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It's super interesting that Nintendo seems to have down the elements of game design really well that actually make a game fun. Compare that to other games such

by flgr 10y ago

It's super interesting that Nintendo seems to have down the elements of game design really well that actually make a game fun. Compare that to other games such as Pokemon Go or No Man's Sky, which feel like the designers might have forgotten to add the core game itself. It's also interesting to compare to Witcher 3, which is another great game (but via different means IMHO). I'm surprised by how much Nintendo nailed this (what features to invest time into to make a game fun). Seems like they might be ahead of others there. And that makes me wish that that part of game design was better understood.

city41 10y ago
Shigero Miyamoto has been overseeing Nintendo's games for 37 years now. If you read any interviews or histories on Nintendo, Miyamoto providing feedback on a game to make it fun and engaging is very common. Combine his vast experience with the fact he's a genius when it comes to gameplay, and he's tough for other companies to beat.
- flgr 10y ago
  I guess what surprises me is that we haven't written down mechanics or principles that will make a game fun instead of just addictive. (There seem to be many well established dark patterns for getting people to spend money on freemium games, but I haven't seen much about what makes a video game more fun.)
  - marrone12 10y ago
    You can't encapsulate fun to a series of algorithms. The brilliance of the Breath of the Wild is in it's imagination. When a game truly feels like magic, it needs someone to inspire it.
  - Negitivefrags 10y ago
    There are numerous attempts at theories of fun out there, but none of them really let you look at a design and know if something will be fun without trying it. They don't even really give you much of any concrete guidance on how you might change a design to make it more fun if it isn't currently. The best attempts at this tend to be along the lines of looking at certain player profiles and trying to imagine what about your design appeals to those who enjoy that profile. It's possible that this isn't something we can easily quantify. If I asked you to write a book about what makes music good, would you be able to do that?
    - komali2 10y ago
      Well, we can quantify things like circle of fifths and all those other weird music things I never seem to understand. Not well enough to automate music making, sure, but enough to teach people how to make good music.
      - mathw 10y ago
        Well, you can automate music making, but the automated systems tend to produce incredibly generic music that's fairly bland and kind of aimless. We still need that creative spark to give it emotional content, direction and to break the rules in just the right ways to keep things interesting whether it's just a slightly unexpected harmonic progression or whether you're blazing an entirely new idea. Nobody ever got told they were an amazing composer because they followed all the rules. You can be good, but the greats all redefined something about the common practice of their time. However, if you stray too far away, people find your music too alien and tend not to like it at first. History is littered with references to new music from composers we now consider to be truly magnificent, who were at the time considered to be merely mediocre, or whose innovations were not welcomed with open arms. And of course, computers are still terrible at writing lyrics. That's an entirely different game. Maybe one day there'll be enough video games and literature that we can formulate a video game theory which is as extensive as our modern understanding of music theory. The thing with music of course is that we've been doing music for a lot longer.
    - mysterydip 10y ago
      Raph Koster has a good book, "A Theory of Fun for Game Design", which I think does a pretty good job as an easy read intro to the problem. My main takeaway from it, if I had to boil it down to one point, is your brain finds fun in mastering something (beating a challenge), but not so much afterwards (boring/repetitive) or if it's too difficult (frustrating). The problem is, where that line is for any given challenge can be different for everyone. You can also get more mileage out of something if an aspect of the challenge changes (people will play chess longer than tic tac toe for example, even though the game space is the same each time).
      - 10y ago
  - bane 10y ago
    There's a couple of efforts. I think this is the most public: http://www.anatomyofgames.com/anatomy-of-a-game/ http://www.anatomyofgames.com/anatomy-of-a-game/
    - flgr 10y ago
      Wow, looks super interesting. Thank you!
  - Agentlien 10y ago
    This is because it's very easy to break down and formalise what makes a game addictive, but it's very difficult to do the same for fun. At Ghost we often find ourselves looking at a proposed or newly implemented feature and asking out loud "but, is it fun?". The answer can be very difficult to find, especially since many great features aren't fun until they've received that final layer of polish. And here's part of what Zelda does so well. You can see how a lot of the great things in Breath of the Wild would be great fun even in a simple prototype. On the flip side, this kind of exhilarating feeling of being able to do so many cool things only works because every single piece of the game is designed with this in mind and all the crazy interactions people come up with are actually supported. It only works so well because people aren't getting that familiar feeling of "oh. That didn't work." This must have been a massive task and I'm amazed they pulled it off!
    - a-saleh 10y ago
      I have read [1] that they actually tried large part of the systems (article mentions physics and chemistry) in a simple prototype. I would actually like to play the 2D version :) [1] http://www.polygon.com/2017/3/1/14780954/the-legend-of-zelda-breath-of-the-wild-2d-prototype-gdc-2017 http://www.polygon.com/2017/3/1/14780954/the-legend-of-zelda...
      - Agentlien 10y ago
        Yes, they talk about it in the GDC talk[1] and that's what I was referring to: That I can see how even in such a simple prototype the fun seemed evident. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyMsF31NdNc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyMsF31NdNc
  - wingerlang 10y ago
    What is fun for one might be torture for another.
  - cableshaft 10y ago
    I'm a game designer. Something can seem super fun in your head, but until it gets in front of you and you can play with it, there's no guarantee it's actually fun. And almost always, there was one or more flaws in your thinking that will have to be ironed out by playing it over and over again, preferably along with other people and getting their opinions on it as well. I can't begin to tell you how many times I come up with this clever idea, mock up a bunch of components or start coding a prototype, and go... "oh, damn, this isn't much fun." I've been able to whip a lot of those failed ideas into something fun, but it often takes a lot of experiments with different ideas or borrowing pieces of designs from other games that have worked, a lot of time and rumination on the design (I get a lot of my ideas for new things to try while walking my puppy, commuting in a quiet car, or in the shower), and putting it aside to work on something else and letting my subconscious or things I encounter in life to inspire potential solutions to the problem (and often it'll still take multiple attempts to fix things). The ones that drive me the most crazy are the ones where you try it for the first time and go 'This isn't that fun with this set of rules, but it's close to fun. If I can just find the right tweak, this can be great.' It can sometimes seem like it takes forever to find that right tweak. I've got some prototypes that I think are almost there, but I've had to put aside because I spent so much time on it and still couldn't figure out the right tweak for them. There have been attempts to nail down Game Design principles. There are quite a few books you can get on Amazon that have some good insights in them, GDC lectures, Gamasutra articles, academic journals, etc. There's nothing that's totally universal, but the more you learn, the larger your design palette to draw from.
- marrone12 10y ago
  It is truly incredible how a singular person can have such an influence on the world. What would gaming have been like had he never been?
vkou 10y ago
Witcher 3 is very interesting from that perspective. I found the controls to be fairly clunky, the detective vision a bit of a mess, combat as not particularly engaging, Gwent as an objectively bad card game... Yet, the strength of the writing, and the characters carry it.
- mathw 10y ago
  The characters repelled me, I hated playing as Gruff Brooding Manly Man all the time. I could have dealt with that perhaps, but because the gameplay systems had so many issues I just put it down again and never even had a flicker of interest in going back. Between us I think we've illustrated the distinction between "good setting" and "good game mechanics" and how they can influence whether somebody wants to play your game or not. But you definitely need at least one of them!
  - doikor 10y ago
    > Gruff Brooding Manly Man That is the "public" image of witchers in the universe. If you play the games (and especially if you read the books) it becomes quite clear that it is just a facade. And quite a bit of brooding that is there is "I've seen this shit before" as Geralt by the time of Witcher 3 over 100 years old (the older witcher Vesemir is over 200 years old). The mutations give Witchers long lives (none of them have ever died of old age)
    - mathw 10y ago
      The Witcher 3 did nothing at all to show me this in the time I played it. Admittedly I didn't get very far, but by the time I'd not enjoyed it for a good 15 hours or so I thought it was about time to do something more entertaining. Also the word "Witcher" set my teeth on edge too. So really the whole world is probably not for me!
  - foobarchu 10y ago
    I think between the two of you, you've illustrated the subjective nature of both settings and game mechanics. Many, many people think that the Witcher 3 had both good setting and good game mechanics, that's why its one of the most acclaimed game of all time, critically and from consumers. There's really no winning strategy here. The best creators can do is try to target what they know their existing fanbase will like, or target a fanbase as the audience they want to get. Miyamoto is really good at this. CDProjekt is also really good at this.
threeseed 10y ago
No Man's Sky had what 12 staff in total ? People need to stop comparing it with games from first-tier creators like Nintendo.
- sametmax 10y ago
  Zelda link to the past didn't have a huge team, and much less the technological luxuries we have today. Yet the game is really fun. It's a culture thing.
  - wingerlang 10y ago
    Even if we assume Zelda had 12 people, does it make it a fairer comparison? They have huge resources, exactly the experience needed and so on. Hardly comparable.
- CM30 10y ago
  There are far better indie games with one or two people on the development team and even less of a budget. Some of which do damn well at competing with triple A titles. No Man's Sky's issues did not purely come down to budget or team size, but skewed priorities. Lots of work went into the tech and procedural generation, while seemingly a lot less went into the actual core gameplay systms that actually give the players something to do in said world. They put the idea of an unlimited size universe above that of a game that has interesting things to actually do in said universe.
- thefalcon 10y ago
  If they decide to charge the same price as other first-tier games, they're asking to be compared to other first-tier games.

by flgr 10y ago

city41 10y ago

Shigero Miyamoto has been overseeing Nintendo's games for 37 years now. If you read any interviews or histories on Nintendo, Miyamoto providing feedback on a game to make it fun and engaging is very common. Combine his vast experience with the fact he's a genius when it comes to gameplay, and he's tough for other companies to beat.

flgr 10y ago
I guess what surprises me is that we haven't written down mechanics or principles that will make a game fun instead of just addictive. (There seem to be many well established dark patterns for getting people to spend money on freemium games, but I haven't seen much about what makes a video game more fun.)
- marrone12 10y ago
  You can't encapsulate fun to a series of algorithms. The brilliance of the Breath of the Wild is in it's imagination. When a game truly feels like magic, it needs someone to inspire it.
- Negitivefrags 10y ago
  There are numerous attempts at theories of fun out there, but none of them really let you look at a design and know if something will be fun without trying it. They don't even really give you much of any concrete guidance on how you might change a design to make it more fun if it isn't currently. The best attempts at this tend to be along the lines of looking at certain player profiles and trying to imagine what about your design appeals to those who enjoy that profile. It's possible that this isn't something we can easily quantify. If I asked you to write a book about what makes music good, would you be able to do that?
  - komali2 10y ago
    Well, we can quantify things like circle of fifths and all those other weird music things I never seem to understand. Not well enough to automate music making, sure, but enough to teach people how to make good music.
    - mathw 10y ago
      Well, you can automate music making, but the automated systems tend to produce incredibly generic music that's fairly bland and kind of aimless. We still need that creative spark to give it emotional content, direction and to break the rules in just the right ways to keep things interesting whether it's just a slightly unexpected harmonic progression or whether you're blazing an entirely new idea. Nobody ever got told they were an amazing composer because they followed all the rules. You can be good, but the greats all redefined something about the common practice of their time. However, if you stray too far away, people find your music too alien and tend not to like it at first. History is littered with references to new music from composers we now consider to be truly magnificent, who were at the time considered to be merely mediocre, or whose innovations were not welcomed with open arms. And of course, computers are still terrible at writing lyrics. That's an entirely different game. Maybe one day there'll be enough video games and literature that we can formulate a video game theory which is as extensive as our modern understanding of music theory. The thing with music of course is that we've been doing music for a lot longer.
  - mysterydip 10y ago
    Raph Koster has a good book, "A Theory of Fun for Game Design", which I think does a pretty good job as an easy read intro to the problem. My main takeaway from it, if I had to boil it down to one point, is your brain finds fun in mastering something (beating a challenge), but not so much afterwards (boring/repetitive) or if it's too difficult (frustrating). The problem is, where that line is for any given challenge can be different for everyone. You can also get more mileage out of something if an aspect of the challenge changes (people will play chess longer than tic tac toe for example, even though the game space is the same each time).
    - 10y ago
- bane 10y ago
  There's a couple of efforts. I think this is the most public: http://www.anatomyofgames.com/anatomy-of-a-game/ http://www.anatomyofgames.com/anatomy-of-a-game/
  - flgr 10y ago
    Wow, looks super interesting. Thank you!
- Agentlien 10y ago
  This is because it's very easy to break down and formalise what makes a game addictive, but it's very difficult to do the same for fun. At Ghost we often find ourselves looking at a proposed or newly implemented feature and asking out loud "but, is it fun?". The answer can be very difficult to find, especially since many great features aren't fun until they've received that final layer of polish. And here's part of what Zelda does so well. You can see how a lot of the great things in Breath of the Wild would be great fun even in a simple prototype. On the flip side, this kind of exhilarating feeling of being able to do so many cool things only works because every single piece of the game is designed with this in mind and all the crazy interactions people come up with are actually supported. It only works so well because people aren't getting that familiar feeling of "oh. That didn't work." This must have been a massive task and I'm amazed they pulled it off!
  - a-saleh 10y ago
    I have read [1] that they actually tried large part of the systems (article mentions physics and chemistry) in a simple prototype. I would actually like to play the 2D version :) [1] http://www.polygon.com/2017/3/1/14780954/the-legend-of-zelda-breath-of-the-wild-2d-prototype-gdc-2017 http://www.polygon.com/2017/3/1/14780954/the-legend-of-zelda...
    - Agentlien 10y ago
      Yes, they talk about it in the GDC talk[1] and that's what I was referring to: That I can see how even in such a simple prototype the fun seemed evident. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyMsF31NdNc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyMsF31NdNc
- wingerlang 10y ago
  What is fun for one might be torture for another.
- cableshaft 10y ago
  I'm a game designer. Something can seem super fun in your head, but until it gets in front of you and you can play with it, there's no guarantee it's actually fun. And almost always, there was one or more flaws in your thinking that will have to be ironed out by playing it over and over again, preferably along with other people and getting their opinions on it as well. I can't begin to tell you how many times I come up with this clever idea, mock up a bunch of components or start coding a prototype, and go... "oh, damn, this isn't much fun." I've been able to whip a lot of those failed ideas into something fun, but it often takes a lot of experiments with different ideas or borrowing pieces of designs from other games that have worked, a lot of time and rumination on the design (I get a lot of my ideas for new things to try while walking my puppy, commuting in a quiet car, or in the shower), and putting it aside to work on something else and letting my subconscious or things I encounter in life to inspire potential solutions to the problem (and often it'll still take multiple attempts to fix things). The ones that drive me the most crazy are the ones where you try it for the first time and go 'This isn't that fun with this set of rules, but it's close to fun. If I can just find the right tweak, this can be great.' It can sometimes seem like it takes forever to find that right tweak. I've got some prototypes that I think are almost there, but I've had to put aside because I spent so much time on it and still couldn't figure out the right tweak for them. There have been attempts to nail down Game Design principles. There are quite a few books you can get on Amazon that have some good insights in them, GDC lectures, Gamasutra articles, academic journals, etc. There's nothing that's totally universal, but the more you learn, the larger your design palette to draw from.
marrone12 10y ago
It is truly incredible how a singular person can have such an influence on the world. What would gaming have been like had he never been?

vkou 10y ago

Witcher 3 is very interesting from that perspective. I found the controls to be fairly clunky, the detective vision a bit of a mess, combat as not particularly engaging, Gwent as an objectively bad card game... Yet, the strength of the writing, and the characters carry it.

mathw 10y ago
The characters repelled me, I hated playing as Gruff Brooding Manly Man all the time. I could have dealt with that perhaps, but because the gameplay systems had so many issues I just put it down again and never even had a flicker of interest in going back. Between us I think we've illustrated the distinction between "good setting" and "good game mechanics" and how they can influence whether somebody wants to play your game or not. But you definitely need at least one of them!
- doikor 10y ago
  > Gruff Brooding Manly Man That is the "public" image of witchers in the universe. If you play the games (and especially if you read the books) it becomes quite clear that it is just a facade. And quite a bit of brooding that is there is "I've seen this shit before" as Geralt by the time of Witcher 3 over 100 years old (the older witcher Vesemir is over 200 years old). The mutations give Witchers long lives (none of them have ever died of old age)
  - mathw 10y ago
    The Witcher 3 did nothing at all to show me this in the time I played it. Admittedly I didn't get very far, but by the time I'd not enjoyed it for a good 15 hours or so I thought it was about time to do something more entertaining. Also the word "Witcher" set my teeth on edge too. So really the whole world is probably not for me!
- foobarchu 10y ago
  I think between the two of you, you've illustrated the subjective nature of both settings and game mechanics. Many, many people think that the Witcher 3 had both good setting and good game mechanics, that's why its one of the most acclaimed game of all time, critically and from consumers. There's really no winning strategy here. The best creators can do is try to target what they know their existing fanbase will like, or target a fanbase as the audience they want to get. Miyamoto is really good at this. CDProjekt is also really good at this.

threeseed 10y ago

No Man's Sky had what 12 staff in total ? People need to stop comparing it with games from first-tier creators like Nintendo.

sametmax 10y ago
Zelda link to the past didn't have a huge team, and much less the technological luxuries we have today. Yet the game is really fun. It's a culture thing.
- wingerlang 10y ago
  Even if we assume Zelda had 12 people, does it make it a fairer comparison? They have huge resources, exactly the experience needed and so on. Hardly comparable.
CM30 10y ago
There are far better indie games with one or two people on the development team and even less of a budget. Some of which do damn well at competing with triple A titles. No Man's Sky's issues did not purely come down to budget or team size, but skewed priorities. Lots of work went into the tech and procedural generation, while seemingly a lot less went into the actual core gameplay systms that actually give the players something to do in said world. They put the idea of an unlimited size universe above that of a game that has interesting things to actually do in said universe.
thefalcon 10y ago
If they decide to charge the same price as other first-tier games, they're asking to be compared to other first-tier games.