imposes his own reality.”

“I concluded the lecture speaking as Don Quixote. ‘All right, I am leaving the industry. And by leaving the industry I can see the Dragon. I can see him now. Yes, yes, you frighten me, Dragon. You hurt me! I can feel your claws ripping through my soul.’ I almost screamed the words out. It really scared the audience. I pulled out my sword—a real, leaf-bladed sword—held it up, and shouted “Come Dragon, I shall fight you! CHARGE!’ And went galloping down the lecture hall, ran right out of the door, and never came back. That was how I announced my departure from the games industry.”

If Crawford’s departure was larger than life, his post-departure ambitions were even larger. Crawford’s goal was to create a new art form: Interactive storytelling. “I thought it would take me eighteen months, maybe two years, to put together interactive storytelling. I’ve been working on this for eleven, or twelve years now.”

What exactly is interactive storytelling? “Games about people instead of about things,” explained Crawford. “It’s very difficult to understand. It’s just like the problem they had with the cinema – it took them about fifteen years to figure out what cinema really is. Around the turn of the century, the thought was that cinema was like a play with the camera sitting where the audience sits. That’s where we are with interactive storytelling – people can’t conceive of it.”

The closest anyone has come, said Crawford, is an interactive story called Façade (http://www.interactivestory.net/), by Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern. Façade has been broadly praised by mainstream commentators such as the New York Times, which called it “the future of video games,” as well as by Crawford, who called it “without a doubt, the best actual working interactive story world yet created.”

Crawford is somewhat more grudging in his praise of Façade in private. “Façade is the only genuine interactive story-telling thingamob out there, but it only demonstrates just how difficult the problem is. The story has only three characters, takes place on a single stage, has a limited repertoire of behaviors… It’s still very good – And it works, which I can’t claim the Erasmatron does. But they defined The Problem more narrowly.”

The Erasmatron is Crawford’s own interactive storytelling technology. And The Problem is the richness of human social interaction.

“Social interaction can’t be built in incrementally,” he explained. “Take romance. You can’t just permit a gesture called Kiss and expect to get some romance in your game. Because romance involves a hell of a lot more than just kissing, it’s a huge array of behaviors. Real social interaction is one giant step that has to be taken at once. You can’t approach it a tiny step at a time.”

Crawford, in other words, seeks to create a platform that encompasses all real human interaction in a computer environment. “I want to bring the whole set of human behaviors in at once, complete in a mathematical sense, covering all dramatically important activities. And the set must be closed, not open ended.”

I asked for more details, and Crawford really started talking. He was theorizing at Faster Than Light speeds, and my note-taking went from inadequate to moot.

“My first solution with Erasmatron was inadequate. I asked too much of storybuilders. The solution I have now is to create a language, ‘Deikto.’ It’s a small language that has only around a thousand words, it’s very skeletal. But it permits you to do anything, describe any human behavior.”

We were looking at samples of Deikto code for a bit when I suddenly realized I’d been interviewing Crawford for almost two hours. I decided to press him for a self-evaluation: “You remind me of Albert Einstein, post-relativity. Have you, like Albert, lost your way?”

Crawford thought for a moment. “I think it’s a fair comparison, me to Einstein, post-relativity theory. I am searching for a grand, unified theory – a grand wonderful solution to all of our problems, and I have not produced an answer yet. The difference is that Einstein really was groping the entire time. He never showed a major step forward. Whereas I am much more confident that Erasmatron will solve the problems. And Mateas and Stern have published a tiny version of Unified Field Theory – so we know it can be done. But it’s weird and immensely difficult. I may not have the strength to pull it off, but I retain great confidence in the likelihood of success.”

It is the peculiar tragedy of genius that the greatest minds of any generation find themselves drawn to challenges that are beyond the limits of their era. Tesla invented the radio and the alternating current before embarking on a fruitless quest for broadcast power. Einstein gave us the special and general theories of relativity before turning his attention to the unified field theory that eluded him to his death. It is quite possible that Chris Crawford, perhaps the most gifted designer of his generation, is destined for a similar fate.

But I actually think not. When Crawford emerges from the wilderness of his isolation, like Musashi with the Book of Five Rings, count me as unsurprised.

This interview was originally published on The Escapist on 27 September 2005 under my pseudonym Max Steele.

This interview with Brad Wardell of Stardock, designer of Galactic Civilizations and publisher of Sins of a Solar Empire and Sorceror King, took place as part of the DevGame course on March 4, 2016:

VD: Today we're talking with Brad Wardell. He is the founder and CEO of Stardock. He is one of the industry's leading designers of what we call 4X strategy games, which I will let him explain what they are. He is the designer of the Galactic Civilizations series and the publisher of Sins of a Solar Empire. He has also worked with our old friend Chris Taylor on Demigod and his latest game is Sorcerer King. 

Brad: Hi, glad to be here.

VD: First of all, I want to point out that Brad is an excellent designer. I've got several of his games. I've played both Galactic Civilizations II and Sins of a Solar Empire, which PC Gamer just last week recently named two of the 25 all-time top strategy games. Brad, congratulations for that.

Brad: Ah, thanks.

VD: Now what exactly is a 4X strategy game? Why has that become a category in its own right?

Brad: A 4X game follows a very specific pattern. If you think of chess, or any number of common strategy genres, they all have their own style. 4X has a very specific style which stands for eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate. So the beginning of the 4X is always about starting with very little, you grow into something, you find your opponents and then you use what you have to try to beat them. There are a lot of other terms for them, such as “empire builders”, for example, but overall 4X has come to mean a specific strategy genre that includes not just Galactic Civilizations, but Master of Orion, Civilization, and various other titles.

VD: Now, we have studied the history of games throughout the course, so I'm interested in knowing which strategy games were most influential on you in developing Galactic Civilizations.

Brad: Well, clearly Civilization. When I did Galactic Civilizations, I was still in college and very naïve on IP laws, clearly. It was a different time in 1992, and I wanted something like Civilization, but in space. So, I came up with the radical name of Galactic Civilizations. That, obviously, had a pretty tremendous impact on the initial start up of the game. And over the past 20 years, numerous other titles have had influences here and there on the development of the series.

VD: You and I are pretty close in age, so what were some of the strategy games that you were playing back in 1992?

Brad: There was Spaceward Ho, certainly Empire.

VD: Were you ever into the board-and-counter wargames or were you more of a computer strategy guy?

Brad: There was always Risk, but back in those days when I would be playing a non-computer game it was usually Dungeons & Dragons.

VD: So you're more of a role-playing game guy rather than a war gamer?

Brad: Yeah. I'm less into the Panzer General sort of thing, I like history and all, but I'm not into it just for fighting wars.

VD: So, getting outside the strategy genre, what were some of your favorite games when you were younger?

Brad: I would say Archon. This was the Commodore 64 era. There was Zork and the Ultima series. When I got to PC, it was Star Control and the Wing Commander series.

VD: What system did you usually play on?

Brad: Well I started on the Commodore 64. That was my first computer.When I got a PC in 1989,  I got a 286 which was just a PC clone.. I'm trying to think of the very first games for the PC I might've played. It would've been an Ultima.

VD: How did you go from doing 4X strategy to designing business games like Business Tycoon and Entrepreneur? It's a little unusual to just hop into the business-type of games. What inspired you to do that? Was it your own experience as entrepreneur?

Brad: Running a business is often like a strategy game because you have very finite resources; you have competitors and you have to win "territories" in the form of physical geography or market share. So, it ironically just worked out that those kinds of games or those businesses lend themselves to turning into strategy games.

VD: You've moved from doing science fiction with Galactic Civilizations into doing 4X fantasy with Fallen Enchantress and Sorcerer King. What were some of the challenges that were involved in moving from science fiction to fantasy?

Brad: The biggest one for us was going from a space-based game like Galactic Civilizations II to a land-based game like Fallen Enchantress. Specifically, the terrain. You are dealing with the ground. And that turned out to be a huge challenge for us because we had never had to deal with it before. We had never really run up against things like video memory or the limitations of DirectX in terms of how to make a mountain. You think about it, of course, but how you make something like a mountain can be limiting based on DirectX, because there's only so many points you can put on there. So that turned out to be a huge hurdle for us, and that really bit us in the butt, because, at the time, we didn't do our homework on what we could and couldn't do with the current technology.

VD: Interesting. That's very timely because we're going to be getting into things like polygon count and so forth when we talk about art later today. Now, in the publishing world, the market for fantasy is considerably larger than the one for science fiction. Is that true in games as well, or do you find that science fiction usually outsells fantasy?

Brad: I read mostly science fiction myself. In the game arena, I would say science fiction tends to be a bit ahead of fantasy, only because the problem people run into with fantasy is that they think fantasy means medieval Europe with magic. And that's not a just a problem in terms of the designer's limits, it's more the expectations of the public. If you move too far outside the box, you are punished for it in the marketplace. Whereas in science fiction, you have a little bit more room to breathe.

VD: Speaking of moving outside the box, I was really fascinated to see how you took a crowdsourcing approach to the Sorcerer King quests. How did that work out, and what were some of the challenges that came about from doing it that way?

Brad: Yeah, that was a very fun and interesting experience. It is one that I would like to do again in the future because it worked out so well. Essentially, the problem we ran into came down to the budget. We are an independent developer, the team size for Sorcerer King was like six people, so it was pretty small. It had a relatively small budget, but we needed to have lots and lots of quests. So one of the ways to do that was to say, look, here's a tool, let's make quests, and we will hang out on Skype together and you send in your quests and I'll sort through them, and we will put them in the game then come up with some way to give goodies or some sort of reward in exchange. There was no competition because there was no budget for any of this.

VD: Right, but you are able to compensate them by in-game rewards and that sort of thing.

Brad: And there were credits, of course, as a lot of people are trying to build up their portfolios. But most the time, for most of them, it was obviously just for fun. What I'd like to do in the future - and I actually just came back from Valve where we discussed this - is that I'd like to see a system, an apprentice/journeyman/master system on Steam where novice developers can start selling their stuff and work their way up. It would be a marketplace that didn't only consist of premium stuff but rather, people worked their way towards that if they want to do something more than just casual modding. With that sort of marketplace for user-created content, I think players would end up with so much more content for their favorite games.

VD: That sounds similar to what we're doing where with DEVGAME. We've got six different dev intern teams in the group here as part of this course.

Brad: Cool.

VD: So you've already answered my next question, which is how large your development teams are compared to the past. It sounds as if  they are actually much the same size they used to be back in the day. What sort of range are your budgets these days?

Brad: It depends on the game. Sorcerer King was an unusually small project, but I would say on the minimum side, four developers are required. Every game you need an engineer, preferably two. You need at least a couple of artists to make the kind of games that we like to make. And on the high-end, you can get into over a dozen people but we don't have any games that involve dozens and dozens of people or anything like that.

VD: And how long are your development periods normally?

Brad: We try to aim for somewhere between 24 and 36 months.

VD: That long? I didn't realize that.

Brad: Yeah, we have games and development that won't ship until 2018.

VD: Wow, fantastic. Now, this is something that I'd like to ask every designer or producer, what do you consider to have been your best design or development decision, and what was your worst one?

Brad: The worst ones are always easier for me. I would say the best one was actually The Political Machine. The original Political Machine was supposed to be a game like You Don't Know Jack, which was a trivia game of some years ago. 

VD: I remember that one.

Brad: The game was mostly political trivia.We were committed to ship this game at retail in June with Ubisoft, and a couple of months before, we were playing our internal beta and it was just not any fun. It was terrible. So at the last second, we redesigned the game into more of a strategy game, with each state being a territory that you had to capture for its electoral votes. We did all that right at the end and rewrote it in about a month. I don't recommend that as a good thing in general, but that was what saved that game. 

On the bad side, Elemental from start to finish was just a disaster. That was the game that preceded Fallen Enchantress and people don't usually hear about it except for when people are trying to criticize me on the Internet. That was a project where we were so in love with all of the things that we wanted to do with the game. We wanted to do all this stuff, and we tried, but it turned out the engine just couldn't handle it. It wasn't even a matter of the hardware, it just turned out that DirectX could only have so many vertices and you could only do so much with it. We ran into all of these artificial problems because we had never dug deeply enough into DirectX at the time. At the end, we were chopping this project that was originally going to be a Master of Magic-style game into something that was nothing like what we intended to make, but was what we could get in there and still have the engine work with it.

VD: Yeah, I can imagine where that would be a problem. Sorcerer King is your most recent game and you have two more games coming out soon, can you tell us about those?

Brad: Sure. We shipped Galactic Civilizations III last May. Sorcerer King came out in July. Just this past week, we shipped Galactic Civilizations: Mercenaries and we released Political Machine 2016 last week too. So it's been a pretty busy few months. The next game on the line is Ashes of the Singularity. I'm out here in Maryland working on it until it ships. It's a massive real-time strategy game where you are dealing with thousands of units and you're trying to conquer a world. That is supposed to come out this spring. Also this spring is Offworld Trading Company where you start a company on Mars and are competing with other corporations for dominance of the Martian colony.

VD: Okay, cool. We will keep an eye out for those. Brad, thanks so much for stopping by DEVGAME. I really appreciate it, and we will look forward to speaking again with you soon.

Brad: I appreciate it. Thanks a lot!

Why does one game succeed brilliantly while another game vanishes into obscurity? Why is one game an absolute blast to play while another, very similar game, simply isn't that much fun? It is often easy to understand why a game fails, but it is usually more difficult to ascertain why one game becomes a hit when another does not, epecially when the hit does not feature better features, prettier art, faster performance, or a most distinctive brand than other games in the same genre.

In most cases, success comes down to superior game design, by which I mean the use of game concepts and mechanics that provide the player with a more enjoyable gameplay experience. Game design should never be confused with game development or with production, as it is the aspect of game development that consists of conceiving and articulating ideas that are subsequently turned into functional reality through the process of production.

There are four types of game design.

• Original
• Evolutionary
• Synthetic
• Imitative

While most discussion of game design revolves around its highest form, original design, the fact is that very few game designers will ever rise to the level of a Sid Meier, a Will Wright, or a Peter Molyneux. Most successful games – and most good games – involve either evolutionary or synthetic design. And the reality is that most games that are developed and released are best characterized as the lowest form of game design, imitative design.

There are several reasons for this to be the case. First, imitative designs are easier to conceive, for both the novice game designer as well as the experienced professional. Most of us possess considerably less creative originality than we would like to imagine, and even in the game industry, true originality is as likely to be greeted with skepticism and dismissal as with enthusiasm and support. Second, imitative design is easier to articulate, as it takes considerably less time and effort to write a game design document that can be largely cribbed from another game's manual, or from notes taken while playing another game, than it does to start from scratch with original research, algorithms, and arbitrary values.

Third, imitative design is easier to sell to the development team, to the investors, to the publisher, and often, to the public. Fourth, imitative design is safer. The imitative designer is able to have confidence in the game's mechanics because he has already seen them work.

And yet, even when two or more games are designed in imitation of a successful game, and developed with a reasonably equivalent level of production competence and resources, they often meet with widely varying results. So, in light of the uncomfortable fact that most game developers will, sooner or later, find themselves working on an imitative game, what separates a successful imitation from an unsuccessful one?

Consider the case of the various imitations of one of the most widely imitated games in computer game history, Doom. Doom was revolutionary for its time, is considered to be one of the ten greatest games in computer game history, which sold 2 million copies, distributed another 20 million, and spawned a host of “Doom clones” between 1993 and 1997, including Duke Nukem 3D, Dark Forces, Heretic, Rebel Moon Rising, Rise of the Triad, and CyClones.(1)

All of these games were 2.5D shooters that were, more or less, functionally identical to Doom. Yet the most commercially successful, Duke Nukem 3D, sold 3.5 million copies; considerably more than the 50,000 copies sold by the least successful, CyClones. To understand why these very similar games had such dissimilar results requires understanding the challenges of imitative design.

The primary problem with designing an imitation is that there is often no intrinsic need for the imitation to exist in the first place. Unless the imitation reaches a platform the original cannot reach, or the imitated game cannot fulfill the existing demand it has created, there is no market for the imitator. Why should a gamer play the imitation when the original is available? Space Armada sold one million copies on Intellivision because Atari refused to port Space Invaders to its competitor; would Sonic the Hedgehog have sold as well as it did on the Sega Genesis if Nintendo had made Super Mario World available on the Genesis rather than keeping it exclusive to the SNES?

Exacerbating this problem today is the ability to retroactively add more content to existing games through DLC and updates, which now makes success by imitation even more difficult. After Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning came out, it was not long before Blizzard added an achievements system to World of Warcraft, thereby rendering moot one of the few distinctions between WAR and WoW.

The secondary problem with imitative design is that the imitator seldom understands either the internal game mechanics involved or the necessary tradeoffs that were required in deciding upon them. Even fairly small alterations, made in ignorance, can disrupt the well-honed flow of the original gameplay and make the game feel less fun than the original.

That being said, imitative design can succeed if:

1. the imitator is able to take advantage of a brand that creates independent appeal or creates a market for the game. Example: Dark Forces. Who didn't want to see what Doom-style action in the Star Wars universe would be like?
2. the imitator fully understands the internal workings of the design imitated and is careful to only change superficial elements that don't disrupt or otherwise interfere with the internal mechanics. Consider how different the superficial elements were in Duke Nukem 3D  in comparison with Doom.(2)

DUKE NUKEM 3D

• Character: colorful personality
• Dialogue: sardonic vulgarity
• Genre: cheesy science fiction
• Mood: silly and cocksure
• Environment: Earth and familiar

DOOM

• Character: nameless Doom guy
• Dialogue: shrieking and wailing
• Genre: eldritch horror
• Mood: dark and frightening
• Environment: Hell and alien

The same was not true of the less successful Doom clones; despite having new features like an independent reticule and the ability to look up and down, the generic nature of CyClones meant that, unlike Duke Nukem 3D, first-person shooter fans had little interest in playing it.

Imitative design may not be glamorous of game development, but it has its place in the industry. And if you're going to imitate a successful game, don't settle for a lame and lazy ripoff. Take the trouble to think it through, do it right, and with a little luck, your efforts will be rewarded.

(1) Full Disclosure: I had personal involvement with three of these games. I designed and co-produced Rebel Moon Rising, my company Power of Seven did the music and sound effects for CyClones, and I reviewed Heretic for Computer Gaming World in 1994. 

(2) It has been argued that the addition of features such as swimming and flying permit Duke Nukem 3D to be considered an evolutionary design, but all of the various Doom clones had a number of minor new features that did not fundamentally change the core gameplay mechanics. The fact that the developer was unable to build on the huge success of the game after the technological shift to true 3D graphics also tends to argue against the idea that it was evolutionary.

Game developers are not stupid.  They know that leveling up, increasing numbers, and filling in the bars to completion is inherently satisfying in a staggering amount of players.  When they make endgame content, which in this situation meaning content that comes only when you're at max level, they include all sorts of methods for increasing your own numbers, whether it's grinding reputation, climbing pvp ranks, or acquiring shinier and better gear in places you can only access once you've finished the leveling process.

The smart ones will have these systems running concurrently with the leveling process, so that when leveling abruptly ends, these other systems that incentivize play will remain familiar to the player.  To do otherwise is to have an experience where you play two completely different games, the leveling "tutorial", and the "real game" at the end in which you do completely different things during leveling.  This sort of tonal dissonance between the two sections is very aggravating, and akin to having a nailbiting horror movie end in a ten minute light-hearted slapstick section that intentionally tries to make the previous horror bit pointless.  One of those things for the avant-garde and those bored with the genre, but for people just wanting to enjoy and immerse themselves in what's going on, it's jarring.

In which case you may ask yourself... why halt leveling at all?  Part of it comes down to design choices.  If the game is very strictly gated by levels, allowing uncapped leveling can quickly make any challenge set forth pointless.  To explicate, imagine a single-player game with an RPG-ish structure.  In this game, you are only allowed to set foot in the dragon's lair once you are level 60, and anytime before than that you cannot even enter the zone.  The game will not let you, and even if it did you would very quickly become slaughtered as inherent level differences between targets carry strict penalties.  The game designer for this example included this feature so that players would be compelled to stick only to zones appropriate to their level and not try to level too quickly by fighting enemies a much higher level than them.

At level 60, this fictional dragon in this fictional game is a very tough challenge, and the dev team put a lot of heart, soul and effort into this encounter.  A player trivializing it would basically waste the time they put into making it, in their mind.  Regardless, the player fights the dragon, and finds himself not up to the challenge.  If the player can still level, he can simply grind experience until he holds the advantage and take out the dragon, trivializing the difficulty of the encounter away from execution of game mechanics, into simply spending more time killing what's likely to be far less challenging monsters.  So is the solution simply to water down levels to be far less important?  Not necessarily. 

It all comes back to knowing what kind of game you're making.  In my personal experience as a player, games where levels can make a huge swinging difference are absolutely fine and even great when you're playing games where you're expected to start from the beginning often, such as in roguelikes.  That kind of game, however, is completely different than a game where you're expected to invest a lot of time into a very small set of characters.

Again, there's no particularly good or bad game mechanic, just a good or bad situation to implement them.  They are multiple different tools in your toolbox, and I hope that as you grow as a skilled craftsman, you are able to determine when to use the hammer, and when to use the mallet.

Let's talk AI.

An aspect of gaming that has been there for almost as long as there's been games, Artificial Intelligence fleshes out the world in MMOs, provides training dummies for competitive PvP games, and for many single player games is the entire reason they exist.

Yet, AI in the gaming sense is not AI in the academic sense.  Let's get this perfectly clear, because that's a rather important distinction.  In games, the Artificial is clearly artificial, and the Intelligence is a misnomer, whereas the academic AI definition seeks to make Artificial Intelligence indistinguishable from regular human intelligence.  There's a good reason for that.

Remember, what is the game being made for?  One would hope it would be for the enjoyment of its audience.  If the only one enjoying themselves are the creator, that's simply a mockery, not a game.  Academic AI isn't made for the audience to enjoy themselves, even people can certainly derive that via wonder at the advancement of technology.

Game AI is for the enjoyment of the user however, and as such often means intentionally flawed AI, very often due to being direct competition for the player.  A perfect AI in an MMO would realize he has no chance winning against the player character whatsoever, and as such would run away immediately upon spotting a player.  This might be fun for awhile, until the AI realizes that the only winning move is not to play, and simply decides not to respawn.  Suddenly fun times are over.

Even not going as far as that, an AI with no intentional flaws has an absurd advantage over human players in that there is hardly any reaction time.  Gauging a threat and determining a course of action happens over the span of ~16ms, versus a human reacting blindly out of reflex taking ~160ms, ten times slower than the computer.  A machine won't mentally tire from stress or fatigue either, making random "dumb" mistakes.  So gaming AI will often have artificial limitations set on their artificial intelligence.

It could be said that part of the reason why is so that it'll be more fair.  This is a mistake of what the goal is.  Rather, the reason why gaming AI will often have artificial limitations is because it is more enjoyable to play against, not because it is fair.  Sometimes it's really fun to smack around very dumb AI, as Valve found out when they were making Left 4 Dead and discovered that mowing down hordes of mindless zombie AI was actually really fun, instead of small amounts of tactically placed enemies.  Sometimes it's really fun to challenge yourself and play against very unfair AI as it becomes a tightrope of trying to stay alive while discovering the AI's Achilles heel, and you search for the Achilles heel because you know full well it's impossible to win a straight out fight.

Put in other words, AI from an academic standpoint is meant to be like a human, whereas AI from a gaming standpoint is meant to be a puzzle for the player to try and solve.

So don't be worried if your AI isn't perfect.  The real question is, is it fun?

From the transcript of the Devstream:

I'm actually in the middle of developing a design for a mobile football game and so I've had to deal
with some of these issues. I'm dealing with them right now and it's a difficult question, because on the one hand, simulation for process tends to allow a more open solution. What simulation for process is, you set up a series of rules to simulate the events, so in the case of a sports game you set up the various rules for how the players are gonna play, you set up the various rules for what the different variables are going to be and how they're going to interact with each other, and then you just step back and you let it run.

Believe it or not, this is actually in some ways an easier approach, because you know you're not responsible, you know you're not trying to dictate any one result. Yeah, you just put in the ingredients, you mix them up and what happens happens. Now that's the way that you would have seen the old statistics in the Madden football games, for example. You know when you do that, when you use simulation for process, you almost always have a situation where the results are not going to be realistic. The process is complicated and it is intrinsically inaccurate. It doesn't matter whether you're talking about an AI attempt to replicate human intelligence, whether you're talking about an attempt to replicate an infantry firefight, or whether you're dealing with something like a football or soccer game, in all of those cases you're dealing with multiple layers of abstraction, and every abstraction, every assigned variable is going to be different than the real world

Even if you build a very complicated model using very accurate statistics, the small errors, the small
differences, are going to multiply so that by the time that you get to the end result, you're not going to end up with very realistic numbers.

RM wonders if games are becoming more targeted to the r/selected:

Would it be correct to say videogames from the last 10+ years are generally targeted at an r-selected audience?

The first time I noticed a change in videogame mechanic and map design was when I went from playing the multiplayer mode for Modern Warfare 1 (released in 2007) to playing the multiplayer mode for Modern Warfare 2 (released in 2009).

In Modern Warfare 1, the generally larger maps meant more open spaces and sections of the map off the beaten path. The maps were large enough to sneak past the enemy team or attempt flanking maneuvers, even with two teams of 24 players. This map design discouraged running around like a headless chicken, because the snipers on the other team would take you out in seconds if you played that way, and it wasn't fun to spend all your game time doing the same 30 second run from your team's spawn. The game encouraged more investment in each life and a longer time preference. The maps in Modern Warfare 1 encouraged cooperation and thoughtfulness.

In Modern Warfare 2, the generally smaller maps had fewer open spaces and sections of the map off the beaten path. Most maps were crowded with two teams of 9 players, and the maps had pretty direct routes that funneled the teams toward each other. This map design encouraged running around like a headless chicken, because most of the battles were fought inside the 10-yard range. If you used your explosives and took a spray-and-pray approach, you'd probably take somebody out before you died yourself. When you did die, you'd respawn with a full loadout, usually close to the action. Modern Warfare 2's maps discouraged cooperation and thoughtfulness.

I'm interested to know if you think r/K selection applies to videogame design and the games' intended players.

Yes, this is almost certainly true in the broader sense. It is probably not a conscious design decision made by someone conversant with selection theory, it's probably just an attempt to make things more "accessible" and "appealing to the casual player" that reflects the larger cultural shift towards the r/selected population. But the essential effect is the same; one could even build a mathematical model demonstrating this by comparing the average number of player-lives lost in a similar time period in one game versus the other.

In the game that appeals to the r/selected, the number of lives would be higher, the average in-game lifespan would be shorter, and there would be less benefit to being patient and exhibiting longer time preferences.

From the transcript of the Devstream.

Our idea was that you were going to be interacting with artificial intelligence, so you had your squad which could be AI soldiers, which could be enemy soldiers, NPCs, etc. Yeah we really went  overboard because we were bringing in synthetic speech, we were bringing in speech recognition, so there was a surprisingly sophisticated interaction with the artificial intelligences. We actually wanted to try to make it that you couldn't tell if you were interacting with a human or an artificial intelligence you know, so kind of like what you see with the bots these days, but but even more sophisticated. And remember this is back in 1996 and 1997, and the reason that the stuff sounds so advanced is because the industry went in a less sophisticated direction.

Again not a criticism. That was the right thing to do. People have sold literally billions of dollars of games that are based on the pseudo railroad.  I mean it's not actually a rail shooter - a true rail shooter would be something like the original Rebel Assault where you're literally on a rail and you can sort of swing back and forth a little bit, but from a design perspective, it's still the same function, it's still the same thing, in order to experience the story, in order to experience the the gameplay, you have to go through in a general order generally the same way.

It was interesting to see how effective that was in the early Call of Duty games before Call of Duty turned into being primarily a multiplayer game. The original missions did a very good job of giving you a pseudo-military experience, but of course it was all heavily scripted. You had to do things in exactly the right order, you knew exactly what was coming at you eventually; in some ways it was very similar to the old arcade games. In that MMOs have opened things up, you know, the FPS MMO; no one has really truly managed to design the proper one, the ultimate one, but there have been numerous attempts. Even Richard Garriot was unable to deliver on on that idea with Tabula Rasa.

But the interesting thing to me about Fortnite, and the reason why I consider Fortnite to be essentially the game designers more or less giving up, is because what we have been doing as FPS designers from the very beginning is attempting to provide meaning and structure and story and experience to the action, and unfortunately we've been fighting the tendency of a certain group of
players - who I am not at all convinced are the majority of players, but there are a lot of them - and they have a tendency to simply run around like chickens with their heads cut off. If you've played any online game starting back in the days of Doom and Heretic - yeah when we were playing with 4-player and 8-player networks - what you would see is some people would play strategically, some people would camp, other people would would team up and move cooperatively, but you always had the people who just run around like crazy, blasting away like crazy, and basically behaving in a way
that you can't even possibly consider anything that is remotely approaching anything credible or realistic.

And so, with Fortnite, and I have played it, and it's a very good example of what it is the Battle Royale genre and so forth, but ultimately there is no purpose, there is no story, the action is the experience. Now that's ok, that's fine if that's if that's what you want, but you see, for years designers have been trying to hide that, they've been trying to keep that under control, and what Fortnite represents - and it's obviously not the first Battle Royale game, it's not the only one, but it is the most successful, the most symbolic of the concept - it's basically the designers throwing up their hands and saying, "you know what, you guys just want to run around like chickens with your heads cut off slaughtering each other, here you go!" And to their credit, they give you the means to do that, so that's what's different between that and Call of Duty and Battlefield and all these other FPS games. Almost all the other games were trying to limit that, they're trying to limit it through the level designs they're trying to limit it through the ammo drops, and all that sort of thing.

The Alt-Hero RPG had its second playtest. The core mechanics are working smoothly. The logarithmic system is as elegant as I'd hoped and it is working well when conjoined with mechanics that can take advantage of it, such as making multiple attacks, attacking in teams, and so on.

All sorts of wonderful emergent properties became evident in this playtest. For instance, combat against large groups of enemies can be easily resolved by using the logarithmic scaling. One attacker with Agility 3 and a pistol is not scary. 16 attackers with pistols (+4 multi-attacker modifier) is Agility 7 and suddenly a threat.  We also learned that Teleport 15 is sufficient to move an enemy into near-orbit above the Earth; the quick use of the logarithmic math (Time = Distance - Speed) let us determine how many rounds the heroes had to finish off the rest of the combat before he fell to earth.

In this playtest we introduced a set of "legwork" mechanics that can be used for crime scene investigation, forensic study of evidence, interviewing crime victims, and other Detective Comics type game play. The legwork mechanics assign"clues" a logarithmic score based on their obscurity; investigators then find clues based on their Acuity stat added to the time (in logarithmic score) spent doing legwork. For instance, if "bullet casing made of strange alloy used only by Dr. Dread" has an Obscurity of 20, it will take The Brick (Acuity 4) a long time to find the clue - 20-4 = 16 units of time, or about two-and-a-half days. If Dr. Quantum (Acuity 12) is on the job, however, he will find the clue in (20 - 12) 8 units of time, or about 15 minutes.

To use the legwork mechanics in play, the Mastermind (GM) should structure multiple different locations with information, along with some sort of time pressure from either the villain's plans or natural events or both. In yesterday's session, for instance, the heroes knew that a powerful superhuman was about to manifest his powers for the first time, and it was a race against time to get the information needed to stop him.

It's still very much a work-in-progress but the framework of a great game is being put into place.

Magnate

The design for the Alt★Hero RPG is proceeding well. Unlike most superhero RPGs being designed today, it takes a simulative rather than narrative approach. It is a spiritual descendant of Mayfair Game's DC Heroes RPG and TSR's Marvel Heroes RPG. The game mechanics, which I am calling the "Supermetric system", are based on logarithmic mathematics. Each point on the Supermetric scale represents a doubling in real-world measurements. This approach will be  familiar to anyone familiar with DC Heroes. Unlike Mayfair's system, however, the Supermetric system is fully logarithmic. For instance, in DC Heroes a character with a BODY 6 would be felled with six 1 point-hits, two 3-point hits, or one 6-point hits, even though one 6-point hit was worth eight 3-point hits or sixty-four 1 point-hits. Alt★Hero uses some very clever behind-the-scenes math that enables us to carry logarithmic design to its logical progression while keeping the game fast and fun. In playtesting so far, we've found the combat to be very flavorful with collateral damage, environmental interaction, and more.

At this point, the core mechanics are complete and playable so the next step is to begin to develop the character generation system and the full index of powers. One thing I am still assessing is whether to make the character generation randomized (like Marvel Heroes or Golden Heroes), point-based (like Champions or DC Heroes), or hybridized (like Heroes Unlimited). Because superhero combat tends to be so intransitive (that is, it's like scissors-paper-rock rather than high-roll-wins), I have always been skeptical of point-based systems' claims that they can achieve balance. How do you "balance" worldwide teleportation and the ability to lift a 747? On the other hand, for gamers who enjoy such things, building the uber-powerful character within the limits of points is a lot of fun. I'd love to hear what the Alt★Hero RPG community has a preference for!

Fight On,
MAGNATE