Game Design - Essay 2

(For my game design class, I have reworked my first post into a more formal essay)

                Addiction is a topic that’s often brought up in relation to video games.  We’ll often hear stories like this in the news media usually with a bias towards making games look bad. It’s curious that something like that story could happen. What causes video game addiction, and is it possible to use that power for good? I’m going to try to analyze my own behaviors and dealings with the addictive quality of some games to try and figure that out.

                The game League of Legends is really what started me on this topic. I realized that I have been playing it a lot more recently than I have in the past, so much so that I would say I’m addicted. Not to such an extreme as the article linked above, but I definitely feel a big compulsion to play the game, and it’s probably affected my life in a slightly negative way. But this made me curious as to why, although I’ve had an account for almost 3 years, it’s only now that I’ve been playing a lot more. Whatever changed is probably a big contributing factor into what makes games addicting.

                The thing that changed was that I finally hit level 30 in the game. In League, this means I could start playing ranked games. Before this, I would play every now and then, usually with my friends over Skype. It was a way for me to keep in touch with friends. But once I started playing ranked games, I would go on a lot more, specifically to play ranked alone. I would play to raise my ELO because I was a lowly Bronze player, and I wanted to rise through the ranks of Silver, Gold, Platinum all the way up to Diamond.

                This leads to my hypothesis:  game addiction is caused by a sense of progression, by a sense of setting goals and then striving to achieve them. Don’t get me wrong. The game has to be fun at some level. People will come to your game because it is fun mechanically. But they will stay if you give them a sense of progression.

Another personal example to solidify this point is Sid Meier’s Civilization IV, perhaps my favorite game of all time. It’s a different kind of addicting, because I don’t play it all that often. But when I do play it, I usually play it all the way through in one sitting (Civ is a notoriously long game- At least 6 hours). Again, I think the reason for that is because in the game, I’m progressing from a simple primitive society, to an advanced empire. I will tell myself I’ll stop in 5 turns, as soon as my goal of getting a specific technology is reached, but by then, I’ll have a new goal and by the time the game is over it will be morning.

If this is the case, can we use this knowledge for some good purpose? I think so. For me, it was interesting how the sense of progression compelled me to play League, but when I tried to learn to play guitar a couple of summers back, I gave up pretty quickly. I don’t even think it was an issue of fun, because I remember my middle school years where I would grind for hours to level a skill in Runescape (a decidedly not fun activity) just to gain that extra level. I think the core of the issue is that when I was practicing guitar, I wasn’t really feeling like I was getting better. I think the sense of progression that certain types of games provide can be used to help people learn skills they wouldn’t otherwise learn. For the guitar case, Rocksmith is a great example, but this could be applied to anything (another example is DuoLingo for learning a language).

Gamification is a buzzword that’s being used (and probably misused) in business contexts to help companies run better. If instead of business people, we game designers were to focus some of our efforts to harnessing the addictive quality of our products, we could truly make the world a better place.

Game Design - Essay 1

(For my game design class, I have reworked my last post into a more formal essay)            

             As far as online games are concerned, League of Legends is generally recognized as having one of the most toxic communities. In fact, if you Google “most toxic game community” or “most unpleasant game community”, MOBA games like LoL or DOTA crowd the top results (as well as some mentions of Call of Duty). Why do these types of games breed toxic players? To try and figure this out, I tried to analyze my own behaviors and thoughts while playing the game. This might not be the most scientific approach, but it may give some deep insights on what is ruining the player experience for this game.

                The most obvious reason for why I get angry playing LoL would be that I don’t like losing, and while that may be true, it’s not enough. As a counter-example, I point to my own days playing soccer in high school. It’s important to note that my team was not good at all. We would win a handful of games each season, but for the most part, we would lose day in and day out.  While frustrations were certainly shown after some matches, for the most part the team remained civil. We were just there to have fun, and while losing wasn’t fun, the act of playing the game was good enough.

                Perhaps it’s the fact with LoL, there is something at stake with every match. I am talking of course of LoL’s ranking system, where you gain and lose ELO for every match. It’s a plausible theory, but again I would like to point out a personal counter-example. In addition to soccer, in high school I played a lot of chess. Unlike soccer, I was actually pretty good at chess, placing fairly well in tournaments. When I did lose, I never really got angry, but rather I got sad. There was more at stake here than my soccer matches (which was just a fun recreational league rather than a USCF rated tournament), but when I lost, I had no one to blame but myself.

                That might be the core issue. Unlike in soccer, when we lose, I can’t talk to my LoL team afterwards and we can’t address the issues in practice. Unlike in chess, when I lose in LoL I can point out another person’s mistake that cost us the game. When I play LoL and lose, I feel helpless. And for a lot of people, feeling helpless makes you angry. And if you’re angry, you’re more likely to express yourself in a toxic manner. This is especially true if you are online and have some degree of anonymity.

                So as game designers, what’s the solution? The best bet is to alleviate the causes of toxicity. We want to get rid of the things that make players feel helpless. In the case of LoL, I think an in-game voice chat would help a lot. Firstly, it would get rid of some of the online anonymity that causes bad behavior. But also, it would alleviate helplessness because players could tell others that they should be careful or that they want to go in or that they should split push. If a player knows their ally is listening, they won’t feel as helpless. The current in-game system of pings and chat are ok, but don’t provide nearly the same feedback that voice chat would.

                Helplessness causes frustration, which kills fun. Players specifically play games to do things they wouldn't ordinary do in their real lives. Helplessness is the last thing they want to feel while playing a game. Challenge in a game is good, but a player must feel like they can overcome it. If a player feels helpless, they will simply stop playing. Riot recognizes this problem, which is why they have started experimenting with ways to reduce the frustration as  this Gamasutra article indicates.  Only time will tell if they are successful.

Helplessness Kills Fun

I was going to continue this post in the vein of crowdsourcing which I started talking about last post, but I think I’ll save that for next post. Instead I want to talk about something that’s been affecting me recently. As you may have read in my post [On What Makes Gamesaddicting], I’ve been playing a lot of League of Legends lately. I still haven’t reached silver (though I’ve gotten tantalizingly close before falling way back down into the depths of bronze).

But these last few days especially, I’ve been incredibly frustrated with the game. I’ve actually been getting really mad at the game, at the other players, at myself. So I’m going to put on my game designer cap and try to figure out exactly what’s happening here. See, I’ve definitely lost other games before, and I’ve definitely felt bad or sad when that’s happened. But I don’t usually get mad when I lose.

Obviously, some part of it has to do with the ranked system. I really want the “recognition” of not being bronze anymore. It’s been a goal of mine, and I keep failing, and every time I lose, I get a little madder.

But there’s definitely more to that. As an example, two of the games I was really big into in highschool were chess and soccer. I would have multiple soccer matches every week, and my team was god awful. We would lose almost every game. And while I was much better at chess (I played in USCF tournaments pretty frequently and placed pretty highly), I of course wasn’t undefeated. In both of these cases, I was emotionally invested in the outcome, but I never (or almost never) got mad when I lost.

So what gives? Here’s my theory. It’s about the feeling of helplessness. See, when I play a ranked game of LoL, I am playing with 4 other strangers on my team. And I can’t control them or their actions. So one of them keeps going deep into enemy territory by themselves and dying, despite my requests to not do that, I feel incredibly helpless. And note, I’m not saying I’m in bronze because I always have a bad team. I’m just talking about the idea of playing with 4 strangers, and trying to coordinate with pings (not clear) or text (not quick). When that invariably fails, the player just feels a sense of frustration. And I don’t think it’s just me, because the LoL subreddit seems to always have posts about players complaining about the frustration.

This theory would explain why I didn’t get nearly as frustrated in soccer or chess. In chess, I couldn’t feel helpless because I was the only one playing. The game is a nearly symmetrical game with complete information, so there’s no chance and no other players to blame. If I lost, it’s because I messed up or the other player was simply better than me. I still enjoyed the game. And with soccer, the team as a whole could learn from our mistakes. I knew the other players. We could communicate, and we could go over the game in practice to get better. I didn’t feel frustrated in the game even when I didn’t have the ball because I would be yelling at my teammates (“Man on!” or “Look left!” or the classic “Shoot!”) which would give me some influence on the outcome (as little as it was).

So there it is. Helplessness kills fun. It’s not a super-revolutionary idea. But it’s good to have it written down explicitly. If you game has a lot of chance or a super tough boss or anything that makes the player feel helpless, they will not have fun. And if the point of your game is to have fun, you should change that immediately. Maybe Riot could consider that, and try to allow more communication in the game (an in-game voice chat would be heavenly). Or even a better reporting system for toxic players would diminish the feeling of helplessness.

Crowd Sourcing Play

So Twitch Plays Pokémon  (affectionately known as TPP) has been all the rage lately. For those who don’t know, somebody set up a Twitch stream (Twitch being the game streaming service) with a ROM of Pokémon Red and allowed players to input commands in chat. Soon thousands and thousands of people were participating.

 As expected, having people simultaneously input commands is not a great way to play a game. At first TPP rose in popularity because of how funny the concept is. The character in the game moves completely randomly due to all the inputs (and the 14 second delay between chat and game doesn’t help either). Yet somehow, the players got 3 gym badges in a couple of days . That fascinates me to no extent. If you look at them playing, it looks completely random, but there is enough agency there to actually play through the game. Thousands of players, surely some of them being trolls, are able to to play the game, although slowly. There were of course troubles (releasing the starter Pokémon or other top Pokémon into the wild for example). But all in all, It’s been a success in a way only the internet can make something a success. For example, here are all the religions that have popped up in TPP.

When I first saw this, I told my roommate that I would have done it using a tick system. Every 5 seconds, the chat would accumulate the inputs as votes and do the command with the most votes. Turns out they ended up adding a Democracy/Anarchy slider which allows for the same idea. Players, in addition to typing in commands, can vote for democracy or anarchy. Anarchy mode is how the original system was set up. But if enough people vote for democracy, the tick system is activated. It’s really interesting how the players prefer anarchy. Only when the game is really difficult do they end up going to democracy mode.

I’ve always been a fan of crowdsourcing, even since one of my professors at CMU, Luis von Ahn, talked to us in class about his work with reCAPTCH and The ESP Game (check those things out). Crowdsourcing playing a game is something I never thought of, and it’s fascinating. I wonder what it takes to design a game that’s meant to be played with a crowd, and how other examples of crowdsourcing play do it. Here are my random musings on the subject:

It would have to be more than a simple voting system. There’s a reason the TPP players prefer anarchy. It’s more fun, more interesting. I feel like, with voting, you feel like your contributions to the action in the game aren’t as significant (maybe why kids our age don’t vote in the real elections?). In the TPP model, democracy mode is only enabled when trolls could easily ruin the gameplay.

In the Civilization community, there is an interesting game type that players have made up called Democracy games. A group of players play a single game together from the point of view of a single Civ. But they run the game as a government. There is the finance minister and the military minister. The President gets to actually take the turns. There are election cycles. The save file is passed around from president to president. It’s a great way to add role-playing and social interaction to a game which otherwise doesn’t have it. Perhaps a specifically-for-crowdsourcing game would use a similar system.

Another option might be to have a game where all the players have the same goal, but there are many roles. And people in the crowd would need to be able to perform all the roles to make sure the game goes according to plan. A simple example of what I mean is this scenario: There is button A and button B, and both need to be pressed 100,000 times, but if A is ever pressed 1000 more times B, you lose (or lose hp or points. Now extrapolate that to a better mechanic than button pressing and it might be successful.

All in all, this is a design space that’s pretty open. Hopefully TPP inspires people to try designing more games that can be played by a crowd.

Chess: Great Game or Greatest Game?

Whenever I am asked about my favorite game, I usually mention Sid Meier’s Civilization IV. I usually don’t even consider chess, which I played “professionally” (as in I went to USCF tournaments) in high school. Odds are however, there will be a point in my life where I will stop playing Civilization IV, maybe because a different Civilization game comes out or maybe because I can’t find 10 hours at a time to play a single game. However I will probably always play chess. The fact that I don’t even consider it when thinking about games means it has something transcendent about it. Chess is universal (perhaps behind only soccer in terms of how ingrained it is in global culture). What makes Chess so great? And will there ever be a “new chess,” that is a game that takes the place of chess culturally?

                As Jesse Schell has mentioned a couple of times in my game design class, chess has been perfected over centuries. Rules have been added and changed over and over again until we have the game today. If a good game is the result of iteration, chess has a massive head start. The history of the game adds so much to it culturally. I’ve studied matches from the 1600s that were written down and recorded. You certainly can’t watch replays of Soccer matches from that long ago. Everyone, and I mean everyone, knows chess and knows it is a deep and tactical game.

In general, Chess has been studied a lot. I am very curious to know if there has been a game that has been studied as much as chess. The fact that a game with 5 unique types of pieces is deep enough that there are hundreds of names for different opening variations and end game positions is astounding. The 5 units have been iterated over to perfection, and both sides are nearly balanced (slight advantage to white). There is no randomness, which is crucial, because it means the better player really is the better player.

                What does all this mean in terms of game design? Is it possible to develop a “new chess” that is as well regarded as chess? It’s probably possible, but very difficult. The game would have to have fairly simple rules, but be very deep strategically. There could not be any randomness. It would need the possibility of being able to be studied deeply. Most importantly I think, is the medium of the game. Chess can be played on the computer, but it isn’t (especially in tournaments). There is something about physically moving the pieces and physically taking your opponents pieces that makes the game so much better. There is a reason why all sci-fi movies that have a “standard” game like chess usually have it on a holographic, futuristic board rather than played on a screen. The computer screen aspect may be the reason why e-sports (which are certainly gaining in popularity) are still a niche hobby for “hardcore gamers.”

                Even if a game has all that, it will take a while for it to gain traction (especially in today’s marketplace). Chess didn’t have to compete with thousands of other games. But who knows, maybe in a hundred years, people are playing a game with holographic pieces that hover or something, and no one will know what chess is. Or the much more likely scenario, people are playing holographic chess.

On What Makes Games Addicting

So I might be addicted to Riot’s League of Legends. Well “addicted” (you won'tt see me dying because of playing too many video games like this unfortunate case).  I just tend to want to play the game even when I could be doing better or more productive things. It doesn’t matter if I have homework due in two days. I can just play LoL now and do the homework tomorrow. It doesn’t matter if I have homework due tomorrow. I can just play LoL now and do the homework tonight. It hasn’t affected my grades negatively; I get things done and I do them well. But it has certainly effected how stressed I get sometimes and certainly causes me to lose sleep. It’s not the biggest of problems (LoL is fun after all), but it’s something I should cut down. The important question is, what makes the game so addicting?

It’s important to note, it wasn’t always like this. I first started playing LoL when I was interning in Dayton, Ohio after my freshman year. One of the other interns introduced it to me, and it was fun. We did it every day after work mostly because, well, there isn’t much to do in Ohio. But it was just a pastime. When the summer ended and I got back home, I almost completely stopped playing, because I had old high school friends and family to hang out with. When I got back to school, I was so busy with work that the thought of playing the game never even occurred to me.

And so my LoL story would have ended, if the next summer, my high school friend hadn’t brought it up. Apparently he played it a lot at school, and he convinced my entire friend group back home to try it. And so now, basically all of my high school friends play the game to some capacity. I played with them all summer. And I would play with them during school over the next year. But it was still just a past time and a way to keep in touch with my old friends. The majority of my time at school was spent doing work or hanging out with my college friends. If I ever had free time, I would be just as likely to read a book or watch some TV (or even play another game) as I was to play LoL.

So what changed? Why is it now, even though I have a back log of books I want to read, do I decide to spend my free time playing LoL? Want to know what I think the reason is? I hit level 30. See, in Legaue of Legends, you have a “summoner” level which sort of indicates how much you have played in addition to allowing you to start each game with slightly higher stats. Level 30 is the max. At level 30, you can start participating in “ranked” matches. Riot has a system in place, similar to the ELO system that the United States Chess Federation uses for ranking chess players, which gives you a rank. Bronze is the lowest, Diamond is the highest (well technically there is one higher, but that tier is at an almost professional level). And this season (Riot has a new season every year where they do a partial reset of everyone’s rank) I got placed into Bronze.

So now I have a goal, to get out of Bronze. And to accomplish that goal, I play LoL. That’s really the root cause of it, I think. I want to get better, but more specifically I want to get out of Bronze. This leads to my hypothesis, which is not scientifically proven at all and based only on a case study of myself, games are addicting when you can make progress to achieve some concrete goals. This might not be the only thing that makes games addicting, but it’s certainly a factor.

A further example of this (for myself) is the Side Meier’s Civilization IV. It’s a different kind of addicting. I don’t play it a lot. But when I do, I can’t stop until the game is over. In fact that’s probably the reason I don’t play it a lot, because I know that I need to set apart a big amount of time for it, and I’m too responsible to stay up all night playing Civ. Why can’t I stop? It’s because at the end of each turn, I have a goal in mind. Once this unit builds, I can declare war and try to take that city encroaching on my borders. Or I can achieve legendary culture in one of my cities in another 5 turns. So I say, ok, I’ll wait until I reach that goal, then continue the game in the morning. But naturally, by the time I get there, I have started work on another goal, and the process continues. The turns in Civ are similar to games of LoL.

So I have this theory now. Now what? It’s interesting, because this theory doesn’t seem to hold that well in real life (again, for myself). I got a guitar right before I started college. I still don’t know how to play it. Yes, practicing your scales is less fun than a game of league of legends, but I still want to be able to play guitar. I know that being able to play the songs I like to listen to will be fun. And I’ve played games, like the MMORPG Runescape, where I’ve grinded for days at a task I don’t think is that interesting (killing spawns of monsters for example) just so I could level up to go do something fun with that new level. Why wasn’t I as motivated at learning guitar, and could I devise a way that uses the addicting quality of games to make myself motivated? That’s the really tough question.

The answer is probably…probably. The key with LoL isn't that I want to get better, it's that I have a specific goal. It’s curious a guide on how to stop procrastinating will mention how necessary it is to break a task into steps with specific goals and to focus on the end goal. I didn’t really do that with guitar. I kind of just started learning scales, then trying to learn songs, then giving up. But what if I went further than just making an end goal? What if learning X scales made me a Bronze guitarist. Then learning Y songs made me a Silver guitarist. Then learning songs of Z difficulty made me a Gold guitarist. What if I gave myself and experience and leveling system like Runescape? I think, and I would have to try it to be sure, that I could motivate myself to learn guitar. Or write a short novel. Or write my own game. Basically do any of the things I’ve thought about doing, but never really did.

This is the idea behind Gamification, and I hope more research is done with it? I might eventually get around to it myself. As soon as I get to Gold in League of Legends. Maybe.

New Blog About Game Design - First Post!

This is my new blog for Jesse Schell's Game Design class at Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center (http://gamedesign.etc.cmu.edu/).

Here I will be posting my "deep insights" about game design from my experiences both in the class and outside. Hope you guys enjoy!