A short lesson in excellent game design

I spent a far larger portion of my lazy Sunday afternoon than I intended to with a little online game called Auditorium. It’s such a wonderful example of definitive, practical game design, that I felt it worthy to dissect. The game is challenging, but not frustrating. Detailed, but not overwhelming. I can’t really describe the experience in words and do its concept justice, so I suggest that you start by playing the game for yourself for a few minutes. Don’t worry, this post will still be here when you return (about an hour later). I’ll wait.

……

Are you back? Great. Let’s continue.

Now, I’m no David Rosen, but I thought it would be nice to take such a fantastic indie game and point out everything it gets right about designing a fun, addictive gaming experience. So, here’s a bullet point list of how Auditorium succeeds where many games before it have failed.

1. Keep it simple. The challenge of a game should not be contained within complicated rules and severe punishments. In Auditorium, you move some easily recognizable elements around and see how they affect the light patterns. If you aren’t getting the desired affect, alter the arrangement until you do. It’s absolutely brilliant in its simplicity, and that is key to getting people addicted to the experience.

2. Give me achievable goals. This is the other key point. Give me a point A from which I start, and a point B for completion. Don’t change the rules on me midway through a level. I want to be able to clearly see what I have to accomplish, and I shouldn’t need a three-page instruction manual to attain the goal.

3. Show me that I’m making progress on those goals. This is something that Auditorium does really well. If your light pattern is hitting the marker, you can see the meter increase, and–this is important–you can hear the music swell to a crescendo. The visual indicator by itself is not necessarily enough. But hearing the aural indicator alongside the visual display spells out very clearly that I am accomplishing something significant. If you’re going to be able to achieve those goals of the gameplay, you need to first know that you’re playing the game correctly. A little bit of positive reinforcement does wonders for the pleasure centers of the brain that keep you locked into a focused activity.

4. Slowly ramp up the difficulty. The key word here is not “difficulty” but the word “slowly”. Move me up in baby steps at first. If I can get through the first 6 or so stages with little difficulty, then obviously I’m getting the hang of the game. You can begin to ramp it up at the point and tack on some serious gameplay challenges. But make sure we’re not moving from one simple element to five brand new elements in a single step.

5. Give me a break. Even a short break is enough. Give me enough time to catch a breath, but not enough of a break that I might shut the game off and find something else to do.

Those are the points about this game in particular that struck me as essential elements to any game with excellent design. A little craftsmanship goes a long way in an indie title. You can easily get people sucked into your world if you understand these simple concepts. They will allow you to create an experience that will capture peoples’ attention, just like Auditorium has done to me.

AOL kills Ficlets

Well, it was really only a matter of time. Once Kevin Lawver left AOL, I knew that Ficlets wouldn’t be able to carry on without his influence and support. If the fantastic and creative community that cropped up around the fiction site could be considered the lifeblood of Ficlets, then Kevin was really its heart: the driving force that kept Ficlets passionate and inventive.

I got on at the beginning, wrote a handful of stories, and then couldn’t really keep up with the constant flow that the community was pouring out. They created challenges and unique writing opportunities, similar to the various creative writing efforts we generate over at Colony of Gamers. At some point, I discovered that my OpenID login no longer functioned on Ficlets. That’s when I got my first inkling that the site was eventually going to be allowed to either deteriorate to the point of utter uselessness, or closed up completely. I moved over to Protagonize, wrote a story there, and then just got too busy with other projects to continue. I still admire and support the concept of online collaborative fiction. I just wish AOL had given Ficlets the opportunity to succeed.

I appreciate what Kevin Lawver has done, as well. Here’s his comment on the AOL blog post:

I knew this was coming, I just didn’t know the day. I tried, with the help of some great people, to get AOL to donate ficlets to a non-profit, with no luck. I asked them just to give it to me outright since I invented it and built it with the help of some spectacular developers and designers. All of this has gone nowhere.

I’ve already written an exporter and have all the stories (the ones not marked “mature” anyway). I have pretty much all of the author bios too. Since I was smart enough to insist that AOL license all the content under Creative Commons, I’ll be launching a “ficlets graveyard” on 1/16 so at least the stories that people worked so hard one will live on.

I have mixed feelings about ficlets’ demise. On the one hand, I’m proud of the work we did on it. I’m thankful that AOL allowed me to build it with a truly amazing group of talented folks. I’m humbled by the community that ficlets attracted and the awards that ficlets won.

On the other hand, I’m sad that I wasn’t allowed to keep working on ficlets. I’m disappointed that AOL’s turned its back on the community, although I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

So, to all the ficleteers out there – your stories will live on, and there may be a couple more surprises in the works before 1/15 if I have my way. Be on the lookout… I’ll post any news to my blog: http://lawver.net.

Now that’s just classy. I look forward to seeing what he’s accomplished. As for AOL: Ficlets is the last time I get behind anything they create or manage. They’re far too quick to blow a project away that is perceived to be a failure, as opposed to finding ways to breathe new life into them. From now on, I’m going to be extra wary of the AOL symbol on any site I sign up for. It’s a sure sign of a quick and painful death.

World of Goo, de-coagulated

One of my early favorite indie games on the WiiWare channel was Lostwinds, by Frontier. It was a simple concept, with gorgeous artwork, and fluid controls. But the problem was, it was a short adventure. A fleeting experience with very little replayability. World of Goo by 2D Boy has solved that problem, to a certain extent, and created my NEW favorite indie game in the process. World of Goo is a brilliant puzzle game, merging phenomenal gameplay elements with a beautiful, completely interactive world, and excellent storytelling.

David Rosen from Wolfire deconstructs the World of Goo Corporation from the inside out, analyzing aspects of the game that I had completely overlooked. He has an excellent 8-minute video on Vimeo on the topic, the first of hopefully many videos David produces that delve deep into the mysteries of good game design.

I adore discussions on the core intricacies of game design. I could read numerous disertations from Raph Koster on virtual economy, and Lost Garden is one of my favorite sites. David Rosen seems particularly well-suited to the task of dissecting game design, and look forward to more videos in this vein.

Thanksgiving Road Trip!

We don’t usually travel far for Thanksgiving or Christmas. We tend to stay near home those holidays, and prefer to travel and visit relatives in the weekends between. This year, however, Caleb got to thinking that it had been a while since we saw grandpa Cal up in Minnesota. So, we decided to invite ourselves to Thanksgiving up in the great frozen northlands. Within the hour, we’ll be road tripping it up I-35 towards that vast, inhospitable, uninhabited tundra. Which means, I won’t be here. But you should be used to that by now!

But don’t worry! Once I’m back online, I promise to rant unforgivingly about whatever crosses my mind. Until then, enjoy your turkey day! And try to limit yourself to only two pumpkin pies this year, ‘kay?

Facebook completely fails at advertising properly

Facebook has essentially guaranteed that I will never, ever engage with any of their advertising partners. How did they do this? Easily. They did it by completely ignoring me.

For the past week, there has been a recurring ad being displayed on my profile sidebar advertising Sexy Singles in My Area™. It features a half-naked girl on a bed, and I’m honestly sick of seeing it. Every time it has appeared, I have clicked on the little thumbs-down icon. When the message pops up asking why I’m hating on the ad, I select “obscene” (or “pornographic” – I can’t remember what the available comment is). It disappears, but not for very long.

There’s two things very wrong with this. One is obvious: when I so clearly indicate to Facebook that I’m not interested in the ad, why does it keep showing up? I would think they would at the very least change the image and attempt to covertly display the same ad again. But it’s the exact same ad, every time. That, in and of itself, is lame.

But this is even more lame. Supposedly, Facebook has the ability to take content that you are viewing and display appropriate corresponding marketing material. It’s called “targeted advertising”, and it works pretty well in the real world. Apparently not so much in the world of Facebook. You would think, with the sheer amount of metadata available to them, Facebook might have the ability to check just one, small, seemingly insignificant field: Relationship Status.

You see, Facebook, I’m married. I’m not interested in Sexy Singles in My Area™, not even in the slightest. You’re telling me that you aren’t capable of checking just one, simple field on my profile and say “hey, maybe this guy isn’t interested in seeing half-naked chicks in his ‘targeted’ advertising”?

Of course, maybe Facebook is actually checking to see if men are married, and then displaying that sort of advertising to them on purpose. Maybe another one of their advertising partners is an online marriage counseling service.

In any case, Facebook has failed to advertise to me in a meaningful way. I have a whole other rant on how pathetic their “People You May Know” friend suggestor is. I’ll save that for another day.

A bailout analogy

I was talking with a friend of mine about the horrors and pitfalls of our current economic crisis. We discussed such relevant topics as, how in God’s name can we afford $4.6 TRILLION worth of bailouts? And also, why are AIG executives taking taxpayer-funded retreats?

While we generally agreed on a great many debatable points, my friend balked at that last one. “That’s not really fair,” he said. “They had already planned that retreat prior to the bailout, and essentially used their own existing cash flow to pay for it.”

Wait a second. I don’t quite get that. Their own existing cash flow? “How does that compute?” I asked him.

As a response, he offered me an analogy. It went a bit like this:

Say you’re a kid with five dollars. Your mom asks you to go up to the store and buy some milk. She gives you five dollars to pay for it. You take your five dollars and her five dollars and you go up to the store and buy milk, and also a couple of comic books for yourself. Sure, you ended up spending ten dollars in the end, but you bought milk with the five dollars from your mom, and comic books with the five dollars you already had. You spent mom’s money on the things she asked for, and your money on things for you. In the end, everything is a wash.

A wash? No. I’m afraid that analogy didn’t really tell the whole sordid bailout story properly. I offered this friend of mine an analogy of my own that I felt was a tad bit more realistic:

Say you’re a kid with five dollars. Your mom asks you to go up to the store and buy some milk. She’s a bit short on cash at the moment, so she asks you if you wouldn’t mind spending your five dollars getting the milk. “But mom!” you say. “I wanted to spend that on comic books!” “Well, little Timmy. Times are tough. How ’bout you step up for mom here, hmmm?” You decide to fall back on your old standard: lying. “Oh, actually, I think I spent that money already.” “Fine, whatever,” mom says. She digs around the couch for some change, and then goes to the Chinese lady next door, and she somehow manages to scrape together five dollars for milk. You go up to the store with your five dollars and your mom’s five dollars and you buy nothing but comic books. No milk. Just comics. You come home and mom asks the obvious question, “where’s the milk?” “Oh,” you say to her. “I didn’t get it.” She’s not overly astonished, having traveled down this path before. “Well, then, what did you do with the money, little Timmy?” You say “Well, I spent it.” Not only is mom not angry, but she doesn’t even bother to punish you. All she does is warn you that next time, you had better be a bit more transparent about where the money is going.

Now, don’t you think that’s a much more accurate analogy of this gigantic monstrosity our lovely government has hobbled together? My friend didn’t think so.

No, I’m NOT dreaming of a white Thanksgiving, thank you

So, it’s snowing. First actual snow of the season. It probably won’t stick around for very long, as the temperature is already up to 30 degrees and tomorrow it’s supposed to get up to almost 50. But, for now, we have about an inch of the white stuff, and the boys are terribly excited, as kids often are at the prospect of being able to throw objects at dad without being scolded at.

I’m trying really hard to remember where fall went, but it’s existence is quickly slipping away. It’s easily my favorite season of the year, if only for the fact that I feel sorry for it when it disappears before we’ve had a chance to enjoy it even tentatively. It’s a fleeting season. The leaves start to drop, and we fastidiously rake them and bag them. And then a brisk wind sweeps through, and we’re left with nothing but sticks and dead grass until April. Weeeee! Can you just feel the Magic of the Season™ bursting all around you? I thought you could. It might just be the hypothermia setting in. Better get that checked.

In the meantime: snow photos! Snowtos!

About that whole ‘novel’ thing

As you might have guessed by now, as was bound to occur, I have generally given up on the novel. My last bit of writing was done on my birthday, back on October 30th. I sat in a Panera Bread, sucking free wifi, somehow managing to hammer out about a thousand words or so. And then, beyond that, nothing. A ceaseless void. Any attempt to put more words to page in the days that followed have all ended in despair and darkness.

I know what you’re thinking already. “Nathaniel: you have the attention span of a gnat.” And that’s true. I won’t argue that. But in this case, it wasn’t my attention that was being diverted. My brain is simply not capable of functioning properly past 9pm. At least, not in the sense of being forced to focus long enough to craft a reasonably sound and cohesive novel. After I get home from work, eat dinner, play with the boys, enjoy a bit of conversation with the wife, perform necessary household functions, and then get the children to bed, I finally get some time to work on fiction. And by that time, my brain has, more often than not, decided to melt within my cranium into a worthless puddle of goo, not unlike so much oobleck.

(Realize, by mentioning all of those things that occur prior to the small-ish bit of novel writing time I am afforded nightly, I am by no means discounting those activities as unnecessary, wasteful, or tedious. That’s just, you know, life, and I make no apologies for that, nor do I regret it in the slightest.)

So, once again, another bit of something tossed to the backburner. It’s probably for the best, as after 10,000 words, I don’t know that I was really generating something that other people would really care to read. I’ll have another go at it at some point, I can practically promise that. Once I got into the full swing of writing, I was so habitually proud of myself at actually shifting gears from wanting to write a novel to actually writing a novel that I can’t leave that feeling behind for very long. In the meantime, I have around eight to ten short story ideas that floated into my head while working on the novel that ended up as backburner items, themselves. Since short stories generally require far less concentration to work out (at least, that’s been the case for me), I may have a go at getting a few of those crafted while I lament the early grave of my first novel writing attempt.

For now, I’ll probably come back to the blog a lot more often. I’m not as into the tech scene as I used to be, for a great many reasons, but I’m sure I can find a few morsels of information that will interest my neglected blog audience.

Blaudience? Nah. Nevermind.

Oh, and before you ask, because I know some of you will, I assure you, precious reader, that the fact that Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World for the Wii has been strategically placed in my sidebar recently had absolutely nothing to do with the neglect of my novel. Truth. I had stalled in the writing of the novel a full two weeks before the game was even available. It has since gently and happily filled the gaping void, to be honest, and will likely do so for quite some time, thankfully. Because if I can’t get my own stories documented, I might as well enjoy someone else’s.

Despite how much my wife will mercilessly mock the characters.

Colony of Gamers Child’s Play Charity Drive

The Colony of Gamers has started its first annual Child’s Play Charity Drive. Less then 24 hours hours after it started, it is already up to $2,584 — a little more than halfway to the established goal of $5,000.

The Child’s Play charity was started by Mike and Jerry at Penny Arcade as a way for gamers to collectively counter the media mythos that we are nothing more than lazy, selfish losers. With Child’s Play, we demonstrate to the world that we are compassionate human beings, who can give money and gifts to hospitals to use on entertainment for sick children.

In the past, this has been a largely invisible outreach. Hospitals report that they have all the funding and support they require to tackle medical needs, research, and specialized care for children. But no one had ever given a thought to taking care of kids’ non-medical needs.

Child’s Play aims to do just that, by teaming up with 45 children’s hospitals around the world. The workers at the hospital make an Amazon wish list of toys, games, movies, and books, and post them online. You can choose a hospital (University of Iowa Children’s Hospital is on there!) and buy them a few things they need. Or, you can just donate directly, via PayPal, (preferably through our Child’s Play Charity Drive at Colony of Gamers, though you obviously don’t have to).

The gifts purchased are used in the hospitals in two ways. Most of the video games and movies are collected and then distributed via a “check-out” system to kids that are staying at the hospitals. The books and games are available in community activity centers. Some gifts are set aside to be given to kids that are staying at the hospitals during the holidays.

Yeah, I know. We’re not curing AIDS or cancer, or any of the thousands of debilitating diseases that exist. But these are kids. Kids that have terminal diseases, or painful illnesses, and have to spend far too much time away from their families while they heal and recover. They get poked, prodded, tested, injected, medicated, sedated, checked, re-tested. All day long, every day. Child’s Play is a way to give them the essentials of life. Laughter. Sunshine. Happiness. Hope. It may not be a cure, but it’s a great drug.

So, please, support the Child’s Play charity, in any way you can. Part of me does this every year because I have two young boys of my own, and the thought of them possibly spending weeks in a hospital desperately fighting some illness tears my heart out. I like to think that someone has given of themselves at some point in time so that one of them could have a few moments of happiness while suffering through the experience of being in a hospital.

We’re up to $2,632 now. Up $50 in just the ten minutes it took to write this post. Keep it up, gamers. Keep it up.