NOTE: This topic was proposed on site at Project Horseshoe 2019, and became a workgroup.
Topic:
Curate practical vocabulary and tools for designing for a large meaningfully diverse possibility space.
THIS TOPIC MERGES TWO PREVIOUSLY PROPOSED TOPICS. BOTH AUTHORS OF THOSE TWO TOPICS HAVE AGREED TO THE FOLLOWING.
With the growing dominance of free-to-play games, and games-as-a-service, more and more games are meant to be played for years instead of hours. But classic storytelling techniques are difficult to implement and maintain in live games. It is disappointing to see developers conclude that games-as-a-service should not focus on narrative. But players of these games deserve great narrative.
What are the best practices for delivering story for a game that never ends? There are shelf-loads of books on how to write stories for film and television, and the number of books on writing for video games is quickly catching up. But most of these how-to’s – from tumescent tomes to twerpy twitter posts – borrow heavily from the structural narrative assumptions of film, TV, AAA and premium games. If you’re working out narrative issues while caught up in the lucrative whirlwind of free-to-play games, a good number of those structural assumptions for interactive storytelling don’t necessarily fit.
Issues to be discussed include:
Story-oriented games-as-a-service could offer designers a chance to build a uniquely game-centric narrative language. Can the minds of Horseshoe chew on this problem and come up with some advice or even some innovations for live game narratives?
17-button controllers (e.g. XBox One, Dual Shock, or Stadia Controllers) are dominant in the console space, strongly present in PC, and largely absent (currently) in mobile. They’re arguably the most iconic identifier of gaming as a broad activity. When one has mastered their use, they make possible the mapping of a broad range of simulations and experiences onto a single intuitive input vector. Yet they can be intimidating to approach, difficult to learn, and, if not designed for deftly, create unpleasant cognitive load, interfering with immersion.
With streaming on the horizon, we’re at an inflection point where we could potentially advocate for platforms going in a different direction with input mechanisms. Should we?
If we were to standardize a different controller or other input mechanism, what form should it take and what benefits would it bring to the table? What changes would a new controller necessitate in game design? If it was easier to learn, would it also require a sacrifice of control fidelity from game designs/interfaces?
Alternately, if the 17-button controller has earned its place in the market because it is the best mechanism for game input, how can we make it easier to learn? Are there particularly good patterns for “teaching someone to drive” in 3D worlds with a 17-button controller? Should “touch controlling” classes be taught in the way that touch-typing is?
I’d love to see a group dig into the future of game controls and explore the trade-offs between approachability and interface flexibility.
Two wildly different genres — AAA open world games and mixed reality content games — are circling around different design problems that may share a common solution.
As open worlds get bigger and bigger, they demand huge amounts of time and resources dedicated to level design, art production, narrative production, and testing. Designers restricted to working with traditional tools can only affect small portions of the game, while the sheer number of people (and budgets!) involved present huge risks to studios and publishers. If only there was a way designers to could “duplicate” themselves to affect more of the virtual real estate…
On the other hand, mixed reality games have no control of the space in which they happen (unlike VR or location based entertainment). But they still have to work wherever they are booted up, from the giant living rooms of the American midwest to the tiny studio apartments of New York. If only there was a way to ship a designer with every copy of the game, so they could take maximum advantage of the environment…
One possible answer is to use machine learning to augment the tools and abilities of content creators. Given a system with awareness of the world (e.g. this is a rock, this is a tree, this is a coffee cup, this is a window), it is feasible to train AI so that it develops its own heuristics of content creation based on observing the work of human designers. (this essentially inverts the normal relationship, where programmers and designers create rulesets to generate content)
(for more information on how this might work, please see this excellent 20 minute talk by Sam-Snider Held of Media Monks called Enhancing Human Creativity Through Machine Learning and VR)
(you can also reference this snippet from EA’s Andrew Wilson about using AI to generate stories)
(I would also love to know if anybody is aware of what happened to that initiative)
This is an incredibly complex issue with a potentially terrifying scope, so the group’s first order of business might be to restrict this problem set to a specific medium, genre, or content type. The alternative is to “go wide” and try to establish some sort of creative pillars that developers can look to if they seek to empower digital creatives. It’s also super deluxe exciting and very much The Future.
As an aside, the title of this proposal was certainly inspired by but bears no relation to Strange Adventures in Infinite Space, the delicious lunchbreak roguelike of 2002. Give it a try, if you’re into that sort of thing!
After a long period of convergent evolution in game interfaces, the introduction of the Wii and the iPhone in quick succession sparked a cambrian explosion in game interfaces that’s continued over the last dozen or so years, in touchscreens, accelerometers, motion tracking, VR, AR — not to mention the rich ecosystem of unique sculptural interfaces like those you see in alt.ctrl exhibits.
One of the next next big things (depending on where we are in the hype cycle) for game HCI might lie in the internet-connected devices that are rapidly piling up around us: wearables like fitness trackers and watches, smart home appliances, security systems, etc.
But the ways in which we integrate IoT systems into games will be different than with other interfaces. Smart home devices like lights and thermostats are designed to work ambiently in the background, not as direct controls in a typical gameplay setting; devices might not be in the same location that the player is in, or they might be tucked away in their pocket.
I’d like to map out the opportunities, pitfalls, and potential new design spaces that arise as games become increasingly wired into an extended network of physical interfaces. This is an area with lots of potential (and risk!) to upend our known patterns of interaction between player and game.
We’ve all seen them- certain themes, ideas, promises that pull players in and won’t let go. Guillermo del Toro, Miyazaki, Neil Gaimon, Monte Cook all create worlds that are familiar but fresh, enticing you into staying to see what’s over the next hill or around the next corner.
I’m interested in what we can do to build this feeling around design in games. What are the lenses and best practices we can use to incorporate deep resonance into our gameplay itself?
It’s worth noting that repetition decreases this feeling. The first MMOs were some of the most seductive, and over time as the formula has been repeated, I believe they have lost some of that magic.
Off-the-cuff examples that deliver in the promise AND the execution:
Anticipation is everywhere. We constantly are driven by it in unsuspecting ways. When you feel your phone buzz – is that a text? Who is it? Is it important? When you are listening to a song and that favorite part is about to come on. Why is that exciting? When we played hide and seek as kids, the seeker is constantly anticipating finding someone, and the hiders are constantly nervous about being found. I would like to dig further into the biology(Fast and slow dopamine), psychology(Loops) and design considerations for understanding and using Anticipation. Aren’t you excited? That’s Anticipation at work!
I buy art and music for my games. There are loads of ready-made assets out there (even if you don’t use the Unity engine).
Why can’t I buy stories and dialog for my videogame projects in the same way? What process, tool, or marketplace would need to happen to make this a reality?
Design is a relatively new discipline, filled with people without formal training in the job, and I have observed that many design directors have built processes from first principles, while a handful of studios have rolled out design processes they’ve thrashed out themselves, to varied success.
Unlike engineering, writing, art or production there isn’t a lot in the way of formal process for design leadership and management.
With the thousands of years of design experience this Project Horseshoe will concentrate in one place, I’m hoping we can establish best practices for design leadership or management (or one of these, if the participants feel both is too big a goal).
Some questions to provoke discussion:
Mastery, or the building of skill, is one of the core intrinsic motivators called out by SDT and while many games seek to simulate mastery (RPG progression systems, etc.) games that seek to or require that the player build real skill have very niche appeal (with a few notable exceptions.) We have a better understanding than ever before of how skills are acquired and how performance can be improved, we should be able to do better design for mastery!
There is a lot of good research into how humans learn new skills that points toward processes and mechanics (like structured practice and spaced repetition) and there are a few games that have broken through to a large audience that focus on mastery (League of Legends is probably the largest) so it feels like there is plenty of material to work with on this topic. Additionally this group could focus on taking lessons of skill acquisition and apply them to general tutorializing even for games that are not mastery based.
Some examples of what I’m talking about:
Games using the ‘Fate’ engine deliberately offer players moments of narrative control as a meta-mechanic, ensuring player buy in, and offers the player bribes to willingly, even eagerly, accept ‘bad events’ with promises of future dramatic payoff.
Games using the ‘Powered by the Apocalypse’ engine promote tight and expressive themes by encapsulating a complete player narrative arc into a ‘playbook’, and offer mechanics based on ‘moves’ that permit extreme player expression within a coherent mechanical framework.
The challenge: Many service-based games last for years, which necessitates a content treadmill to keep players fed and happy. However, many common progression systems borrow from RPGs and MMOs and involve leveling up in linear fashion. Players grind up to some max cap, at which point the numbers have started to break down. Such games run into power creep, diluted rewards and other balance issues when they belatedly extend the progression for a few thousand hours more.
An alternative is cyclical progression. This is where they player starts growing in power but eventually finds themselves (due to a variety of potential reset mechanisms) coming back around to the start of the progression.
Examples of cyclical progression systems fall in at least a couple main categories…
Hard cycles: The player progresses upward in a roughly linear or exponential fashion. And then they do some form of a hard reset.
Soft cycles: Instead of a hard reset, cycles blur into one another.
Question to tackle at Project Horseshoe
What could the work group tackle? This is a relatively focused topic, but one that I suspect is worth a few hundred million for the right team.
Other notes
Just some rough notes to kickstart people’s thinking.
1. Ideas from linear progressions
Cyclical progression is contrasted against linear progression (up and to the right!) where players steadily gain in resources and power.
Several key ideas in linear progressions that are also important to cyclical progressions.
2. Managing loss aversion in cyclical progressions
Cycles inevitably involve loss. There are some very solid existing systems for managing that loss.
3. Meditations on ritual and progress
Humans are inherently cyclical creatures. We live in a world with seasons. Our communities involves overlapping cycles of birth, growth, death. Many traditional cultures and religions emphasize cycles and their associated rituals. Are there ways of building cyclical progressions that enhance the gentle living of a player’s life? Or must games always be about climbing the infinite mountain.
I hesitate to submit this topic because of my profound ignorance. In the past, this lack of personal experience can lead to a group that BSs for the weekend and then has to do huge amounts of research afterwards in order to salvage some sort of publishable result.
The big question
What are the key connections between: A. Joris Dorman’s internal economies (sources, sinks, pools, transforms, etc) and B. recent social game design discussions around the Trust Spectrum, friendship formation, group formation, social logistics and anti-toxicity? Our group might:
What is the source of this esoteric topic?
What I’ve found is that as soon as we start designing robust social systems, we jump deep into the realm of systems design. We immediately leave behind any sort of pure social psychology and start layering in an economics backbone.
It feels like in order to build rich, robust social systems, a working designer needs to tackle the economic foundations and ramifications of that system.
Where do we start?
There’s conservatively a 150+ years of dense writing on these topics. And as far as I can tell, much of it is incomprehensible rhetoric highly specific to the time and place it was written. So I’d need 2+ decades intense research to be mildly educated on past thought experiments. (Despite my socialist leanings, Marxism and its faux scientific rants-masquerading-as-theory is an absolute blight on search engines. Nothing builds on past discoveries; just a century of wordy folks bickering.)
And let’s also be clear. Most of the *good* work out there involves laboriously constructed but completely untested models. These are proposed with the hope of convincing some government in the next 50-200 years to maybe (pretty please) give it a try. Or they rely on natural experiments (which are mostly commenting on stuff that happened in the hopes of boosting a pet theory)
There’s very little experimental stuff outside what you can do with Mechanical Turk or a tiny captive herd of WEIRD young grad students. And of course very little of this is associated with making games.
Some references
So I’m ignorant. But it feels like I should at least making an attempt to ground this investigation. In that spirit, here’s a horribly incomplete list of reading. If people were to read these before November, it might be better than just sitting around in a circle jawing.
Basic game economies:
Basic social psych for games:
Economics focused reading:
Questions for those with a passing interest
Questions worth answering before tackling this topic (which feels like a black hole)
Dance 10 XP, Looks 3 XP. In Search of the Interactive Musical
If you love the magic of musical theatre and are a video game designer, then you’ve probably spent some time thinking about this largely untapped creative territory for interactive design. Though interactive stories and interactive live theatre are starting to be better understood as art forms, there has to date been very little commercial experimentation weaving together the agency-laden experience of game play and the artful execution of storytelling through song. This working group would bring their love of musical theater and interactive design to explore how these two worlds might collide and shed light on new avenues for interactive narrative and the traditional Broadway musical.
Everlasting. Best practices for narrative design in free-to-play mobile games as a service.
There are shelf-loads of books on how to write stories for film and television, and the number of books on writing for video games is quickly catching up. But most video game narrative design how-to’s – from tumescent tomes to twerpy twitter posts – borrow heavily from the structural narrative assumptions of film, TV, AAA and premium games. If you’re working out narrative issues and caught up in the highly lucrative whirlwind of free-to-play mobile games, a good number of those structural assumptions for interactive storytelling don’t necessarily fit. What are the best practices for delivering story for a game that never ends? How do you focus sharp narrative design in free-to-play games that are delivered as a service in a way that might just have to go on forever? How do you get players who don’t want to read (and don’t play with their volume on) to fall in love with your characters, world and IP? How do you best hook players with the emotional pull that only engrossing story and captivating characters can deliver when you’re working with play patterns that are optimized to be played on the bus (or on the toilet)?
This relatively new genre of “Legacy” board games (Risk Legacy, Pandemic Legacy, Gloomhaven, etc.) is a pretty fascinating design space, and it seems like there is a lot more that could be explored here beyond what has been done already. Digital games with Legacy-type gameplay that modify their own rules/data/code permanently? Board games that add new rules so that they grow with a child before the simple base game is outgrown? Alternate story structures?
Would love to take some time to examine some of these games and identify design best practices when working in this genre, and potential new directions to take the genre.
It seems that videogame experimentation (especially in terms of UI/UX) has become exclusively the realm of college students. This makes me sad; kids can chase their muse and build wildly impractical installation UIs, but it’s all a big resume, and once they get a job in the industry, they’ll be much more constrained within the controllers and keyboard layout that the market considers standard.
I think there are plenty of adventurous small videogame companies (including mine) that would bring new experiences to their players if they could make a business case for it. Lets explore some.
Player to player trade in games has gotten a bad reputation; it’s risky, hard to balance, and opens the door to community and CS issues that are hard to mitigate. And yet, it is an incredibly enriching and engaging player experience. I love player to player trade and hate to see it’s decline especially as we are seeing a Renaissance of long-term progression games with interesting economies. Let’s get together and talk about all the wonderful things about player to player trade and how game designers can stop worrying and learn to love the free market.
It’s easy to find a list of things developers shouldn’t do when it comes to player feedback; don’t just listen to the loud voices on Reddit, don’t get defensive, don’t feed the trolls, don’t trust player proposed solutions, don’t be too reactive, etc.
All of that is fine advice I guess, but I feel like I have been hearing this same list of don’ts for 15 years but in that same time I have hear very few dos. Also, if it is such a horrible idea to listen to player’s forum feedback why does it remain the primary source of open ended feedback for so many developers? Where is the better alternative? I have some of my own dos (and some don’ts as well) but I would love to get together with some other Horseshoers and pull our collective experience for how one does successfully manage player feedback.
Proper use of behavioral data, telemetry, and BI are a normal part of many designers work but when training new designers or experienced designers using data for the first time I can find no solid resources that layout how designers should use data, what data ethics looks like in games, or what types of data are useful for what problems or development phase. This is a part of design that would really benefit from some veteran advice and guidance and Horseshoe is just the group to provide said guidance.
More and more games are being designed to be played for years instead of hours. These living games often have designs and production constraints that make narrative designs that borrow heavily from film and television difficult to implement and maintain. I am disappointed when I see developers and players conclude that this means that these “games as a service” style games should not focus on narrative. But players of live games, whether they be mobile, competitive, sandboxes, or even puzzle based, deserve great narrative design too and I believe these types of games could offer designers a chance to build uniquely game-centric narrative language. I would love to see the minds of Horseshoe chew on this problem and come up with some advice or even some innovations for live game narratives.
The proposed workgroup examines experience goals and design strategies for games that contribute to a meaningful life by way of drawing on Existential psychotherapy and depth psychology (e.g. myth and ritual). I am particularly interested in designing for “psychological resonance”, a principle described by clinical psychologist Erik Goodwyn, who exstentisvely researched the use of ritual in psychotherapy. Reading his and related work over the last few years showed me so many connections (and differences, of course) to game design and I’d love to explore this further, particularly to create a counter-approach to how Games 4 Change tend to see transformative game design: namely as prescriptive and directive rather than empowering and self-guided.
This workgroup, I imagine, would speak to designers interested in creating games that illuminate the human experience and aim to enrich player’s lives on a deep level, by prompting them to ponder the Big Questions – life, death, meaning, freedom of choice, connection and identity – and identifying areas of personal growth through artistic, creative engagement.
Following on the wild success of last year’s “Constructing Emergence,” I’ve continued thinking about how to put some of the ideas we explored into practice. In particular I’d like to examine examples of how to use component interaction matrices most effectively, the optimal proportion of directly connected components in such a matrix (if there is an optimum), how we might use hierarchical/nested matrices, and anything else we can cover to nail down additional details of a “how to” for emergence.
I don’t know if that’s even possible or of interest to anyone else, but it’s been on my mind. I think there’s a lot more to explore and uncover here.