Contents
Editorial: Repent! The End is Near!
Chris Crawford
The Joys of the Multi-Player Environment
Dan Bunten
The Better Mousetrap?
William Volk
The Myth of the Mass Market
Jon Freeman
Editor Chris Crawford
Subscriptions The Journal of Computer Game Design is published six times a year. To subscribe to The Journal, send a check or money order for $30 to:
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Submissions Material for this Journal is solicited from the readership. Articles should address artistic or technical aspects of computer game design at a level suitable for professionals in the industry. Reviews of games are not published by this Journal. All articles must be submitted electronically, either on Macintosh disk , through MCI Mail (my username is CCRAWFORD), through the JCGD BBS, or via direct modem. No payments are made for articles. Authors are hereby notified that their submissions may be reprinted in Computer Gaming World.
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Copyright The contents of this Journal are copyright © Chris Crawford 1992.
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Editorial: Repent! The End is Near!
Chris Crawford
Actually, repenting won’t do any good, so you can skip that part. But the era of disk-based computer games is drawing to a close, and it’s appropriate to consider the ramifications of the demise of the medium that has dominated computer game design for a decade.
First off, I want you to understand that we’re not talking about some sort of "every day in every way, better and better" evolution from the disk-based environment to something even better. I think what we’re facing is more along the lines of one of those great extinctions that have occasionally punctuated the history of life on earth. That is, don’t look for disk-based computer games to be slowly replaced by better and more profitable games on other platforms. Expect instead to see computer games grind downward, with accompanying agony in the industry as companies fail and layoffs accelerate. In other words, we’re not talking transition here; we’re talking collapse and rebirth.
Why should disk-based games face a dark future? I think that there are four primary forces working to doom computer games.
Creeping senility
The first and most important factor, I think, is the slow decline in the creative energy of the industry. Let’s face it: we as an industry haven’t been very creative over the last few years. During the 80’s there were a slew of innovative games, but the 90’s have seen a stultifying sameness in our product. The last truly refreshing game I’ve seen is SimCity. That came out in 1988. Since then, we’ve seen almost nothing but sequels, clones, and incremental improvements. Worse yet, most of the original products have been commercial failures. Most of the big hits have been sequels or clones.
An entertainment medium that has lost its creative juice is marking time before it dies. Our industry simply cannot survive by stamping out the same old games with more colors and faster animations. We’ve got to come up with new ideas, and the sad truth is, we’re not. The creative energy that drives this industry has been sapped by the rising costs of development, the conservatism of the retailers and the timidity of the publishers.
Big budget products
The second villain in this story is the big-budget game. These are the monster products that cost $500,000 or more to create. Big budget games can’t make money in a stable marketplace. There’s a reason why most games are budgeted in the $200,000 -- $400,000 range: that’s about the most that you can prudently afford to spend and still have a reasonable chance of recovering your investment. So howcum some publishers have seen fit to spend more?
The answer has to do with a concept called "market share". The basic strategy is to "buy market share". That is, you spend a lot of money to make a product that will sell very well. You still lose money on the product, but the huge sales you make put you in an excellent position to make money with a followup product.
The concept is sound and has been proven to work in many markets with different products. Unfortunately, there’s an unintended side effect of such products in our industry: they raise the expectations of the consumers to levels that simply cannot be sustained. Once a customer has been dazzled by a money-losing yet fabulous product, he’ll turn up his nose at a normal product delivered on a normal budget. And this is precisely what is happening to our customers. Nowadays, if you don’t spend a half-million-plus on your product, it won’t sell.
If you do have a half-million-plus budget, you’ve got to justify every aspect of your design to every beancounter, salesperson, and marketing executive in the company. Which makes it more difficult to take big creative risks. Which is another reason why we have Creeping Senility.
Games Aficionados
18 months ago I wrote an editorial for this Journal entitled "Portrait of the Gamer as Enemy". In it, I pointed out that the aficionados who love our games could well be our worst enemies, because they demand ever-increasing complexity that pushes our games further and further away from the mainstream of "real people".
I didn’t realize how right I was, or how fast events would move. Already the ghetto-ization of games that I speculated might come to pass is well underway. The most popular games with the games aficionados are, let’s face it, absurdly complex products. Some of these games have rules manuals several hundred pages long, and that’s not background material, that’s rules! Does anybody really believe that normal computer owners will play games whose manuals are longer than those of their database managers?
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with absurdly complex games. If some players enjoy those games, that’s fine with me. But this is not some minor subset of the gaming community, happily playing with its complicated toys that nobody else can understand; this is the group that has established itself as the artistocracy of gaming, the opinion leaders for the buying community. These people are dedicated gamers who spend a lot of time and money on their games. They dominate the discussions on national networks like CompuServe, Prodigy, and GEnie. They write long letters to publishers, demanding more complexity and power. They hang around retail outlets, telling the clerks what’s good and bad about every game on the shelves.
This little group, a few tens of thousands of people, determines what succeeds and what fails in our industry. Their tastes are sophisticated (in the strict sense of the word) and narrow. They have steadily pushed this industry into a corner from which it cannot escape. In order to satisfy their expectations, all computer games must be big and complicated. Yet, if we do build such games, we chase away the beginners who are needed to keep the industry alive. The inevitable result is an industry that slowly erodes away.
Videogames
The cartridge-based machines were once so much inferior to personal computers that consumers could make a clear distinction: video-games were cheap but crummy, while games for personal computers were superior. Moreover, videogames were simple-minded shoot-em-ups, while games for personal computers had more variety and substance. Over the last few years, these distinctions have been narrowed. Videogame hardware has improved substantially, with 16-bit processors, better display chips, and more RAM. The big break will come with the introduction of CD-ROM drives for the cartridge-based systems, which will give videogames machines a decided advantage over the average personal computer. Another important trend has been the increasing sophistication of the software available for the cartridge-based platforms. We’re starting to see some of the most interesting personal computer products ported over to the cartridge environment.
The effect of this is to reduce the competitive advantage of personal computers for game-playing. If you can get some pretty good games on a $200 videogames machine, why do you need a $2000 personal computer for games? For more and more people, the answer is: you don’t. Of course, this is largely a matter of perception. A cartridge-based system simply can’t support a flight simulator as fast or complete as those on personal computers. The very best role-playing games are on PCs, not cartridge-based systems, and the same thing goes with almost every other area of gaming. But customers don’t know that. As they turn towards cartridge machines, the market for disk-based products withers.
Optical Media
Even as videogames undermine disk-based games from below, the CD games press down from above. I am on record as one of the few skeptics about CD games on the planet, and in fact much of my skepticism has been borne out by the ongoing failure of the technology to make serious headway. But I’ve always agreed that the final outcome is beyond question: optical media will replace floppy disks someday. The question is, when? My hunch has been that 1995 will be the first year that sales of CD-based entertainment software exceed those of floppy-based entertainment software, and I think that hunch is still on the mark, so long as we don’t mix the apples of videogame CD-ROM sales with the oranges of PC CD-ROM sales.
Whatever the exact timing or relationship, the basic fact remains undeniable: CD-ROM product will steadily become more important, and it will take sales away from disk-based product. Sad to say, this is not a zero-sum game. I suspect that, in the first few years, the existence of CD-ROM product will make developers unwilling to invest in a has-been medium like disk-based games, which will result in lower-quality products that won’t sell as well. For a transitional period, overall sales of entertainment product will go down.
The Extinction of the Independent Developer
Another sad development is the slow elimination of independent developers. Some years ago, I observed that the lone wolf developer was on his way out. Nowadays, not only are lone wolves gone, but even independent studios are endangered. The primary force behind this is the high cost of developing games. Back when a game cost under $50K to develop, publishers could treat advances for such products as a kind of venture capital; some advances would yield hits and some would fail. Now, though, a game costs perhaps $250K, and nobody can afford to gamble with that kind of money. Publishers who advance that kind of money insist on micromanaging the product and the developer to death. For every dollar of advance a publisher puts on the table, he expects two dollars worth of product delivered which drives independent developers to bankruptcy.
A more insidious effect of rising development costs is the way they induce publishers to screw the independents. Publishers must constantly make decisions about allocating resources to products, some developed in-house, some developed out-of-house. The in-house products cost more up front, but have no royalties liabilities. Under these circumstances, it always makes financial sense to give preference to the in-house products. If it’s a month before Christmas, and your manufacturing people are booked solid, you’ll build your in-house product first, then build the out-of-house product, and if the out-of-house product misses Christmas, that’s too bad.
The upshot of all this is that the independent developers, who are the primary source of innovative product, are being squeezed out of existence -- which in turn feeds into the Creeping Senility factor.
The Shape of the Future
We’re not going to experience a smooth transition from disk-based products to something else. The two primary alternatives to disk-based games are radically different in many ways. They appeal to different audiences, different age and income brackets. The kinds of games that will work in these other media are different. The cartridge-based systems have more of an adolescent flavor to them, while the CD-based systems will probably have a stronger educational odor about them.
So let me boldly trace the future of our industry as I perceive it for the remainder of the decade. As we emerge from the recession later this year, things will look up. Christmas 1992 will be bright and cheery, and everybody will feel good, rich, and optimistic. But the respite will be brief. Disk-based games will remain in the doldrums through 1993, and by 1994 the decline will be undeniable. Sales of cartridge-based and CD products will increase, but not enough to compensate for the loss. Thus, a mood of gloom will spread over the disk-based portion of the industry, but the cartridge-based and optical media people will remain optimistic. By 1995 or 1996 we’ll have settled into a new regime, with disk-based gaming relegated to "geek games", complicated, hairy concoctions with lots of rules and exceptions, and "lite games", breezy nothingburger-games to while away a ten-minute break from an intense work session. The overall market for disk-based games will be much reduced, perhaps a third the size of the current market.
I think that CD consumer software will be bimodal. The largest market will be the adolescent games on videogame consoles. These will emphasize sound and graphics, in that order. They will be souped-up versions of current games, with the CD used to bring in backgrounds as scenes change and play music during gameplay. The other side of CD software will be more serious educational stuff. Marketers of this product will never allow the ugly word "game" to be applied to their products. They’ll instead prefer bastard terms such as "edutainment."
Wrap up
Our industry has enjoyed pretty smooth sailing for the last five years. The wild and roiling early and mid-80’s gave way to the placid times of IBM-PC ascendancy. The platform evolved smoothly, our games grew better each year, and sales marched upward. Perhaps some of us have come to expect such tranquil growth as the normal course of events. Don’t count on it. The next five years will surely be more chaotic than the last five years.
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The Joys of the Multi-Player Environment
Dan Bunten
© 1992 Dan Bunten of Ozark Softscape
“Play with each other, not with yourself!” said Ban Dunten (my “good twin” from the parallel universe of Modulus) as he’s quoted in the manual of Global Conquest. Around here we like his saying so much we’ve made that our company slogan and it fits. Since 1979 we’ve done 1 six-player game (Cartels & Cutthroats), 4 four-player games (Wheeler Dealers, MULE, Robot Rascals and Global Conquest), and 4 two-player games (Computer Quarterback, Cytron Masters, Modem Wars, Command HQ). Never mind that 2 solo-player games (Seven Cities of Gold and Heart of Africa) sold more copies than all the multi-player games put together. We have our priorities!
Actually, I just recently rediscovered my priorities. A couple of months ago I was ready to quit the business. I was depressed about the way my products sell and the way my publishers have always beaten me up. (“You need hotter graphics, Dan. You can’t compete without more A/V heat”!) I was deep into debugging our latest project and trying to figure ways to “spiff it up” with our pitifully limited art budget and minimal in-house talents when I made up my mind.
“This is my last game”, I told Chris Crawford, Sid Meier, Eric Goldberg and any other game designers who happened to call around then. They were all wonderfully complimentary and supportive, but I was still sure that after I’d finished this one, I’d try a new career. Don’t laugh, but teaching pre-school seemed appealing: A job where I spent my day playing with happy little people was the change I needed.
It was the height of irony that the game that was going to tie all my divergent interests together was also going to be my swan song. When we started Global Conquest we described it to people as Command HQ meets Seven Cities meets MULE. It was going to have the clean and simple interface and battle mechanics of Command HQ. It would have a randomly generated world to discover like Seven Cities. And it would have the four-opponents, random events and generally funny/funky feel of MULE. When we started I was really excited about the design challenges.
So with high hopes the project started in April ’91. The first couple of months were spent cleaning up the Command HQ code to use as a foundation for the new game. It’s amazing how messy your code becomes by the time you finish a project with all the patches to fix problems and add special features. Also, I had to redo all the graphics code because my old programming partner had left for greener pastures and I couldn’t figure out his code.
The next several months were spent actually writing new code. JD Robinson, my new programming partner, spent most of his time programming the world builder routines. He did a fantastic job with it. It makes worlds with 30,000 terrain blocks of 64 types in only seconds (compared to Seven Cities with a world size of 8,000 and Empire with 1300 that take minutes!).
While JD was working on that, I concentrated on the units and their interaction. I decided to use a basic set of WW II unit types (infantry, tanks, subs, battleships, carriers and planes) since they are so intuitive to most of us. We have notions of what each should do in relation to the others and that makes learning the game a much simpler proposition. This was despite the fact that we had sold the idea to Microprose as Alien Conquest which supposedly would have a science fiction theme. Somehow I couldn’t bring myself to use “anti-grav vehicles and laser blasters”. It seemed to muddy up the design unnecessarily.
Next we worked on the unit movement system. In HQ you could click on a ship and click on it’s destination and it would get there over normal sea lanes. There were serious technical problems to solve with duplicating that system, built around a fixed Mercator projection of the earth in HQ, to a random world. In a world with enough random inlets, peninsulas and bays to be interesting, it was a bear to figure out optimum ship paths. We got most of it working before we found out that “click the unit then click the destination” was not a very good idea. It took all the fun out of discovering the world.
So instead, we came up with an interface that allowed users to click the unit and set intermediate destinations before the final. If a ship’s path caused it to intersect the shore line (which was probably not discovered till the ship bumped it) the ship would stop and message the player. (We later dropped the message idea because the player would be inundated with messages). For land units (tanks and infantry) if their path led from land to sea they would pause and then turn into transports (doing the opposite when coming ashore).
We even added some subtleties to the movement system like patrol, beach-heads and docks without complicating the interface. A patrol is ordered by making one or more intermediate destinations and then setting the final destination at the unit’s current position. The unit will loop indefinitely and thereby patrol the area. A beach-head is formed by positioning an infantry next to the water and waiting for it to dig-in (which it does automatically as in HQ). Any land unit or transport whose movement path moves through that beach-head loads and unloads faster. (We kept the capability to move through friendly units that I used in Modem Wars and HQ).
I decided to add a feature I’d used in Modem Wars called UNIT MENUS where a double click on a unit would bring up a menu of options. Under the unit menu you could tell a unit to “blitz” (move faster at the cost of lost strength points) or “hide” (making it harder to spot by enemy units). “Pursue” let you tell a unit to follow another unit (whether friendly or enemy) and “wait” let you program a delay (for a fixed time or “till repaired”).
The feature of the unit menu I was most pleased with was named “repeat”. It simply tells this unit to repeat the instruction you gave the previous unit (kind of like “redial” on a phone). This was cool because we were looking for a way to handle groups of units that didn’t require the messy interface logic of “form a group”, “give a group command” and “disband a group”. (I know what that is like because I built that set of features into Modem Wars). With “repeat” you could just give a single unit whatever complicated set of directions you wanted and then simply tell everybody else to “repeat” them.
All together, the movement system of Global Conquest came out clean and simple and yet more powerful than either Modem Wars or Command HQ. And it took less memory too! At this stage in the work I was having fun. Creating elegant solutions to complex problems is what game designers love.
Much of the other work went pretty well also. I just duplicated the combat system from HQ (without nukes) except that I added a bunch of features to the planes. Planes turned out to be one of the neater things about HQ. In that design I tried to make the planes missions just “do the right thing”. If, for instance, you selected a plane and clicked on an enemy unit that meant “air strike” the unit. If a friendly city was the spot clicked on it meant “transfer the plane here” and if the city was enemy controlled, the plane bombed it. It worked pretty well but sometimes led to mistaken instructions where the plane didn’t do what the player really wanted it to do. In Global Conquest I added an “Air Menu” that is accessed by double clicking on a plane (just like the unit menu). The mission options were “paradrop”, “bomb”, “dogfight” and “kamikaze”. A “normal click” on a plane did an abbreviated “do the right thing” interface: if an enemy unit was under the destination, the plane did an air strike but otherwise it did a recon mission which discovered the undiscovered terrain as well as any unseen units.
The big nasty jobs began with the economic system. We decided on a system different from HQ where cities made money, money bought units and, depending on the scenario, units needed oil to move. In HQ you could build units anywhere if you had the money (unless you had built something very recently or very expensive at that city which made this system kind of kludgy).
I settled on the old “cities build units and units take different times to complete” design. I liked the simplicity of it but it sure wasn’t innovative. To add a little more interest I made cities have different speeds of building and then replaced speed with money. This way different cities earned income at different rates but units could cost a fixed amount. This allowed an easy way to handicap for player skill by adjusting the fixed cost upward for advanced players and downward for beginners. It also let me add resources (oil and minerals) such that they simply added a small amount to the income of the nearest city. In addition, in advanced scenarios resources would be necessary to build certain types of units.
To this quasi-economic model I added support costs for units. This allowed me to insure that players could never reach the unit limits. (I got beat up pretty bad (justifiably, I guess) about the “too many units” error in HQ). After adding unit support as a city’s responsibility I had to add ways to display and modify it.
In addition we wanted to be able to change the world as well as explore it so I added an “exploit” option under the unit menu for infantry. With an infantry on top of a city, selecting “exploit” in advanced scenarios gave you a chance that the site would be upgraded (a village would become a town or a town become a city). If the unit were on any other land terrain, an oil field or mineral would be found. In return the unit would disappear (presumably becoming workers instead of soldiers). When it was done, the economic system was satisfactory to me but the code was really ugly with lots of patches on patches.
And so in November of ’91, after over six months of work we were still not ready to start play testing (which I had hoped to begin months earlier). We still had “Random Events” to do and a lot of stuff about the multi-player environment to work out (alliances, team-mates, multiple people on a machine, etc). I got mired down trying to fix “out of sync” problems with the 2 machine version. Although we basically just duplicated the communication protocol from HQ, the game which that protocol was supporting was very different from HQ. There seemed to be millions of exceptions that were trying to use the system differently. Most of them had to do with the change from the “continuous action, real-time” approach of Command HQ to a new “simultaneous timed phases” design in Global Conquest.
Although it was thoroughly untested, I felt sure that a modified turn system would actually be a good idea for this product. The intense and frantic activity that HQ required during some stages of the battle really turned some people off. Even the ability to set a different fixed speed of action didn’t seem sufficient. However, I didn’t want a true turn system because for multi-machine play it would be very boring waiting for the other player since most of the time you don’t see most of his units or even the land masses he occupies. Also, I like the way real-time handles movement and resolves battles.
What I was working on when all the bugs invaded was a “punctuated real-time” system. After a certain number of ticks (during which units move and fight) the game would pause. This pause we called the “orders phase” (an original name, no?) during which players would revise their units’ plans, do air missions, initiate new unit manufacturing, etc. By offering a variety of ways to end the orders phase we could appeal to the widest possible gamer audience. There would be “cutthroat endings” (where the turn ended as soon as either player clicked “execute”), “delayed endings” (which were like cutthroat but gave a certain amount of time before execution began after one player had finished their turn), “fixed time endings” (that ended the turn automatically) and “unlimited turn” (that waited till both players were ready to execute). It sounded good and looked like it would work well for both multiple machines and multiple players on one machine. But it wasn’t working at all. It was causing me no end of grief.
So this was when I decided to quit the biz. We had over six months of work into something that was built around a lot of untested notions: Things like “Time Warps” and “Space Pirates” in a war game. Like “spies” and a “comcen” (units I stole from Modem Wars) Like my weird turn design. Then, you add to that the fact that the artist we had hired was not coming through (our graphics looked pitiful even by MY standards). It was definitely a low point.
Well, I got through the gloomy debugging. We worked out a way to improve our graphics by increasing the resolution. (It’s amazing how much better the same iconic style of graphics look with 4 times as many pixels!) We found some great artists (Peter and Caitlin Mitchell-Dayton).
But what really made a difference in my attitude was when we got to start playing the game with other people. At the same time my partner, JD, (who had his own office till then) moved his equipment into my office (two large rooms on the back of my house) and we started working together. It was amazing how our productivity improved! We’d play the game, fix some stuff and play again. Next, we invited our manual writer, Scott Osborn, to move his stuff in too. We’d work on the manual, play the game and then code some. We invited lots of folks over each evening and started really testing the game play. We played all the variations that Global Conquest offered: 2 players on 2 machines, 2 players on one machine, 3 players on one machine, 3 players on 2 machines, 4 players on one machine and 4 players on 2 machines.
We were in “crunch mode” working 12 to 14 hours a day, 7 days a week. We had a deadline staring us in the face and more things to do than could possibly be done. But we were having fun! In the last week I got the 4 players on 4 machines version working and we really started playing together. Not since MULE have I had so much fun finishing a game.
But, most importantly, I discovered that I didn’t have to teach pre-school to find a bunch of “happy little people” to play with. Inside every adult is their “little kid” (as my wife the psychologist has told me) and that’s the person who comes out when we play together. In creating a good multi-player game I built a good multi-player environment where my little kid could play. That’s why I got in this business in the beginning — to play with my friends even during business hours! And that’s why I’ll stay in the business.
What’s next? You can bet it’ll be a multi-player game. Anyone interested in a game of MULE II?
NOTE: You can join us in building the next great muti-player game by calling our BBS at (501) 227-7694 and signing up as a play-tester.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________ The Pukey Award
With this issue I begin a new occasional installment: The Pukey Award, presented to the poor fool who had the temerity to publish some truly inane blunder. The premier presen-tation of the Pukey Award goes to Casady & Greene for this stunning piece of writing, provided in a postcard advertising their latest game, Mission: Thunderbolt: “You are the last surviving member of an elite commando team with an ultra top secret mission that is vital to the future of all humanity.”
All together now: P U K E ! ! ! !
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The Better Mousetrap?
William Volk
Is it possible to create an interface that is intuitive and obvious and still allow for a challenging puzzle structure? This was the issue I faced when designing the interface for Leather Goddesses of Phobos II (LGOP2). I wanted to create an accessible game interface that would appeal to a broader audience than those who have typically driven the market for adventure product. At the same time it was important to retain the game play value created by Steve Meretzky’s design.
One of the best books on the subject of interfaces is “The Design of Everyday Things”, written by Donald A. Norman. On the subject of games he states;
“If a game isn’t difficult enough, experienced players lose interest. On the other hand, if it is too difficult, the initial enjoyment gives way to frustration. In fact, several psychological factors hang in a delicate balance: challenge, enjoyment, frustration, and curiosity.”
Play value can be defined by that balance. A broad audience might not want to play or be able to complete a game as difficult as one that would appeal to a seasoned gamer. The challenge, of course, is to create a product which will appeal to both novices and experts alike. One possible solution is to design an easy interface with hard puzzles. The difficulty of the game results from the nature of the required actions needed to move along in the story. The goal is to make this difficulty relate to the story and not to the interface. The ideal interface would be transparent to the player.
LGOP2’s interface is based on a first person, point and click interaction that has already appeared in several Macintosh products. Some examples include Spaceship Warlock, Cosmic Osmo, and The Manhole. Movement to new locations occurs by moving the cursor in a desired direction of travel and clicking the mouse button. These “surrogate travel” titles have their roots in the “Aspen Project”, a laser-disc based representation of the town of Aspen, Colorado created in the ’70’s.
The Osmo and Manhole products were mostly experiences by exploration and could be classified as “interactive amusements” as opposed to actual games. Manhole allowed you to navigate and operate devices via the point and click interface. Osmo allowed you to grab objects and perform actions with objects. Spaceship Warlock blended the surrogate travel with a story and some arcade-type action to create an actual game.
There are some problems however with the “point where you want to go or over what you want to use and click” interface. First there is no indication what a click will accomplish, you have to guess where to click. This experimentation slows down game play, introducing an apparent rather than transparent interface that reduces the fun-factor. A possible solution is to have the cursor’s appearance reflect the possible action. Move the cursor over a door and it turns into a “go-forward” arrow. Move over an object that you can use and the cursor turns into a hand. Unfortunately, you wind up defining actions for almost anything that looks interesting in the game and providing action clues that are counter productive to the goal of creating hard puzzles.
Since it’s now easy to find out that something will respond to a click, it makes puzzle design more demanding. I have seen games where the puzzle was finding the correct pixel to click on, but in my opinion that’s a cheap trick. The puzzles have to depend on possible actions with objects, character interactions, and the timing of actions.
One approach for any interface is to have the puzzles make use of layering and dependency. In order to solve a particular puzzle or obtain a required item, a series of other puzzles have to be solved. Discovery of the true situation in a game also adds to the play value. Giving a character an object, at the right time, can cause a character to provide you with another useful object or clue. The character interaction is also a good place to provide clues and reveal the nature of the story. In many point-and-click products the conversations are non-interactive. They just “happen.” We used an “ask-about” approach, with icons representing the subject matter. I prefer this to canned speeches but do not believe that existing point-and-click games have achieved the same sense of control that text adventure parsers provided in the past.
A possible solution we’re experimenting with is an “ask, listen, respond or simply ask, listen” system. This would provide the player with a limited ability to engage in a conversation. The respond choices could be represented by animated expressions of agreement, disagreement, anger, confusion, fear etc... Conversations would become an integral part of the puzzle and story structures. This would have been great in LGOP2, but with three different characters which you can play and 40+ speaking parts we wound up with a big chunk of digital audio with just the “ask-about” approach.
Larger capacity media can be used to add more depth to a game. Rather than creating more locations, provide a deeper set of interactions. I don’t believe that having 10,000 locations will add play value. In interactive stories we are creating an illusion of control. Depth of interaction enhances that sense of control by providing more paths to the ultimate solution(s).
Audio can be exploited in an interface as well. Sound cues for picking up and dropping objects provide feedback to the player. We decided to have displayed text accompany the digital audio to prevent problems with the player missing the content of key speeches. Since many clues can be found hidden in a single word or thought it is imperative that the player not become frustrated as a result of some arcane and hidden innuendo.
Obtaining good quality audio with low bandwidth is a topic by itself. To make matters worse, you really cannot depend on a minimum level of audio hardware quality (on MS-DOS computers) unless you take the extreme step of providing hardware in the package (which is what we wound up doing). Even with these limitations the growing appeal of digital speech is evidenced by the strong sales of sound cards. Digital speech can become an important element in the game story.
Another issue is playing time. It is possible for a player armed with the puzzle solutions to play through the entire game in short order. Most of that speed is related to the first-person nature of the interface. You don’t wait for a character to walk across a screen.
You don’t see Indiana Jones sitting on a plane for several days in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Films routinely skip over uninteresting events in a story and segue to more interesting sections. Games can do this as well. Of course it now requires more meat in the game design to create the same play time without the segues
The ideal situation is to have the story and puzzles be interesting and challenging enough to take time to figure out. The use of digitized conversations can also act to control the pace in the game. Liberal use of visual effects (dissolves, wipes, fades, etc.) can act as delays and are quite useful when seguing But is playing time really an accurate measure of play value? In evaluating play value we need to distinguish between play-time and puzzle-time when designing a product. Thirty-five hours of waiting in a forty hour play-time game can’t be all that exciting.
The main question remains, does “easy to use” equate to “too easy to play”? Why bother improving interfaces if the perceived effect is to reduce game play value? One reason is to reach an audience beyond the current hobbyist market. Significant capital has been invested in various attempts to create a mass-market optical media platform. Can these platforms succeed if the audience is limited to the current computer game market? Probably not. But maybe you can have your interactive cake and eat it. It looks like it requires inventive puzzle design and more work in interface to balance the ease of use and game value element. Great game design, under-standing the audience and recognizing what makes interactive entertainment software fun are the keys. Perhaps new mass-market platforms and well designed games will facilitate the achievement of these lofty goals.
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The Myth of the Mass Market
Jon Freeman
Copyright © 1992 Jon Freeman
In our business, it seems to be an article of faith that we’ll all be rich and famous (or some such) when the mass-market millennium arrives. Debate vacillates between identifying the “hidden flaw” and finding the “magic bullet.” That is, what keeps computer games from replacing TV and other “passive” media as a primary means of entertainment for the masses? And which element will provide the breakthrough: more adult themes and concerns (the highbrow, build-a-Field-of-Dreams-and-they-will-come claim of Chris Crawford), more elaborate software (the bury-them-in-disks-and-snow-them-with-graphics approach of Wing Commander), or better hardware (the two-dozen competing cartridge, CD-ROM, and VR factions, all of whom claim to follow the One True ROM)?
Enjoyable as such arguments may be, childish videogames aren’t the problem, and CD-whatever isn’t the answer. The issue is more fundamental than that. Our underlying assumptions are wrong. In order to have a mass market (as the term is customarily used) for computer games, there must be a mass market for computers, for adult games, and for interactivity (i.e., active entertainment). Alas! Such things exist only in our imaginations.
Our judgment on the subject of computers is warped because we are already committed; many of us live in Silicon Valley; most of our friends own computers; and the critics have been wrong so often that, like the boy who cried wolf, we no longer pay any attention to them. However, an awful lot of new computers really do seem to be going to experienced users, upgrading old equipment, instead of to new customers expanding the installed base. Far from being happy throngs of would-be customers who want computers to be faster, cheaper, or smaller, those people outside the electronic boundaries of our high-tech global village look very much like a bunch of hostile tribesmen who do not want computers at all. They are not afraid of computers because they are computer illiterate; they are computer illiterate because they dislike technology.
People blindly enjoy the benefits of technology without reducing their suspicion of science, technology, knowledge, and intelligence. The evidence is everywhere, from a past President of SFWA, who happily proclaimed herself (on GEnie!) a Luddite, to newspaper headlines. To the blue-collar worker, Japan is the home of industrial robots and automation; to the average consumer, Japan is the home of high tech. The current round of Japan-bashing is, in no small part, just the latest round of technophobia. (It is no coincidence that Mr. Technophobe, Michael Crichton, has shifted from one to the other.) That vast, untapped computer market we read about is illusory: The computerless are more likely to want to destroy ours than to get one for themselves.
In most quarters, playing games is not an accepted adult activity. Most games are, a priori, either “too childish” or (like chess) “too intellectual” for the average American adult. The fact that Trivial Pursuit became a fad does not imply the existence of a mass market for adult games, any more than hula hoops established an adult market for children’s toys, or the popularity of pet rocks led to a general interest in geology. Ostensibly hot board games are popular gifts but once unwrapped serve chiefly the same functions as old computers: doorstops or garage insulation. Still, some, like card games, retain a measure of status and popularity, and computer simulations thereof have achieved modest success. However, for most adults, the social aspect of games is more important than any other, and in that respect real card and board games will always be better than anything offered by computer.
Network games will not replace board games, much less create a mass market. They require both a computer and a modem and a mastery of both communications and network software — a combination clearly beyond the average person. People who loathe voice mail and answering machines are not going to find typing online an adequate substitute for face-to-face commun-ication. Finally, paying for playing time is a notion utterly foreign to the average American, who regards free entertainment on free TV as a birthright and pay-per-view (idiotically enough) as somehow unAmerican.
To estimate the common value of interactivity, compare the number of people who actually engage in sports with the number who simply watch — preferably from the comfort of their living rooms. For that matter, is hitting ENTER with a hand full [sic] of nacho chips much more interactive than flipping channels with a remote control? Ned Nerd may imagine himself a mighty barbarian hero with the fastest sword stroke in Cimmeria — much the way Joe Sixpack in his easy chair imagines himself Joe Montana on the (safely distant) televised playing field — but (like J.S.) he shuns exercise and resents any game element requiring a shred of coordination. In short, most people prefer their active entertainment to be as inactive as possible. (So much for the appeal of Virtual Reality!)
A glance at standard TV fare (soap operas, sitcoms, tabloids, unintellectual talk shows) makes it obvious that most adults do not want mental exercise. Anyone who did not buy a single book last year (even a $5 paperback!) — as was supposedly true of sixty percent of American families — either cannot afford $50 computer games (much less $2000 computers) or cannot (or will not) read a manual. Anyone who is too stupid or too lazy to learn to program a VCR — and surveys indicate this is a majority of adults — is a poor candidate for computer ownership. Anyone too stupid or too lazy to change the channel when a program is over — and this behavior is the basis of network programming — is not even going to look at SimEarth.
Forget the mass market. In the words of a beer commercial, “It doesn’t get any better than this.” Computer games in some form will remain a lucrative market for young people and a viable one for elite adults, but in no form will our products replace TV and other passive media as a primary means of entertainment for the masses. Those of us who design — and play! — computer games will not give them up, but the rest of the world will not be lining up to join us. Instead of waiting for the millennium, we should plan for a future we are more likely to see.
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Journal Ads Don’t Work!
Yes, friends, when you place your ad in the Journal of Computer Game Design, it will be read by hundreds of important decision-makers throughout the industry, people in a position to act on your ad! And experience proves that ads placed in the Journal of Computer Game Design have remarkable drawing power: scientific studies show that nobody responds to them! Isn’t that remarkable?
Accordingly, I will no longer accept ad submissions for this Journal. If you want to thow your money away, just send me a check. I’m too honest to accept the money for ads that don’t work. So I’ll just take the money all by itself.
On another front, I owe all readers an apology for the complete screw-up of the mailing of the last issue. In an effort to cut costs, we used a mailing service. What a disaster! I will NEVER use that mailing service again. For now, we are reverting to the tried-and-true first class mail that has always gotten the Journal to you quickly and safely.
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