Category: Game Design (Page 4 of 22)

This is a version of an article that first appeared in the March 2012 issue of Game Developer magazine.

The simple die roll is one of the single most vexing tools in the designer’s repertoire.  Rolling dice is fun.  Landing double-sixes is a lot of fun.  Seeing big critical hit numbers pop across big bad boss monster’s head is deeply satisfying.  And yet, the experienced designer knows that, much of the time, the dice are his enemy. Which is tragic, of course.  Most game designers, at the core, love absurd amounts of dice rolling.

There are few ways to get a room full of RPGers excited than to bring back the fond memories of the Rolemaster Critical Hit Tables, where simple acts like trying to climb a ladder might result in accidentally dropping your sword and dismembering your own arm.  The sheer magic and hilarity of events like this is transcendental – it’s a story that will be described to other gamers for years after the fact.  What is often is only fun in retrospect is passing that point and actually playing further as a one-armed Paladin. Continue reading

This is a version of an article that first appeared in the December 2011 issue of Game Developer magazine.

Left 4 Dead has many things going for it – tight mechanics, compelling atmosphere, great characters, all of which make Valve’s zombie-pulping low budget masterpiece a must-buy for serious gamers.  However, without a doubt, the center pillar of the game was the focus on cooperative play – the idea that all players are working for a common goal.

Cooperative play used to be an afterthought in games, except those made for consoles played on the same couch.  For a while, designers focused more on direct conflict (i.e. player vs. player combat or deathmatch) as the natural way to play.  However, cooperative play has survived, and indeed now thrives, now frequently as a fulcrum to multiplayer game’s design.

Capture the Flag

Cooperative play is nothing new, however the shooter market seemed to almost abandon the concept, putting in very nearly token cooperative modes in games, while focusing more and more time on making other multiplayer modes more popular.  But along the way, a funny thing happened – the two gameplays merged.  As id moved from Doom to Quake I and Quake II, Capture the Flag slowly emerged as a gameplay mode far preferable to straight up deathmatch, and almost every gameplay mode since then that has emerged has focused on various team vs. team structures.

There are a lot of reasons for this.  Capture the Flag offers a lot more strategy and depth than straight up headshotting opponents endlessly, and there are a lot more different ways to play the game: as the defender of the home base, as the kamikazi flag runner, or as the sniper taking potshots across no-mans-land.  But I think most of all, it is the sense of teamwork and camaraderie that enriches the game experience, and keeps players coming back.

Consider the various psychological emotions that happen in a good capture-the-flag game.  Leaders get a chance to shine.  The very skilled get a chance to display mastery over other players, but the lesser skilled can still contribute and get the good feelings from a victory.  Winning team members congratulate each other.  Losing members console each other.  The odds that a player will have a positive interaction in a game with a cooperative element are far higher than in one where everyone is trying to crush each other – especially online, where the other driving factor is anonymity.

Cooperative Board Games

While it is no means the first, the excellent board game Pandemic ushered in a wave of cooperative dice-throwers (with other games like Forbidden Island and Defenders of the Realm offering very similar gameplay styles).   And beyond the fact that they offer interesting and different game mechanics from the usual fare, it’s not difficult to see why.

In most of the great board games, gathering 6 people means that after a couple of hours of play, 1 player will be the winner and 5 will be losers (this math is even worse on a 32 person Quake Deathmatch server, of course).  But in Pandemic, either everyone wins or everyone loses.  As a person who runs a lot of board games, this comes in very handy when, for example, you have more than one person who cares about winning a little too much.  Or more crucially, when you have a new person at the table, who is unsure of the rules and concerned about making foolish decisions.  The tone of the table changes considerably when everyone has a vested interest in the new guy’s success.

Pandemic is not without its flaws.  The nature of the game means that it is possible and likely one domineering player may effectively run the game, controlling everyone’s turns, for example.  And some designers, such as the team that did the excellent Battlestar Galactica boardgame, have managed to find success in creating tension and interesting social mechanics with the introduction of a traitor mechanic into the cooperative gameplay style.  Still, board games have improved dramatically as a whole since some designers have taken cooperative gameplay to heart.

Force Multipliers

When most people imagine the possibilities inside of an MMO like Ultima Online or EVE, what they tend to gravitate towards is the ‘massive’ part of the equation.  Getting hundreds or thousands of people in the same space is interesting because of the possibilities there of doing something much larger than yourself, whether its attacking an enemy player city with 50 close friends in Shadowbane, or killing the Lich King with 25 close friends in World of Warcraft.  These spaces are interesting largely because of the uniqueness of the experience, and what adventuring with other players brings to the table.

Even on PvP servers, MMOs are largely all about cooperative play, and the cutting edge of that play is typically dominated by guilds who have embraced the three great force-multipliers of cooperative play, Leadership, Teamwork and Communication.  Guilds with strong, charismatic leaders can motivate and drive their players through conflict.  Players acting in concert can be devastating.  And the degree of coordination and responsiveness that can be achieved with strong communication tools like voice chat can dramatically increase a team’s effectiveness.

One of the great challenges of an MMO designer is finding ways to challenge players who have embraced these tenets of cooperative play, without making the game impossible for players who can’t find these guilds.  But the interesting thing about these principles — leadership, teamwork and communication – is that they take hard work to achieve.  Whether it be hardcore PvP or top-level raiding, excelling requires players need to know each other, learn how to work well with each other, and depend on each other.  And these dependencies work to build strong communities inside of your game space.

Asynchronous Play

One of the principle knocks against Facebook games is that, even though the games are called social games, the games to be found there are typically profoundly asocial.  Playing most facebook games is somewhat of a solitary existence, and the play patterns are very short.  A player may spend 15-20 minutes getting a group together in an MMO like World of Warcraft or Rift – few entire Mafia Wars game sessions last more than 10.

Some games, like Frontierville, allow the player to visit another player’s lot, but the short time cycles are so brief that the odds of actually running into the owner of that lot are fairly low – and considering many people are tending their crops when they’re supposed to be at work, they may not be in the mood for a prolonged conversation anyway.

However, Facebook games lean heavily on cooperative play in order to build virality into their products, and they do so with asynchronous game concepts – i.e. finding ways for players to assist each other even when they don’t play on the same time.  They like to do this with both carrots (offering rewarding mechanics for giving gifts) and sticks (putting in roadblocks that can only be overcome by getting help).

Facebook games are still hitting their stride in finding the way to do this.  Spamming up a player’s wall provokes a fair amount of backlash from players, something I think not enough Facebook developers worry about.  Asking for help is often socially awkward, and introverts in particular may resist.  But logging in to find that while you were offline, your high school girlfriend gave you a rusty pump handle is a surprisingly powerful emotional event.

Other Players as Content

Playing Guitar Hero and Rock Band alone is one thing.  Playing it with a full group of four is quite another.   The former is a test of your own personal skill, and little more.  The latter is more social, and more fun.   Suddenly, new concerns come up, such as maximizing star power bonuses or saving a weaker link.  Players play song outside their comfort zones.  Virtuosos have an audience to show off to.  And like most cooperative gameplay, the sense of shared triumph is even more intoxicating than beating the game alone.

One of the most central tenets of multiplayer game design is that, when designed correctly, other players are the content.  Few things bring this home like handing the microphone around in Rock Band, and hearing your mother sing Metallica – often while reading the lyrics for the first time.  Like all cooperative games, the presence of other people makes old content new again, and the presence of different people brings new strengths and challenges.

In Conclusion

Making great cooperative content isn’t easy, but if done right, it can result in powerful gameplay elements that strike strong emotive notes in the player.  Principles like cooperation, teamwork and leadership become very important.  Designers need to work to account for these, and to encourage players to bond and sympathize with each other to achieve loftier goals inside the gamespace.

One of the best ways to make cooperative gameplay interesting is to elevate other players to be interesting actors inside the space, who can bring different skills, talents and personality to a task.  Designers that succeed may find themselves rewarded with games that have greater replayability, stronger communities, and memories that resonate in the player’s mind long after the game is gathering dust on the shelf.  Other people are interesting.  Cooperative gameplay should embrace that.

This is a version of an article that first appeared in the November 2011 issue of Game Developer magazine.

Every now and then, I get asked by a junior designer how to move up the ranks in hisorganization and become a senior designer or a lead.  There is no simple answer to this question – different designers at different organizations have wildly different day-to-day responsibilities and toolsets.

There are commonalities, though, things that are true no matter whether you’re a worldbuilder, a systems designer, or a game writer.  They are core personality traits focused on leadership, teamwork, and quality.  While they don’t belong in game design theory books, they are crucial to the success of large software projects, and among the most important traits I look for when interviewing potential design candidates. Continue reading

This is a version of an article that first appeared in the September 2011 issue of Game Developer Magazine.

It is natural for the designer to think of himself as at odds with the player – he is, after all, the guide on the player’s journey through the game experience.  He needs to ensure the game is interesting and challenging throughout.  However, the rise of multiplayer gaming has resulted in a different strain of fun – griefing – and it has offered a new, more adversarial dimension to the designer/player relationship.

Griefing is the idea of players exerting power over other players inside of the game space, usually (but not always) in a manner that is orthogonal to the rules and goals of the game.  Beyond this, the definition gets a little tricky.  While griefers frequently cheat, a player can (and often does) grief without doing so.  While griefers often engage in direct player confrontation, oftentimes griefing can be done through backhanded channels.  In most games griefing is seen as a negative, but a precious few are actually built on it as the backbone.

Griefing is most commonly associated with massively multiplayer online games  but nearly any genre with multiplayer has the potential for grief.  Designers of shooters have to deal with spawn campers and team killers. Facebook designers have to deal with players who repeatedly kill the same opponent over and over again.  Any game with a chat room has to deal with trash talk so toxic that more mild-mannered players may be dissuaded from playing at all.

Even tabletop games run the risk of grief – the Pandemic player who insists on not helping the cause, or the D&D player who tries to burn down the town.  Most of these smaller games have a recourse – the owner of the game or server can stop inviting a jerk to play.  Designers of MMOs and other games with ‘public’ servers, on the other hand, have to come up with alternative solutions, or deputize themselves as wardens defending the peace.

The Expression of Power

Griefing is about power.  Killing a player 20 times in a row by spawn camping him is addictive fun not because you win the Deathmatch, but because he can’t stop you.  This same strain of fun can be found, albeit with a very different tone, by those who dance naked on mailboxes in Orgrimmar.  Or, for that matter, that unique friend on your Facebook roll who insists on telling the world endings of all the M. Night Shyamalan movies.

When I was working at Ubisoft, a game called Uru was being developed in a sister studio.  This game was meant to be an MMO version game of the classic puzzler Myst. I had several earnest discussions with their designers about what form griefing might take place in a game with no combat.  A top concerns was puzzle-griefing – players standing by puzzles, shouting out the answers as players came near.  And while it is amusing to imagine players wasting time shouting ‘blue triangle, green circle, red horseshoe!’ before you start moving puzzle pieces around, one can imagine the devastating effect it would have on those who loved Myst for its core gameplay.

One doesn’t have to attack or kill another player to grief.  Sometimes, not being able to be killed is the griefing tactic.  Consider Fansy the Bard.  In the early days of EverQuest, Fansy started a career on the heavy PvP, ‘no rules’ server of Sullon Zek.  He carefully kept his character below level 6, where due to the game mechanics he couldn’t be attacked.  This worked wonderfully in his favor when he led gigantic enemy creatures (i.e. ‘trained’ them) onto other players completely unable to retaliate in any way.  Due to complaints from the most hardcore of the hardcore Everquest player, the ‘no rules’ server had to make an exception to deal with Fansy.

A Cultural Thing

What is griefing is going to depend highly on the culture found within a game. The designer must identify the culture they want within the game and promoting or defending it is going to be as much part of their job as laying down levels or designing the combat math.  The cultural cues the designer puts into the game can have a huge effect – designing a testosterone-drenched game with scads of violence and/or women as sex objects (say, a Bulletstorm or a Duke Nukem Forever) is going to attract a very different audience, and have very different griefing thresholds, than online components for, say, the Settlers of Catan Xbox Live game or a more casual MMO like Maple Story or Free Realms.  In the latter, the bar for what equates griefing will be much lower, but the former will likely have a lot more players eager to test the boundaries.

Games designed for a younger market have to consider the risk of griefing to be a core component of their game, especially due to the uniquely ominous turn that sort of activity can take for that audience.  Wizard 101, and many other games, go so far as to not allow most players with each other to chat without special safeguards – most players playing the freeware version can only communicate using preset words and phrases.  It is still possible to annoy or frustrate another player, but these avenues are limited primarily to in-game mechanics.  For the most part, parents can feel at ease when their kids are playing Wizard 101 –an important consideration for that market.

Some games, however, have a much more expanded version of what is reasonable behavior vs. what is griefing.  Many MMOs in particular, have attempted to embrace a libertarian ideal for the genre, encouraging players to do whatever the game allows, and then allowing players to use the threat of force to correct problems on their own.  While this ideal often captures the imagination of the playerbase, the reality of griefing often catches up with them.  A couple of months before Ultima Online came out, there was an article on the game’s website giving the helpful hint that if you had one player lead the guards out of town, his friends could go on a player-killing rampage throughout the city.  After the game launched, the development team would actually spend a lot of time trying to quell these sorts of strategies.

Enter Eve

This is not to say that design of a more permissive game is not possible.  EVE Online initially launched with a permissive attitude, and has not wavered much from that design stance ever since.  It has been rewarded amply, both in the press as well as in the marketplace.

One  of many examples is the player Cally, who was an entrepreneur who started the EVE Intergalactic Bank.  He took player’s money for safekeeping, offering it out to other players as loans, complete with interest rates and payment plans.  At some point, he got bored, stole all of the money (by some estimates, worth more than a hundred thousand real dollars), spent it all on a souped up capital ship, and then proceeded to spend his time mocking those who formally trusted him across the web.

In most games, this would be perceived as an enormous example of catastrophic griefing, and countless customer service house would be spent trying to correct it.  But CCP, the makers of EVE, decided that in their vision of the game, such activities are fair game, so long as the money was earned through non-exploitative means (i.e. through legitimate game mechanics).  Their attitude: buyer beware.

The history of EVE is a rich tapestry of such scams and acts of personal betrayal, and they succeed in keeping the game on the front page of Wired.  Such events keep the idea of the game fresh and exciting.  EVE Online is a game where anything can happen, but it is also a wild frontier.  The game is, in many ways, defined by where it draws the line on griefing.

Ending the Grief

Griefing  can be hard to define and stop, largely because different players (and sometimes designers) can vary wildly on what actually is griefing inside of the same playspace.  Roleplayers in Ultima Online considered the guild of players who roleplayed Elves to be griefers – because everyone should know that there are no elves in the canonical Ultima!  Note in this case, the elves were only griefing accidentally.

When considering griefer activities inside your game, some simple rules of thumb are:

• Be clear and consistent. Be sure that players understand what is expected of them, be sure that game mechanics support your decision, and be sure your designers, community personnel and customer service all have the same idea of what is permissible or not permissible inside of a game environment.  Note: this is usually very hard the first day a potential griefing tactic is found.
• If you don’t want it, block it. Designers should catch themselves and say ‘oh, players will never do that’, especially if what you’re talking about is a way for one player to negatively impact another player’s experience.  Players can be extremely clever when it comes to finding ways to annoy and frustrate other players.
• You get the behavior you incentivize. If you give players achievements or other rewards for grieftastic behavior, you will teach players that this sort of activity is permissible and encouraged!  Be sure you’re not giving rewards for spawncamping or killing the same player 20 times in a row – unless that’s really the culture you want to encourage.
• Anonymity breeds grief. The less attached that players are to their character and reputation, the more likely they will engage in grief tactics.  This is one place where subscription-based MMOs have an advantage over free-play games and public server FPSes – but even then the designer needs to be wary that the player who griefs is typically far less attached to his character than his victim.

Griefing cannot be stopped in any multiplayer game, but it can be managed to the degree that it is an occasional distraction.  Failure to take griefing seriously, however, can result in your game getting a negative reputation, and can result in a community where ‘good’ customers flee, leaving a more unruly customer base to manage.

A wise producer once described a griefer as ‘a customer who costs me more money than he gives me’.  This simple description is an incredibly effective way for designers to think about griefers and their potential impact on the community as a whole.  It is also a useful reminder to designers that designing a multiplayer game is not just about laying out maps and designing weapons, but also about shaping the culture and permissiveness of their game.

A version of this article first appeared in the June/July 2011 issue of Game Developer magazine.

For years now, the Stone Temple Pilots have been my great white whale.

Ever since the original Rock Band came out in 2007, I’ve been banging on the skins, taking drum skills that started as shamefully comical (I believe I caught the dog laughing at me once) and slowly and earnestly practicing and getting better.  Improvement was relatively quick – I slogged all the way from Easy up to Expert, and one by one songs that seemed unplayable were conquered.  But a few of those songs continued to elude me.  One such song was “Vaseline”.

At first, I could barely finish it, and once I did, my scores were laughable.  The song was a chore for me to play.  I liked the song- it has a certain nostalgia factor that takes me right back to my unkempt days- but as I progressed through the game and advanced through the game, I stopped playing it.  I didn’t stop playing the drums, though – I kept playing, downloading DLC, buying expansions, eventually getting the pro set.  But I kept avoiding “Vasoline”, up until one day, three years later it was thrown in a random set list by happenchance.  As the familiar drum beat kicked in, I approached the song with a certain level of trepidation.  But then a funny thing happened.

I destroyed it.  Apparently, somewhere along the way, I’d picked up enough drumming skills to not only skate by the song, but to utterly conquer it – gold starred, top score, you name it.  What once seemed borderline impossible now seemed shockingly simple, and the sense of victory that arose was well beyond that of beating your average song, but a taste of sweet, sweet vindication.

Few moments in gaming are more powerful than that moment in which you completely own something that previously flummoxed you.  Fortunately for us designers, this is a feeling that we can manipulate and inspire. Continue reading

A version of this article appeared in the April 2011 issue of Game Developer magazine.

In my previous two columns, I discussed how designers can craft and integrate stories into their game.  Narrative can take many forms in games, ranging in practice from the backstory paragraph that serves as context for many games, to the branching, integrated stories found in story-based games like Dragon Age.  There is one additional kind of storytelling to be found in and around games: the stories the players themselves choose to tell.

Much like developer-created narratives, the player’s stories can take a dizzying number of forms.  They might be designed to borrow, mesh and interweave with the game’s narrative – or they may choose to ignore it in favor of the player’s own narrative.  Further, the stories could be entirely mechanical – about game rules rather than game fiction – or even purely social, in the case of multiplayer gaming.

While these stories vary in many respects, they all have one thing in common – they are the player’s own.  They star the imagination and events of himself and his friends.  When the designer’s narratives have to compete with these stories for attention and brainspace, he faces an uphill battle.  Rather than fear or fight these narratives, the designer should look for how to integrate and leverage them. Continue reading

A version of this article first appeared in the February 2011 issue of Game Developer magazine.

As mentioned in last month’s column, there are many ways for games to leverage story, ranging from passive background information to being the primary driver throughout all the game content.  However, in most of the examples that we talked about, story was passive, useful for guiding people through the content but giving the player little avenue to actually change the flow of the story.  Many great story games, such as Uncharted 2 and Starcraft, present stories that the player might find deep and engaging, yet give the player very little agency to make changes.

However, some games try to go farther, and let players actually make choices that shape and change the narrative of the game.  The patron saint for these games are, of course, tabletop RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons, where a room full of dice-rolling adventurers are free to take their adventurers in any direction they choose, while a frantic dungeon master tries desperately to get them to the front door of the dungeon he brought to the table.

This freedom is one of the hallmark of these tabletop RPGs, and it should come as no surprise that developers trying to bring the tabletop experience to life on the PC.  I work at one of these companies today, and seeing Bioware put these games together up close has given me new appreciation for the remarkable design intricacies in the construction of making these games. Continue reading

A version of this article first appeared in the January 2011 issue of Game Developer magazine.

Unlike what video game detractors might tell you, story and narrative are a huge part of the art and science of building interactive entertainment.  Nearly all games have some level of storytelling in them.  What is more fascinating to me as a designer is how wildly different the usage of it from genre to genre, and even within that genre from game to game.

This is, of course, quite different from most other media – most fiction, be it murder mysteries, cop shows, blockbuster movies or even Saturday morning cartoons, are deeply and intuitively narrative driven (although, of course, the quality of it can vary wildly).  Not so with video games.  Nearly every game leverages narrative in a way, to a different degree, to different results.

Some games (such as those of Bioware, my studio) make story central, whereas others use it as a mere backdrop.  Most triple-AAA titles opt for a middle path – having a simple (but sometimes powerful) story that creates a sense of place and purpose.  These designs never forget that gameplay is king, and story should only be pushed so far as to support those ends.

Story is perhaps the most flexible tool in the designer’s toolbox, and as such, use of story in games can take wildly divergent approaches.  This is one of the reasons that making rules about narrative in games can be so difficult – the approach and focus given to story is going to wildly adjust how the designer needs to approach it.  Is the story merely a backdrop to the action, or is it core to the player’s activity?  Can the player adjust the flow of the story, or is he merely along for the ride?  Does your design require the player to pay attention to the story, or is it merely there for color?  All of these things are central to how the story, and the player’s interactions with the story, must be constructed.

This is all complicated by the fact that telling stories in games is hard for a lot of reasons.  Designers don’t have control over the flow or cadence of the experience.  Games are long, so long it can be hard for players to keep track of the narrative, especially if they walk away from the experience for a while.  And despite the fact that players always claim to want more and better stories, inartfully trying to cram it down their throat is more likely to bore or confuse them – care needs to be taken to present the story to them in a manner and pace conducive to the rest of their game environment.  What that manner is will vary wildly based on the game you’re trying to make. Continue reading

A version of this article first appeared in the October 2010 article of Game Developer magazine.  It is effectively a ripoff — er, a REVISITING of a previous article I wrote for them here.  Hey, crunch sucks.

I’m a pretty mellow guy, for the most part.  I’m relaxed and easy going when it comes with design. But some things can make me go purple with rage.  One of those things are boss fights apparently designed as afterthoughts by otherwise capable and talented design teams.

I find it inconceivable that truly terrible boss fights still infect our games.  You would think we’d be better at this now.  Our genre is now middle-aged – Pong is 40 years old, for Pete’s sake.  We’ve had decades to hone our skills and practice.  And yet still, I’m playing triple-AAA games with boss fights pulled straight out of amateur hour.

A poorly designed boss can cripple or kill a game.  This is even more true nowadays, where many games are linear – which means the unfortunate player can’t move on without finding some way past your design abomination.  In such a scenario, stumped players have no choice but to reach for the strat guide, dial in the cheat codes — or quit playing altogether.

Disdain for crappy boss-fights is not new.  Some designers nowadays think that the idea of bosses are obsolete, and should ultimately suffer the same fate as the dinosaurs.  I disagree – a well-tuned, well-balanced boss fight can provide an epic capstone to a chapter or game, and can help create an emotional flow through the gamespace that makes the entire experience more compelling.  Great boss fights provide epic, memorable game experiences that will often live with the player longer than grinding through the cannon fodder to get there.

Unfortunately, a lot of boss fights are still a long way from ‘great’ or ‘epic’, and lousy bossfights can kill a game.  Too many design teams are still failing the basics.  And so, written in the glint of my incandescent rage at a game-that-shall-remain-nameless , here are a couple of things for designers to remember as they put together the ultimate showdowns in their own gaming experiences. Continue reading

A version of this article first appeared in the August 2010 issue of Game Developer magazine.

Talk about capturing casual gamers has been a constant in the games industry ever since the days that Myst and Tetris showed eyepopping sales to customers who, suspiciously, did not live in their mother’s basements and were known to shower from time to time.  For the most part, the games industry kept making hardcore games for hardcore gamer audiences, but in recent years, speculation about the idea that games have gone casual has reached a deafening pitch.

And why not?  The Sims, most assuredly considered a game for non-gamer significant others, dominates monthly PC top-ten lists and is possibly the best-selling franchise of all time.  Casual games like Zynga’s Mafia Wars has tens of millions of active players.  And while all the hardcore nerds were taking sides in the great 360/PS3 flame wars on the web, no one predicted that the Wii would end up very nearly selling more consoles than both of them combined.  Indeed, one could argue that we’re now firmly entrenched in the days of the casual gamer.

In an environment like this, it is not terribly uncommon to see hardcore gamers (and indeed, devoted game developers) trending towards something akin to despair.  There seems to be a very real fear that gamers for gamers are dinosaurs, hurtling towards extinction in a world where all games are Nancy Drew games and web apps.

I don’t see it that way.  I see casual games as creating the next generation of hardcore gamers.

Definitions

It has become common practice to conflate casual gamers with women and casual games as the kind of games that women play – often derisively.  The truth is much more complex than that.  Casual is not a market, nor is it a genre, as much as it is a level of investment.  A casual hobbyist does not commit hardcore to her hobby, but a hardcore one does.

Consider knitting.  To many, knitting is probably mentally one of those things that grandma does.  In game terminology, any such activity is surely a casual hobby.  Walk down the yarn aisle of Hobby Lobby or wander a knitting website like Ravelry.com and you’ll be quickly disabused of this notion.  Knitting is a skill that is easy to learn but hard to master.  Knitters swap rare patterns, go to conferences and crafting festivals, and spend vast sums of cash on hoards of yarn they can never possibly use in one lifetime, and form communities of likeminded, hardcore knitters where they talk in indecipherable slang and occasionally slag on the newbies trying to put together their first pair of socks.

Clearly, one can see certain parallels.

The point is that knitting is not a casual activity – but neither is it a hardcore one.  Instead, the hobby is one that easily scales itself to the investment level of someone who is interested in it, from the knitter who may pick up the needles once a year to stay in practice to the hardcore yarnslinger obsessed with knitting her own burial shroud.  Knitting is a popular hobby precisely because of that scalability.  This scalability of experience is one that is mirrored in the most popular games in our industry.

The Sims

The Sims story I heard was always the same:  someone I knew who considered themselves a ‘hardcore gamer’ bought it because it was Will Wright’s masterpiece, and played it a couple of days before they realized they were spending their time cleaning virtual toilets.  However, their wife, daughter or significant other had been watching over their shoulder from time to time, and before the friend could turn off the computer in disgust, this person, who normally treated video games with a mixture of disdain and disgust, asked simply, “Can I play?”

These stories were told often with a level of sadness and betrayal: the great Will Wright had sold them a casual game.  But the truth is more complex than that.  Many of these ‘non-gamers’ went on to play the game obsessively, spending endless hours in the game nurturing or torturing their Sims, shelling out hard-earned cash for the two sequels and dozens of expansion packs released, publishing their stories on the web, and creating their own (often spectacular) art to import into the game.  It turns out, the Sims has enough intricacy and depth for some of these players to be seriously hardcore Sims players.

And my friends, the husbands and boyfriends?  It turns out that for this game, they were the casual gamers.

The funny thing, of course, is that the game industry is driven by ‘classically hardcore’ gamers, and as a rule, we tend to have a problem making games that we can’t get passionate about ourselves.  This can lead to myopia that’s kind of staggering, and challenges the notion that the industry is too driven by casual-oriented business-think: 10 years later, the Sims has sold 125 million boxes or expansions for more than 2.5 billion in revenue, and yet no one has shipped a serious, well-funded competitor.  Meanwhile, a quick tour of the E3 floor shows that all of the ‘real’ companies are fighting for ever smaller slices of the space marine market, the racing game market, and the world war II shooter market.

Thanks to The Sims, millions of new customers are walking down the PC games aisle at Best Buy.  Now then, what are you going to do about it?

The Spectrum

Compared to the MMOs that came before it, World of Warcraft is a pretty player-friendly MMO.  Death penalties were light, travel times were quick, players could solo for a large part of their experience, and the degree to which a 14-year-old mouthbreather with too much time on his hands could ruin your whole day were severely curtailed.  Some players who looked back fondly at the wild west-like brutal frontiers of Everquest and Ultima Online were quick to deride World of Warcraft as a casual experience for ‘care bear’ players.

It’s not, though.  Being a top-end raider in WoW takes an enormous amount of skill, teamwork, and devotion of time and energy.  Being a PvPer at the top of the Arena rankings is even more brutal and competitive.  The difference between WoW and most of its predecessors was not that it was easier, as much as the game provided content and challenges no matter the player’s investment level : casual players could solo, whereas slightly more invested players can run dungeons and other light group content.  Hardcore players run raids and PvP arenas, and the top-end players chase ludicrously difficult achievements in those environments.  Furthermore, Blizzard continually works to refine this escalation and coax people up the ladder.

Back in 1971, Nolan Bushnell of Atari said “All the best games are easy to learn, and difficult to master,” a design philosophy now treated as instinctual by nearly every designer in the industry.  What this philosophy is describing is a philosophy of smoothly escalating levels of investment.  Casual to hardcore is not a binary option – it’s a sliding scale.  We as designers want to find ways to smooth out that climb so that players increase their commitment level to our game.  Good games convert casual players into hardcore ones, because these games are worth the investment.

Reexamining Casual vs. Hardcore

This idea that casual and hardcore are levels of investment leads to some interesting design thoughts.  For example, being too casual and being too hardcore could both be considered broken game designs. A casual game is one that lacks the depth for players to get truly invested into it, which means that people quickly wash out of it (something that is definitely not true for the Sims or Mafia Wars).  On the flip side, a hardcore game is one where the price of investment is more than the player is willing to pay.  Typically, the problem here is a poorly managed investment curve – when a player throws down his control in disgust and say “that’s impossible”, it typically means that the difficulty curve has risen too high before the player can bother to care about it.

The truth of the matter is that, while players tend to think of themselves as all-around hardcore gamers, in actuality they tend to be invested in only a few genres or titles.  A hardcore racing gamer may only play shooters casually, and be moderately into RTSes.  Furthermore, even inside the genre, a game must prove itself to earn a player’s devotion.  Put another way, whether you’re making the Sims or Dead Space, Farmville or Demon Souls, your gamers are starting as relatively uninvested, casual gamers.  Converting those gamers into devotees means coaxing them inward until they can find the fiendish strategic depths of your games.

This isn’t just about making things easier.  A game that is too easy, in fact, risks boring people before they can find your secret sauce.  The secret really seems to be about allowing players to quickly find a place in your game where they can learn, where they can demonstrate mastery, and where their level of skill and investment are rewarded.  Can your players find the spot for them in your game’s casual-hardcore equilibrium?  And can you make them want to go to the next rung up?