Time to make a game!
Here's some tips for doing that.
As with any creative medium, I feel it's important to be cognisant of the ethics of the product we develop. Unlike many other mediums, games have the addition of interaction, which opens a floodgate of concerns, especially relating to accessibility, and player psychology. However, I thought it would be good to talk a little bit about my experiences with AI, and some thinking I've done on the subject.
When people think of violence they usually think of head exploding gore, and the Western cultural fixation on arcadey military deathmatches. I'm going to first give you a large number of extremely successful games which use violence in constructive or smart ways. This should be enough to convince you that violence isn't inherently detrimental, but if it isn't I've included a section for Donald Trump and your mom, who for some reason agree on something.
I have marked stipulations and important context in bolded text, because this discussion is inherently cultural.
The game enacts one-sided violence to punish, sicken, or scare the player. (Click to expand.)
- This is ultimately used to train the player about the mechanics, and raise their level of skill within the world.
- It's seen most commonly in genres like platformers, horror games, and stealth games.
- The player needs to know what kind of game they are buying. Don't just drop this shit on them. Some people are very sensitive to this type of content.
Examples:
The game is violent, but the player is expected to make a deliberate choice on whether to partake. (Click to expand.)
- Some of the best dialogues on game violence we started by a game itself critiquing our fixation on violence.
- Sometimes the choice to be non-violent isn't obvious, because players follow tropes blindly. This creates an "oh my god" moment when it dawns on them they had a choice.
- The game mechanically punishes you or rewards you for your choice.
- The consequence carry weight because you had the choice.
- As a designer, you must take into account representational consent with games where the player is given a choice to invoke violence against a depiction of a person. (See next section.)
Examples:
The game's portrayal of violence is realistic or frictional. (Click to expand.)
- Weapons kill quick.
- Fights are dirty, and asymmetrical.
- Weapons don't feel like toys, but feel like tools.
- Allusion to or direct simulation of bystanders, civilians, and collateral damage.
- The violence enforces an aesthetic of authenticity, even education.
- These games often begin as actual training simulators, or historical projects.
- These games are often (unintentionally) great 'Anti-War War Games'.
- One of the only times portraying violence against real groups can be constructive. Documentarily - for awareness, with dignity, and with CONSENT.
Examples:
- DCS World
- Arma 3 which is a commercialized version of a military training simulator
- Kingdom Come: Deliverance
- Rainbow Six 3
The game's violence enforces an aesthetic of desperation and perserverance. (Click to expand.)
- The desperation can be physical or psychological in nature.
- Often the struggle is non-literal - metaphorical.
- Often the violence isn't the fun part - surviving is.
- These experiences typically look and sound bleak.
Examples:
Violence is the joke, it's the message. (Click to expand.)
- Satirical and overblown in nature.
- Commentary or critique on the Western fixation on violence.
- Often isn't set in the same universe as us, or is in an exaggeration of it.
- This is the most often (in my opinion) wrongly-criticized form of violence in media, because the satire requires extensive knowledge of the thing it is satirizing. Media outlets often don't come from an angle of videogame literacy.
- Don't ever target a disenfranchised group.
- Don't hear 'exaggerated version of our universe' and think 'stereotypes'.
Examples:
Violence is the chosen channel for designed 'Game Feel'. (Click to expand.)
- Exaggerated player agency is the goal.
- Violence is the means.
- Players aren't chasing violence, but are rather are chasing agency.
- Sometimes the violence is toned down, but the agency is toned up. I.e. Guns have huge kickback, but don't draw blood.
- Often seen in Fighting games.
- Game Feel should not be leveraged against a group of people. The game must not depict violence against actual groups of people, or it gets into propaganda territory.
Examples:
All of this said, most games aren't violent. You can, and probably should design games without violence until you are confident and responsible enough to do it properly. You should be capable of well-designed 'Doom-calibre' Game Feel before you justify your violence with "it feels good" and you should be culturally aware and sensitive enough to not make a tone-deaf fool of yourself as your avatar mows down disenfranchised people.
Game violence can have intent and can be justifiable...
...but if you can't make any game good without adding violence - violence isn't going to save your shitty games.
So maybe start by making game which isn't violent.
This message is meant mostly for the bro-type game designers who get excited by the idea of making the next hyperviolent darling, without regard for the the rest of the fucking industry and world. Fuck those people.
Can we shut the fuck up about videogame violence? (Click to expand if you reallyyyyy want.)
The first thing told to me in University upon being assigned a game-themed research piece in my technical writing course (paraphrased):
"Please, don't write about the videogames causing violence debate. They don't. It's so frustrating to write and boring to read. The debate has been over for 10 years." — Paul Brokenshire, TA
- Every new medium brings with it a moral panic. The same things were said about movies, music, writings, imagery, theatre, etc...
- Meta-analysis of the mixed results of studies show there is little-to-no effect on behaviour.
- This is what we expect of all expressive mediums.
- This meta-analysis, by nature, seeks to make sense of noisy results.
- The 'little' in this case is even called into question in point 3.
- Meta-analysis of studies show that the act of 'claiming intense effects' statistically shows signs of meddling and bias.
- Meta-analysis of studies shows studies claiming games' responsibility for negative behaviour appear to be particularly prone to false positive results since results vary so wildly, and studies testing for positive ('prosocial behaviour') are more heterogenous and overwhelmingly say "there isn't really an effect".
- In other words, the premise of the question (even if testing for the same things) seems to influence the accuracy of results.
- In other words, the consistent results of studies looking for positives imply accurate means and conclusions. (The conclusion being "no significant effect".)
- In other words, the wildly varying results of studies looking for negatives imply biased means, misrepresented conclusions, even meddling/scapegoating and agendas. (Conclusions ranging from the "no significant effect" we expect, to exremes of "makes your kid into a killer" which isn't nearly as present in the positive studies.)
- Most videogames provide catharsis, and realms to improve dexterity, strategic thinking, and even experience different cultures. They're like sports, but less likely to injure you and others, and more likely to be voluntarily experienced.
- Because interaction opens many doors for skill and knowledge analogs, there are plenty of skills you can learn from games, no matter how violent.
- I learned how to type from Runescape.
- My passion for the incredibly violent game Lugaru taught me the modding basics which got me into the career I'm in today.
- Sim City taught me about urban planning even as I burnt my city alive.
- Since I'm a developer now, being cognisant of violence as a design decision has forced me to actually take a stance on what I think is okay and what I think isn't. This is more than I can say for a lot of people. Some people just don't care. People who don't care are more dangerous and less predictable than people who have a concrete stance.
- It's just a useless conversation. These games aren't going anywhere, and they'll still sell. Alcohol or football are both much more immediately physiological scapegoats if you really need one, parents and/or Donald Trump (you don't - please stop).
Okay, the next sections should be less sassy.
(Coming Soon) Concerning developing with sensitivity, a look at cultural appropriation, and the complications of representational consent of having a game avatar when the player is arbitrary.
by Logan Buchanan
The discussion surrounding free-to-play monetization / loot boxes has been pretty heated over the past 8 years or so. As a developer it’s hard to get a broad view of this topic and to feel like you’re making ethically sound decisions when you’re trying to make money (not to mention a living) from your games. Despite this difficulty, it’s important to understand the implications of monetization strategies and where they stand.
(Eventually this section should probably define a glossary of terms, but due to me being tired I’m giving a brief overview and referring the reader to several helpful (and well written) resources).
This was the first major layer of monetization strategies that swept across the mobile games market. Energy systems, alternate currencies, malicious difficulty all started to crop up and were quickly refined for greatest monetary benefit. These topics are thorny and complicated, but there are two great articles that approach it from the player’s perspective and the developer’s perspective respectively.
Chasing the Whale: Examining the ethics of free-to-play games
By: Mike Rose
Mike Rose interviews several people who are heavily invested (>$2000) in Free-to-Play titles. These players are referred to in industry as “Whales” which are the primary profit drivers of free-to-play titles. Rose pointedly reveals the deep roots of addiction that spread through certain Free-to-Play tactics and the very human struggles of those who are victims of them.
who killed videogames? a ghost story
By: Tim Rogers
Tim Rogers paints a rather bleak picture in this incredibly long essay (bordering on Novella) about his time designing free-to-play mobile games. Definitely not a mandatory read, but one that gives a peak behind the curtain at what emotional tolls can be felt when working on predatory games. A brief and effective summary is found in its final sentence “God help us; Shigeru Miyamoto help us all.”
This is pretty well tread ground in the games industry at this point, but it’s worth talking about loot boxes here for a brief discussion on the ideas behind them. Loot boxes have a core psychological principle that governs their effectiveness: Operant Conditioning. The figurehead of this principle was the psychologist B.F. Skinner, who created his eponymous Skinner Boxes which studied rats and their reaction to positive feedback loops. The basic idea was the rat would push a button or perform some small task, and then they would receive a small reward for that task (a little food, or a treat of some sort). Over time, even if the rewards were not consistent, the subject would continue to push the button or perform the action sometimes at the expense of all else. Here’s a simple explanation of how this applies to games.
Your players are the rats.
Now let's look at how this Rat Box model is used in games:
In this scenario, the repetitive action that your player must do to receive the reward is to just play your game! Before microtransactions abounded, this was a widely used way to keep players engaged. Most RPGs with random loot systems (ie: Diablo 1 & 2, Borderlands, Torchlight) used this kind of operant conditioning to support the power growth of the player and give a reason for the player to push further into the world (or to just murder more loot pinatas).
This type of investment can also result in the multi-currency systems of free to play titles. In these systems the player gains one currency by engaging with the game systems, and another currency by paying money (ie: Clash Royale, League of Legends). These systems become a bit ethically murky because they blend gameplay investment with monetary investment, speaking of which:
In this scenario, the repetitive action is spending small amounts of money on bonuses or items within the game. Using this strategy, the player becomes hooked on the positive feedback the game gives them whenever they spend money. This can vary from simply a small fanfare that plays when someone buys a microtransaction, to the power that said transaction gives their in game avatar. Either way, it’s aiming to create a psychological dependency or at least a craving to engage in the action again.
These kinds of tactics are the ones that result in the ‘whales’ that were mentioned previously. A player can become so enraptured with the act of spending money that they can do so at the cost of all the other needs in their life (ie: rent, food, relationships). While you can’t control whether a player will cast away everything that they need to sustain themselves, you can try to avoid creating systems that encourage it.
While it’s easy to lambast developers who employ these predatory tactics, it’s important to look at why large and small studios alike are resorting to these kinds of monetization efforts. The truth of the matter, no matter how large or small your team, is that games are expensive, time consuming things to make. Even if you are a solo developer who works in the dim light of the evening, you still need to pay rent, buy food, and live a life. So while the cost is not immediately obvious, there is still a cost. Extra Credits produced a well formulated argument that delves into the difficult monetary position that games find themselves in today, and it is worth a watch. Of course the reasons behind this are larger and more complex than simply “We don’t have enough money”, but it’s important to understand that unethical business practices don’t necessarily come from malicious intent.
So with all of this ethical haberdashery how are we supposed to design and implement systems that are at least aiming to be ethically sound? Well, because the internet loves lists, I’ve come up with a few guiding questions that should help you evaluate your monetization scheme.
- Does your game need a complex monetization scheme at all? Or is your game better suited to a traditional single price model?
- Does your monetization plan negatively affect the play experience of other players who do not participate in it?
- If developing a competitive game, does the monetization scheme give a distinct advantage to those who pay more?
- When paying for a microtransaction, does the player know exactly what they are getting, or at the least do they know the exact odds of receiving certain items/benefits?
- If employing lootboxes of some sort, is there a way for the player to guarantee that they will receive a certain item, or certain rarity of item (See: Pity timers)?
(Coming Soon) Concerning artificial intelligence, humility, and my thoughts on how to approach development in burgeoning fields of intelligence emulation.
As a developer in a small team, you'll often have to make calls about design decisions when your designer is away for lunch, or even just because you're expected to know the answer. The basics of game design are more-or-less as follows:
- Games are greater than the sum of their parts.
- If something isn't feeling good, add sound, animation principles, visual polish, agency, responsiveness, cinematography, tone, etc...
- Good game developers can use the full spectrum of the medium to add flare and satisfaction to a part of a game.
- GREAT game developers can make something look and feel good using only a couple of the aforementioned components.
- Player input needs to be responsive.
- It needs have have punch and it needs to feel good.
- If you need to slow the responsiveness of something down, use animation principles to give it physicality.
- Dark Souls does this really well. Attacks don't happen instantly, but have anticipation, windup, followthrough, and there is a noticable secondary impact motion on the enemies which helps communicate your power.
- Design toward an experience. Design by subtraction.
- Everything in your game should bring it closer to a particular experiential aesthetic. Decide on that aesthetic early, and tailor EVERYTHING towards it.
- Often the best way to make something better is to take something out of it. We make assumptions constantly about what 'should' be in a game. In the example of Zombie Donuts we let the player move around the environment, and due to the limitations of the Gear VR players didn't like the control scheme and felt sick because of it. Players had more fun by standing still.
- If you want a great example of design by subtraction take a look at one of my favourite game designers of all time - Fumito Ueda's Shadow of the Colossus and Ico.
- Fuck tutorials.
- If you can make a game entirely without tutorials, do it.
- In addition to forcing you to make a terrible bastardization of your gameplay loop, players hate them.
- Players hate reading, feeling patronized, and having the discovery of mechanics spoiled for them.
- Teach the player without them noticing.
- Use light or colour 🌈 to guide the eye to important gameplay elements.
- Use sound to cue the player to look in a direction. Use framing to focus the player on important elements.
- Use visual weight (notice how the rainbow emoji draws your eye because it has a bolder visual presence than the rest of the text) to draw attention.
- Force the player using psychology to teach themselves how to play the game. It's hard but when it's done right it's phenomenal.
XR, which is a blanket term for VR, AR, MR (Mixed Reality) and other such designations, have some interesting design concerns associated with them, mostly around input and interaction. For those User Experience (UX) people out there, this might be interesting for you.
- Make interactions kinetic! (Give them physicality and weight.)
- Have the player directly influence items in the game world or on the phone screen.
- Don't rely on buttons and floating UI.
- Avoid unmotivated movement, perspective shifts of any sort, and even movement in general if you can.
- Doing something like changing the Field of View in VR is such a no-no that most VR SDKs and APIs totally lock it.
- Stop making buttons and text elements! Screen real-estate is deceptively tiny in VR. You have a wide field of view, but players hate having buttons and text plastered on their face. See the Vergence-Accommodation Problem for more information.
- Make intuitive or charming environmental interactions instead of buttons. Ex. Toggle the music by having the player shoot a jukebox.
If you must do movement, try some of the following options:
- Fade/blink to an indicated location.
- Slow movement using conventional control schemes. Must be a decent controller with accurate directional and analog input.
- Constant and linear movement. (See Run Dorothy Run)
- Deliberate physical movement.
- Using motion controllers to swim or push off objects in space.
- Needs to be tuned to feel physically true-to-life, make sure there are no physics glitches that will make you instantly barf. 😷
- One game that does this REALLY well is Lone Echo which gets around this problem by having the player in zero-grav environments for the entirety of the game. You also see your body if you look down. Super cool.
Depth, and our physiological understanding of it, is crucial for immersing ourselves in a space. In VR, depth is feigned, and this limited analogy for depth can (if we're not careful with our design) throw users through a nauseating experience.
Enter the Vergence-Accommodation Problem.
Basically, in real life, when we focus on an object, our eyes adjust in two ways:
- Vergence - We rotate our eyeballs to point at the object in question.
- Accommodation - Our eyes' musculature bends and focuses the lenses of our eyes.
"Cool! So why is this a problem?"
Well, in VR, the screens displaying the experience are at a fixed distance to your eyes. Accommodation doesn't need to happen.
"Cool! I still don't see the problem. Let's just not do step 2."
Except that, like many neurological processes, you need to actively train your brain to decouple these two things. It's not an intuitive thing to do, and new VR users often run into this problem without knowing how to verbalize it. They will just suddenly feel sick because 'things don't feel right'.
This is a major part of finding your 'VR-legs', which is basically just shorthand for 'finding relative comfort in these feigned systems'. New players need time to retrain their brain.
Alternatively:
We can design around this problem!
- Avoid putting objects which are fixed to the camera, requiring players to use their eyes to parse.
- If you do have an object fixed to the camera (by which I mean softly-fixed/smoothed, because 1-to-1 fixing is terrible in VR), keep it spatially at a medium range from the camera I.e. Don't place it on the face.
- Additionally, keep any other fixed camera elements close to the center of the view space. It's tempting to want to really exploit that huge FOV you get in VR. Resist this urge.
- Encourage players, explicitly or implicitly, to look around using their head! Some first-time users don't understand that they should be turning their head, so they fall into the habit of relying on eye movement in their formative experiences.
- As always, use the tools at your disposal - light, color, shadows, space, audio - to guide the player to use their full 360 degrees of head movement. Get them to do it early so it becomes a habit.
The best way to make good games is to play both good and bad games. Play a lot of them. Talk to friends about them. Analyze them.
(Coming Soon) Using feature subtraction, emptiness, scale, and grace, to evoke intense aesthetics.
(Coming Soon) Using adversity to enforce triumph. Forcing players to confront thoughtful play. Being okay with players missing a secret.