Game design is simple

Raph was the lead game designer on SWTOR a game that was way ahead of it's time and one of the most enjoyable sandbox mmorpg's I've ever played. I'm working on a new game that will take inspiration from lessons learned there.

I wouldn’t say A Theory of Fun is “the book.” It’s more a coffee table read. “The book” is Jesse Schell’s The Art of Game Design

Someone should convince Richard Garriott and Sid Meier to write too.

1. This article, at its very core, says that grind-based games are less successful than games that are not based on grind. How you got the reverse out of it, I do not know.

2. This article also does not say that fun equals repeated challenges. The closest thing in there is that fun is about prediction. Even the definition of "mastery" that the article sets forth is pretty explicitly about every type of cognitive challenge you meet in life.

3. This article does not imply that stories cannot be fun. In fact, I specifically pointed out that stories that you are unsure where they are going, and stories with more interpretability are more likely to be fun that predictable ones. If you follow the links in the article, you will see

4. I don't exclusively work in the MMORPG space. I have worked in tabletop, puzzle, trivia, casual, and single-player RPGs.

If you look at most games, they're all repeated challenges, but some are so good that you don't see or experience them as such.

Others are very obvious though; MMORPGs are the obvious answer and they often don't even have an interesting story or reward to go with the grind, because the reward is a gamble. Ubisoft games are another example, ever since the first Assassin's Creed their games have generally been the same formula of an overworld with a lot of repeated but sameish "quests". The Division series combines the two with randomized, chance based loot. (...coincidentally I'm playing that one right now).

But yeah, the "repeated challenges" thing is best left to that particular class of games. Some people realy enjoy it though.

Raph has written about avoiding grinding in games very explicitly. This was one of the big takeaways from Ultima Online.

Have you made any games?

Yeah, imagine playing the same level in a single player game 100 times just to get 1 piece of loot..unless it's a roguelike :')

That "Fun" is a de gustibus sort of thing is the important point. I wonder if there is something like relationships between the various flavors of fun, or if one can infer good "collateral fun" activities from the main genre.

For instance, I think that puzzles are ok in Mass Effect, but the many mini-games in Final Fantasy 7 are borderline annoying.

Perhaps you didn't read the article, or you did and failed to grasp the key points about the "game spiral" or unpredictable things becoming predictable?

But let's simplify this. What are your favorite games, and in what way do they sidestep having any repeated challenges? Do they have one single challenge, after which the game is over? Is that fun?

Sure, RPGs tend to have "repeated" battles or harvesting. Racing has repeated laps. FPS have repeatedly finding someone else to shoot. Coding simulators like Factorio have you repeatedly add automation, and repeatedly replace them with better automation. Platformers have you repeatedly move through platforms.

This is all illustrated and explained in the article, though.

I've played about 20 hours of Arc Raiders and I'm already a little bored of fishing stuff out of draws and lockers. These days I mostly just hunt Arc, or other players that shoot at me first.

It's kind of hard to stay equipped without salvaging though.

Personally what I find off-putting is throwing around the term "dopamine". Yeah, there's a link and all, but why include this bit?

> Dopamine can release for 'richly interpretable' situations

Ok, and? I mean, Oh, right. The dopamine. The dopamine for gamers, the dopamine chosen especially to entertain gamers, gamers' dopamine. That dopamine?

> And let me also reject the implicit notion that stories are entertainment but not, academically speaking, fun.

Stories are obviously fun, otherwise no-one would read books, but a story that you interact with meaningfully, that you can change significantly, really hard to do well.

Like every game where you can do good thing or bad thing, and the game punishes you for doing bad thing. It's really hard to write a compelling story where a nasty piece of shit still somehow saves the Fantasy Kingdom from the Prophesised Doom and becomes the hero.

I honestly cant't think of any good examples where game mechanics and stories interacted in a way that gave you significant agency while still being fun. I'd love to be given contra-examples though.

I think of the Mass Effect games and their attempts at this, "Oh you were only 92% Paragon, so now we're at the end, _this_ crew-member has to die for some reason, if only you'd known that 30 hours of gameplay ago when you punched that grifter in the Citadel!"

Or one I still bear a massive, MASSIVE grudge against, Fable III, where if you didn't massively grind for resources before the bit you thought was the end-game - where you fought and defeated the evil oppressive king, you found yourself making ridiculously stupid binary decisions like "Should this multi-storey building be used as an orphanage? Or as a whore-house?" That's literally one of the decisions you had to make. Oh, and the game made sure to tell you "Btw, because you didn't grind enough, if you choose the way that earns less money, EVERY ONE DIES BECAUSE YOU WANTED TO HELP THE ORPHANS."

It was an interesting attempt, to be sure, a brave experiment but I resented the game so much for the heel turn it pulled - "Actually, the evil oppressive money grubbing king you overthrew was RIGHT! Now you have to do what he was doing! Mwahahaha! Irony!"

Worst of all, it never let me make nuanced choices - why can't it be orphans downstairs, sex workers upstairs, and during the daytime, I pay the sex-workers to look after the orphans? Nope, it was either "look after the innocent children" or "four floors of whores". Complete with animations of crying children if you chose sex-workers. Or crying sex-workers if you chose the children. Once again, not kidding.

Once you knew the heel-turn twist, you could game it massively beforehand, one of the best strategies was to buy properties, become an incredibly oppressive landlord by demanding extortionate rents, so when it came time for the "orphans/whores" decisions, you had so much money you could could choose the good path and everyone declared you a saint.

But I felt so disrespected by the game that I didn't even bother.

That's the problem - good stories need direction towards a satisfying end, and it's really hard to give a player agency in a good narrative, and so I felt railroaded into comically absurd black/white choices.

Honestly, I think the only games that have ever done the good/evil choices in a story well were the Knights of The Old Republic series, but once again, it stopped being so much fun when I had to keep on being evil because I'd chosen evil stuff prior.

Can't I just be evil today, and maybe a bit nice tomorrow? After all, the best villains are the mercurial ones.

I feel modern game design as the exact opposite problem: It's all show and no substance. It looks spectacular on video, but it doesn't feel spectacular when you play it, since it's non-interactive script driven gameplay, barely more interactive than a cutscene.

A bit of juice is fine and necessary, but the moment your juice starts to look like interactive gameplay, but isn't, it went way to far and just becomes noise. I rather have some less spectacular debris I can interact with, then just a particle system filling the screen with non-interactive nonsense.

TotalBiscuit was ranting about it ages ago[1]. 2kliksphilip also has numerous videos[2] on the lack of interactive physics in modern games.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOHyD49DaeA

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxQW2GL64U0

"juice" (in terms of game making) will always remind me of this amazing, classic talk - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy0aCDmgnxg

In a game design context, he is definitely using "uncertainty" in a wider sense, as popularized by Greg Costikyan's Uncertainty in Games book.

In that sense of the word, it's not only about random things, but also things like "will I click at just the right time to head-shot that enemy?" or "I will checkmate the next turn unless my opponent thinks of some clever move that I don't?"). And the theory is that once you run out of uncertain things there is no more a game, as the player know how it will end and there is nothing more that can fail or anything unexpected that can happen. Basically like reading the end of a book you have already read before, so you know exactly what will happen.

And depth from a game design pov is also not necessarily strictly positive. Make the game too deep and there is, as you say, pure random. You could keep adding rules to chess to make it 100% impossible for any human to remotely guess what kind of move to make, and that's when you added so much uncertainty that it became too deep.

There's been quite a few games in recent years where I notice some system and think "ugh, do I really need to bother with this, too?". Especially crafting or skill point systems which feel slapped on. Some games make them a fun and integral part of the gameplay, some seem to include them because it's trendy and it just adds friction and mental load with little payoff.

I don't mind complexity, some of my favorite games are ridiculously complex (Dwarf Fortress), but the complexity needs to pay for itself.

Remember, it's about prediction (point 1 of the 12). Pure random cannot be predicted. From a prediction point of view, it is therefore ironically, an already determined result. So it is solved, and therefore not interesting.

In Theory of Fun, I phrased this as "everything has patterns, but if you are not equipped to see the pattern, it becomes noise, and therefore boring."

But it's the same underlying point.

Yeah, you need to strike a balance. Maybe ambiguity is a better way to look at it than uncertainty or randomness; chess is fun, but the only random factor are the whims of your opponent. There's no randomness, but there is ambiguity about what their strategy is, and whether they're seeing something that you're missing.

An extreme example of more-is-better are games like EU4, where just understanding how trade works, is more complicated than most entire games, and that's just a single subsystem. You can ignore it, but mastering it can be satisfying. Or frustrating.

It also matters a lot what type of uncertainty a game has, and what the curve of learning to manage it is.

E.g. slight variations in inputs should produce a slight but ideally meaningful variation in output, so the outcome of pressing keys is both reliable as well as an open space for further mastery.

It's also important that you can trace and understand what happened in retrospect. Just missing because of a 5% chance isn't fun. Missing because you didn't consider wind direction and the movement of an object between you and the target on the other hand is perfectly grokkable.

In some sense though, 100% randomness is meta-predictable: something happens that I can’t predict. There’s a lot less tension. Idk where in the middle is the best spot, I guess that’s where the artistry is

I worked on an AAA game and the cinematic group had a team that worked in a different location from the main development team, we met a few times very early during preproduction, cue about three years of work, we got the completed videos pretty deep into development (nothing major was going to change in either the cinematics or the gameplay) and after viewing them were wondering what the cinematics had to do with the game with we made, to be fair the cinematics looked very good for the time, but I just plugged them into the game's framework to play at the appropriate point as one of my milestones, but all these videos were skippable after one viewing and I only viewed them completely just to QA the rest of the game when I was ahead of schedule.

I don't think it's a modern thing, I tried playing the original Kingdom Hearts on my PS/2 but gave up because there are so many mandatory videos that are unskippable during combat. Not going back as far, Bayonetta series has a ton of quicktime sequences, that I hate, have to beat an enemy, die to due slow reflexes and unexpected quicktime event, repeat and hopefully get the timing right on button press which is sharp contrast to the otherwise fluid combat in Bayonetta.

There was also at one point in ancient history a very big deal to have cinematics integrate seamlessly into gameplay, using the same engine for both, instead of prerecorded video sequences. So then games did that just as a point of pride, and having the cinematics in game engine it possible for non specialists to add (or storyboard and leaving final result to specialists) cinematics into a game's flow.

I think different people value different things in entertainment. For you, the "cinematic" aspects of the media are worthless - but for others, the whole "interactive cinematic spectacle" is worth it even if it comes at the expense of intractability or the ability to execute skills. Take the COD campaigns for example - notoriously, some of the turret-vehicle-chase-sequences don't actually require any user input to succeed at, but a certain class of player still enjoys them because they're in it for different things than you.

Sounds like you're still bitter over Dragon's Lair and other LaserDisc games.

But like AAA has never been an adjective that meant good or fun. Just that the budget is big.

Cut scenese are an opportunity for a change of pace and to tell the story in a different way. Or as a way to emphasize a game action. When you get a touchdown in Tecmo Bowl, you have a little cut scene which is nice (but gets repetitive). The cut scenes in a Katamari game give you some sort of connection to the world, but you can always skip them.

I think I've managed to skip most big budget games for most of my gaming life. That's fine, lots of other customers for those, I'll stick to the games I like.

This isn't the first time I've seen this opinion, and while I share the disdain for quicktime events, and I agree many cutscenes in the most popular games don't work, I don't understand being against the whole concept of cutscenes.

What exactly is the right way to tell a good story though a game? The only other ways I've seen are:

1) Text boxes or Bethesda-style dialogue trees

2) Dark-souls style slow-drip storytelling.

Although they can both work, I don't think I prefer either one over cutscenes. (1) especially is more like something I'll forgive rather than like because I know cutscenes are difficult for smaller teams and limiting for games that emphasize player choice.

It's one of the reasons I liked Baldurs Gate 3 so much -- suddenly the cinematic cutscenes don't feel like a tradeoff for sacrificing choice.

Half-Life got it right. The cutscene plays but you can still run around and do whatever you want (including not listening).

You should play more indie games. Not only are they more gameplay focused, there is an over abundance of great games at bargain prices.

I just picked up Prodeus, if you like games like old Doom and Quake you’ll probably love it.

Also, From Software games (Dark Souls, Elden Ring, Sekiro, Armored Core) are basically all gameplay. Cutscenes are kept to a minimum and gameplay is is tight AF

> is there a concise theory of game design that properly explains why cutscenes are fucking stupid?

Yes. In general it's because they're made by a different team, with different incentives, working to a different schedule.

They're often made using an earlier version of the game lore and story. Due to the massive effort required to make changes and render frames, they often don't match up with late-breaking changes made by the game team.

But sometimes you get lucky and the cinematics team excels. I worked with Blizzard's cinematics team in the '90s, and those spectacular folks produced an amazing body of work.

> But I digress… I essentially hate games nowadays

This is not exactly a new phenomenon. The final cutscene in Metal Gear Solid 4 (2008) is 71 minutes long (Guinness world record). The total cutscenes add up to around 9 hours according to a Reddit user. Maybe more games are doing this now compared to 15 years ago, but I wouldn't bet on it.

Bad take IMO. Cutscenes are fine. Many are beloved, even.

Taking agency away from the player is usually a bad thing, so its not something you want to do when the player has other goals to work on. They are a fine tool to break up the action and games are also about the story and world building so expositional sections are a natural thing.

Its important to not mess with the game pacing, though.

After a heavy boss fight where the player doesn't even know what their next goal is anyway? Perfectly fine time for some exposition.

Running past an NPC on the way to do something? That's a horrible time to whip around the camera and tell the player something.

AAAs have huge momentum so you'll often see plot points and exposition that needs to be shoehorned in to fix some writing issue or what have you. Of course, you also just have game directors making bad decisions.

As a game designer I’ve struggled with the topic of cutscenes and have landed on the side that they are not inherently bad design. Advancement of a story is a form of progression (THE form of progression in a narrative game) and the release of new story beats, or any new content in general, can be used to reward the player. That’s not to say that they can’t be done badly - many are.

The thing about cutscenes, as with most aspects of AAA games, is that they test well in their target market. Cutscenes aren’t exactly cheap to make, especially if acted. They wouldn’t do them if they weren’t popular.

But it’s perfectly fine that you, like many (and me), don’t like cutscenes. Embrace that and accept that perhaps those games aren’t for you, because there is so much choice out there that that you will certainly be able to find things more to your tastes.

Back in the day, I loved the cutscenes Privateer II (starring a very young Clive Owen from Children of Men (I believe) as aforementioned privateer, bless) included, not the ones with any people acting very badly in them, but the rendered cutscenes that played the first time you arrived at a new planet or spaceport, that showed you, hey, this place is a different place.

I played that in my teens, and 30 years later, I can still remember the name of the peaceful agricultural planet that had blimps as their main form of transportation - Bex.

Why? Because the cutscene played and I was like "Wow, look at this place, this is nothing like New Detroit".

And it didn't make you (IIRC) watch the cutscenes. Every. Damn. Time you landed thereafter.

> My question: is there a concise theory of game design that properly explains why cutscenes are fucking stupid?

Two things to consider regarding cut scenes. First, sometimes they are mandated by the game story writers and backed up by artists wanting to show off. Second, and more importantly from a game developer's perspective, they are a useful tool for hiding scene loading I/O such that the customer experience does not notice a nontrivial delay.

I know exactly what you mean. Lots of video games really do feel more like movies these days. Cyberpunk drove me absolutely crazy with all the cut scenes

I think you summed it up yourself, because cutscenes are trying to turn this medium into that of movies.

Cutscenes add to the sense of immersion playing the game. I like them, but I also like to skip them if I've already played the game before.

They're not stupid -- they're feedback. You get them as a reward for having done something, usually.

But they are also not gameplay, obviously.

https://www.raphkoster.com/2012/01/20/narrative-is-not-a-gam... https://www.raphkoster.com/2012/01/26/narrative-isnt-usually...

...and maybe https://www.raphkoster.com/2013/03/13/why-are-qtes-so-popula... since you dislike QTE's. :)

my theory is a there are two camps of "games" (really more of a spectrum from the projection of 2 axes "play" and "art"):

- proper games ("play"): if you remove all the lore, cinematics, dialogs, etc the gameplay can stand on its own and the user find it fun. (ex: Elden ring, Pokemon. you can play a cut-scenes ripped version in a language you don't understand and still enjoy both, chess and other abstract games are the extreme end of this category)

- interactive DVD menus ("media arts"): it's a movie but sometimes you get to interact with it. in this category you have also have visual novels with branching trees/DAGs. they are more than a movie but still ultimately the most important test: they can't stand alone without the story/lore.

I enjoy both, but I wish games and steam pages were more front and center about which camp they are in the beginning before I even buy them.

my ultimate sin is games that think they are in category 1 who give you unskippable cut scenes.

All the AAA games will be inherently fucking stupid almost by design. And this is unavoidable - massive hundreds of millions if not billions in budget -> even if you alientate the bottom 10%, you lose 10% of sales. Bottom 20%, 20% of sales. Not gonna happen.

So you have Legend of Zelda games where pretty much all puzzles are so simple you can instantly tell what the solution is the very moment you see them, ie. downright retarded with few rare exceptions. This also applies to difficulty, etc.

As a result, AAA games can only be appretiated or enjoyed for not much else but production values. The soundtrack, the setpieces, the massive worlds and how much money must have gone into it, etc.

I have never disagreed more with a comment on this site.

It's more like someone ran a PowerPoint presentation through a converter that makes a web site. There's good stuff in there, but the presentation is clearly a slide deck.

In that sense most things are simple. Though it's also simple to over simplify. Since often simplicity arises out of the accumulation of expert analysis rather than being obvious from the get go. Which I think is just as important as what you say:

  Simple != easy
  Simple != obvious
  Simple != intuitive
  Simple != easy to understand

  Elegant == Simple
  Simple  != elegant

Yeah kind of feels like "writing a hit novel is simple - you just need a plot that is engaging, well written prose, and a satisfying story arc".

I mean... yeah kind of obvs. Very "rest of the owl".

Indeed, the galaxy brain move here would be to make a game about game design, that itself follows its own principles.

Candy Crush was immensely popular. It's not exactly chess.

In simple, reductive terms:

Fun, among other things = remaining in the tight channel of flow, where your skills get challenged without ever reaching a point of frustration. Too little challenge = boredom.

Skills improve as they get challenged, i.e. when our prediction and pattern matching system receive enough feedback to improve upon our previous actions to get a more optimal outcome.

So, fun is (among other things) getting better at doing something, and as we get better, what was once a challenge turns easier, so a fun game needs to have a well-tuned difficulty progression to keep in pace with your improving skills.

Progress on predictions means both getting better at prediction (learning) and applying that.

Gaming has always been about exploiting human psychology. It's about making people have fun, fun is a psychological state and dopamine release is intrinsicly linked to that.

That doesn't mean that it has to be bad or destructive! Fun is a positive thing, and most game designers I've met from across the industry are in it because they just want to make people have fun.

Dopamine release is a bit of a curio, really. You don't make design decisions based on optimising dopamine release; there's no way of doing that. But it's interesting to know the physiological reasons why people think that things are fun, and it's useful evidence when building a framework such as Raph's.

Game development and game design are completely separate domains.

Game development can be generalized to algorithms and languages targeted to specific processors and architectures because it's a subset of programming and computer science. You can't have a DSL for design because the domain is the human mind. The design of a game like Undertale has absolutely nothing to do with the language used to develop it.

Unless you're talking about things like modelling and UV unwrapping and the like, but even then I don't see what benefit a separate language would provide.

Towards the end of the article I mention "some of us have been working out the rule set for how you can link loops into a larger network of problems for literally over twenty years."

That is referencing the "game grammar" effort undertaken by myself, Dan Cook, Stephane Bura, Joris Dormans, and many others. It is very specifically about arriving at a notation system for gameplay logic.

The original talk from 2005 is here: https://www.raphkoster.com/games/presentations/a-grammar-of-...

The principles in this talk went on to be used by the field of computational modeling of games, AI game generators, and also used in training AI game players.

I agree there aren't very many. I can think of PuzzleScript, Unreal Blueprints, and Machinations (mentioned elsewhere in this thread). Perhaps this dearth is why Blueprints got so popular?

Honorable mentions might go to PICO-8's flavor of Lua (C-like but clearly designed to create a specific type of game and have a specific developer experience) and Excel (used for developing & balancing game mechanics, but usually replaced in the final product).

This is an extremely interesting article about game design and it's a bit silly to fixate on the title.

I think it's tongue-in-cheek.

He's pretty clear about it towards the bottom. Roughly "any paragraph in this essay could be a book".

To your last paragraph I think contextualising the mystery is a good amount of the fun and I guess all of the storytelling.

There's a lot of things about our real world, that if told by an alien race, would make us sound like ethereal wizards.

"They convinced the sand itself to think for them, guided the power of Sol to move them, and spoke to eachother through the very fabric of energy that moves invisibly through us all"

Similar to that, there's a bunch of magic/fantasy storytelling that can kind of pull me out of disbelief, because I can't help but think "yeah we have that, it's electricity" or "witches are just pharamacists without good research"

Most classic games are in fact built out of NP problems, or at least the upper reaches of PSPACE. https://www.raphkoster.com/games/presentations/games-are-mat... has an overview.

That's just like, your opinion man. In my opinion neither of those two claims are universially true.

Towards the end of the article, I say this: "If you just make the same game, the one you know how to make, the players get bored because it’s nothing but problems they have seen before and already have their answers to. Sometimes, they get so bored that an entire genre dies." -- the last phrase links to a video about how MMOs are dead. :D

I thought this was obvious? These are social games where everyone is in the same funnel and the players with the most time dominate others... but also need new objectives. At the beginning you quest with people your level, but they always, always devolve into bigger, more tedious tasks (raids) that have less and less differentiated rewards (1% chance of a drop that boosts you 2%) because otherwise you have players at level 283 and there is no way to balance team dynamics as some people scale infinitely.

Because MMOs are expensive to make and run and the people who can afford to fund that expect a strong return on investment or they will shut it down.

I loved World of Warcraft for many years, but kind of stopped playing during Cataclysm.

And it's kind of weird, but I preferred the old-style questing (many repeated quests and perhaps less streamlined experience) compared to what came afterwards.

In Cataclysm they tried to improve the quest experience, add more variety, but somehow the game lost a bit of its magic - at least from my point of view.