Tic Tac Toe Vs. Chess: How Mechanics with Depth Affect a Game

Everybody knows how to play Tic Tac Toe. It’s one of the first set of game mechanics that children learn. Get three in-a-row of your symbol and bam, you’ve won! Chess is another game with mostly simple rules, but we have a lot more Chess tournaments than Tic Tac Toe tournaments. Why is that? There are a huge variety of ways that you can play chess and win. In gaming, a similar phenomenon pops up. Anybody can pick up the basics of Candy Crush or Street Fighter II Turbo, but you’d be hard pressed to find a Candy Crush tournament anywhere.

Still waiting for chess pieces that murder each other though. I WAS SOLD A BILL OF GOODS, ROWLING.

But how does depth of mechanics affect a game?

For a bit of reference, in the same month this came out, Magic: The Gathering was first released. Go forth and feel old.

Foremost, deeper mechanics exponentially extend the lifespan of a game. With more room for exploration and refinement, the longer the game will last. People still play Street Fight II Turbo, which was released nearly twenty years ago in 1994, at this year’s Evolution Championship Series (EVO), the largest and longest running fighting game tournament in the world. The fact that people are still competing means that they’re still discovering new ways to use the characters.

Basically this but instead of drying laundry it'll prevent your Pokémon from taking 12.5% damage on entry.

Higher levels of play are only possible because of the variety of strategies that a player can experiment with and employ. After all, anybody can level up their favorite Pokémon to steamroll an opposing trainer, but a skilled player assembles their team specifically to counter threats before they’re fully realized. Using entry hazards like Spikes and Stealth Rock mean that a trainer could use a Pokémon with Rapid Spin to counter, or a Pokémon that’s immune to certain kinds of paralyzing attacks. These higher levels of play encourage the perception of progress through a game, by keeping the player more engaged with the mechanics than they were before they played strategically the player learns more about how the game works.

Spend years building a new engine, creating new mechanics, graphics, and people will still put the most effort into bringing back the one game you made they liked.

Deeper mechanics also tend to create passionate fanbases, a double-edged sword if there ever was one. With a passionate fanbase, people will be discussing, playing, and analyzing your game for years to come, but these same people are more attached to game than the studio that develops it. There’s a mod called Skywind for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim that is centered entirely around bringing the world of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind into the modern age by porting the whole game into Skyrim. Changes in the formula can have very negative reactions, like the large change in gameplay that players found in Fallout 3 compared to the earlier games in the series. Imagine that you’ve picked up a particularly mouthy barnacle and you’ll get a good idea about what it feels like to develop a “masterpiece.”

Deeper mechanics do not necessarily mean “complicated” or “nonsensical,” so when players must exit the game to understand how it works, something went wrong. Dark Souls, though a deep and enjoyable game, feature some unexplainable mechanics that don’t make sense within the game itself. Figuring out that Resistance is a garbage stat or that humanity is required to summon help (but also opens you up to invasion) is tough without a friend or the internet. Games like Dwarf Fortress are renowned and perhaps even loved for their complexity, but then true popularity will always be slightly out of DF’s reach. If you make a game too simple, it won’t hold enough interest to form a fanbase, so developers must introduce deeper mechanics to keep their company alive (usually in the form of sequel after sequel).

This is the flowchart of advice recommended to new players of Dwarf Fortress. Any game that needs a flowchart is clearly not looking to appeal to the average person.

Chess is almost 1500 years old. To put that in perspective, chess has been around longer than most empires on Earth. Yet, people still play chess and will probably continue to play it until the sun explodes. The more you study the game, the more ways you learn to play. At the same time, most children can pick up the basics after a game or two. Deep mechanics create long lasting and loved games. Next time you’re playing something ask yourself, “is this is a flash in the pan or the kind of fire that burns forever?”

Mobile games will take over the entire gaming ecosystem unless you share this article with everybody you know. Quickly now, they’re coming!

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Hit me one more time: Death and Punishment in Games

Dying is a big part of life, both in reality and in videogames. Since the first games, there has been a need for some kind of failure state. After all, what’s the fun in playing a game you can’t lose? Some games, like Atari’s Pong had “loss” as a failure state, but most games went with “death” of some kind. In any game, there needs to be some kind of factor that makes death unappealing (besides the fact that it’s an uncomfortable reminder of our own fragile mortality) so you avoid it. Different kinds of games have tried different things to make death unappealing, though some work better than others.

When arcades died, the continue screen died with them. IT's a real shame, considering how awesome some of them are.

What are some interesting methods of de-incentivizing death? Which of them are well designed?

In the Pokémon series “death” is not much of a hurdle, and that’s a good thing. You “lose” in Pokémon by making all of your Pokémon “faint.” You wake up at the last Pokémon center you visited after blacking out. Nurse Joy heals your Pokémon and tells you three or four lines about how the center is always here to help you.

No, I think I'd like my poor electric rat to just stay terribly poisoned, thanks. Is this free? Is there Pokémon healthcare? Do we have an HMO? Hold on, I need to call my mom.

If you just mash the A button to get through it quickly she’ll heal your Pokémon and you’ll have to listen to the whole spiel again. It might not seem like punishment, but having to read the same lines over and over again is just annoying enough to make “dying” a pain. This whole process incentives good item use and keeping an eye on your Pokémon’s health as you travel. If you let your Pokémon faint too often they start to dislike you which leads to your Pokémon disobeying you in the middle of battle.

I guess this is what I get for putting Caterpie first against that level 75 Charizard.

This system is well designed because it doesn’t interfere with your gameplay in a large way while also ensuring that you want to avoid dying, just so that you don’t have to hear Nurse Joy lecturing you again.

Death is such a part of the Souls series that the first DLC-included version of Dark Souls is called Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition. You’d think that because death is so common in that game that there’s no way to de-incentivize it, right? When you die in Dark Souls, all the souls you’ve collected (used to level up, upgrade weapons, etc) are left where you died.

Welcome to the Souls series, where the enemies are relentless and the souls don't matter.

After death you respawn at the last bonfire (the game’s checkpoints) that you used. To get them back, you have to make it back to the spot where you bit the dust. What’s so clever about this method is how it changes based on how many souls you were carrying and where you died. If you only had a couple of thousand souls, you might not even care about them but if you had several hundred thousand, you would probably want to head back super carefully because losing all those souls means losing hours of game progress.

All your souls are right there in that little green light. You will die many times trying to get back to that light. You will resent that light.

If you just rolled off a cliff by accident, then picking up your souls is a simple as going back to the spot and grabbing them. If you died in the middle of a boss fight, you might have to dodge around a giant dragon while maneuvering towards your souls. It’s a multilayer form of punishment that really fits the tone of the game and incorporates directly into the gameplay nicely.

In Bethseda RPGs, death always results in the same thing: reloading your most recent save. Most modern games have an autosave system that will save your game every x minutes, but some older games require to manually save your progress. Bethesda RPGS are famous for their massive amounts of content, and each game just keeps adding to the pile.

This bear is actually a metaphor for how badly the massive amount of content (the bear) is going to crush you (you).

Every time you die, you can lose hours of progress depending on when the game saved, or when you did. This is unfair because it feels like saving should be a system that the game handles, rather than the player. It’s almost like you’re being punished for enjoying the game so much that you forgot to take yourself out of gameplay and go through a bunch of menus to save. This is a case where the game goes too far towards dis-incentivizing death, to the point where death results in you putting the controller/mouse down, maybe for the day. This can be mitigated, based on how often the game autosaves, but that’s more of a band aid than a cure.

Dying in The Legend of Zelda is a slap in the face that you see coming a mile away. You know that you shouldn’t have gone into that high leveled temple with one and a half hearts, but you did anyway.

This is not going to end well for me. What's that, Giant Dino-corn? You agree? Nice to have consensus.

Before you know it, you hear that sad little sound effect and you wind up back where you started the game. Every time you die you respawn with three hearts, no matter the maximum amount of hearts you have. In the beginning of the game you only have three maximum hearts so you can shoot (maybe throw? It’s unclear) your sword no problem. However as you progress though the game you get more hearts, so death means that you start out hobbled. Now you have to start out every new life by either grinding for hearts, grinding for money to buy medicine to restore hearts, or you need to find a fairy pool to heal yourself. This feels poorly designed because the game is putting an artificial time sink between you and more progress. The only difference between starting like this or starting will full hearts is about ten to fifteen minutes of wasted time.

As Benjamin Franklin said, “…in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes!” Videogames have to make sure that death is aggravating because they’re the only place where you can die every five minutes and still be doing what you’re doing. Exactly how to go about making death aggravating must be a hard concept to wrestle with, given how final it is in reality. Clever developers come up with systems that play into the game mechanics, but others go for the low hanging fruit of time based frustration and quicksaving. Next time you die in a videogame, think about what you have to do to progress again. Is the mechanic well designed? Is it annoying? Why so?

Thanks for reading, everybody. Please share and send feedback, if you’re so inclined. 

Love to Hate ‘Em: Villains, Blackguards, and Jerks.

What is it about a villain that makes them compelling? Why do people see Darth Vader and think he’s the coolest character in Star Wars? What makes people despise Delores Umbridge more than Voldemort in Harry Potter? In traditional mediums, you experience a story passively, but video games allow you to personally confront villains, so it makes sense that players might hate their virtual adversaries a little more than you might have a movie villain.

Except for Delores. We can hate Delores just fine without having to actually deal with her.

So, how do you construct a good Video Game villain?

Mass Effect is a series filled with antagonists, big and small, but few are as well composed as Saren, the villain from the first game. Saren is a Spectre, an agent of the inter-species galactic council. Spectres are the right arm of the Council, their eyes and ears across the galaxy. You first encounter Saren on a human colony, where he and his robotic Geth have brutally slaughtered the colonists. He even murders another Spectre in cold blood.

Look at this jerk. About to kill his friend. Didn't even give him the dignity of an awesome fight on a rooftop.

Saren makes for a good villain for a number of reasons. The first is that he’s present from the start of the game to the end of the game. While you face smaller enemies along the way, you never forget that he’s the one you’re working against. Saren is also clearly dangerous; his army of Geth easily lay waste to every place they visit, he himself is an extremely well trained special agent. When you do encounter him face-to-face, he’s a challenge to fight and he can easily beat you and your team if you’re not careful. In the few moments you get to speak to him, you learn about why he’s doing what he’s doing. He believes that he can secure a future for organic life by helping the Reapers take over the galaxy, and though there’s definitely some cowardice in there, he’s trying to preserve the galaxy, in his own way.

Well, maybe he's just a coward. 

The one area where Saren falls short is this development, which is basically non-existent, besides going a little crazy near the end of the game. You have no chance to see what Saren was before he met Sovereign, how they met, or really understand his journey, which is a shame.

The town in Silent Hill 2, aptly named Silent Hill, is more memorable than most villains, despite no final battle, or even a body. As James Sunderland, you journey through Silent Hill, trying to find your wife. The town has no form, but you can’t shake the feeling that it has feelings; specifically, the feeling that it doesn’t want you there and that it will get you to leave. From the minute you get there, an oppressive fog makes navigation hard, and not-quite-human monsters crawl out of the woodwork to harass you.  

Charming place, no? Who wouldn't want to find an AirBnB here? Nobody that's who.

Here is where Silent Hill succeeds where Saren failed; as you progress through the game and explore the town, you understand a little more about it and why it is the way that it is. When you look at the characters in the game, you see that the town reflects what they bring with them. The town is a trial by fire, in a way. You made Silent Hill the way it was; you’re not here to fight the monsters in the town, you’re here to confront your own demons.

Maybe there's a reason this game opens with the main character starting at his horrible twisted reflection...

The town is obviously present and presents a danger, so it’s only real failing is the lack of gameplay challenge. Without challenging gameplay, the town of Silent Hill almost feels like it would make a better movie villain than a game villain.

How much of a jerk must this guy be that his own granfather doesn't even know his name?! At least you can name him ASSFACE if you want.

What about something smaller, more homegrown? Pokémon Red introduces you to Gary (or Green if you’re a game purist) right off the bat, and boy, is he fun to hate. From the minute you meet him, Gary is snobbish, rude, condescending, and just a general jerk. 

Gary impedes your progress with a well-trained team a number of times, he’s always one step ahead of you, and somehow he’s still smug after you’ve beat him down every time. Sure, Gary isn’t grand or evil or even that threatening, but he’s all the more infuriating because he’s much realer than a rogue government agent or a supernatural town. Gary can send you packing to the Pokémon center and he’ll laugh at you while he’s doing it.

You never question why he’s doing what he’s doing either; you know that he’s trying to do the same thing as you, become the Champion. The only issue with Gary is that he never changes, no matter what you do, or how badly you beat him. Gary is always Gary, and you never figure out why he’s the way he is, or get to see him evolve.

There is no good story without conflict. There is no protagonist without an antagonist. Games put you in the protagonist’s shoes and a good antagonist helps make the journey memorable. A good video game antagonist should be present throughout the whole game, be dangerous, develop throughout the story, be challenging, and have understandable motivations. Though none of the villains we’ve looked at here had all of the qualities, they’re still good villains and antagonists because they’re well rounded. 

Yes, I would like to pick up 5000 swords: Loot and Looting in Games

Loot, for those of you who don’t know, is a term used for equipment, armor, currency, and other pick-up-able items that you would find in a videogame. You usually get loot for completing a quest, or killing an enemy in a RPG, though the lines have definitely gotten murkier over time. The distinction that I still think holds true is if you can find an item with many slight variations, it qualifies as loot. You probably wouldn’t call an ammunition pickup loot, but you would call a +1 Steel Sword loot, for instance. So, now that you’re all edumcated, let’s get down to it.

I'm going to pick up all of this junk, stuff it in a chest, and totally forget about it forever.

What makes for good loot in games? What makes for a good loot system in games? Why is obsessively collecting things fun at all?

The most impactful example of loot and looting in video games has to be Diablo, released in 1996. In Diablo, you play as one of three classes and you are charged with defeating Diablo, the Lord of Terror. The loot in Diablo is good because it presents a clear reward for progression, with harder enemies giving out better loot, and because figuring out what is better isn’t a headache.

All the needed info is right there, presented clearly. Loot like this is hard to find and really gratifying when you stumble across it.

The items also have a number of stat requirements which increase replay value by offering you a number of different playstyles besides just the class differences. In Diablo 2, 3 and Titan Quest (a mythological themed hack’n’slash lootfest very similar to Diablo) the items are even easily visible when you’re fighting an enemy, so you can tell what they’re going to drop ahead of time, which increases anticipation.

You know what weapons these enemies are going to drop just by looking at the enemies. You'll be able to tell if a weapon or armor piece is rare early on, which makes defeating tough enemies with rare items fun.

These games also all make good use of chests and treasure boxes. These items are usually positioned after bosses or near the end of dungeons to give a reward besides the items from the boss and to increase the anticipation to finish an area. Yes, you’re low on health potions and you know there’s a tough boss ahead, but man, you could find that +5 Staff you’ve been wanting in the chest behind them.

Most games took their loot systems and loot design from Diablo, so they’re generally well thought out, but there are some odd choices some games make. Borderlands is another loot filled game, though through the lens of an FPS-RPG, rather than an isometric RPG. Borderlands is a generally good game, but I think the loot and loot system have some issues. First of all, unless a weapon is massively overpowered, you can’t figure out much about it when an enemy is using it. You might be able to tell what kind of weapon it is, but only if you’re pretty close, as the cell shaded design of the world makes the weapons tough to distinguish.

It's hard to figure out what kind of weapon an enemy is using, especially when a bunch of bad guys are shooting at you, which is always.

Another choice I’m not too fond of is one that World of Warcraft made with its loot system. While the actual loot in WoW is pretty interesting design-wise, the loot system revolves around a lot of random drops. Essentially, bosses and enemies in WoW have a set group of loot that they can drop, with each item on the list having a certain percentage to drop once the boss/enemy is defeated.

For this particular boss, the drop rates aren't even known yet. This doesn't really seem like good, or even fun, loot design.

This encourages “farming” of items and bosses. Farming is when you keep killing the same boss over and over again to try to get an item drop. MMOs are designed differently than other games, specifically to keep you playing, but having a mechanic that actively discourages progression doesn’t sit well with me. It feels a little too much like a Skinner box, and the fact that designers would think in such a blatantly manipulative manner is a little off-putting.

So, now that we’ve talked about what makes good loot/a good loot system, let’s go a little deeper: Why is collecting loot fun at all? Well, there’s a number of reasons. One of the first is just aesthetics; who doesn’t want to create an awesome looking character by equipping them with cool weapons and armor? There’s something very gratifying about building a unique look in these games, and though Diablo was a bit primitive graphics wise, the later games really allowed you to create an awesome looking hero.

Somebody spent many hours (or even possibly some real money) making this Demon Hunter this awesome.

Besides customizing how you look, there’s also the satisfaction you’ll get from making your character move effective in a general sense, or designing a particular build. For instance, you might be building a character that has a really high damage per second, so you equip armor and weapons that increase your attack speed.

You can design your gear around your build, aiming for a specific kind of gameplay or experience.

Lastly, collecting things, useful or not, is pretty fun. Pokémon is a living example of this, as is the absolutely gigantic amounts of different kinds of Oreos you can find in China. Maybe you don’t even want to equip the full set of that awesome armor, you just want to have all the different sets in your storage and use something else. People like collecting rocks in real life, so collecting different suits of armor in games doesn’t seem that odd to me.

Bet you thought I was joking. Nope. China has a huge variety of Oreos, with different flavors and style of cookie. You don't realize how much you'll miss peach Oreos until you can't get them anymore

Loot and loot systems are huge parts of gaming history, from table top games like Dungeons and Dragons to AAA games like Destiny. Every game puts its own unique twist on the concepts pioneered by earlier games, but every game with a decent loot system shares some qualities. It’s hard to improve upon a system like Diablo’s, but game developers and designers deserve credit for exploring new ground. So next time you’re playing your favorite lootfest, ask yourself what the game is doing to make their loot system more unique and interesting.

Formula Friction

Ubisoft, a French game publisher, has sold millions of games since its inception in 1986. Now it is a near household name, known for Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, and Tom Clancy series. Ubisoft’s strict adherence to formula has drawn recent criticism, but not the right type. The inorganic nature about Ubisoft’s game design formula causes problems, but not necessarily formula itself. 

From left to right, Watch Dogs, Assassin's Creed, and Far Cry.

An organic process follows logically from start to finish. For example, imagine if you are spawned in a room with a nailed-shut door at the end and provided with a claw hammer. You would use the hammer to pry out the nails to open the door and get out. An inorganic process would not follow logically. Imagine if you were spawned in the same room, but given a salmon and expected to know that you have to knock on the door exactly three times with it, at which point the door will open.

The special weapon unlock system in Watch Dogs provides a perfect example of Ubisoft’s game design philosophy. How does completing 17 QR codes teleport a Thompson submachine gun into your inventory? How does solving six missing person cases unlock an Assault Rifle? No explanation or in-world connection is present or offered. Similarly, the in-game world and the side-missions don’t connect. When you move to a start indicator and you are magically transported into the mission, a lack of transition or connection to the game world draws you out of the experience. The side missions lock you into a nonsensical closed-off section that destroys the notion of “open world” almost entirely.

Watch Dogs QR codes appear in various places and can give you rewards once scanned.

Inorganic game design is present in a fair amount of incredibly well selling games, so people might assume that it’s the norm, or that there are no other ways to make games. However, one need not look far to find plenty of examples of more logical game design.

Assassins’ Creed 4: Black Flag might not be the title you think of when you think organic gameplay, but a large portion of the game is in fact a great example of good design philosophy. Assassin’s Creed 4 tells you that you are a pirate, and you quickly find out that you can do what pirates are famed for: pirating. You can board enemy ships, capture their resources, hire crew members, sell contraband goods at the various ports, and upgrade your pirate ship to allow more pirating. Sailing your ship to find loot to plunder is responsive, intuitive, and enjoyable. Perhaps the only confusing part is having to cut down your opponent’s flag to “claim” their ship. The enjoyment of this game is only marred by the stock Assassin’s Creed style gameplay when off your ship. 

The exciting and fast-paced pirate gameplay elevates Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag over the rest of it's franchise.

In a different vein, Amnesia: The Dark Decent offers some seldom used design choices. In Amnesia you cannot fight the various enemies the a dark and terrifying castle you are trapped in, so you hide. Not being able to fight makes you think hard about how you use the tools you’re given. You can light various candles, or use a lantern, but light allows enemies to see you. Hiding in the dark is an option, but the longer the character is in the dark, the less of a grip your character has on reality. There is no point at which fighting is an option, or when you are expected to figure out that one monster is actually killable if you throw enough barrels at it. You are instructed about the game’s world, given the tools to use, and their use follows very clearly, adding tension and atmosphere and to enhance the horror in the game.  

Since combat is not an option, hiding is the only method you have to deal with enemies.

In the Pokémon series, right in the beginning of the first game, you are told that there are many different types of Pokémon. You quickly learn that certain types have strengths and weaknesses and that the best strategy is to use a team of different types. This general style of game has remain mostly unchanged for 20 years. As the success of Pokémon proves, formulas are not necessarily problematic. Many series follow formulas, but they escape the criticism that has plagued Ubisoft of late because they employ organic game design and gameplay.  

While formulaic and increasingly complex, Pokémon types create strategic and compelling gameplay.

Organic mechanics are a large part of what makes the aforementioned games great, enjoyable, and some might say timeless. This is not to say that Ubisoft games cannot be enjoyable, or that the company is doomed financially, or that anybody is going to forget the various Ubisoft series, just that good game design should be the focus of any gaming company.