Simon Carless’ article discusses the return to difficult content in games and how these new difficult games are receiving positive reviews. While very insightful I think it misses one critical point; “hard” does not equal “good” from everyone’s viewpoint.

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Here is a quick analysis of what makes me, as a player, interested in playing Double Wires, a ‘swinging on ropes’ flash game (yep, spidey stylez!). In this game design analysis I am looking to understand what motivates me as a player to play the game.

In Double Wires you have one rope in each hand, and each click of the mouse throws out a rope from alternating hands. You throw out ropes in front of you to keep swinging forward. The concept is great; simple, fun, challenging! It hits many of the key attributes of a good core mechanic, although its other non-essential elements (visuals, level design) are rather lacking.

Double Wires - an excellent concept poorly executed.

For how long did I play? 6 minutes.

What hooked me:

1. Simple physics-based mechanics that implicitly described my goals. I knew what I had to do without any explanation.
2. No distractions from actually playing the mechanic. I was experiencing the core mechanic within seconds of starting to play; swinging with two ropes, from ceiling to ceiling. Gorgeous! Some games suffer from pulling me away from actually playing the core mechanic, wasting my time – this game certainly did not.
3. Groking the mechanic and improving my skills was almost instant. It only took me a couple turns to get used to some of the subtleties of the design; the length of the ropes, how long each connected rope would stay alive, how fast I would move through the air, the elasticity of the ropes etc. Not only was it easy to improve, the better I got, the better it felt to fluidly swing through the air.

What broke me:

1. The difficult curve. I found the difficulty at the very start of the level quite easy, however it becomes 50x harder within about 10 seconds of the first level and for me that broke the whole system. It was completely unapologetic and did not ramp with me gently. Personally I cannot be bothered to pursue it since I feel like the skill I was gaining was not rewarded. I stopped playing here. I knew I liked the concept, and I wanted more, but the challenge to get over that initial wall was too high! Essentially, all that skill I felt I was gaining, was wasted because it still was not enough.
2. Vision impairment and level design awkwardness! The screen scrolls sideways at a constant speed like the infamous ‘Helicopter game’. However as you move faster than the camera speed, you reach the far right edge of the screen (the direction you’re heading) and the camera then begins to scroll with you at your speed to keep up, putting you at a constant 20-30% from the right edge. This is an issue because you need surfaces to shoot your rope onto and you don’t get much of a chance to see them coming when you’re up against the far right edge. This means you are effectively punished for moving faster than the camera. Ideally, you’d be kept on the left side so you can always see whats coming. Furthermore it would have been nice if the ceilings weren’t so low to start with!

Summary:

• Fell in love with the concept instantly.
• My experience soured almost as quickly once I hit an unforgiving and pointlessly hard difficulty curve.

I might be back, when I’m not tired.

Why am I doing this gameplay analysis? See ‘Analysing the shorter game experience’.

EDIT (the next night): I just replayed it and got much further. I like this game enough to return, but am still disappointed by its level design.

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I’m playing more games these days, but I’m spending less time doing it. How? I am playing smaller games. Games on flash portals, iPhone, Xbox Live Arcade, Xbox Live Indie Games, Wii Ware and finding short PC demos / experiments. There are some absolutely fantastic games out there and they have quickly become my favourite style of game! Generally they are short experiences that focus on “hooking” you quickly with a strong core mechanic, without much distraction.

Conversely I am some way through Fallout 3, however it’s such a mammoth task requiring a large investment of time that I don’t end up visiting it very often. Unfortunately I am often disappointed when I play it because I don’t get such a short and sweet kick from groking a new concept and completing a whole game in under an hour!

So I want to look at the flash games and analyse their core motivational hooks – from a game design perspective. Its not a game review. When I enjoy a flash game, I will cut it apart and look at what it did well from a game design perspective. I am exposing their innards to find out what made me stay there for the experience in the hope that better understanding them will help me to make more focused short game experiences myself.

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Dolphin Hero: Agent Duski to the rescue! now available on the App Store.

Six weeks of development later and I have my first iPhone and iPod Touch game available on the iTunes App Store!! You play as a dolphin and save drowning people. The game is a balancing act between getting a high score, saving people and dodging enemies. I’m really happy with the result, especially since it is our first title as a company and on this platform. Buy it now!

Check it out http://www.thevoxelagents.com/dolphinhero/

Follow us on twitter: http://www.twitter.com/thevoxelagents/
Read about our development process: http://www.thevoxelagents.com/agentlogs/

game development · Games · iphone · iphone dev · iphone games

Finally I’ve uploaded the fix for Vista. You can find it on the projects page. I’ve also updated the actionscript so that the XBOX360Manager is now a singleton.

Really I didn’t do much to add support for Vista. Grant Peters provided the knowledge and the Vista PC to debug and fix the code. Thanks Grant.

Also, thanks to Dean Loades for pointing out a bug that made it impossible to compare a previous gamepad state to the current state. This is now fixed.

flash · game controllers · game development · Games · xbox 360

After wanting for many years to be able to get full access to analogue gamepads in flash, a friend showed me the work Thibault Imbert has done to get standard gamepads into flash using a C# socket server and the new ByteArray functionality of actionscript 3.

I took his code and stripped out directx, brought in XNA to grab the XBOX 360 gamepad values and built in support for multiplayer and the ability to specify the polling interval and port number.

I also created an XBOX 360 controller manager class in as3. It manages all the network code for you. Inside the demo flash file you will find four movieclips on the root of the scene and each movieclip is a copy of a nastily hacked together demo showing how to use the manager.

Its quite simple to find out if player 1 has the X button pressed, you simply call
XBOX360Manager.getState(1).X;
To see the data structure of the object passed back by getState, simply check out the com.GamePads.XBOX360GamepadState.

I will work on making an equivalent as2 server, as I myself still like to use as2 for really cheap and nasty gameplay prototypes. Unfortunately without binary socket support in as2, I will need to generate xml, and use an xml socket. This will run slower and will take some time to code… so bare with me or beat me to it!

To download the files check out the projects page.

flash · game controllers · game development · xbox 360

Western society has developed an obsession with the Protestant work ethic; a desire to work harder and longer to attain greater social status through the accumulation of material possessions. As the ethic slowly drains the life from the Western world, it harms even some of our most jovial and free forms of entertainment, namely; computer games. Play should be a light activity, with no material interest or profit, yet the Protestant work ethic is often used as a driving motivator for games. This needn’t be the case. The computer games industry has a unique position as an entertainment industry to help Western society loosen its focus on this rhetoric of progress prescribed by the Protestant work ethic.

Being hard-working has not always been an admirable trait. The Greeks believed that a person’s morality, prudence and wisdom could be determined by the amount of leisure time a person enjoyed [1]. The elite should “engage in pure exercises of the mind–art, philosophy, and politics” [2]. To the Romans, physical labour was beneath any citizen’s dignity [3]. During the Medieval period (approx. c400 AD – c1400 AD), a mélange of existing conceptions and that of Christianity formed focusing on being self-sufficient, thus avoiding the need for charity of others, but amassing material possessions was still frowned upon. Similar to the Greeks and Romans, social status was linked to the ability to engage in spiritual activities and those related to nature [4]. Up until the Enlightenment, work was not positively perceived; humans were expected to chase high level personal interests and material possessions were of little interest.

The current attitude towards work was initiated by the work of Martin Luther and John Calvin, and put into practice by the Protestants during the Enlightenment in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries. Martin Luther preached to the world that work formed the base of society; professions were useful and through them people could serve God. John Calvin took this notion further by forming the belief that some people were born into the elite class that would be accepted into heaven – the Elect. However those who showed success in their own personal endeavours might also be accepted into the Elect; “a person who was active, austere, and hard-working” [5] showed that they were a worthy child of God. Materialism began here; one’s value to society was derived from one’s possession. Thus the attitude towards work and life as a whole had changed. Working hard became a religious pursuit, and the Protestant work ethic prescribed the notion that progression was for a greater purpose.

Capitalism springs from the Protestant work ethic, and its characteristics permeate society so heavily that it is strangling us. “American life-styles, for all the material acquisition and the seeking after comforts and pleasures, are plagued by boredom, loneliness, alienation” [6]. Americans spend on average, as little as three-quarters of an hour per day socialising. [7] Progression motivates us so strongly that we have forgotten how to live our own lives. In our society forms of play that are perceived to not carry the ideology of progress are disregarded as worthless. Paradoxically this is the exact problem faced by the games industry as the social elite do not perceive games to carry the progression ideology. Already computer games have had a major effect on society; they are continually in the media, they rival the economic turnover of Hollywood, we agonise whether they insight violence in children and they have created a giant sub-culture of ‘gamers’. Fortunately games, regardless of perception, harness a power that other forms of entertainment do not posses and its future is brightly illuminated with the power to change the world.

Typically people have three places they frequent: the home, the workplace and ‘the third place’. The third place is an informal social location that offers diversity, novelty, emotional expressiveness, perspective, colour, and provides the opportunity for extra-community friendships to exist [8]. Recently, due to major technological change, a trend is forming for people of many diverse demographics to move their third places online [9], into online games, namely Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) in a very big way. However these online third spaces are still in their infancy and cannot offer the same fidelity and freedoms of the physical third places they replace. The third place was typically a relaxed social environment, and unfortunately MMORPGs are often the worst examples of the proliferation of the Protestant work ethic. MMORPGs are heavily focused on a levelling system strikingly similar to that of the Protestants. MMORPGs are guilty of requiring players spend hours performing repetitive complex and tedious activities in the name of ‘fun’ [10]. On a regular basis millions of people return from a day’s work to participate in MMORPGs that resemble factory like settings, performing complex tedious tasks for ever diminishing returns.

There are many games that do not use the rhetoric of progress as a primary player motivator. Electroplankton [11], designed by the world renowned artist Toshio Iwai, includes no form of progression and incites play primarily as notions of frivolity and the rhetoric of the self. Electroplankton has no central character that needs to be ‘levelled’, no material items to collect or tasks to perform. Instead the player is encouraged to experiment with a series of varied auditory and visual toys. The gamer plays in their own time and for their own personal pleasure, relaxation, and escape in another world. The game encourages play performance, creativitiy and improvisation. Unfortunately the game stands with a select few in the industry and has received average sales in the marketplace. Hopefully the rhetorics present in Electroplankton continue to be explored further and designed into games more successfully, eventually providing players a third space that is a complete escape from their lives driven by the Protestant work ethic.

Games have a unique ability to alter our culture. Games embody social culture, they are a place of meaning, nature and social relations [12]. Games reflect many cultural aspects of our society, they are worlds full of symbols imbued with cultural meaning, and a place of social activity. By practicing a particular way of life, even a virtual one, patterns form in the mind that alter our beings: “changes in knowing become changes in being” [13]. Games have the power to teach players new ways of being, to ontologically transform players [12]. Therefore video games can ultimately enable us to explore other motivations in life that aren’t related to work and progression, and as a result gain more balanced lives.

Games are a powerful medium, but they have a long way to go. The attitude towards work in contemporary Western society originates from the Protestants, an attitude that places importance on working hard. This attitude, whilst good for productivity, is not conducive to relaxation, leisure and whimsical fun, yet it remains a dominant rhetoric in modern computer games. The computer game industry has a unique opportunity to break the spell cast on Western society and remind us that there is more to life than work. Perhaps once computer games have mastered the entire playful palette, and altered the course of Western society, it too will have earned its place on the pedestal reserved for the arts. After all, “all play means something” [14].

References

1. Braude, L. (1975). ‘Work and workers’. New York: Praeger.
2. Tilgher, A. (1930). ‘Homo faber: Work through the ages’. Translated by D. C. Fisher. New York: Harcourt Brace.
3. Lipset, S. M. (1990). ‘The work ethic – then and now’. Public Interest, Winter 1990, 61-69.
4. Rose, M. (1985). ‘Reworking the work ethic: Economic values and socio-cultural politics’. London: Schocken.
5. Roger B. Hill (1996). ‘Historical Context of the Work Ethic’, http://www.coe.uga.edu/rhill/workethic/hist.htm (retrieved September 20th, 2006)
6. Oldenburg, R. (1999). The Great Good Place: Cafes, coffee shops, bookstores, bars, hair salons and other hangouts at the heart of a community. New York: Marlowe & Company.
7. Longley, R. (2004). On an ‘Average’ American Day: BLS reports latest American Time Use Survey. Retrieved Oct 2, 2004 from http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/censusandstatistics/a/averageday.htm
8. Oldenburg, R., & Brissett, D. (1982). ‘The third place’. Qualitative Sociology, 5(4), 265–284.
9. Steinkuehler, C., and Williams, D. (2006). ‘Where everybody knows your (screen) name: Online games as “third places.”’ Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11(4), article 1. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol11/issue4/steinkuehler.html
10. Nick Yee, ‘The Blurring of Work and Play’, 2006, http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/000819.php?page=3 (accessed 20th September 2006)
11. Nintendo. Electroplankton, (2005) [cited 2007 april]; Available from: http://www.nintendo.com/.
12. Dourish, P. (2000). ‘Embodied Interaction: Exploring the Foundations of a New Approach to HCI’. Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction.
13. Gee, J. P. (1999). ‘An introduction to discourse analysis: Theory and method.’ New York: Routledge
14. Huizenga, J. (1949). ‘Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture.’ London: Routledge & K. Paul.

game culture · game development · Games

That’s what I get for googling my name!

Interesting Snippet of information – the rewards of the Vacation Scholarship Scheme
Simon Joslin, a final year student in IF90 B CI (COM DESIGN)/B INF TECH received a best paper award from CGIE 2006. The paper was titled Modelling Quest Data for Game Designers. Simon has been asked to submit the paper to the ACMIE journal. Simon was a vacation scholarship student and, according to his supervisors, wrote the paper with little help form them (Ross Brown and Penny Drennan). Congratulations, Simon!

Taken from a QUT newsletter.

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