Can You Make a Good Game Without Good Play Mechanics?

[Music] first is a talk about can you make a good game with a good play mechanics but before that let's starting by introduce an introduction of me a bit so my name is sun and the real name is prasad with yagan and some people might already guess that i come from thailand a country which people have a very long name and too hard to pronounce and to remember but so please feel free to call me and remember me as son so nice to meet you so i came from thailand but i actually now live in japan for longer than 10 years now and i used to be a lead game designer for a game called final fantasy xv and i'm i used to be in charge of these characters and implement the way the behavior and the real-time gameplay like how they walk how they talk what inside their mind i write ai because i specialize in emotional ai and to

its application to the thing i call cx which is character experience and our studio used to be part of squaring japan but now we become a different studio we call luminous productions and we're still underscore in this group but separate from square enix japan and that's about me and my studio and well it's my third time here in gdc though but i'm still so feeling excited to be here and to talk with you today and let's hope we get a good friend from my talk today so let's get started so can we make a good game without good play mechanics this is a very tricky questions but before we go that let's me for the sake of clarity and make sure we're on the same page let me define a bit what we think good gameplay mechanic is when we talk about good gameplay mechanics i mean clear goals and rules or the players meaningful sets of approaches

appropriate challenges and appropriate reward which is kind of straightforward so you might say that well playing mechanics or game mechanics is a quality that makes a game a game itself so let's imagine we want to draw a graph that represents balance between a fun that come from game mechanic and the fun they come from other aspects of game then we might get something like this for game right so game play mechanics just come first but what about other medias that is not game such as interactive toy interactive art interactive meteor or some kind of applications you might get something else maybe like this but why do you talk to you about this aren't we supposed to talk about gaming in this lecture the reason is boundaries between content genres have become vague these days in the past gaming games are games and

non-games are non-game but now we got very gradations of genre happen in between and there's a lot of contents in between and sometimes you get some kind of what strange contents like well a character social game that you just push on buttons and then just repeatedly put the button and then they fight for you and in the end you want the battles but it's fun and sometimes you get something like a narrative vr experience which is very immersive but you rarely have anything to choose at all but it's fun yes and we can spend our 30 minutes here to define what this game which one is not which is probably game and which one is probably not but i'm not gonna do do that today because no matter if you call them a game or not it's a game designer job to design them anyway you see we call them we call ourselves game create the game designer but actually our job are wider than that sometimes we have to make some other things maybe we should just call ourselves i don't know

interactive content designer i don't know but we just called him game discerner but it depends on your company and your project on what you're actually making so make sure you ask themself what the content or the game you make the fun balancing it is something like this or like this or like this and if if your contents or your game that you are making has a bigger balance of fun from other aspects rather than gameplay mechanics then what do we do as a game designer should we just give up and let i don't know write or write a good story no maybe not like that so this lecture is not about talking that you should write good story you should have good graphic but i'm here to tell you that game desire is more than just game mechanic design it's more than play mechanic design if you have good game design we can cover the other area too we can make sure that our game is more fun and it might not be fun from play mechanics but they have fun that can only become

when if we apply the good game design to your games or our contents that might or might not be game i don't know so if you say that a game mechanics design is a primary skill for a game designer then i might say that the not in game mechanic but that game design skill is maybe a secondary skill that we actually need so our goals today so i'm not here to tell you that we don't need good gameplay mechanics we need it but to learn how to see the values other values game could possess from other perspective might teach us how we can make him a better thing and might teach out a new way for us to enhance our game and because you're going to need it someday and believe me you're really going to need it in the near near futures so the approach we're gonna talk today and we're gonna use today is the approach i call defining the verbs so let's start with

um something simple something that i like personally i really love ice cream so we do it ice cream so what do people do with ice cream what do you do with ice cream yeah we eat so if we decide that to eat is a thing we do with ice cream then we decide scream to maximize taste like what they do around here in san francisco some americana this is our famous ice cream in san francisco i've been taking this picture around these days to for the talk but not not for me but yeah i love ice cream though but if what if we define another verb that people can do with ice cream let's say like like to instagram then can we get something else maybe like this no maybe no because good designer can balance visual and flavor so you know you don't have to define a new word for that that we can still balance visuals and flavor right but if what if we put all we have

to the new world into instagram what if we care about appearance more than more equal than its flavor what do we get we might get something like this this is ice cream in harajuku in japan very flashy and this is what happens when you define a new word to instagram when you invest everything you have to a new value as ice cream would possess that might not be to eat and you get something new you get a new product so it's applying to everything in all product designs when you get new verb you get a new value for your product when you get new value it's mean you can come up with new design approach for it and this is also applying to game two so what do people do with game if it's to play if it's yes then you need a good gameplay mechanic that's that's that's the way it should be but if if there are the words that we can define the player do with games and if we can

define it maybe we can find a new approach of thinking of how we can improve our games so that's what we're going to talk about today verbs so today i've already i will tell you seven verbs here that people can do with game staffing from to play down to the bottom of the list with the order of you know awareness to designers and we go it one by one and see our news perspective that we can get from a game design and maybe you can maybe if you can we might get the same game arts game design game game from from the new perspective but to get a new person we mean you get a new tool for it so i think it's interesting that we explore this world together starting from the first wave to play and then the second verb which is to explore to explore a game is fun and sometimes people mix this up like

with to play because it's really close to each other but for me to explore doesn't really need challenges when to play neat challenges imagine sightseeing we go slicing we love slicing right but why do people good sizing do you really need a challenge there like if say if you go to bali or you go to phuket i don't know and you don't have obstacle you don't have challenge in your trip with that's gonna make your trip feel boring maybe no it's it's fun anyway to to to see new thing to see unseen thing to face the unexperiences it's fun exploring is fun in itself and there are lots of ways we can do to improve that but one technique i'm gonna tell you today is the technique called itemizations and visualizations so when they say itemization this mean to well people's brain can easily recognize thing that is symbolized and it's good if we make this countable uh the the number of things that you

haven't seen or the id the location that you haven't been imagine in the new seamless open world game it's like radiation like this so it's cool and stuff it's believable but you don't you can't really cop how many areas or how many places you have been because it's all connected to one place and you feel like you there's something missing about it you don't know where the areas start you don't know where the area and you your brain cannot recognize it easily and it would be better like imagine the old game where all the maps are separated in discrete and it's really easy to recognize that you've been to this area or not at this area and to solve this problem there are lots of ways we can do and one thing we can do is is to use well visualization using ui or you can use approaches that japanese usually do in their society which is thing called stem rally that's in japan stem rally is an activity that

when in the festival in the fair the children will get a paper of a kind of book and they have to visit lots of place to get a stamp and if you collect all the stem they're gonna get a prize now this is technically a game though but what i like to say that you don't have to add this in the game but the the the process of having people to do something when they go to some place is really clever because it symbolized the idea that this area is one area so instead you get the big open world seamless area that doesn't cannot be easily defined as in locations when you put a point that people have to do something and you you have people to do the user to do that people on the kind of imaginary boundaries of the concept of what location it is and then they can make it they can count it and they can feel that they can fill in some kind of list and feel better when they do explorations this is one of the things we can do

another thing that might be interesting is to say that motivation might change during explorations first it might be expiration for the sake of exploration but later on when you nearly complete the list it becomes expiration for the sake of completion which actually to play and unique gameplay and that's not a bad thing i just want to state that it's a kind of different things so take away for exploration exploring is fun in itself can we use itemization and visualization to add value more to the explorations and how do you use the sense of completion to urge the player to explore more okay so we go to the third the next verb which the thing you can do with game which is to role play so by role play i mean you savor the characters and their interactions you say with the story the saber the world itself by being a character and there are actually

two types of roleplaying the first type is the being you type when you become an innovator or a name character you customize it you become someone who or the type of being him or her that you become a particular character and well whichever is fine too but it's really important that we make it clear about it in our design because we're going to need different kinds of approach for our designs let's go for the type being you first for being your role playing design it's really important that we don't put too much detail as personalities into our characters and trying to live in the room and allow chance of players to express the way they want to be express their thoughts express their personalities into character inside the game but if we only get the vague role for it players will get just gonna be themselves like there are every day which is maybe boring so in contrary it's very important that we give them a concrete role or concrete

situation the player to act the role should be concrete so players know what to act but the details in that the personality should be leave open for the player to express themselves that's how you can balance the being you type role playing design and have the player have fun playing that role the best and there are other types called being him and her role playing design and in the game that when that there are only cut scenes well you can make a game like that but it would be more like cinematics but if you're making a game that and you want the user to role play to act as a character in the game it's really important that you make sure that the character the p the user know how what character would do in each situation so they know how to act especially in the first part of the game when when the player doesn't really know much about the characters so i would suggest we start with the stereotype stuff and then add some more detail

the further on when users spend long and long time with the character inside the game and i've already talked about this a lot in my last year gdc talk about character experience design in the talk called walked on my friends giving live to ai buddies in final fantasy 15 and it's what's available in gdc vault so if you have interest please check on it i think it's very interesting topic too one more thing that we should state about being him her role playing design is that don't ever let the player choose between being himself or being the characters one bad example is of this is a game where you play as a character with a short temper and always say things before he thinks and ruins everything so you want to have clear laurel play the characters and inside the conversation you have a choice like this it's going to be fine because whichever you choose you can be the character anyway and you can express yourself by choosing a or b but what

happened in many games and many developers that they put a new choice like this which you know players want to choose it because they want to make this issue and get better but as soon as you choose them you're going to destroy the characters itself because this character they he should think he should talk because he thinks so he shouldn't come up with this kind of things so you have to choose it and then he will go off of immersion which is not good at all so you can't stop players from being themselves anyway so make sure that all the choices express correctness but different variation in choice shoes express the user himself the child choose all shots should express characters and users should choose one choice to express themselves that's the best way to create a role playing design game for being human hair type one last thing we should state about role playing design is that about projection swifting and although as being him and her type role

playing design there are times that users become themselves and there are times that users become characters in game two and normally player tends to be the character in the part where there are much narrative stuff and they tend to be themselves in the part where there's more freedom so and this is completely fine but we as a game designer we should be able to distinguish both of this and make sure that we don't put and we don't allow unnecessary freedom to let the player destroy and to create conflict of what character should be so check away so role playing is fun in itself how do we define a concrete role for player to acts and how do we make a game that allow users to express themselves without making a conflict to the given character settings so we go to the next verb which is to create well creation is fun and i bet that many users really

want to be a game creators but to well we should turn user into creators but turning user integrator is not the same thing as turning user into designer it doesn't mean that we should give him level this level editor and have them level to their design for themselves creation can be more simple and more casual it could be something like customize the characters or take a picture draw a picture write something or name something like they do and like what they do in no man's sky where they allow you to name a new planet or a new species of animal when you discover them which is seen really clever because creation can come very simple and there's no one who can do not know how to name things but make sure that you have a way for people to share the creation with other users but however there's one trap that usually happens now today now that putting a screenshot and selfie system is a trend in our game industry so

there's something like this hey i've added a range of self-system in the game that's right well man is that not enough for me i guess because some people might not some user might not really want to care and to use this kind of system and you might say that we don't want to force them and yes we don't want to force them but that mean always a ways to turn that user into creators so the things that for me that i would do to the approach i would do to this problem is i think players greatest creation is the game play they have arc actually play itself that adventure so it's already a great creations if the game could find a way to turn the user gameplay that avenger that he has been into something they could share easily then singing is going to be very simple like what i did in final fantasy 15 where i have a snapshot system so when you play the game the ai character gen automatically shoot the foot choose a folder for you

and in the night they will show this folder for you and you can share it and all they have to do is to press the share buttons also although even if you're a player that do not care much about creating stuff you can still share it because it's simple but you can still be feel proud of it that is your creations because these photos is only yours and it wouldn't happen if you want to play the game so i've talked about this a lot in my last year's gdc talk about prompt of facebook how about the ice auto snapshot your event in final fantasy xv it is also available in the gdc evolve so you have time please check it so take away creation is funding itself can we find a way to allow players to have that fun in our game can we find the way for them to share their creations and for those players who doesn't care much about creations can we find a way to change the game experience into some thing into creation for them to share because the play experience

is the best creations that the user have actually made okay we go to the next word which is to communicate to talk into social life is fun itself right maybe not yeah sometimes it's fun but most of the time a pain when is it forced personally for me i think conversation is the most painful type of communication because if communication is a game i saw that it's a game that is allow user to force other users to do communication you see i say something and someone has to reply something and you're forced to say something and that's not fun i mean so maybe i don't know i don't think we need much verbal communication in the game instead i think we should make this use of instinctive communication urges like nurturing and prank for nurturing i believe that people in the indonesia they love to help each other

if given the right situation and the right grammar to do so they would do so a good example of this in for our dragon question which online game and in the world map you can see other people finding monsters in the world map and you cannot go and help them by directly killing monster but you can use a shared command to help them give a buff stat for the other users and what do you get you don't technically get anything you get thank you but you do it anyway because people like to do that and you do it and you feel fun and their communication happens that's a good way to encourage any communication in the game which is fun and not forcing one more thing is that prank prank is fun everyone loves to do prank but if the game suggests too obviously and make it too painful it's not gonna be good but there's a wise way to do it and there's one good example of one of the mobile game for girls which allow you to create your own boyfriend inside the game and you are allowed to

well dress your boyfriend in a stylish fashion and stylish costume and since it's a game about fashions there's a feature that you can recommend the clothes the costume to other people boyfriends and you can change other people's boyfriends costume and dress so people use these functions to change other people's boyfriend into something like this or they can actually recommend a swimsuit or other people by french which technically means you can undress other people's boyfriends and do you do this all the time so when users get back home and lock into the game they're going to be surprised to see their boyfriend naked or dressing stings stuff and they're going to laugh and they're going to say okay i want to rearrange this and they're going to find some other players and they share they recommend other dresses and undress them and do whatever and their communication happens and what's interesting is that the game maker never tell people to use this stuff for pranking they all

know that this is a fun way to use this system and it's in their communication coming in and it's not forced so this is a good way example of doing this so communication is fun when it's not forced can we give the right situation and the right grammar to do so can we encourage nurturing and can we subtly suggest ranking the next verb is to broadcast and to watch so now game has become more sports like esports so when we design game we should design a game that is not only fun to play but a game that is fun to watch also the game doesn't mean mean for the audience but maybe most of us here in this room doesn't create an esport game right so i don't make esport game so this is concerned me right well wrong because live streaming has become one of the new standard the user used to enjoy the game in general not only for esports and i actually i admit to you that this

is not in the streaming and stuff it's not the area of my expertise so i cannot go too much deep into this topic but still i feel the need to talk with this to you guys because well we know that steaming happens in our game but not many put this in into their design process we we know it's happened we neglected but what about we it's time me and you start to think of this seriously and trying to put in in our game design process can we think of a game design that can turn user into streamers more and can do we make a game that is fun to stream and fun to watch i think there's good homework for both of us to find a new generation for our games design and the last keyword this is a new keyword too which is to fan create so when we say fan creation i mean fan fiction fan art dojinshi and fan game anything that fandom creates and this is our similarly to the last keyword

so we know that it's happened there are something in it but we normally doesn't care and put that in our design process but you see making fan fiction making fan art is fun and if that's the way the user enjoying our game so why not we decide our game to make that happen but how do you make it happen what kind of game what kind of game design we make to make sure that users are gonna love our game because game that has many fans it's not the same thing that game has that had many fan creations to think about this we must analyze first from the reason from what fans actually create fan normally don't create a new game because it's difficult and fan normally not don't create a new characters but fan usually create a new story from the already assisted characters so you can say that characters are a story machine in itself is a catalyst for our content as soon as long as you have interesting characters they're going to be the chemical stuff

between that and they're going to be constant going on and on so what's really important to that you make sure that you correct create a character that they care about when they say the character they care about is mean the character that they cannot nickle it the character they feel something about it the feeling could be anything it could be love even hate even curiosity want to know more about characters hate is fine too anything is fine the worst thing that you could ever happen to your game character is that no one cares about that everyone forget about it do you don't think you don't feel anything about that so hate is completely fine and when people feel something about your characters they're gonna have a wish in their mind like with love they're gonna wish for his and her happiness they're gonna wish i love him and her too with hate they're gonna wish for his and her unhappiness which other to hate him and her too with curiosity they want to learn they want to analyse it not to learn about the characters and when they know something they want to share it to other users too

and what important is these wishes become inspirations because the user can make their wishes come true by creating a new content and that's become friend creations so i think the very most important thing is that wish is the best in inspiration for fan creations and it could be happen when you create the character that they care about so the takeaway is that being fan is fun and it's even more fun to create a new thing inspired by the game since the character are the energy source of fandom can we make sure that we create the characters that user we care and can we create that wishes for the characters so here we are seven verb here today which all related to fun and what's important is that well especially for the last two we already know it's exit but we never put it until our game design loop but i think it's time that we do before i end today let's go to the last trap if i announce you today they've already made a new game

like this well actually it's for children 846 but i didn't tell you to use her and i have you play and you played it and say my game is silly and too easy and complain in my game should i care well maybe not because i created this game for 468 year olds kid what i like to say is that you can't possibly please everyone with one content you have to focus on your target and sell the right game to the right people when i told you at the first of this talk that you should know the fun balance between your games it's really important too that you trying to estimate what you yours your user expect your game content balance to be although if you create a very fun game they come from other aspects but if your users expect your game to be fun from gameplay mechanic they won't be satisfying your games so user expectation control is really important don't let the user expect and be disappointed by whatever we can give them or don't plan to give them at all so for the conclusions

can we make a good game without good play mechanics yes depend on the content you make and your user expectation too play mechanic is a super powerful tool but to rely only to it will limit the possibilities of what your game could be so let's be a game creator who knows how to make a good game with both good play mechanics and other approaches too the end thank you very much