The Psychology of Fun

Psychology has a tendency to focus on disfunction rather than function. If you search of the web for Psychology and Computer Games you will probably finds lots of articles referring to the psychologically damaging effects of games that the popular press seem to be so interested in. An area where more positive material can be found is in the use of games by psychologists in their work. Bahavoiral psychologists use simple games to explore how people learn and act in different situations and have a set of terminology that refer to elements in these games which can be useful. A reinforcer is an outcome or result that is rewarding in some way to the player, like an experience point, completing a level, or a new bigger weapon. A contingency or schedule of reinforcement is a rule or set of rules governing when reinforcers are given, like a character level for 1000 experience points, or a bonus level only available if a particular creature is killed. The response is an action on the part of the player that can fulfill the contingency.

Behavoirial psychology studies the way subjects behave in the face of different reinforcers and schedules, and while much of the study has been done with animals, the results have been found to be species independant, and apply equally well to humans.

Fixed ratio schedules - burst of intense activity preceded and proceded by a pause.

variable ratio - more sustained activity by less intense.

fixed interval - subject visits the location early, and repeats visits more and more frequently until the reinforcer is provided.

variable interval - subject checks regularly.

The Game Design Process

Dave Morris, a consulting game designer, and co-author of Game Architecture and Design describes a game design process as a number of stages. The first stage is creating the game concept. This is formed by taking a number of ideas, synthesising them together, finding the resonances between those ideas, and then rounding them off into a complete concept for a game. The treatment is the first attempt for formally commit the game to paper. It is written from the finalised concept, and it should be done without worrying about constraints. Writing the concept down will force the designer to think about issues they had not yet considered, but it should not go into any detail yet. The treatment should only be short - a few pages. It should focus in the things that make this particular concept special. The design process up to this point should not have taken long. The treatment should be written directly from the concept in the designer head, and should document all the important elements of that concept. Because no consideration has to be given to economic or practical constraints, and no attention to details is required, it should be possible to write the treatment quickly. Once the treatment has been written down, there is no immediate need to pursue the design further. A game designer who has lots of ideas can build up a portfolia of treatments, and pick a suitable one to build a complete core design from later.

Core Design

Designing a game is not simply deciding what type of fancy graphics the game will have, the details of the puzzles in the game, or writing the games story. At the core of the game design is gameplay. The game spec. is a sizeable document from which the game must be developed, and it will probably also need to be used to raise funding for the game. Fundamentally it should describe features, gameplay, interface, rules, and level design style of the game. It will need to specify the rough technological constraints, but not overspecify as it may not be clear what all the constraints are until well into the development process, and available technology may change significantly during the development.

Alternative design processes

Simon and Dean Carter of Big Blue Box proposed what they called an Organic Design Process at the Game Developers Conference Europe in 2001. This process moved away from the requirement of a large paper design docuement in favor of an evolving design.

Mark Cerny, designer of Ratchet and Clank presented a keynote at the 2002 GDCE called The Method. In it he proposed his own approach to game design. It focuses on having a pre-production phase where a single playable level of publishable quality is created using rapid prototyping. The Method explicitly does away with the requirement for a large paper design document, which it dismisses as a waster of resources. The prototyping approach allows fundamental ideas to be verified as they are generated. Producing the first publishable is fairly costly, but is a relatively small proportion of the cost of the full game, and allows the developer an publisher to get a much better idea of how good the game will be, and how much it will cost earlier in the development process than is otherwise possible.

Types of Game

Dave Morris proposes borrowing from the common model of drama when devising the concept for a game. Style, plot, character, setting and theme. Some choices for style can be action, adventure, strategy, simulation, puzzle and toy. While very few good games fit entirely into one of these style, most tend towards one, and include elements from another. Plot must be handled carefully in games, as games are not primarily a story telling medium, and some of the worst games can be the ones made by frustrated authors. A game with no choices, where the player simple triggers the next part of the story is not a game at all. Plot can however add entertainment to a game through use of a back story, and can provide a valuable way to orient the player into the setting and help them to understand the rules. The importance of character in games varies extensively, and in some games is a large part of their appeal. Many modern titles like Tomb Raider, and Ratchet and Clank have a strong character element to the game. Even games that appear to have no character will often lead the player to form an idea of the character they represent in the game, and this should be considered in the games design. A setting for the game can very important to provide the right direction for the artists who are to implement it, and can be essential in stimulating the players imagination, and enhancing their immersion. The theme is a more philosophical concept of an idea that the designer wants to get across to the player. Closely tied to story and character, it can be an important element of some styles of game.

Gameplay

A game is a series of interesting choices. The choices a player makes is their strategy. In order for the game to be meaningful there must be more than one good strategy - otherwise the choices are not interesting. There must therefor be no dominant strategy, though a strategy may become dominated if another strategy becomes available later. A game feature, which may include code and artwork, is a waste of time if it there is no point in the player using it. A player will either never use it, or will become frustrated when it does not appear to be as useful as should be expected in the game. The effort would have been better spent on something else.

Two factors making a choice interesting. A choice that is affected by other factors, and a choice that is dependent on its timing.

Game Balance

Balance is most easily discussed when looking at competetive games, when two adversaries play against each other, and it can simply defined as the property of the game that means that the best player will win. A common example used when discussing balance is the hand game Paper Scissors Stone. It is in one sense perfectly balanced, but in the sense that it has no skill element, it should be impossible for any one player to consistantly win.

However balance is not necessarily absent if the winner is not always the best player. The concept of handicaping should be familiar to anyone with knowledge of the rules of golf or horse racing. The idea being that oponents start on an equal footing based on their previous performance, and the winner should be the one who improves the most. Taking as an example the 2 player beat-em-up popular since the late 80s. These games typically feature multiple characters, with different fighting styles, strength, weaknesses and special moves. Often if two players want a perfectly balanced game they need to select the same character, but matches between different characters can still have an element of balance. It can be used as a handicap to allow an inexperienced player to play against an acomplished one, or it can be affected by a choice of strategy. A fighting strategy which does not work for one character might work well for another.

Balance is also important in games which are not directly adversarial, where the player is pitted against the game environment, or against an AI oponent. In a strategy game it is essential for the balance of the game that the cost of a type of unit reflects the effectiveness of the unit. If it is too cheap it will become dominant, or too expensive and it will be dominated.

Feedback can be a very important technique in controlling game balance and ensuring gameplay. In almost any game the way the game is played tends to change with time, and the player expects to make some kind of progress. Feedback is the way this progress affects the players ability to continue depending on how they have progressed so far. In an adversarial game, the ammount one player has won already will affect their ability to win in future. In an RPG the player expects their correct to get better as they progress.

Positive feedback - making it easier to do well the better you are doing - is a very common feature in many games. Monopoly - more money - easier to win. It is essential in monopoly in order to overcome the random element of the dice. If there was no positive feedback it seems likely that the game could go on for hours without anyone winning.

Negative feedback - making it harder to continue the further you have come is an important element in different styles of game. Many games use control of the pace to regulate difficulty, and increasing the pace to make the game more difficult can be essential in creating a sense of achievement at having reached further into the game.

Too much feedback - winner wins too quickly. Too little feedback - better player may not win.

Level Design

A level is otherwise known as a mission, stage or map depending on the type of game. The level designer is responsible for implementing gameplay using the rules provided in the Game Design. Many of the the principles involved in Level Design are the same as those involved in Game Design, however the product of the work is different. Whereas the game designer produces a design document, the level designer produces the data files that implement the level itself. The level designer is quite clearly much closer to the technology than the game designer. Some would argue that a game design should contain no direct references to the technology to be used to implement the game, but every detail of the level designers work is linked to the game implementation.

The level designer is a creative role, but they are also an integrator. They take the output from most of the other members of the team, and glue it together, with careful consideration for the result. The primary skills required are design related, but there will be technical requirements as well. In a data driven game engine, the level designer may be required to write scripts to define how a level works. The programmer will have carefully designed the scripting interface so that a non-programmer can use it, but even the simplest of scripting requires a certain level of technical expertise.

Systemic level design for emergent gameplay.

Player Created Levels

Level Design was one of the first areas of game development to make it into the increasingly important area of player created content. This are is now frequently discussed by game designer, especially related to online games, but a decade ago it was almost unheard of. Doom was one of the game which lead the way for true player created content. Previous attempts had been made to publish game construction kits, but these usually either built very poor games, or presented the user with very little control. Doom was a full quality polished commerical game with bleeding edge technology, but information was made available about the file format for the levels, and players began to build tools to create their own. Large archives of levels became available, and builders began to use more and more extreme techniques to get more freedom out of the engine, even hacking the binary. Quake went further and set the model for future games by providing essential level building tools, source code for the game scripts, and the code for the script compiler. The gaming community has now come to expect a certain level of support for creating their own levels from any original first person shooter. Some of the levels available have taken advantage of the high level of flexibility offered by the engines to create games with completely different character, and their have been a number of conflicts with intellectual property owners as fans attempt to build levels based on their favorite movies, and other popular culture.