I don't wanno do my video game chores

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/i-don-t-wanna-do-my-video-game-chores

Discuss.

 

I read it and I agree.

RDR2 is the prettiest and worst designed game I've seen. There is no decisions for you to make. The game plays itself. It's an impressive theme park ride but not a game.

It seems like most the AAA games I've played lately are like that though. They're just haphazardly copying novel mechanics from the last big hit.

A favorite quote by Stavros Melissinos: "A writer who does nothing but write is like the moon, which gives off some light, but borrowed from the sun."

This is what is happening. Company who is making games solely with intent to produce profit can only borrow light from others. WIth slavish effort they can create something impressive, but nothing lasting and meaningful.

It will stay like this because games is big business now. Every once in awhile a work created with passion will cause a stir, then all the bottom feeders will come in after and scrape every morsel they can.

 

Fair enough, but what can we as game designers do to make sure we don't fall into the same trap? "Don't suck" is sound but not very helpful advice.

The writer raised an interesting point about making sure your chores have meaningful rewards. If there's crafting, side quests should provide some juicy ingredients. If your game uses gear, I guess it could provide good gear. Money might work but only if your game doesn't have a major inflation problem (as almost all games do). Something really unique, like getting your own house you can stay in, or furnishings/decorations for it, might be best.

I think quests that have some interesting story can work too, whether they are part of the main story or a side plot. I recall actually caring about a few of the side-quest stories in Oblivion. But it's a tricky business... I think many gamers click through dialog as quickly as they can, and really don't care about your exposition. To work the stories need to be genuinely interesting, not "my farm is being raided by boars, please kill 5X of them so I can get back to work" or "my love has spurned me, bring me 8X rare flowers so I can win her back."

Basically I think it's all about accomplishment (oops, I'm on that again!). The author of this opinion piece hates his RDR2 chores because they don't seem to accomplish anything. Gimme some new ability, or some noticeable improvement in my living situation, and I'll go to bed feeling like it was time well spent.

 

agree with all ^^^

i only pointed out what I thought was wrong. You explained what would be more right.

I'll add one thing. The best kind of accomplishment (for me anyway) is one that you identify yourself, you make a plan to achieve it, you carry out the plan, face some unforseen problem, and then in the end you get the reward you set out to achieve.

That is where RDR2 lost me. I remember that I saw you could craft some bear outfit. I thought, well hunting bears sounds really cool. I wanna hunt bears. So i spent a few hours hunting bears. But the actual gameplay involved in hunting bears was boring, repetitive, and mindless. Zero challenge, only a test of patience. Then when I finally got the items to make the outfit, I realized that it did nothing meaningful. And it looked silly. So, so much for all of that.

 

I think the problem with these games is that they try to maximize player freedom in a way that clashes with the concept of a 'realistic' game. It's fine to enable players to do anything they want in minecraft, but when you have a setting like that, with a realistic presentation of characters and civilization, the implicit idea is that the player will encounter a similar realism in the way that the game world reacts to their actions.

Instead of focusing on adding meaningful structure to the game world, such as the way that characters in the game treat the player on the basis of their actions, the game focuses on enabling the player to do more numerous mundane things, and abandons the deeper elements of the game to conform to some superficial rule-set such as a progression/XP mechanic. The result is that the game is so whiz-bang-realistic that you can wash your face and wipe your a$$, but when you shoot someone in the head everyone forgets about it 5 seconds later.

It appears to me that the 'sacred' rule of maximizing player freedom has been so overdone that it has deteriorated into freedom from consequence, which renders everything meaningless. It seems that the only time that the game will force a player to do something is to essentially force them to participate in some additional game mechanic that they would otherwise not be particularly interested in, rather than constrain the range or outcome of a player's actions in a way that makes it meaningful.

Again, this is a problem that I think is particularly related to realistic games, where the visual realism carries with it a symbolism of a world that is structured and full of realistic rules, but when the player digs deeper they find only a few superficial progression systems, and all the visual realism does is make the game seem more disappointing.

 

I didn't play RDR2, but I've played other open-world games, hardly any of which I've completed in the last decade because I get bored. For example, Skyrim and Fallout 4 open with some introduction to the story, you get a sense that who you are and what you do is supposed to matter in terms of some other event(s) going on in the game world, but then you spend countless in-game days/months doing all kinds of things that don't impact that main story line at all. There is no urgency. The world is a dream in which nothing happens unless you're there to experience or drive it.

The original Fallout gave you something like 100 in-game days to complete the game due to the state of the world when you start it. By contrast, Skyrim has a civil war going on, though absolutely nothing happens with regard to that civil war unless you make it happen - no villages change hands, no major events, nothing. Even Fallout 3 - dad disappeared to go take care of something that was a big deal, so I guess I'm going to spend six game months doing everything but go look for him.

They like to tout how much area the playable game world covers, and bigger is celebrated as better, but man I feel like there's just so much filler thrown in. I'd like to see them focus more on depth, rather than breadth.

I think the sense of having a living game world/universe works better in 4X strategy games because the world is changing whether you want it to or not. You have the urgency to be involved and do meaningful things because you might actually lose the game if you don't care.

 

This! I don't like quests like this. I couldn't get into the original Borderlands game because the first quests were similar to this. Time-consuming grinding that I don't find interesting or exciting. MMOs are rife with this but at least you can group up and make it more interesting with other people.

 

I kind of think that the "issues" with RDR2 are that it's a niche game that happens to also be a blockbuster.

I've only played a comparatively small amount of the game, but I definitely agree it has its issues. The standard whole-world-waits-for-the-player thing is one of them, volatile difficulty is another, and I'll take the article's word on resource imbalances because that's a pretty common issue. However, the mundane tasks aren't one of them... to me.

I see RDR2 as a Period Drama in video game format. It's not so much about what happens as it is about the vibe and atmosphere of the time it's set in. I don't think they pad out horse rides because they're eeking out as long a run time as they can, I think they're trying to give you the feeling of plodding through the wilderness on a horse. I think they get you to do all those mundane tasks because, despite what we see in action-oriented spachetti westerns, being a cowboy isn't all shootouts and quick draw duels and horse chases. Most of it's just living, and even when you're on the run most of it's at a snail's pace compared to what we're used to today.

That article compares RDR2 to Fortnite and all but says that Fortnite is superior because it better addresses short attention spans. I primarily refute that aspect of the article, because being slow isn't worse, it's just different. While I do enjoy fast paced games I don't need every single game I play to be fast paced, and I enjoy playing slow games too. Acting as if a game is inferior because of a deliberately slow of pace is folly. Some people enjoy that, and it's good to make games for those people, too.

Shenmue wasn't some warning against the tedium of simulating life, as the author says. It's a game that did something unique, and did it well. It just didn't do it for everybody, and nor are those games supposedly following in its footsteps. And there's nothing wrong with that.



There's something else in that article that I think is worth raising:

The idea of a game is that it's meant to be entertaining in and of itself. If playing a game "feel[s ] like work" and you're bothered that you're not being "compensated for [your] effort" then the game clearly doesn't work for you. That's cool, there are plenty of well regarded games I don't like either... so I don't play them.

Furthermore, getting more game is 100% my favorite reward for doing stuff in a game. As long as I'm enjoying it then finding side quests, new levels, challenges, whatever... yes please! Playing the game is why I'm there, so if you're going to give me more then awesome. And the moment I've had enough and don't want more... cool, I'll stop.

I think this criticism in the article is misplaced. The issue isn't a lack of compensation or meaningful incentive. It's that the mechanics are only skin deep. In Fortnite the rewards in and of themselves aren't what make the "chores" fun, it's that the chores themselves are meaningful decisions: What chores do you do? Where do you do them? How well / quickly can you do them? (I'm guessing. I've never played Fortnite.) It's all tied into a dynamic, competitive risk-reward model that, in what I've played, simply doesn't exist in RDR2, presumably because it just doesn't fit the experience they were trying to make.

Not every game needs to make the player feel good by making a big deal of showering them with shiny, made up rewards. That works well for some games, but I think it's unhealthy to rely on it as a default for all things in all games.

 

I think you raise a lot of interesting points, but I'm going to pick on this one a little bit:

I dunno about the author of the original article, but I wasn't thinking about shallow rewards of the Candy-Crush sugary praise sort ("Awesome! Amazing! Here's some stars and fireworks!"). I was thinking about rewards in terms of things that actually matter, i.e. increase your capabilities in some way. Like in Tron Evolution (my favorite underrated game), where a quest might give you some entirely new attack or a previously unheard-of ability to wall-run or whatever. Or in virtually any of the LEGO games, where side quests at least provide pips (currency) which can be spent not only for cosmetic upgrades (which are fluffy), but also to unlock new abilities or even new playable characters with different abilities, and with those, you can reach areas of the game that were unreachable before (which ties into your "more game" point).

On the other hand, I totally dig your point that a game can be intentionally slow-paced and about the atmosphere, and this may be just what some players are in the mood for. Or that seemingly shallow/pointless quests are just fine if you just enjoy being in the world and need something to do. But on the gripping hand, I'm totally with @BrainwavesToBinary about games that open with some incredibly pressing crises, and then expect you to ignore it for months while you wander around doing odd jobs.

I'll tell you what, all of this great discussion has fed my urge to make an RPG to a level it hasn't been in a very long time (if ever). (It's possible that has also been fed by playing Ni no Kuni, which is better than any other RPG I've played.) My dream RPG would attempt to feature the following:

• any unfolding world crisis proceeds to unfold, whether you participate or not
• ...but your participation can impact how that unfolds and what the resulting world looks like
• quests are relatively few, but have deep stories that really affect their character's lives
• if you kill somebody, other characters around you react appropriately (if this is even possible... Ni no Kuni manages to be a fun game without any murder at all, if you can imagine that)
• to provide plenty of gameplay despite relatively few quests, a deep economic system will allow for plenty of self-directed trading/crafting to build wealth (or other measure of success)
• any wealth you build can be spent on meaningful things, like your own private house/estate

Of course I realize that (1) this would be a huge project, and (2) even if executed perfectly, it wouldn't be for everyone. But it seems like it would be a quite different game than most RPGs, even though it would look similar on the surface, and I find that interesting.

 

I agree with this, I think the idea that receiving a 'physical' reward at the end makes the player feel satisfied with mundane quests and mechanics is a very superficial reading. There's no excuse for something fundamentally boring being in a game, and there's nothing that can redeem it afterward. It's either fun in the context of itself and what came before it, or it doesn't belong.

I think the only reason why those things are there is because players demand bigger and more interactive games, but designers translate that into some boring mechanic with an ad-hoc connection to whatever superficial progression/economic systems they are working on. The result is more work and less play, but it's bigger.

I'm a bit disappointed to see that games that are essentially economic transactions of player time for something, no matter what that something is, are getting such a grip on things (and killing franchises that previously weren't constructed that way). It doesn't have to include microtransactions to be simply poor value - even games that simply use large amounts of grind to flesh out the content are dragging down the quality tremendously. Games are not played for an economic reward, they are played for fun and meaning, and nothing in a game should ever sell itself on the basis of a transaction of time for something afterward, least of all the ability to continue playing.

I think the best example of 'side quests' done well is the Mass Effect sidekick-focused missions, where something that was essentially irrelevant to the main path through the game, rather than being meaningless, was (at least for me) equally or even more meaningful than the main quest itself, because the designers took the time to integrate something you cared about (isn't that what the whole point is?) into the content. Even better than this would be to integrate the entire game world into any quest (which I think is the point you're making).

 

One point I wanted to make is that it's possible to inject huge amounts of 'reaction' to the player through dialogue, cutscenes or written information in a way that doesn't force you to create very complex mechanics to make the world change (most of which the player probably won't notice).

For example, if you shoot some random person in the head, just hearing an NPC mutter to another later on "isn't that the person who randomly killed someone the other day? Must be a lunatic." Or even a positive reaction, it doesn't matter. The result is that the player's imagination is set off about who they are and how they are seen by the game world.

The reason I say this is because it's often hard, it seems to me, to create really effective built-in mechanics that are efficient at conveying a message to the player. For example, if someone chased the player down and shot them, either the player will die (and feel annoyed that an action in the game is a 'dead end', or contradicts other things they are 'allowed' to do) or the player will be forced to multiply the original anomaly by continuing to shoot people (which they might do anyway) until the game can't possibly react in a reasonable manner.

Based on my own experience, I think players subconsciously translate virtual actions into a sort of equivalence value that allows even a small reaction value to fit and be satisfying. The same way a player would say "I fell fifteen feet and now the game wants me to lie in hospital for half an hour with a broken leg? That's ridiculous!" they also might say "OK I shot someone randomly and now people are 'suspicious' of me? Actually that's a strong reaction, I wonder what's going on there?" and the NPC behaviour doesn't actually need to really change to make the reaction felt.

 

There's always a tension between freedom and maintaining the game. Shopkeepers in many games are usually the toughest badasses in the game — far stronger than any boss — because the designers simply don't want you to kill them (but are trying to give you the illusion of freedom by letting you try). That always struck me as odd; if this fruit merchant is so tough, why doesn't the king send him out to slay the big bad?

But I get it: if you can kill the shopkeeper and loot his store, it rapidly becomes a very different game. But perhaps this is just another view on the "sandbox" vs. "story-driven" tension. In a sandbox RPG, it would be very interesting to try and give merchants and guards ordinary amounts of strength, and if you kill them, have natural consequences (witnesses flee in terror and summon more guards, who hunt you for the rest of your days, etc.). Of course this only plays out "realistically" if you don't end up with superhuman hero powers, and that also breaks standard RPG tropes that players expect and appreciate.

But if your game is story-driven, rather than sandbox, then actions that would break the game (or are blatantly out of character) shouldn't even be an option. This is how Ni no Kuni works. But there the illusion of freedom is very thin; you know you're playing out a very particular story, and that it's going to play out in more or less the same way for everybody who finishes it. That's fine if you buy into it, but does feel limiting sometimes.

...Game design is hard.

 

The problem with RDR2's chores is that they had no payoff.

In real life if I sweep the floor, then my house is clean and i feel better and I work better. And wife is happy. meaningful payoff.

In RDR2 most of the chores you do just end and there is no payoff. And there isn't any satisfaction in the chores themselves because the controls are bad and the whole game is basically contextual animations that happen on cue. Very little player input besides deciding where to go.

To put it simply, the loop that happens in my mind while playing RDR2 is this:

• Invent a goal to accomplish - coincides with some immersive fantasy i want to believe
  
• goal aim is to make some noticeable difference in the play experience
  
• Time investment to attain goal
• goal achieved makes no noticeable difference
• dissappointment

when the time investment to reach dissappointing goal outcome is in the hours, refund please.

 

In a way I think it's not just whether it's a sandbox, but also whether the game presents in a realistic way (the art of Red Dead is a story in itself). All that detail to create immersion is ridiculed by the player's ability to do random crazy stuff.

I think toon/stylized characters and settings work well for games that want to add more un-managed player freedom, with the (obviously limited) resources for the game world to react often used for something very funny or memorable which makes it worthwhile for the player even if not totally realistic.

 

Spending five minutes on a time investment of boredom is enough to lose me. A time investment doesn't make me value the reward any more, although a fun challenge would.

 

I remembered liking the first Red Dead and I was pretty hyped for the second, so I gave it as much patience as I could. But yeah, typically if i am playing something without any preconceptions about it, if I'm turned off in 10 minutes I just refund.

 

So then... what kind of payoff would make sweeping a floor in RDR2 ok?

I can imagine sweeping a floor being engaging if there's some mechanical interest to it. Maybe I have to balance doing a thorough job against being finished before someone arrives. Or maybe I need to get a bunch of "chores" done and need to prioritise, knowing I don't have time to do everyhing and trying to achieve some desirable outcome.

Or if sweeping a floor is a part of evoking a feel or atmosphere then I could be ok with that, too, as long as the overall context is engaging.

But if a game literally wants me to do stuff I don't like, just so I can keep playing to also do more stuff I don't like... I don't care what the payoff is. I'm outta there. I'm not wasting any of my precious game playing time on that.

If you ignore the rewards then are the quests in Tron Evolution engaging? By which I mean, would you play the quests even if they weren't linked to these rewards?

 

That's actually a misleading question, because the point I'm driving at is that these things can't be looked at in isolation.

Linking actions and "rewards" makes a lot of sense in many games. However, when the author of the article talks about making rewards "meaningful" his examples both directly tie the action taken into the greater context of a game's mechanics.

When chopping down a tree vs. digging up some rocks (or whatever) the interesting part isn't necessarily the action of chopping or digging. (In many games that's boiled down to a "hold E to chop" and that's not being complained about here, as far as I understand.) And chopping or digging doesn't suddenly become fun if an arbitrary number changes as a result. (I know "Idle Games" shoot this in the head. I honestly have no answer to that.) What does make getting wood in Fortnite engaging is that you're not just collecting wood. You're exchanging one resource (time) for another (wood) in order to achieve some objective (build a fort) which is a part of a longer term prusuit (win the game). In other words, the chopping is just one part of a larger, integrated activity.

In this case the author isn't into the larger, integrated activity, so I can't see how any rewards given could be "meaningful" to them.

I think the game Jalopy is a good example of this kind of thing. You limp a busted old car from petrol station to petrol station, hoping to find valuable stuff on the roadside as you journey from A to B. The car is falling apart, so you constantly need to stop and repair it, and buy spare parts by selling random things you find along the way. That's it. I don't think you can even lose. I distinctly remember my wife being pleased to find a crate of sardine cans (or similar) by the side of the road, and the only value was that she could exchange them for spare parts to keep limping the jalopy along.

The reward only has value in the context of the game, so if you're not enjoying the game then the reward can not have value.

 

Generally yes — they are good (correctly balanced for me) twitch challenges with plenty of variety, so yeah, they are fun to play (and generate a sense of accomplishment) in their own right. Having meaningful rewards (powering up your character) just makes the satisfaction of beating them so much deeper.

 

I'm doing a second playthrough of Subnautica currently. I started it because I'm so unenthusiastic about all the other games on my list and I tremendously enjoyed my first playthrough of it. I have to say it still holds my interest really well, more than I expected. Arguably the game is a nonstop grind and chore if you want to apply an uncharitable interpretation of the core loop, but everything is thematically logical and supporting the survival fantasy that you're living in this game, and all the grind unlocks new gear that unlocks new fun things to do, places to explore, or ways to creatively express yourself in the gameworld through the available mechanics. There is little to no hand holding, you have a very small number of overarching end-goals to persue and strive towards (winning the game by escaping from the planet), and you feel like you have a whole lot of agency in picking your own personal sidequest goals based on the priorities you want to give to getting certain gear, wheras most of the modern games have little to no agency, so that they can shove more linear narrative and scripted sequences (that look good in trailers) down your throat and aren't too hard for casuals "ensure a smooth playing experience".

I think the issue isn't in having "routine tasks", it's when you don't make the "routine tasks" the fun part of the game (or at least design it so that the chores/grind are easily done on the side while persuing the most fun parts, like e.g. exploring new areas in Subnautica), that players get annoyed. I really liked RDR 1, but from what I hear RDR 2 doesn't hold the appeal to me that I had hoped for it to have, because of this lack of agancy that comes from the mandatory chores. I was so certain I'll play it before it got released, but I no longer am so sure of it to be honest.

 

Indeed. Routine tasks are in fact the bread and butter of video games. When players complain that a game is "repetitive" then the underlying issue is that the activities they're doing aren't interesting enough, or the design of those activities hasn't allowed for enough variation over time.

Take Geometry Wars Evolved (or whatever the newset one is called) as an example. The core activity is super repetitive, you just dodge things while shooting bad guys. But there were a bunch of ways the developers gave that super simple activity ways to modulate over time:
- Levels are different shapes.
- Introducing new enemies over the course of the game.
- Various forms of changing difficulty.
- Powerups which temporarily change things about the game.
- Different win conditions.
- Subtleties in the controls. This one is particularly interesting, because it means that variation in the game comes from changes in the player.
- Non-linear progression, so you're not stuck on the same permutation of the game to progress.

If you're into the dodge-and-shoot gameplay then it doesn't feel repetitive, because while the core activity never changes it's never quite the same from one level to the next. You get good at one thing and then the game asks you to be good at something slightly different, but still with probably a 90% overlap.

If you're not into the dodge-and-shoot then nothing they do without fundamentally changing the game will save it for you.

 

You basically mix Witcher (specially 3) series and Fable series
There is some talk on YouTube, where discusses early dev. of Witcher 3 that it supposed be living world. That is only one of many features, which hasn't be entairly implemented. Only bits. However gameplay through is highly affected, by decision made, along the play. And funny part is, if player moved saves from Witcher 2 to 3, there was also affecting some part of gameplay.

Doe to amount of work game required, last DLC was rather halve assed. But untill then, game shines on many levels and beyond. Well, besides horse riding LOL.

In fable you can buy estates. Besides making money, not sure if these affect gameplay otherwise. But decisions along game, affect how game changes into the future good / evil.

 

Majora's mask

 

haven't player RDR2 but feel the same way about witcher 3, nothing but unnecessary chores.

i'm attempting to create something that required more ingenuity to complete,, like tomb raider or hitman

 

I have read one third of what was said here, sadly it's too much text and I can't read it all, but it already diversified in opinions to a point, where I thought, well, this is a good discussion to engage with, BUT I've seen a discussion like this too many times now, and it rarely ends with any kind of conclusion.

No, it's not. And yeah, I don't intend to solve its problems for everyone, it's also hard.
But bear with me, maybe I can break it all down for you, if we are to ever let this discussion mature to a point where we don't all have to agree that we disagree. And this is inevitable when it comes to games. Oh and art in general.

I will go meta, and I'll try and keep this short. Rest assured that the topic isn't small, it's vast and I've been working on this for ages, but if I'm breaking new ground to you, it's best to go with bite-size information.

Discussions like this are inconclusive because we all tend to compare apples and oranges. We compare games that are nominally incompatible, we compare designs that are not supposed to be compared. We all strive to be better in our choices, this is why we do it, but it's a fallacy right from the get go. Including the original article linked in the OP's post. Any discussion is immediately a fallacy, and we can not end up with constructive conclusions regarding what a good game design should encompass.

There are just three rules explaining any quality game design. No exceptions, three rules only:
1) The game has to offer some kind of meaningful and relatable experience to other people.
2) The game has to feature an idea worth exploring, that people readily acknowledge as worthy of their time.
3) The game has to be made around a certain cognitive discipline and exclusively nurture such demographics.

Now each of these points can turn into a book in itself.
And while it seems that all of this isn't exactly anything new, it actually tells a lot about what we're actually looking for in games (i.e. games are not 'entertainment', that's the biggest fallacy of all):

1) We discover new parameters of decision-making in our lives, and go breadth-first in gaining wisdom.
2) We seek for knowledge and wisdom authorities, and wish that our existence is guided toward pristine truths.
3) We are already cognitively-equipped for certain tasks, and wish to hone our skills and aptitudes further.

It really speaks meta about our existence as a species, and we're not alone on this planet. Almost every other specie practices some sort of simulated environment to achieve all three, each in its respective domain of affluence. We just the happy ones, who have developed techniques and technologies to investigate this rationally, and improve the entire process.

So let me break this down again:
1) it's not enough that a game does things, it needs to have a je-ne-sais-quoi deeply embedded in its systems of rules; it's either deeply immersed in what is already familiar, or tries to reshuffle and explore new possibilities that emerge from few hypotheticals. we need to move laterally.
2) it has to be done intelligently, for we are rarely amused by something that is beneath our own level of cognizance or daily mundanity; we ask from wiser among us and other gurus to inspire us, and direct us toward greater beauty and greater art. we need to move forward.
3) it has to feel and reward us the way we're made to understand and we have systems in our bodies that register our this type of satisfaction. and yes it implies that no human is same as another, though we may be collectively the same, but each of us has its strong points, strong interests and non-descript curiosities that seem to come from nowhere. just like having a unique idea, cognitive hungers are not something we obtain from the society, on the contrary.

The last point is especially interesting, because in my work, I've stumbled upon three standard archetypes of cognitive potential in gaming, all of which have something to do with our individual (subconscious) goals that seem to be very essential to the civilization as a whole. Once I figured out how to analyze these further and plot them against some tethered parameters, it started resembling cognitive psychology and psychometrics, but I couldn't work with this data.

What I could do, however, was to layout a chart of all big and otherwise important games, and these games started forming islands, depending on the actual demography that they appealed to. In my work, I refer to these demographics as farmers, soldiers, and builders, all three of which are cognitively equipped for different information-processing capabilities in life, and for different reasons. I also have numerous subtypes that emerge from these three.

What looked the most amazing to me is that some of the most big successes in gaming (i.e. The Sims, Starcraft, Minecraft, which rationally don't seem to have anything in common) actually scored right in the center of my chart, almost perfectly marrying all three archetypes. So this can serve as a massive predictor to market success.

There are three axes in the system, working in tandem as a vector basis, because the whole chart turns out to be nothing more than a coordinate system. I use many words to describe them, and the whole thing resembles a tetrahedron, though I've exclusively analyzed it in two dimensions only.

These axes can be applied to any art and any human endeavor in a general sense. In other words, and I think this is the main takeaway, the games a person plays can be used to describe that person! But unlike other psychometric systems, this one is based on a physical reality, and not just sampling based on some loose tests, and loose hypothetical values, so it's pretty darn scientific. The world of games is massive, and if I could access the Steam usage database, I could very accurately profile the playing population.

In fact, as I've become more and more proficient with the chart, I've reached the level at which I can tell just from a description of a game where exactly it belongs on the chart, and RDR2 for example, belongs in the lower-left part from the center, pulled to the 'hunter' cusp on the so called abstraction-simulacrum axis (obviously towards simulacrum). What pulls it toward the center is exactly what people criticize (so you can tell who are the people that criticize it, and if they made it wouldn't be the absolute hit): the routine grind, basic patterns of "chore-like" duties, sense of duty and responsibility (obviously dispersed by sudden outbursts of violence, and they simply couldn't marry the two, it's a game design curse, so that's why this is awkward), abstract governing over the management aspects of the game (town building, shopping, achievements, and upgrades), etc.

In fact, when I said it's pulled to the 'hunter' cusp, the actual hunting mechanic in the game is practically the opposite of that. These words do not reflect the game's intentions, but the actual required cognitive repertoire and rewards (and Western games mostly just shoot for dopamine). When I see someone criticizing the RDR2 hunt, that person knows what hunting means and what it should deliver instead. Not everyone is a hunter in real life, however, deep down, we've roamed this world for hundreds of thousands of years. There is a demography still equipped for it, even if it is a vestigial system in today's world.

That said, with RDR1 I was blown away with how deliberately accurate the sounds of horse hooves were done, and the feeling it gave me. Like the sound of a lit fireplace, there is something very ancient about these sounds and the mental state they produce. It worked on me (very much), but maybe it didn't work on you! It produced this feeling of having breeze in the hair, and being free in the wilderness, embraced by the nature, outside of the civilized cages we all live in. It was a stark contrast that Rockstar aimed to sell (underlining 1 in my rules above), not just a boy's cowboy fantasy.

All in all, RDR2 is just a glorified walking simulator game, intersparsed with well-produced narrative and action-packed missions, but essentially not different from a fishing simulator. It offers its players improvisational sandbox with predictable and repetitive outcomes, a balanced approach to instant-gratification and experimental playground, all set up against the canvas of photographically-accurate Wild West, made to feel deeply immersive and give rise to situational sense of immediacy.

Sorry if this turned out longer than what I originally desired, but hopefully I've brought something new to the table. There is a lot to talk (and unpack) about this, so if you have any questions, shoot.

 

You said game design wasn't hard. Then long post to explain the big truths in game design. But I am having really hard time gleaning anything practical from the post. So is it hard, or is this just to say you are smart, and we are dumb?

 

I gave you zero reasons to act provocatively, especially because I've already typed the answer for that question in the same row.

I said

So, well, yes I am smart, I'm glad you asked. But I can't and won't tell that you're dumb, why are these two things exactly exclusive? A weird strawman argument.

 

But basically from your appearance alone I can tell you're a twitch-based lover.

This is what I have to say about your cognitive profile
(not every single thing has to be spot on, it simply describes a cognitive bias with cloud words):
- stimulation, attention-deficit, reflexes
- violence & stress relief
- strong/aggressive setting and character presentation
- first person view, shooting, evasive maneuvering
- immersive movie-like experiences (limited in scope, highly detailed)
- physical competitive environment
- "forbidden" or spectacular imagery
- simplicity (simple rules & instant gratification)
- limited play time
- eye-to-hand coordination
- concrete skills
- escapism, consumerism, flocking
- control, function, details

Also passive aggressiveness, getting loudly bored or annoyed, downplaying other's opinions, downplaying other's ego, dominating social settings, mostly intolerant or ignorant toward other tastes.

All hallmarks of soldiers, who typically love to play first-person and other twitch-based games, likely militant or violent, honing their instant gratifications protocols, and accomplishing short-term goals. It's a very predominant group of players, most of which are loud and devout, shaping the landscape of the industry as we know it.

If you liked Dota2 or LoL and top-down camera in general, you'd lean to the right of the chart, if you liked RDR2 more, you'd lean to the center of the chart. But given that you don't seem to enjoy (established) competitive arenas, you're not a perfect soldier either, thus you lean toward the left, to experiences akin to rally-driving, in terms of feeling almost lost, but able to play instinctively, getting in the "zone", and having to abide to just a few rules that are proverbially "easy to learn, but hard to master".

So you're a rogue.

You absolutely hate phone games and farming MMOs, and in fact anything that has to do with any kind of farming, any economy management, cookie clickers, simple logical games and such. You also despise not having a simple goals defined in front of you, but also despise complex design and hand-holding. You think that all of that is a waste of time.

When in fact, none of it is a waste of time, and there is much to learn about game design and humanity in general, if you would only go meta. People are constantly diluting this very much strict endeavor with their cognitive specialties, and this is what is making it appear so elusive, and why I said it's not hard, but it's hard at the same time. It's up to you. The question is not whether I'm smart, because I am, but what can you do with this knowledge.

I know that in this world, everyone is full of ideas, everyone rates their opinion higher than it should be. This is called Dunning-Kruger effect and of course we should be wary of it. But it's not wise to greet any new knowledge with disdain.

 

Lol. I expected a good response and you delivered. I was just poking at you cause to provided your insight like god booming down from the heavens. I thought some stuff you said was good but it's too vague and broad, so a more succinct answer for regular people to understand would be nice.

Some of your psychoanalysis is about right, but a lot of it isn't. I guess if you say everything in one post those odds are pretty good.

 

@orionsyndrome, you keep talking about this chart that places players and games along a couple of axes. But you haven't given a very clear picture of it. Can you elaborate, perhaps with an actual picture of this chart? It could be a very interesting discussion (probably worthy of a new thread to itself).

 

hahahaha ok, listen, I didn't say how much, that guy is obviously a genius.
however do you really expect this to be a fertile place for discussion?
an audience filled with hecklers isn't exactly what constitutes democracy. you got it all backwards and all I got from you so far is a horrible strawman and a creepy ad hominem.

@JoeStrout
Well thanks for being mildly receptive I guess.
I didn't intend this to be neither psychoanalysis nor 'ludological' theory, it was a market analysis that turned very quickly into a philosophical ontology, the basis of which being the attempt to define what is fun, something that is truly critical if we're ever to get anywhere. What I got in the end simply looked like a 3D diagram, where the 3 axes are depicting 3 cardinal psychological traits that historically make discussing tastes a moot point.

It's silly when you think critically about it, why can't we discuss taste exactly? Isn't it silly? It should be a phenomena like color. Colors are a perceivable part of our material reality, and whether we really like the red or not, colors are omnipresent but also reproducible, and pragmatically used for information, traffic, advertisements, and general comfort and everyday life, and we still can't tell conclusively if they are qualia or not.

So please, try to think of my axes as simply representing base colors in the additive model (RGB). Couldn't be more convenient for the game designers I think, because we're all inclined to gather mystical patterns in our designs one way or another. It's essentially a behavioral metapattern that is also present in works such as "The Hero's Journey" describing a cycle of a mythical protagonist coming from a simpler perspective, crossing some cognitive threshold, until finally being ready to elevate to higher awareness, and bring this knowledge back, only to renew this cycle. The same mystical metapattern is present in many ancient models of behaviorism and universal categorization, including but not limited to kabbalah, numerology, zodiac, alchemy, and so on.

It's important to reiterate again that I didn't reach this by extrapolating from numerology and zodiac -- the journey was quite the opposite, I've started from market analysis and trying to define what is fun. In particular, what is fun and what is chore. When I noticed the convergence it was already too late, but this is perhaps the explanation why game design crosses so much into the realm of pseudo-scientism, and why science didn't exactly destroy our ingrained fascination with such topics.

While doing this, it struck me that what I discovered was, for the first time, able to withstand the test-retest reliability, because it is grounded in the usage of verifiable products, whose content and effects on psyche can be determined.

Obviously this is only 1% of what I did so far, and I get it's a lot of text anyway, but I really just wanted to test the waters, and not really bring the whole topic to the table. Here's an older version of the chart, in many ways quite similar to psychometric tools such as the Big Five



Consider the cusps of the triangle as ideals that cannot be achieved fully. Also consider gender symbols to be archetypal and anthropological, having nothing to do with any kind of a gender stereotype. It precipitates to an extent however.

What is really important in this work is not, in fact, how this all relates to games, but how exactly we are equipped to discern fun from chore. A way to explain our mental processes, and the necessity of living thinking conscious organisms, such as humans, could be very simple. It can be said that our goal in the universe is to subsume the meaning amidst the apparent illusion of chaos. To achieve this, we employ contextual categorization, experimentation, and imagination. And already we've been able to show that universal languages such as mathematics do not necessarily belong to this universe, but can correlate strongly only when we want it to. So what we're trying to do is decipher some incoherent and unreachable source of information through what is an objective reality to us.

I call this the signal. And in this sense, we're mere signal compression agents. It's not enough to simple be/live on the signal, we have to 'transduce' it into a more compact truth, hence the mythologizing and story-telling in general. Now what is fun is simply the parts of the signal worth preserving. That means that anything fun is basically what we deem as relevant and connected to some deeper meaning. Any loose ends or redundant signals are lost, and this is what taste is. In other words, there is no one universal strategy to prune chore from fun. To convert one signal to another.

Thus in conclusion, we are born or developed into being sufficiently equipped with cognitive tools and strong points aimed at this universal task, that is, it goes without saying, completely above our everyday cognizance, and relates to the civilization as a whole.

I went completely off-topic at this point, but I hope I've given you enough to realize this is not just a brain fart, even if it appears to be pseudo or underdeveloped. A stricter rigorous analysis is possible, but as I said, I'm just testing water. Something in me tells me the timing is right, even if this is a wrong place for it. On the other hand, I can't think of a better place, and I also believe the world of gaming (philosophy) has lost enough time pursuing trivialities and that entertainment, in the social and industrial sense, has nothing to do with games at large. I could write an essay just about this topic alone.

In the meantime, this can be used as a predictor of sorts, if I tell you that all modern games have a certain recipe that is easy to follow. There is always a mental centerpiece and a lot of fluff to package the product into a presentable whole.

This mental centerpiece typically comes in two flavors: natural problems or social problems.

Fractal patterns, logistic function, space colonization, graph optimization, zero-sum games, permutations and statistics, memorization and memoization, navigation, step optimization, flow charts, simple physics, tiling, are some examples of natural problems that are consistently challenging and practically inexhaustible when it comes to fascinating human mind. I could fill an entire page worth of natural problems worth of mentioning. Some are more pragmatic, immediate and puzzle-like, others are deeply philosophical as they pervade the cosmos, such as light or gravity. Some also highlight our own blind spots, and train us into reasoning with non-intuitives, counterlogicals, and apparent non-sequiturs.

The next best flavor is obviously story-telling. Mythological disposition, pantheons, identification, threshold crossing, black vs white, questions of morality, intellectual dilemmas, modernistic exposition, critique of society, worldbuilding, and the list goes on and on. All good art employs both natural and social problems, while also posing questions or quality introspection which reinforces impressionability.

It's easy to get lost in the implementation details of a game and genre characteristics. This doesn't matter. It's dead wrong to split games into genres and subgenres, this has only historical and informal value. What you personally like also doesn't matter as well. As a game designer, I need to appreciate the most ridiculous of games I can imagine, if they show traction, and I'm to understand the rules of the system. Cookie Clicker and Flappy Bird anyone?

The game needs to provide a mental centerpiece and tick all three checkboxes I mentioned in my previous post. Brilliant games typically tick these checkboxes without effort, because they have all the love, patience, finance, wisdom, enthusiasm, and IQ backing them up. It's not feasible to fake this.

To put it bluntly, you can't fake being pretty, you can only reduce the excess potential. Good and inspiring things simply emerge from possessing a certain mindset, and then a wave of copycats begin to appreciate its newfound success and polish this rough diamond further. It goes on until it crystallizes into a staple genre, which then regularly attracts fans by being a centerpiece of consumerism, much like any other mainstream canon out there.

To bring myself back to rails, I hope this vantage point makes analysis of a game such as Red Dead Redemption 2 brutally simple from this point on. I also hope this makes a clear distinction between what is a mental centerpiece of such a game, who are the people playing it and why are they doing it, and what exactly is the fluff surrounding it.

 

So what games have you made?

 

It's interesting, and I appreciate the time and effort you've put into posting. I'm still having trouble discerning any "hard" (as in concrete, specific, potentially measurable) dimensions. Each of the three "types" of games arranged around that triangle as a long hodge-podge of phrases with it which may be related in the minds of some, but by what, is not clear.

As a possible counterpoint, I have my own theory of fun which is much simpler (though I'll readily admit that some folks still don't seem to understand it). It makes a lot of specific predictions: a game can be fun without being difficult, or difficult without being fun; adding a monotonically increasing score to a game increases the fun; taking points away from the score reduces the fun (and is likely to just cheese your players off); any long game is at risk of a non-fun slog in the middle; conversely, the maximum fun in goal-oriented games is to be found near the beginning and near the end; a game with no ending requires exponentially-larger numbers in order to maintain the fun; etc. I'm happy to elaborate on any of these points if desired. I've found this theory useful both in understanding why games (or specific parts of games) are fun or not-fun, and in making design decisions in my own games.

Now what's lacking from my theory is some classification of types of accomplishment or goals, in order to predict which ones will have the strongest pull for certain segments of the market. It seems like this is what you're getting at. So I think there's value there, but I wish you could be more specific and clear. Something like:

Axis 1: Adrenalin — people at one end love being scared, facing risks, violence, etc.; people at the other end abhor such and prefer calming, peaceful games.
Axis 2: Thinking vs. Twitching — at one end, people like to ponder each move deeply as long as they like; at the other, players prefer training their cerebellum to react to inputs instantly, without thought.
Axis 3: Creation vs. Destruction — at one end people value building things up; at the other, tearing them down.

I suspect these are wrong, but it's my best stab at what you might possibly be trying to say.

Any chance you can lay out what you've found in something this clear?

P.S. And the reason the original author hates the RDR2 chores? He gets no sense of accomplishment from them; i.e. he doesn't feel they move him noticeably closer towards a goal he cares about.

 

You are absolutely right. It is a hodge-podge mainly because the exact values are so elusive that they aren't encompassed by the languages we readily use. This is true for English as well as my native language.

Maybe some languages on this planet can do a better job (German is known, for example, to be a fertile ground for many psychological and sociological terms and neologisms which are used in English as well, such as gestalt, zeitgeist, or schadenfreude). I was afraid the essence would be lost if I stuck with simple words. So I went down the path of trying to get the right "feel" of each domain by clustering words into semantical clouds instead. It's really just a technique of nailing it down, because it's just as new for me as it is for you, but I'm absolutely with you on this.

However, in time, I've developed a sense for what is truly behind these words. And if I absolutely had to be succinct about it, it goes like this, though I urge you to replace the word "people" with "metaphors" -- I'll explain shortly.

1) (yellow axis) People at one end need to belong to a crowd, to feel embrace of being one of many, and develop a sense of belonging (aka 'the minglers'); People at the other end need to feel independent, to feel embrace of being one of a kind, and develop a sense of being responsible (aka 'the pillars').

2) (magenta axis) People at one end need to blindly pursue simple (hamster) goals, to feel urgency and react to their environment, and have a hands-on experience (aka 'the soldiers'); People at the other end need to have a holistic approach to the complex state of affairs, to plan multiple stages ahead, to feel elevated and have an out-of-body experience (aka 'the patrons'). (Also Illuminati confirmed.)

3) (cyan axis) People at one end need to be immersed in predictable cycles, be routinely patient, and optimize their energy efficiency with calendar in mind (aka 'the farmers'); People at the other end need to be immersed in stochastic patterns, improvise, live in the moment, and optimize their energy with opportunity in mind (aka 'the hunters').

Also, there are also useful symbolic representations for the domains described, which I'm really yet to design, but I could try to explain them.

1) Imagine a plane with points and pillars. Pillars are spaced out as much as possible, while points cluster around them and between themselves. Both points and pillars are codependent. The ends of the spectrum depict the relative distance from the nearest pillar. This is not a mere function of courage, but also a question of reproduction, and deeper social and cultural conundrums. It's a matter of adherence.

2) Imagine a point outside a sphere at one end. Imagine a point inside a sphere at another. There is a continuum between these two images, unfolding the sphere into a plane directly next to point, and then folding it back again (in mathematics this is called point-plane duality, and the whole thing could be considered a 4-dimensional duality of presence). I think this is the most beautiful representation of this concept, without having to refer to any kind of human hierarchy. Hierarchies do emerge however, which is especially observable in military and government organizations, because they solve a natural problem. Obviously both ends are codependent, as you cannot have a military commander without a battalion of soldiers.

3) Imagine a sinewave against a dry noise pattern. What works for one doesn't work for the other. Human systems are deeply immersed in both predictable and unpredictable patterns (with day/night cycles, seasons, crops, ebbs & flows at one end, and weather disasters and stock exchange plummets at the other). Obviously one can't exist without the other, it's only a matter of coherence.

I do not care about notions such as adrenaline, scare, violence and destruction. That's just an emergent contextual information, more likely delivered from a singular perspective. 'Adrenalized peril' is just a paintbrush as any other syntagma used in that image, and doesn't necessary imply feelings that relate with the actual adrenaline being produced. In fact, there are numerous examples in nature (and human history) where destruction of some thing can be seen as birth of another, depending on the exact angle of observation, so it is largely irrelevant. I.e. I do not consider destruction or adrenaline an inherent constituent of any domain. It could be found anywhere. Just as much as creation and peace.

However, the temporal quality of it, the feeling of being cognitively 'squeezed' into sudden events, whether sudden destruction or sudden creation, and a quick (or slow) reaction to it is part of the wheel, because the wheel is completely anthropocentric and relates to human cognitive behavior, and not external stimuli per se.

What matters to me the most is that these, admittedly hand-waving notions of adhesion, presence, and coherence are pervasive in many sociological and psychological works, but most prominently in those by Carl G. Jung and his followers. I'd go as far and state that this is a natural continuation of his work, directly adding on top of what he already established with the archetypes, collective unconscious, emotional complexes, and extraversion/introversion delineation (which has sadly deviated from the original premise of Jung's).

Now let me get back to metaphors. Linguistically, a metaphor is 'a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable.' However I'm more interested in its general meaning 'a thing regarded as representative or symbolic of something else'. Now that's a game. A game is an interactive metaphor conveying some alternate reality. A game always carries the omnipresent notion of life as well. (Life, or a direct measure of consequence, is probably the oldest mechanic ever, clearly adapted from how our own existence is laid out as well.)

So when I said to replace "people" with "metaphor" this is why: Games are free to be arbitrary in how exactly they choose their own parameters of adherence/presence/coherence, typically in order to satiate the taste of the developer and/or to fulfill some market demand. The other well-known metaphors are all deeply rooted in cultural values, such as myth retelling, ritualistic ceremonies with deep metaphoric elements (i.e. masks, dresses, dance, commonly known as folklore), but also various art forms, from visual to literary. In the latter we also recognize allegory that achieves a similar thing. Thus, the pattern I aim to describe isn't exclusive to games.

A metaphor is a useful device for the universal ability in humans to transplant their own identity. An emotional response to which is present in every form of today's media, and regardless of demographics. A cognitive process known as identification (and its literary counterpart). Here I can quote what's been said about soap opera:

"Although melodramatically eventful, soap operas such as this also have a luxury of space that makes them seem more naturalistic; indeed, the economics of the form demand long scenes, and conversations that a 22-episodes-per-season weekly series might dispense with in half a dozen lines of dialogue may be drawn out, as here, for pages. You spend more time even with the minor characters; the apparent villains grow less apparently villainous" –Robert Lloyd

"I think people like stories that continue so they can relate to these people. They become like a family, and the viewer becomes emotionally involved. There seem to be two attitudes by viewers. One, that the stories are similar to what happened to them in real life, or two, thank goodness that isn't me." –H. Wesley Kenney

Games deliver the next step, once we cross that boundary of social and interpersonal relationships, which are also present in mainstream media -- letting self become immaterial, be supernatural, be god-like, in charge, a force of nature, an animus, and ultimately Deus ex Machina of a fictional reality.

tl;dr fair warning

Spoiler

With all of that said, this is where things start to get really interesting.

You can find more about the chart if you divide it into six most obvious triangular sections. Now starting with the top yellow one (with the word 'surrealism' in it), enumerate them clockwise in the following pattern 1, 2 - 4, 5 - 7, 8. With the cusps bearing 3 (Y), 6 (C), and 9 (M), consider the following numerological keywords -- normally regarded as nonsense, and I wouldn't claim otherwise -- but try to correlate this with what I've told you so far.

I'm aware that this technique is very controversial, and that I shouldn't pursue this idea along with any scientific rigor, and in the same article. However, I'm also talking about all-pervasive patterns, and this goes as a testament to how hard it is to avoid an apparent overlap. It also implicitly questions why we have numerology in the first place, who invented it and for what reasons, where does it come from, what kind of curiosity does it satisfy, what natural problem does it try to solve, etc?

I mean, apart for the most obvious of monetary reasons, basic unfounded fears and curiosities...
Obviously it just sounds deeply mystical and otherworldly, right? And there are many potential explanations, but how exactly we arrive at the very same motion of ideas from vastly different points of origin, is the right question.

I was able to do this with Western astrology as well as Myers-Briggs type indicator, but also with other patterns, diagrams and processes that have nothing to do with esoteric teachings, but are considering something else, sometimes with credible scientific rigor. For example Lewis Model of cross-cultural communication. (See more here.)

My other favorite example of this pattern is as atypical as this.

And I have a ton of them, here's also some historical evidence on organizing entire civilizations based on such a pattern. But in that case we also have to be mindful of what trinity represents in Christianity. But it very easy to get lost in the tangents.

Back to numerology:
(these quotes are ordered respective to independent anonymous sources picked for illustrative purposes)

1: (farmers, 1st half, which I call the 'candor')
Leader, Rulership, Influencer, Authority.
New beginnings, Creation.
Initiating action, Pioneering, Leading, Independent, Attaining, Individual.
Independence, Individuality, Attainment, Leadership, Pioneering, Administrating.
Individuality, Independence, Self, Unique, Assertive.

2: (farmers, 2nd half, which I call the 'artifice')
Opposites, Balance, Extremes, Femininity.
Duality, Balance, Intuition.
Cooperation, Adaptability, Consideration of others, Partnering, Mediating.
Cooperation, Closeness, Sensitivity, Balance and Harmony, Supportive.
Sensitivity, Being aware of the 'other', Intuitive.

3: (minglers)
Creativity, Groups, Arts, Imagination, Fun.
Self expression, Creativity, Outcomes.
Expression, Verbalizing, Socialization, Creativity, The joy of living.
Expressing Self, Joy of living, Enthusiasm, Optimism, Creativity, Sociability.
Self-expressive, Creative, Social, Movement.

4: (soldiers, candor)
Logic, Reason, Intelligence, Endurance.
Foundations, Hard work, Pragmatism.
A foundation, Order, Service, Struggle against limits, Steady growth.
System and order, Service, Sense of limitation, Managing, Working hard, Practical, Down-to-Earth.
Earth, Order, Responsibility, Form, Planning.

5: (soldiers, artifice)
Pleasure, Adventure, Travel, Human Senses.
Change, Challenge, Freedom.
Expansiveness, Visionary, Adventure, The constructive use of freedom.
Constructive use of freedom, Variety, Excitement, Progressive, Creative.
Change, Freedom, Adventure, Researcher, Experiment.

6: (the hunters)
Love, Romance, Sex, Loyalty, Relationships.
Love, Harmony, Relationships.
Responsibility, Protection, Nurturing, Community, Balance, Sympathy.
Balance, Responsibility, Love, Supportive, Comforting, Serving, Helping.
Love, Beauty, Pleasure, Artistry, Helpfulness, Family.

7: (builders, candor)
Occult, Mystic, Paranormal, Spiritual.
Withdrawal, Contemplation, Metaphysics.
Analysis, Understanding, Knowledge, Awareness, Studious, Meditating.
Analysis, Understanding, Introspective, Search for Truth, Spiritual understanding.
Spiritual, Meditative, Nature-loving, Quiet, Analytical.

8: (builders, artifice)
Drive, Ambition, Enterprise, Focus.
Prosperity, Abundance, Manifestation.
Practical endeavors, Status oriented, Power-seeking, High-material goals.
Material satisfaction, Accomplishment, Desire for success, Power, Recognition.
Power, Expansion, Ambition, Will, Strength.

9: (patrons)
Wisdom, Charity, Activism, Understanding.
Completion, Conclusions, Compassion.
Humanitarian, Giving nature, Selflessness, Obligations, Creative expression.
Selflessness, Humanitarianism, Giving without thought of return, Compassionate.
Kind, Encourages and supports others, Idealistic, Wise.

(Candor and artifice terms are a topic in itself.)

(You can also see from these examples, that some things that shouldn't be correlated, gets axial components mixed up, which is a very peculiar thing, because these sources do not include any kind of wheel diagrams, and there are no axes in numerology; if nothing else, this should be a complete mumbo-jumbo, but turns out to have significant overlaps.)

Absolutely. We're definitely on the same page here.

I'd only add that they can't even tell what exactly are the goals they care about. The author cannot precisely formulate their own taste, as they can only cherry-pick the extremities compared to what is subconsciously maintained as fun. And it's not a problem of this one person, we're all victims of being completely unable to express innate taste through the language alone. This can obviously only get worse if a person has a higher affinity to adherence. You're no longer sure if the thoughts are genuinely authentic or if they are an echo.

Also the games are almost never monolithic in design. Most games, typically AAA, suffer from being stitched from many individual parts, partly because this is how fluff gets made, partly because they are the brainchilds of large teams suffering from taste inequalities as well.

Some of these elements are correctly considered as mini-games, many other, most annoyingly, are seen as mechanics, even though a mechanic of a game cannot stand alone, strictly speaking. Car driving (or horse riding) is not a mechanic, it's a doing in and of itself. Earning achievements as well. Experience gathering. Tier upgrading and unlocks. All of these are mini-games or in-game freedoms, not mechanics. This misnomers do not help anyone, but are as such because people erroneously assume they cannot be made into stand alone games. Taking such amalgamated games as a whole, only speaks of them as shelf products, and mixes and matches different parts wildly out-of-context, which is crazy dangerous.

This is the core reason why game design is hard, and why we shouldn't ask our audience what they want.
Anyone who's worked in the industry knows that's the quickest path to hell.

 

@JoeStrout
I am yet to read your theory with undivided attention and give you my opinion, didn't want to just glance over it.

 

Where does this kind of information come from?

And why you don't answer the important question? Where dem gamez at dawg. You seemed to want to establish yourself as an authority, why can't we easily find your body of work so we can put substance to all these ideas?

I read a lot of books, but I am having trouble making much practical sense from most of your writing. If I could see the ideas in action, that would probably help a lot.

 

From me directly. It should be taken as contrastful and idealistic as possible, not a single soul is at the extreme end of such a continuum, but it's there, and it is measurable.

It is comparable to what is in Big Five called Agreeableness and also Conscientiousness to an extent (low A and high C equates an intense 'soldier' mentality, and when I say 'soldier' I mean strictly in the sense of my study, that's just a word that correlates very well with the world of gaming; the scientists would obviously be very careful to pick a term that doesn't imply that much).

It's just their dimensions are all over the place, so they don't correlate one to one against mine. There are other (normally proprietary and closed) models measuring similar stuff in people, typically used by HR stuff and other employment agencies. I can't remember the names of the modern ones, because they're very closed for the public, but Keirsey Temperament Sorter comes to mind.

In this study, you can see a very detailed correlation between high conscientiousness and emotional stability sampled from the employed in the government and military sectors on both coasts of the North Atlantic. There are many such papers, but people like you are typically oblivious to this reality. It's not that I'm blaming you, but you should be more considerate to the extent of social engineering in modern times. If people are filtered through such glasses, this is yet another confirmation that people do, in fact, possess verifiable traits that make them more cognitively suitable for one job or another. And when that employer is a government, one has to start asking questions.

Also, just my personal remark, I find highly conscientious people critically dangerous, as is evident from the famous lab experiment known as The Milgram Experiment. It also shows very clearly there is a continuum that I've described in the sentence you highlighted. If you find the bottom line offensive or are skeptical about it, I'm sorry, but it happens that not everyone questions the authority. In fact, most of the people invent their own universe in which the authority is never supposed to be questioned and just play along. Which is exactly what I described as 'hamster goals'.

I never claimed I was an authority. You can judge on your own by the volume and quality of things I have to say.
Maybe it's S*** by your standards, I'm not here to impress you. I just wish you'd ad hominem less, and concentrate more on the ideas themselves.

You shouldn't respect me any more or any less based on my prior financial or market success.
What would be the purpose?

Spoiler

I have no need to pump my ego, I'm old enough and simply wish to share my knowledge (which is objectively vast), and maybe have a proper discussion and also learn something in the process, something valuable and useful, if at all possible. This year would be 37 years since I've played my first video game. It was on a computer that didn't even have a persistent memory. You'd have to roll your own assembly, play with it, and once you'd shut it down, it was gone. My father made it from spare electronic parts. It wasn't his design though, it was a local inventor who designed it, so the computer itself is very much unknown outside my country. I live in a metropolis (according to some widely accepted standards; though it's hardly NYC), but fortune had it that I used to play board games with his son for a while, but didn't know at the time.

I've spent at least 30 years thinking and expanding about this, almost every day. Early on I wished I'd partake in it. I had to find a way to enter the local gaming industry from the top, it's hard core elitistic, so I worked for an Atlantic City "gaming" company, grinded my way up, then bailed for true gaming. It's been around 7 years ago when I discovered this chart. I had a, um, constructive debate with a creative director I was working with. I told him there were only three types of games in the world, that was just my intuition at the time.

I told him a) you can tell a story and once you finish it's done, b) you can make a shooter which is really who is faster at clicking on faces, or c) you can make something of value. He was an educated movie director and was pissed because he really wanted to make movies, but the doors were closed, so he made trash-movie-style side-scroling iOS shooters stuffed with RPG progression rigged to favor microtransactions. He said "That's not a game, that's a toy" as if that somehow invalidated my opinion. He didn't believe me, and I couldn't sway him, so I set out to prove it to myself. It took me a couple of weeks to understand why this is true, that the truth is much simpler than what is normally presented in the books about game design. Most are just crap anyway, and exist solely because the topic is still hot, so they sell.

It's not about the games, it's about what people see in them. I once had a friend who was a sucker for anime-styled hack'n'slash RPGs. Obviously we all had our tastes developed in specific directions, but at some point I realized that is pretty awesome and ridiculous to get hooked on something so stupidly uncanny and specific.

Obviously, it was part of his social expression, not a genuine desire. He would play that because he had to invent a way to defend himself from what was really popular in his clique -- third person MMOs. He simply knew he wouldn't get out if he started.

So I've thought about this for quite some time, why do we develop such a need to push others into a pastime? Why we lose ourselves in it? What are we trying to achieve? Is it like a car? Is it like a picture hanging on the wall? What is the true value of a game? Does it solve a problem? And if it does, what problem does it solve? Why do we play? Nowadays even my boomer mother is a player (ah who am I kidding, she played games the most during the 80's -- EVERYONE's a player, they just don't know it yet).

I'm a software engineer by vocation btw, but used to be graphic designer and many other things, I've dipped my fingers in many many different professions, around dozen of them, from magazine prepress to software consulting, from composing music to game dev. I am naturally drawn to complex things and crafts and learn like a sponge. It's just my specialty, learning and reading, and connecting. I had to endure three wars and numerous crises of morality, finances, fear, cultural devastation, even hunger. What's going on right now is probably my fourth. It's a murder to anyone's intelligence. Programming is my first best thing though. Though I do try my best to understand humans more than machines. Frankly, it's more of a challenge.

@JoeStrout
I've not read it yet, but I've seen enough to remind you to be wary of mixing up fun with impressionability.

Impressionability of a product is an ability to form a strong impression on its users. Obviously, as a producer, or as a reseller, you want this. But this can be a very dangerous path to walk on. Do I have to say 'loot boxes' to ring some bells?

What matters is how exactly the game translates into meaningful mental action, and what is the empirical takeaway, because this is what ensures the positive impressionability.

As far as we're concerned about ambivalent impressionability, you know, people tend to talk about narratives, plot twists, and whether you can pet the dog, and so on. A highly controversial game is more likely to be talked about. Carmageddon and GTA titles come to mind. But what really matters is can you remember that game a month away from its release. And after we're past that if, why. Business minds are like "What's the key selling point?" It's simpler than that -- What is the takeaway? If you're cheesy, no one wants to feel that. If you're playing smart, everybody waits until you slip up. If you're bold, you're selling something right? But it lasts only until you show them what exactly you're selling. If you're upfront, people will actually give you a chance, but then you better have a brilliant loop. If you're like: "Ok, here's the core loop, you do that, it's okay-ish, it's fun -- but wait! It's a commodity in itself! You can grind the core loop (it's technically called mining), and you can sell that value back to us, and get some new S***." And now we're talking.

Keep this close to your heart:
- Brilliant games treat you as a witness of a beauty unfolding. You won't forget that.
- Brazen games treat you as a feeble-minded unreasonable addict without brakes. You can't forget that.

There is a world of difference. So impressionability alone cannot be a metric worth of pursuit.

This is especially noticeable when you say 'adding a monotonically increasing score to a game increases the fun; taking points away from the score reduces the fun'. I can agree only to a degree.

Here, let me fix this thought, so that we can both agree:
Adding a monotonically increasing score to a game increases the perceived fun; taking points away from the score reduces the perceived fun.

Perceived fun is the most dangerous thing in the world right now. You know what else is fun?
Being high on coke while having unsafe sex with teenagers in a speeding luxurious sports car.

You cannot rigorously define what is fun based on what is perceived as fun. This is the fallacy of the entire Western entertainment industry (yes Asian and European entertainment industry diverge a lot in this sense). In that underlined sentence, there is no underlying meaning, it's fun mostly because it is forbidden, meaning you have fallen into a trap of perceiving fun from the mentality of a 'soldier' verging to the right cusp (there is a reason I've included 'Forbidden and spectacular imagery' and why I'm implicitly referring to 'minglers' as being irresponsible; it's a natural trait of being 'just one of many' you see?).

Let me unpack this highly controversial sentence:
- it implies position of apparent status
- it implies living in the moment
- it implies peril of potentially getting caught
- it implies pleasant chemically-induced feelings
- it implies questions of morality
- it implies irresponsible behavior
- it implies sexual thoughts and feeling of arousal

Many people would automatically react to all I said as being automatically fun. Maybe not out loud, depending on their background, but they would still silently consider it. You know they would. And it's not. It's not fun. Everything I said about it sounds like fun, but has no deeper function or purpose to an individual and comes as a social more, from a society that simply thinks that fun is what you do when nobody is watching.

People that in fact did this would only confirm my argument (and they did, only it was in a jacuzzi, to further the stereotype even more), because once you do this, you start to question your original goals in life, because the true sense of fun is nowhere to be seen. It is a socially-induced fallacy.

Feeling elated does not equal having fun, and by extension feeling joy.

In many ways it's not your fault. You'll find sooo many wildly different definitions of fun. It's slippery.
The reason why this miscategorization is happening at large is because the industry has shaped itself around catering to that profile of people, almost without exceptions.

When I said I started from the market analysis, I also mentioned the islands would appear on the chart. These islands are simply point clouds of plotted games against the backdrop, and I'd color them in their vendor's color. And each vendor (a big publisher or a big studio) would have a preferred zone of influence. Now that isn't peculiar in itself, right? One could say "Of course they have a preferred zone of influence, each vendor is strong in its craft and serves a particular portion of the demography, that's how market should function in the first place. It doesn't make any sense for them to change their winning formula."

Well, yes, and no. They all have their own area of the diagram when it comes being around the center, and further away from the center, and some of these vendors have many products, or at least a dozen of them, so you can see very clearly where exactly they tend to move, and how exactly they test new grounds.

But then, as if they're all crazy, all of them are significantly overlapping in the rightmost part of the chart, nearing the 'minglers' cusp, and there is a reason why I've tilted the triangle exactly like this.

This is because they've got a feel for a formula of achieving very clear financial success with this particular demography. They don't have to possess a theory for this kind of success, they simply try and measure it against the live audience. With a shovel I might add.

And the whole culprit is that swap of theses where fun is equated to 'feeling elated' and 'you only live once'. 90% of all competitive arenas, MMO and RTS titles, web and mobile games. Every single massively popular game has some sort of an addictive social component embedded into it. It's basically a mental centerpiece that is coercing the mingling population into 'peer pressure', by means of vanity, escapism, social status, and social belonging.

Free to play industry is especially a predator in this age and format, having an entire terminology developed around tested and tried psychological tricks and other malpractices that coerce minglers into disproportionate payments, time wasting, regular retention, and proliferating someone else's products and messages, partaking into brand virality of their own volition.

In recent times we call this behavior 'NPCs' when it comes to politics, but such people are mostly just victims of a precise and tactical socially-engineered behavior targeted against their cognitive profile. I do not wish to engage in any discussion about conspiracy theories, I'm merely suggesting that when the water contains blood, any nearby sharks will surely come to investigate.

Now whether this particular cognitive profile is more numerous, or is perhaps even cultivated by our modern societies, that's another topic. But what you've described in that sentence is one of the fallacies I've seen numerous times. Let me explain what's wrong with it in a nutshell. I'll change it a little, so you can read what I'm reading.

Adding a monotonically increasing score to a game triggers the addictive loop of instant-gratification and thus irrational reasoning in most of the people, making them unable to resist, and leading them to stay a little longer, which ends in a vicious gambling cycle; taking points away from the score makes them see through it and quickly lose any interest -- which is how your control group would behave anyway.

But I cannot just tell you hey don't do it. If your goal is a million bucks, nobody asks you how you got it anyway. There are plenty of people looking forward into scamming others and making a quick buck out of other people's miseries, and games seem to be pretty white-gloved. My aim, on the other hand, is to make a difference by showing the world that you don't have to shoot for faulty systems of perceived happiness only to establish fantastic impressionability and product longevity.

But this path is obviously not for everyone, because not everyone can check all three boxes I mentioned earlier. I may be idealistically-inclined, but I wish we lived in a world in which people would realize the major problems with this approach in time, without reaching the point of having certain games demonetized based on some centrally-adjudicated criteria like YouTube already does.

And while this sounds laughable to some, with well-positioned online stores and thousands of games per year, we're quickly reaching that point of pay-per-click and pay-per-play. I'm just glad that Stadia seems to have failed.

Rest assured, they will try again.

 

You're right, I can understand it does require a stretch of imagination. Let me help you with that.
You can design a demo-centric game, and once you get a good feel for the niche, differentiate from there.

Let's try something:
1) you want a game that children could play, but you don't want to make a strictly child's game
2) you want its graphics to be colorful but easy on the eyes, and preferably unisex
3) you want the core loop to be twitch-based but without turning away the planners
4) you want the problems of the game to arise naturally, but also you'd like it to be competitive
5) it should be played in quick bursts, and almost without a takeaway, very sporty
6) at this point, it becomes clear that you'd like a multiplayer game

How many players? Well technically 10 to 20 is the most you can hope for.
What about retention? It could harbor the usual techniques: unlocks, xp grind, and satisfying core game loop.
Obviously you need some cosmetic vanity, and some memorable characters are a must.

You can already shuffle around tasks to your team: investigate multiplayer, draw characters, check out the competition.. But you still don't know what the core gameplay is.

So let's check out the chart:
1) start from the center, this is where you want to be
2) stay in the center, as long as the graphics appeal to almost everyone, it's not a problem
3) go right, this game seems to live somewhere on the yellow line, it needs to appeal to casual gamers
4) go down for a measure, this game lives in between the word 'expressionism' and the base of the magenta line, this is what you get for making a game highly competitive
5) it's not a core game though, so bring it up and to the right, it's more casual than your typical sports match
6) bring it nearer to the right cusp, a fun casual multiplayer game is hyper-populistic

So once the target demography clears out, you can check out the competition. Who else did a multiplayer game that is twitch-game but not too core, that's fluffy and cute, sporty and logical, but challenging in its own right? Well Bomberman comes to mind. It's definitely unisex. It's right in between the desired twitchiness and slow reflexes, logical to an extent, and reliant on some planning. You also kill, but it's cute and explody, everyone likes explosions, especially if they're properly animated. So you push into researching this animation more than anything else. If it's a game about bombs, they better explode tasty.

You start brainstorming about various abilities that could be unlocked with a progression.
You also consider some physics. Definitely doable, maybe it could add some twist to the formula?

After many suggestions, many of which are cool, you start thinking about a branching ability tree, which is a great 'farmer' mini-game (so top right), and let's people try out and commit to various strategies. Someone mentions class selection, which is just what you need to bring it back to boyland slightly, and multiple ability trees that can be freely combined would flesh out the needed combinatorics for extended retention (it moves the thing to the lower right). This design also fits well with a variety of characters. Once these are done they inspire a plethora of possibilities, from punching a bomb, to having karate moves, erecting walls, and phasing through them. One guy blows fire, the other can freeze the bombs, third is a commando having a remote. You check the chart: maybe it's too boyish. Let's balance it a bit by making it a little slower (up).

Let's characters also have invulnerable pets, that's cute enough (right). So you finally come up with a core grind, where all players collect coins and simple buffs from the crates they destroy initially. Pets help with the mundane tasks, whether by collecting coins, whether by making alert sounds, some can peck the opponent slowing it down, some can carry you around for a limited time.

At this point you begin pondering if some abilities are too cool and if they should be more general instead. Someone says ok maybe there is a currency that lets you be more powerful during the match, so you decide to make an incremental killstreak reward, with which you can buy progressively more interesting equipment with limited uses.

But most importantly: Your top-down camera is just right and fits the right demography. Players can see their character and their surroundings. Cosmetic items come naturally into sight, and thanks to some distance, your animations can be simple and to the point. You could've seen this in the chart, that position implies a third person perspective. The team starts producing a client prototype.

Now you start thinking about diversifying. We want this to be played by children. Obviously the floors can be whatever, sticky, slippery, pointy, conveyor belts. Do we want this? You make a prototype, a girl in the team says its too much for her, she liked it more as it was because it could be played more carelessly. You could've seen this in the chart, such a nudge into the twitch-zone implies a dominantly male population, yet it's too cute for them, so it's a design curse: no one would play it.

You decide to leave some of the more benign floor tiles, but focus on the walls instead. First you make it possible for characters to scale walls, and some pets can also carry them up there, which provides you with a possibility to have another level on top of the lower one, with bridges connecting the parts. This lets the planners take advantage of the situation, throwing bombs from above. The game starts to feel more tactical and creative. You could've seen this in the chart, such a push toward the center is a welcome change.

With everything done so far, it starts to feel like a proper game. The server is makeshift at this point but it works very well locally, so you start to increase the number of players. You lose the sense of it being tactical and predictable after a certain threshold, and you begin to get a feel for the perfect amount. Also whenever a player dies, the arena becomes a slog, because it doesn't change in size. It's boring. Someone says maybe we should try Battle Royale recipe? But alas, it already exists. You enter that desperate zone of questioning everything, including your own birth.

Then you decide to pull an ace. You look at the chart, and you're still too far on the right, too childish and too short lived. Also it gets boring throughout the match. What could you possibly add that would pull you to the left? Technically, you'd also like to even out the killing rate so that the most of the players are locked inside their games. But obviously, you can't just force them to spectate for the rest of the game, as that would get stale very quickly. To pull things to the left, this game should strive and engage players creatively, it should contain a mechanic like no other.

Yes, it should let you play when dead.

Players turn into ghosts, and keep playing. Ghosts are invisible to ordinary players, but have different goals and abilities. Ghosts can play cooperatively and collect mana in their color and solve ghastly puzzles in the level to gain more power. The actual puzzles have to be devised with this in mind, but should be simple time wasters, your typical no-brainer mana-miners. With this power they can affect the real world in small ways. Sudden quasi-coop brings a fresh air to the game. They can turn off the lights, nudge the bombs, steal players' health, trigger traps, and make their abilities fumble. Every time they do something devious, they recuperate some of the score they've lost when they died. But they can normally travel only on the edges of the map, progressively getting stronger and stronger, reaching for the center. So for the remaining alive players, the level becomes progressively more spooky, with more and more ghosts becoming apparent and affecting the real world. As this peril rises, we also achieve the Battle Royale mechanic without it being sterile and plastic. Oh and some of the spooky characters and pets can get an edge in the late game.

(Battlegrounds Battle Royale is not as cool as it sounds btw. I've expected a lot more from a game that was indev for 2.5 years. I've burned very quickly and microtransactions are ridiculously expensive and absolutely nonsensical. High tier being 100€? To get a bear costume and a dragon costume and a low poly baseball bat with a nail? ppffff)

Anyway, this was just a quick illustration of how to get a practical sense of the chart, and I hope you get the point. For starters, the very position of the camera is definitely something you can immediately extrapolate just from picking out a domain. And from that and the theme alone, the actual genre might reveal itself completely naturally. After that, you basically nudge your critical decisions in such a way to approach your wanted niche, and check your bearings against the known beacons out there. Once you're there you diversify and/or merge with another concept, novel or otherwise.

Keep in mind whether your mental centerpiece is narrative or logical (it can be a hybrid as well), and design your fluff without moving your game too much. And this is probably the most sensitive part of the design, and a chart like this gives you a sanity check at all times. In this example above, I've simplified some of the choices. This game obviously needs more to really stand out, but it has a wild potential, because I've framed it with particular people in mind, not losing sight of what they really need. Mainly variety, logical progression, feeling of power, a creative twist, and dead simple ruleset with a lot of room for tactics and improvement, not alienating female population whenever possible even though it features murderous explosions. By not having a punishing death I'm also reinforcing a positive attitude among the players (some of whom might just as well die only to be on another side) and a possibility to recuperate and perhaps even come to life again. Such a sandbox is what gives rise to an all-time what-if game, which you don't have to play exclusively to win, one that is able to provide feelings of fun to almost any sensibility out there. And in my experience, feelings of joy and sincere cheer gather a devout fanbase, are much easier to monetize, and such a genuine attempt is rarely harshly criticized. So all wise design choices.

Now, would this be popular? I don't know!! But does it live near the center of the chart? It does. And if it was well-executed in terms of code, gameplay choices, and level/character design, it could turn out to be exactly what we bargained for.

 

Congratz you have reinvented the lazzaro-bartle model, it's at leat 20 years old and widely known i also suggest you looking at the pens model (autonomy, relatedness and competance). I forgot about Roger Cailois of ludus vs paida, with agon, vertigo, alea and mimicry.

Insert here a rant about lack of gamedesign culture that lead to Nih design.

 

Nobody is going to read all of that.

You seem to think it's all novel, but its not. It's extremely wordy, pretentious, and all to say simple things many of us are already aware of.

You're behind the curve, which is totally okay, except that you keep telling us you are up on the moon.

I'm not picking at you because I'm a jerk, I'm trying to help you come back to reality.

 

Because it indicates validity of your ideas.

 

You've just massively validated my approach. Thanks.
This model (let's call it APC for Adherence/Presence/Coherence) is created with respect to gaming market and very simple epistemological truths regarding fun in a metaphysical framework. Completely detached from any cultural definition of fun, and detached from what is traditionally considered as fun in games.

I didn't want to pull this out because it was mostly irrelevant, but Lazzaro-Bartle is eerily similar in the conclusions it draws, though there is a dangerous misconception lurking beneath that shiny package. Of course I know about it, every game designer in the world knows about it.

But, both Bartle's taxonomy and Lazzaro's emotional theory were made by analyzing players' feedback, which is a horrible mess that anybody, given enough resources, could come up with. They basically try to categorize the behavior already on the table, which is admirable in its own right, but I'm extrapolating beyond what is already observable.

It's important to remind you that I didn't categorize players based on the games alone, or based on my personal anecdotal evidence. It only started like that. I used the tried archetypes and established dimensions in the field of cognitive psychology and defined cognitive profiles until they were able to explain what we can observe on the market.

I can predict motions and cognitive preferences that are not yet tapped into. Namely the left and top part of the diagram. Also the center seem to be that slippery sweet spot that many try to capture, but fail horribly. The whole industry revolves around a formula to grasp the center. While games on the left and top are considered as irrelevant toys by the industry, slowly precipitating only after some random indie manages to secure a financial success.

Sure, you can look at all games through these Lazzaro-Bartle prisms, and you'll learn a lot (if you knew very little to begin with), but critically, Bartle's taxonomy cannot even explain a game such as Minecraft, or a game such as Dwarf Fortress (or Prison Architect and recently Rimworld). What is the prime mover in such examples?

Rimworld author has a theory on his own, there is a talk on YouTube, where he's practically pissing on both Bartle and Lazzaro by presenting something entirely else. Namely his mental centerpiece is a story-generating simulacrum, in which things happen without having to cater to any other established playing "needs".

You cannot explain these games entirely by slapping Explorers, Achievers, Socializers or Killers. It's none of these things, yet it's all of them. It knows nothing about the massive impact of roguelikes on replayability. (Both things were known since the 80's, it's nothing new, which means they're simply parroting what is already popular with the cash cow industry.)

In fact they wouldn't include Socializers at all, hadn't MMORPGs already established themselves as lucrative. So is it a good model, if we simply feed it with new trends as they come along? What does it predict? What does it show? Paying attention to them means wasting brain capacity, and then thinking how times are surely changing, this is why they don't hold.

It gives nothing about the emotional spectrum of peril, scare, survival, and does not consider takeaways, nor impressionability of a game. There is no notion of being "in the zone" or being on the opposite end, and offers no reasoning why this is so.

Killers? Are you sure about this? Your players are killers? Not survivors? We don't consider that players kill only because they're explicitly funneled into killing in order to win? Even though this is very obvious (and such devs always quote that the act of killing is a popular stress-relief mechanics). And what about the recent surge of stealthy games and killing games in which you don't have to kill? Is it for Explorers only? Or Achievers? I'd argue that killing is just a mere solution for the natural centerpiece in such games.

In other words, killing is just an in-game freedom, employed by having a shooting mini-game, which has to feel satisfying (because hey, players who play it, find guns amusing; it's a problem-ending instant solution, so instantly gratifying).

After a while, people started addressing the lack of other freedoms within killing games, and this is implying two things: 1) that their cognitive affinities are suited for more than just killing, 2) that their goals appear to be somewhere else, and are not limited to killing alone.

So how exactly are they Killers? That just explains what they do in a game made about killing, and not exactly why are they playing it. Yes there is a strong correlation, but not everybody who plays a killing game should automatically deserve a Killer label.

In fact, here's an anecdote for you: I like to kill in games such as BF and COD not because I kill, stop, and remove other people, but because I thrive in quick-burst tactical situations that require a massive dose of split-second guessing, bluffing, and execution, in order to outsmart an opponent or several of them.

When these games stop working for me, is when someone does actually play solely for the win, or for the kill. And we all know that 'camping' guy, or that 'cheater' guy. Do you need more arguments against it? Killing almost comes as a necessary evil. You could just as well say that Killers are the same thing as Achievers. Oh let me find this quote, from Lazzaro's work

Is it from a Killer mentality, or Achiever one?

In both models, games are observed as facultative emotion-inducing market commodities that are simply consumed. They do exactly what I consider the greatest fallacy in today's industry. Games have their own anthropological meaning, they are not just a consequence of a decadent population, and fun is not what you get when nobody's watching. Thank god for that, otherwise "Instagram happiness" would be a real thing, and not a synthetic illusion akin to Second Life.

Not a single model is brave enough to define what fun is in metaphysical constraints.

Lazzaro also went to an extent to implicitly split emotions into "fun" and "not so fun" ones. Also "hard" and "easy" fun, whatever that means -- I think that he's silently nodding in the direction of "Listen, these are just made up terms to explain some of the behaviors." Easy fun in this work is what is truly generating feelings of joy and aspiration, but it's not clear cut.

Some of the fun emotions in his arsenal are "Feeling better about myself," "Avoiding boredom," and "I want an excuse to invite my friends over". These are not emotions, and do not necessarily have anything to do with fun. These are coping mechanisms that have to do with the sense of belonging, sense of self-respect, sense of self-worth, and more often than not can lead to social escapism and addictive behaviors, while some are indicative of weak, addictive, and traumatized personalities, or personalities with a development disorder (aka fixation).

You know what else is fun in this terms? Porn. It's de facto "entertainment".
Now do I really have to back this argument up? Why don't they tackle that subject as well?

And let me tell you something about difficulty. Difficulty challenge has nothing to do with games. It's a side-product of an attempt to prolong the product's shelf-life, and, in GD terms, offers an elastic approach to attract and cater to a greater population.

Difficulty was and always will be a point of great contention among game designers, because it invalidates the takeaway, and makes the centerpiece very hard to implement and balance. A harder difficulty will always alienate the more casual among the players (I generously give you Dark Souls and gitgud mentality), while a game that's too easy won't have a desired impressionability and will mostly feel as a roller-coaster.

There is a social component hidden in there as well. Game design, or in fact, level design, is all about finding the sweet spot between the peaks of contrasting emotional content, the idea of a narrow escape, high risk, and perilous situations, humans are naturally built to respond with such situations by excreting hormones that provide the necessary feelings of power, self-aggrandizement, self-worth, peer reception, and feelings of being alive in general.

This is what difficulty and balance should really mean, not ramping up from 10 enemies to 40 enemies. And in many designs, such scaling does not yield a desirable effect anyway, making a game more costly to produce for dubious reasons. If they've picked a quality natural centerpiece that intrinsically scales with the intelligence of the player, they wouldn't have to balance it out.

But many times they are caught in the middle ground, and thus they have to appeal to the slowest in the crowd, holding their hand, making sure that they pay attention, making sure they don't have to remember anything. Tutorials aren't just boring, like killing they are this necessary evil that helps not receive backlash from any of the ends on the IQ spectrum. For many people this completely destroys any takeaway, and they're in just for the story and production value ("and will go through it even if they have to watch walkthroughs" -- Lazzaro's words). And I have a theory how exactly this leads to piracy as well, but that's another topic.

Lazzaro's definition of 'why we play games' is valid only partially and is heavily contextual, as it relates to the late 20th century Western hemisphere. Games have existed since the dawn of humanity, children and adults played games during all that time. Only the technology of the gaming changed. Did they also seek relief from every-day worries? There is no deeper meaning behind such an activity. Also there is nothing decadent about games, this isn't some weird activity that suddenly gained traction in the last couple of centuries, it's as fundamental to social, emotional and intellectual growth as imagination and usage of tools themselves, many animals have been observed capable of play and tool-using as well, and not just in youth but throughout their lives.

They all repeat what they've heard from the players, about what is their perception of fun. You can also look at their diagrams, and check exactly what's missing and what is ill-defined. It's also all over the place, almost without any sort of continuum, or logical connections between the activities.

They also don't include in their models a possibility of many players being victims of social conformity. This has been well studied, where large portions of population will always subconsciously imitate the crowd behavior only to fit into a catered group, shaping their tastes and perceptions of fun along the way. Sticking to these corny ways of thinking, where all you have to do is "ask the players about what is fun to them," is exactly why we still don't have a productive theory of game design.

But what bothers me the most about these models, is that they inspect the games on separate grounds, as if there was some sort of a wall between a human being and a human player. They split the need of expressing self within the game from any need of expressing self outside the game, which basically excludes the human nature.

The point of an avatar is really just a process of cross-identifying one self. This avatar I have on this forum is simply just an aspect of my intellectual reality (and to an extent, physical as well). There are no invisible walls, I'm free to pass any information from my real self, to this domain, where I'm some anonymous post-giver who's having a hard time shaking the status quo among the random denizens.

If you asked this orionsyndrome "Well what do you feel when you're typing this and this" you'd surely get a non-sequitur; the important questions is why am I engaging with this forum through this persona in the first place. What I am trying to achieve, and what are my goals. And this completely transcends the forum per se, it's just some medium through which I'm expressing. Clearly with some meta goals in mind, or even subconsciously. It doesn't matter what I feel while I'm typing anything.

I probably just feel whatever goddamn people feel on goddamn forums: Most of it is probably shame, rage, ego stomping, and pathological satisfaction of being "right".

Thanks for bringing these up, so that I can provide some additional rationale behind APC.

This is definitely a congruent model, however I dislike the overall message, and the biases it introduces.

Right off the bat they separate the cognitive behavior into positive and negative. You won't see that in my model. Every cognitive profile is out there for a reason that we should not attempt to tailor to our needs. Any time there is a dichotomy between a positive and negative, you need to ask yourself "Who is judging exactly?"

The other thing is the point of origin. This also doesn't touch the subject of fun, but continues the lineage of Maslow's hieararchy of needs and ERG theory (existence, relatedness, growth) and collates axiomatic truths that speak of the inherent qualities in humans to try and make the best of themselves. I don't readily disagree with any of it, but it's immediately egocentric and wildly misses the finer points.

But in the end, it overlaps so heavily with APC (at least dimension-wise) that it makes one wonder what exactly seems to be the problem? At this point I need to politely ask you how exactly does this invalidate my work, and how does it make unworthy of closer examination?

Because you've certainly managed to do the opposite.
Thanks!

 

I've read most of it, and I agree with the most of the things you said, bar the slight misnomers regarding the usage of the word fun, as I've already tried to summarize before.

It is mostly true what you said about accomplishments, in my humble opinion, your mind is in the right place.

You've also noticed how crescendos need to be exponential, not linear, and that mid game tends to become a slog, even in games that are as open-ended as Minecraft. There is also some fine talk on minimalistic game design as well, something I enjoyed very much.

Though you missed to notice some of the very important aspects of Cookie Clicker, you assumed that Cookie Clicker's simple unlock minigame is not comparable with the Cooper's Little Adventure's simple narrative. In fact, for most accomplishment-oriented people CC nails that sweet spot better. They want all those little animations and nifty little features that bake their cookies, without having to read anything! In turn that Unlock mechanism IS Cookie Clicker's narrative.

But (admit you knew the long post was coming ), I have to make a clear distinction between our approaches in theoretical modelling. My approach is philosophical and more abstract, while yours is concrete and already directed toward a specific demography without you even knowing.

And I get an impression that most of you (well maybe not you personally) do want to simply hoard simple psy-tricks to fool the player, which is a shame. The aim of good design is not to fool the player, it is to understand what a foul design is.

Let me try and describe it this way, with simple logical truths
(we can talk about them if necessary, but I wouldn't defend them at all, this is just really contrived/blunt example):

1) Lemmings can be either very smart or very stupid, and there is a normal distribution between these two extremes
2) Lemmings that are smart will very rarely suddenly become stupid on their own, and vice versa
3) all Lemmings play games



Now let's ignore what happens when they play, but what happens after

1) Lemmings criticize the games that are as smart as they are, feeling invited to do so
2) Lemmings praise and support the games that are slightly above their level of intelligence, being inspired by them
3) Lemmings loudly hate the games that are slightly beneath their level of intelligence, affecting the other Lemmings
4) Lemmings ignore the games that they cannot comprehend, as the games are either too stupid or too smart

Now if you try to make your game to have the following reception:
- The majority of Lemmings should give praise and support -> this is always our goal
- Some Lemmings should criticize it -> well someone has to
- A few Lemmings should hate it -> we don't want this behavior
- The rest should mostly just ignore it

Now the question is, what are your options and your strategies?
Consider that image and try to be brutally honest about it.

Spoiler

Yes, there is really just one strategy:
a) You intentionally make a thing one standard deviation above the mediocrity line and cull off the smart population.

Now if you consider that you can't actually measure the Lemmings IQ this perfectly nor you can tailor your game that precisely, what you end up with is known as 'regression to the mean', simply because your game will end wherever, based on many criteria, most of which could be just as well sheer luck.

And at this point I'm not trying to criticize you at all, but am merely trying to illustrate what can happen if your goals are too concrete and too down-to-earth. Were you unethical in your decision? Were you greedy? Were you dishonest? No, no, and no. It's just the way things work. Maybe your game will float back to where it belongs, maybe it'll sink to the depths of gaming oblivion...

But given that you couldn't predict the actual outcome, did you provide the best possible outcome for the population or was it the best possible outcome for yourself? Think about this question a little. It's a tricky one.

Now you could be like "But I don't care" however you are affected by this feedback that you introduced in the system. First of all, by satisfying the greatest population you're immediately going to garner the most praise and support. If you're successful many will come and imitate you until the local competition outgrows you both in terms of investments and marketing aggression. Second of all, you don't understand the rules of this market very clearly. What works on this population doesn't work on you personally. They are gullible to primitive techniques and cheap tricks, and you're all competing against each other over who's able to attract more Lemmings with blunt devices, having to resort to gambling and features of kitsch in the long run. In the meanwhile, the smarter population is growing restless, dissatisfied, and cynical toward all of your products. Because no one is catering to them they are throwing all kinds of wrenches into the system, likely by pirating, by giving bad reviews, by playing niche games that fall completely off the radar, and finally by making their own games that will eventually ruin your business.

What in fact should've happened is completely irrational from the ordinary business perspective. You essentially can cultivate a smarter population, by shooting beyond the 2nd standard deviation (for the Moon right?). Don't forget, games can have serious takeways, and people can seriously invest themselves in chasing their cognitive dreams. Not a single player in the world (mostly children) seemed to have a problem with the early Minecraft being tough to configure and launch properly. You were expected to install JVM, and configure it via command line according to your local specs, in order to make it run. (Don't get me started about launching a proper standalone server.) I've never seen a single bad review telling this to anyone. Admittedly, for most people it just worked, but for the others it was like you were given a chest full of gold, and what's a little lock for such a prize? If a game has intrinsic value, you don't care for the bad mouths, the population will rise to meet your standard, you will invent your own arena which is incredibly hard to imitate (and this is essentially still true for Minecraft ten years into the future). Many of your fans will also defend you in the open. Because they're not essentially defending you, but their own escalation of commitment, and their own personal investment. Essentially by making them earn their access to your world, you're making them value you even more, because they learn the price of admission by having to do it. This admission price is the real psy-trick, I will come back to it once more.

There are many RL examples, it's not just Minecraft, but let me get back to the crux of the issue.

The sense of accomplishment is not universal among the people. What you were describing is an effect that is obvious to you only if you are deeply immersed in the right-hand-side population, where the most games normally live. It's the populistic tendency, and observing this is again, a regression to the mean fallacy. There is nothing to learn about the humanity at large at that side of things. You're all tempted to repeat same tried recipes and tricks, but it gets stale too quickly, because that population is oversaturated and everybody caters to them already.

You can read my post above where I mention Rimworld as an example of a game that was made specifically to tailor to non-killing non-exploring non-achieving non-socializing players. It's been a smashing (though silent) hit so far. Stardew Valley also serves as a fine example, though it was deliberately framed with true farming in mind and the simple narrative of making the world a better and less stressful place. But this is exactly the sort of takeaway I'm talking about.

You could say that a game's takeaway is what you're left with after you've paid an admission price. The whole game up to that point is the price you pay, it's not just entertainment (edit: I forgot to back this up with the first thing that crossed my mind -- Bastion, a highly praised game with incredibly simple, even tedious gameplay, but the one that manages to make people cry in the end -- think about that crescendo for a moment, was it just a random fluke?). And to argue against this is to argue against the entire microtransaction industry.

This is exactly why people were so riled up with the ending of the Mass Effect trilogy. They got nothing worth of remembering. For many people it was utterly meaningless, after they have already invested themselves to the neck. The story was just a soap opera, and it died before it had a chance to give people anything of value. Same thing is going on with the recent Star Wars movies.

Yadda yadda, I know it's a lot of text, I'm sorry, but I can't get this point across any shorter.

The point is that your techniques work only for 'the minglers' or 'the dwellers' or 'the extraverts'. Or whatever you'd like to call them. They are hooked to simply flipping the games, because this is what they do, they consume. The chance that they will even notice a serious takeaway is very small, so games made for them don't need to include any. If you consider what they're doing, it becomes obvious that they're simply trying to accomplish something, without any rationale. But I urge you to not stop there, try to get to the bottom of why are they doing it. You'll get wild responses, but soon enough you'll realize that accomplishing is all they do all the time, it just never occurred to you.

They hear about something or get told to accomplish something, and they go and accomplish it, obviously if they're able to. They will turn you down immediately if they can't, it's not a problem for them. There are no deeper conundrums, whether they enjoy it, or where does it lead them, no, it's a simple thing -- a 'farmer' mentality crossing the deliberation of a 'soldier' -- you have a task, you simply organize your energy to get it done and through the door. And that's a good thing right? However -- they rarely do anything truly efficiently or creatively. They thrive in doing the same things over and over, and are hooked when the feedback is some sort of exponential growth. It's a cognitive bias, but absolutely natural.

I mean you can always try and imagine your mediocre twitch tv streamer playing Limbo or Inside. Screaming right? Yelling "what's this S***, what's going on, this is crazy" and so on. Does he get the deeper allegoric messages? The chances are really small. And it's not just a measure of his/her IQ, it's a matter of attentiveness.

I had a coworker that was hardcore hooked on Cookie Clicker, he would set up a rig that would click in his place, when he was afk, at his workplace! It was incredibly hard for me to reason with that guy, even though he was incredibly responsible and artistic person, physically active and even quite handsome. He was a cuckoo clicker for me.

They are an extremely massive and relatively loud population that is responsible for the most of consuming. You know, in the consumer's market? And when I say they, it's really diluted, there is no clear cut between people, someone is only 20% mingler, someone else is 90%. If there is anything to learn from my chart it's that you, being a game designer, ALREADY do not belong there, you obviously know a lot more than them, and are aware of individual psychology and psychology of the masses. And don't get me wrong, it's not about the quantity of your knowledge, it's about your interests first and foremost. You want to know a lot more than most of other people, more likely. This is your cognitive profile. It's easy. And yes, game design is a lot easier than it looks. You just have to frame the proper burning desire inside you, right? To be someone else. For many people this is hard. Most people lack the mental capacity to detect bad design at all. Or to be someone else, just for a moment. I don't know why is this the case, but this is all we really care about.

These score manipulations are all just simple techniques to get the desired mental response. You can measure them on your self and tweak them on the fly. They are absolutely true and they work, most of the time anyway (they rarely work on me, for example). But it's not a theory of fun. Fun is something else. Fun is what we inexplicably do for ourselves, regardless of whether someone is watching or not. Fun is what you subconsciously think about when you don't have to. Fun is what you catch yourself thinking or doing on a vacation, instead of thinking or doing nothing. We rarely talk about it, in fact. We just 'love to' [insert your favorite activity] because [insert your favorite excuse], but in fact it's because it brings us one step closer to what we truly deem as fun, with our whole selves, not just with our father selves, or husband selves, or boy selves (let me throw in a little TA for a good measure).

Sadly, we're conditioned into hiding this truth from ourselves, and many people have miserable jobs and lives as a result. Games serve as an outlet of sorts. And the industry is largely predatory.

Instead of trying to shift your games into having appeal for a mentality you naturally know very little about (and have obviously devoted so much energy just to understand), maybe it's better to step back, and do that one game that really pushes the envelope? Go away from that crowd, go make a game for the builders instead. Contrary to popular belief, such games aren't toys. They actually tend to disrupt the gaming scenery from time to time. If you can, do it.

I wish I could do more to make people see more in that chart, but I guess that old adage still holds: beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

 

Wait. You've already commited several arguments of passion, a straw man, repetitio ad nauseam, and ad hominem. And that's all you contributed so far. But now you insist on committing an argument from authority as well? Man, you're like a human machine gun of informal fallacies. Seriously you probably have a great time on YouTube comment section.

And here we are, talking about perception of fun.

Besides, you have your answer already:
1) It's either that I'm an underdog, having absolutely nothing to back me up, just barking at the Moon.
2) Or I'm a top dog, locked down in a quarantine, having nothing better to do atm, fiddling my thumbs.

Place your bets, and stop being annoying.

 

Actually sounds a lot like Space Rangers 2 though it wasn't a typical 3rd-person protagonist RPG, more like a top-down spaceship RPG, but the invasion was done brilliantly. An impending doom, slowly spreading through the pretty big sector of space, with factions, intrigues, technologies, planets and their background stories. And the game was perfectly designed around it, giving you a chance to invest yourself as a player and feel and see the futility of resisting the dreaded Dominators. At some point the tides obviously change, you get better, you form alliances, you pit the Dominators against each other etc. Though I've never finished it (I rarely do, never been the accomplisher sadly).

It also featured quite interesting minigames, including a textual adventure mode, I remember being imprisoned and training a racing cockroach for months, stealing food and building my muscles in order to survive.

Crazy Russians. Design and graphics were brilliant for its time.

 

If we take the high road and ignore your personality, extracting only the ideas from your largely incoherent tomes, we find a few nuggets of wisdom, but I can't personally point to one that shines a light on any darkness. Many of your ideas which take paragraphs to reach fruition are so banal i would consider it an insult to explain to grown adults.

I'm sure somebody out there is getting something worthwhile from it, and others some entertainment value. To me, your myriad of foregone conclusions based on anti-science indicate not intelligence but the opposite.

For somebody who thinks they can define and categorize entire humans from reading a couple of post, I'd expect better communication skills. But I think you've summed something important up yourself: "(I rarely do, never been the accomplisher sadly)."

Typically I don't care much about the person, only the ideas. But in the case of a person who thinks they have all the ideas, then I want to know, okay what can this person accomplish with all that knowledge?

You don't seem to understand how a discussion works. If you want to put all of your ideas out there in one swoop without any of them being challenged, you can write a book. If you do actually want to discuss, share ideas, and pick up something new, then the obvious thing to do is work with the people you are talking to. I.e, stick to one thing at a time, and make sure you are being clearly understood.

What you are doing is the opposite. I seriously doubt anybody besides me is even attempting to read your post. And nobody besides you will understand most of it. You are off topic from the purpose of the thread, and you've suggested that you are just "working your fingers" because you are bored. Well, that's a bit selfish isn't it? The rest of us were actually having a discussion.


Well you aren't the type that's here to listen or learn so I won't annoy you any more, but here's a parting tip: Smart people use public forums to challenge their own ideas and learn from the community. Other people, seeking attention or validation, find the process of peer review to be "annoying."

 

the same thing

This is just the reality of creative productions. It's a cycle of having ideas, wanting to make something creative, needing money, repeat. The founders wanted to make a passion project, they succeeded, this grew into a business, they need money for their next projects/ideas so they make some less-inspired cash grabs, then later another hit, etc. It's a cycle. You see it in music too. Those companies have to have money to survive, so 99% of what they put out is just typical stuff. Every once in awhile somebody actually has something to say, and that sticks. We call those "classics."

 

@orionsyndrome everything you've laid out is brilliant, especially from a psychology standpoint. I think if you shared any of this with Dr. Peterson, or on a subreddit for JBP or Jung, you'd be their new hero.
This may be a pearls before swine kind of moment. Don't let it discourage you, because everything you've researched and written is absolutely brilliant.
Similarly to the archetypes you've laid out, some will not understand it or appreciate it, but that's not really a bad thing. People are just different

 

@tylerguitar75 , the thing is, this isn't a dissertation of research. I'm not saying it's without value and there isn't some golden nuggets in there, but don't let the guise of cleverness fool you.

For every nugget of knowledge there is a great number of wild, outlandish conclusions that are unverifiable and couldn't be based on anything other than speculation.

The validity of an idea is measured by it's ability to produce accurate, predictable results. Retrospective analysis of other peoples work is nice and all and a great way to learn, but being the best armchair general isn't worth 1/1000th of being an average real life grunt, right?

So right off the bat I am seeing a lot of foregone conclusions from orion, all of which are incorrect. What would this indicate to you?

Being wrong about something is no crime. And if we are all just happily BS'ing that's cool too. But our friend barges in here, first announcing that Joe is wrong, game dev isn't hard, then writes a tome with the worlds most complicated graph full of mostly nonsense to illustrate how easy it all is, and uses every opportunity to sneak in a very transparent pat on his own back. "I'm not hear to to discuss how brilliant I am, but I am extremely brilliant."

Okay. Prove it. Ideas without action are worth squat. Don't tell me you are smart and then try to tire us all out with words. Show us the fruits of your big brain in action.



Anyway, I'm just procrastinating. I welcome orion and would love to hear his opinions on things but it would be great if he could participate in a discussion by considering other peoples opinions, not just use people disrescpectfully as stepping stones to launch of into lengthy tangents because he is bored and wants to enlighten us all with his vast brain power.

 

@orionsyndrome
You are making some very outlandish rhetorical shortcut that invalidate most of your post.
1. The Bartle Lazzaro model isn't the only model presented, so you already lost by not addressing the other complementary model. For example the very Old Caillois model.
2. You misunderstand fundamentally the model, first it's a spectrum there is no boundaries, second it show tendency, and third it's not a classification of games or players, just a map of player behavior, that is a single player can move around the map in a single play, with some player preferring to stay inside a corner and not spread.
3. How does it validate your model, then you explain it's useless?
4. It's based on observable evidence, not on conjoncture based on theory. @BIGTIMEMASTER is right to point it's just speculation, and it's too vague to be pragmatique.
5. You used minecraft as an example, and failed to realized the model comes from MUD (multi user dungeon) which has gameplay on par with minecraft (highly interactive worlds with multi user interaction).

If you want a proper in depth exploration of theory and pratice of old game design model I'll advise you to read Rules of play from Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman


It's as dense as your wall of text, and already explore everything you think you stumble onto.
There is many more stuff to read, but that's a good intro.

For actual practical modeling of game design, I recommend Advanced game design from Joris Dormans and Ernst Adams


Both books still deal with abstraction irrespective of game genre or publics, yet they can give you straight to point model to actually make any games for any aesthetics, mechanics or publics.

It's important to realize that while perception of game design in video games can seem small due to the over reliance on genre, board game are older and more mature, and break convention and genre boundaries more often than video games, a lot of design insight comes from board games, and many author above are well rounded designer who crossed career in both sector.