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Game design is simple
- henning 11mo agoNothing asserted here is simple. And after reading all that it's still hard to design and build a game that will cut through the noise of all the other games coming out on Steam. It's not a matter of "simple vs. easy". If you have to write many words to list your ideas and you state each idea is deep and connected to all the other ideas, the thing you are talking about is not simple.
- alstonite 11mo agoThis feels like a classic example of the concept that simple ≠ easy
- godelski 11mo agoIn that sense most things are simple. Though it's also simple to over simplify. Since often simplicity arises out of the accumulation of expert analysis rather than being obvious from the get go. Which I think is just as important as what you say: Simple != easy Simple != obvious Simple != intuitive Simple != easy to understand I think if people remembered these things then things would be more simple. I'll add one more relationship Elegant == Simple Simple != elegant
- philipov 11mo agoSimple means not complex, means not composed of even simpler parts. A twelve step plan is literally a list of simpler parts, making it not simple. Most things are complex, since there are so many ways to combine simples. It is an ironic title.
- nkrisc 11mo ago> Simple means not complex, means not composed of even simpler parts. “Simple” is obviously subjective and context-dependent, but I don’t agree with that. Getting a bowl of cereal is simple, yet still composed of several simple steps.
- throwaway8xak92 11mo ago> Simple means not complex, means not composed of even simpler parts. Is that formally defined and widely accepted? If not, I don’t think your argument holds because almost nothing is simple based on what you said.
- godelski 11mo ago> Simple means not complex I disagree. Most things are complex, yet most things are also simple. Don't forget that words are overloaded so they only mean things in context. Words are both simple and complex because of this. As an example: the rules to the game of life are simple. The outcomes are complex. The rules cannot even be decomposed further, making them first principles of that universe. > means not composed of even simpler parts These would really be "first principles". Which is a form of simplicity. Being the simplest something can be, yet that sentence itself conveys that "simple" relies on context and in a continuum. This relationship of "simple yet complex" is quite common. We could say the same thing about chaotic functions like the double pendulum. It is both simple and complex.
- IshKebab 11mo agoYeah kind of feels like "writing a hit novel is simple - you just need a plot that is engaging, well written prose, and a satisfying story arc". I mean... yeah kind of obvs. Very "rest of the owl".
- christophilus 11mo agoWell, that wouldn’t give you a “hit” novel. That would give you a good novel. Hit != Good
- PostOnce 11mo agoFor reference Raph Koster wrote "the book" on game design, and was the lead designer for Ultima Online (among other things) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raph_Koster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raph_Koster
- animex 11mo agoRaph was the lead game designer on SWTOR a game that was way ahead of it's time and one of the most enjoyable sandbox mmorpg's I've ever played. I'm working on a new game that will take inspiration from lessons learned there.
- starkparker 11mo agoI remember when Raph was working on Metaplace[1], which was a kid-targeting, programmable (Lua dialect), virtual world/user generated content factory that was contemporary to the launch of Roblox ca. 2006-2007. I wonder quite often what things might be like if Metaplace had gotten to the scale and scope that Roblox wound up achieving. 1: https://www.raphkoster.com/2007/09/18/metaplace/ https://www.raphkoster.com/2007/09/18/metaplace/, or this demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZiB_JcRH_s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZiB_JcRH_s, or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaplace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaplace
- vkou 11mo agoWhat was interesting/worked about it's design (and why did the players care?[1]) Was it resilient to the, uh, many, many well-documented problems that the genre pushes players/itself into? --- [1] There's a lot of ideas in this space that sound interesting on paper to nerds bikeshedding, but often fall flat in actual implementation. I'm curious as to what were the ones that worked.
- tekbruh9000 11mo agoGame was SWG, not SWTOR. Launched in 2003 and was sunset in 2011 when SWTOR launched. SWG set out to be something like Dwarf Fortress in terms of depth to the worlds physics; for example, gunsmiths could tinker on all parts of a gun and maybe get a lucky roll to unlock +N more damage or -N recoil. Same with land vehicles and bioengineered animals, droids. Parameters to noodle all the way down. Some under user control, others random to foster sense of a chaotic physical world. As the in game object economy was entirely propped up by crafters this fostered economic PVP. Lucasarts of 2000-2003, when the game was developed, did not understand MMO, and 3D games take much longer than 2D adventure games and shoved it out the door 2 years too early. It also suffered from 90s OOP heavy software development patterns. Devs had difficulty managing it and updating over the years. Ultimately it failed at being a Star Wars game. PVE was just "kill a nest of bugs" and failed to leverage storylines and characters. Players with nothing else to do ended up ruling the economy or whatever. Could have made them compete against Star Wars power brokers, IMO. Jabba sabotaged your factory, or something. Once a player was kitted out they had nothing to do. Some have spent the last 10+ years implementing a server emulator, various tools and mods. An emulator built around the original release is here: https://github.com/swgemu https://github.com/swgemu I tinker on a modded private server now and then. Initially added in random world events, to generate things to go do and replacing odd design decisions like mission terminals with NPC models to talk to in that seedy back alley, to foster more in world RP vibe. When WOW launched SWG was redesigned to play more like that. Typical MBA "copy paste what they are doing" project management.
- cloud_watching 11mo agoThe title is ironic. Game design is very simple indeed. This is an amazing article. I work on game design and I think this could work as a map of the terrain.
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- b00ty4breakfast 11mo agothe complexity of a given domain is not necessarily an indication of it's difficulty. I suspect that a guy of Koster's experience and reputation knows that and is making a spicy title for the clicks.
- andrewflnr 11mo agoHe's pretty clear about it towards the bottom. Roughly "any paragraph in this essay could be a book".
- MattRix 11mo agoFor the people taking the title literally without apparently reading the article: > Put another way — every single paragraph in this essay could be a book.
- Animats 11mo agoIt's more like someone ran a PowerPoint presentation through a converter that makes a web site. There's good stuff in there, but the presentation is clearly a slide deck.
- Raph_Koster 11mo agoNo, I added all the images after writing the article. But the images ARE from the many many presentations I have given on game design, which can be found here: https://www.raphkoster.com/games/presentations/ https://www.raphkoster.com/games/presentations/ Many of the links are to those presentations, and many of them are deep dives on single sentences in the article.
- zwaps 11mo agoThis reads like the handbook for people making grind-based games. Sure enough, the author exclusively works in the mmorpg space. If you are a game designer, please take this with a grain of salt. Fun does not equal repeated challenges. And let me also reject the implicit notion that stories are entertainment but not, academically speaking, fun.
- gafferongames 11mo agoHave you made any games?
- gafferongames 11mo agoI ask this because Ralph is a luminary in the field and you just likened his contribution to the industry to that of somebody who designs predatory engagement loops and this is utterly ridiculous.
- pxc 11mo agoI thought your comment was too dismissive at first, but then I read the whole article, and I fully agree with it. The article gives useful theoretical tools for understanding and critiquing such shallow games, actually. Its examples are drawn from many genres, and it's thoughtful and insightful about many kinds and aspects of games. The comment you call out with your question is indeed a low-effort and low-quality dismissal. I struggle to describe it without being more insulting than that.
- meheleventyone 11mo agoThe important thing to note is that Raph’s ideas are in the formalist camp and there other competing theories about game design. The criticism made in the parent of the thread has been a common one since Theory of Fun was first published. With artistic disciplines like game design you often have multiple ways of looking at similar things that are more about the values of the author than any one view being more inherently correct.
- zoeysmithe 11mo agoWhen I started writing fiction I found myself naturally gravitating towards inserting puzzles and mysteries and twists and unknowns. I think some people just love that. There's this dopamine aspect of solving the problem or knowing the unknown and the anticipation towards it can be very intriguing! Games do this in a more obvious way, but the 'rule of fun' is everywhere. Look how exciting mystery is and how boring well known things are, but ironically there's a lot more to, say, the theory of gravity that if contextualized differently would be exciting and deeply interesting that 'unknowns' like the mystery of some cult or whatever can't even come close to, but in the end, there's something inside of us that wants to read about that cult. I make sure to self-aware of this and do deep dives into the boring 'known' world and push back on the sensationalism and such I'm so drawn to.
- ehnto 11mo agoTo your last paragraph I think contextualising the mystery is a good amount of the fun and I guess all of the storytelling. There's a lot of things about our real world, that if told by an alien race, would make us sound like ethereal wizards. "They convinced the sand itself to think for them, guided the power of Sol to move them, and spoke to eachother through the very fabric of energy that moves invisibly through us all" Similar to that, there's a bunch of magic/fantasy storytelling that can kind of pull me out of disbelief, because I can't help but think "yeah we have that, it's electricity" or "witches are just pharamacists without good research"
- dejobaan 11mo agoRaph is, at once, incredibly accomplished, thoughtful about design, and humble about it. I once caught him coming off an international flight, and he was excitedly showing off a game he'd coded on the plane. He genuinely loves working on the stuff and thinking about it. His writing is often SO full of ideas that I can't absorb an entire piece in one sitting. It's like a 12 course tasting menu. The neat thing with his writing is that, despite what he says here about all 12 pieces being important together, you can often just pick an isolated bit and chew on it for a while, and still learn something. (Presumably return to the other 11 courses later; they'll still be fresh.)
- ninkendo 11mo agoMy question: is there a concise theory of game design that properly explains why cutscenes are fucking stupid? There are a lot of AAA games out there that very clearly seem like the developers wish they were directing a movie instead. Sure, there’s loads of cutscenes to show off some cool visuals. But then they seem to think “ok well we need to actually let the player play now”, but it’s still basically a cutscene, but with extra steps: cyberpunk 2077 had this part where you press a button repeatedly to make your character crawl along the floor and the take their pills. It’s just a cutscene, but where you essentially advance frames by pressing the X button. Then there’s quick time events, which are essentially “we have a cutscene we want you to watch, but you can die if you don’t press a random button at a random time”, and they call it a game. If it’s not that, it’s breaks in play where they take control away from you to show you some cool thing, utterly taking you out of the experience for something that is purely visual. I usually shout “can I play now? Is it my turn?” at the screen when this happens. But I digress… I essentially hate games nowadays because this or similar experience seems to dominate the very definition of AAA games at this point. None of them respect your time, and they seem to think “this is just like a movie” is a form of praise, when it’s exactly the opposite of why I play games.
- throwaway314155 11mo agoI have never disagreed more with a comment on this site.
- nkrisc 11mo agoHalf-Life got it right. The cutscene plays but you can still run around and do whatever you want (including not listening).
- weird-eye-issue 11mo agoI know exactly what you mean. Lots of video games really do feel more like movies these days. Cyberpunk drove me absolutely crazy with all the cut scenes
- 542458 11mo agoI think different people value different things in entertainment. For you, the "cinematic" aspects of the media are worthless - but for others, the whole "interactive cinematic spectacle" is worth it even if it comes at the expense of intractability or the ability to execute skills. Take the COD campaigns for example - notoriously, some of the turret-vehicle-chase-sequences don't actually require any user input to succeed at, but a certain class of player still enjoys them because they're in it for different things than you.
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- CompoundEyes 11mo ago> crazy juicy, so that players are captivated by spectacle, well beyond the needs of feedback from a UX perspective What a great phrase to describe an aspect of game design to strive for. https://www.raphkoster.com/2015/06/29/game-design-ux-design/ https://www.raphkoster.com/2015/06/29/game-design-ux-design/
- gregsadetsky 11mo ago"juice" (in terms of game making) will always remind me of this amazing, classic talk - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy0aCDmgnxg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy0aCDmgnxg
- chrisweekly 11mo agoInteresting, I came across "juice" in this same sense of relatively subtle UX polish in this article: https://garden.bradwoods.io/notes/design/juice https://garden.bradwoods.io/notes/design/juice.
- CompoundEyes 11mo agoFantastic watch thanks for sharing. I realize now how a favorite game of mine, Wario’s Woods on SNES, juices up a twist on match 3 puzzle and how dry early versions of Tetris were (succeeding despite that).
- PhearTheCeal 11mo agoReminds me of this interactive demo (created by the lead of Dead Cells) where you can adjust the juice amount in the menu: https://deepnight.net/games/game-feel/ https://deepnight.net/games/game-feel/
- HelloUsername 11mo agoOh I thought you were gonna post that one of Vlambeer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJdEqssNZ-U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJdEqssNZ-U
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- jessetemp 11mo agoI hadn't heard of the author before this. I'll definitely read more of their stuff, but I thought the bottom line for part three was a little incomplete. > Bottom line: the more uncertainty, indeterminacy, ambiguity in your game, the more depth it will have. Sure, starting from 0%, adding uncertainty adds depth. But the player needs to maintain some influence over that uncertainty. If you crank the uncertainty up too 100% then its pure random which isn't deep or fun. I've noticed a similar more-is-better trend in a few sequels I've played, where the first game had say 5 mechanics which were fun. Then the sequel has 10 mechanics, and because 10 is more than 5 it therefore must be more fun. But it ends up being too much shit to juggle and less fun as a result. More isn't always better
- Agentlien 11mo agoThere's been quite a few games in recent years where I notice some system and think "ugh, do I really need to bother with this, too?". Especially crafting or skill point systems which feel slapped on. Some games make them a fun and integral part of the gameplay, some seem to include them because it's trendy and it just adds friction and mental load with little payoff. I don't mind complexity, some of my favorite games are ridiculously complex (Dwarf Fortress), but the complexity needs to pay for itself.
- ceigey 11mo agoI’ve had similar thoughts too: the older I get, the less “extra features” translate to value if I’m expected to stretch my concentration across all of them to have fun. I’m not as sophisticated as the average Dwarf Fortress player, but an emergent quality of that game that I’ve admired from afar has been how you can ignore various mechanics and you’re rewarded with an interesting ride. It’s dynamic enough that by pulling various gameplay “levers” you can get wildly different outcomes (and thus value through replayability), but things will sort of run themselves (for better or worse) if you forget about them. So you’re half writing your own story, half discovering it as it writes itself.
- moduspol 11mo agoMy cynical take is that crafting systems are probably the most attractive on the ratio of "amount of dev effort required to implement" relative to "amount of play time added." They're also trivially tunable. You can add (or subtract) hours of play time just by changing the numbers required to craft things. Unless they're an integral feature of the game (like in Minecraft), they always feel slapped on to me.
- ostwilkens 11mo ago> Bottom line: fun is basically about making progress on prediction. I'm having some trouble parsing this sentence. Does he mean that "player has fun if their predictions lead to progress"?
- meheleventyone 11mo agoProgress on predictions means both getting better at prediction (learning) and applying that.
- jebarker 11mo agoAlso a decent definition of intelligence
- meheleventyone 11mo agoI think for both contexts its far too simplistic to be more than a generalization and certainly for fun its a very local definition to serve Raph's ideas about what constitutes a game rather than encompassing enough to define it fully. For intelligence for example you could have a PID controller where there is automatic tuning which would fit the definition of learning and application. But I don't think we'd call it intelligent outside of marketing copy.
- jebarker 11mo agoA PID doesn’t get better at learning and applying predictions. I’d argue that to do that essentially indefinitely requires intelligence.
- meheleventyone 11mo agoHence mentioning a PID controller that has autotuning. Drop it in a new environment and it'll adjust. Drop it in another and it'll reconfigure itself.
- wartywhoa23 11mo ago> Bottom line: the more uncertainty, indeterminacy, ambiguity in your game, the more depth it will have. Well, welcome to planet Earth then, the ultimate game environment.
- runevault 11mo agoI need to sit down and give this a proper read, but anyone who wants more of Raph giving insights into game design should check out this old GDC talk he did about Practical Creativity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyVTxGpEO30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyVTxGpEO30
- foota 11mo agoJokingly, something about the idea of taking NP problems and making them into games seems cruel to the optimizer in me.
- Raph_Koster 11mo agoMost classic games are in fact built out of NP problems, or at least the upper reaches of PSPACE. https://www.raphkoster.com/games/presentations/games-are-math-10-core-mechanics-that-drive-compelling-gameplay/ https://www.raphkoster.com/games/presentations/games-are-mat... has an overview.
- blablablerg 11mo agoIt is an interesting article but I find the slides inserted without much context to be confusing.. or is that part of the game?
- svantana 11mo agoIndeed, the galaxy brain move here would be to make a game about game design, that itself follows its own principles.
- class4behavior 11mo agoTell me why all MMOs are crap or just fail and as a result turned into a gambling institution.
- teamonkey 11mo agoBecause MMOs are expensive to make and run and the people who can afford to fund that expect a strong return on investment or they will shut it down.
- stefs 11mo agoThat's just like, your opinion man. In my opinion neither of those two claims are universially true.
- wsc981 11mo agoI loved World of Warcraft for many years, but kind of stopped playing during Cataclysm. And it's kind of weird, but I preferred the old-style questing (many repeated quests and perhaps less streamlined experience) compared to what came afterwards. In Cataclysm they tried to improve the quest experience, add more variety, but somehow the game lost a bit of its magic - at least from my point of view.
- lubujackson 11mo agoI thought this was obvious? These are social games where everyone is in the same funnel and the players with the most time dominate others... but also need new objectives. At the beginning you quest with people your level, but they always, always devolve into bigger, more tedious tasks (raids) that have less and less differentiated rewards (1% chance of a drop that boosts you 2%) because otherwise you have players at level 283 and there is no way to balance team dynamics as some people scale infinitely.
- Raph_Koster 11mo agoTowards the end of the article, I say this: "If you just make the same game, the one you know how to make, the players get bored because it’s nothing but problems they have seen before and already have their answers to. Sometimes, they get so bored that an entire genre dies." -- the last phrase links to a video about how MMOs are dead. :D
- random9749832 11mo agoI watched a lot of Sakurai's (Smash Bro's director and creator of Kirby) videos on game design and development and not once did he bring up "dopamine" or any other neurochemical. I think once you start thinking about game design from this perspective you are essentially looking for ways to exploit human psychology which explains how a lot of games have now turned into casinos. Some of the best games out there defy a lot of prior design knowledge or things most people don't like but still have a cult following (look at Death Stranding) (Dark Souls made difficulty cool again when everyone else was trying to be "accessible"). The best games are also probably by people who were just passionate about bringing a certain idea into life because they themselves want that thing (Pokemon got a lot of its inspiration from the creators childhood exploring outside) not because people will get addicted to it. I understand treating game design as a science to some degree but it rubs me the wrong way.
- teamonkey 11mo agoGaming has always been about exploiting human psychology. It's about making people have fun, fun is a psychological state and dopamine release is intrinsicly linked to that. That doesn't mean that it has to be bad or destructive! Fun is a positive thing, and most game designers I've met from across the industry are in it because they just want to make people have fun. Dopamine release is a bit of a curio, really. You don't make design decisions based on optimising dopamine release; there's no way of doing that. But it's interesting to know the physiological reasons why people think that things are fun, and it's useful evidence when building a framework such as Raph's.
- random9749832 11mo ago>Gaming has always been about exploiting human psychology. If you think about it from this perspective than it certainly makes sense to add elements of randomness with intermittent reinforcement (e.g. slot machine) to any game or quick rewards and exponential progression (e.g. Cookie Clicker). Meanwhile you have games like Shenzhen.io which have a PDF that you need to go through to solve programming puzzles and no hints. What part of human psychology is being exploited here outside of progression from solving the puzzle which you would naturally always have? Or even look at Shenmue. While every game at the time was a platformer where you collected things, Shenmue made you take on a partime job doing fork lifting, yet it is a cult classic. Did they use a framework to make that decision? Doesn't seem like it when it defied all game design at the time.
- threetwoonezero 11mo agoI’m not experienced game designer, but I definitely view games a bit differently from the author. I don’t like complexity much tbh, and I’m sure there are people like me who enjoy some clicker like experience without game forcing me to solve problems
- tgv 11mo agoCandy Crush was immensely popular. It's not exactly chess.
- Raph_Koster 11mo ago1. As the article says, "People will be willing to go along with pretty simple and pretty familiar problems as long as the feedback is great." 2. For arbitrary n x m boards, Candy Crush (and Bejeweled, it's predecessor), has been shown to be NP-complete. That means as a general class of problem, it's officially hard. This is why I said that "A lot of very good problems seem stupidly simple, but have depths to them." If you look at some of the ones I examine in this talk: https://www.raphkoster.com/games/presentations/games-are-math-10-core-mechanics-that-drive-compelling-gameplay/ https://www.raphkoster.com/games/presentations/games-are-mat... you'll see they are often what seems very simple!
- tgv 11mo agoSorry, but that's a bit of hyperbole. Candy Crush may be NP complete (in some sense), but that doesn't make it hard to play.
- Raph_Koster 11mo ago"Hard to play" has almost nothing to do with "the underlying game system is Hard in a complexity sense." And both are somewhat orthogonal to the complaint about "adding more stuff" -- doing so may make something more complicated, but that doesn't mean it becomes more complex mathematically. Adding more stuff in general may very well make something harder to play, but it has more to do with how many of the added things are simultaneously visible. We can go back to the old 7+/-2 rules of thumb on that one. Candy Crush is Hard in a math sense. So are Battleship, Minesweeper, Pipes, Othello... they are all easy to play. They are fun because they are Hard in a math sense. Dark Souls is not hard in a math sense, meaning it is not formally complex. It is hard to play mostly because it is a reaction and timing game that presents very difficult challenges, and the ambiguity comes from mastering signals and reactions. Civilization is complicated, and almost certainly Hard in a math sense. But it has solid onboarding and is not that hard to play. Dwarf Fortress is complex AND complicated, and has no onboarding, and a ton of stuff in it, and is both Hard and hard. DF is built out of a ton of separate Hard game atoms.
- Razengan 11mo agoOne thing that gets me is how there hasn't really been a language made solely for gameplay logic.. Almost every other domain has its specialized language: SQL, Julia, even HTML/CSS/JS.. but game developers still have to trundle on with general purpose languages invented 500 years ago by people who had nothing to do with games.
- krapp 11mo agoGame development and game design are completely separate domains. Game development can be generalized to algorithms and languages targeted to specific processors and architectures because it's a subset of programming and computer science. You can't have a DSL for design because the domain is the human mind. The design of a game like Undertale has absolutely nothing to do with the language used to develop it. Unless you're talking about things like modelling and UV unwrapping and the like, but even then I don't see what benefit a separate language would provide.
- Razengan 11mo agoI mean coding gameplay logic. The game engine can remain in C/++ or whatever. Gameplay and game mechanics are fairly different from making other types of programs. Things like stats, buffs/debuffs, conditions, and their dependencies on each other. It's all sort of a vague middle ground between typed vs untyped, static vs dynamic, inheritance vs composition, sequential vs asynchronous, and other oddities that make it distinct from other domains. > You can't have a DSL for design because the domain is the human mind. The design of a game like Undertale has absolutely nothing to do with the language used to develop it. But what if coding could correspond almost 1:1 to the design? I've been attempting some of it here: https://github.com/InvadingOctopus/comedot https://github.com/InvadingOctopus/comedot with stuff like abstracting the idea of "Actions" that could be anything from a verb like "Look at" in a text-based adventure, to clicking on spells/weapons buttons in a turn-based strategy game, or a Dash move in a platformer etc. Fantasizing about elevating those concepts to being core keywords in a hypothetical language is my equivalent of counting sheep to fall asleep :)
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- random9749832 11mo agoI can program and play chess to a proficient level but I also know I can't design a good game whatsoever because the mindset required to design a truly good game seems to me to be something beyond logic and reasoning. Same thing with any other art. I don't think any framework could ever truly explain it.
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- opyate 11mo agoRaph replied to another video on fun (which also critiques his book) in the Youtube comments, referring to said blog post: https://youtu.be/56ENqlUST9U https://youtu.be/56ENqlUST9U "What is fun? Let's overthink it!" by Indie Game Clinic