Design Blog

Thursday, November 26, 2009

The Intention of Design

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. It's been a while since my last post, my new job is pretty busy, and pretty awesome. Here's something I've been writing up in the meantime:

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This is a topic that came up when a friend told me the story of a City of Heroes character named "Twixt" and another story about an Everquest character known as "Fansy the Famous Bard". This eventually led me to another article about how David and Goliath works in real life.

The gist of these two stories was that the player's of these characters became the most hated people on their servers... and they did it all by playing by the rules that the designers developed. It brings up some interesting questions about the goals of designers versus the goals of the players, and how even when the two goals sometimes match up, things still don't go quite right.

For reference, here are the articles

Twixt (City of Heroes)

Fansy the Famous Bard (Everquest)

How David Beats Goliath

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Now that you've read them (you did read them right?) let's break each part down.

Twixt, the Outcast
The Twixt case involves a player (specifically a university professor) who noticed that players in a certain server of City of Heroes/Villains did not tend to PvP in the designated PvP zones. Instead the players preferred to chat with the people the game designers intended to be their enemies while fighting NPCs that happened to be in the zone as well. The professor in this case decided to go against social convention and play by the designer's rules.

He PvPed villains. And he did it really well. So well in fact that for breaking this particular social agreement between the players, that he ended up being ostracized by both camps. The whole time, by following the game rules.

Now it should be obvious that this would happen. If someone breaks a social convention that is established and followed by many people he will likely draw a lot of their ire. What makes the case of Twixt so interesting was that what he was doing was EXACTLY what the designers wanted him to do. As a result, despite many other players complaining about him, the developers never acted against him. In fact, the player behind Twixt reported several people for threatening him, and as far as he knows, they have stopped since then.

The professor in this case was studying human behavior, and certainly deviation from social convention gave him a lot to work with, however, I'm more interested in how the game design factored into all this.

While my experiences in City of Heroes are somewhat limited parts of the article and the professor's paper seem to imply that the PvP zone was simply more lucrative for players to engage in NPC combat rather than combat with other players. This is a design issue, and this is the truly important takeaway from the article in my opinion. When players do not play the game as the designer intended, and more so, actively ostracize those who do find the best way to play with your rules as in the case of Twixt, then there is a problem with the design and it needs to change. There are many ways that this could have been accomplished, but there are two overall goals that a designer can follow in this kind of situation.

They can either change rules to force the players into the correct behavior, or they can change the rules to make the players' behavior the correct one.

Now, I'm not going to say one or the other is more correct, since I think this depends on the situation. And really, in any game, players will ultimately discover more than a designer or a tester will find during the games production. What matters though is how the game and the designer react to them. Now in the case of City of Heroes, I would say that changing the rules to encourage the correct behavior would have been the best choice. The game already has many zones where players can kill NPCs and if players were continuing to do so in PvP zones, then the first thing to look at is how the rewards are assigned. The players in this case could clearly tell that it was better to attack the NPCs, so it's up to the designer to make it better for them to attack other players to preserve the intent of the zone.

Fansy, the Rebel
The case of Fansy is a similar case of following the rules of design, however this case ended differently from that of Twixt. Like Twixt, Fansy existed on a server where certain social conventions had occurred. The server that Fansy was on had a specific rule set which seems to have precluded the players to choosing the "evil" faction in this game. (The website refers to it as "no play nice rules" and that it would probably have "many unfair battles".) With only 11% of the server being on the "good" side, much of the server was taken up by these "evil" characters. Fansy was one of the exceptions, and made it his quest to defeat the bad guys.

However, because he was excessively outnumbered in this case, he took advantage of certain server rules which made him invulnerable to certain enemy skills while he low level (presumably to prevent newer players from being killed off too early). With this invulnerability to direct attacks from the other faction, and not having enough power to defeat them in a direct confrontation, he used a "monster training" strategy, to lure high level monsters into his enemies where they (and occasionally he) were killed.

What's interesting is that, while this type of behavior is not very sporting, and probably not necessarily how the designers intended the game, this was still a valid tactic, and apparently there was even a GM who told him that this tactic was perfectly legal. Even one person who was personally against him, still had to admit that the server he was on had "no rules". Another person compared Fansy's actions to other legal game techniques that are frustrating to other players, such as going into the enemy zones at low levels and preemptively defeating monsters that they use to level in order to deny them that resource.

Fansy's adventure terminated differently from that of Twixt however, as the designers changed the rule that kept Fansy invulnerable to higher level players. They removed this ability across the board for zones deemed "mid-level" and above. This was a case of the designers changing the rules of the game to fix the problem. While this does seems like a somewhat heavy-handed solution, I won't say that it was the wrong one, especially given my low familiarity with Everquest.

What's important about this story is that unlike the Twixt story, Fansy was doing something that was NOT intended by the designers (but still playing by the designer's rules). This seems to be the important distinction on why no action was ever taken against Twixt. For the designer, it's very important to remember that your intent with the game rules is not something that the player necessarily has to follow, even if he plays by your rules.

Bringing it Together, David and Goliath
The final article talks a lot about how underdogs can overcome those in power. One of the big points it makes is that David should not follow the established conventions if he hopes to beat Goliath. Goliath in these situations is much more powerful when operating under these conventions and David will most certainly lose if he follows them. This article brings up two actual games, basketball and a naval game, and shows how David can win by going against Goliath's preconceived ideas about how the game should be played. In the case of the basketball game the coach instructed his less skilled players to play full-court press the entire game, which the other teams were not used to, but is perfectly legal to do. For the naval game the winning player used strategies that no real fleet commander would ever use in a real war but within the scope of the game they were the most efficient.

Both of these players met with similar fates to Twixt and Fansy as well. The basketball team was forced to change their playstyle when a referee who didn't like their playstyle started calling four times as many fouls against them. The naval game player was asked by the organizers of the tournament not to enter again because his strategies were "not really in the spirit of the tournament". For these situations, those in power worked to coerce the players into playing their way or not playing at all. This is a somewhat more extreme example of enforcing the intent of design than the previous two examples since it involves going after the players themselves instead of the designer changing the rules. However because these examples were not video games, its possible that this approach was less feasible in the context of the problems (though I'm not entirely convinced of this).

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So that was three different articles, all tied together by the same thing. INTENT of design versus design RULES. These examples all show that developing robust game rules can go a long way to preventing behavior which deviates from the intent of the designer. It also puts a great burden of responsibility on the designer as it should be clear from these examples that players will always try and seek out the best way to use the designer's rules to their advantage, regardless of if this type of gameplay goes against the designer's original intent.

There's a second facet of this too, and that is for situations where you discover that your rules do not accurately convey your intent and have the chance to change them. I think that when these situations come up, it's better for the designer to try and develop better rules that accurately convey his intent rather than simply trying to develop rules to stop the player. And that even developing hard rules to stopping players is better than making players who go against your intent feel unwelcome in the game as in the case of the player in the naval game.

A game is nothing without its players, even if they don't want to follow your rules, the fact that they are playing in the first place is an indication that they find the design fun. Design needs to work with players in order to convey the intent of the designer, but it should do that through the rules, rather than through mandates to the players.

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That was a long one this time. There are a lot of games I need to play this holiday season and a lot more I want to talk about. Although I may be busy with my awesome job as well, I hope to find more time to talk about these issues.

Labels: design intent, design philosophy, game mechanics, PvP

posted by Saikyo at 11:05 PM

Sunday, August 16, 2009

The Problem With PvP

I've been a fan of fighting games (especially Guilty Gear) for a while and now that I'm working on Guild Wars I find that there are a lot of parallels in terms of how the players approach the games and how new players get into them. After a bit more analysis I found that the reason for this seems to be a core of understanding the nature of competitive play.

To put this idea simply, it's that "PvP, by its nature, is designed to reject potential new players."

An adendum to this is: "The rejection rate of new players will increase with the game's lifetime."

Now, by PvP in this case I'm refering to any game which has direct competition between players based on skill. Fighting games are the purest example of this, but MMOs that have battlegrounds and balanced tournaments as well as sports games. However this also extends to just about every other method of playful competition including real world sports. I think in general the idea that competative activities can be hard to get into is obvious, but games have an additional layer to them.

Here is the process as I see it:

Stage 1: The Level Playing Field

In any PvP game that is first introduced, all new players start at the same skill level. Any new player has just about any chance to win as any other player. Obviously some players will grasp the rules of the game better than others and perform better, but in general at this point there exist no high level strategy of techniques and players work with simply their normal understanding of the rule set.

In fighting games, this is the absolute beginner stage where players mash buttons in an attempt to win.

Stage 2: Complexities Emerge

After a certain amount of time in the game a portion of players start to break off as "skilled" and have mastered all of the low level ideas of the game (punching, jumping, dashing, etc), and move onto developing more complex strategies and techniques. For fighting games this takes the form of things like wakeup games, high/low mixups, and intentionally wiffed moves.

At this point players who have not grasped these aspects of the game begin to lose more often. This is the stage at which you start to see complex behaviors develop, as designers, I think this is something we need to design into our base mechanics so that the game can reach this next level.

Stage 3: The Metagame

The metagame refers to the game that exists outside of the game. Generally this refers to elements of competative play which become determined by players rather than the designers. If a certain strategy or combo is seen as effective then it will start to be duplicated. The differece between competative players and non-competative players is that competative players will actively seek out the most efficient method for winning, even if it is less fun to play and especially if it is easier to execute for its effectiveness.

This is when specialized player terms begin to develop in a game. Game specific elements such as Wave Dashing, Roll Canceling and Burst Baiting start to show up at this time as a result of player experimentation and drive for efficiency. Generally at this level the true level of balance that the designer has achieved will become apparent.

This stage is also the one at which a barrier to entry becomes apparent. While competative players who have been playing since the beginning have gotten to the point where the previous low level elements have become simple, new players now have an even higher skill and knowledge bar to attain to become competative. This is the level at which new players start to be detered, due to the difficulty of learning everything as well as the low chance of winning against players that understand the metagame well.

Stage 4: The Slippery Slope

The final stage of PvP games comes when the influx of new players trickles to a halt or at least a slow drip. At this point new players are generally turned off from attempting this game due to the high time commitment required to compete on an even level with veteran players. The conundrum is that you have designed your game to be balanced, then this is exactly what should happen. But the problem is that if new players lose 90% of their matches or more because the game is filled with veteran players then the game has sealed its own fate by locking out any new players.

Even well designed PvP style games begin to decline at this point, and to some extent that's okay. No game is meant to last forever, but for many companies who produce these games it's valuable to be able to keep selling copies as long as possible between releases.

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So what can be done to prevent this kind of thing? Looking at some real world examples we can see a few solutions. Real life sports such as basketball and baseball separated players into leagues of relative skill levels. Even though NBA players would easily crush junior high basketball teams there are systems set up so that they only play people at their own skill level. Similar to this games sometimes use a ranking system to make sure that new players are not matched up with players of a higher skill level. This is a great solution and works in a lot of situations for many games since it allows new players to start out the game in an environment where their chances to win are approximately 50/50, and the large barrier of time to develop skills can proceed at its own pace. Players in these kinds of systems can choose to quit whenever they feel like it if the competition becomes too difficult.

But skill discrepancies can still cause problems even in these kinds of systems. Skilled players can often have a difficult time getting their friends to join them due to the skill barrier. If you prevent skilled players from dropping down levels to play with their friends then the system itself becomes a barrier to players. Similarly the ability to measure a player's skill level becomes difficult in video games as well, since players can simply buy another account or throw matches in order to get a low rank again. If too many players engage in this behavior then the ranking system becomes irrelavent since it does not reflect the skill level of the players anymore.

At the moment, there really isn't an obvious catch-all solution for the problems, and to some extent the solutions need to be developed to the case at hand. This somewhat extends into my ideas about game design patterns, but that can wait for another day.

Labels: design philosophy, game mechanics, guild wars, guilty gear, PvP

posted by Saikyo at 6:06 PM