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Highly complex, in-depth, system simulation is like a siren song for game developers and players alike. There's this perception that an amazing simulation will

Highly complex, in-depth, system simulation is like a siren song for game developers and players alike. There's this perception that an amazing simulation will be the basis for an amazing game. In practice, high-quality simulations seem to be interesting but not all that fun. See: F.E.A.R.'s Goal-Oriented Action Planning (https://alumni.media.mit.edu/~jorkin/goap.html https://alumni.media.mit.edu/~jorkin/goap.html) which had to be modified to broadcast its intent to the player, because play-testers felt the game was unfair and that the A.I. was cheating. And it also seems like players can't really tell the difference between a sophisticated simulation and a handful of heuristics with some calls to random() thrown in. From the perspective of a player who does not know how the simulation works, the latter can _seem_ like the output of a complex system. See: _Designing Games_ by Tynan Sylvester, developer of RimWorld (https://tynansylvester.com/book/ https://tynansylvester.com/book/). Dwarf Fortress, I think, is the exception which proves this rule. Anyway, I think simulations like this are really cool to build, but hard to turn into a fun game.

w-ll 4y ago
Wait till the Spiffing Brit get's his hands on it.
Forgeties79 4y ago
How “advanced” would you say _Designing Games_ is? I’m a layman with an amateur interest in game development.
- ecdavis 4y ago
  It's very accessible. If you can grok the first 30 minutes of this talk you can grok the book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdqhHKjepiE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdqhHKjepiE Strong recommend, if only to understand how RimWorld was designed and built.
  - Forgeties79 4y ago
    Thanks! Appreciate the insight
Buttons840 4y ago
> heuristics with some calls to random() thrown in I've come to see one aspect of game design as "shaping randomness into more interesting and artistic forms". Just a plain rand() call is sort of interesting, you never know exactly what you're going to get, but with some art and careful shaping it can be made much more interesting.
- atoav 4y ago
  Also consider that random will give you random. A lot of things can be better if they follow different distributions (e.g. gaussian or a bounded random walk)
ok_dad 4y ago
On that same note, they tend to underestimate the time it takes to develop a good complex simulation, like DF, when it has taken like 10 to 15 years to get to the level of detail DF has. One developer isn’t usually going to be able to develop that much complexity in a few years or something, it’s gonna take a while.
Barrin92 4y ago
>because play-testers felt the game was unfair and that the A.I. was cheating the F.E.A.R ai is still amazing to me after all these years. I'm surprised by the play tester reaction because even without the broadcasting of intent I think the AI felt very organic. Honestly still one of the most convincing ones to this day in shooters. https://youtu.be/KQN3yKYkFmE https://youtu.be/KQN3yKYkFmE
- Aeolun 4y ago
  I think they just had the AI shout what they were doing right? They didn’t modify the actual behavior. Of course, shouting ‘Grenade!’ at your enemy gives them plenty of time to get away.
  - kqr 4y ago
    In essence, yes, "the AI" as one whole just shouts out what it is doing. What's sort of neat is that since all AI characters share one mind, they can have one character give orders to another, which then appears to comply – even though it was effectively the character that was going to do the thing that decided to do the thing in the first place. In other words, the "order" is just "the AI" telling itself what it's doing – but it looks to the player as though one AI character instructs another on what to do, and the other obeys.
    - Aeolun 4y ago
      Haha, yeah, I wonder if they at least designated a ‘squad leader’ that was the designated ‘order giver’, or whether it was always a random nearby soldier. I guess it doesn’t matter from a game perspective since I never noticed, but from a technical perspective it seems more elegant to me.
- kqr 4y ago
  It wasn't just about the play tester reaction. Other benefits of broadcasting: - Sometimes AI characters can't act on their knowledge in a way that is obvious to the player, so they might seem more dumb than they are. The fact that they can vocalise their knowledge even if they can't act on it makes it clear that they are more intelligent than they appear. - By vocalising their knowledge about the situation, fortuitous incidents will more easily appear like consequences of AI direction, even though they were not actually related. (Narrative bias in the human.) - Since the AI actually works with a shared mind, it can seem unnatural that each AI character knows what all the others are doing without any voice communication.
chongli 4y ago
And I would argue that Dwarf Fortress is no exception at all. In all of my time with the game I've enjoyed the idea of the game more than I actually enjoyed playing it. This is the player side of the simulation siren song. The more time you spend with it, the more you understand how it works, the more you realize how incredibly unbalanced it is. The game's legendary difficulty is entirely due to the impenetrability of its user interface and systems. When you actually finish getting through all the tutorials needed to learn how to play the game it falls flat on its face. It is quite trivial then to get a fortress up and running and produce far more food, drinks, and goods than you ever need and grow your wealth rapidly. And then when the enemy comes knocking it's quite trivial to pull up your drawbridges and line the entry halls with traps and generally grind them into a smooth red paste. Dwarf Fortress may be a fine simulation and an interesting study in systems and a great conversation piece but it is not a very good game. It is like the Great Salt Lake of games: a hundred miles wide and a few feet deep.
- dash2 4y ago
  But the stories it generates though.
- seszett 4y ago
  > It is quite trivial then to get a fortress up and running and produce far more food, drinks, and goods than you ever need and grow your wealth rapidly. And then when the enemy comes knocking it's quite trivial to pull up your drawbridges and line the entry halls with traps and generally grind them into a smooth red paste. I'd say that the point of this kind of open-ended simulation game without a clear goal is not to "win" since there is nothing to win, but to create your own challenges. I've played a lot of these games and from Civilization II to Dwarf Fortress, just winning by using the game weaknesses has always been very uninteresting, but building a world-class city-state on an island or an above-ground wooden fortress without digging, for example, are challenges that you can create for yourself and that make these games interesting to play. Since they are single-player, I find just "mastering the game" to maximise end-game score to be quite pointless, but that's just how I feel of course.
  - 4y ago
belugacat 4y ago
I agree about the siren song aspect, and how full system simulation is very non correlated to fun, but I think it’s one of those things where we haven’t seen the full potential yet - we’re still maybe a few computational leaps away from it. Kind of like ray tracing, or voxel worlds; for the latter, Minecraft was a great example of a first game meeting that “computation required” vs “fun” slope intercept; Teardown is a more recent game that uses its voxel engine to enable novel gameplay that would be totally infeasible without it.
ehnto 4y ago
The best simulation games are those that have done a good job at giving your systems a purpose that requires using what you have built. One such game is Factorio. It's a logistics and manufacturing simluation at it's core, but they gave a half decent attempt at making a story and antagonist that makes your factory have a purpose outside of just building the factory. Another great example is Stormworks: Search and Rescue. There's no shortage of lego-like vehicle building games, but Stormworks gives you the purpose of completing various search and rescue missions with your vehicles. From that, you suddenly have practical reasons to build things certain ways. I can build a boat in a few different games, but only in Stormworks would I need to build a boat that can extract a piece of mining equipment from the sea floor and have provisions for delivering it onto a wharf.
thom 4y ago
The Football (nee Championship) Manager series is one of my all time favourites, and is effectively just a bunch of spreadsheets about football players and teams. It has the advantage that the numbers underlying the simulation are also interesting enough to form the majority of the UI. In some ways it proves your rule though - for a long time there was no actual visual match engine so you couldn’t watch your team play, and it was every bit as addictive back then.
ekianjo 4y ago
Not every game has to be fun in the common sense of the word. Flight simulations are another example where you spend dozens of hours to understand how to fly a plane correctly which is much more like work. There are just different kind of people who like different kind of experiences.
slightwinder 4y ago
> In practice, high-quality simulations seem to be interesting but not all that fun. I think a great deal about good games is the communication of their black box of rules and mechanics. In a simulation this is especially hard, as much to communicate, and they are usually created by more techno-orientated people, which simply suck at these things. So the player is confronted with a highly complex world where things happen, but for the player it's not always obvious why something happened, which impact their actions have, and sometimes they don't even get that something happened. Thus, giving players a way to explore the rules of the simulation, and understand the state of the world they are playing, is far more important in a simulation because of it's complexity.
EamonnMR 4y ago
I think that bots are a uniquely bad fit for in depth simulation. A city builder is more like dwarf fortress.
imtringued 4y ago
Forcibly coding heuristics is how you get suburbia simulators like cities skylines. The heuristics reward car centric designs because you need to build dedicated pedestrian pathways for the AI heuristics to pick up the intended change. Your city will get to look very ugly.

w-ll 4y ago

Wait till the Spiffing Brit get's his hands on it.

Forgeties79 4y ago

How “advanced” would you say _Designing Games_ is? I’m a layman with an amateur interest in game development.

ecdavis 4y ago
It's very accessible. If you can grok the first 30 minutes of this talk you can grok the book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdqhHKjepiE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdqhHKjepiE Strong recommend, if only to understand how RimWorld was designed and built.
- Forgeties79 4y ago
  Thanks! Appreciate the insight

Buttons840 4y ago

> heuristics with some calls to random() thrown in I've come to see one aspect of game design as "shaping randomness into more interesting and artistic forms". Just a plain rand() call is sort of interesting, you never know exactly what you're going to get, but with some art and careful shaping it can be made much more interesting.

atoav 4y ago
Also consider that random will give you random. A lot of things can be better if they follow different distributions (e.g. gaussian or a bounded random walk)

ok_dad 4y ago

On that same note, they tend to underestimate the time it takes to develop a good complex simulation, like DF, when it has taken like 10 to 15 years to get to the level of detail DF has. One developer isn’t usually going to be able to develop that much complexity in a few years or something, it’s gonna take a while.

Barrin92 4y ago

>because play-testers felt the game was unfair and that the A.I. was cheating the F.E.A.R ai is still amazing to me after all these years. I'm surprised by the play tester reaction because even without the broadcasting of intent I think the AI felt very organic. Honestly still one of the most convincing ones to this day in shooters. https://youtu.be/KQN3yKYkFmE https://youtu.be/KQN3yKYkFmE

Aeolun 4y ago
I think they just had the AI shout what they were doing right? They didn’t modify the actual behavior. Of course, shouting ‘Grenade!’ at your enemy gives them plenty of time to get away.
- kqr 4y ago
  In essence, yes, "the AI" as one whole just shouts out what it is doing. What's sort of neat is that since all AI characters share one mind, they can have one character give orders to another, which then appears to comply – even though it was effectively the character that was going to do the thing that decided to do the thing in the first place. In other words, the "order" is just "the AI" telling itself what it's doing – but it looks to the player as though one AI character instructs another on what to do, and the other obeys.
  - Aeolun 4y ago
    Haha, yeah, I wonder if they at least designated a ‘squad leader’ that was the designated ‘order giver’, or whether it was always a random nearby soldier. I guess it doesn’t matter from a game perspective since I never noticed, but from a technical perspective it seems more elegant to me.
kqr 4y ago
It wasn't just about the play tester reaction. Other benefits of broadcasting: - Sometimes AI characters can't act on their knowledge in a way that is obvious to the player, so they might seem more dumb than they are. The fact that they can vocalise their knowledge even if they can't act on it makes it clear that they are more intelligent than they appear. - By vocalising their knowledge about the situation, fortuitous incidents will more easily appear like consequences of AI direction, even though they were not actually related. (Narrative bias in the human.) - Since the AI actually works with a shared mind, it can seem unnatural that each AI character knows what all the others are doing without any voice communication.

chongli 4y ago

And I would argue that Dwarf Fortress is no exception at all. In all of my time with the game I've enjoyed the idea of the game more than I actually enjoyed playing it. This is the player side of the simulation siren song. The more time you spend with it, the more you understand how it works, the more you realize how incredibly unbalanced it is. The game's legendary difficulty is entirely due to the impenetrability of its user interface and systems. When you actually finish getting through all the tutorials needed to learn how to play the game it falls flat on its face. It is quite trivial then to get a fortress up and running and produce far more food, drinks, and goods than you ever need and grow your wealth rapidly. And then when the enemy comes knocking it's quite trivial to pull up your drawbridges and line the entry halls with traps and generally grind them into a smooth red paste. Dwarf Fortress may be a fine simulation and an interesting study in systems and a great conversation piece but it is not a very good game. It is like the Great Salt Lake of games: a hundred miles wide and a few feet deep.

dash2 4y ago
But the stories it generates though.
seszett 4y ago
> It is quite trivial then to get a fortress up and running and produce far more food, drinks, and goods than you ever need and grow your wealth rapidly. And then when the enemy comes knocking it's quite trivial to pull up your drawbridges and line the entry halls with traps and generally grind them into a smooth red paste. I'd say that the point of this kind of open-ended simulation game without a clear goal is not to "win" since there is nothing to win, but to create your own challenges. I've played a lot of these games and from Civilization II to Dwarf Fortress, just winning by using the game weaknesses has always been very uninteresting, but building a world-class city-state on an island or an above-ground wooden fortress without digging, for example, are challenges that you can create for yourself and that make these games interesting to play. Since they are single-player, I find just "mastering the game" to maximise end-game score to be quite pointless, but that's just how I feel of course.
- 4y ago

belugacat 4y ago

I agree about the siren song aspect, and how full system simulation is very non correlated to fun, but I think it’s one of those things where we haven’t seen the full potential yet - we’re still maybe a few computational leaps away from it. Kind of like ray tracing, or voxel worlds; for the latter, Minecraft was a great example of a first game meeting that “computation required” vs “fun” slope intercept; Teardown is a more recent game that uses its voxel engine to enable novel gameplay that would be totally infeasible without it.

ehnto 4y ago

The best simulation games are those that have done a good job at giving your systems a purpose that requires using what you have built. One such game is Factorio. It's a logistics and manufacturing simluation at it's core, but they gave a half decent attempt at making a story and antagonist that makes your factory have a purpose outside of just building the factory. Another great example is Stormworks: Search and Rescue. There's no shortage of lego-like vehicle building games, but Stormworks gives you the purpose of completing various search and rescue missions with your vehicles. From that, you suddenly have practical reasons to build things certain ways. I can build a boat in a few different games, but only in Stormworks would I need to build a boat that can extract a piece of mining equipment from the sea floor and have provisions for delivering it onto a wharf.

thom 4y ago

The Football (nee Championship) Manager series is one of my all time favourites, and is effectively just a bunch of spreadsheets about football players and teams. It has the advantage that the numbers underlying the simulation are also interesting enough to form the majority of the UI. In some ways it proves your rule though - for a long time there was no actual visual match engine so you couldn’t watch your team play, and it was every bit as addictive back then.

ekianjo 4y ago

Not every game has to be fun in the common sense of the word. Flight simulations are another example where you spend dozens of hours to understand how to fly a plane correctly which is much more like work. There are just different kind of people who like different kind of experiences.

slightwinder 4y ago

> In practice, high-quality simulations seem to be interesting but not all that fun. I think a great deal about good games is the communication of their black box of rules and mechanics. In a simulation this is especially hard, as much to communicate, and they are usually created by more techno-orientated people, which simply suck at these things. So the player is confronted with a highly complex world where things happen, but for the player it's not always obvious why something happened, which impact their actions have, and sometimes they don't even get that something happened. Thus, giving players a way to explore the rules of the simulation, and understand the state of the world they are playing, is far more important in a simulation because of it's complexity.

EamonnMR 4y ago

I think that bots are a uniquely bad fit for in depth simulation. A city builder is more like dwarf fortress.

imtringued 4y ago

Forcibly coding heuristics is how you get suburbia simulators like cities skylines. The heuristics reward car centric designs because you need to build dedicated pedestrian pathways for the AI heuristics to pick up the intended change. Your city will get to look very ugly.